BEVERLY ROGAN TAKES A WHUPPIN

 

Tom was nearly asleep when the phone rang. He struggled halfway up, leaning toward it, and then felt one of Beverly’s breasts press against his shoulder as she reached over him to get it. He flopped back on his pillow, wondering dully who was calling on their unlisted home phone number at this hour of the night. He heard Beverly say hello, and then he drifted off again. He had put away nearly three sixpacks during the baseball game, and he was shagged.

Then Beverly’s voice, sharp and curious-’Whaaat?’-drilled into his ear like an ice-pick and he opened his eyes again. He tried to sit up and the phone cord dug into his thick neck.

“Get that fucking thing off me, Beverly,” he said, and she got up quickly and walked around the bed, holding the phone cord up with tented fingers. Her hair was a deep red, and it flowed over her nightgown in natural waves almost to her waist. Whore’s hair. Her eyes did not stutter to his face to read the emotional weather there, and Tom Rogan didn’t like that. He sat up. His head was starting to ache. Shit, it had probably already been aching, but when you were asleep you didn’t know it.

He went into the bathroom, urinated for what felt like three hours, and then decided that as long as he was up he ought to get another beer and try to take the curse off the impending hangover.

Passing back through the bedroom on his way to the stairs, a man in white boxer shorts that flapped like sails below his considerable belly, his arms like slabs (he looked more like a dock-walloper than the president and general manager of Beverly Fashions, Inc.), he looked over his shoulder and yelled crossly: “If it’s that bull dyke Lesley, tell her to go eat out some model and let us sleep!”

Beverly glanced up briefly, shook her head to indicate it wasn’t Lesley, and then looked back at the phone. Tom felt the muscles at the back of his neck tighten up. It felt like a dismissal. Dismissed by Milady. Mifuckinlady. This was starting to look like it might turn into a situation. It might be that Beverly needed a short refresher course on who was in charge around here. It was possible. Sometimes she did. She was a slow learner.

He went downstairs and padded along the hall to the kitchen, absently picking the seat of his shorts out of the crack of his ass, and opened the refrigerator. His reaching hand closed on nothing more alcoholic than a blue Tupperware dish of leftover noodles Romanoff. All the beer was gone. Even the can he kept way in the back (much as he kept a twenty-dollar bill folded up behind his driver’s license for emergencies) was gone. The game had gone fourteen innings, and all for nothing. The White Sox had lost. Bunch of candy-asses this year.

His eyes drifted to the bottles of hard stuff on the glassed-in shelf over the kitchen bar and for a moment he saw himself pouring a splash of Beam over a single ice-cube. Then he walked back toward the stairs, knowing that was asking for even more trouble than his head was currently in. He glanced at the face of the antique pendulum clock at the foot of the stairs and saw it was past midnight. This intelligence did nothing to improve his temper, which was never very good even at the best of times.

He climbed the stairs with slow deliberation, aware-too aware-of how hard his heart was working. Ka-boom, ka-thud. Ka-boom, ka-thud. Ka-boom, ka-thud. It made him nervous when he could feel his heart beating in his ears and wrists as well as in his chest. Sometimes when that happened he would imagine it not as a squeezing and loosening organ but as a big dial on the left side of his chest with the needle edging ominously into the red zone. He did not like that shit; he did not need that shit. What he needed was a good night’s sleep.

But the numb cunt he was married to was still on the phone.

“I understand that, Mike… yes… yes, I am… I know… but…”

A longer pause.

“Bill Denbrough?” she exclaimed, and that ice-pick drilled into his ear again.

He stood outside the bedroom door until he got his breath back. Now it was ka-thud, ka-thud, ka-thud again: the booming had stopped. He briefly imagined the needle edging out of the red and then willed the picture away. He was a man, for Christ’s sake, and a damned good one, not a furnace with a bad thermostat. He was in great shape. He was iron. And if she needed to relearn that, he would be happy to teach her.

He started in, then thought better of it and stood where he was a moment longer, listening to her, not particularly caring about who she was talking to or what she said, only listening to the rising-falling tones of her voice. And what he felt was the old familiar dull rage.

He had met her in a downtown Chicago singles bar four years ago. Conversation had been easy enough, because they both worked in the Standard Brands Building, and knew a few of the same people. Tom worked for King amp; Landry, Public Relations, on forty-two. Beverly Marsh-so she had been then-was an assistant designer at Delia Fashions, on twelve. Delia, which would later enjoy a modest vogue in the Midwest, catered to young people-Delia skirts and blouses and shawls and slacks were sold largely to what Delia Castleman called “youth-stores” and what Tom called “headshops.” Tom Rogan knew two things about Beverly Marsh almost at once: she was desirable and she was vulnerable. In less than a month he knew a third as well: she was talented. Very talented. In her drawings of casual dresses and blouses he saw a money-machine of almost scary potential.

Not in the head-shops, though, he thought, but did not say (at least not then). No more bad lighting, no more knock-down prices, no more shitty displays somewhere in the back of the store between the dope paraphernalia and the rock-group tee-shins. Leave that shit for the small-timers.

