Thirteen
The pizza party gathered at the appointed hour on the
Fourth of July. Leslie entertained the twins in the yard outside. Wendy
was put in charge of sprinkling on the pizza toppings, leaving Lori, Amy,
and Karen to assess the welfare of their extended family. They sat at the
dining room table of the tiny, three room house and nodded satisfaction
with the surrounding merriment. "Now if only the men will stay away,"
Karen commented bitterly.
"They were the best we could manage at the time,"
Lori reminded her.
Karen threw her a coldly quizzical look. "Really,
Lori. Are you condoning Dave's behavior?"
"No, but I like men now and then. If you'll
remember, there's a biological drive involved."
Karen feigned disinterest. "Biological drive, my
ass."
Wendy came to her rescue, sliding the first pizza
onto the table. "Oh, dear," Karen muttered unhappily. "Pig-out time
again."
They settled down to noisily gobbling messy pizza
slices and salvaging goo with bare fingers. The twins seated side by side
at one end of the table rapidly covered themselves with greasy drippings,
hilariously gluttonous with their large, dark eyes surveying their
spectators with cool distrust.
"We've all relied upon one another when things have
gotten rough," Karen said. "I'm proud of us for that."
Amy dipped her head meekly. "I haven't been of much
help."
"You haven't been of much help?" Karen said gruffly.
"Has anyone else in this heartless town taken the time or cared enough to
listen to my problems when Gloria disappeared? Amy, you and Lori are the
only friends I have in the whole world. I know I've been difficult..."
"Hey," Lori said. "You're going to start crying in
your pizza."
They burst into strained laughter and ate in silence
for a time.
"But I've been thinking," Karen said. "Perhaps we
should have more formal arrangements."
"Do we need that?" Lori said, sensing that Karen had
given the matter some thought. For Karen, the solution to all the world's
ills centered on forming social action committees.
"It might help to react more efficiently during an
emergency. We still have Ralph to contend with. He threatened us in the
hospital, and even in court."
Lori glanced at Amy for confirmation. Amy nodded
solemnly. "He behaved terribly. My mother's so afraid of him that she
won't stop at the house anymore. I have to meet her at the gas station."
"What could be done about him?" Lori wanted to know.
"Are you suggesting a vigilante committee? Do we hire a hit man to break
his legs?"
Karen took the sarcasm in stride. "Are you willing
to assume they're just idle threats?"
Lori shook her head thoughtfully. "No, I'm not. I
think he can be very dangerous when he's drunk."
"And then there's a little matter about Ronnie to
settle."
"I'd rather not discuss that subject with Wendy
present."
Wendy looked around. "Mom! I'm not a child!"
"All I'm saying," Karen insisted, "is that we put our
heads together and come up with some way of verifying whether what I said
is true or not. A trick I once used was to tie thread to a tree, stick
the end through a window screen, and tie it to a pan inside the house.
The thread can't be seen at night. If someone trips over the thread, they
set off a more than adequate alarm..."
"And we all run outside with our baseball bats and
beat him silly," Lori concluded. "That sounds innocent enough, but a
Sorrel Vigilante Committee of Abused Housewives could be carried way too
far."
"Karen can beat up Ralph," Wendy chimed in. "And Amy
can let the air out of Dad's tires when he's messing around with that
hussy of his..."
"You, young lady, can take Leslie and the twins and
go play outside until they're ready for a nap. This is a serious
conversation."
"Oh, Mom!"
Karen laughed. "Child, you just take care to pick
the cream of the crop when your turn comes."
Wendy reached for Leslie's hand. Together, they
dragged the toddlers out the front door and into the summer afternoon.
"I don't think Ronnie is capable of harming anyone,"
Lori said when they resumed their conversation, "but if we have a window
peeper in the neighborhood, I agree that we should take action to identify
him. Ralph is a more serious problem, though. I want to hear what you're
thinking, Karen. You're very angry sometimes. Dangerously so."
"Amy needs new locks on her doors," Karen said
evenly. "She should have a phone extension upstairs. I'm not advocating
violence, just common sense and organized cooperation."
"What about Carol's problem?" Amy said. "Shouldn't
she be part of this?"
Lori nodded agreement. "We shouldn't leave Carol out
of any plans we make."
Karen looked unsympathetic. "I hear she's lost her
job and moved away."
"She's on vacation and she'll be back," Lori said.
"I can't discuss her problem right now, but we might be able to lend her a
hand, too. God only knows she's been of help to me in the past."
"I like Carol, too," Amy said.
They discussed the details of informal pact of mutual
aid until dusk, then supervised Wendy and Leslie as they burned a dozen
boxes of sparklers to the twins’ unending delight. The twins then fell
asleep on the couch, and at midnight, Wendy phoned and demanded that Lori
return home immediately to discipline Leslie.
Lori spent the remainder of the night restlessly
pacing the overheated house. The temperature rose quickly to an even one
hundred degrees the next day. One of the fans began smoking and blew a
fuse. With Wendy and Leslie off enjoying one of childhood's endless
summer days, Lori replaced the fuse in the musky basement, then retreated
to the shade of the front porch in search of a fresh breeze.
A white truck stopped across the street. Crude black
lettering along its side read Smith's Exterminators. Four men climbed
from the truck, two dressed in white uniforms and two in dark business
suits. The two uniformed men went into the empty Robinson house next to
Carol's, leaving the men in the suits pacing the sidewalk.
Lori thought it odd that they took no equipment
except for flashlights and crowbars. She thought at first that the bank
had hired them to check the house for termites prior to placing it on the
market. Frowning, she watched the two men on the sidewalk scanning the
neighborhood. They glanced her way.
