Homefront. Part 3

They walked to the toolshed on the playground next to the monkey bars, where Broker spotted one of Kit's green mittens peeking from the snow on the roof. He lifted her by the knees, and she was able to reclaim her gloves.

Then they walked back to the truck, got in, and fastened their seat belts. Broker started the Toyota, pulled away from the curb, and checked the rearview. Ca.s.sie Bodine and her son stood stolidly in the cold a few feet from the sheriff 's car, where Jimmy Klumpe sat, head on his chest, in the front seat with the sheriff. Exhaust from the police car and Klumpe's truck swirled in a gust of wind, cloaking them like smoke over wreckage.

He turned to his daughter. "We'll talk to Mom about the fight with that kid. But we won't mention what happened here, in front of school. You understand? She's got enough on her mind, okay?"

Kit blew on her hands, rubbed them together. Then she sucked on her skinned knuckle. "Yes, Dad."

Chapter Four.

After Keith Nygard finished up his lecture, Jimmy got back in his truck, still holding the hanky to his nose; he turned the key, put the Ford in gear, and pulled away from the curb. Ca.s.sie sat next to him, arms crossed, knees crossed, face working. his lecture, Jimmy got back in his truck, still holding the hanky to his nose; he turned the key, put the Ford in gear, and pulled away from the curb. Ca.s.sie sat next to him, arms crossed, knees crossed, face working.

"You got any more smart ideas?" Jimmy mumbled through the hanky.

"You let him make fools out of us in front of everybody," she said back.

"Some old guy from the cities, you said. Back right down."

"Gonna be all over town."

"I tripped and fell down on the ice," Jimmy said.

"Bulls.h.i.t. He spun you around and dropped you on your a.s.s and got away with it, just like his f.u.c.king kid punched Teddy-"

"Mom, don't swear. Dad tripped. Me too." Teddy spoke up from the rear seat, where he pressed the ice pack the nurse gave him against his nose.

"No, I'm the one who tripped when I had to marry your dad," Ca.s.sie muttered. And suddenly she had trouble breathing, as if the air they were taking in changed in their lungs and came out poison. She jammed her finger on the door panel controls and opened the windows, flooding the cab with icy air.

"Mommm," Teddy protested.

"For Christ's sake," Jimmy said, and he hit his controls. The windows started up. Ca.s.sie jammed on hers again and sent the windows down again. An electric whine cycled as they both hit their controls and the windows jumped up, then down, then froze, stuck in their tracks.

They glared at each other.

Then Ca.s.sie relented, took her finger off the controls, and crossed her arms across her chest again. Jimmy closed the windows. They drove in silence for a while, no sound except the tap of Teddy's GameBoy in the backseat.

Ca.s.sie spoke first. "So, what you gonna do?"

"Drive the speed limit home." He craned his neck to check the rearview mirror, dabbed at his nose with the hanky. "Seeing how I got Keith on my tail."

Another glum interval of silence. Then Ca.s.sie started in again. "He was a lot older than you, too. I saw some gray in his hair, over his ears."

"Not now, Ca.s.sie. Please." He sighed, seeing how no way she was going to back off; she was getting that feral Bodine vendetta fix in her eyes.

"I heard Keith talking to him," Ca.s.sie said. "His name is Phil Broker. He rents Harry Griffin's place, the one on Twelve, across the lake from us. Works for Griffin part-time."

Jimmy grimaced, inspected the blood on the hanky, put it down, and tested his nose with the fingers of his free hand. The bleeding had stopped. He turned to his wife. "Part-time on the stone crew won't pay much on that new Tundra he's driving, or the freight on that house. Not after all the work Griffin put in fixing it up to rent to summer folks."

"What's Griffin pay his laborers?"

"About ten, fifteen bucks an hour."

"Don't fit, does it?" Ca.s.sie said.

"So? Maybe he's got some money."

"Then what's he doing working labor part-time for crazy Harry Griffin? See, it doesn't fit. Plus how he had you so fast. Like he's used to putting men on the ground. Another thing. The way Keith was talking to him, kinda like two dogs sniffing each other out..."

"What are you getting at?"

"Dunno, just something," Ca.s.sie said. Then she turned to the backseat. "How you doing, hon?"

"Okay, I guess." Teddy was hunched over, preoccupied with the GameBoy in his free hand.

"No, you're not okay. You're in pain. And that's what you'll tell Ed Durning at the clinic. We're gonna get you X-rayed for your neck."

"Huh?"

"Your neck, it hurts, don't it?"