He had known a great deal about her before she knew he had any real interest in her, and that was just the way Tom wanted it. He had been looking for someone like Beverly Marsh all his life, and he moved in with the speed of a lion making a run at a slow antelope. Not that her vulnerability showed on the surface-you looked and saw a gorgeous woman, slim but abundantly stacked. Hips weren’t so great, maybe, but she had a great ass and the best set of tits he had ever seen. Tom Rogan was a tit-man, always had been, and tall girls almost always had disappointing tits. They wore thin shirts and their nipples drove you crazy, but when you got those thin shirts off you discovered that nipples were really all they had. The tits themselves looked like the pull-knobs on a bureau drawer. “More than a handful’s wasted,” his college roommate had been fond of saying, but as far as Tom was concerned his college roommate had been so full of shit he squeaked going into a turn.

Oh, she had been some kind of fine-looking, all right, with that dynamite body and that gorgeous fall of red wavy hair. But she was weak… weak somehow. It was as if she was sending out radio signals which only he could receive. You could point to certain things-how much she smoked (but he had almost cured her of that), the restless way her eyes moved, never quite meeting the eyes of whoever was talking to her, only touching them from time to time and then leaping nimbly away; her habit of lightly rubbing her elbows when she was nervous; the look of her fingernails, which were kept neat but brutally short. Tom noticed this latter the first time he met her. She picked up her glass of white wine, he saw her nails, and thought: She keeps them short like that because she bites them.

Lions may not think, at least not the way people think… but they see. And when antelopes start away from a waterhole, alerted by that dusty-rug scent of approaching death, the cats can observe which one falls to the rear of the pack, maybe because it has a lame leg, maybe because it is just naturally slower… or maybe because its sense of danger is less developed. And it might even be possible that some antelopes-and some women-want to be brought down.

Suddenly he heard a sound that jerked him rudely out of these memories-the snap of her cigarette lighter.

The dull rage came again. His stomach filled with a heat which was not entirely unpleasant. Smoking. She was smoking. They had had a few of Tom Rogan’s Special Seminars on the subject. And here she was, doing it again. She was a slow learner, all right, but a good teacher is at his best with slow learners.

“Yes,” she said now. “Uh-huh. All right. Yes… ” She listened, then uttered a strange, jagged laugh he had never heard before. “Two things, since you ask-reserve me a room and say me a prayer. Yes, okay… uh-huh… me too. Goodnight.”

She was hanging up as he came in. He meant to come in hard, yelling at her to put it out, put it out now, RIGHT NOW!, but when he saw her the words died in his throat. He had seen her like this before, but only two or three times. Once before their first big show, once before the first private preview showing for national buyers, and once when they had gone to New York for the International Design Awards.

She was moving across the bedroom in long strides, the white lace nightgown molded to her body, the cigarette clamped between her front teeth (God he hated the way she looked with a butt in her mouth) sending back a little white riband over her left shoulder like smoke from a locomotive’s stack.

But it was her face that really gave him pause, that caused the planned shout to die in his throat. His heart lurched-ka-BAMP!-and he winced, telling himself that what he felt was not fear but only surprise at finding her this way.

She was a woman who really came alive all the way only when the rhythm of her work spiked toward a climax. Each of those remembered occasions had of course been career-related. At those tunes he had seen a different woman from the one he knew so well-a woman who fucked up his sensitive fear-radar with wild bursts of static. The woman who came out in times of stress was strong but high-strung, fearless but unpredictable.

There was lots of color in her cheeks now, a natural blush high on her cheekbones. Her eyes were wide and sparkly, not a trace of sleep left in them. Her hair flowed and streamed. And… oh, looky here, friends and neighbors! Oh you just looky right here! Is she taking a suitcase out of the closet? A suitcase? By God, she is!

Reserve me a room… say me a prayer.

Well, she wasn’t going to need a room in any hotel, not in the foreseeable future, because little Beverly Rogan was going to be staying right here at home, thank you very much, and taking her meals standing up for the next three or four days.

But she very well might need a prayer or two before he was through with her.

She tossed the suitcase on the foot of the bed and then went to her bureau. She opened the top drawer and pulled out two pairs of jeans and a pair of cords. Tossed them into the suitcase. Back to the bureau, cigarette streaming smoke over her shoulder. She grabbed a sweater, a couple of tee-shirts, one of the old Ship “n Shore blouses that she looked so stupid in but refused to give up. Whoever had called her sure hadn’t been a jet-setter. This was dull stuff, strictly Jackie-Kennedy-Hyannisport-weekend stuff.

Not that he cared about who had called her or where she thought she was going, since she wasn’t going anywhere. Those were not the things which pecked steadily at his mind, dull and achy from too much beer and not enough sleep.

It was that cigarette.

Supposedly she had thrown them all out. But she had held out on him-the proof was clamped between her teeth right now. And because she still had not noticed him standing in the doorway, he allowed himself the pleasure of remembering the two nights which had assured him of his complete control over her.

