Gerald’s Game

CHAPTER EIGHT

This isn’t going to happen, Jessie told herself. No way it can, so justrelax.

She went on telling herself this right up to the moment when the upper half of the stray’s body was cut off from her view by the left side of the bed. Its tail began to wag harder than ever, and then there was a sound she recognized-the sound of a dog drinking from a puddle on a hot summer day. Except it wasn’t quite like that. This sound was rougher, somehow, not so much the sound of lapping as of licking. Jessie stared at the rapidly wagging tail, and her mind suddenly showed her what was hidden from her eyes by the angle of the bed. This homeless stray with its burdock-tangled fur and its weary, wary eyes was licking the blood out of her husband’s thinning hair.

“NO!” She lifted her buttocks off the bed and swung her legs around to the left. “GET AWAY FROM HIM! JUST GET AWAY!” She kicked out, and one of her heels brushed across the raised knobs of the dog’s spine.

It pulled back instantly and raised its muzzle, its eyes so wide they showed delicate rings of white. Its teeth parted, and in the fading afternoon light the cobweb-thin strands of saliva stretched between its upper and lower incisors looked like threads of spun gold. It lunged forward at her bare foot. Jessie yanked it back with a scream, feeling the hot mist of the dog’s breath on her skin but saving her toes. She curled her legs under her again without being aware that she was doing it, without hearing the cries of outrage from the muscles in her overstrained shoulders, without feeling her joints roll reluctantly in their bony beds.

The dog looked at her a moment longer, continuing to snarl, threatening her with its eyes. Let’s have an understanding, lady, the eyes said. You do your thing and I’ll do mine. That’s the understanding.Sound okay to you? It better, because if you get in my way, I’m going tofuck you up. Besides, he’s dead-you know it as well as I do, and why should he go to waste when I’m starving? You’d do the same, I doubt ifyou see that now, but I believe you may come around to my way of thinkingon the subject, and sooner than you think.

“GET OUT!” she screamed. Now she sat on her heels with her arms stretched out to either side, looking more like Fay Wray on the sacrificial jungle altar than ever. Her posture-head up, breasts thrust outward, shoulders thrown so far back they were white with strain at their furthest points, deep triangular hollows of shadow at the base of her neck-was that of an exceptionally hot pin-up in a girlie magazine. The obligatory pout of sultry invitation was missing, however; the expression on her face was that of a woman who stands very near the borderline between the country of the sane and that of the mad. “GET OUT OF HERE!”

The dog continued to took up at her and snarl for a few moments. Then, when it had apparently assured itself that the kick wouldn’t be repeated, it dismissed her and lowered its head again. There was no lapping or licking this time. Jessie heard a loud smacking sound instead. It reminded her of the enthusiastic kisses her brother Will used to place on Gramma Joan’s cheek when they went to visit.

The growling continued for a few seconds, but it was now oddly muffled, as if someone had slipped a pillowcase over the stray’s head. From her new sitting position, with her hair almost brushing the bottom of the shelf over her head, Jessie could see one of Gerald’s plump feet as well as his right arm and hand. The foot was shaking back and forth, as if Gerald were bopping a little to some jivey piece of music-'One More Summer” by the Rainmakers, for instance.

She could see the dog better from her new vantage point; its body was now visible all the way up to the place where its neck started. She would have been able to see its head, too, if it had been up. It wasn’t, though. The stray’s head was down, and its rear legs were stiffly braced. Suddenly there was a thick ripping sound-a snotty sound, like someone with a bad cold trying to clear his throat. She moaned.

“Stop… oh please, can’t you stop?”

The dog paid no attention. Once it had sat up and begged for table scraps, its eyes appearing to laugh, its mouth appearing to grin, but those days, like its former name, were long gone and hard to find. This was now, and things were what they were. Survival was not a matter for politeness or apology. It hadn’t eaten for two days, there was food here, and although there was also a master here who didn’t want it to take the food (the days when there had been masters who laughed and patted its head and called it GOOD DOG and gave it scraps for doing its small repertoire of tricks were all gone), this master’s feet were small and soft instead of hard and hurtful, and its voice said it was powerless.

