Manchester, New Hampshire 1982
Rina Varger beat her palm against the old Ford pickup’s door in time to Aerosmith’s “Push Comes to Shove” as she drove across the bridge and into town. It was the morning of the tenth of September and the Merrimack was running high after a week of torrential rain, debris and dead brush from upriver borne along by the surging brown water. The wind in her face felt good after a day spent scrubbing years of dust and nameless gunk from between sticky floorboards. Everything had to be perfect for Aunt Eleanor’s wedding. Nana Marian was losing her mind trying to get the house in shape, running their skinless maid Kate Bartlett ragged.
A little after eight Rina parked in front of Julian and Eddie’s place, a cramped two-story bungalow with a patchy lawn and huge stands of sumac nearly obscuring its front entrance and encroaching on its drive-way. Julian, an aging queen cast off by a prominent Cape Cod family, owned Plover Antiques downtown. Eddie Means was a veterinarian at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, and had been the Varger family’s meat man for almost ten years. Rina killed the engine and stepped out onto the curb, fishing in her jacket pockets for her cigarettes. She was about to light up when she heard voices coming from the direction of the driveway. She pocketed her smokes and went around the house, moving slowly, keeping to the shadows of the sumac stand.
Four teenage boys, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and a girl who looked a little younger stood in a half circle at the end of the driveway, in front of Julian’s garage. Another girl, maybe a year or two older than the others, sat fenced in by their little gang with her back against the peeling garage door. Even from the curb, Rina could see the shiner discoloring her left eye and cheekbone. As she watched, one of the boys kicked the seated girl in the ribs. She gasped, bending double.
“Show us,” the biggest boy demanded. He was the whole pack-age, letter jacket and crew cut, neck and shoulders like a bull. “Come on, freak. Let’s see if it’s true.”
Rina bent and scooped up a stone from the lawn’s sandy edge, stepping out into the center of the driveway. She weighed the rock in her palm, sizing up the distance between her and the gang. Her mother would have stomped right into the middle of them, screaming that she’d call their parents. Her grandfather would have thrown his skin off then and there and gone for their throats. Her grandmother would have watched. “Somewhere down the middle,” Rina muttered to herself.
“I’ll do it myself,” said the boy. He knelt, a look of strange, compulsive hunger making him seem older than his years. The girl squeezed her eyes shut tight and pressed herself against the garage door. Rina took a deep breath, did her best Bruce Hurst windup, and threw the rock as hard as she could. The boy turned at her grunt of effort and took it square in the nose, his head snapping back like a speed bag. He went down on his ass with a shriek, clapping his hands over his gushing nose. Blood dripped into his lap as the others turned in shock. One went for a pocketknife.
Rina pulled her jacket back to show the revolver stuffed into the waist of her jeans. “Get lost,” she said. The gang stopped cold. She snapped her fingers. “Come on. Time’s a-wastin’.”
They remained frozen for a moment. One of the boys looked at their ringleader, then looked away, shamefaced and red. The girl in their little gang seemed on the verge of tears. Slowly, two of them helped the bleeding boy to his feet and led him past her toward the street. He glared at her in passing, poisonous hate and terror at war behind his beady blue eyes. “Fucking dyke,” he muttered.
“If I see you around here again, you’ll wish I hadn’t,” said Rina. “You got that, tiger?”
He ducked his head and ran, and the others ran after him, the girl looking back fearfully over her shoulder. When she was sure they were gone, Rina went to the girl sitting against the garage door and offered her a hand. She took it. “Thanks.” The girl got unsteadily to her feet, wiping dirt from her shirtfront. She was taller than Rina, chubby and a little stooped, with a round face and buck teeth. When she spoke, it was with the slightest lisp. “I’m Wendy.”
“Rina. You know Eddie and Julian?”
“Julian’s my uncle,” said Wendy, sniffing. “I’m staying with him for a little while.”
“He give you that shiner?”
Wendy shook her head. “No. He’s okay.” She picked at the cuff of her sweatshirt. “I had, um, some problems with my mom. It’s why I’m out here.”
The side door banged open. Eddie hurried down the concrete steps, shirtless and barefoot in nothing but a pair of tan slacks. He wore a big buck knife on his hip. “You alright, honey?” he asked Wendy, though he didn’t for a moment look away from Rina. Rina smiled, showing all her teeth.
“We were just talking,” said Wendy.
“That’s alright, then. Why don’t you go help your uncle with dinner?”