I don’t want you to smoke around me anymore, he told her as they headed home from a party in Lake Forest. October, that had been. I have to choke that shit down at parties and at the office, but I don’t have to choke it down when I’m with you. You know what it’s like? I’m going to tell you the truth-it’s unpleasant but it’s the truth. Ifs like having to eat someone else’s snot.

He thought this would bring some faint spark of protest, but she had only looked at him in her shy, wanting-to-please way. Her voice had been low and meek and obedient. All tight, Tom.

Pitch it then.

She pitched it. Tom had been in a good humor for the rest of that night.

A few weeks later, coming out of a movie, she unthinkingly lit a cigarette in the lobby and puffed it as they walked across the parking lot to the car. It had been a bitter November night, the wind chopping like a maniac at any exposed square inch of flesh it could find. Tom remembered he had been able to smell the lake, as you sometimes could on cold nights-a flat smell that was both fishy and somehow empty. He let her smoke the cigarette. He even opened her door for her when they got to the car. He got in behind the wheel, closed his own door, and then said: Bev?

She took the cigarette out of her mouth, turned toward him, inquiring, and he unloaded on her pretty good, his hard open hand stroking across her cheek hard enough to make his palm tingle, hard enough to rock her head back against the headrest. Her eyes widened with surprise and pain… and something else as well. Her own hand flew to her cheek to investigate the warmth and tingling numbness there. She cried out Owww! Tom!

He looked at her, eyes narrowed, mouth smiling casually, completely alive, ready to see what would come next, how she would react. His cock was stiffening in his pants, but he barely noticed. That was for later. For now, school was in session. He replayed what had just happened. Her face. What had that third expression been, there for a bare instant and then gone? First the surprise. Then the pain. Then the

(nostalgia)

look of a memory… of some memory. It had only been for a moment. He didn’t think she even knew it had been there, on her face or in her mind.

Now: now. It would all be in the first thing she didn’t say. He knew that as well as his own name.

It wasn’t You son of a bitch!

It wasn’t See you later, Macho City.

It wasn’t We’re through, Tom.

She only looked at him with her wounded, brimming hazel eyes and said: Why did you do that? Then she tried to say something else and burst into tears instead.

Throw it out.

What? What, Tom? Her make-up was running down her face in muddy tracks. He didn’t mind that. He kind of liked seeing her that way. It was messy, but there was something sexy about it, too. Slutty. Kind of exciting.

The cigarette. Throw it out.

Realization dawning. And with it, guilt.

I just forgot! she cried. That’s all!

Throw it out, Bev, or you’re going to get another shot.

She rolled the window down and pitched the cigarette. Then she turned back to him, her face pale and scared and somehow serene.

You can’t… you aren’t supposed to hit me. That’s a bad basis for a… a… a lasting relationship. She was trying to find a tone, an adult rhythm of speech, and failing. He had regressed her. He was in this car with a child. Voluptuous and sexy as hell, but a child.

Can’t and aren’t are two different things, keed, he said. He kept his voice calm but inside he was jittering and jiving. And I’ll be the one to decide what constitutes a lasting relationship and what doesn’t. If you can live with that, fine. If you can’t, you can take a walk. I won’t stop you. I might kick you once in the ass as a going-away present, but I won’t stop you. It’s a free country. What more can I say?

Maybe you’ve already said enough, she whispered, and he hit her again, harder than the first time, because no broad was ever going to smart off to Tom Rogan. He would pop the Queen of England if she cracked smart to him.

Her cheek banged the padded dashboard. Her hand groped for the doorhandle and then fell away. She only crouched in the corner like a rabbit, one hand over her mouth, her eyes large and wet and frightened. Tom looked at her for a moment and then he got out and walked around the back of the car. He opened her door. His breath was smoke in the black, windy November air and the smell of the lake was very clear.

You want to get out, Bev? I saw you reaching for the doorhandle, so I guess you must want to get out. Okay. That’s all right. I asked you to do something and you said you would. Then you didn’t. So you want to get out? Come on. Get out. What the fuck, right? Get out. You want to get out?

No, she whispered.

What? I can’t hear you.

No, I don’t want to get out, she said a little louder.

What-those cigarettes giving you emphysema? If you can’t talk, I’ll get you a fucking megaphone. This is your last chance, Beverly. You speak up so I can hear you: do you want to get out of this car or do you want to come back with me?

Want to come back with you, she said, and clasped her hands on her skirt like a little girl. She wouldn’t look at him. Tears slipped down her cheeks.

All right, he said. Fine. But first you say this for me, Bev. You say, “I forgot about smoking in front of you, Tom.”

Now she looked at him, her eyes wounded, pleading, inarticulate. You can make me do this, her eyes said, but please don’t. Don’t, I love you, can’t it be over?

No-it could not. Because that was not the bottom of her wanting, and both of them knew it.

Say it.

I forgot about smoking in front of you, Tom.

Good. Now say “I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry, she repeated dully.

