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“She doesn’t know anybody to go to with it. I think she needs some careful handling. Kit gloves. The welfare worker wants her to shut up.”

“I’ll think about that. Go ahead and pay the welfare clerk.”

“A thousand dollars?”

“Just make sure she knows that’s all she gets.”

Lying on Mason’s couch in the dark, her cheeks stiff with dried tears, Margot Verger listened to Cordell and Mason talking. She had been trying to reason with Mason when he fell asleep. Obviously Mason thought she had left. She opened her mouth to breathe quietly, trying to time her breaths to the hiss of his respirator. A pulse of gray light in the room as Cordell left. Margot lay flat on the couch. She waited almost twenty minutes, until the pump settled into Mason’s sleep rhythm, before she left the room. The eel saw her go, but Mason did not.

CHAPTER

61

MARGOT VERGER and Barney had been hanging out together. They did not talk a great deal, but they watched football in the recreation room, and The Simpsons, and concerts sometimes on educational TV, and together they followed I, Claudius. When Barney’s shift made him miss some episodes, they ordered the tape.

Margot liked Barney, she liked the way she was one of the guys with him. He was the only person she’d known who was cool like that. Barney was very smart, and there was something a little otherworldly about him. She liked that too.

Margot had a good liberal arts education as well as her computer science. Barney, self-taught, had opinions that ranged from childish to penetrating. She could provide context for him. Margot’s education was a broad and open plain defined by reason. But the plain rested on top of her mentality like the Flat Earther’s world rests on a turtle.

Margot Verger made Barney pay for his joke about squatting to pee. She believed that her legs were stronger than his, and time proved her right. By feigning difficulty at lower weights she lured him into a bet on leg presses and won back her hundred dollars. In addition, using the advantage of her lighter weight, she beat him in one-armed pull-ups, but she would only bet on the right arm, her left being weaker from a childhood injury sustained in a struggle with Mason.

Sometimes at night, after Barney’s shift with Mason was over, they worked out together, spotting one another on the bench. It was a serious workout, largely silent except for their breathing. Sometimes they only said good night as she packed her gym bag and disappeared toward the family quarters, off-limits to the staff.

This night she came into the black and chrome gymnasium directly from Mason’s room with tears in her eyes.

“Hey, hey,” Barney said. “You all right?”

“Just family crap, what can I tell you? I’m all right,” Margot said.

She worked out like a fiend, too much weight, too many reps.

Once Barney came and took a barbell from her and shook his head. “You’re gonna tear something,” he said.

She was still grinding on an exercise bike when he called it quits, and stood under the gym’s steaming shower, letting the hot water take the long day down the drain. It was a communal gym shower with four overhead nozzles and some extra nozzles at waist and thigh level. Barney liked to turn on two showers and converge their streams on his big body.

Soon Barney was enveloped in a thick fog that shut out everything but the pounding of the water on his head. Barney liked to reflect in the shower: Clouds of steam. The Clouds. Aristophanes. Dr. Lecter explaining about the lizard pissing on Socrates. It occurred to him that, before he was peened under the relentless hammer of Dr. Lecter’s logic, somebody like Doemling could have pushed him around.

When he heard another shower go on, he paid little attention and continued scrubbing himself. Other personnel used the gym, but mostly in the early morning and late afternoon. It is male etiquette to pay little attention to other bathers in a communal athletic shower, but Barney wondered who it was. He hoped it wasn’t Cordell, who gave him the creeps. It was rare for anyone else to use this facility at night. Who in the hell was that? Barney turned to let the water pound on the back of his neck. Clouds of steam, fragments of the person next to him appear between the billows like fragments of fresco on a plastered wall. Here a massive shoulder, there a leg. A shapely hand scrubbing a muscular neck and shoulder, coral fingernails, that was Margot’s hand. Those were painted toes. That was Margot’s leg.

Barney put his head back against the pulsing shower stream and took a deep breath. Next door the figure turning, scrubbing in a businesslike way. Washing her hair now. That was Margot’s flat ribbed belly, her small breasts standing up on her big pecs, nipples raised to the jetting water, that was Margot’s groin, knurled at the juncture of body and thigh, and that’s got to be Margot’s pussy, framed in a blond trimmed Mohawk.

Barney took as deep a breath as he could and held it … he could feel himself developing a problem. She was shining like a horse, pumped to the limit from the hard workout. As Barney’s interest grew more apparent, he turned his back to her. Maybe he could just ignore her until she left.

The water went off next door. But now her voice came. “Hey, Barney, what’s the spread on the Patriots?”

“With … with my guy, you can get Miami and five and a half.” He looked over his shoulder.

She was drying herself just beyond the range of Barney’s spray. Her hair was plastered down. Her face looked fresh now and the tears were gone. Margot had excellent skin.

“So you gonna take the points?” she said. “The pick ’em pool at Judy’s office has got …”

Barney couldn’t pay attention to the rest. Margot’s mohawk, jeweled with droplets, framed pink. Barney’s face felt hot and he had a major cockstand. He was puzzled and disturbed. That freezing feeling came over him. He had never felt any attraction to men. But Margot for all her muscles was clearly not a man, and he liked her.

What is this shit of coming in the shower with him anyway?

He turned off his water and faced her wet. Without thinking about it, he put his big hand on her cheek. “For God’s sake, Margot,” he said, his breath thick in his throat.

She looked down at him. “Goddammit, Barney. Don’t…”