Possession (5 page)

His eyes still held hers, and he was still smiling. He pointed to a silver trailer parked in the shadows behind the tent. "You change your mind, you come back, hear? You just knock on that door over there. You come back before 3:00 A.M. and I'll be waiting. Just bring your little suitcase, and you knock."

She didn't know what to say. He watched her as she edged away, trying to find a space in the flow of people behind her. Then she found one and slipped in.

"Hey, girlie!"

She turned and saw he was back on the little stage. He cupped a hand around his mouth and shouted over the din, "Memphis! New York! Miami!" Lureen ran almost all the way home, and she kept seeing the man's eyes. She figured he'd been teasing her. She wondered if she'd look pretty in one of the costumes with the fringe and the net stockings, and then she was sure he'd been teasing her. Nobody was going to give a wonderful job

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like that to her, except... . She stopped, winded, walked slowly past Piscoglio's Drugstore, the windows darkened now. It was a lot later than she'd realized. Except maybe it was the same thing as Vito Ferrano. Maybe it was because of the little bit of power she had with men. She wasn't sure she wanted a job because of that. And she probably wouldn't get to see "As the World Turns" anymore since most likely you couldn't have televisions in trailers.

The front porch light was out, but she could see the lamp on in the living room. She went up the steps quietly and tried to make the staircase inside without Pete's seeing her. He didn't care how late she stayed out, but she didn't like to talk to him when he was drunk, and he'd be sure to be drunk by this late.

"Where the hell you been?" His voice stopped her, and she blinked as she walked into the living room. The room looked different somehow, but she couldn't tell what was changed.

And then she looked toward the television set. It wasn't there. She darted glances around the room and she couldn't see it anywhere. She looked at Pete in bewilderment.

"So? What's the matter with you?" he said. He was really drunk, so drunk his whole face seemed squashed and the few strands of hair he usually combed over the top of his head were down in his eyes.

"Where's my television?"

"It ain't your television."

"Where'd you put it?" She felt panicky. "Did you put it in the kitchen?"

"It ain't here."

"Don't tease me. I want to know where it is. I've got shows I've got to watch."

"I gave it to Myrna. Hers is on the fritz and I said she could have it. Hell, I never watch the damned thing."

"I watch it!" she screamed. "I've got my shows. I watch it all the time."

"Well, you ain't gonna watch it no more because I gave it to Myrna."

Lureen sank down on the straight chair next to the

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hallway. He meant it. He wasn't going to bring it back. She started to cry, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

Suddenly Pete was standing in front of her, weaving but standing. He grabbed at the dogwood pin on her blouse and pulled it off, ripping the thin material as the pin came away.

"What the fuck are you doing with this?"

"My mother left it. It was in Grandma's stuff. It's mine now."

"Your mother didn't leave one shitty thing here, dummy. She took it all with her when she waltzed out of here."

"It's hers! She must have left it. I remember when she used to wear it."

He held the brooch high over her head, making her jump for it as he staggered away.

"She took it when she run out," he shouted. "She took every damn thing but the silverware."

"Grandma had it," Lureen said softly. "She had all of Mama's stuff, and I found it in the closet. Give it to me!"

"They sent it back." Pete stopped, turned back to his chair and lifted his can of beer and drained it.

"What?" Lureen was in a frenzy. It was her fault. If she hadn't gone out, he couldn't have stolen her television set. If she hadn't looked in the closet, she wouldn't have found the jewelry. "Who sent it back?"

"No one." Pete studied the floor between his bare feet.

"Who sent it back? I'm going to find her. I'm going to ask her."

"You ain't gonna find her! Because she's dead. Dead. Dead. Dead."

"No!" Lureen screamed to drown out his words. "She's got amnesia. She can't remember how to get home."

"She can't remember because she's dead, you airhead. They sent all that junk back from some morgue in Chicago a coupla years ago. She left me, and she left you, and she wasn't nuthin but a whore. Shit! Shit, why'd you make me tell you? Ain't I taken care of you all this time? You just better believe she's dead and forget about her." She looked at him without expression. She was more shocked than Pete was when she leapt on him, raking his

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face with her fingernails, driving her knee into his hairy body. He covered his head with his arms as she beat on him, screaming, "Liar!