The cigarette lay smoking on the pavement like a cut piece of fuse. People leaving the theater glanced over at them, the man standing by the open passenger door of a late-model, fade-into-the-woodwork Vega, the woman sitting inside, her hands clasped primly in her lap, her head down, the domelight outlining the soft fall of her hair in gold.

He crushed the cigarette out. He smeared it against the blacktop.

Now say: I’ll never do it again without your permission.”

I’ll never…

Her voice began to hitch.

… never… n-n-n-

Say it, Bev.

… never d-do it again. Without your p-permission.

So he had slammed the door and gone back around to the driver’s seat. He got behind the wheel and drove them back to his downtown apartment. Neither of them said a word. Hah0 the relationship had been set in the parking lot; the second half was set forty minutes later, in Tom’s bed.

She didn’t want to make love, she said. He saw a different truth in her eyes and the strutty cock of her legs, however, and when he got her blouse off her nipples had been rock hard. She moaned when he brushed them, and cried out softly when he suckled first one and then the other, kneading them restlessly as he did so. She grabbed his hand and thrust it between her legs.

I thought you didn’t want to, he said, and she had turned her face away… but she did not let go of his hand, and the rocking motion of her hips actually speeded up.

He pushed her back on the bed… and now he was gentle, not ripping her underwear but removing it with a careful consideration that was almost prissy.

Sliding into her was like sliding into some exquisite oil.

He moved with her, using her but letting her use him as well, and she came the first time almost at once, crying out and digging her nails into his back. Then they rocked together in long, slow strokes and somewhere in there he thought she came again. Tom would get close, and then he would think of White Sox batting averages or who was trying to undercut him for the Chesley account at work and he would be okay again. Then she began to speed up, her rhythm finally dissolving into an excited bucking. He looked at her face, the raccoon ringlets of mascara, the smeared lipstick, and he felt himself suddenly shooting deliriously toward the edge.

She jerked her hips up harder and harder-there had been no beergut between them in those days and their bellies clapped hands in a quickening beat.

Near the end she screamed and then bit his shoulder with her small, even teeth.

How many times did you come? he asked her after they had showered.

She turned her face away, and when she spoke her voice was so low he almost couldn’t hear her. That isn’t something you’re supposed to ask.

No? Who told you that? Misterogers?

He took her face in one hand, thumb pressing deep into one cheek, fingers pressing into the other, palm cupping her chin in between.

You talk to Tom, he said. You hear me, Bev? Talk to Papa.

Three, she said reluctantly.

Good, he said. You can have a cigarette.

She looked at him distrustfully, her red hair spread over the pillows, wearing nothing but a pair of hip-hugger panties. Just looking at her that way got his motor turning over again. He nodded.

Go on, he said. That’s all right.

They had been married in a civil ceremony three months later. Two of his friends had come; the only friend of hers to attend had been Kay McCall, whom Tom called “that titsy women’s-lib bitch.”

All of these memories went through Tom’s mind in a space of seconds, like a speeded-up piece of film, as he stood in the doorway watching her. She had gone on to the bottom drawer of what she sometimes called her “weekend bureau,” and now she was tossing underwear into the suitcase-not the sort of stuff he liked, the slippery satins and smooth silks; this was cotton stuff, little-girl stuff, most of it faded and with little puffs of popped elastic on the waistbands. A cotton nightie that looked like something out of Little House on the Prairie. She poked in the back of this bottom drawer to see what else might be lurking in there.

Tom Rogan, meanwhile, moved across the shag rug toward his wardrobe. His feet were bare and his passage noiseless as a puff of breeze. It was the cigarette. That was what had really gotten him mad. It had been a long time since she had forgotten that first lesson. There had been other lessons to learn since, a great many, and there had been hot days when she had worn long-sleeved blouses or even cardigan sweaters buttoned all the way to the neck. Gray days when she had worn sunglasses. But that first lesson had been so sudden and fundamental-

He had forgotten the telephone call that had wakened him out of his deepening sleep. It was the cigarette. If she was smoking now, then she had forgotten Tom Rogan. Temporarily, of course, only temporarily, but even temporarily was too damned long. What might have caused her to forget didn’t matter. Such things were not to happen in his house for any reason.

There was a wide black strip of leather hanging from a hook inside the closet door. There was no buckle on it; he had removed that long ago. It was doubled over at one end where a buckle would have gone, and this doubled-over section formed a loop into which Tom Rogan now slipped his hand.

Tom, you been bad! his mother had sometimes said-well, “sometimes” was maybe not such a good word; maybe “often” would have been a better one. You come here, Tommy! I got to give you a whuppin. His life as a child had been punctuated by whuppins. He had finally escaped to Wichita State College, but apparently there was no such thing as a complete escape, because he continued to hear her voice in dreams: Come here, Tommy. I got to give you a whuppin. Whuppin…

He had been the eldest of four. Three months after the youngest had been born, Ralph Rogan had died-well, “died” was maybe not such a good word; maybe “committed suicide” would have been a better way to put it, since he had poured a generous quantity of lye into a tumbler of gin and quaffed this devil’s brew while sitting on the bathroom hopper. Mrs Rogan had found work at the Ford plant. Tom, although only eleven, became the man of the family. And if he screwed up-if the baby shat her didies after the sitter went home and the mess was still in them when Mom got home… if he forgot to cross Megan on the Broad Street corner after her nursery school got out and that nosy Mrs Gant saw… if he happened to be watching American Bandstand while Joey made a mess in the kitchen… if any of those things or a thousand others happened… then, after the smaller children were in bed, the spanking stick would come out and she would call the invocation: Come here, Tommy. I got to give you a whuppin.

