Self-Defence

42

She drove slowly, and I had to hang back. When I reached the honeysuckle at the mouth of Sanctum's entry road, she was nowhere in sight. I began the upward crawl. A speed-walker could have beaten me to the double gates. Lucy had left them open. The second pair of gates was unlatched, too.

A few more bumps up the shaded path, then the trees parted and I saw the big lodge house, brown as the trunks of the bristlecone pines that nestled it. The Colt was parked nose out, as far as possible from Lowell's Jeep and Mercedes.

No other vehicles in sight.

The front door to the house was shut, and I figured she'd already gone in. But then she appeared from around the back of her car- taking something out of the trunk?

No, nothing in her hands. No pocket bulges.

Her mouth opened as I pulled up.

I said, "Think of it as an extended house call."

Expecting anger, but she stared past me.

Blank and focused at the same time.

Hypnotic.

When she put a hand to her mouth, I thought she'd lost her nerve and I felt relieved, yet sad.

Then she walked quickly to the house, stomping up the wide porch stairs.

I was next to her as she knocked hard on the front door.

No one answered. She tapped her foot and knocked harder. "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon."

I looked through the dusty windows. The big front room was unlit and uninhabited.

Lucy began pounding the door with both hands. When there was still no response, she dashed off the porch and stood in front of the house, taking in its bulk.

Walking toward the right side of the building, her steps were fast and deliberate, scuffing the dust. Another brief pause; then she continued. Toward the back. Toward the high thicket that rose behind the house like some great green tide.

I found her staring at the overgrowth.

"Back there," she whispered.

A voice above us said, "What's going on?"

Nova, framed by a second-story window, her face grayed by a screen.

"Hi," I said, taking Lucy's icy hand. "We knocked but no one answered."

A finger poked the screen. The expression above it was hard to gauge. "So you decided to come."

Lucy's fingers dug into my hand. "Sure," she said. "We were in the neighborhood and decided to pop in. Is there a problem with that?"

Nova tented the screen with her fingertips. "No. Not unless Daddy's got one." She gave a strange laugh. "Come around the front."

She was waiting for us, holding a glass of lemonade. The copper in her hair shone like electric wire.

"He wasn't in any great mood when he went to bed, but I'll tell him you're here."

"I'll tell him myself," said Lucy, walking past her into the front room. Taking in the stuffed heads, the shabby furniture, the emptiness.

Staring at the log walls.

Nova seemed amused. Nothing nurturant about her. Why had she chosen to care for a feeble, cruel man?

Kindred souls, just like Trafficant and Mellors?

What was her particular brand of cruelty?

Lucy made her way toward the staircase, moving slowly and cautiously, like a trapper on ice, passing under the steps, then continuing toward the back room.

Nova put her hands on her hips and watched, rubbing one foot against the other.

She wet her lips with her tongue and glanced at me.

Her eyes returned to Lucy and satisfaction filled them.

Lucy's discomfiture turned her on.

Lucy looked up at the ceiling, then the floor.

Then back to the walls.

Stopping short. Arms straight at her sides, her face frozen.

She stared at the left-hand door.

Nova said, "That's right, Daddy's back there, dear."

Despite her smile, tension in her voice.

Competition- mock sibling rivalry?

Wanting Lucy to come here, certain it would destroy her?

I took Lucy's elbow. She shook her head and moved her arm out of my grasp.

Twenty feet from the room.

I covered the distance with her.

The door was pine, once heavily varnished, the finish cracked, flaking like dandruff.

She sucked in breath and opened it. As we stepped into a big, dark, book-lined room, a sulfurous smell hit us, not unlike the stench of the ER at Woodbridge. A hospital bed was in the center, cranked to a semi-upright position. Lowell's wheelchair was folded in a corner.

