37

Boyle hit the freeway at ninety miles an hour. He had the windows and the air-conditioner blasting. The radio played a somber passage from Ravel’s Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello, suggestive of a night funeral, slouched pallbearers shouldering a coffin under a full moon. It was Almond in the box, waxy and dead. To cease upon the midnight with no pain.

He wondered what she’d felt. If it was all over in a flash. Into the void immediately. He heard rats scamper in his skull. They were busy chewing things, building nests, breeding.

Who needs a boyfriend in the picture anyhow. He’s bad news.

Braking only lightly, he left the freeway. The tires whined, rubber burning. He slowed when he reached the suburb, where it was all yield signs and intersections and kids on bikes half hidden under trees. He reached his destination, parked and got out the car in one fluid movement. He walked along the alley, came to the iron gate, opened it, wondered how much time had passed since he was last here. Sixty minutes max. He hoped he wasn’t too late.

Sixty minutes was nothing when you were a kid with fire in your gonads. You could come and come again, maybe with a couple of cigarette interludes and some chitchat between times.

Allow me to show you the downside of all this, asshole.

The rats were gnawing on timbers. Chomp chomp. The way to deal with them was to ignore them. They were figments anyhow, they were products of Samsa’s dope. But that didn’t go any way toward explaining why their small sharp teeth caused him flashes of pain in his head. Why he could smell their fur and their rancid breath and the small excited squeaks they made.

He looked through glass.

The pair on the floor were so caught up in their pursuit of the wild goose of gratification they didn’t hear him. He stood and watched. He wondered how many times they’d fucked during the last hour.

He slid open a door and stood unnoticed.

What did he have to do to get some attention here? Introduce himself?

The girl opened her eyes and saw him, and with a look of surprise pushed the young man away from her. ‘Who the hell are you?’ she asked. ‘Is this a robbery or something?’

Boyle said nothing. The rats had scurried away to some deeper level, and now there were steam valves opening in his head and hissing, a whole load of pressure. This was a real piece of chicanery going on here. This was dirty work.

The kid turned over and said, ‘What the fuck?’

‘What the fuck indeed,’ Boyle said.

The kid snatched at his turquoise boxer shorts, which were lying at his feet. He got them straightened out and was drawing them up over his red erection when Boyle, stooping slightly, hearing the valves in his head release steam, punched him in the throat. Once, twice, a third time in quick succession. ‘She’s way.’ Punch. ‘Outta.’ Punch. ‘Your.’ Punch. ‘League.’

The kid moaned and the girl, covering her tits, yelled. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

Boyle sideswiped her abruptly, a knuckle job. He felt her teeth against his bone. She flopped over, dazed, drooling blood. The kid was feeling his larynx with anxious fingers. ‘Oh, man,’ and his voice was just above a croak.

‘I hate fucking turquoise,’ Boyle said. ‘If there’s one color that goddam pisses me off it’s turquoise.’

‘Who are you?’ the kid asked, froggy-voiced.

‘I’m the fucking avenging angel,’ Boyle said. ‘I punish guys for their sordid deeds. I’m the one who tells you you’re shit, you piece of scum.’

‘You’re insane, crazy fuck.’

Boyle pressed himself down on the guy, throttling him one-handed, driving his head into the floor. The sheer energy he felt. The unfettered strength to destroy. ‘What’s your name, asshole?’

‘Nick.’

Boyle hammered him across the face with a solid fist. The kid’s eye began to darken and swell almost immediately. ‘Nick who?’

‘Mancu … so. Shit. What’s this all about?’

Boyle relaxed his grip a moment. ‘This is about the company you keep, fuckhead.’

‘What company?’

Boyle got up, walked a few paces away, seething, boiling, his heart like a yo-yo, then he turned round and kicked the kid in the mouth. He felt the lips yield to slackness, and the slackness give way to an open hollow. ‘I’ve taken a fucking serious dislike to you.’

Wiping blood from his lip, Nick Mancuso said, ‘What the fuck have I ever done to you? I’ve never even –’

‘You don’t have to do any one particular thing for me not to like you,’ Boyle said. ‘I flare up at stuff other people wouldn’t even notice, hotshot.’

‘Look, hey, please, leave us alone, go away. I don’t know what you want. Here, take my watch. It’s a Rolex.’

‘Fuck your watch,’ Boyle said. ‘Did Daddy buy it for you, huh? Daddy lay out the bread for your goddam Rolex?’

‘Yeah,’ Mancuso said.

‘Good old Daddy. May his name be blessed.’ Boyle reached down, gripped one of the kid’s nipples and twisted it viciously, then slapped his face back and forth.