The former Prince’s growls changed to muffled pants of effort, and as Jessie watched, the rest of Gerald’s body began to bop along with his foot, first just jiving back and forth and then actually starting to slide, as if he had gotten all the way into the groove, dead or not.

Get down, Disco Gerald! Jessie thought wildly. Never mind theChicken or the Shag-do the Dog!

The stray couldn’t have moved him if the rug had still been down, but Jessie had made arrangements to have the floor waxed the week after Labor Day. Bill Dunn, their caretaker, had let the men from Skip’s Floors “n” More in and they had done a hell of a job. They had wanted the missus to fully appreciate their work the next time she happened to stop down, so they had left the bedroom rug rolled up in the entry closet, and once the stray got Disco Gerald moving on the glossy floor, he moved almost as easily as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. The only real problem the dog had was keeping its own traction. Its long, dirty claws helped in this regard, digging in and inscribing short, jagged marks into the glossy wax as it backed up with its teeth buried to the gumlines in Gerald’s flabby upper arm.

I’m not seeing this, you know. None of this is really happening. Justa little while ago we were listening to the Rainmakers, and Gerald turneddown the volume long enough to tell me that he was thinking about goingup to Orono for the football game this Saturday. U of M against B U. Iremember him scratching the lobe of his right ear while he talked. So howcan he be dead with a dog dragging him across our bedroom floor by thearm?

Gerald’s widow’s peak was in disarray-probably as a result of the dog’s licking the blood out of it-but his glasses were still firmly in place. She could see his eyes, half-open and glazed, glaring up from their puffy sockets at the fading sunripples on the ceiling. His face was still a mask of ugly red and purple blotches, as if even death had not been able to assuage his anger at her sudden capricious (Had he seen it as capricious? Of course he had) change of mind.

“Let go of him,” she told the dog, but her voice was now meek and sad and strengthless. The dog barely twitched its ears at the sound of it and didn’t pause at all. It merely went on pulling the thing with the disarrayed widow’s peak and the blotchy complexion. This thing no longer looked like Disco Gerald-not a bit. Now it was only Dead Gerald, sliding across the bedroom floor with a dog’s teeth buried in its flabby biceps.

A frayed flap of skin hung over the dog’s snout. Jessie tried to tell herself it looked like wallpaper, but wallpaper did not-at least as far as she knew-come with moles and a vaccination scar. Now she could see Gerald’s pink, fleshy belly, marked only by the small caliber bullet-hole that was his navel. His penis flopped and dangled in its nest of black pubic hair. His buttocks whispered along the hardwood boards with ghastly, frictionless ease.

Abruptly the suffocating atmosphere of her terror was pierced by a shaft of anger so bright it was like a stroke of heart-lightning inside her head. She did more than accept this new emotion; she welcomed it. Rage might not help her get out of this nightmarish situation, but she sensed that it would serve as an antidote to her growing sense of shocked unreality.

“You bastard,” she said in a low, trembling voice. “You cowardly, slinking bastard.”

Although she couldn’t reach anything on Gerald’s side of the bed-shelf, Jessie found that, by rotating her left wrist inside the handcuff so that her hand was pointing back over her shoulder, she could walk her fingers over a short stretch of the shelf on her own side. She couldn’t turn her head enough to see the things she was touching-they were just beyond that hazy spot people call the corner of their eye-but it didn’t really matter. She had a pretty good idea of what was up there. She pattered her fingers back and forth, running their tips lightly over tubes of make-up, pushing a few farther back on the shelf and knocking others off it. Some of these latter landed on the coverlet; others bounced off the bed or her left thigh and landed on the floor. None of them were even close to the sort of thing she was looking for. Her fingers closed on a jar of Nivea face cream, and for a moment she allowed herself to think it might do the trick, but it was only a sample-sized jar, too small and light to hurt the dog even if it had been made of glass instead of plastic. She dropped it back onto the shelf and resumed her blind search.