Better to be the whupper than the whupped.

If he had learned nothing else on the great toll-road of life, he had learned that.

So he flipped the loose end of the belt over once and pulled the loop snug. Then he closed his fist over it. It felt good. It made him feel like a grownup. The strip of leather hung from his clenched fist like a dead blacksnake. His headache was gone.

She had found that one last thing in the back of the drawer: an old white cotton bra with gunshell cups. The thought that this early-morning call might have been from a lover surfaced briefly in his mind and then sank again. That was ridiculous. A woman going away to meet her lover did not pack her faded Ship “n Shore blouses and her cotton K-Mart undies with the pops and snarls in the elastic. Also, she wouldn’t dare.

“Beverly,” he said softly, and she turned at once, startled, her eyes wide, her long hair swinging.

The belt hesitated… dropped a little. He stared at her, feeling that little bloom of uneasiness again. Yes, she had looked this way before the big shows, and then he hadn’t gotten in her way, understanding that she was so filled with a mixture of fear and competitive aggressiveness that it was as if her head was full of illuminating gas: a single spark and she would explode. She had seen the shows not as a chance to split off from Delia Fashions, to make a living-or even a fortune-on her own. If that had been all, she would have been fine. But if that were all, she also would not have been so ungodly talented. She had seen those shows as a kind of super-exam on which she would be graded by fierce teachers. What she saw on those occasions was some creature without a face. It had no face, but it did have a name-Authority.

All of that wide-eyed nerviness was on her face now. But not just there; it was all around her, an aura that seemed almost visible, a high-tension charge which made her suddenly both more alluring and more dangerous than she had seemed to him in years. He was afraid because she was here, all here, the essential she as apart from the she Tom Rogan wanted her to be, the she he had made.

Beverly looked shocked and frightened. She also looked almost madly exhilarated. Her cheeks glowed with hectic color, yet there were stark white patches below her lower lids which looked almost like a second pair of eyes. Her forehead glowed with a creamy resonance.

And the cigarette was still jutting out of her mouth, now at a slight up-angle, as if she thought she was goddam Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The cigarette! Just looking at it caused dull fury to wash over him again in a green wave. Faintly, far back in his mind, he remembered her saying something to him one night out of the dark, speaking in a dull and listless voice: Someday you’re going to kill me, Tom. Do you know that? Someday you’re just going to go too far and that will be the end. You’ll snap.

He had answered: You do it my way, Bev, and that day will never come.

Now, before the rage blotted out everything, he wondered if that day hadn’t come after all.

The cigarette. Never mind the call, the packing, the weird look on her face. They would deal with the cigarette. Then he would fuck her. Then they could discuss the rest. By then it might even seem important.

“Tom,” she said. “Tom, I have to-”

“You’re smoking,” he said. His voice seemed to come from a distance, as if over a pretty good radio. “Looks like you forgot, babe. Where you been hiding them?”

“Look, I’ll put it out,” she said, and went to the bathroom door. She flipped the cigarette-even from here he could see the teeth-marks driven deep into the filter-into the bowl of the John. Fsssss. She came back out. “Tom, that was an old friend. An old old friend. I have to-”

“Shut up, that’s what you have to do!” he shouted at her. “Just shut up!” But the fear he wanted to see-the fear of him-was not on her face. There was fear, but it had come out of the telephone, and fear was not supposed to come to Beverly from that direction. It was almost as if she didn’t see the belt, didn’t see him, and Tom felt a trickle of unease. Was he here? It was a stupid question, but was he?

This question was so terrible and so elemental that for a moment he felt in danger of coming completely unwrapped from the root of himself and just floating off like a tumbleweed in a high breeze. Then he caught hold of himself. He was here, all right, and that was quite enough fucking psycho-babble for one night. He was here, he was Tom Rogan, Tom by-God Rogan, and if this dippy cunt didn’t straighten up and fly right in the next thirty seconds or so, she was going to look like she got pushed out of a fast-moving boxcar by a mean railroad dick.

“Got to give you a whuppin,” he said. “sorry about that, babe.”

He had seen that mixture of fear and aggressiveness before, yes. Now for the first time ever it flashed out at him.

“Put that thing down,” she said. “I have to get out to O’Hare as fast as I can.”

Are you here, Tom? Are you?

He pushed the thought away. The strip of leather which had once been a belt swung slowly before him like a pendulum. His eyes flickered and then held fast to her face.

