Alice Munros Best

her. “Like, with guys?”
    She gave him a look, as if to say, Don’t be dumb.
    Warren felt a trickle now, down one side of his scalp. She had sneaked up behind him. He put a hand to his head and it came away green and sticky and smelling of peppermint.
    “Have a sip,” she said, handing him a bottle. He took a gulp, and the strong mint drink nearly strangled him. Liza took back the bottle and threw it against the big front window. It didn’t go through the window but it cracked the glass. The bottle hadn’t broken – it fell to the floor, and a pool of beautiful liquid streamed out from it. Dark-green blood. The window glass had filled with thousands of radiating cracks, and turned as white as a halo. Warren was standing up, gasping from the liquor. Waves of heat were rising through his body. Liza stepped delicately among the torn, spattered books and broken glass, the smeared, stomped birds, the pools of whisky and maple syrup and the sticks of charred wood dragged from the stove to make black tracks on the rugs, the ashes and gummed flour and feathers. She stepped delicately, even in her snowmobile boots, admiring what she’d done, what she’d managed so far.
    Warren picked up the hassock he had been sitting on and flung it at the sofa. It toppled off; it didn’t do any damage, but the action had put him in the picture. This was not the first time he’d been involved in trashing a house. Long ago, when he was nine or ten years old, he and a friend had got into a house on their way home from school. It was his friend’s aunt who lived in this house. She wasn’t home – she worked in a jewelry store. She lived by herself. Warren and his friend broke in because they were hungry. They made themselves soda-cracker-and-jam sandwiches and drank some ginger ale. But then something took over. They dumped a bottle of ketchup on the tablecloth and dipped their fingers in, and wrote on the wallpaper,
“Beware! Blood!
”
They
broke plates and threw some food around.
    They were strangely lucky. Nobody had seen them getting into the house and nobody saw them leaving. The aunt herself put the blame on some teenagers whom she had recently ordered out of the store.
    Recalling this, Warren went to the kitchen looking for a bottle of ketchup. There didn’t seem to be any, but he found and opened a can of tomato sauce. It was thinner than ketchup and didn’t work as well,but he tried to write with it on the wooden kitchen wall.
“Beware! This is your blood!”
    The sauce soaked into or ran down the boards. Liza came up close to read the words before they blotted themselves out. She laughed. Somewhere in the rubble she found a Magic Marker. She climbed up on a chair and wrote above the fake blood,
“The Wages of Sin is Death.”
    “I should have got out more stuff,” she said. “Where he works is full of paint and glue and all kinds of crap. In that side room.”
    Warren said, “Want me to get some?”
    “Not really,” she said. She sank down on the sofa – one of the few places in the front room where you could still sit down. “Liza Minnelli,” she said peacefully. “Liza Minnelli, stick it in your belly!”
    Was that something kids at school sang at her? Or something she made up for herself?
    Warren sat down beside her. “So what did they do?” he said. “What did they do that made you so mad?”
    “Who’s mad?” said Liza, and hauled herself up and went to the kitchen. Warren followed, and saw that she was punching out a number on the phone. She had to wait a little. Then she said, “Bea?” in a soft, hurt, hesitant voice. “Oh, Bea!” She waved at Warren to turn off the television.
    He heard her saying, “The window by the kitchen door … I think so. Even maple syrup, you wouldn’t believe it. … Oh, and the beautiful big front window, they threw something at that, and they got sticks out of the stove and the ashes and those birds that were sitting around and the big beaver. I can’t tell you what it looks like….”
    He came back into the kitchen, and she made a face at him, raising her eyebrows and setting her lips blubbering as she listened to the voice on the other end of the phone. Then she went on describing things, commiserating, making her voice quiver with misery and indignation. Warren didn’t like watching her. He went around looking for their helmets.
    When she had hung up the phone, she came and got him. “It was her,” she said. “I already told you what she did to