At their farthest stretch, her exploring fingers encountered the rounded edge of a glass object that was by far the biggest thing she had touched. For a moment she couldn’t place it, and then it came to her. The stein hanging on the wall was only one souvenir of Gerald’s Alpha Grab A Hoe days; she was touching another one. It was an ashtray, and the only reason she hadn’t placed it immediately was because it belonged on Gerald’s end of the shelf, next to his glass of icewater. Someone-possibly Mrs Dahl, the cleaning lady, possibly Gerald himself-had moved it over to her side of the bed, maybe in the course of dusting the shelf, or maybe to make room for something else. The reason didn’t matter, anyway. It was there, and right now that was enough.

Jessie closed her fingers over its rounded edge, feeling two notches in it-cigarette parking-spaces. She gripped the ashtray, drew her hand back as far as she could, then brought it forward again. Her luck was in and she snapped her wrist down at the instant the handcuff chain snubbed tight, like a big-league pitcher breaking off a curve. All of this was an act of pure impulse, the missile sought for, found, and thrown before she had time to ensure the failure of the shot by reflecting on how unlikely it was that a woman who had gotten a D in the archery mod of her two-year college phys ed requirement could possibly hit a dog with an ashtray, especially when the dog was fifteen feet away and the hand she was throwing with happened to be handcuffed to a bedpost.

Nevertheless, she did hit it. The ashtray flipped over once in its flight, briefly revealing that Alpha Gamma Rho motto. She couldn’t read it from where she lay and didn’t have to; the Latin words for service, growth, and courage were inscribed around a torch. The ashtray started to flip again but crashed into the dog’s straining, bony shoulders before it could roll all the way over.

The stray gave a yip of surprise and pain, and Jessie felt a moment of violent, primitive triumph. Her mouth pulled wide in an expression that felt like a grin and looked like a screech. She howled deliriously, arching her back and straightening her legs as she did. She was once again unaware of the pain in her shoulders as cartilage stretched and joints which had long since forgotten the limberness of twenty-one were pressed almost to the point of dislocation. She would feel it all later-every move, jerk, and twist she had made-but for now she was transported with savage delight at the success of her shot, and felt that if she did not somehow express her triumphant delirium she might explode. She drummed her feet on the coverlet and rocked her body from side to side, her sweaty hair flailing her cheeks and temples, the tendons in her throat standing out like fat wires.

“HAH!” she cried. “I… GOT… YOUUUU! HAH!” The dog jerked backward when the ashtray struck it, and jerked again when it bounced away and shattered on the floor. Its cars flattened at the change in the bitchmaster’s voice. What it heard now was not fear but triumph. Soon it would get off the bed and begin to deal out kicks with its strange feet, which would not be soft but hard after all. The dog knew it would be hurt again as it had been hurt before if it stayed here; it must run.

It turned its head to make sure its path of retreat was still open, and the entrancing smell of fresh blood and meat struck it once more as it did so. The dog’s stomach cramped, sour and imperative with hunger, and it whined uneasily. It was caught, perfectly balanced between two opposing directives, and it squirted out a fresh trickle of anxious urine. The smell of its own water-an odor that spoke of sickness and weakness instead of strength and confidence-added to its frustration and confusion, and it began to bark again.

Jessie winced back from that splintery, unpleasant sound-she would have covered her ears if she could-and the dog sensed another change in the room. Something in the bitchmaster’s scent had changed. Her alpha-smell was fading while it was still new and fresh, and the dog began to sense that perhaps the blow it had taken across its shoulders did not mean that other blows were coming, after all. The first blow had been more startling than painful, anyway. The dog took a tentative step toward the trailing arm it had dropped… toward the entrancingly thick reek of mingled blood and meat. It watched the bitchmaster carefully as it moved. Its initial assessment of the bitchmaster as either harmless, helpless, or both might have been wrong. It would have to be very careful.