“Uncle Eddie—”
“Go on in, honey,” he said, firmly this time. Wendy took a hesitant step back, her cheeks reddening, and then fled inside.
“You stay away from that girl, Rina,” said Eddie. “She’s got enough problems.”
“You calling me a problem, Eddie?”
Eddie stuck his thumbs in his belt. He was only a few inches taller than Rina, and maybe thirty pounds heavier, but faggot or not, he wasn’t someone you wanted to fight. “Yes.”
Rina shrugged. She hadn’t really thought about Wendy like that, until Eddie told her not to. She tried on the idea of slipping her hands under that baggy sweatshirt, of tilting that soft, rounded chin up for a kiss, sweaty black hair tangled around her fingers. The things you weren’t supposed to eat were always the sweetest. “Fair enough,” she said, clearing her throat. “What you got for me?”
Eddie shook his head and went to lift the garage door. “Broad fucking daylight,” he said as the smell of ripe meat and preservatives billowed out around him in a fragrant cloud. Rina stepped closer, sniffing at the air. In the gloom of the garage, between rusted gym equipment and stacked cardboard boxes, the source of the smell lay wrapped in plastic on a dolly under a frayed blue tarp. Eddie looked back at her. “You may not care who sees you, but I lose my job and you’re gonna have to find someone else to play ball.”
Ignoring him, Rina went to the dolly and knelt, lifting the nearest corner of the tarp. A liquid black eye stared back at her through long, curling lashes. A dead Cape buffalo, maybe a year old, horns not yet fused over the crown of its skull. “Beautiful,” she said. She stood, letting the tarp fall back into place. “I’ll get the ramp.”
The things you weren’t supposed to eat were always the sweetest.
Rina took the back way home, the station crackling through the dead spots on the orchard road so that Captain and Tenille sounded like they were singing from the depths of a bottomless pit. She turned the radio off. She kept thinking of Wendy. Broken birds always got her going. Something about how vulnerable they were, how bad they needed someone to be good to them. Rina liked being that someone, at least at first. If you rode out the crying and the clinginess for a few weeks you could really put your feet up afterward. Coast on goodwill while they made you breakfast and ate you out on the couch.
“You’re just too bad.” She chuckled to herself, lighting a cigarette as she turned onto the old pumping station connector. Weighed down by the buffalo carcass in its bed, the truck thumped and rattled over the broken pavement where it gave way to dirt. The trees—old growth, not pine—crowded close so that their branches formed a tunnel of dappled shade over the road. Part of Rina always felt relief when she turned into that sheltering gloom, like she’d braved the open grasslands on a hunt and come back to the tribe with meat over her shoulder. Sometimes she envied those long-ago Skin Dancers their adventures, the danger they’d faced in a world not yet broken to the saddle.
A flock of wild turkeys darted into the road ahead of Rina. She slowed to let them cross, the tom keeping a wary eye on her as the hens hurried their half-grown pullets along. He was a big one, scarred on his head and neck and missing most of his comb. Not today, thought Rina, smiling at the tom. The fox in her itched and whined, pulling at her thoughts, turning them red and quick. She’d eaten it only a week before, and it still paced restlessly in her mind. You enjoy the weather, old man. We’ll Dance another time.
The big tom gobbled and fluffed his wings. The turkeys disappeared into the woods. Rina drove onward. She passed the burned-out wreck of the Mercer farm, half the big dairy barn still standing thirty-odd years after the fire that had killed three of the Mercers in their beds. Rina’s family owned the land now, but they’d never built on it. The Mercer cows had been sold off for dog food and the forest now crept step by careful step toward the blackened skeletons of the farmhouse and the barn. Rina remembered laying on her back beneath those sagging beams on her sixteenth birthday, bored and frustrated as Fabian La Vigne, her second cousin on Nana Marian’s side of the family, tentatively licked her pussy.