"Ah? I don't-"

"It hurts, honey. You tell Ed it hurts."

"Okay, Mom."

"She'll apologize for hitting you. In front of everybody. I insist on it. We'll make them pay."

Jimmy accelerated around a bend and checked the mirror again. "Can you believe this s.h.i.t? f.u.c.kin' Keith. He's gonna follow us all the way home."

"Dad, you said the F word. You and Mom both."

"Don't swear around Teddy. You know how I can't stand that," Ca.s.sie said in a strict voice.

Jimmy sighed. "Yeah, right. Teddy, I apologize for using bad language. Now, look, Ca.s.sie-Keith gave me a warning, says to back off this thing."

"'Keith says,'" Ca.s.sie p.r.o.nounced with mincing sarcasm.

"He's the sheriff, for Christ's sake."

"They don't look after him like they should..."

"Ca.s.sie," he said patiently, "we don't need Ed Durning in on this. I want you to start cooling down now before it gets-"

She cut him with a look. "Gets what? Out of control. Don't you talk to me about things getting out of control. Don't you talk to me about things getting out of control."

Jimmy winced and looked away from her seething voice, and they drove in silence for a minute. Then he said, "Just take it easy, okay."

"I just worry," Ca.s.sie said.

"I know you do." He dropped the subject, fixed his eyes ahead on the road. "I'll drop you home. I have to get back to the garage."

It took Jimmy and Ca.s.sie fifteen minutes to drive to the east end of the big lake where they lived in Jimmy's dad's house on the ten acres of prime real estate Jimmy had inherited. When they moved in three years ago, the woods had screened them. When Ca.s.sie was growing up, it had been the biggest house on the lake. Now there were new log homes dripping balconies and gables a hundred yards off on either side. Ca.s.sie stared at the bright new houses, all that gla.s.s and stonework. Lodgepole pine-they'd build the houses in Colorado. Take them apart, truck them cross-country, and put them back together. Like the summer people were mocking the older place where Ca.s.sie lived, boarded up in tired brown cedar siding...

The first thing Ca.s.sie did after Jimmy dropped them off was wave to Keith as he drove away in his police car. Keith was a sweet man. Her guardian angel.

But waving to Keith was one thing. Listening to him was another. The morning churned in her chest, dredging up gobs of anger, fear, and self-consciousness. This called for a response. No way she was going to back off on that guy and his snotty little kid.

Teddy drifted to his room to change out of his shirt and play his computer games. Ca.s.sie went for the kitchen phone, tapped in the number for the school office, and got Madge.

"So who are they, Madge?" she asked by way of h.e.l.lo.

"Honest, Ca.s.sie, I don't have the slightest idea. New people. They showed up in January," Madge said in a hushed tone.

"You gotta know something."

"Well, there is one thing. n.o.body's ever seen the mother, just the dad. He registered her, drops her off, and picks her up every day."

"That's a little weird," Ca.s.sie said, pausing slightly to furrow her brow. "Thanks, Madge." She ended the call abruptly.

No-show mom-that didn't fit either. The thing was taking a suspicious shape in her mind. She went to the living room, where they kept a tripod telescope to look out over the lake. Slowly she focused the lens and searched the west sh.o.r.e. Griffin's was the narrow green house with the wraparound deck, cedar siding, a rusted tin roof, and a newer kitchen addition thrusting toward the sh.o.r.e.

She found it, between the Nagel place and Chris Johnson's. She squinted, straining her eyes. She had never been in the house and could only guess at how the rooms were laid out. Some people liked their kitchens facing the water; others, herself included, liked the living room on the lakeside.

"Mom?"

Ca.s.sie turned and saw Teddy standing behind her. He'd washed his face and changed into a fresh T-shirt. She brushed a dark curl of hair from her eyes and studied him. "Is anything wrong?"

"Ah, no..."

"Don't worry about that snotty little girl, honey. We'll fix her."

Teddy shrugged. "Only reason she knocked me down is I slipped on the snow."

"I know. They pick on you..."

"Mom," he said with a slight edge of irritation in his voice, "I want some lunch."

After lunch she let him ride the ATV around the backyard to take advantage of this last snowfall. She was tidying up the kitchen when she noticed the crumbs from Teddy's tuna-melt sandwich on the linoleum under his chair. Must have missed them when she cleared his plate and loaded it into the dishwasher. She immediately stooped, plucked up the crumbs, and then wiped down the area with a dish rag and lemon-scented 409. When she was finished, she took the soiled dishrag and some towels into the laundry room. That's when she saw Teddy's shirt on the floor under the laundry chute.

