Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

"And you assume he's going to go back to the same guy?"

"Yeah. It's not like there're four columns of these guys in the yellow pages. Besides, I plan on having him sent a flyer in the mail."

"A flyer?"

"Yeah," said Karp. "A bunch of clips about the Heeney murders and the arrests with a friendly note: 'Hey, next time, hire the best, regards, Mr. Ballantine.' "

"This is the hit man?"

"More like a hit-man broker, according to my sources," said Karp. "There'll be a number for Lester to call."

Karp went from Hawes's office to the hospital. They had moved Giancarlo to a sunny room on the second floor. As Karp passed the nurse's desk, he saw that the piles of toys and cards and flowers had grown. The townspeople had adopted the boy as a symbol of their current travail and, perhaps, their guilt. People had tied yellow ribbons around their trees. Deputies were wearing little yellow ribbons on their badges. Marlene wouldn't let any of the material into the child's room.

She was there, sitting side by side on straight chairs with Zak. She rose when she saw Karp enter.

"Are you going to stay? I have to go out." She had a frantic look on her face. Zak didn't stir; Karp saw that his lips were moving.

She moved past him into the hall. He turned and followed her, putting his arm across her shoulders. It was like grabbing a phone pole.

"Marlene, what's wrong?"

"What's wrong? What's wrong? Excuse me…?"

"I mean what's going on? We haven't talked in days, it seems like."

"Okay, let's talk. Nice weather but we could sure use some more rain. How about those Mets!"

"Marlene, don't be like this." She had her hands clutched together. He felt her trembling.

"No, I'm sorry. I don't know how I should be. I keep replaying it in my mind. If only I… if only you… if only Lucy. I started this. I am the cause of this."

"That's stupid, Marlene."

"Right, stupid Marlene." She looked into his eyes. Her realie was teary and red-rimmed, but the other seemed full of pain, too, a familiar hallucination.

"I stare at him all these hours," she said, "and I think what if this goes on for ten, twenty years? It happens. I can't deal with it, Butch. And he talks, Zak, he talks to Giancarlo, and it's like he's listening, too. He's going crazy like his mother. Lucy walks around like a zombie… I don't know. Do you remember, whenever we'd have a fight, you and me or me and Lucy, Gianni would make us stop, he'd jolly us out of it, or throw a phony tantrum? How he always wanted us to be 'regular'? We're flying apart." Her voice choked. "I need some air."

She broke away and ran down the hall. Karp went in and sat down next to his son.

"How're you doing, kid?"

"Okay. He's still here, Dad." Zak's face was pinched and his tan had gone yellow, like old newspapers. "He's still here. He wants to come back but there are these nets, like in fishing. I'm helping him."

The fear sweat popped out on Karp's face. He patted the boy's shoulder. "I'm sure you are."

Lucy drove. She drove most hours that she wasn't sleeping or at the hospital, with Magog beside her in the shotgun seat, the dog's head lolling out the window, tongue flapping in the breeze. Driving passed the unbearable hours, presenting a pathetic illusion of freedom. Once she took the road up to Aaron's Throne, but shied at climbing to the vista itself. She thought she might throw herself off, and was afraid. Mostly she frequented the bleaker parts of Robbens County, parts with which it was unusually well supplied: yards full of rusting machinery, deserted coal patches, dreary villages of fallen-down miners' shacks, the great pit of Majestic Number Two itself. She would stroll along the lip of the workings, dodging from time to time immense coal trucks roaring by that showered her with grit. She watched the dragline scoop away the mountain, and the monstrous D11 Cats shove the spoil over the lip into the defenseless hollows, obliterating streams and deserted settlements, sterilizing the country under a pall of rubble. During these hours she thought often of a famous New Yorker cartoon, the one showing a featureless waste studded with trash and old tires, under the caption "Life without Mozart." She had a copy pinned to a corkboard in her room in the City. It did not seem as amusing as it once had.

Gradually over a week or so, the first sharp pangs of utter despair scabbed over. She began to consider how she would spend her life, deprived as it now was of something greater than Mozart. She had no experience of living without God. The question of what else to worship arose, for she understood that everyone worshiped something, the usual gods in her society being power, money, sex, fame, and the sacred Me. She had good models: her father worshiped the law and the family; her mother the same, plus justice, minus the law. They seemed to have done all right in life. Not for her, though. The usual secular gods had little appeal, except sex, and she cringed with shame at the memory of how she had tormented that poor boy. She certainly did not believe in justice. Or mercy. A line from Weil flickered through her mind, the one about there being four proofs of the mercy of God here below: the consolations of the saints; the radiance of these and their compassion; the beauty of the world; and the complete absence of mercy.

How to live, then, on the endless, trashy plain. Usefulness still appealed to her. She could use her gifts. Be a humble lab rat for a while, she owed Shadkin that much. After that, what? Some distant place helping the hopelessly miserable, a Graham Greene sort of burnt-out life. Thinking of what was owed, she found her wheels turning back toward the town, and once there, toward a house she knew on Walnut Street, where Emmett Heeney lived with his girlfriend, and recently, with his brother, Dan.

The house was small, wooden, red-painted, shaded by maples. Dan had been put up in a room above the garage. She climbed the creaky outside stairway and knocked.

"I'm surprised to see you." Dan was wearing a grubby T-shirt and cutoff jeans. He hadn't shaved in a while, and his face was wary.

"Can I come in?"

"Sure." He stepped aside. "I wasn't expecting company."

Obviously. The room was littered with take-out cartons, cups, and wrappers and smelled of unwashed clothes, man, and fast-food greases. She sat down in a rocking chair, on matted clothing. It was the same rocker that had stood on the Heeney porch.

Besides the rocker, the room contained an iron bed, unmade, with flowered sheets bunched in the center, a straight chair, an overflowing trash basket, and a deal table on which stood Dan's computer. The computer had a paused game showing on its screen-a gunsight pointed down a dark corridor.

"I called you at the lodge a bunch of times," he said. "Then I gave up."

"What've you been doing?"

"Oh, having a ball. Reading astro for next year. Playing Doom. Hanging around on the Net. You know, the usual nerd stuff. How's your brother?"

"The same. It's driving all of us crazy. I'm sorry. I mean about not calling. That was mean."

He shrugged. "Hey, no biggie. It's not like we were engaged or anything." She was silent. He examined her more closely.

"What's wrong? You're not sick, are you?"

"No, I'm not sick." Her voice was dull. Why had she come here? To share the torment? Why don't I just fuck him and get it over with? At least I would be doing someone some good. As soon as this thought appeared, she felt something shrivel in her and thought of her mother.

"Your mother was by a day or so ago," Dan said conversationally, as if reading her mind.

Her head snapped up, as if she had been stung. "My mother? What did she want?"

"Just some maps. When she first got here, I showed her some hi-res topo and side-scan sonar maps of the county. Mine shafts, coal seams, and all that. She wanted me to cut her a CD of a couple of sections-Burnt Peak, surface and sub. She paid me, too." He paused and looked closely at Lucy again. She had stiffened, was chewing nervously at her lip.