Lori recognized the two. She slipped back into the
house, hiding in a dark corner with her heart pounding. They were the
same men who had been looking for Ruben. The truck was a cover. They
were conducting a search of the house that had been pointed out as Ruben's
refuge in Sorrel. The wrong house. Like the police, they knew, or at
least suspected, that Ruben had stolen a fortune in drugs.
The uniformed men emerged forty-five minutes later,
shaking their heads in disgust. They climbed aboard, and the truck swung
around in the middle of the street and accelerated briskly away.
The incident touched off a nervous reaction that
lingered throughout the day. After dark, Leslie fell asleep in front of
the fan on the living room rug. Lori and Wendy rounded up several spools
of tough button and carpet thread and circled the house in search of ideal
spots to set their string traps. They tied the thread between the
neighbor's fence bordering their property on the east and threaded the
ends through the dining room screen. Along the driveway, there were no
fence posts or trees. "We tie one end around bricks," Wendy suggested.
"Bricks will have to do, but we don't panic if pans
start falling right and left. We got raccoons about, stray dogs,
skunks..."
"The kind with two legs?"
"Whatever."
Wendy smiled. "What would you do if you caught a
prowler in the yard? What would you do if we really had trouble?"
Only one idea came to mind. "We have that awful
rifle of your father’s hanging in the master bedroom."
"Oh, sure. I can just see you shooting someone. Do
you know how?"
Dave had coaxed her into firing the rifle once at a
range in Clayton, a one-time experience she had had no desire to repeat.
But she knew how to use the weapon and she fixed the girl with a look of
solemn determination. "I can't think of a lot that would justify shooting
a man, but I'd do it in an instant to protect the three of us. Don't you
ever doubt me."
Wendy grimaced. "Okay. You don't have to get so
hyper about it."
They tied the loose ends of the threads to pans and
set them on the edges of tables and dressers. Lori couldn't decide if the
traps made her feel secure, or merely heightened her anticipation of
trouble. Wendy gave up the day at midnight and went off to bed. Lori
roamed the house in the dark. She turned on the television for a time,
but turned down the brightness so that it wouldn't cast such a revealing
illumination over the room. She drifted to sleep on the couch and would
have fallen prey to the recurring dream.
Wendy’s rough hand saved her. "Mom! My pan fell
over!"
Lori forced her eyes open. She fought to orient
herself. Leslie was sprawled at her feet, sound asleep, and Wendy's pan
had just fallen over. Rapists, or hedgehogs?
She pushed herself to her feet and turned off the
television. "Check the bedroom windows. See if you can see anything."
Wendy darted off to do her bidding. Lori peeked
through the shade covering the front window. The streetlight cast a dim
glow over the blacktop. The windows of the empty house across the street
stared back like vacant eyes. A bat dipped into the light and fluttered
erratically about. Crickets chirped incessantly, noisily, at the height
of their glory in the warm, midsummer night.
The pan dangled from the window in Wendy's bedroom,
but the brick outside didn't appear to have been disturbed, or the thread
broken. "What do you think?" Lori asked of the girl. "Bigfoot?"
Wendy looked exasperated. She had no deep-seated
fear of the night despite her obsession with Gloria's disappearance. She
dropped back down upon her bed, content to leave the window open and the
curtains pushed aside to take advantage of stray breezes. "I'm going to
go back to bed."
Lori left the bedroom door cracked open. She flipped
the switch to the back porch light, but the bulb was out. She slipped
outside cautiously, reluctant to expose herself to unnecessary risks
dressed so scantily in shorts and halter. Still, she feared the
countryside wildlife, wild dogs and raccoons especially, more than
occasional vagrants passing through town. With her eyesight adjusted to
the dark, she slipped along the back foundation and peeked around the
corner.
The streetlights illuminated the side of the house
and driveway. Nothing moved in the night, but she could imagine how
easily a voyeur could make his way about after dark. The elderly majority
in town had passed an ordinance against barking dogs years ago,
effectively ridding the town of the outdoors variety of watchdog. Dave
had brought home a puppy just after Leslie's birth. In less than a year,
Snoopy had grown from an adorable baby to a friendly monstrosity capable
of snapping chains. She wished she had the animal standing guard now.
She went back inside and locked the doors. She
considered formally preparing for bed and properly crawling between cool
sheets. Instead, she eased herself down alongside her son in the stream
of air from the floor fan.
She slept soundly for a time. Her eyes snapped open
somewhere in the middle of the night. She sat up, lightheaded with sleep,
aware that something had awakened her and sent her heart to beating a
little faster.
She rolled to her feet and went directly to Wendy's
bedroom. For one stunned moment, she thought she was having a waking
nightmare, a brand new one to replace the horror of the glass eye. The
warm glow of the streetlights outside silhouetted a man's head and
shoulders in the frame of Wendy's window.
Lori's breath caught in her throat. In the next
moment, the shadow slipped to one side and was gone. The pot dangling
from the window rose to the window, then clattered noisily to the floor as
tension on the thread was released.
Wendy turned over onto her stomach, sleeping in a
scanty nightie and underpants. She sighed, and was asleep again in an
instant, oblivious to Lori's quiet panic.
An approaching train wailed in the night. The
chugging and the thunder intensified until it became a rattling and
clicking of steel wheels on steel tracks and the creaks and groans of the
swaying freight cars. In time, it retreated and faded away. The utter
stillness of the night closed back in about her like a noose, but she knew
now that she was not alone in the stillness, nor were she and her children
safe. The night had once belonged to her, personal property relinquished
by a sleeping world. All along, she had shared it with at least one human
predator.