With the blood on it.

The sensation that she was being watched came slowly as she methodically took the shirt to the sink, poured Shout on the stain, and worked it into the material. The red stain foamed up and covered her fingers. Got under her nails. Grimacing, she flung the shirt into the washer, put the dial on hot/hot, added Tide, and turned it on. When the rush of steaming water poured into the washer drum, she thrust her hands into it, blasting away the sc.u.m of foam.

But a tiny residue resisted the scalding water and still clung under her fingernails, and the sensation was coming stronger now, almost a glow in the walls. When it got bad like this, she actually believed that a presence inhabited the house. She could even smell it sometimes, no matter how hard she cleaned. A smell like old Tommy Klumpe's lingering pipe tobacco smoke that permeated the walls.

The presence shifted around in her mind. Sometimes it was old Tommy himself, sitting at the kitchen table, telling Jimmy straight out, right in front of her, like she didn't count.

"Nothing good will ever come of marrying a f.u.c.king Bodine."

Other times it got weirder. And she felt she was under scrutiny by a vague judgmental figure who demanded to be pleased. Sometimes she pictured this presence as a bizarre nexus between Martha Stewart and Jesus Christ.

One night this watchful presence had chosen to speak through her husband. Jimmy didn't even know he was the vessel of an angry house G.o.d; he was just being Jimmy, half loaded, making one of his nasty pa.s.sive-aggressive cuts. But his spiteful voice had echoed like thunder in Ca.s.s's ears: "Since you're not working anymore, the least you can do is keep this f.u.c.king house clean!"

It had started again; the bad carnival ride that turned the big dump they lived into a fun house with distorted mirrors, eyes in the walls; the craziness getting ready to jump out of where it nested in the bathroom closet...

Ca.s.sandra Bodine always tried to fight the crazy.

Dutifully, she filled her bucket with hot water, grabbed the Comet cleanser, her scrub brush. She carried the bucket up the stairs and down the hall to the unused storage room past the master bedroom. Went in. The shades were pulled. A throw rug filled most of the floor s.p.a.ce. She could hear the engine on Teddy's ATV grinding in circles in the snow below the window as she rolled back the rug, kneeled, and began to scrub.

Jimmy had put in a new floor.

Didn't matter. It was still there.

An hour later Teddy was back in his room playing Doom instead of doing his homework. Ca.s.sie squatted naked in the tiled corner of the shower stall. The master bath was Jimmy's one concession to fixing up the place. Didn't help. She cringed under the stinging needles of hot water.

She was boxed.

The trap they had built for themselves was so cunningly designed that there was n.o.body she could really talk to. Except the one person who built the box. No other way to go. Because they were out there planning to hurt her son. Hurt them all.

She stood up, turned off the shower, stepped from the stall, and took a fresh towel from the wall rack. She wiped the steam away from the broad vanity mirror and, seeing her compulsively trim body, got a flash of the loathing that drove the young girls to cut themselves.

Her eyes traveled around the bathroom, every surface sparkling, the towels arranged just so. No matter how hard she scrubbed, she couldn't stop the crazy. It whispered to her now from its hiding place in the closet next to the sink, where it nestled, waiting, among the carefully folded towels and washcloths. Like church back when she tried that; like communion. An altar call. Her hand trembled as opened the closet door and snuck through the clean folded cotton until she felt the dirty crumple of tinfoil. She withdrew her hand and studied the way the foil winked dirty silver gray in the soft vanity mirror lights...

...like a lump of anti-meteorite that had not fallen from the sky...

That had blasted up from h.e.l.l.

Carefully she peeled back the foil, expecting a chunk of yellowish crystal the size of her thumbnail. Aw, man, musta lost track. Nothing left but a few pebbles, some dust. And there was only one place for her to get it now...and he never gives me enough......and it never came easy. Always the old undercurrent.

Carefully, Ca.s.sie shook the residue of the crystal meth into her mouth, then probed the fissures in the wrinkled foil with her tongue, licking up every last speck.

Not enough.

Still, like a catechism, she recited the ground rules: Just never smoke the stuff.

Nibble a little, to keep your weight down, to zoom through housework on jet afterburners. Smooth out the day.

To turn down the volume on the loud G.o.dd.a.m.n world...

Ca.s.sie swallowed the last dot of crystal, sat down at her vanity table, and tried to concentrate, putting on fresh eye shadow. Could tell by the way her fingers shook.