Lowell reclined under the covers, his hair greasy and limp, his long arms resting on the blanket, white and blue-veined below frayed gray undershirt sleeves. His chin was coated with white stubble, his eyes unfocused. It was 2 P.M. but he hadn't awakened fully. He turned toward us with obvious effort, then turned away and closed his eyes.

Lucy's hand found its way back into mine, so sweaty it slithered in my grasp. Her shoulders twitched, then began shaking.

I followed her eyes as they reconnoitered, landing on the pine bookshelves that sheathed three of the walls.

A door in the right-hand corner was open, exposing a small bathroom. The other, centered between the windows, led outside. Bolted. Lucy's gaze lingered on it, then moved on.

Books and piles of magazines and newspapers littered the floor. Atop a stack of New Yorkers was an aluminum tray laden with dirty dishes: curling bread crusts, congealed eggs, cornflakes swimming in milk that looked bluish in the mean, grainy light. An empty bedpan sat on a stack of old Paris Reviews. Packages of adult-size disposable diapers were piled high on a tottering mountain of assorted periodicals. A cardboard box next to the diapers was filled with empty whiskey bottles. A tower of Dixie cups and an old black rotary telephone, the phone's cord snaking into the jumble and vanishing.

The shakes had moved down to Lucy's fingers, and I felt her knuckles slap against mine. Nova was nowhere in sight, but I felt her presence- an icy current.

Lowell moaned and moved his head from side to side. His eyes had closed.

Lucy didn't move. Then she began scanning the room again.

The filthy windows.

The door to the back.

Back to the log walls.

Repeating the circuit. Staying, this time, on the door. Wide-eyed.

This was where she'd slept the night of the party. The room she'd left, sleepwalking.

Her hand was shaking so badly I could barely hold on to it.

Lowell's eyes opened and he flipped his face at us.

Seeing us for the first time.

He let out a deep, pitiful, angry noise and began the long, excruciating process of sitting up. No hoists above the bed. He hadn't availed himself of conveniences- not even an electric wheelchair- and I wondered why.

Cursing, he slid and heaved and finally propped his upper body high enough to rest his back against the pillows. His chest was caved in, his shoulders knobby and narrow. The flair of the white suit and the panama hat seemed a distant joke. The last couple of days had knocked him low.

Grief?

Lucy watched him the way you watch a repulsive but fascinating insect make its way up a wall.

He laughed. She turned away and hugged herself.

"So," he said hoarsely. Several moments of throat clearing. He gave a look of distaste, rotated his lips, and spat a wad of phlegm at the log wall. It missed and landed on the floor. Coughing and grinning, he expelled another wad.

Lucy looked ill, but she didn't move.

Lowell watched her intently.

His fingers scratched the sheets as he continued to pull himself up. Trying to move his head in an upward arc. Pain stopped him.

"So," he said again. His voice had cleared a bit.

"Cute," he said. "Very cute."

"What is?" said Lucy, straining for a light tone.

"You." He chortled, as if she'd set him up for a punch line. He looked her up and down. None of the lasciviousness he'd shown with Nova. Cold, precise, as if taking the measure of a piece of furniture.

"Play tennis?" he said.

She shook her head.

"Those are tennis player's legs. Even through those dungarees I can see them. Play anything?"

Another headshake.

"Of course not," he said. "No appetite for games."

He rubbed his eyes and stretched his arms, laughing some more.

"So what can I offer you, Mary-Little Lamb?" he said. "Alcohol? Percodan? Demerol? Morphine? Endorphins? Or is alleged truth the dope you're shooting? What kind of stories should I tell you to help you lubricate your mental deadbolt? Is this a monumental moment for you?"

Lucy remained silent.

"No stories? What then?"

Lucy looked at the rear door.

Lowell shouted wordlessly and slapped the bedsheet. "Ah, the spectacle! Here to goggle at my groanery, my little serpent's tooth? Barge in with your brain mechanic in tow, so you can listen to the thrum-thrum and imagine my torment?"

Grinning. Laughing.

