The Dark Country Read Online Free

hanging down to the middle of her thin back, with blond streaks bleached in, tres chic, you know, and one of her phony eyelashes was coming unglued in the warm, wet air.
    "A house in the Valley, two cars—no, three—paid vacation in the Virgin Islands, and a son, yeah, a little Vladimir Jr. to carry on his glorious family name. Just like he always wanted. But that was all he wanted—that's the part they never tell you in front."
    She dropped the butt of her Pall Mall and lit another at once, pulling long, hard drags down into her lungs.
    "Last week the kid took the gun from the closet and walked up to me in the kitchen," she continued, starting to hand-wash a sheet in the sink. "Pointed it right at my head and said, 'Bang, you're dead, Mommy.' 'Well,' I said, 'are you gonna do it or not? Don't ever point one of those things at someone unless you're gonna use it.'
    "So he did. The kid pulled the trigger. I didn't think h; had the guts. 'Course it wasn't loaded. That really pissed me off. It was just like Vladimir, not teaching him what it means to be a—but what would his dad know about that? About what it takes to be a man."
    She scrubbed at the soiled sheet, pausing to jerk a wet hand up to move a strand of hair away from her face. I couldn't help taking a better look at her face then. It was like the rest of her, young and yet old, drawn and tight, made up expensively even now, in the middle of the night, though obviously in haste, and tired, and blank. For a second then, overpoweringly, I had the belief that she was the same young/old woman I had seen seated in the window of a beauty salon in Beverly Hills once; and later, in a cocktail lounge with another girl, waiting, with long, sharp fingernails the color of blood. French-inhaling a Marlboro and with a look on her face that told you she had a hundred-dollar bill in her purse. And that she was waiting. Just waiting.
    She picked up her Pall Mall with a wet thumb and first finger, drawing hard.
    I noticed the clock on the wall: three o'clock.
    "That was when I got it. All these years, trying to figure a way to teach him and mat God damned kid of his something."
    I fed a couple of nickles into the detergent machine.
    She paused long enough to take a couple of more lengthy hits from her Pall Mall. It was so quiet you could hear the sound of the smoke blowing out into the white light.
    "So tonight he comes home and makes the pitcher of martinis, as usual, and goes into his room and closes the door. I go to the door and ask him what the hell's wrong this time. He says he doesn't know. He just wants me to leave him alone."
    She laughed startlingly, hoarsely.
    "Okay, hot shot, I'll leave you the hell alone, I think. You wanna come home from your fucking office looking like a corpse again tonight and lay around until you fall asleep for the zillionth time? All right, I'll let you!
    "We'll find out if that's what you really want.
    "Only first you and that little pussy of a son of yours are gonna get a lesson you'll never forget."
    She turned on the water full force. It gushed out, flooding the basin faster than it could empty.
    "Who ever said if you wash it in cold water it'll come out? Damn. Why the hell did I have to give him the striped sheets, anyway?
    "So I wake the kid up. It doesn't matter—he's awake, and the bed's all wet as usual. I ask him if he remembers what I taught him.
    "It takes a minute or two, but he finally catches on, the dumb little bastard.
    "So I go get the bullets down and tell him to go in there and prove to me that he remembers what it was I beat the shit out of him for last week. ..."
    I started to dump my stuff into a machine at the far end of the room. Then, all of a sudden, the thread of what she had been saying got through to me.
    I turned back to look at her.
    She was grinding a bar of soap into the sheet now. At the edges the spot was a thick brown, almost black, but at the heart I noticed it was still a deep, gummy shade close to the color