THE HERALD
(from the novel, Follow Down the Light)David Hollander
She drives west through darkness with the sun circling behind her and the old Rabbit clamoring to outrace this next inevitability, traversing the arc of a towering suspension bridge whose warning lights glower through evening fog like enraged eyes, Wrench’s blood hot and electric and the glass pipe unconcealed on the passenger seat as she soars above a mighty black river before the bridge belches her onto the mainland where she hooks northward. The late night disc jockeys prattle their immemorial prattle, glorifying sex and death and rock & roll—“She’s hot Sammy. Like an oven!”—and summer insects explode against her windshield like purulent snowflakes of gore, Wrench sweating a furious sweat of bourbon and death.
Balanced on a quivering wooden stool, a kitchen knife in her tiny pale fist, Lydia prying at the locked cabinet while at her back, beyond the kitchen’s archway, the tired reprimand of that old macaw rang out: “Not for little girls! Not for little girls!” The bird shadow-boxing on a wooden spindle that bisected the golden cage, its own dish overflowing with dried fruits and nuts inaccessible to hungry girls who liked their fingers, the oily bird sadistic and unforgiving, its dull black beak slashing at the air. The famished child made her panicked assault on sequestered foodstuffs, loaves of bread and packaged snack cakes, while upstairs her foster parents moaned and groaned in connubial rituals from which they always emerged panting, chocolate brown skin swathed in red robes and glowing with sweat.
“Not for little girls!” sang the dirty white macaw.
Lydia, unable to master the padlock and so instead using her elbow as a ramrod, pounding away at the waferboard until finally it gave and she thrust her fist within this forbidden vault, bloody fingers groping desperately, Lydia buried up to the elbow when he called her name from the archway.
“Hand in da cookie jar, blondie. Now dat be sum-tin I wish I had me a picture of.”
“I’m sorry Peter,” she said, lowering her eyes.
“How many times I got to tell you girl? It’s Mama and Papa.” He moved toward her and the macaw screamed gleefully as Lydia struggled to extricate herself, his smile advancing and a golden yellow snack cake held between his thumb and forefinger. He waggled it. “Strupes,” he scolded. “How many times blondie? You ain’t no bird, dat mooch is ob-vee-use….” And a moment later his female counterpart—Andrina, or “Mama,” depending on perspective—stepped through the archway and stood beside him, her red robe stained with semen and uncinctured, revealing black panties and one exposed nipple with a huge purple aureole, like a birthmark or a burn. Her hair pulled back with a barrette, her chubby brown cheeks rattling with laughter and a wooden yardstick in her hand, which she began to tap against the countertop, as if establishing the tempo of the punishment impending….
North now along a highway whose grassy median is pierced by the same rigid pine in endless repetition, the moon a dollop of solder and the road all but forgotten at this dark hour. The radio station fading from range and crackling with static, a background for Wrench’s own improvisations, her voice rising in song: “Time to pay, all you angels. Burn! Burn! Burn! Burn!” Her laughter saws through the cockpit, dark squirrels and marmots flittering out in the median like tiny gnomes arranging nocturnal bloodpacts. She breaks the Connecticut border, penetrating suburban wonderlands of scotch and riches, and the route is a map etched into her grey matter. Exit eight, and then up a steep hill hemmed in by old uncut forest with the engine sputtering. At the zenith she pulls onto a gravel shoulder beside the tree line and she kills the lights. She loads the pipe from the ziplock bag in the darkness, the crystals reconstituted as chips of talcum by the round moon centered in her windshield. She thinks without thinking of Randy, of promises made in those first days, of words of love reciprocated. “I’ll never forget what you’re doing for me,” she’d said. And also, “I’ll try if you will.” Well, she had tried, hadn’t she? She was trying even now. She lights up and the cockpit sizzles with molten light, tiny demons giggling at her periphery and the roar of flame and the sulfur hiss, the hot glass cradled in her palm and the great thaw commencing yet again.
Outside, crickets symphonize and a warm wind stirs roadside trees, their trunks rendered chrome-like by the liquid moon and Wrench’s mad laughter sucked mysteriously upward. She withdraws the gas can from the trunk and loops the coiled rope about her shoulder, then ducks within the tree line, an ivory phantom haunting the forest’s edge, the rusted five gallon can banging against her thigh and her boots clearing a swath through mulch and loam, beady-eyed rodents and brightly hued moths fleeing the wild spectacle that is her passage. “I’ll take care of you Wrench,” she says aloud. “God has a fucking plan for you.” She clatters through these quiet woods, snorting, the smell of earth kicked up and permeating her high, as if she channeled some dirt goddess who fed off the land’s dark energy. Windows of yellow light sit on the air, the house now fifty yards distant and Wrench arriving at the far side of this standing acre of forest and staring up at a familiar silhouette in the upstairs bedroom.
“Papa,” she smiles. And now she’s floating out across the property’s selvage of dirt and pine needles and then onto the soft lawn, her body gone astral and cool and soundlessly she works her way into the shrubbery that grows wild against the cedar-shingled home, and she pours the gasoline generously down those shingles and into the twisted bushes, hoping most of all that that fucking bird still counts itself among the living, the petrol smell thick and promising and Wrench liberated from all earthly cares and limitations, an angel herself, one chosen specially to do God’s dirty work.
She moves to the front door and ties one end of the rope securely around the knob and then runs the length out to the prize oak that stands sentry a mere fifteen feet from the entryway. Giggling, she runs three loops around this ancient citizen before tying off and checking the tautness, proud of her own forethought for this little detail. She glides back to the base of the house and stands in puddles of gasoline, risking a good long look through a front window, the downstairs unlit but the contours of the kitchen visible just beyond the vestibule, the slate flooring slick and dark as glass. A kitchen stockpiled with food but Lydia sustained only by parental discards, gnawing at ragged meat still cleaving to the bones of their finished meals, always placed perversely on a clean white plate. Time to pay, all you angels.
She backs away and the struck match hisses and she flips it forward. Fire: hungry and bellicose, rising all at once as if summoned. She turns with the flames at her back, the woodland creatures once again flummoxed by this bony silhouette marching forward like some herald of the undead, thick black smoke surrounding neon flame and Wrench walking away from her handiwork, imagining Peter at the door, pulling, the rope holding fast and the macaw shouting with dread wisdom, “Unfortunate death by fire! Caw! Unfortunate death by fire!” And then the greasy feathers catching, seared away from the still-living bird whose blood begins to boil in the veins, greasy meat slipping from the bones.
She stumbles for the car with the branches snatching at her clothing and adrenaline complicating her high, the flames building now to a roar at her back, earth’s oldest anger risen up in ecstasy and accelerating toward her. Ivory undernourished Wrench, breaking through the woods and back to the gravel shoulder and only then turning to see what she has reaped, the fire an immense and jagged hole in the night, evidence of a vast inferno backlighting this skin of light and air, this supposed world through which she travels. Wrench, staring wasted into this fresh hell, smiling and panting, tears streaming down her glowing face and the image of fire-blackened corpses—their hands raised defensively against unspeakable pain—these images dancing like sugar plums all through her head.
“How do you like me now Mama?” she asks. “How do you like your little girl?” And her maniacal laughter and tears running hot down her pale face and the car’s hood still warm. Alive. Wrench is still alive.