Practical Demonkeeping Chapter 14-15

14 dinnerTravis parked the Chevy on the street in mien of jenny asss augury. He turned step up the locomotive and turned to perk up.You stay hither, you at a lower placestand. Ill be patronage in a brusque while to check on you.Thanks, Dad.Dont play the radio and dont beep the horn. Just wait.I promise. Ill be good. The demon attempted an innocent smile and failed.Keep an eye on that. Travis pointed to an aluminum cup of tea on the backs play come in.Enjoy your d view as. The car will be fine.Whats wrong with you?Nothing, stumble grinned.Why are you world so nice?Its good to see you acquire out.Youre lying.Travis, Im crushed.That would be nice, Travis said. Now, dont eat anybody.I n incessantlytheless ate last dark. I dont even feel hungry. Ill just sit here and meditate.Travis r from some(prenominal)ly unmatcheded into the inside pocket of his version coat and pulled out a comic book. I got this for you. He held it out to the demon. You can look at it while you wait.The demon fumbled the comic book outside from Travis and spread it out on the bum. Cookie junkie My favorite Thanks, Travis.See you subsequent.Travis got out of the car and slammed the door. Catch watched him walk across the yard. I already looked at this one, ass quite a little, he hissed to himself. When I fixate a forward-looking master, I will tear your arms off and eat them while you watch.Travis looked back oer his shoulder. Catch waved him on with his best effort at a smile.The doorbell rang precisely at seven. jennets reactions went handle this dont dish out it, change clothes, answer it and feign sickness, clean the kinsfolk, redecorate, inscription plastic surgery, change bull color, take a handful of Valium, appeal to the Goddess for divine intervention, stand here and explore the possibilities of paralyzing panic.She cap subject the door and smiled. Hi.Travis stood there in jeans and a gray herringbone tweed jacket. He was transfixed.Travis? jenny said .Youre beautiful, he said finally.They stood in the doorway, jennet blushing, Travis staring. jennet had decided to stick with the black dress. on the face of it it had been the right choice. A full minute passed without a word between them.Would you like to come in?No.Okay. She shut the door in his face. Well, that hadnt been so bad. Now she could mark on slightly sweatpants, encumbrance the refrigerator onto a tray, and settle shovel in for a night in front of the television.thither was a timid knock on the door. jenny undefended it again. Sorry, Im a little nervous, she said.Its all right, Travis said. Shall we go?Sure. Ill bump my purse. She closed(a) the door in his face. in that respect was an uneasy silence between them while they drove chisel to the restaurant. Typically, this would be the fourth dimension for trading vivification stories, save Jenny had resolved non to talk approximately her marriage, which closed about of her adult life to conver sit cut down(p)ion, and Travis had resolved non to talk about the demon, which eliminated most of the twentieth century.So, Jenny said, do you like Italian food?Yep, Travis said. They drove in silence the rest of the way to the restaurant.It was a warm night and the Toyota had no air conditioning. Jenny didnt dare roll down the window and venture blowing her hair. She had spent an hour styling and pinning it back so that it fell in long curls to the middle of her back. When she began to perspire, she immortaliseed that she quiet had dickens wads of locoweed paper close in down the stairs her arms to stop the bleeding from splinter cuts. For the contiguous a few(prenominal) minutes all she could destine of was getting to a restroom where she could remove the spotted wads. She decided not to mention it.The restaurant, the Old Italian Pasta Factory, was set upd in an old creamery building, a residuum of the time when languish Coves economy was based on livestock rather than to urism. The concrete appals remained intact, as did the corrugated steel roof. The owners had taken care to preserve the solecism of the structure, while adding the warmth of a fireplace, soft lighting, and the handed-down red-and-white tablecloths of an Italian restaurant. The tables were small but comfortably spaced, and s everally was decorated with fresh flowers and a candle. The Pasta Factory, it was agreed, was the most romantic restaurant in the area.As presently as the hostess seated them, Jenny pardon herself to the restroom.Order whatever wine you want, she said, Im not picky.I dont drink, but if you want mostNo, thats fine. Itll be a nice change.As soon as Jenny left, the waitress an efficient-looking muliebrity in her thirties came to the table. near(a) level, sir. What can I bring you to drink this evening? She pulled her order pad out of her pocket in a quick, liquid movement, like a bomber drawing a six-shooter. A career waitress, Travis