thing itself. He was also destined, Teddy thought, to carry through life the knowledge that his father had died unreconciled with his only son, and at least fifty percent of the blame for that, and maybe a good deal more, lay with the younger party.
But, Jesus, Grady was in a foul mood tonight. Kathleen Cover was in Lester’s with her husband, and some of his buddies and their wives. Kathleen and Grady had enjoyed a fling a couple of years back while Davie Cover was off fighting the ragheads in some place that Davie couldn’t even spell, and certainly couldn’t have found on a map before he was sent there. It might have been considered low, and even unpatriotic, to fuck a man’s wife while he was off serving his country, except that Davie Cover was a bedbug on the ass of life, and the president of the United States himself would have felt duty-bound to fuck Kathleen Cover as a way of spiting her husband had he ever been forced to spend any time in Davie’s company. Davie Cover was a bully and – naturally, since the two went together – a coward, a man with the social skills of a scorpion and the higher intellectual functions of one of those insects that could keep existing on a basic level even if their heads were cut off. He’d joined the National Guard because he craved the veneer of authority offered by a weekend warrior’s uniform, and the official sanction for his actions that it implied. Then airplanes had started flying into buildings, and suddenly the US was seemingly at war with every country that was more than half sand, except maybe Australia, and Davie had found himself separated from his wife of six months and the mother of his child, Little Davie, the fact of their marriage not being unconnected to the existence of that child. Most everyone in Falls End, possibly including some of Davie’s blood relatives, felt a sense of profound relief at Davie Cover’s departure, and waited hopefully for the appearance of his name in an obituary column.
Surprisingly, though, Davie Cover had thrived in the army, in no small part because he was put on a prison detail, and therefore spent most of his time in uniform tormenting semi-naked men by alternately beating them, boiling them, freezing them, and pissing in their food. He’d liked it so much that he’d stayed on for an extra nine months, and he might still have been there had his enthusiasm for the uncontracted aspects of his job not brought him to the attention of superiors with a conscience and, more to the point, a desire to protect their own reputations, and Davie Cover had found himself quietly discharged.
By that time, Grady Vetters and Kathleen Cover had been conducting a discreet but passionate affair for almost a year, and Grady had even considered asking Kathleen to run away with him. She could bring Little Davie along too, because he was a cool kid, especially as his father wasn’t around to make him otherwise. But then Davie Cover came home, and Kathleen dropped Grady like he’d brought crabs to her bed, and when he persisted with his attentions she threatened to tell her husband that Grady had come on to her repeatedly while he was away, and had once even tried to rape her out back of Lester’s. Grady had left Falls End again shortly after, and had not returned for more than a year. He just didn’t understand what happened at the end between Kathleen and him, and, judging by his mood tonight, he still didn’t.
But Teddy did, because in some things he was much smarter than his friend would ever be. Teddy knew that Kathleen Cover had Falls End in her veins. She was never going to leave that place, for the wider world frightened her almost as much as it frightened Teddy. Kathleen and her husband had more in common than Grady could ever have imagined, and Grady had just been a way to kill time until Davie’s return. Grady had believed himself to be something exotic, something more than her husband could ever be, and maybe he was, but secretly Kathleen Cover despised him for it, and Teddy suspected that her happiest moment in the relationship had come when she’d dumped Grady and taken her husband back into her bed. If she could, she’d have made Grady watch Davie humping her while she smiled back at him