"Yes, I'm in pain, girl. Sacramental, sizzling battery-acid synaptic joy. Maybe you'll know it too, one day, and then you'll understand what a fucking hero I am to be sitting here, smelling like shit and looking like a Gehenna-leaseholder knowing the only fuck-damn reason you pranced your little tennis butt in here is to drink up my misery so you can say you've had a tall, frosty revenge cocktail at the expense of the best."

Lucy kept staring at the door.

"Ho," said Lowell. "The silent treatment. Just like when you were a baby."

"How would you know?" said Lucy.

Lowell guffawed, very loud. His shrunken body seemed to grow with each expulsion. Laughter energized him, turning him demonic and lively and bringing color to his face.

"The opening movement of The Guilt Sonata! Don't waste your quarter notes, lass. I've soloed with the best of the Sin Symphonies!"

Lucy began circling the room, moving as freely as the clutter would allow.

"Your silence," said Lowell, "is not artillery. It's an empty knapsack- you were a mute baby with skinny legs. No cries, no tears, not a yawp. Dead-mute as an anencephalic accident. Unlike the other one, Peter-Peter morpho-morto poison eater; he howled professionally. It was rent a studio down the block or strangle the little snot-rat."

He closed his eyes. "You, on the other hand, kept your lips glued as if your tonsils were treasure." The eyes opened. A bony finger shot out, accompanied by a hoarse laugh.

"You wouldn't shit, either, har. Anus on strike, weeks at a time, quite a style, quite a style. Take all, hold in, give nothing. I thought you were abnormal. Your mother assured me you weren't and poured mineral oil down your aphasic little gullet."

Still walking, Lucy mustered a smile of her own. "Is that why you ran? Scared at having an abnormal baby?"

Lowell chuckled, but there was anger in it.

"Run, did I? No, no, no, no, no, I was invited to vacate the premises. Menstrually shrill banshee bye-bye from Maw-Maw and a claw at the face."

"Mother kicked you out?" Lucy's turn to laugh. "A big tough guy like you?"

Lowell looked at her, as if in a new light. Sucking in breath, he wiggled his thick eyebrows and stuck his finger in his mouth.

He kept it in there, probing and scraping and breathing roughly.

Pulling it out, he examined a fingernail. "Mother," he said, "was a blindered, bujwhacked, neurally corseted, parlor-bound stumplet with the textbook vision of a suburban storm trooper. Middle-aged at twenty-three, old at twenty-four. Tapioca libido- her sheer puddingness turned me into a rebellious adolescent. She wouldn't- couldn't-learn how to be. She had nothing to live for but rules and rot."

Lucy's hands clenched as she turned. For a moment I thought she'd pounce on him; then she shook her head and put one hand in her pocket. And laughed. Her hips angled forward. A lounging pose as staged as Nova's.

"God," she said, "you're pathetic. Terminally blocked, blah, blah, blah. Hiding behind all that bad Joyce."

Lowell paled. Smiled. Lost the smile. Fished for it and finally found it. But it had lost its cruel luster and his grizzled jaw seemed to weaken.

"Joyce," he said. "Know him well, do you, Mademoiselle Sophomore? I met the dwent. Paris, 1939. Clerk face, no lips, woman's hips, lime-suck, lime-suck, lime-suck, bloody gud. That fucking Irish lechery for talk with no conclusion… but let's get back to lovely Mother. She died a virgin and you genuflect to her daily; the truth is, you know as much about her as you do about prostate clog but you defend her because that's your script- well, believe what you will, shutter your limited mind to your heart's contempt."

He wheezed and inflated his voice.

"Whether or not you know it, you've come here to learn. If you fail to do so, it's your lowered expectation, not mine. The truth, Constipata: she invited me to leave because she couldn't tolerate a bit of in flagrante delicious."

Lucy pretended to remain aloof. But he was talking loudly, and his voice made her flinch.