scene.I scen e Id wait for the lady to return, he said.Oh, Jenny. Shell take a leak an herb tea tea. And you want, lets see She looked him up and down, crossed-referenced him, pigeonholed him, and announced, Youll have some sort of imported beer, right?I dont drink, soI should have known. The waitress slapped her forehead as if shed just caught herself in the middle of a recruit error, like serving the salad with plutonium instead of creamy Italian. Her husband is a drunk its only intrinsic that shed go out with a nondrinker on the rebound. Can I bring you a mineral water?That would be fine, Travis said.The waitresss pen scratched, but she did not look at the order pad or lose her we aim to please smile. And would you like some ail scrape while youre waiting?Sure, Travis said. He watched the waitress walk by. She took small, quick, mechanical travel, and was gone to the kitchen in an instant. Travis wondered why some people seemed to be able to walk fastinger than he could run. Theyre pr ofessionals, he belief.Jenny took five minutes to get all the toilet paper unstuck from her underarms, and there had been an embarrassing number when an opposite cleaning woman came into the restroom and found her to begin with the mirror with her elbow in the air. When she returned to the table, Travis was staring everywhere a basketball hoop of garlic bread.She saw the herbal tea on the table and said, How did you know?Psychic, I guess, he said. I ordered garlic bread.Yes, she said, lay herself.They stared at the garlic bread as if it were a bubbling caldron of hemlock.You like garlic bread? she asked.Love it. And you? One of my favorites, she said.He picked up the basket and offered it to her. Have some?Not right now. You go ahead.No thanks, Im not in the mood. He put the basket down.The garlic bread lay there between them, steaming with implications. They, of course, must both eat it or neither could. Garlic bread meant garlic breath. There might be a coddle later, maybe more. There was just too accurse much intimacy in garlic bread.They sit in silence, reading the menu she looking for the cheapest entree, which she had no intention of eating and he, looking for the item that would be the least embarrassing to eat in front of someone.What are you going to have? she asked.Not spaghetti, he snapped.Okay. Jenny had forgotten what dating was like. Although she couldnt remember for confident(predicate), she thought that she might have gotten unite to avoid ever having to go through this kind of discomfort again. It was like driving with the emergency brake set. She decided to squeeze out the brake.Im starved. Pass the garlic bread.Travis smiled. Sure. He passed it to her, and then took a piece for himself. They paused in midbite and eyed all(prenominal) other across the table like two poker game players on the bluff. Jenny laughed, spraying crumbs all oer the table. The evening was on.So, Travis, what do you do?Date married women, evidently.How d id you know?The waitress told me.Were separated.Good, he said, and they both laughed.They ordered, and as dinner progressed they found common ground in the awkwardness of the situation. Jenny told Travis about her marriage and her job. Travis make up a history of working as a traveling insurance salesman with no certain ties to home or family.In a uncivil exchange of truth for lies, they found they liked each other were, in fact, quite taken with one another.They left the restaurant arm in arm, laughing.15RACHELRachel Henderson lived alone in a small house that lay amid a grove of eucalyptus trees at the asperity of the Beer Bar cattle paste. The house was possess by Jim Beer, a lanky, forty-five-year-old cowboy who lived with his wife and two children in a fourteen-room house his grand naughtyher had strengthened on the far side of the ranch. Rachel had lived on the ranch for five geezerhood. She had never paid any rent.Rachel had met Jim Beer in the Head of the Slug Sal oon when she first arrived in Pine Cove. Jim had been intoxication all mean solar day and was aroma the w 8 of his rugged cowboy charisma when Rachel sat down on the bar stool next to him and put a newspaper on the bar.Well, darlin, Im cursedly if youre not a fresh wind on a stale pasture. Can I get you a drink? The banjo twang in Jims accent was pure Oklahoma, picked up from the hands that had worked the Beer Bar when Jim was a boy. Jim was the third generation of Beers to work the ranch and would belike be the last. His teenage son, Zane Grey Beer, had decided former(a) on that he would rather ride a surfboard than a horse. That was part of the reason that Jim was drinking away the subsequentlynoon at the Slug. That, and the fact that his wife had just purchased a new Mercedes turbo-diesel wagon that exist the annual net income of the Beer Bar Ranch.Rachel unfolded the classified subsection of the Pine Cove Gazette on the bar. Just an orangeness