Rina wondered if Eleanor’s marriage would be like that. She’d never pictured Aunt Ellie with a man. Rina had a clear childhood memory of her aunt, maybe nineteen or twenty at the time, splashing in the shallows at Lake Winnisquam with some of their girl cousins from Memé Carlotte’s side of the family up in Maine, the Gerstmanns. Ellie, plump and long-legged in her two-piece, her red hair flying as she skimmed a palm across the surface of the water, droplets sparkling in the air, and that smile, alive with mischief and desire. Now she was marrying Rudy Gerstmann, her third cousin, a tall, soft-spoken man with a sandy mustache and the slender fingers of a pianist. Rina’s great-aunt Simone always said if you married outside the bloodline you’d wind up with chimeric babies, unable to control the Skin Dance. Her late uncle Cecil’s baby with the girl in town he’d fallen for had been stillborn, a patchwork horror of fur and feathers, but her uncle Albert’s bastard, Jean Paul, could Dance as well as any of them, and his mother was a diner waitress. When Rina asked Simone about that, her great-aunt told her it wasn’t decent to talk about matters of the bedroom.
Rina pulled onto Bear Lake Drive, the truck bouncing as it hit dirt road, the trees closing in tight to either side. A half mile in, Alfie Heureaux, one of her grandmother’s men and a distant cousin on the La Vigne side of the family, stood guard at the bottom of the driveway to Hensteeth, leaning against the rusted cattle gate, a lit cigarette dan-gling from his mouth. With his creased, leathery skin and colorless hair he might have been anywhere from fifty to seventy. He had a Dancing scar at the right corner of his mouth that pulled it down a little, and another at his hairline that gave him a little bald triangle above his right temple. He wore a weathered denim jacket over a plaid shirt.
“What’s the word, hummingbird?” he asked as Rina rolled to a stop beside his post, the Ford’s brakes squealing in protest.
“Not a thing, chicken wing,” Rina answered, smiling. “Anyone been down from the house?”
“Camille went out a little while ago.” Alfie blew smoke out his nostrils and inhaled it. He gestured with his cigarette at the tarped mass in the Ford’s bed. “Everything go okay with Siegfried and Roy there?”
“Fine, yeah,” said Rina. “You gonna make me fuckin’ sit here all day listening to you?”
Alfie shadowboxed at her, muttering good-naturedly, then chuckled and went to open the gate. The iron post dragged over the stony ground of the drive. He waved her in. “Someone’s gonna wash that mouth out with soap one of these days, kid,” he called after her.
It was a mile and a half through the woods to Hensteeth, the Varger family compound Rina’s great-grandparents had built at the dawn of the century. Manchester was a rich place then, textile factories booming on both sides of the river, lumber in the hills, distilleries pouring rivers of illegal booze south to Boston and Worcester, north to Concord and the seacoast. Great-grand-père Etienne and Great-grand-mère Antoinette built a mansion that made the governor’s residence at Bridges House look like a garden shed. Rina could see it through the trees, the four-story redbrick facade with its creeping ivy and its mullioned windows, the flash of light on the arboretum glass, and behind them the low bulk of the Old House built back against Thrush Hill, which rose two hundred feet of cut and blasted rock to a wooded ridge where deer sometimes passed by in single file.
Emil sat out in front of the garage in a rusty deck chair, his shotgun propped beside him, when Rina pulled into the circular driveway. He nodded at her. One of the cats, a big black queen, ran out of the bay and between his legs, a mouse in her jaws. She paused to look at Rina for a moment, then darted away into the gardens. Rina put the truck in park and tossed Emil the keys. Gravel crunched beneath her boots. “Make sure this gets to the kitchen,” she told him, jerking her thumb back at the truck’s bed. “Is anyone here yet?”
“Not yet,” he said, shifting his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other as he stood. He was tall and very thin, his hair pomaded, his coat fashionable. Emil was Great-aunt Adeline and Great-uncle Louis’s eldest, a distant cousin on the Cotard side of the family, Rina’s great-grand-mère Antoinette’s kin; he’d come down from Quebec just the year before. “They are come later. Ce soir.”
Rina left him to take the Ford around the back of the house. For a while she walked through the gardens, which were thinning out as fall came on, the lilacs long since gone, the pink crab apple blossoms trodden to fragrant, oily humus. She stopped for a while by the piscine, watching the carp swim in the dark green water in the shade of a line of cypress, the morning sky reflected in the surface. She thought about Wendy again. Julian’s niece wasn’t bad-looking. Rina liked a little something to grab on to, even if Wendy was only a kid . . .
Don’t make a problem where there isn’t one, she told herself. She flicked her cigarette butt into the water. A fish swam up to investigate it, then turned and dove. Across the pool, a peacock strutted over mossy stones, its tail feathers dragging in the dust.