Jessie lay on the bed, now faintly aware of the throbbing in her own shoulders, more aware that her throat really hurt now, most aware of all that, ashtray or no ashtray, the dog was still here. In the first hot rush of her triumph it had seemed a foregone conclusion to her that it must flee, but it had somehow stood its ground. Worse, it was advancing again. Cautiously and warily, true, but advancing. She felt a swollen green sac of poison pulsing somewhere inside her-bitter stuff, hateful as hemlock. She was afraid that if that sac burst, she would choke on her own frustrated rage.

“Get out, shithead,” she told the dog in a hoarse voice that had begun to crumble about the edges. “Get out or I’ll kill you. I don’t know how, but I promise to God I will.”

The dog stopped again, looking at her with a deeply uneasy eye.

“That’s right, you better pay attention to me,” Jessie said. “You just better, because I mean it. I mean every word.” Then her voice rose to a shout again, although it bled off into whispers in places as her overstrained voice began to short out. “I’ll kill you, I will, I swear I will, SO GET OUT!”

The dog which had once been little Catherine Sutlin’s Prince looked from the bitchmaster to the meat; from the meat to the bitchmaster; from the bitchmaster to the meat once more. It came to the sort of decision Catherine’s father would have called a compromise. It leaned forward, eyes rolling up to watch Jessie carefully at the same time, and seized the torn flap of tendon, fat, and gristle that had once been Gerald Burlingame’s right bicep. Growling, it yanked backward. Gerald’s arm came up; his limp fingers seemed to point through the east window at the Mercedes in the driveway.

“Stop it!” Jessie shrieked. Her wounded voice now broke more frequently into that upper register where shrieks become gaspy falsetto whispers. “Haven’t you done enough? Just leave him alone!”

The stray paid no heed. It shook its head rapidly from side to side, as it had often done when it and Cathy Sutlin played tug-o'-war with one of its rubber toys. This, however, was no game. Curds of foam flew from the stray’s jaws as it worked, shaking the meat off the bone. Gerald’s carefully manicured hand swooped wildly back and forth in the air. Now he looked like a band-conductor urging his musicians to pick up their tempo.

Jessie heard that thick throat-clearing sound again and suddenly realized she had to vomit.

No, Jessie! It was Ruth’s voice, and it was full of alarm. No, you can’t do that! The smell might bring it to you…bring it on you!

Jessie’s face knotted into a stressful grimace as she struggled to bring her gorge under control. The ripping sound came again and she caught just a glimpse of the dog-its forepaws were once again stiff and braced, and it seemed to stand at the end of a thick dark strip of elastic the color of a Ball jar gasket-before she closed her eyes. She tried to put her hands over her face, temporarily forgetting in her distress that she was cuffed. Her hands stopped still at least two feet apart from each other and the chains jingled. Jessie moaned. It was a sound that went beyond desperation and into despair. It sounded like giving up.

She heard that wet, snotty ripping sound once more. It ended with another big-happy-kiss smack. Jessie did not open her eyes.

The stray began to back toward the hall door, its eyes never leaving the bitchmaster on the bed. In its jaws was a large, glistening chunk of Gerald Burlingame. If the master on the bed meant to try and take it back, it would make its move now. The dog could not think-at least not as human beings understand that word-but its complex network of instincts provided a very effective alternative to thought, and it knew that what it had done-and what it was about to do-constituted a kind of damnation. But it had been hungry for a long time. It had been left in the Woods by a man who had gone back home whistling the theme from Born Free, and now it was starving. If the bitchmaster tried to take away its meal now, it would fight.

It shot one final glance at her, saw she was making no move to get off her bed, and turned away. It carried the meat into the entry and settled down with it caught firmly between its paws. The wind gusted briefly, first breezing the door open and then banging it shut. The stray glanced briefly in that direction and ascertained in its doggy, not-quite-thinking way that it could push the door open with its muzzle and escape quickly if the need arose. With this last piece of business taken care of, it began to eat.