juice, thanks. Im house hunting today. She curled one point under herself on the bar stool. You dont know anybody that has a house for rent, do you?Jim Beer would look back on that day many times in the eld to come, but he could never quite remember what had happened next. What he did remember was driving his pickup down the back road into the ranch with Rachel following fanny in an old Volkswagen van. From there his memory was a montage of images Rachel naked on the small bunk, his turquoise belt buckle hitting the wooden floor with a thud, silk scarves tied nearly his wrists, Rachel bouncing to a higher place him riding him like a bronco acclivity back into his pickup after sundown, sore and sweaty, disputation his forehead on the wheel of the truck and thought about his wife and kids.In the five years since, Jim Beer had never gone near the little house on the far side of the ranch. Every calendar month he penciled the rent collected into a ledger, then deposited cash from his poker fund in the business checking account to cover it.A few of his friends had seen him reserve the Head of the Slug with Rachel that afternoon. When they saw him again, they rib him, do crude jokes, and asked pointed questions. Jim answered the jibes by pushing his pass Stetson back on his head and state Boys, all I got to say is that male menopause is a rough trail to ride. Hank Williams couldnt have birdsong it any sadder.After Jim left that evening Rachel picked several gray hairs from the bunks pillow. Around the hairs she carefully tied a single red thread, which she knotted twice. Two knots were large for the bond she wanted over Jim Beer. She placed the circumstantial nap in a babyfood jar, labeled it with a marking pen, and stored it away in a cupboard over the kitchen sink.Now the cupboard was full of jars, each one containing a similar bundle, each bundle tied with a red thread. The number of knots in the thread varied. Three of the bundles were tied with four knots. The se contained the hair of men Rachel had loved. Those men were long gone.The rest of Rachels house was decorated with objects of power eagle feathers, crystals, pentagrams, and tapestries embroidered with magic symbols. There was no evidence of a past in Rachels house. Any photos she had of herself had been taken after she arrived in Pine Cove.People who knew Rachel had no clue as to where she had lived or who she had been before she came to town. They knew her as a beautiful, mysterious woman who taught aerobics for a living. Or they knew her as a witch. Her past was an enigma, which was just the way she wanted it.No one knew that Rachel had grown up in Bakersfield, the girl of an illiterate oil-field worker. They didnt know that she had been a fat, ugly little girl who spent most of her life doing corrupting things for disgusting men so that she might set out some sort of acceptance. stillterflies do not ascend nostalgic about the time they spent as caterpillars.Rachel had mar ried a growth-duster pilot who was twenty years her senior. She was eighteen at the time.It happened in the front seat of a pickup truck in the pose lot of a roadhouse outside of Visalia, California. The pilot, whose name was ousel Henderson, was still breathing hard and Rachel was washing the cheating(a) taste out of her mouth with a warm Budweiser. If you do that again, Ill marry you, merle gasped.An hour later they were fleeting over the Mojave desert, heading for Las Vegas in merls Cessna 152. Merle came at ten thousand feet. They were married under a neon arch in a ramshackle, concrete-block chapel just off the Vegas strip. They had known each other exactly six hours.Rachel regarded the next eight years of her life as her term on the wheel of cry out. Merle Henderson deposited her in his house lick by the landing strip and kept her there. He allowed her to visit town once a workweek to go to the laundromat and the grocery store. The rest of her time was spent waiting on or waiting for Merle and helping him work on his planes. for each one morning Merle took off in the crop duster, taking with him the keys to the pickup. Rachel spent the days cleaning up the prevue, eating, and watching television. She grew fatter and Merle began to refer to her as his fat little mama. What little self-esteem she had drained away and was absorbed by Merles overpowering male ego.Merle had flown helicopter gunships in Vietnam and he still talked about it as the happiest time in his life. When he opened the tanks of insecticide over a field of lettuce, he imagined he was releasing air-to-ground missiles into a Vietnamese village. The Army had sensed a destructive edge in Merle, Vietnam had honed it to razor sharpness, and it had not dulled when he came home. Until he married Rachel, he released his pent-up madness by starting fights in proscribe and flying with dangerous abandon. With Rachel waiting for him at home, he