Then slowly, slowly, as if he were a rubber doll on an air pump, the old man stiffened, raised his head, and straightened; he looked at Eve and raged, “Lying bitch. You lyin’, fuckin’ bitch.”
He was still fighting for that rotten lie that had ruined his life and his son’s. A macho point of honor, maybe, A man’s gotta lie like a man’s gotta lie.
“Stone fuckin’ liar.” The old man spat, then looked at his son. “She’s spinnin’ you a tale, you moron, and you’re eatin’ it up. Jesus Christ, what’d you think would happen, you poor booby?”
The attack took Adam by surprise. He backed up and the gun wavered in midair.
“You dumb shit,” the old man yelled. “You get hold of her, whatever she is, stick a Colt Python in her face and say, ‘Tell me the tale of the scars.’”
“You knew—” Adam cried.
“I knew shit. But you asked about scars every fuckin’ month for twenty-five years, so I knew they were there, didn’t I?”
“How?”
“How the fuck should I know how you got ’em? Maybe from some game the other kids played with you because you were such a scrawny little wimp and little boys love to see blood, so they tied you down and cut you up a little. So what?”
“Want to see how they ‘cut me up a little’?” Adam said softly. “No! So they cut you up a little more than a little, and you made the biggest deal out of it since the Mansons. And found this bitch.” He glared at Eve. “Stuck a gun in her face and told her to spin you a tale and she spinned you a good one so you wouldn’t blow her head off. Spinned you a tale of passion and lies, torture and death, where your ma ain’t your ma and your past is a cross between Days of Our Lives and Night of the Living Dead and you fell for it, you sucker.”
Adam looked at Eve.
“It’s a thought, isn’t it?” he said softly.
“No, it’s not, and you know it,” she said.
“You don’t know it!” the old man yelled. “Think, asshole! Just think. Think people in this town’d keep quiet about a story like that? Think they wouldn’t tell their kids that Adam Fuller’s a bastard? Think the kids’d torment you more than she savs your poor ma did? Think Ida Van Damm wouldn’t ferret out such a story and spread it all over God’s creation?”
“He’s got a point,” Adam said. The gun stopped wavering and fixed on Eve. But it didn’t faze her because she had an ace in the hole.
“That’s it!” the old man screeched. “She’s the one you should be pointing that pistol at, not your ol’ dad. Ask her, boy. Ask her how a thing like that could happen in a town like this where everyone knows every time you take a shit. Ask her!”
“I’m asking,” Adam said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see any more after Edna died, except for something that happened later.” (Years later, when the bitch got her comeuppance, but there was no point in bringing it up now.) “Maybe they said they adopted you. That wouldn’t cause much stir, even back then. But I don’t know.”
It sounded lame and the old man cackled, “See there... she ain’t got no answer.”
Adam took a step toward her, the old man shivered with excitement, and Eve played her ace in the hole. She looked around the kitchen, then back at Adam. “Where’s the cookie jar?” she asked. “There was a cookie jar with a sad face next to the sink. It looked like it felt sorry for you... as if it could see what she was doing to you. Where is it?”
There wasn’t a sound in the kitchen except for the solid click of the railroad clock pendulum, then the old man blubbered, “She seen it at your house! She seen it—”
Adam leaped across the kitchen, grabbed the front of his father’s plaid flannel shirt, and slammed him against the refrigerator. The beer bottle flew out of his hand and clinked across the floor, leaking foam, and the old man’s eyes rolled back in his head. Adam dragged him to the table and shoved him in the chair. His head fell forward and Adam grabbed the back of his collar and yanked him upright, then jammed the gun into the soft meat under his chin and dug it in. “She didn’t see it at my house, you old shit. She’s never been to my house. She saw it when she saw the rest of it.” He dug the gun deeper; the old man’s face turned cheesy.
“Who was my mother?” Adam screamed in his father’s ear. “What happened to her?”
The old man compressed his dry, cracked lips and Eve thought he would let his head get blown off before he’d give up the lie. She braced herself for the shot, then the old man sagged and moaned, “I killed her.”
Adam eased up on the gun and stepped back, and the old man whispered, “Me’n the doctors killed her. Barbara the bitch killed her, ’cause if I didn’t have to be scared of what she’d do, we could’ve stayed here, with a decent hospital, decent doctors. You killed her. Something previous, they called it.”
“Placenta previa,” Adam said.
“Yeah. We were out in Road Dust USA and it took the ambulance half an hour to get to us. Didn’t matter, the doctors said, she’d’a died anyway, unless she was right there in the hospital, like she’d begged them to let her be because she knew something was wrong. So she bled to death.”
“And the other one?”
“Barbara?” The old man grinned a little. “Barbara Healy Fuller was ready and waiting at poor Edna’s funeral like the ol’ spider in the parlor. Some other teachers came and the principal—can’t remember his name now—and a few of the kids, but Edna’d been gone five months, kids forget fast. And Barbara. She took me off into this little room with lots of boxes of Kleenex and packs of smelling salts and made me this proposition.
“She had it all figured out, must’ve been studying on it from the second she heard Edna was dead. I’d left you back in Stanton with another new mother, a woman Edna’d made friends with. She made friends easy, people liked her. Anyways, Barb figured we’d take you to her mother’s in Utica, and she’d stay there with you and Mike for a few months, then come home with our new baby. Maybe people would be suspicious, might whisper behind their hands, but everyone who knew Barb was a little scared of her, and she knew they wouldn’t say a word. Not much they could say because she was a big woman, more’n possible she was a few months gone when we went to her mother’s.
“So that’s how we did it, son; that was her proposition and I accepted it. Made a pact with a flowered-dressed devil who made flaky piecrust that she’d raise you as her own and I’d pay the freight. Sold my soul to a demon Betty Crocker for your sake, boy. She said she didn’t see as I had any choice, with those black eyes of hers snapping like there was a thousand lit candles in her head, and I wanted to kill her. But she was right, so I made m’pact, and I kept it. And thought she did too.
“Oh, Adam,” he cried, “Adam, I knew she hit you more than she should ’cause you started getting real quiet and kind of strange. But I figured you’d get over it. Figured it was the hand life dealt you, and for a few extra licks you were kept clean and fed and as well turned out as Mike, and Christ knows what would’a happened to you with just me to look after you. So I let it go. I never, never”—he raised his right hand—“never knew about cutting you up or any of what she”—pointing at Eve—“says. Never would’ve imagined such things until you started asking me where the scars came from. Then I knew what Barbara’d done to you—to Edna’s baby—but Barb was dead by then, too, and I didn’t see any point telling you.