Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

Oh, you scumbag, she called after him in her mind-get back here, you shitsucking scum-

The coral, perhaps sensing a moment of inattention, gathered itself and lunged for freedom. Linda’s grip tightened reflexively, but she had it around the midsection now instead of behind the head; as she brought her left hand over to grab it higher, she felt a sensation like two needles sinking into the back of her left wrist.

It must have been quite a sight. The middle-aged couple, huge man with a Panama hat and a broken arm, big woman with a long brown braid and a broken nose, all but skipping down the ramp into the terminal.

“We did it!” Dorie exulted, still flushed with the glory of having licked her last phobia.

“You did it,” said Pender. He was happy for her, of course, and not unmindful of his contribution, but mostly he was just glad to be out of goddamn coach. One first-class flight with Sid had been enough to spoil him forever.

Normally, Sid would have been waiting at the curb in front of the baggage claim. There are friends, and then there are friends who pick you up at the airport-Sid was the latter to Pender, and vice versa. Pender hadn’t asked him this time, though-he wasn’t sure Sid was still talking to him, after the stunt he’d pulled at SFO last Friday. So after they picked up Dorie’s baggage, the suitcase and footlocker-and mirabile dictu, both arrived safely, sliding down the designated carousel in the designated airport-Pender hailed a cab.

The ride from Virginia to Maryland was Dorie’s first experience with honest-to-God autumn foliage. Pender got a kick out of watching her-the expression on her face was MasterCard-ad priceless: not so much that of a kid in a candy shop as a teenage boy in a whorehouse.

Pender turned tour guide for the last leg of the drive, pointing out Civil War sites, detailing the history of the C amp;O. At the bottom of Tinsman’s Lock Road, a canopy of yellow-leaved box elders shut out the sky. Dorie had never seen light like that before-where she came from, bowered light was always green.

Pender pointed out his driveway, warned the cabbie about the ruts. They jounced the last few hundred yards. Then, as the driver carried the luggage to the front doorstep, Dorie told Pender she wanted to see the canal while it was still daylight.

“Follow that path around the side of the house,” Pender told her, “and keep going downhill until you see a woman in a bloodstained nightgown looking for a redheaded baby. I’ll catch up as soon as I pay the man.”

Phasmophobia-fear of ghosts. Despite her protestations last night, Dorie didn’t have it, had never had it-after all, who ever heard of a ghost wearing a mask?

The path was steep and narrow; it wound down through a dense wood, then opened out suddenly on a scene Dorie longed to paint with all her heart, and doubted she could ever capture. Pender had been right-she would need to add a few new oils to her palette to get it all: the formal strips of color in the foreground, emerald green lawn, malachite green water, reddish brown canal wall built of rough-hewn, fitted sandstone blocks; the particulate air, the long black shadows, the horizontal light streaming in from dead ahead, but cut into dazzling vertical columns by the single row of flaming trees towering behind the towpath running along the raised berm of the far bank.

Impossible, though, to capture all that in a plein air, then paint in any of the detail-the footbridge, the miniature waterfall tumbling down the flume, the split-rail wooden fences, never mind the joggers and dog walkers on the towpath-before the light faded entirely.

Still, wouldn’t it be something to try! If the weather held, she could set up her easel in the same spot a few days in a row, paint in one section at a-

“Well? Did I lie?” Pender caught up with Dorie as she mentally began cutting the scene into horizontal sections-the landscape defined its own verticality.

“It’s beautiful, Pen. I can’t wait to paint it. Or try, anyway. Where’s the nearest art supply store?”

“We’ll have to consult the yellow pages on that, scout,” said Pender as they started back up the path to the house. “The last time I bought any art supplies, they came in a Crayola box with a built-in sharpener.”

“I loved that built-in sharpener,” said Dorie.

“Me too.”

When they reached the house, Pender nodded toward the porch. “Let’s go in that way-I want you to see the panorama.”

“Technically, a panorama is an unbroken view or a series of pictures representing a continuous scene,” Dorie explained as she trudged up the steps after him.

Pender stopped on the landing and turned back to her as if he had something important to say. Actually, he was just winded from the climb. “Did anybody ever tell you you were extremely argumentative?”

“Yes. I always took it as a compliment.”

The view from the porch was spectacular, Dorie had to admit. It occurred to her, as Pender unlocked the sliding glass door, that she could paint from up here in the morning, then go down to the canal in the afternoon. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it, she thought, following Pender into the house. God, I love my work.

Simon was ready. He’d been ready for hours, fussing around the house, watching TV, smoking a joint out on the porch, refining the game. At the last minute, he changed his mind about taking a chair down to the cellar beforehand. He was halfway down the stairs with it when it dawned on him that if Pender did enter the house through the porch door, he was as likely to head for the kitchen as the bedroom-best to leave everything as is.

Simon did an about-face on the steps. He was still in the kitchen when he heard a car coming down the drive. He raced into the living room, peeked out through the drawn blinds, saw the cab pulling up behind the Geo. He saw Pender climb out-nice hat, duude; wha’ happen, somebody break your arm? Then he saw a second figure climbing out.

Simon’s heart dropped-please let it be a cab-share-and when he recognized Dorie Bell, his jaw dropped as well. Last time he’d seen her, she was naked in the galvanized tub in the basement of 2500 and he was holding her head underwater. He knew she hadn’t drowned, but as the only participant ever to have survived the fear game, she had somehow slipped into another dimension of Simon’s consciousness, neither dead nor living; he wasn’t quite as surprised to see her as he would have been to see, say, Wayne Summers-but it was a near thing.

As the cabdriver dropped the suitcase by the front door and went back for the footlocker, Simon raced into Pender’s bedroom, thinking furiously. Dorie’s presence wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Snatch her first, put a gun to her head, he’d have himself a bargaining chip. Think Edward G. Robinson: Freeze, G-man, or I blow her brains out. Hero cop like Pender, he’ll freeze all right. He’ll do anything I tell him to do-she’s his sweetie pie now. Some hero: he saves ’em and screws ’em.

And as he closed the bedroom door behind him, breathing hard, as engaged and excited as a soldier going into combat, Simon realized that having a second shot at Dorie was the only thing that could possibly have improved what was already promising to be the ultimate fear game. Not just a triple-header, but a chance to erase his only loss. Because when he was finished with Dorie (and this time he would insist on having a piece of what Pender had been enjoying, if it took him all night to get it in), the final score in the fear game would be Childs: 27, World: Zip -and that was without counting Zap, any of the old folks, any of the cops, or what’shis-name, Gloria’s husband, the Chinese guy in the red bikini underwear.