Then there was the face in the window.
It was a large face, pale and childish, tapering at the brow and expanding like a prize eggplant in the region of the jowl. Above, there was a bristle of close-cropped hair and a long-billed cap; below, a congeries of chins. When I recovered from my initial shock, I realized that the face belonged not to a sheriff’s deputy, spare extortionist or special investigator from the DEA, but to our own witless, puerile and very likely subhuman neighbor, Marlon Sapers. Who else?
“Oh, my God,” Aorta had said, and we’d frozen in our worst moment, the moment of our dissolution and grief. Vogelsang had Gesh in a lethal chokehold, I was wrestling the.22 from Phil, Dowst was shouting, Aorta gasping, garbage climbed the walls as if it were alive and chaos roared in our ears. Phil was the first to react. He swung the rifle around like a skeetshooter and took out the upper left panel of the window as neatly as if he were potting a clay pigeon. Pow! The face disappeared from the window, Vogelsang sprang up as if he’d been scalded, Gesh struggled unsteadily to his feet, Dowst hit the floor. Looking pleased with himself, looking as if he’d just solved the better portion of the world’s problems in a single flamboyant stroke, Phil lowered the gun. It was then that I made the association between those fleshy befuddled features and Sapers’s son and heir, and I called out his name in shocked reproof. “Marlon!” I cried. “You come back here!”
The next thing I remember, Vogelsang and I were crashing through the scrub behind the house, pursuing Marlon. What we intended to do with him once we caught him was a question that begged further consideration. We didn’t stop to consider.
To his distress, Marlon was not built for flight. Clumsy, lumbering, reeling from the shock of discovery and rattled by the deadly crack of the gun, he lurched blindly through the brush, heading first in one direction, then another. We caught up with him between the storage shed and the propane tank. Perceiving our closeness, he turned at bay, a frantic, crazed, trapped-beast sort of look in the eyes that loomed huge behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “Go away!” he screamed, his body shuddering under the force of conflicting impulses and aberrant emotions. “Leave me alone!” I pulled up short, half a dozen feet from him, but Vogelsang, caught up in the chase and the bloodlust of his clash with Gesh, dove for his legs like a tackier.
If he could have paused to think things out or had he been a fraction less keyed up, I’m sure Vogelsang would have acted differently. As it was, he saw almost immediately that he’d made a mistake. A grave mistake. Marlon let out a shattering, high-pitched, psychotic shriek — the shriek alone enough to commit him to Mattewan — and flung Vogelsang from him as if he were made of sawdust and paper. Then he turned to me. Vogelsang lay in the bushes, stunned, birds flew cursing into the trees, the sky darkened. Marlon was in a rage. He stamped his feet and shrieked again, pounding his fists up and down like pistons. I backed up a step. “Marlon,” I said, trying for a reasonable, soothing tone. “No one wants to hurt you.”
“You do,” he choked. “You don’t like me.” There were beads of sweat on his face, he was turning color — his usual chalky pallor giving way to the angry swollen red of a sore about to burst — and his eyes jerked around the perimeter of the glasses like fish trapped in a sinking pond. Here was the psychopath, the disturbed adolescent who’d nearly crushed his grandmother after she’d scolded him, the inhabitee of the padded cell at Napa State. “I know you,” he blubbered, his voice so constricted it sounded like the hiss of a deflating balloon. “You, you hollered at me!”
The great reddening hulk of him was awash in inflammatory chemicals, burning secretions from bad glands. His teeth chattered, his neck foundered on its chins like a ship going down. I backed up another few steps, poised to run, when suddenly he let out a terrible scourging shriek, bent low, tore up a bush the size of a bale of hay and heaved it at me. Branches scraped my chest, roots, dirt, I felt something wet at the corner of my mouth. When I looked up, Marlon was spinning round as if in a game of blindman’s buff, dust beating about his frantically churning legs, a high choking whinny of rage and terror stuttering through his clenched teeth. Suddenly he lurched off, erratic as a drunk, all thought of fleeing subsumed in the peremptory urge to nullify his immediate environment, to beat the visible world to dust. Before him stood the propane tank, big as a submarine. He never hesitated. Just lowered his shoulder and galloped into it, pounding it repeatedly until it fell from its cinder-block stand with a single deep booming reverberation.
I didn’t know what to do. We’d set him off, and he was unstoppable. Vogelsang didn’t look as if he had any ready solutions either. While Marlon was distracted by the propane tank, he’d dodged out of the way, holding his side. Now he stood at a discreet distance, looking dazed and helpless, as Marlon turned his attention to the storage shed. Huge, savage, amok, Marlon reared back and hit the side of the building with the force of an artillery shell, and I heard something give, the brittle snap of stud or beam. Then he began pummeling the weathered panels with his fists and forearms until he’d managed to punch a hole in the wall. Then again and again, tearing at the hole, his fists bleeding, face warped with hatred and anguish, the ancient flimsy structure rocking on its foundation. He was awesome, brutal, mindless, King Kong hammering dinosaurs into submission. “Marlon!” I shouted over the clamor. “How about a Coke?”
No response.
“A Mars bar?”
Nails screamed, boards wheezed. A plank tore loose and flew into the field.
It had begun to look as if he would reduce the entire lodge to splinters when there came a sharp imperious roar from the ravine at my back. “Marlon!” the voice boomed, deep as the rumble of ruptured earth, hard as a wall of granite. “You stop that now!” I turned my head. There, blasting up out of the thicket like Grendel’s mother was the biggest woman I had ever laid eyes upon — not your typical fat woman or bearded lady, but a monument to flesh, twice the size of the shot putter for the Soviet women’s team. Or for the men’s team, for that matter. Trudy Sapers. I didn’t need an introduciton.
Neither did Marlon. As enraged as he’d been an instant earlier, as frenzied and disturbed and out of control, he now shifted gears, suddenly caught up in a new paroxysm of blind, destructive, mother-mortifying fury. His jowls shuddered convulsively, he stamped and raged in full tantrum, put the great log of his sneakered foot through the wall. But his mother knew him too well. On she came, six-two at least, five hundred pounds or more, moving across the field with a purposive grace, with a mammoth, unimpeachable dignity, undaunted in an ankle-length dress the size of an open parachute. She took hold of him by the upper arm and firmly but gently, almost tenderly, threw him to the ground and sat on him.
There was nothing to say. In the face of such a fit and so monumental an act of melioration and tenderness, Marlon’s voyeurism seemed hardly worth mentioning. I stood there awestruck through a long aphasic moment as Marlon’s breathing gradually became easier and Sapers himself emerged from the bushes behind me. He could have been emerging on a battlefield. Vogelsang was still cradling his ribs and I was licking blood from the corner of my mouth, there were three jagged rents in the face of the storage shed, and the propane tank lay on its side in the bushes like a beached whale.
“Heh-heh,” Sapers said, and he spat nervously. “Heh-heh. My apologies about all this, boys. No harm done, I hope. Heh-heh.” He spat again, the stream of tobacco juice like some part of his anatomy, a coiled brown tongue lashing in and out as if to test the air before each breath. “Ohhhh, don’t you worry a bit, I’ll pay for the damages, a course.”