بخش 04 - فصل 04

4 Not many miles from where Kermit William Hodges and Janelle Patterson are lying together in the house on Harper Road, Brady Hartsfield is sitting in his control room.

Tonight he’s at his worktable instead of his bank of computers. And doing nothing. Nearby, lying amid the litter of small tools, bits of wire, and computer components, is the Monday paper, still rolled up inside its thin plastic condom. He brought it in when he got back from Discount Electronix, but

only from force of habit. He has no interest in the news. He has other things to think about. How he’s going to get the cop. How he’s going to get into the ‘Round Here concert at the MAC wearing his carefully constructed suicide vest. If he really intends to do it, that is. Right now it all seems like an awful lot of work. A long row to hoe. A

high mountain to climb. A . . . a… But he can’t think of any other similes. Or are those metaphors? Maybe, he thinks drearily, I just ought to kill myself now and be done with it. Get rid of these awful thoughts. These snapshots from hell. Snapshots like the one of his mother, for instance,

convulsing on the sofa after eating the poisoned meat meant for the Robinson family’s dog. Mom with her eyes bugging out and her pajama shirt covered with puke –how would that picture look in the old family album? He needs to think, but there’s a hurricane going on in his head, a big bad Category

Five Katrina, and everything is flying. His old Boy Scout sleeping bag is spread out on the basement floor, on top of an air mattress he scrounged from the garage. The air mattress has a slow leak. Brady supposes he ought to replace it if he means to continue sleeping down here for whatever short stretch of life remains to him. And where

else can he sleep? He can’t bring himself to use his bed on the second floor, not with his mother lying dead in her own bed just down the hall, maybe already rotting her way into the sheets. He’s turned on her air conditioner and cranked it up to HI COOL, but he’s under no illusions about how well that will work. Or for how long. Nor is sleeping on the

living room couch an option. He cleaned it as well as he could, and turned the cushions, but it still smells of her vomit. No, it has to be down here, in his special place. His control room. Of course the basement has its own unpleasant history; it’s where his little brother died. Only died is a bit of a euphemism, and it’s a bit late for those.

Brady thinks about how he used Frankie’s name when he posted to Olivia Trelawney under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. It was as if Frankie was alive again for a little while. Only when the Trelawney bitch died, Frankie died with her. Died again. “I never liked you anyway,” he says, looking toward the foot of the stairs. It is a

strangely childish voice, high and treble, but Brady doesn’t notice. “And I had to.” He pauses. “We had to.” He thinks of his mother, and how beautiful she was in those days. Those old days.