‘Hey – hey – hey,’ Mancuso kept saying, blinking, trying to twist his head out of the way.

‘And the car? Daddy buy the fucking car?’

‘He helped.’

‘I bet he did. Good for picking up babes, huh? A genuine pussy-wagon, huh? Chicks just want to jump in that car, right? It’s a piece of shit, that’s what it is. A piece of goddam flash German shit.’ He was in freefall, hypersthenic, charged with the need to keep havoc going. He walked to the mantelpiece, where various sports trophies were lined up. He swiped his hand across them, and they tumbled to the floor and rolled away.

‘Why?’ Mancuso asked.

‘You stay the fuck away from her,’ Boyle said.

‘Who?’

‘Don’t fuck with me, lover boy.’

Mancuso was looking at the prone girl, who was breathing badly. ‘She’s hurt.’

‘That’s the whole idea,’ Boyle said. What else could he smash? What else could he just fucking destroy? He saw the fireside implements, horse-headed brass doodahs. Monique had taken riding lessons – dressage, of course – every Saturday morning. One time, when she was eleven, she brought home a ribbon she’d won and Hugh hung it on the wall of his office. It was probably still hanging there, that goddam green ribbon, a souvenir of Monique’s achievement. She had a horse called Mambo, a monster skewbald that had died in mysterious circumstances.

I poisoned its fucking food, Boyle thought. You never even knew that, did you, Monique? You wept in the stable over the horse’s big dead body. I can still hear your tears, you spoiled bitch. I can still see the truck from the abattoir coming to dispose of Mambo, the horse stiff, mouth gaping. I can remember feeling absolutely great. I remember the foul stench of the truck.

He gripped the poker and hauled it out of the stand. He whacked it through the air, listening to the swish it made. Mancuso was starting to rise, hands held out in front of him, shaking his head as he watched the poker lash space.

‘No,’ he said.

Boyle stared at this spoiled-brat kid with his swollen eye and his mouth running blood. He heard the sirens of chaos, the whole choir of destruction singing in his head. ‘You ever fuck her, Nick?’

‘Who?’

‘Darcy, you asshole.’

‘Darcy?’

‘You ever FUCK her, I asked.’

‘No, I never did.’

‘But you try.’

‘Sure I try.’

‘She doesn’t let you.’

‘Listen, why don’t you put that poker down?’

‘You tell her you love her?’

‘Yeah, I tell her that. It’s true.’

‘Lying fuck.’ Boyle whipped the poker just under Nick Mancuso’s nose. The kid stepped back fast. ‘You tell her you love her because you figure that’s the numero uno route to screwing her. But the thing is she’s too smart for you. You’re unworthy. You’re some links down the great chain of life, Nick. She’s floating on the pond like a lily, and you’re down there in the dark-green slime with the fucking mosquito larvae. This blonde heap of shit is your level, just about.’

‘What’s Darcy got to do with you?’

‘That’s none of your goddam business. You just stay the hell out of her life,’ Boyle said. He sliced the air with the brass poker. Mancuso stepped further back. The blonde, Mandy, raised her face and made a small choking sound of pain. She gazed at Mancuso, then at Boyle, as if she were trying to piece the events of her world together.

Don’t bother, sweetheart, Boyle thought, and hit her across the skull with the poker. He hit her a second time smack on the forehead, and she fell back silent.

Mancuso, lowering his head like a young bullock, charged suddenly, roaring aloud as he came across the floor, and his skull struck Boyle in the chest. Boyle was thrown against the wall and lost his balance, sliding on one of the silver trophies on the floor, going down on his ass and striking out furiously with the poker, catching Nick Mancuso on the kneebone and feeling it snap under the force of brass. The kid crumpled and fell, hugging the knee to his chest and gasping with pain.

Boyle rose and stood over him. ‘You stupid fucker,’ he said.

He hit him time and again with the poker, working up a frenzy, a crescendo of rage, and then it wasn’t just this kid he was beating to pulp, it was everybody who’d ever crossed him, everybody who’d interfered with his life, everybody and anybody who’d acted against him to his detriment: judges, lawyers, cops, social workers, professors, psychiatrists, counselors, Hugh – especially Hugh – and the world, the fucking world. Up and down and up and down, brass rising and falling, the kid’s face mashed potato, welts rising on his body, and the choir singing full-throated in Boyle’s ears, He will awake no more, oh, never more, and up and down, and on and on, the brass stick whacking cartilage and bone and ligament. No refuge! No appeal! Just metal hot in his hand and speed roaring through his system and the abysses of the sky and the wild earth and the kid bleeding and bleeding on the floor.

Breathless, elated, Boyle dropped the poker, which fell without any sound that he could hear.