Liar!"

He brought his arm back and knocked her halfway across the living room. She lay there stunned as he stood over her, blood oozing from the scratches on his face. He lifted his arm again, and then stopped. He could kill her. She would kill him if she had the strength. Her head ached where she'd hit the doorjamb.

She watched his chest heave, and then saw him lift his hand to his face and stare at it as it came away stained with his own blood. He turned and walked unsteadily toward the bathroom.

She was gone before he came out, everything she owned jammed into a shopping bag. She would never remember running back to the carnival grounds. There was no place to go back to, and no place else to run to.

She pounded on the door of the little silver trailer, saw a light come on inside, and then the man was there in the doorway. He was barechested and she could see he had a purple snake tattooed across his belly and over one shoulder. He smiled when he recognized her and stood back to let her in.

He looked at the shopping bag in her hand, and asked, "Now, how old did you say you were?"

She stared back with flat eyes. "Eighteen. I'm eighteen like you said."

After a few days, she saw that the baby wasn't as ugly. Its head had settled into a nice round shape, and they all came to see it and told her he was a pretty baby. Dolly Dimples, the fat lady, took care of her, bringing her food as the caravan hurtled through the nights and days, heading south. Her breasts filled with milk, and it was a relief when she nursed him. He was cute—like a doll—and he didn't cry very much. When he did cry, she discovered that she could quiet him with a teaspoon of whiskey. She didn't really want him, but she didn't hate him anymore either.

She decided to give him a really nice name, something

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different. Duane—because that sounded good with Demich. And Elvis for a middle name, because she still thought about Elvis sometimes, even though they never got closer to Memphis or Nashville than Wilmington, Delaware.

When she had to perform, she either got Dolly to watch him, or she gave him a little extra whiskey and he slept in a cardboard box behind the stage.

He turned out to be a really smart little kid, and the roustabouts taught him to swear when he was two and everybody thought that was funny. She didn't know what the hell she was going to do with him when he got old enough to go to school, but the kid was a fact of life, and that's the way it was.

Sometimes she thought maybe she should adopt him out, but she never got around to it, and after a while he just seemed to take care of himself. She liked him when he was good, and when he wasn't, there was usually somebody who'd take him off her hands. She guessed she wasn't cut out to be a mother.

Lureen cried a lot. Just some little thing would make her eyes puddle up, and she couldn't help weeping. She tried never to think about Dorothy, not after that last night in Coatesville, but once in a while she just couldn't help it. She still dreamed about her mother and woke to find tears streaming down her face. Little things made her cry too; she couldn't bear to see the carcasses of cats and dogs that had been killed along the highways and left there as if nobody cared about them. Sometimes she cried because of things that men said to her and did to her, but that didn't last long because there was always another man in another town.

The baby hated it when she cried. He patted her face and cooed, "Poor Reenie," and she would hold him and rock him until her tears went away. It was a funny thing about that little kid; when he looked at her with those big eyes, it seemed like he understood everything, like he was the grown-up and she was the baby. The gypsies said that meant he was

"born old," and it seemed like maybe he had been. Lureen was dumbfounded when she learned that Duane had taught himself to read when he was only just past four.

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All that trouble she'd always had trying to figure out letters and numbers and her own kid could read better than she could. The gypsies said he was born under a Scorpio moon and that was why, but she didn't believe that; she'd seen them finagle too many suckers out of the gold in their teeth with all their spooky double-talk. Besides, Duane wasn't that smart. He got lost just like any kid and would stand in the midway bellering for her at the top of his lungs, crying till the snot ran down his face.

He always had a dirty face and wet pants, and he was afraid of the dark too. It was hard to figure him out. Sometimes he seemed grown up, and sometimes he was only a baby, clinging to her skirt and pulling on her until she felt like screaming.

