He didn’t shut the fuck up.
“Leave him alone,” I said. “Let’s wait until Lucas gets here. Maybe we should go to the living room. I can put him on the couch.”
“Fuck it, no. Get up Barry. Quit your whining.”
Barry fell quiet for a moment. He moved his body, trying to get his legs under him. The movement only made him start moaning again.
“He fell hard, maybe he fractured a vertebrae or something. Or broke his coccyx.”
“He broke his ass? I don’t think so. He’s stalling. Trying to make a distraction.” She leaned down and shouted at him again. “Nice try Barry.”
“At least let me get him to the couch so he can lay down.”
“No, he needs to lay down on a flat, hard surface,” Marjorie said. “We usually use the front hall.”
“Oh you’d like that wouldn’t you?” Sam aimed the gun back at Marjorie. “Divide and conquer, huh? Split up and someone goes for the gun? Is that it?” Sam stuffed her pistol back into her waistband and went to the kitchen.
She passed right in front of me. The air brushed my hair. I could have reached out a hand and stopped her. I could have twisted her arm and pinned her to the wall in about three seconds flat, disarm her. End this. I could do it with my training, my experience. I could do it. Only, I couldn’t.
My arms stayed frustratingly at my side.
“Leave him the fuck alone,” I squeaked out. The synapses firing to move my arm had been redirected, a lone curse word the token gesture from my changing brain chemistry. It didn’t help Barry.
“Shut up!” She bent down so she almost touched his face with hers. She kicked at his back and he turned up the volume on the moaning. Sam turned, opened a drawer. A clang of metal utensils. She slammed it shut again, opened the one next to it. More rattling of silverware, whisks, slotted spoons. She dug in, pushed aside the unworthy and came out with something in her hand.
Marjorie gasped. I turned to her, she held a frightened hand frozen over her mouth. I spun back to Sam and saw what she held. A potato peeler. Small, chrome-plated, a dagger on the end and two razors with a gap in the middle for sectioning off thin slices of potato peel. Carrots too. Call it what you want, Barry wanted no part of it. Can’t say I blame him.
Sam bent down to him brandishing the peeler like a switchblade. “What’s it gonna be Barry? You gonna shut up like I asked you, or do I peel the skin off your nose?” She set the peeler against the bridge of his nose, between his eyes. There was a lot of flesh to be had off that beak.
Barry clamped his mouth shut, tears forming in his eyes threatening to rust the blade of that peeler. Sam held his shirt front, an ugly tie with duck decoys on it bunched up in her fist.
“Stop it,” I said.
“Or what? You’ll say a dirty word again?” She kept her eyes locked on Barry. She pushed against his chest, twisting his spine. He couldn’t contain the cry of pain.
“Keep it together, Barry,” she said. “Maybe the fingers are better.” She moved the peeler down to his hand. She took his wrist, pulled his hand up toward her, set the peeler against his index finger.
“They have nothing to do with it,” I said. A little bit of anger came to my throat. My threats may have still been empty, but they sounded a little fuller. Sam dispensed with the witty rejoinder.
Barry whimpered like a dog having his nose rubbed in a piss stain on the carpet.
“I’ll ask you one more time Barry. Shut up. You’re giving me a headache.”
A headache summed up how we lived every minute these past few days. Barry had nothing to do with it.
“Barry honey, listen to her,” Marjorie pleaded. “Please.”
“Where’s it hurt, Barry?” Sam turned his body, spinning him on a slick of spilled coffee. He stifled a yelp. I watched her move him deliberately. She had no interest in him being quiet. She was enjoying herself too much.
“Here?” She lifted her foot and I cried out like a horror movie actress.
“Nooooo!” Did about as much good too.
Her shoe came crashing down onto his lower back. Barry screamed, making a better horror movie bimbo than I did.
“That does it,” she said and flipped him back over.
I felt like my body almost let me move, let me leap in and pull her off. The attack, the violence of it was too much. Even in defense of someone else, I couldn’t be the instigator of violence. It felt closer than ever, though. I strained like an Olympic weight lifter to make my muscles respond.
Sam took the peeler, grabbed Barry’s right hand, but she didn’t run the tool down his finger, stripping off flesh. She turned the blade to the dagger end. The shovel-shaped tool used for digging out eyes on a potato. She pushed it up under the fingernail of his ring finger.
His screams before were only a warm up for this performance.
I slapped my hands over my ears, shut my eyes only to see her view of his agonized face.
I heard Marjorie get up. Her thick thighs banged against the breakfast nook table and her sunflower mug fell to the floor. I opened my eyes again to see her moving away toward the stairs. She’d seen her chance and she took it.
Sam saw her too. She ripped back on the peeler, tearing the blade out from underneath Barry’s nail and splashing blood on the tile to mix with the coffee.
She ran past me again, and again my body did nothing to respond. My head ached with the effort. I’m sure I know what it feels like to be paralyzed.
Marjorie made it to the stairs, moving faster than a stay-at-home mother of two should be able to. Barry’s extra twenty pounds had a twin riding on each of her hips. She hit the fourth stair on her way to her bedroom and the promise of her Smith and Wesson before Sam caught her.
Sam’s hand reached out and grabbed a fistful of hair, pulling back and bringing Marjorie off her feet. Her momentum switched in an instant from forward and up, to backward and down. Marjorie’s body hit the stairs and slid to the floor of the hall.
Tears clouded my view and Barry’s screams next to me drowned out most of the sound except for the high wheezing of Marjorie fighting to fill her lungs again after the fall. A scream strained to get out, but she couldn’t make a sound until she could breathe.
Sam dragged her back to the kitchen, caveman-style, and dumped her on the floor next to her husband. The tangle of Marjorie’s hair soaked up the blood from Barry’s finger.
A PLAN OF ACTION (NOT MINE THOUGH)
“Going for the gun, weren’t you Marge?”
Marjorie and her husband both curled on the kitchen floor, a pair of newborns slimed with blood and unable to speak yet.
Sam turned to me, “Don’t need to be able to look into her brain for that one, huh?”
I tried my best angry stare. It got a laugh from her.