went to bars less often and released his agg ression on her in the form of constant criticism, verbal abuse, and finally, shells.Rachel bore the abuse as if it were a penance sent down by God for the sin of being a woman. Her mother had endured the alike sort of abuse from her father, with the same resignation. It was just the way things worked. consequently, one day, while Rachel was waiting at the laundromat for Merles shirts to dry, a woman approached her. It was the day after a particularly vicious beating and Rachels face was bruised and swollen.Its none of my business, the woman said. She was tall and majestic and in her mid-forties. She had a way about her that scare Rachel, a presence, but her voice was soft and strong. But when you get some time, you might read this. She held out a pamphlet to Rachel and Rachel took it. The title was The Wheel of Abuse.There are some numbers in the back that you can call. Everything will be okay, the woman said.Rachel thought it a strange thing to say. Everything was okay. But the woman had impressed her, so she read the pamphlet.It talked about valet rights and dignity and personal power. It spoke to Rachel about her life in a way that she had never thought possible. The Wheel of Abuse was her life story. How did they know? broadly it talked about courage to change. She kept the pamphlet and hid it away in a box of tampons under the fundament sink. It stayed there for two weeks. Until the morning she ran out of coffee.She could catch out the sound of Merles plane disappearing in the outmatch as she stared into the mirror at the bloody hole where her front teeth used to be. She dug out the pamphlet and called one of the numbers on the back. inwardly a one-half hour two women arrived at the trailer. They packed Rachels belongings and drove her to the security. Rachel wanted to leave a note for Merle, but the two women insisted that it was not a good idea.For the next three weeks Rachel lived at the shelter. The women at the shelter cared for her. They ga ve her food and understanding and affection, and in return they asked only that she acknowledge her own dignity. When she made the call to Merle to tell him where she was, they all stood by her.Merle promised that it would all change. He missed her. He needed her.She returned to the trailer.For a month Merle did not hit her. He did not touch her at all. He didnt even speak to her.The women at the shelter had warned her about this type of abuse the withdrawal of affection. When she brought it up to Merle one evening while he was eating, he threw a plate in her face. Then he proceeded to give her the worst beating of her life. afterwards he locked her outside the trailer for the night.The trailer was fifteen miles from the nearest neighbor, so Rachel was forced to cower under the front steps to escape the cold. She was not sure she could walk fifteen miles.In the middle of the night Merle opened the door and yelled, By the way, I ripped the phone out, so dont waste your time thinkin g about it. He slammed and locked the door.When the sun broke in the east, Merle reappeared. Rachel had crawled under the trailer, where he could not seduce her. He lifted the plastic skirting and shouted to her, Listen, bitch, youd better be here when I get home or youll get worse.Rachel waited in the apparition under the trailer until she heard the biplane roar down the strip. She climbed out and watched the plane climb gradually into the distance. Although it yen her face, and the cuts on her mouth split open, she couldnt help smiling. She had find her personal power. It lay hidden under the trailer in a five-gallon asphalt can, now half full of aviation grade motor oil.A policeman came to the trailer that afternoon. His jaw was set with the stoical resolve of a man who knows he has an god-awful task to perform and is determined to do it, but when he saw Rachel sitting on the steps of the trailer, the color drained from his face and he ran to her. ar you all right?Rachel c ould not speak. Garbled sounds bubbled from her depressed mouth. The policeman drove her to the hospital in his cruiser. Later, after she had been cleaned up and bandaged, the policeman came to her room and told her about the crash.It seemed that Merles biplane muzzy power after a pass over a field. He was unable to climb fast enough to avoid a high-tension loom and flaming bits of Merle were scattered across a field of budding strawberries. Later, at the funeral, Rachel would comment, It was how he would have wanted to go.A few weeks later a man from the Federal Aviation Administration came around the trailer asking questions. Rachel told him that Merle had beat her, then had stormed out to the plane and taken off. The F.A.A. concluded that Merle, in his anger, had forgotten to check out his plane exhaustively before taking off. No one ever suspected Rachel of draining the oil out of the plane.