Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (45 page)

“Get ready,” he told her.

“Why?”

“Why? Why are you
asking
?”

Her face looked pained.

“Get ready. And put that blouse in some cold water.”

He walked behind her to the kitchen and watched as she ran the water in the sink and stripped off the blouse. He could see the outline of the rose on her shoulder beneath the thin layer of gauze. The man had said it would scab for a few days and then heal. That was fine. He wouldn’t touch her there. Nor, for the moment, would he touch the rings.

“Turn around.”

He reached for the short leather riding crop on the peg-board behind him on the kitchen wall hanging amid the pots and pans.

“Raise your arms,” he said.

He began on her stomach.

He lay across his sheets drunk with too much scotch on top of too little of the greasy Italian food and heard her shift in the box he’d built for her beneath the bed. He knew that it was hard for her to sleep. Her nipples would hurt. Her back would hurt from the tattoo. Her thighs and stomach would still be stinging.

It was nothing new. In the four years since he’d found her in the parking lot at K Mart and bluffed her into the car with his toy pistol pain had become something she was used to. There had been a thousand such nights. Tonight was only different, really, in that he’d had hopes again in fucking her. Perhaps his arousal would translate into her own, and arousal into a baby. He wanted the baby because it would be a continuation of her when she was gone. But it hadn’t happened. He knew it hadn’t.

It was dark as the grave inside the box. He knew that, too. He’d tried it out himself to see if the casters worked and found that it was darker even than the basement where he’d kept her the first two years of her captivity, listening to her whine to please, please set her free—to let her call her parents or go to the toilet or loosen the wire coils around her wrists—until finally there was no more whining and no more talk at all for a long time.

The box was better than the basement and darker. It was what she deserved. To be buried there.

It was a sin that he loved her.

“Barren,” he muttered. And finally he fell asleep.

The following day was Monday, and he went to work as usual, leaving her bound naked inside the box beneath the bed. The bonds were not really necessary. The bonds were merely custom. It was over three years ago that she had attempted to escape him twice over the period of a single month and he had discouraged her with the red-hot blade of a kitchen knife and the suggestion that he had contacts everywhere, that he was part of some vast vague criminal machine and that should she try a third time, first her mother and then her father would meet with accidental death, reinforcing this by showing her that he had their address and her father’s business address in his Rolodex and even knew the make, model, and year of the car sitting in their driveway.

He told her stories of this criminal network frequently,
mostly of their viciousness in matter of retribution. He told that her name was registered in their central computer and that should anything happen to him, should he die or be arrested, they would be honor bound to find her and torture her to death according to their code. In his stories he described these tortures in loving detail and saw that she soon came to believe them.

She no longer tried to run away.

He returned from work at noon to let her feed herself and use the bathroom and saw that she had her period again. Her first day’s flow was always heavy. He had her change the thin grey sheets in the box before he put her back inside again. The period meant that he probably wouldn’t want to touch her for a few days. He’d probably just watch cable.

Nights he’d come home to a liter of scotch and “Nick at Nite,” and he’d be able to forget that she was there doing the dishes, the laundry, even the vacuuming if he turned the sound up loud enough. He’d be able to forget his phone installation route and his goddamn supervisor and the long-dead woman whose home he was living in even though her ghost was everywhere. He’d get a little smashed and think, Ma, if you could see me now.

On the fourth night he fucked her.

He had to have been blind drunk to fuck her because there was still some bleeding, some residue inside her, but fucking her blind drunk was nothing new either, and he pulled and tugged on the rings in her nipples until she screamed, and he came in her from behind with a power that astonished him. And he must have been pretty blind drunk indeed because as he fell away from behind her across the bed and she stepped away he thought he saw not one rose but two branching off the same central stem that curved along her shoulder blade.

He even thought he smelled them.

The following night, he
was
blind drunk, no question, raging.

“You want to call your parents? We’re back to
that
shit? You’re giving me that shit again?”

He had all kinds of whips all over the house just for times like these when he needed one instantly and did not want to go looking for one and this one on the living room mantel was long and thin. It was meant to produce pain and it was studded to produce blood.

She knew that about the whip but didn’t run away—just stood there looking at him, defiant. He’d thought they were long past the defiance.

“Take off your clothes.”

She didn’t move.

So he whipped them off her.

She was wearing just a light summer skirt and blouse he’d picked out for her at K Mart, and when he was done they were just tatters hanging off her hips and shoulders, spackled and streaked with blood.

He put her in the bathtub and ran a tub for her and closed the door.

By the time she came out again he’d killed the bottle. He watched her crawl meekly into the box and roll herself under the bed just moments before he fell asleep in the heavy overstuffed armchair in front of the television.

She was naked. The welts across her body looked like runners, like heavy creepers—serpentine, overlapping and intersecting inside her flesh—the ripe red wounds that the metal studs had made like the small blossoms of flowers.

And then it was the weekend again.

On Saturday he left her alone, feeling bad about the beating of the night before. Though she’d provoked him.

The girl kept her distance. She made them lunch and handed him a shopping list, and when he returned with the groceries she was on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. She wore an old red sweatshirt and sweatpants which had once belonged to him but which had shrunk with repeated washings so that they were even tight on her now,
and because the front of the shirt was wet he could see the outlines of the nipple rings when she stood to change the water.

Still he left her be.

That night they watched a movie together—
Poltergeist
—about a family battling supernatural forces which threaten to drive them apart and winning.

