SLICKERED AND BOOTED, WEARING THE SAME jeans and wool sweater as before, sitting behind the wheel of his silver BMW, Corky Laputa felt stifled by a frustration as heavy and suffocating as a fur coat.
Although his shirt wasn’t buttoned to the top, anger pinched his throat as tight as if he’d squeezed his sixteen-inch neck into a fifteen-inch collar.
He wanted to drive to West Hollywood and kill Reynerd.
Such impulses must be resisted, of course, for though he dreamed of a societal collapse into complete lawlessness, from which a new order would arise, the laws against murder remained in effect. They were still enforced.
Corky was a revolutionary, but not a martyr.
He understood the need to balance radical action with patience.
He recognized the effective limits of anarchic rage.
To calm himself, he ate a candy bar.
Contrary to the claims of organized medicine, both the greed-corrupted Western variety and the spiritually smug Eastern brand, refined sugar did not make Corky hyperkinetic. Sucrose soothed him.
[82] Very old people, nerves rubbed to an excruciating sensitivity by life and its disappointments, had long known about the mollifying effect of excess sugar. The farther their hopes and dreams receded from their grasp, the more their diets sweetened to include ice cream by the quart, rich cookies in giant economy-size boxes, and chocolate in every form from nonpareils to Hershey’s Kisses, even to Easter-basket bunnies that they could brutally dismember and consume for a double enjoyment.
In her later years, his mother had been an ice-cream junkie. Ice cream for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Ice cream in parfait glasses, in huge bowls, eaten directly from the carton.
She hogged down enough ice cream to clog a network of arteries stretching from California to the moon and back. For a while Corky had assumed that she was committing suicide by cholesterol.
Instead of spooning herself into heart failure, she appeared to grow healthier. She acquired a glow in the face and a brightness in the eyes that she’d never had before, not even in her youth.
Gallons, barrels, troughs of Chocolate Mint Madness, Peanut-Butter-and-Chocolate Fantasy, Maple Walnut Delight, and a double dozen other flavors seemed to turn back her biological clock as the waters of a thousand fountains had failed to turn back that of Ponce de Leon.
Corky had begun to think that in the case of his mother’s unique metabolism, the key to immortality might be butterfat. So he killed her.
If she had been willing to share some of her money while still alive, he would have allowed her to live. He wasn’t greedy.
She had not been a believer in generosity or even in parental responsibility, however, and she cared not at all about his comfort or his needs. He’d been concerned that eventually she would change her will and stiff him forever, sheerly for the pleasure of doing so.
In her working years, his mother had been a university professor of economics, specializing in Marxist economic models and the vicious departmental politics of academia.
[83] She had believed in nothing more than the righteousness of envy and the power of hatred. When both beliefs proved hollow, she had not abandoned either, but had supplemented them with ice cream.
Corky didn’t hate his mother. He didn’t hate anyone.
He didn’t envy anyone, either.
Having seen those gods fail his mother, he had rejected both. He did not wish to grow old with no comfort but his favorite premium brand of coconut fudge.
Four years ago, paying her a secret visit with the intention of quickly and mercifully smothering her in her sleep, he had instead beaten her to death with a fireplace poker, as if he were acting out a story begun by Anne Tyler in an ironic mood and roughly finished by a furious Norman Mailer.
Though unplanned, the exercise with the poker proved cathartic. Not that he’d taken pleasure in the violence. He had not.
The decision to murder her had really been as unemotional as any decision to purchase the stock of a blue-chip corporation, and the killing itself had been conducted with the same cool efficiency with which he would have executed any stock-market investment.
Being an economist, his mother surely had understood.
His alibi had been unassailable. He inherited her estate. Life went on. His life, anyway.
Now, as he finished the candy bar, he felt sugar-soothed and chocolate-coddled.
He still wanted to kill Reynerd, but the unwise urgency of the compulsion had passed. He would take time to plan the hit.
When he acted, he would follow his scheme faithfully. This time, pillow would not become poker.
Noticing that the yellow sl............