The Sound of Broken Ribs(24)
She felt the moment that the Percocet kicked in, even if it didn’t completely relieve her from her suffering, it did take the teeth out of the tiger. The sharpness of the pain was gone. Only the slow throb in her bones remained. But that was still too much. She couldn’t seem to lay still, and the more she moved, the more she throbbed. Harry muttered things like, “Babe, you gotta stop moving,” and “Come on, Lei, you have to rest,” and she tried to tell him she couldn’t, that not moving was an impossibility, but she couldn’t form words. And the dry erase board and washable marker? Useless. If she put the marker between her toes now, she would likely snap the thing in two.
A cramp crushed her stomach in a vice-like grip. Lei loosed her best approximation of a howl. Harry gazed down at her writhing form, his affect helpless and hopeless.
The oddity of the situation was this:
The more she hurt the more she worried about Harry. She could not imagine what was going on inside his head, how tortuous it must be to be forced to watch someone you love suffer as much as she was now suffering.
Another cramp seized her stomach, and for a moment, she thought she would vomit. But there was nothing in her stomach. Bile slipped and slid through her NG tube like sped up slugs.
*
Tony returned quicker than Belinda expected he would. Then again, on his second trip, he hadn’t been struggling with a mattress.
He came out of the tree line with an old Coleman lantern dangling from his fist. He walked with the nonchalance of a 50s moviestar, all long strides and swinging arms. Belinda wouldn’t have been surprised to find him whistling a merry tune as he drew closer.
Without a word said to any of them, Tony strode into the cabin, unscrewed the canister of kerosene attached to the bottom of the lantern, and dumped its contents into a puddle beside the Paul burrito. Then he dribbled some on the comforter for good measure. He screwed the kerosene canister back on and walked outside.
Tony handed the lantern to Carl, who held it while Tony pulled a Bic cigarette lighter from his back pocket, flicked it, and touched the flame to the ball wicks inside. Belinda assumed the wicks were still doused in enough kerosene as to maintain a flame. It was the only possible explanation, given that Tony had drained the canister before screwing it back onto the lantern casing.
Without closing the access panel to the wicks, Tony tossed the lantern into the cabin. The interior of the structure lit up with a massive WHUMP! The sound reminded Belinda of when her grandmother used to hang out her rugs on her clothesline so she could beat the dust out of them. Belinda and Tony would be inside, watching Saturday morning cartoons after spending the night with Memaw, and that sound would float in through the open back door—whump… whump… WHUMP!
“That’s that,” Tony said, slapping his hands, as if to say “I wash my hands of this.”
Belinda squinted against the intense heat coming from the spreading inferno. She took several steps back, as did the men.
Frank said, “Should we hang around to make sure the trees don’t catch?”
“And what are we gonna do if they do?” Tony asked.
Carl said, “We should still stay and see if the place burns all the way down. I mean, if that comforter doesn’t burn away, people gonna know someone killed him.”
“They’re going to know that anyway,” Belinda muttered.
“Huh?” Tony asked.
“We were only burning him to get rid of evidence right? You didn’t believe you could cover up the fact that someone bashed his brains in, did you?”
Tony stared at her as if that was exactly what he’d thought.
“Weren’t we gonna bury the mattress springs and bones?” Frank asked.
“Oh yeah,” Tony said, brightening. “What Frank said. That was the plan.”
“Oh,” Belinda said. “Right. I forgot.”
Tony said. “I think it’s kinda pretty, what with how the flames are licking out of the windows. Looks like dragon’s breath—right, Bee?”
Belinda didn’t concur, but she nodded anyway. She stared at her bright-eyed brother, and for a brief instant, she saw the carefree boy he’d once been. He’d been a bully as a teenager, but there had been a time that even the bully had been an innocent kid.
Kids like Anthony and Belinda Marchesini were what some people called “Irish twins.” They were not twins. Not even in the fraternal sense. The term is meant to imply back-to-back pregnancies. Pop one bun out of the oven and stuff another right in after it. In total, Tony was eleven months and eight days older than his sister. In experience, he was decades her senior.
Tony had moved out of the house at the age of seventeen and moved in with a friend from school. Both boys worked odd jobs to pay their rent and keep their cupboards stocked with Ramen noodles. On one of her last visits before she got married and drifted away from her brother and into the arms of her husband, Belinda had wondered if Tony and his roommate might be more than just roommates. She didn’t want to think of her brother in terms of sexuality, but the thought did cross her mind. She’d never been a supporter of homosexuals, thought they were unnatural and unclean, but she kept her opinions to herself.
Hell, even now that Tony had proved to be a murdering psychopath, she still couldn’t fully hate him. In fact, after Carl’s stories about the men Tony had killed, Belinda thought she understood her brother for the first time in their thirty years of life. And she certainly couldn’t judge him.