“Listen to me, Tom. There’s been some trouble back in my home town. Very bad trouble. I had a friend in those days. I guess he would have been my boyfriend, except we weren’t quite old enough for that. He was only an eleven-year-old kid with a bad stutter back then. He’s a novelist now. You even read one of his books, I think… The Black Rapids?”

She searched his face but his face gave no sign. There was only the belt penduluming back and forth, back and forth. He stood with his head lowered and his stocky legs slightly apart. Then she ran her hand restlessly through her hair-distractedly-as if she had many important things to think of and hadn’t seen the belt at all, and that haunting, awful question resurfaced in his head again: Are you there? Are you sure?

“That book laid around here for weeks and I never made the connection. Maybe I should have, but we’re all older and I haven’t even thought about Derry in a long, long time. Anyway, Bill had a brother, George, and George was killed before I really knew Bill. He was murdered. And then, the next summer-”

But Tom had listened to enough craziness from within and from without. He moved in on her fast, cocking his right arm back over his shoulder like a man about to throw a javelin. The belt hissed a path through the air. Beverly saw it coming and tried to duck away, but her right shoulder struck the bathroom doorway and there was a meaty whapl as the belt struck her left forearm, leaving a red weal.

“Gonna whup you,” Tom repeated. His voice was sane, even regretful, but his teeth showed in a white and frozen smile. He wanted to see that look in her eyes, that look of fear and terror and shame, that look that said Yes you’re right I deserved it, that look that said Yes you’re there all right, I feel your presence. Then love could come back, and that was right and good, because he did love her. They could even have a discussion, if she wanted it, of exactly who had called and what all this was about. But that must come later. For now, school was in session. The old one-two. First the whuppin, then the fuckin.

“Sorry, babe.”

“Tom, don’t do th-”

He swung the belt sidearm and saw it lick around her hip. There was a satisfying snap as it finished on her buttock. And…

And Jesus, she was grabbing at it! She was grabbing at the belt!

For a moment Tom Rogan was so astounded by this unexpected act of insubordination that he almost lost his punisher, would have lost it except for the loop, which was tucked securely into his fist.

He jerked it back.

“Don’t you ever try to grab something away from me,” he said hoarsely. “You hear me? You ever do that again and you’ll spend a month pissing raspberry juice.”

“Tom, stop it,” she said, and her very tone infuriated him-she sounded like a playground monitor talking down to a tantrumy six-year-old. “I have to go. This is no joke. People are dead, and I made a promise a long time ago-”

Tom heard little of this. He bellowed and ran at her with his head down, the belt swinging blindly. He hit her with it, driving her away from the doorway and along the bedroom wall. He cocked his arm back, hit her, cocked his arm back, hit her, cocked his arm back, hit her. Later that morning he would not be able to raise the arm above eye level until he had swallowed three codeine tablets, but for now he was aware of nothing but the fact that she was defying him. She had not only been smoking, she had tried to grab the belt away from him, and oh folks, oh friends and neighbors, she had asked for it, and he would testify before the throne of God Almighty that she was going to get it.

He drove her along the wall, swinging the belt, raining blows on her. Her hands were up to protect her face, but he had a clear shot at the rest of her. The belt made thick bull whip cracks in the quiet room. But she did not scream, as she sometimes did, and she did not beg him to stop, as she usually did. Worst of all, she did not cry, as she always did. The only sounds were the belt and their breathing, his heavy and hoarse, hers quick and light.

She broke for the bed and the vanity table on her side of it. Her shoulders were red from the belt’s blows. Her hair streamed fire. He lumbered after her, slower but big, very big-he had played squash until he had popped an Achilles tendon two years ago, and since then his weight had gotten out of hand a little bit (or maybe “a lot” would have been a better way to put it), but the muscle was still there, firm cordage sheathed in the fat. Still, he was a little alarmed at how out of breath he was.

She reached the vanity and he thought she would crouch there, or maybe try to crawl under it. Instead she groped… turned… and suddenly the air was full of flying missiles. She was throwing cosmetics at him. A bottle of Chantilly struck him squarely between the nipples, fell to his feet, shattered. He was suddenly enveloped in the gagging scent of flowers.

“Quit it!” he roared. “Quit it, you bitch!”

Instead of quitting it, her hands flew along the vanity’s littered glass top, grabbing whatever they found, throwing it. He groped at his chest where the bottle of Chantilly had struck him, unable to believe she had hit him with something, even as other objects flew around him. The bottle’s glass stopper had cut him. It was not much of a cut, little more than a triangular scratch, but was there a certain red-haired lady who was going to see the sun come up from a hospital bed? Oh yes, there was. A certain lady who -

A jar of cream struck him above the right eyebrow with sudden, cracking force. He heard a dull thud seemingly inside his head. White light exploded over that eye’s field of vision and he fell back a step, mouth dropping open. Now a tube of Nivea cream struck his belly with a small slapping sound and she was-was she? was it possible?-yes! She was yelling at him!

