Predator

8

Early the next morning, snow blows sideways overCape CodBayand melts when it touches the water. The snow barely dusts the tawny sliver of beach beyond Lucy’s windows but is deep on nearby rooftops and the balcony beyond her bedroom. She pulls the comforter up to her chin and looks out at the water and the snow, unhappy that she has to get up and deal with the woman sleeping next to her, Stevie.

Lucy shouldn’t have gone toLorraine’s last night. She wishes she hadn’t and can’t stop wishing it. She is disgusted with herself and in a hurry to leave the tiny cottage with its wraparound porch and shingled roof, the furniture dingy from endless rounds of renters, the kitchen small and musty with outdated appliances. She watches the early morning play with the horizon, turning it various shades of gray, and the snow is falling almost as hard as it was last night. She thinks of Johnny. He came here toProvincetowna week before he died and met someone. Lucy should have found that out a long time ago, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t face it. She watches Stevie’s regular breathing.

“Are you awake?” Lucy asks. “You need to get up.”

She stares at the snow, at sea ducks bobbing on the ruffled gray bay, and wonders why they aren’t frozen. Despite what she knows about the insulating qualities of down, she still can’t believe that any warm-blooded creature can comfortably float on frigid water in the middle of a blizzard. She feels cold beneath the comforter, chilled and repulsed and uncomfortable in her bra and panties and button-down shirt.

“Stevie, wake up. I’ve got to get going,” she says loudly.

Stevie doesn’t stir, her back gently rising and falling with each slow breath, and Lucy is sick with regret and is annoyed and disgusted because she can’t seem to stop herself from doing this thing, this thing she hates. For the better part of a year, she has told herself no more, and then nights like last night happen and it isn’t smart or logical and she is always sorry, always, because it is degrading and then she has to extricate herself and tell more lies. She has no choice. Her life is no longer a choice. She is too deeply into it to choose anything different, and some choices have been made for her. She still can’t believe it. She touches her tender breasts and distended belly to make sure it’s true and still can’t comprehend it. How could this happen to her?

How could Johnny be dead?

She never looked into what happened to him. She walked away and took her secrets with her.

I’m sorry, she thinks, hoping wherever he is, he knows her mind the way he used to, only differently. Maybe he can know her thoughts now. Maybe he understands why she kept away, just accepted he did it to himself. Maybe he was depressed. Maybe he felt ruined. She never believed his brother killed him. She didn’t entertain the possibility that someone else did. Then Marino got the phone call, the ominous one from Hog.

“You’ve got to get up,” she says to Stevie.

Lucy reaches for the Colt Mustang.380 pistol on the table by the bed.

“Come on, wake up.”

Inside Basil Jenrette’s cell, he lies on his steel bed, a thin blanket pulled over him, the kind that doesn’t give off poisonous gases like cyanide if there’s a fire. The mattress is thin and hard and won’t give off deadly gases if there’s a fire. The needle would have been unpleasant, the chair worse, but the gas chamber, no. Choking, not breathing, suffocating. God no.

When he looks at his mattress when he is making the bed, he thinks about fires and not being able to breathe. He’s not so bad. At least he’s never done that to anybody, that thing that his piano teacher did until Basil quit his lessons, didn’t care how hard his mother whipped him with the belt. He quit and wouldn’t go back for one more episode of almost gagging, choking, almost suffocating. He didn’t think about it much until the subject of the gas chamber came up. No matter what he knew about the way they execute people down there inGainesville, with the needle, the guards threatened him with the gas chamber, laughed and hooted when he’d curl up on the bed and start to shake.

Now he doesn’t have to worry about the gas chamber or any other means of execution. He’s a science project.

He listens for the drawer at the bottom of the steel door, listens for it to open, listens for his breakfast tray.

He can’t see that it is light outside because there is no window, but he knows it is dawn by the sounds of guards making their rounds and drawers sliding open and slamming shut as other inmates get eggs and bacon and biscuits, sometimes fried eggs, sometimes scrambled. He can smell the food as he lies on the bed under his nonpoisonous blanket on his nonpoisonous mattress and thinks about his mail. He has to have it. He feels as furious and anxious as he’s ever been. He listens to footsteps and then Uncle Remus’s fat, black face appears behind the mesh opening high up on the door.

That’s what Basil calls him. Uncle Remus. Calling him Uncle Remus is why Basil’s not getting his mail anymore. He hasn’t gotten it for a month.

“I want my mail,” he says to Uncle Remus’s face behind the mesh. “It’s my constitutional right to get my mail.”

“What makes you think anybody would write your sorry ass,” the face behind the mesh asks.

Basil can’t make out much, just the dark shape of the face and the wetness of eyes peering in at him. Basil knows what to do about eyes, how to put them out so they don’t shine at him, so they don’t see places they shouldn’t before they turn dark and crazed and he almost suffocates. He can’t do much in here, in his suicide cell, and rage and anxiety twist his stomach like a dishrag.

“I know I have mail,” Basil says. “I want it.”

The face vanishes and then the drawer opens. Basil gets off the bed, takes his tray and the drawer loudly clangs shut at the bottom of the thick, gray, steel door.

