Gerald's Game(7)

It's his spunk, she thought, although she knew perfectly well it wasn't. It's his goddam spunk.

Her response was not so much directed at Gerald as at that hateful feeling that came flooding up from the bottom of her mind. In a very real sense she acted with no thought at all, but only lashed out with the instinctive, panicky revulsion of a woman who realizes the trapped thing fluttering in her hair is a bat.

She drew back her legs, her rising right knee barely missing the promontory of his chin, and then drove her bare feet out again like pistons. The sole and instep of her right drove deep into the bowl of his belly. The heel of her left smashed into the stiff root of his penis and the testicles hanging below it like pate, ripe fruit.

He rocked backward, his butt coming down on his plump, hairless calves. He tilted his head up toward the skylight and the white ceiling with its reflected patterns of sunripples and voiced a high, wheezy scream. The loon on the lake cried out again just then, in hellish counterpoint; to Jessie it sounded like one mate commiserating with another.

Gerald's eyes weren't slitted now; they weren't gleaming, either. They were wide open, they were as blue as today's flawless sky (the thought of seeing that sky over the autumn-empty lake had been the deciding factor when Gerald had called from the office and said he'd had a postponement and would she like to go up to the summer place at least for the day and maybe overnight), and the expression in them was an agonized glare she could hardly look at. Cords of tendon stood out on the sides of his neck. Jessie thought: I haven't seen those since the rainy summer when he pretty muchgave up gardening and made J. W. Dant his hobby instead.

His scream began to fade. It was as if someone with a special Remote Gerald Control were turning down his volume. That wasn't it, of course; he had been screaming for an extraordinarily long time, perhaps as long as thirty seconds, and he was just running out of breath. I must have hurt him badly, she thought. The red spots on his cheeks and the swath across his forehead were now turning purple.

You did! the Goodwife's dismayed voice cried. You really reallydid!

Yep; damned good shot, wasn't it? the new voice mused.

You kicked your husband in the balls! the Goodwife screamed. What in God's name gives you the right to do something like that? Whatgives you the right to even joke about it?

She knew the answer to that one, or thought she did: she'd done it because her husband had intended to commit rape and pass it off later as a missed signal between two essentially harmonious marriage partners who had been playing a harmless sex-game. It was the game's fault, he would have said, shrugging. The game's,not mine. We don't have to play it again, Jess, if you don't want to. Knowing, of course, that nothing he could offer would ever cause her to hold her wrists up for the handcuffs again. No, this had been a case of last time pays for all. Gerald had known it, and had intended to make the most of it.

That black thing she had sensed in the room had spun out of control, just as she had feared it might. Gerald still appeared to be screaming, although no sound at all (at least none she could hear) was now coming from his pursed, agonized mouth. His face had become so congested with blood that it actually appeared to be black in places. She could see his jugular vein-or maybe it was his carotid artery, if that mattered at a time like this pulsing furiously beneath the carefully shaved skin of his throat. whichever one it was, it looked ready to explode, and a nasty jolt of terror stabbed Jessie.

"Gerald?" Her voice sounded thin and uncertain, the voice of a girl who has broken something valuable at a friend's birthday party. "Gerald, are you all right?"

It was a stupid question, of course, incredibly stupid, but it was a lot easier to ask than the ones which were really on her mind: Gerald, how badly are you hurt? Gerald, do you think you might die?

Of course he's not going to die, the Goodwife said nervously. You've hurt him, indeed you have, and you ought to be sorry, but he's not goingto die. Nobody is going to die around here.

Gerald's pursed, puckered mouth continued to quiver soundlessly, but he didn't answer her question. One of his hands had gone to his belly; the other had cupped his wounded testes. Now they both rose slowly and settled just above his left nipple. They settled like a pair of pudgy pink birds too tired to fly farther. Jessie could see the shape of a bare foot-her bare foot-rising on her husband's round stomach. It was a bright, accusatory red against his pink flesh.

He was exhaling, or trying to, sending out a dour fog that smelled like rotting onions. That's tidal breath, she thought. Thebottom ten per cent of our lungs is reserved for tidal breath, isn't thatwhat they taught us in high school biology? Yes, I think so. Tidalbreath, the fabled last gasp of drowners and chokers. Once you expel that,you either faint or...

"Gerald!" she cried in a sharp, scolding voice. "Gerald, breathe!"

His eyes bulged from their sockets like blue marbles stuck in a clod of Play-Doh, and he did manage to drag in a single small sip of air. He used it to speak a final word to her, this man who had sometimes seemed made of words.

"... heart..."

That was all.

"Gerald!" Now she sounded shocked as well as scolding, an old-maid schoolteacher who has caught the second-grade flirt pulling up her skirt to show the boys the bunnies on her underpants.

"Gerald, stop fooling around and breathe, goddammit!"

Gerald didn't. Instead, his eyes rolled back in their sockets, disclosing yellowish whites. His tongue blew out of his mouth and made a farting sound. A stream of cloudy, orange-tinted urine arced out of his deflated penis and her knees and thighs were doused with feverishly hot droplets. Jessie voiced a long, piercing shriek. This time she was unaware of yanking against the handcuffs, of using them to draw herself as far back from him as possible, awkwardly curling her legs beneath her as she did so.