“I don’t know.”
“I know something,” Reggie said. He sat up and reached for his belt. He had left it draped over the back of the couch, in case he needed it, in case he could think of some other use for it. Candy felt her stomach turn over and her mind go blank.
“You know what I know?” Reggie said. “I know how I like to see you best when you’re wearing that stuff.”
“Yes,” Candy said.
“Hands and knees,” Reggie said. “On the floor.”
“Yes.”
“When I get done with this, I’m going to take you just like a dog,” Reggie said, “just like a dog. That’s all you are anyway, you stupid bitch. Just a dog.”
“Yes,” Candy said again, and thought: The carpet needs cleaning. It’s supposed to be green and now it looks like swamp.
In the air above the back of her the belt was whistling and screaming, really screaming, as if it were alive. It was talking to her and she could hear every word it said. You asked for it. You always ask for it. You’re so stupid and so bad, if you didn’t have somebody like Reggie to do this for you you’d go straight to hell, just straight to hell, because you’re bad, you’re evil, you’re rotted right to the core and if a doctor had to cut you open all he’d find was pus and stink.
That was what the belt was saying, but oddly enough, for once it wasn’t what Candy’s conscious mind was saying as well. Candy’s conscious mind was on a tangent of its own, and what it was telling her was this:
It was a damned good thing that Reggie couldn’t read too well, because if he could, and if he read the back of that paperback book she had left sitting on the kitchen table, he would probably kill her, in self-defense.
The name of that book was The Burning Bed, and it was all about a woman whose husband had beat her up and beat her up and beat her up day after day and year after year until one night when he’d passed out dead drunk on the bed, she doused him with gasoline and lit a match.
Seven
1
YEARS AGO, JUST AFTER the Second World War, when the money had first started really rolling in, the citizens of Bethlehem, Vermont, had had an argument about the seating for the Nativity play. From the beginning, the Nativity play had been staged in the town park with the gazebo as the stable. From the beginning, people coming to watch had stood along the park’s edges in the cold, their heads covered with thick woolen hats and their ears straining to hear whatever they could. It was a kind of theater in the round gigantus. Some of the people in Bethlehem wanted to leave this as it was. People had been coming and standing for over a dozen years and would probably come and stand for over a dozen more. One citizens’ committee had insisted on the construction of a bandshell with poured-concrete audience tiers. They envisioned busloads of tourists from Delaware and Ohio, all in search of the post-War definition of reasonable American comfort. They envisioned Bethlehem ringed by discreetly placed motels, Howard Johnsons taking up the slack when the inns in town couldn’t provide the New American with the New American idea of plumbing. A third group wanted to do something sensible, but not drastic. Obviously, the crowds were getting out of hand. They couldn’t just go on letting people crowd along the edges of the park. There were too many of them, and too many of them were from Away. People pushed. People shouted and got angry. People drank. The Nativity play needed an organizing principle, and what that organizing principle was was this: a set of collapsible bleachers with a canvas tent shield and portable space heaters, combined with a very sophisticated sound system that included spot mikes and strategically placed speakers. It was elaborate, unwieldy, ridiculous and expensive as all hell, but it worked, and the town stuck with it. By the time Gregor Demarkian was making his way from the Green Mountain Inn to the center of town in the company of Bennis Hannaford and Father Tibor Kasparian, on his way to the first night of his first performance of the Bethlehem nativity play, it had become a town tradition. The original collapsible bleachers had been replaced with new ones that included cushioned benches. The original canvas tent shield had been replaced with one especially designed for the Celebration and including air vents and low-noise fans to blow the heat from the space heaters upward at the people who needed to be warmed. The new sound system had benefited from decades of experimentation by rock musicians and the CIA. That was frosting. The Bethlehem Nativity Celebration had always been the transformation of the center of a small New England town into the center of a small Palestinian one. It always would be.
The collapsible bleachers were divided into six sections with natural aisles in between. Each section was split in the middle by a makeshift stair, so that older patrons didn’t have to climb the bleachers like monkeys or junior high school students. The natural aisle at the very northernmost part of the park, the one nearest Carrow Street, was triple the width of all the others. Coming into his own set of bleachers, just to the left, Gregor could see the dark shapes of animals shifting and shuddering at the far end of it. Tibor, who had been so interested in how and where the animals would come, now seemed not interested at all. He plodded along behind Bennis with an air of leaden pessimism, the black skirt of his cassock brushing against the snow. Leading them, Bennis kept referring to their tickets and muttering to herself. Gregor thought it was a good thing. He had gotten back to the Inn just after lunch, his pockets stuffed with notes and a crudely reproduced map of what he and Franklin Morrison had begun to call “the problem.” He had been trying ever since to talk it over with somebody. At first, he had been alone, deserted by Bennis and Tibor, who had gone off to listen to Christmas carols or check out the souvenir stores or something. Then he had been in the midst of too much activity, with Bennis and Tibor getting back late and scurrying to get ready to leave in time, with Tibor mumbling about everything Bennis had and hadn’t eaten, with Bennis panicking because she couldn’t remember where she’d put the tickets or the program or her reading glasses or her cigarettes or anything else. Now, of course, they were filing in to see the Nativity play, which would effectively cut off conversation for the next two hours. Gregor thought it was typical. When he didn’t want to talk about crime or cases or bloody murder, Tibor and Bennis were all over him like feathers, probing and prodding, driving him crazy. When he did want to talk about them, they had something else to do.