“C’mon,” Harry says now, “you’re a knockout. It doesn’t matter what you wear.”
“I just can’t decide whether to go strapless and dressy or long and flowy and summery.” She tosses the catalog on the floor and gets up. “Here, I’ll let you choose.” She walks to the closet, opens the door… and smells him before she sees him: beer, cigarettes, and sweat-funk.
She starts to turn around and call to Harry, but she’s too late. A pair of strong arms reach out from the shadows and hanging clothes and pull her to the floor. Now she finds her voice, “Harry!”
He’s already off the bed and moving. He hurls himself at Gwendy’s attacker, and amidst a tangle of clothes hangers and blouses, they grapple across the floor.
Gwendy pushes herself back up against the wall and is stunned to see Frankie Stone, dressed in camo pants, dark glasses, and t-shirt, as if he thinks he’s a soldier on a secret mission, rolling around her bedroom floor with her boyfriend. That’s bad, but something else is worse: lying on the closet floor, half-buried in fallen clothes, is a scatter of silver dollars… and the button box. Frankie must have found it while he was waiting for her, or while he was waiting for Harry to leave.
Has he pushed any of the buttons?
Is Africa gone? Or Europe?
The two young men crash into the night table. Hairbrushes and makeup rain down on them. Frankie’s Secret Agent Man shades fly off. Harry outweighs Frankie by at least thirty pounds, and pins the skinny little dipshit to the floor. “Gwen?” He sounds perfectly calm. “Call the police. I’ve got this skanky little motherf—”
But that’s when it all goes to hell. Frankie is skinny, Frankie doesn’t have much in the way of muscles, but that is also true of snakes. He moves like a snake now, first wriggling, then hoisting one knee into the crotch of Harry’s boxers. Harry makes an ooof sound and tilts forward. Frankie pulls one hand free, makes finger-prongs, and jabs them into Harry’s eyes. Harry screams, claps a hand to his face, and falls to one side.
Gwendy pushes herself up in time to see Frankie coming at her, grabbing for her with one hand and trying to get something out of the pocket of his camo pants with the other. Before he can touch her, Harry tackles him and they go reeling into the closet, falling and pulling down more dresses and skirts and pants and tops, so at first Gwendy can see nothing but a pile of clothes that appears to be breathing.
Then a hand emerges—a dirty hand with blue webbing tattooed across the back. It paws around aimlessly at first, then finds the button box. Gwendy tries to scream, but nothing comes out; her throat is locked tight. The box comes down corner first. Once… then twice… then three times. The first time it connects with Harry’s head, the sound is muffled by clothes. The second time it’s louder. The third time, the hit produces a sickening crack, like a breaking branch, and the corner of the box is coated with blood and hair.
The clothes heave and slide. Frankie emerges, still holding the button box in one tattooed hand. He’s grinning. Behind him she can see Harry. His eyes are closed, his mouth hangs open.
“Don’t know what this is, pretty girl, but it hits real good.”
She darts past him. He doesn’t try to stop her. She goes on her knees beside Harry and lifts his head with one hand. She cups the other palm in front of his nose and mouth, but she already knows. The box used to be light, but for a while tonight it was heavy, because it wanted to be heavy. Frankie Stone has used it to crush the top of Harry Streeter’s skull. There is no breath on her palm.
“You killed him! You filthy son of a bitch, you killed him!”
“Yeah, well, maybe. Whatever.” He seems uninterested in the dead boy; his eyes are busily crawling over Gwendy’s body, and she understands he’s crazy. A box that can destroy the world is in the hands of a crazy person who thinks he’s a Green Beret or a Navy SEAL or something like that. “What is this thing? Besides where you store your silver dollars, that is? How much are they worth, Gwennie? And what do these buttons do?”
He touches the green one, then the violet one, and as his grimy thumb moves toward the black one, Gwendy does the only thing she can think of. Only she doesn’t think, she just acts. Her bra closes in front, and now she opens it. “Do you want to play with those buttons, or with mine?”
Frankie grins, exposing teeth that would make even a hardened dentist wince and turn away. He reaches into his pocket again, and pulls out a knife. It reminds her of Lenny’s, except there’s no Semper Fi engraved on it. “Get over on the bed, Prom Queen. Don’t bother taking off your panties. I want to cut them off you. If you lay real still, maybe I won’t cut what’s underneath.”
“Did he send you?” Gwendy asks. She’s sitting on her bottom now, with her feet on the floor and her legs drawn up to hide her breasts. With luck, one look at them is all this sick bastard is going to get. “Did Mr. Farris send you to take the box? Did he want you to have it?” Although the evidence seems to point to this, it’s hard to believe.
He’s frowning. “Mr. who?”
“Farris. Black suit? Little black hat that goes wherever it wants to?”
“I don’t know any Mr. F—”
That’s when she lashes out, once again not thinking… although later it will occur to her that the box might have been thinking for her. His eyes widen and the hand holding the knife pistons forward, driving through her foot and coming out the other side in a bouquet of blood. She shrieks as her heel slams into Frankie’s chest, driving him back into the closet. She snatches up the box, and at the same time she pushes the red button, she screams, “Rot in hell!”
30
Gwendy Peterson graduates from Brown summa cum laude in June of 1984. There has been no running track for her since her senior spring in high school; the knife-wound in her foot got infected while she was in the hospital, and although it cleared eventually, she lost a piece of it. She still walks with a limp, although now it is barely discernable.
She goes out to dinner with her parents after the ceremony, and they have a fine time. Mr. and Mrs. Peterson even break their long abstinence with a bottle of champagne to toast their daughter, who is bound for Columbia grad school, or—perhaps—the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She thinks she might have a novel in her. Maybe more than one.
“And is there a man in your life?” Mrs. Peterson asks. Her color is high and her eyes are bright from the unaccustomed alcohol.
Gwendy shakes her head, smiling. “No man currently.”
Nor, she thinks, will there be in the future. She already has a significant other; it’s a box with eight buttons on top and two levers on the side. She still eats the occasional chocolate, but she hasn’t taken one of the silver dollars in years. The ones she did have are gone, parceled out one or two at a time for books, rent (oh God, the luxury of a single apartment), and an upgrade from the Fiesta to a Subaru Outback (which outraged her mother, but she got over it eventually).
“Well,” says Mr. Peterson, “there’s time for that.”
“Yes.” Gwendy smiles. “I have plenty of time.”
31
She’s going to spend the summer in Castle Rock, so when her parents have gone back to their hotel, she packs up the last of her things, stowing the button box at the very bottom of her trunk. During her time at Brown, she kept the awful thing in a safe deposit box in the Bank of Rhode Island, something she wishes she had thought of doing sooner, but she was just a kid when she got it, a kid, goddammit, and what do kids know? Kids stow valuables in cavities under trees, or behind loose stones in cellars prone to flooding, or in closets. In closets, for Christ’s sake! Once she gets to Columbia (or Iowa City, if the Writers’ Workshop accepts her), it will go into another safety deposit box, and as far as she’s concerned, it can stay there forever.