“Hope nobody spit on your food,” Uncle Remus says through the mesh. “Enjoy your breakfast,” he says.

The wideplank floor is cold beneath Lucy’s bare feet as she returns to the bedroom. Stevie is asleep under the covers, and Lucy sets two coffees on the bedside table and slides her hand under the mattress, feeling for the pistol’s magazines. She may have been reckless last night, but not so reckless that she would leave her pistol loaded with a stranger in the house.

“Stevie?” she says. “Come on. Wake up. Hey!”

Stevie opens her eyes and stares at Lucy standing by the bed inserting a magazine into the pistol.

“What a sight,” Stevie says, yawning.

“I’ve got to go.” Lucy hands her a coffee.

Stevie stares at the gun. “You must trust me, leaving it right there on the table all night.”

“Why wouldn’t I trust you?”

“I guess you lawyers have to worry about all those people whose lives you’ve ruined,” Stevie says. “You never know about people these days.”

Lucy told her she is aBostonattorney. Stevie probably thinks a lot of things that aren’t true.

“How did you know I like my coffee black?”

“I didn’t,” Lucy says. “There’s no milk or cream in the house. I’ve really got to go.”

“I think you should stay. Bet I can make it worth your while. We never finished, now did we? Got me so liquored up and stoned, I never got your clothes off. That’s a first.”

“Seems like a lot of things were your first.”

“You didn’t take your clothes off,” Stevie reminds her, sipping coffee. “That’s a first, all right.”

“You weren’t exactly with it.”

“I was with it enough to try. It’s not too late to try again.”

She sits up and settles into the pillows, and the covers slip below her breasts, and her nipples are erect in the chilled air. She knows exactly what she has and what to do with it, and Lucy doesn’t believe what happened last night was a first, that any of it was.

“God, my head hurts,” Stevie says, watching Lucy look at her. “I thought you told me good tequila wouldn’t do that.”

“You mixed it with vodka.”

Stevie plumps the pillows behind her and the covers settle low around her hips. She pushes her dark-blond hair out of her eyes, and she is quite something to look at in the morning light, but Lucy wants nothing more with her and is put off by the red handprints again.

“Remember I asked you about those last night?” Lucy says, looking at them.

“You asked me a lot of things last night.”

“I asked you where you got them done.”

“Why don’t you climb back in.” Stevie pats the bed, and her eyes seem to burn Lucy’s skin.

“It must have hurt getting them. Unless they’re fake and I happen to think they are.”

“I can clean them off with nail polish remover or baby oil. I’m sure you don’t have nail polish remover or baby oil.”

“What’s the point?” Lucy stares at the handprints.

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“Then whose?”

“Someone annoying. She does it to me and I have to clean them off.”

Lucy frowns, staring at her. “You let someone paint them on you. Well, kind of kinky,” and she feels a pinch of jealousy as she imagines someone painting Stevie’s naked body. “You don’t have to tell me who,” Lucy says as if it’s unimportant.

“Much better to be the one who does it to someone else,” Stevie says, and Lucy feels jealous again. “Come here,” Stevie says in her soothing voice, patting the bed again.

“We need to head out of here. I’ve got things to do,” Lucy replies, carrying black cargo pants, a bulky black sweater and the pistol into the tiny bathroom that adjoins the bedroom.

She shuts the door and locks it. She undresses without looking at herself in the mirror, wishing what has happened to her body is imagined or a nightmare. She touches herself in the shower to see if anything has changed and avoids the mirror as she towels herself dry.

“Look at you,” Stevie says when Lucy emerges from the bathroom, dressed and distracted, her mood much worse than it was moments before. “You look like some kind of secret agent. You’re really something. I want to be just like you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“After last night, I know enough,” she says, staring Lucy up and down. “Who wouldn’t want to be just like you? You don’t seem afraid of anything. Are you afraid of anything?”

Lucy leans over and rearranges the bed linens around Stevie, covering her up to her chin, and Stevie’s face changes. She stiffens, stares down at the bed.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you,” Stevie says meekly, her cheeks turning red.

“It’s cold in here. I was just covering you because…”

“It’s okay. It’s happened before.” She looks up, her eyes bottomless pits filled with fear and sadness. “You think I’m ugly, don’t you. Ugly and fat. You don’t like me. In the daylight, you don’t.”

“You’re anything but ugly or fat,” Lucy says. “And I do like you. It’s just… Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“I’m not surprised. Why would someone like you like someone like me?” Stevie says, pulling the blanket around her and off the bed, covering herself completely as she gets up. “You could have anybody. I’m grateful. Thank you. I won’t tell anyone.”

Lucy is speechless, watching Stevie retrieve her clothes from the living room, getting dressed, shaking, her mouth contorting in peculiar ways.

“God, please don’t cry, Stevie.”

“At least call me the right thing!”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Her eyes huge and dark and scared, Stevie says, “I’d like to go now, please. I won’t tell anyone. Thank you, I’m very grateful.”

“Why are you talking like this?” Lucy says.

Stevie retrieves her long, black, hooded coat and puts it on. Through the window, Lucy watches her walk off in a swirl of snow, her long, black coat flapping around her tall, black boots.