Still, when she got to crying so bad and he looked at her and said,

"Don't worry, Reenie, I'll take care of you," she just had to believe him. And she'd look right at him and say, "You do that Duane. You always take care of your mama and we'll both make out O.K."

Part 1

September 1, 1981

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He was as invisible as any living creature could be when venturing out of its natural habitat. Protective coloration. A tall man, all long bones, and yet crouched in what should be an excruciating position for even an average-sized man. He had trained himself to remain motionless for hours, a lesson learned from the yogi in the freak show who made the rubes gasp when he lay down on his bed of nails. He was shrouded behind a wall of trees and vegetation where humans could not see him, and the woods creatures skittered by him without fear or even awareness of his presence among them.

The huge rock he'd selected for his vantage point had been deposited by some glacier eons before. Its worn surface was baked hot where his toes gripped it, and the September sun above him seared the late afternoon and made the air smell of baked pine needles. But the man was oblivious to the sweat that oozed from his pores and snaked over his body and to the dusty membranes in his throat. There was a canteen he'd stashed beneath the lowest outcropping of his perch, but his mind was not on slaking his thirst. He felt no thirst. He felt no pain from the cramped muscles in his calves and thighs as he hunkered there, his long spine bent improbably forward, his elbows resting easily on his bony knees.

He used only one of his senses: sight. The binoculars pressed to his eyes lent him the semblance of a great brown frog alert for prey. He could see more keenly than any hundred men without glasses, but he had to be sure that this time she would be perfect. He had thought he had found flawless specimens before, only to find that they were shabby, deceptive imitations.

They had wasted his time and his energy and they had made him angry. He'd revealed himself to them, deluded by

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their lies and pretending, and so he had had to deal with them. God, how he hated the ugliness of it, but they each deserved it, and he had done what had to be done. Each time, for days afterward, he had trouble thinking clearly.

He couldn't have that now. His mind was one of his weapons. He'd known he was smarter than hell ever since he'd known anything, and he never made the same mistake twice; it was just that the sluts could put on so many different faces.

His mind had kept him alive. He had endured because of it, with no help from a goddamned soul. Ever.

His physical development had kept pace with his mind. Six feet, five inches tall, 195 pounds, with long, long femur and humerus bones supported by taut, functional muscles that gave him the strength some men coaxed and honed in gymnasiums and on playing fields. Sports were anathema to him, an odds-on threat to the only entities he was sure of— his body and his brain. He'd seen too many old boxers with stove-in faces and scrambled minds, reliving glory days that never happened; even Broadway Joe was walking around on legs with knees three times as old as he was. Stupid.

He had only the slightest of defects, and that had occurred before he was old enough to prevent it: a slight bowing out of his shinbones, the aftermath of rickets from a diet of french fries, Coca-Cola, snow cones, and never enough milk. Once he was big enough to steal or beg his own food, he'd eaten well, and become stronger than most men by the time he was twelve. He had just a vestige of hearing loss in his left ear; one of Lureen's boyfriends had knocked him across the trailer after he bit him on the leg, but that had almost been worth it—to see that fat turkey howling and jumping up and down on one leg.

He rarely thought of the raised scar that ran across his back from shoulder to shoulder like a bolt of lightning— bluish, smooth skin there, the keloid left when the burns healed. No feeling there, as if the streak of scar were full of Novocain. He couldn't remember pulling the coffee pot down off the two-burner gas stove, but he recalled the brilliant pain of the hot liquid cascading over his back and

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his screaming for Lureen who didn't come. He didn't blame his mother. He'd never held her responsible for any of the bad things; she'd done the best she could. Women liked to trace the slick-skinned path across his back, and he always told them he had been struck by lightning. Bitches who mothered him turned him off.

He'd had a mother. The only mother.

Lureen.

Her name whispered through the synapses of his brain cells and made his gut roll over. He missed her with a consuming ache, just as he'd always missed her. She was woman to him, and would be forever. Vague, tentative, frightened—too frightened to be with him all the times he needed her.