بخش 03 - فصل 29

29 When he can put it off no longer, Brady creeps upstairs. Twilight has come. The smell of seared hamburger is almost gone, but the smell of puke is still strong. He goes into the

living room. His mother is on the floor next to the coffee table, which is now overturned. Her eyes glare up at the ceiling. Her lips are pulled back in a great big grin. Her hands are claws. She’s dead. Brady thinks, Why did you have to go out in the garage when you got hungry? Oh

Mom, Mommy, what in God’s name possessed you? Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, he thinks, and then, looking at the mess she’s made, he wonders if they have any carpet cleaner. This is Hodges’s fault. It all leads back to him. He’ll deal with the old DetRet, and soon. Right now, though, he has a more pressing

problem. He sits down to consider it, taking the chair he uses on the occasions when he watches TV with her. He realizes she’ll never watch another reality show. It’s sad . . . but it does have its funny side. He imagines Jeff Probst sending flowers with a card reading From all your Survivor pals, and he just has to chuckle.

What is he to do with her? The neighbors won’t miss her because she never ever had anything to do with them, called them stuck-up. She has no friends, either, not even of the barfly type, because she did all her drinking at home. Once, in a rare moment of selfappraisal, she told him she didn’t go out to the bars because they were full of

drunks just like her. “That’s why you didn’t taste that shit and stop, isn’t it?” he asks the corpse. “You were too fucking loaded.” He wishes they had a freezer case. If they did, he’d cram her body into it. He saw that in a movie once. He doesn’t dare put her in the garage; that seems a little too public, somehow. He supposes he

could wrap her in a rug and take her down to the basement, she’d certainly fit under the stairs, but how would he get any work done, knowing she was there? Knowing that, even inside a roll of rug, her eyes were glaring? Besides, the basement’s his place. His control room. In the end he realizes there’s only one thing to do. He grabs

her under the arms and drags her toward the stairs. By the time he gets her there, her pajama pants have slid down, revealing what she sometimes calls (called, he reminds himself) her winky. Once, when he was in bed with her and she was giving him relief for a particularly bad headache, he tried to touch her winky and she slapped his hand away.

Hard. Don’t you ever, she had said. That’s where you came from. Brady pulls her up the stairs, a riser at a time. The pajama pants work down to her ankles and puddle there. He remembers how she did a sitdown march on the couch in her last extremity. How awful. But, like the thing about Jeff Probst sending flowers, it had

its funny side, although it wasn’t the kind of joke you could explain to people. It was kind of Zen. Down the hall. Into her bedroom. He straightens up, wincing at the pain in his lower back. God, she’s so heavy. It’s as if death has stuffed her with some dense mystery meat. Never mind. Get it done.

He yanks up her pants, making her decent again–as decent as a corpse in vomitsoaked pj’s can be–and lifts her onto her bed, groaning as fresh pain settles into his back. When he straightens up this time, he can feel his spine crackling. He thinks about taking off her nightclothes and replacing them with something clean–one of the

XL tee-shirts she sometimes

wears to bed, maybe–but that

would mean more lifting and

manipulation of what is now

just pounds of silent flesh

hanging

from

bone

coathangers. What if he threw

his back out?

He could at least take off

her top, that caught most of

the mess, but then he’d have to

look at her boobs. Those she

did let him touch, but only once in awhile. My handsome boy, she’d say on these occasions. Running her fingers through his hair or massaging his neck where the headaches settled, crouched and snarling. My handsome honeyboy. In the end he just pulls the bedspread up, covering her entirely. Especially those staring, glaring eyes.

“Sorry, Mom,” he says, looking down at the white shape. “Not your fault.” No. It’s the fat ex-cop’s fault. Brady bought the Gopher-Go to poison the dog, true, but only as a way of getting to Hodges and messing with his head. Now it’s Brady’s head that’s a mess. Not to mention the living room. He’s got a lot of work to do down

there, but he has something else to do first.