He rubbed his hands together and looked at me.

"A sad, sick, salacious, succulent tale, Braintrust. Perfect for you."

Turning quickly to Lucy. "After you stretched her womb, she lost whatever feeble interest she'd ever had in the double-backed beast. But like the old song says, her sister will- oh, did she, little Sister Kate. One of those yawning vaginas the exact color of bubblegum. So who was I to play brakeman to Fate? Her sister did, so I did her sister, oh, yes, oh, yes." Smile. "She bucked and buckled, that one did. Scratched and caromed and screamed like a stuck sow at the moment of truce." Pointing to his groin. "Remembering it almost convinces me something dingled, once upon a spine."

I kept a close watch on Lucy. She was staring in his direction, but not at him. Anger shot through her slender frame like an injection of starch.

"Sisterly love," said Lowell. "Maw-Maw found us, sang her ode to virtue, and I creeped off, tail-tucked."

He tried to shrug and managed only a shoulder tic.

"Banished to the horrors of Paris. Reprobate Kate parceled off to California. Then Mother caught herself something postnatal and fatal, and suddenly I was called back to be a father."

He aimed his thumb at the ground and mock-frowned. "Ill-suited for the care of a mewling snot-jack and a no-tone, anally blocked normal infant, I had the wisdom to relinquish parental privilege to ForniKate. By then, she was fucking some pansy Jew journalist."

Gleeful bellowing.

Lucy was standing on the balls of her feet. I could see moisture in her eyes. I was thinking of my dead father.

Lowell said, "Why fight it, girl? You need me."

"Do I?"

"Given your insistence upon projecting an air of injured chastity, I'd say so. Really, dear, enough bad theater, let us slash pretense's throat and allow it to bleed out richly into the gutter. The permanent-hymen act won't work with me. I know about the summer you spent with your heels in the air, looking into the bile-sooted eyes of Roxbury coons. Quite disappointing, I must say. To rut is nature; to rut for money, commerce. But to rut niggers for money and let some boss nigger pocket the profits? How sheepheaded, girl. I shall assign a collie to herd you."

Lucy's fists opened and her knees bent. I held her by the arms, whispering, "Let's get out."

She shook her head violently.

"Ah, the self-esteemer plies his craft," said Lowell. "Dispensing turds of wisdom as you try to convince her she's okay."

Lucy let her arms fall. She stepped away from me. Right up to the edge of the bed. Stretching her arms as wide as she could, she stared him in the face. Exposing herself.

Shock therapy? Or the death of hope?

Lowell turned to me. "She's not okay. She's planets from okay." Back to Lucy: "Want to know how I learned all about your Moorish mooring? Darling Brother Petey. No interrogation necessary. Lovely, filthy truths emerge when a wretch craves his needle, toof, toof. Ah, yes, yet another betrayal, daughter. Not to worry, disillusionment builds character. Stick with me and you'll be granite."

"Did you kill him?" said Lucy. "Did you give him that overdose?"

That surprised Lowell, but he rebounded with a snort.

"No-o," he said softly. "He did a fine job of that himself. My error was kindness. Giving him cash when I knew what he'd do with it. He'd come up here, in this room. Lie on the floor, rolling around, begging and vomiting- a craftsman of cowardice. And evidently you, Stupid Girl, are his apprentice."

"Him," said Lucy. "Me. That's some parental report card."

"Is that what Siggie Fraud, here, told you? That you can blame your shit-life on me? That you have some right to happiness?"

Shouting and spraying spit, his words pushing him forward.

"You're not meant to be happy! There's no grand plan. Your happiness doesn't mean two buckets of sour pus!"

"Not to you, that's for sure."

"Not to anyone! God- whatever He is- looks down on you, sees your misery, scratches His balls, cackles, and pisses steaming buckets on your head! His condo-mate Satan stops buggering tiny animals just long enough to add to the torrent! The raison d'être isn't happiness, you styoopid nin. It's being. Existence. Inherence. It doesn't matter what happens, or doesn't, or who else is! Fuck the consequences; you occur!"