“I’m going to the airport, you son of a bitch! Do you hear me? I have business and I’m going! You want to get out of my way because I’M GOING!”

Blood ran into his right eye, stinging and hot. He knuckled it away.

He stood there for a moment, staring at her as if he had never seen her before. In a way he never had. Her breasts heaved rapidly. Her face, all flush and livid pallor, blazed. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a snarl. She had, however, denuded the top of the vanity table. The missile silo was empty. He could still read the fear in her eyes… but it was still not fear of him.

“You put those clothes back,” he said, struggling not to pant as he spoke. That would not sound good. That would sound weak. “Then you put the suitcase back and get into bed. And if you do those things, maybe I won’t beat you up too bad. Maybe you’ll be able to go out of the house in two days instead of two weeks.”

“Tom, listen to me.” She spoke slowly. Her gaze was very clear. “If you come near me again, I’ll kill you. Do you understand that, you tub of guts? I’ll kill you.”

And suddenly-maybe it was because of the utter loathing on her face, the contempt, maybe because she had called him a tub of guts, or maybe only because of the rebellious way her breasts rose and fell-the fear was suffocating him. It was not a bud or a bloom but a whole goddam garden, the fear, the horrible fear that he was not here.

Tom Rogan rushed at his wife, not bellowing this time. He came as silently as a torpedo cutting through the water. His intent now was probably not merely to beat and subjugate but to do to her what she had so rashly said she would do to him.

He thought she would run. Probably for the bathroom. Maybe for the stairs. Instead, she stood her ground. Her hip whacked the wall as she threw her weight against the vanity table, pushing it up and toward him, ripping two fingernails down to the quick when the sweat on her palms caused her hands to slip.

For a moment the table tottered on an angle and then she shoved herself forward again. The vanity waltzed on one leg, mirror catching the light and reflecting a brief swimmy aquarium shadow across the ceiling, and then it tilted forward and outward. Its leading edge slammed into Tom’s upper thighs and knocked him over. There was a musical jingle as bottles tipped over and shattered inside. He saw the mirror strike the floor on his left and threw an arm up to shield his eyes, losing the belt. Glass coughed across the floor, silver on the back. He felt some of it sting him, drawing blood.

Now she was crying, her breath coming in high, screamy sobs. Time after time she had seen herself leaving him, leaving Tom’s tyranny as she had left that of her father, stealing away in the night, bags piled in the trunk of her Cutlass. She was not a stupid woman, certainly not stupid enough even now, standing on the rim of this incredible shambles, to believe that she had not loved Tom and did not in some way love him still. But that did not preclude her fear of him… her hate of him… and her contempt of herself for choosing him for dim reasons buried in the times that should be over. Her heart was not breaking; it seemed rather to be broiling in her chest, melting. She was afraid the heat from her heart might soon destroy her sanity in fire.

But above all this, yammering steadily in the back of her mind, she could hear Mike Hanlon’s dry, steady voice: It’s come back, Beverly… it’s come back… and you promised…

The vanity heaved up and down. Once. Twice. A third time. It looked as if it were breathing.

Moving with careful agility, her mouth turned down at the corners and jerking as if in prelude to some sort of convulsion, she skirted the vanity, toe-stepping through the broken glass, and grabbed the belt just as Tom heaved the vanity off to one side. Then she backed up, sliding her hand into the loop. She shook her hair out of her eyes and watched to see what he would do.

Tom got up. Some of the mirror-glass had cut one of his cheeks. A diagonal cut traced a line as fine as thread across his brow. He squinted at her as he rose slowly to his feet, and she saw drops of blood on his boxer shorts.

“You just give me that belt,” he said.

Instead she took two turns of it around her hand and looked at him defiantly.

“Quit it, Bev. Right now.”

“If you come for me, I’m going to strap the shit out of you.” The words were coming out of her mouth but she couldn’t believe it was her saying them. And just who was this caveman in the bloody undershorts, anyway? Her husband? Her father? The lover she had taken in college who had broken her nose one night, apparently on a whim? Oh God help me, she thought. God help me now. And still her mouth went on. “I can do it, too. You’re fat and slow, Tom. I’m going, and I think maybe I’ll stay gone. I think maybe it’s over.”

“Who’s this guy Denbrough?”

“Forget it. I was-”

She realized almost too late that the question had been a distraction. He was coming for her before the last word was out of his mouth. She whickered the belt through the air in an arc and the sound it made when it smashed across his mouth was the sound of a stubborn cork coming out of a bottle.

He squealed and clapped his hands to his mouth, his eyes huge, hurt and shocked. Blood began to pour between his fingers and over the backs of his hands.

“You broke my mouth, you bitch!” he screamed, muffled. “Ah God you broke my mouth!”

He came at her again, hands reaching, his mouth a wet red smear. His lips appeared to have burst in two places. The crown had been knocked from one of his front teeth. As she watched, he spit it to one side. Part of her was backing away from this scene, sick and moaning, wanting to shut her eyes. But that other Beverly felt the exultation of a death-row convict freed in a freak earthquake. That Beverly liked all of this just fine. I wish you’d swallowed it! that one thought. Wish you’d choked on it!

