“She’s not coming in again till after vacation.”
“Well, where’s the House Mother?” said Kathy. “I know, I know, there’s no House Mother here. Ooh, I wish I was still a PT!”
“Better not let Madam President hear you,” said Sharon. “She’ll kick you out on your ass.”
Kathy groaned and went upstairs.
Lissa laughed. She had seen the House Mother for the Pi Taus; her face had more lines in it than War and Peace, which she had been reading for English 260. Trying to read. Part I had been on the “Six O’Clock Movie” Monday. Dutifully she had watched it, but for some reason she had had to miss Part II. Part III had been on for a few minutes now.
“Henry Fonda’s the only one who acts like he read the book,” said Sharon, giving up on the color controls and laying her legs over the arm of the couch again. The set, which rendered everything the color of bile, did look, as Sharon had once remarked, “like somebody took a whiz on it.” Lissa tried to follow the plot, but by now it made no sense at all to her.
‘Who’s been leeching my Marlboros, anyway?” said Sharon, digging under the cushions.
Lissa flipped over to Channel 11. “Hey, Chiller’s on.”
“Right arm,” said Sharon.
“Is that Frankenstein?”
“Not again,” said Sharon. “I’ve seen this flick so many—”
“You know, I’ve never seen it all the way through,” said Lissa. “My folks would never let me.”
“Ha!”
“No, really.”
“Well, go ahead, knock yourself out.”
Fascinated, Lissa watched the scene in which little Maria so innocently shared her flowers with the Monster on the riverbank. One by delicate one they cast daisies on the water. Then, very slowly, the Monster’s expression began to change, as the child ran out of flowers, as the scene began to fade out.
“That’s the part they always cut,” said Sharon. “You should see his face right after this, before they find her with her neck broken. You know what I think? I don’t believe he even meant to kill her at all. I think he just sort of, you know, crushed her to him. You know what I mean? I don’t think there was anything evil about it. They were both innocents. Neither one of them knew anything about it.”
A bald-headed used-car salesman appeared on the screen, his face a sneer of chartreuse.
Joe stood stock-still and waited for the next sound.
It did not come.
He stepped onto the blue-shadowed lawn. His hand steadied on his flashlight.
He heard footfalls on the other side of the hedge, close to a house.
He let himself into the foliage, deciding to follow it up. Leaves, small and shiny, tracked past him on either side, hard branches skidding off his head, almost knocking his hat to the ground.
Close to the other side, he saw a man’s back moving quickly away from him along the side of the house, toward the front sidewalk. The house was dark, probably empty; he hoped so. He felt disoriented for a fraction of a second, almost as if he were not really here but somewhere else entirely. Then he saw the figure stand straight and slow to a normal gait, crossing under the street lamp. Then the figure returned to a crouch and headed into the trees on the other side. Peeping Tom? Or the one he had been hired to catch? Well, if this is the one, he must be one poor scared son of a bitch right now, even if he doesn’t know he’s being watched. In fact, Joe realized, his own heart hammering at the back of his badge, that part wouldn’t really have anything to do with the feeling, not anything at all.
Joe pulled free of the hedge and backed up. He moved down behind the next four houses in line and then continued forward to the street and crossed at the end of the block. He cut into the alley just past the houses.
He stayed close to the wooden fence, navigating around trash barrels—empty, they would drum an alarm down the whole of Sorority Row. He heard tennis shoes grinding into the gravel.
A young man crossed the alley not fifty feet in front of him.
They heard Kathy put a record on the turntable upstairs.
The TV screen receded into the deepening shadows of the living room. A cricket started up, sounding so close that Lissa glanced nervously about to see if it was in the house with them. Outside, an elderly officer paced past the hedge, hands behind his back.
“Look at that old codger,” Sharon’s ash flared and hissed before her face, then arced down. “I’ll bet they still don’t give them real bullets to use. Yeah, I saw his gun one time. The barrel was plugged up with wood or bubble gum or something. I wonder if they’re going to do any good now that we need them? Somebody needs them. The only thing they’ve been good for so far is to remind us all. D’you see what I mean?” She sat forward. “God, I’ve got to get away from here for a while. I’m starting to vegetate. When’s Eliot coming over?”
“He didn’t say.”
“He always takes his time. I don’t know what he does on his way over here, wandering around jacking his brain off with some new pet theory.”
“Sharon!”
“Well, it’s the truth.”
They sat with the sound turned down. The cricket synched with the record for a few bars, then continued on its own again.
“Can I have one of those, please?”
“I didn’t know you were smoking now, Lees.”
“I’m not. Not really.”
The young man crossed the alley.
Joe froze.
Then he followed.
Passing between two houses, he stopped again and dropped to one knee.
He saw ahead to the next street. The young man had already crossed over and was now hesitating by one of the huts on the other side. Houses, he told himself. Now Joe looked between the trees and houses as down a tunneclass="underline" as the street lamp flicked on, the pavement mottled under the new light, his eyes focused through to a square of still-bright sky visible now above the long campus, parking lot.
He waited.
Another figure, nearly a silhouette, appeared against the sky.
It was a woman.
He snapped to, aware that he had lost track of his prey. The young man was gone. He had slipped through, probably to the lot. But—had he gone through, or was he still somewhere on the block between, sidestepping from house to house?
He had blown it.
He started to move anyway.
Then it hit him. The woman. The woman waiting in the lot.
It had to be his wife.
“Eliot,” said Sharon, “is very into it. And therefore out of it. If you know what I mean. There are moments with us. Not many, but there are. You were right, though. Sometimes I do wonder if it’s worth it. God, I’ve been staring into this box too long. Now its beginning to stare back.” She clicked off the TV with her toes. “I don’t need to turn on the tube to see rape, murder, and perversion. I can get all that right here at school.”
Lissa heard a record droning upstairs. It sounded like Dylan.
turn, turn, turn again
“Tell her to turn it over, will you?” said Sharon. “That songs bumming me out.”
Lissa felt her way to the top of the first landing.
“Lis-sa? Bring down something to scarf, will you? Um, Screaming Yellow Zonkers. Whatever she’s got hidden up there. An-y-thing!”
Lissa smiled.
turn, turn to the rain and the wind
She walked on down the hall.
Joe had squatted so long that his gaze was fixed, almost as if the rectangle of light sky had somehow been looking back down into him instead. His eyes stung.
Fatigue. He hoped. Four days a week had seemed fine at first. Enough time to do some good, maybe, but not enough to—but it was late now, much later than he had thought, judging by the color of the sky. Marlene, he realized, blinking alert, had been waiting—how long? How long had he crouched here? And how long before, at the other village? Block, he reminded himself, block.