I remembered Nova's little speech. Someone had paid attention during class.

He glared at Lucy, breathing hard. Seized by sudden wet, rumbling coughs, he sucked in air, started to tilt back on the bed, and forced himself upright again.

"Didn't know you were religious," said Lucy, nearly breathless herself.

"Get to know me," said Lowell. "You'll learn lots of things."

She looked at him, then sat on the bed, hard enough to make him bounce.

Pinching sheet between thumb and forefinger, she rubbed the fabric.

"What kinds of things will I learn, Daddy?" she said in a small voice.

After a second's hesitation, he said, "How to create. How to be a cathedral. How to piss from the heavens."

Lucy smiled and played with the sheets some more. "Be God in six easy lessons?"

"No, it won't be easy. You'll change my diapers, wipe my armpits, and powder my thighs. Fetch my papers in your mouth. Get down on your knees and acquire an attention span. Learn what a good book is and how to tell it from crap. Learn how to whore for your own good. How to rid yourself of redbugs like that curly-haired leech over there, how to finally stop binge-purging on self-pity."

He shook a finger at her. "I'll teach you more in one day than all the marrow-suck schools full of eighth-wit arsenods taught you in- what are you?- twenty-six years."

He leaned forward and touched her arm. His fingers looked like crab legs on her plaid sleeve. She didn't move.

"You have no choice," said Lowell softly. "As is, you're nothing."

She studied his pale, twisted hand.

Then her eyes moved back to the rear door.

She gazed into his eyes for a long time.

"Nothing?" she said sadly.

"The quintessense of it, Angel-pie."

She hung her head.

"Nothing," she repeated.

He patted her hand.

She sighed and seemed to grow small.

My fear for her rose like floodwater.

Lowell giggled and traced a line from her wrist to her knuckles.

She shuddered but remained still.

Lowell clucked his tongue, cheerfully.

She was breathing deeply.

Eyes closed.

I got ready to pull her away from this place.

Lowell said, "Welcome to reality. We'll do everything to make your stay as interesting as possible."

Lucy looked in his eyes again.

"Nothing," she said.

Lowell nodded, smiled, and stroked her hand.

Lucy smiled back. Peeled his fingers off and stood.

Walking to the rear door, she tried to slide the bolt. It was rusted and stuck, but she freed it.

Lowell's head craned, his body warping as he strained to watch her.

"Fresh air?" he said. "Don't bother. Sweetness is a lie, your senses are despots. Get used to stale."

"I'm going out for a stroll," she said in a flat voice. "Daddy."

"To think? No need to. It's not your strong suit. You finish your homework and then you can play- pay close attention and I'll turn you into something interesting. You'll endure."

"Sounds pretty Faustian. Daddy."

Something new in her voice- punch-line satisfaction.

Lowell heard it right away. His face lost tone, the bones softening, the skin giving way.

"Sit down!"

Lucy stared.

"Sit down!"

Lucy smiled. And waved. " 'Bye, Daddy. It's been educational."

She threw the door open.

Green filled the doorway and sunlight shocked the room.

Lowell squinted as Lucy looked out at the green tide; then he sprang forward, groping for a hold on nothingness. His lower body was leaden, and it anchored him to the bed.

He cursed Lucy, God, the Devil.

"Nice property you've got, Daddy. There's someone I need to look for out there."

A terrible comprehension took hold of Lowell, a preliminary death. He pitched harder, fell forward, flopping face down on the mattress.

Lying there, face pressed against the sheets, he labored to breathe as he watched Lucy disappear.

His eyes met mine.

His were bottomless and terrified.

I glanced at the black phone and considered ripping it out of the wall. But there had to be other extensions in the house- why remind him of the instrument?

As I left, I heard him howling, like a child, for Nova.