*
On her way to the house, Rina came across her grandmother bedding down the rose bushes, patting mulch over their roots with her long, gnarled hands. Marian Varger was a big woman, two hundred pounds or more, and almost six feet tall. Since Grand-père Henry’s second stroke in ’63 she’d kept the family’s interests in line. The gambling, the loan sharking, the hijacking rings and protection rackets. The first unions in Manchester to try holding back the payments they’d owed her husband had learned the hard way not to cross her. Her Dancing scars must have helped put the fear of God in those hard old New Englanders. Her large, square face looked to have been cut apart and glued together without much regard for symmetry. Her right eye, black and piercing, was a full inch higher than her drooping, milky left, and her nose had been broken several times and flattened slightly on its left side. When she smiled, which wasn’t often, the scars that crisscrossed her lips pulled her face into a grotesque, leering grimace, her gums and teeth showing like a horse’s.
Marian saw Rina and rose, wiping her hands on her apron. They embraced and kissed each other on both cheeks. Marian broke away and held Rina at arm’s length. “Lunch is in an hour,” she said. “Wash up, and change into something decent. You look like a hood.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Get,” said Marian, not unkindly, and sent Rina on her way with a swat across the backside. Rina jogged the rest of the way to the house. She was excited for the wedding. Her mother would be a wreck over it, but what else was new? Marguerite had never really been all there. Rina saw other mothers with their kids in town, holding their hands on the street, carrying them in slings and backpacks, rubbing noses and kissing. Playing in the park. All her childhood memories were of her grandmother, or her great-aunt Celene, or Aunt Ellie. She remembered her uncle Harry a little bit from before he’d left. A big smile. Thick black hair. He’d used to give her shoulder rides across the lawn. No one had seen him in twenty years.
Her uncle Albert lay dozing on the landing in the skin of a tiger, watching her with half-closed eyes as she climbed the stairs. The sharp, musky smell of him hung in the air like gasoline fumes.
The house’s foyer was empty, the dark wood of the branching front staircase leading up to the second floor gleaming in the light that came in through the oculus. Kate the maid lurked just to the left of it, dusting a vase with morose intensity. Beyond the landing’s big mullioned windows, the courtyard garden’s old willow swayed in a gentle breeze. Rina took off her boots by the door and crossed the Oriental carpet barefoot, running her palm over the worn brow of the stone lion at the center of the room for luck as she passed by. Her uncle Albert lay dozing on the landing in the skin of a tiger, watching her with half-closed eyes as she climbed the stairs. The sharp, musky smell of him hung in the air like gasoline fumes. His tail, hanging between the handrail’s slats, twitched slowly back and forth.
The third-story hall was silent, but as Rina passed the door to her mother’s room she heard the groan of something heavy moving across the floor. She paused. Kneeling, she looked through the keyhole and into the dimly lit room. Within, Marguerite lay naked on her bed. The curtains were drawn and the late morning sunlight shone through them, weak and reddish. At the foot of the bed, a polar bear stood on its hind legs, towering nearly to the ceiling. Rina watched through the keyhole as the bear approached her mother. She could smell its carrion breath and the oily reek of its yellow-white pelt. It rested one tremendous paw on Marguerite’s leg, its claws dimpling her flesh. It nosed her heavy thighs apart, chuffing softly, and Rina saw a flash of rough pink tongue between her mother’s legs.
“Careful,” Marguerite whispered. “Careful, darling.” Slowly, she wrapped her thighs around the bear’s huge skull. It retreated half a step, dragging her toward the end of her bed, her long auburn hair trailing over the sheets. She let out a squeal of delight and Rina turned away and straightened, her face burning. What did you expect, pervert? She backed up from the door, walking on tiptoe as the sounds from behind it grew quicker and more frenzied. She didn’t know who was with her mother. She didn’t want to.
Rina’s room was the last on the right, its single dormer window looking out over the north lawn and the ridge and the Old House built up flush to the rock face. She flopped down on her narrow twin bed, staring up at her poster of Gene Simmons onstage at the band’s 1977 Madison Square Garden show, his face a grinning death mask, his bare arms slick with sweat. You could tell from the way the tendons in his wrist and on the back of his picking hand stood out that he was really going for it. Balls out. Rina sighed and slipped her hand down the front of her pants. Her skin was hot. Dampness met her fingers.
She’d just jerk off a little, just to come, and to get Wendy out of her head. Blow out the bad vibes from seeing her mother with whoever she was fucking these days. That was all. She closed her eyes, getting to work. Her breath came a little faster.
It was no big deal.
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