Animosity by David Lindsey

Author:David Lindsey [LINDSEY, DAVID]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780759523388
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2001-05-07T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

He didn’t have a plan. How could he? How the hell could he? He acted by instinct, unaware of any design or objective.

Carrying the gowns, he returned to Céleste’s bedroom and dropped them on the floor near the door. He stood a moment and looked at the body on the bed. The first time he saw it he had been in shock. Now he was offended, angered by the dumb lump of inert flesh. He thought of Céleste’s new bruises, of the burns. He imagined Céleste allowing him to do it. He imagined Leda, alone in another room, knowing what was happening and why.

He stepped up to the bed. Part of the covers were hanging off on the floor. With the tips of his fingers he picked up a fold of the sheet and pulled it, dragging it away from the bed, tugging at it until it wouldn’t come anymore. Then he tugged at another fold, pulling it this way and that, working it away from the body. He kept at this for a while, a kind of dainty fiddling that wasn’t getting him anywhere because the sheets were coiled around Lacan so thoroughly that after a certain amount of give nothing more could be done.

Pissed off, he grabbed Lacan by the ankles and pulled him around straight on the bed, moving him almost completely off the spot where he had been lying. There was a shallow depression the length of the body, sogged with coagulating seepage. How long had he been here? Protruding from under Lacan’s chest, as if coming out of his armpit, was the end of a pipe.

He took a clean section of the sheet and used it like gloves to grab Lacan by his left shoulder. He pulled him back, rolled him over. Lacan’s head remained wrapped in the blackening shroud, a relief, but now that he was on his back his penis was exposed. It was purple with lividity, circumcised, twisted awkwardly because it had been bent when death came. Leda had said that she had come into the bedroom and hit him “while . . . while . . .” Here it was now, twisted and preparing to rot, and probably rot quickly because of the blood that had settled in it, an ironic presence in the absence of arousal.

He threw the sheet over Lacan’s groin and reached down and picked up the pipe. It was common, galvanized plumbing pipe, a section about three feet long with a blunt elbow fitting, the end that Leda had used to pound Lacan’s head.

He walked out of the room with the pipe, down the hall, and down the stairs. In the entry he turned right, guessing that the hall would lead to the back of the house. It did. He passed the large kitchen on his right and went out the back door to the porch. He stepped out on the back porch. In the night he could see a broad yard that fell back to tall hedges.

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