It was this latter Beverly who swung the belt for the last time-the belt he had used on her buttocks, her legs, her breasts. The belt he had used on her times without number over the last four years. How many strokes you got depended on how badly you’d screwed up. Tom comes home and dinner is cold? Two with the belt. Bev’s working late at the studio and forgets to call home? Three with the belt. Oh hey, look at this-Beverly got another parking ticket. One with the belt… across the breasts. He was good. He rarely bruised. It didn’t even hurt that much. Except for the humiliation. That hurt. And what hurt worse was knowing that part of her craved the hurt. Craved the humiliation.

Last time pays for all, she thought, and swung.

She brought the belt in low, brought it in sidearm, and it whacked across his balls with a brisk yet heavy sound, the sound of a woman striking a rug with a carpet-beater. That was all it took. All the fight promptly went out of Tom Rogan.

He uttered a thin, strengthless shriek and fell on his knees as if to pray. His hands were between his legs. His head was thrown back. Cords stood out on his neck. His mouth was a tragedy-grimace of pain. His left knee came down squarely on a heavy, pointed hook of shattered perfume bottle and he rolled silently over on one side like a whale. One hand left his balls to grab his squirting knee.

The blood, she thought. Dear Lord, he’s bleeding everywhere.

He’ll live, this new Beverly-the Beverly who seemed to have surfaced at Mike Hanlon’s phone call-replied coldly. Guys like him always live. You just get the hell out of here before he decides he wants to tango some more. Or before he decides to go down cellar and get his Winchester.

She backed away and felt pain stab her foot as she stepped on a chunk of glass from the broken vanity mirror. She bent down to grab the handle of her suitcase. She never took her eyes off him. She backed out the door and she backed down the hall. She was holding the suitcase in front of her in both hands and it banged her shins as she backed. Her cut foot printed bloody heel-prints. When she reached the stairs she turned around and went down quickly, not letting herself think. She suspected she had no coherent thoughts left inside anyway, at least for the time being.

She felt a light pawing against her leg and screamed,

She looked down and saw it was the end of the belt. It was still wrapped around her hand. In this dim light it looked more like a dead snake than ever. She threw it over the bannister, her face a wince of disgust, and saw it land in an S on the rug of the downstairs hallway.

At the foot of the stairs she grasped the hem of her white lace nightgown cross-handed and pulled it over her head. It was bloody, and she would not wear it one second longer, no matter what. She tossed it aside and it billowed onto the rubber-plant by the doorway to the living room like a lacy parachute. She bent, naked, to the suitcase. Her nipples were cold, hard as bullets.

“BEVERLY YOU GET YOUR ASS UPSTAIRS!”

She gasped, jerked, then bent back to the suitcase. If he was strong enough to scream that loud, her time was a good deal shorter than she had thought. She opened the case and pawed out panties, a blouse, an old pair of Levi’s. She jerked these on standing by the door, her eyes never leaving the stairs. But Tom did not appear at the top of them. He bawled her name twice more, and each time she flinched away from that sound, her eyes hunted, her lips pulling back from her teeth in an unconscious snarl.

She jabbed the buttons of the blouse through the holes as fast as she could. The top two buttons were gone (it was ironic how little of her own sewing ever got done) and she supposed she looked quite a bit like a part-time hooker looking for one last quickie before calling it a night-but it would have to do.

“I’ll KILL YOU, YOU BITCH! YOU FUCKING BITCH!”

She slammed the suitcase closed and latched it. The arm of a blouse poked out like a tongue. She looked around once, quickly, suspecting that she would never see this house again.

She discovered only relief in the idea, and so opened the door and let herself out.

She was three blocks away, walking with no clear sense of where she was going, when she realized her feet were still bare. The one she had cut-the left-throbbed dully. She had to get something on her feet, and it was nearly two o’clock in the morning. Her wallet and credit-cards were at home. She felt in the pockets of the jeans and came up with nothing but a few puffs of lint. She didn’t have a dime; not so much as a red penny. She looked around at the residential neighborhood she was in-nice homes, manicured lawns and plantings, dark windows.

And suddenly she began to laugh.

Beverly Rogan sat on a low stone wall, her suitcase between her dirty feet, and laughed. The stars were out, and how bright they were! She tilted her head back and laughed at them, that wild exhilaration washing through her again like a tidal wave that lifted and carried and cleansed, a force so powerful that any conscious thought was lost; only her blood thought and its one powerful voice spoke to her in some inarticulate way of desire, although what it was it desired she neither knew nor cared. It was enough to feel that warmth filling her up with its insistence. Desire, she thought, and inside her that tidal wave of exhilaration seemed to gather speed, rushing her onward toward some inevitable crash.

She laughed at the stars, frightened but free, her terror as sharp as pain and as sweet as a ripe October apple, and when a light came on in an upstairs bedroom of the house this stone wall belonged to, she grabbed the handle of her suitcase and fled off into the night, still laughing.

 

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