The children were the glue, he thought. He looked at her sadly.

“That could be us, you know.”

“What could?” she said.

He drank his whiskey.

By Sunday night he was still feeling tender toward her.

It was partly because she didn’t look good. Her face had a grey-brown cast to it that he didn’t like. She needed sun. But Sunday was as overcast as Saturday had been. Rain threatened. So there was no point in letting her sit out in the backyard deck sewing his buttons or mending his socks.

Plus she was off her feed. She’d never been one for breakfast, but she usually had a little lunch at least and a fairly decent dinner. Chicken was normally her favorite, but tonight they had chicken and she barely touched it, seeming to prefer the vegetables—though she didn’t do much with them either.

He wondered if she were coming down with something.

Or if that beating Friday night had been more extreme than he remembered.

It was possible that she needed a treat, some kind of pick me up. A boost to her morale.

So when it was time to go to bed he told her as she came out of the bathroom in her pajamas that she did not have to sleep in the box tonight, tonight was special, she could be beside him on the bed. She said nothing but crawled in next to him and rested her head in the crook of his arm.

He smiled. The girl smelled of musk and roses. He wondered
how she had managed that. He was not aware of having ever bought her any perfume, but perhaps at some point he had. It was considerate of her—even loving—to wear it for him now.

She slept in the moonless night.

He could tell by her breathing.

He almost fell asleep, too. It had begun to rain, and he lay listening to it patter on the roof for a long while, and then he thought about her young girl’s body, marked by his hand and bearing his sign, so wet and soft inside; which he had not seen or even touched in nearly two days now, and he felt himself begin to rise.

Perhaps tonight, he thought. He knew nothing about a woman’s fertility, only that it was there, and that somehow he might touch it if he were to go deep enough to dig it out of her.

He turned her toward him in the dark. He unbuttoned her pajama top and felt something prick his middle finger as the third button slid through the buttonhole and thought that she would have to replace that in the morning, that it was broken and jagged and might hurt her.

He drew the bottoms down off her legs, felt the welts like thick coils along her thighs. She stirred and in her slide across the sheets he heard a sound like the rustle of leaves.

He heard the distant thunder.

And it must have awakened her, or else his stripping her had, because she put her hands to his shoulders as he parted her legs and entered her, feeling the welts along the insides of her thighs as she gripped him inside her and moved, swaying gently, beneath him.

It was like nothing that had ever come before.

She had never been so responsive to him, pulling herself up onto him, urgently close to him while the thunder rumbled, and he saw flashes of lightning beneath the closed lids of his eyes and then opened them so he could see her, could see this sudden phenomenon that was clawing at him, fingernails scoring the skin of his back and shoulders,
this amazing phenomenon as his slave of love in every way now plunged in moonless black, which tore and bit and moaned as though tossed in a savage wind and who suddenly seemed to be everywhere around him at once, her fingers a thousand thorns, her body a billion petals all falling together and himself the author of this destruction, this overflowing flowering.

The lightning flashed twice.

He heard the rings drop off the bed and roll across the floor as her wide soft nipples opened, bloomed, and parted, smelled loam and fresh-turned earth as a strand of briar turned twice around his neck. He felt her cunt like a crown of thorns gripping him tight and tearing and felt himself throb and shoot suddenly deep within her, blood and semen, runners crawling over him, their thorns sinking deep, felt himself bleeding into her, veins, arteries pricked and severed as he looked down at the body which was no longer her body but the tangled garden of wild blood-red roses that he had made of her blossoming and erupting from tortured flesh.

She was his earth, his ground. He had cast his seed to her again and again
.

And the creepers grew, nourished.

In three years the City had changed again.

You could almost smell the blood in the air.

Bad blood
.

He walked down Riverside from 82nd. For six blocks no one had passed him. The cool night breeze drifted off the Hudson. Across the street the park was grey and empty in the moonlight.

This area was one of the loveliest in New York. It still was. Old, newly-renovated townhouses along one side, the park along the other. The residents, who were extremely well-off, saw to it that the sidewalks were kept mostly clean. At night there was little traffic.

But look. Here
.

He had to walk around her. Her filthy skirt hitched up to her fat pasty thighs. Cap pulled down over dull brown matted hair. She lay asleep, her toothless mouth wide open—a foul, black hole beneath the streetlight.

He walked by.

It occurred to him that this had been coming for a very
long time. The wealthy—or almost wealthy—and the poor living in wholly separate camps, paths barely intersecting. The middle class, such as they were, little more than badly disguised servants to the rich. Insulated by the same cloak of privilege that draped the shoulders of their masters.

You could no longer refer to the “growing numbers” of the poor. The poor were multitudes.

Even here. On this quiet street.

And not surprisingly, he heard them before he saw them.

Ahead of him. Not far.

He walked slowly, with a measured stride. He was in no hurry to see.

They were across the street in the park at 78th Street, the old man helpless against a tree, the four boys going at him with fists and stones. The homeless man pleading, the sense of his words lost in broken teeth and blood and bone because the tall boy was shoving a rock into his mouth at the same time—no, a piece of jagged macadam from the street—while two others hooted their encouragement and the smallest of the boys, thin and blonde and wiry, twelve maybe, crushed his left kneecap with three rapid blows from a metal bat. The bat gleamed in the moonlight. The man collapsed, shrieking, the chunk of macadam tumbling from his mouth out onto the grass.