This, he thought, was a sign of how shaky the thing with Grace had made him. There were no grounds for fear. Yet he kept on his guard, uncertain whether to turn back or go forward, and, when the man started toward him, moving with a purposeful stride, he felt a sting of panic that sent him scrambling up the shadowed, needle-covered slopes, in among the trees. After perhaps twenty or thirty seconds, he was overtaken by embarrassment—he did not consider himself the sort to panic for any reason, let alone the appearance of a skinny naked stranger whom he could surely snap in two. He stopped and looked around, but saw no one. He adjusted the windbreaker about his hips and shoulders. Drew a steadying breath and rested a palm against the trunk of a spruce; his palm came away sticky, smeared with reddish resin. He studied the marks—like a little hexagram of tacky blood—and wiped it clean on his trousers.
“Fucking Christ,” he said, and stepped out of hiding.
The man was standing no more than twenty-five feet away, his bony ass was turned to Shellane, and he was staring down at the lake. He was bald, his skull was knobbly, almost bean-shaped, and his skin was bleached and grayish. Shellane eased behind the spruce trunk and turned sideways so as to be completely hidden. The wind built a faltering rush from the boughs, like the amplified issuance of a final breath. His heart felt hot and huge, less beating than pulsing rapidly. A scraping noise caused him to stiffen. The idea that he had nothing to fear wouldn’t stick in his mind—he was terribly afraid, and for no reason he could fathom. Then the man came stalking past Shellane’s hiding place, and a reason became apparent: his face had the glaring eyes and gashed mouth and mad fixity of a jack o’lantern. Outsized features carved into the gray skin. He paused, no more than a dozen feet away, his head tilted. Shellane noticed a ruff of flesh at the base of his neck…maybe it wasn’t flesh. Rubber. The son-of-a-bitch must be wearing one of those rubber Halloween masks. But if it was a mask, Shellane wasn’t eager to learn what lay beneath. He held still, not allowing himself to breathe until the man’s ground-eating stride carried him out of sight.
On his way home he remembered the black house and thought that the man in the mask must be one of the freaks who lived there. The thing to do would be to check the house out…No. That wasn’t it. The wise thing to do, the rational thing, would be to put the lake in his rear view. This place was punching holes in him. Or maybe it wasn’t the place. Maybe the years had worn him down to zero, and he just happened to be here when it all started to fall apart, a sudden erosion like that of a man who’d been granted an extra century of life and on the day the term expired, he turned to dust? What if he was only walking around in his head, and in reality he was no more than two piles of gray dust in a pair of empty shoes?
Bullshit, he said to himself, and picked up the pace. To be that way, to be the dust of a dead spell…he should be so lucky.
By the time Shellane reached the cabin, his desire to leave the lake had been subsumed by concern for Grace and a generalized depression that blunted the sharpness of his fears and muddied his thoughts. Feeling at loose ends, his energy low, he sat at his laptop playing solitaire. The darkness that soon began to gather seemed to compress the space around him, and he saw himself isolated in a little cube of brightness adrift in boundless night. A man holding digital aces, cards made of light, haunted by freaks and old crimes and a weeping woman. It was all bullshit, he realized. This poetry of self-pity leaking from him. He remembered the ridged and bloody hole in Donnie Doyle’s forehead, and he remembered a few seconds before the hole had appeared, Marty Gerbasi handing him the gun and saying, “You do it, Roy.” And he had said, “What?”, as if he didn’t know what Marty meant. But he knew, he knew this was how he bought into the big game, this was the soul price of his profession. Gerbasi said. “I like you, Roy. But that don’t mean shit. You need to do this now, understand?” He understood everything. The moral choices, the consequences attending each choice. And so he took the gun and wrote a song on Donnie Doyle’s forehead, the only important song he had ever authored, a hole punched through the bone…
The door latch rattled at Grace’s knock, so light it might have been a puff of wind. He felt the pressure of her gloom brushing against his own, like two rain clouds merging. He let her in and sank to his knees before her, his face to her belly, the clean smell of wool soaking up and stilling the tumble of his thoughts. When he stood, his hands following the curve of her hips, slipping beneath the sweater to cup her breasts, he felt his fingers were stained white by her flesh, that whiteness was spreading through him. Her lips grazed his ear and she said, “He hit me. In the stomach where it wouldn’t show. He told me I was ignorant. A fat Irish cow.” She went on and on, cataloguing Broillard’s attacks upon her, all in a husky tone doubtless influenced by Shellane’s gentler assault, and yet the list of her husband’s sins had an erotic value of its own, informing and encouraging his gentleness. Rage and desire partnered in his mind, and as he removed her clothing, it seemed he was removing as well the baffles that kept his anger contained, so that when they fell into the bed and made the mattress springs creak in a symphony of strain, it was as if anger were riding between his shoulder blades, spurring his exertions, inspiring him to pin her to the bed like a broken insect and fabricate a chorus of moans and cries. Though joined to her, part of his mind listened with almost critical acuteness as she whispered all manner of breathy endearments. Wind dance, meaningless love garbage. Garbled expressions of comic book word balloon passion, sounding one moment like she was strangling on oatmeal, the next emitting pretty snatches of hummed melody. She bucked and plunged, heels hooked behind his calves, the tendon strings of her thighs corded like wires. They were both fucking to win, he thought. To injure, to defile. Love…love…love…love. The chant of galley slaves stoking his mean-spirited rhythm. When he came, a cry spewing from his throat, he was aware of its rawness, its ugly finality, like that of man gutted by a single stroke, shocked and beginning to die.
She left him with her usual suddenness in the morning, returning, he assumed, to the befouled emptiness of her home. Scatters of rain tap-danced on the roof, and he stood by the bed, staring down at the wet spot on the sheet, which had dried into a shape reminiscent of a gray bird on the wing. The violence of their passion, its patina of furious artificiality, all inspired by her relation of Broillard’s abuse—it unsettled him. He was still angry. Angry at her for trying to use him. That was what she had been doing, he believed. Trying to rouse his anger. And she had succeeded. He was angry at Broillard for having caused her to hate so powerfully, so obsessively, that she would use him, Shellane, as a means of wreaking vengeance. But he didn’t care if that was her intent. He was ready to be used.
He drove into town and parked off to the side of the Gas ’n Guzzle, then walked toward the entrance, moved by an almost casual animus, as if of a mind merely to offer a stern warning. It was no act of self-deception—not this time; it was a mask he wore to hide from others a dangerous mood. Thanks to Grace, he had at least reclaimed something of his old self, the purity of his anger. He pushed the door inward, jingling the bell atop it. A girl in a hooded gray sweatshirt was at the counter, buying cigarettes from Broillard, who offered him a careless one-fingered wave. Shellane ambled along the aisles, picking up a can of soup, spaghetti, a bottle of virgin olive oil. When the girl left, he waited at the counter while Broillard rang up the sale.
“Little pasta tonight, eh?” said Broillard, checking the price of the spaghetti. “How’s it going out there?”