All Over Creation (66 page)

Later that morning, around eight o'clock, the sheriff came back out to the house to question Phoenix about the man with the mirrored sunglasses and the GroundUp cap. Someone had phoned in an anonymous tip, he told us. Phoenix repeated his story, and Lilith confirmed it. She had seen the man talking to Elliot at the action. Everyone fell silent, and Phoenix stared at me until I volunteered the information that Elliot was in Room 6 at the Falls Motel. I also told them about Elliot's reaction when I'd asked him about the explosion. Odell immediately sent a pair of officers around to the motel, but they found the room empty. It was the second time that Elliot Rhodes had checked out of Liberty Falls just before the police could talk to him.

Billy was disappointed. He came back several times to grill me about the events of that night and my relationship with Elliot. He seemed to think that I was withholding information as to his whereabouts. He was all puffed up and secretive about the anonymous tip, and for a while it seemed he was looking to implicate us all in a Washington-based conspiracy, but in the end he concluded that Elliot's sudden departure was consistent with that of any spurned lover and had nothing to do with the explosion. Besides, Billy informed me, Elliot had been fired from his job at Duncan & Wiley, so he no longer had any motive to harass the Seeds.

In the course of the investigation they turned up bits of Charmey. Unrecognizable pieces. A section of her skull, I heard them say. A bit of blackened heel that looked like a charred potato. I told Cass, and together we kept everyone else away. Frankie. Geek. My own kids, who were still in shock. Momoko was there, though. We held hands and edged toward the police line and peered at the evidence bags that the forensics men were filling.

Why did I let Momoko watch?

How could I have watched without her?

She knew the old ways. She knew how to identify remains. In Japan bodies are ritually cremated, and afterward the relatives use chopsticks to pick through the bones, identifying this bit and that. Momoko stood next to me and said nothing as we watched the forensics men work. She squeezed my hand, hard, but when the bags were removed, I felt that we had witnessed Charmey's earthly body passing.

Odell turned his attention to Geek's confession, but Will stuck by. He made sure Geek didn't say anything to implicate himself further. It was a horrible and tragic accident, Will insisted, and when Geek had claimed responsibility that night, he hadn't been in his right mind. When the results of the fire department's investigation failed to produce any evidence to support charges of arson, terrorism, or even criminal negligence, the sheriff gave up. Happenstance prevailed as an explanation.

On his way back from the Quinns' one day, Odell stopped by to thank me for the way I'd handled the information about his son's bringing the handgun to school. He said that after Will had spoken to him, he'd confronted his son and gotten him to admit to it and to say he was sorry.

“Phoenix might like to hear that, too. He was the one with the gun in his mouth.”

Billy nodded. “Of course. I'll bring him by.” He was standing at the bottom of the porch steps, and he turned to go, but then he paused. “The gun wasn't loaded. I don't keep loaded weapons in the house.”

“That makes me feel a lot better.”

Odell did track down and question Rodney Skeele, retired private investigator and a founding member of the Tri-County Interfaith League of Family Values. He denied any knowledge of the explosion but freely admitted he had done patent-infringement work for Cynaco in the past. With Elliot checked out, however, any further connection to Cynaco ended with the logo on his cap. Lilith fumed. She muttered dire prophecies of corporate conspiracy into my son's ear. I found it worrisome, but Phoenix didn't seem to mind. More troubling to me was the thought that by banishing Elliot I had blown the only chance we had of ever finding out what really happened.

 

 

“What did Elliot want that night?” Cass asked a few weeks later.

I was packing up by then, sorting out the winter stuff I'd bought for myself and the kids at Wal-Mart—all the snowsuits and mittens, the parkas and muffs and thermal socks—to donate to the Salvation Army. I hoped I would never need them again.

“He asked me to marry him.”

“No! He didn't!”

“Had a ring and everything. I told him to fuck off.”

“Good for you.”

“I'm sure he didn't mean it. He lied about everything else. He even lied about being fired. He told me he'd quit. Like I would have cared?”

“It was just habit with him.” She saw me toss a knit shawl into the discard pile. “Hey, I'll take that. It's nice and soft.” She folded the shawl and placed it in the bag that she'd been filling. “He was a fucker, Yummy.”

“Cass!” I was shocked. I'd never heard her swear before.

She made a face at me. “I've been wanting to say that since we were fourteen.”

“How does it feel?”

“Great,” she said grimly. She sat there and fingered the shawl and thought for a while. “You think he had anything to do with it?”

“You mean the explosion?” I sat on the side of the bed. “Oh, God, Cass, I don't know. What if he did? Maybe I shouldn't have sent him away like that—”

But Cass cut me off. “No, you did the right thing. He was in public relations, for goodness' sake. PR people don't just go around blowing things up!”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I guess that's what I think, too.”

“He was a fucker and a liar, but I don't think he was a murderer, in spite of what Lilith says. You know, the way that girl carries on, you'd think you could actually
kill
someone with public relations. . . .”

 

 

Maybe you can.

After she left, he'd sat there for a while longer staring at the phone, then he reached for his pants. He dressed quickly and started throwing stuff into his suitcase. He grabbed his toilet kit from the bathroom, put on his coat, and left the key to the room on the dresser along with a dollar for the maid. He felt remarkably calm. He carried his suitcase to the doorway and took a last look around. When he was sure he hadn't forgotten anything, he closed the door behind him.

It was still dark in the parking lot. He loaded his suitcase into the trunk, got into the car, and started the ignition. Then it hit him. He had no plans, nowhere to go. He drove toward the interstate and stopped at the twenty-four-hour gas station up on the hill. As he filled the tank, he knew he had to decide. East or west. The East Coast filled him with dread. He couldn't see going back, tail between his legs, to scrape up another PR job at a lesser firm. It was too depressing. But the West Coast—now, that had some appeal. He thought about San Francisco. About Berkeley in the sixties. Maybe he could find a job on a newspaper somewhere and get back to writing. He went inside to pay for the gas and asked the attendant for a map of the western United States.

“Taking a trip?” the guy asked.

Elliot nodded. He started to spread out the map on the counter, then changed his mind when the guy started getting nosy. “Where you heading?”

“North,” Elliot lied. “Up to Canada.” He handed back the map. “Wrong one. Hey, listen, you got a pay phone?”

It was just before sunrise when he called in the anonymous tip to the Power County sheriff's office. He gave the officer on duty Rodney's name and suggested they question him in conjunction with a vehicular explosion that morning at Fullers' Farm. Then he got back into his car and pulled onto the interstate, satisfied that he'd done what he could to make things right. He headed west on 84, past Massacre Rocks. When he passed the sign marking the Liberty Falls town limits and watched it disappear in the rearview mirror, he felt glad to be putting all this behind him—it was terrible about the girl that died, and the propane tanks probably leaked, but if not, if Rodney had taken it on himself to go solo and had done something crazy, it wasn't his business anymore. It was already the past, and there was his entire future to think about.

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the statue of Kali. He set it on the dashboard, but after a few miles he started to worry. The statue sat there, centered in the windshield, holding her severed head like a pocketbook. He used to like the way she looked at him, dusky and ever so faintly cross-eyed, but now it struck him that in all likelihood it was inauspicious to travel with the deity of destruction on one's dashboard.

Just then the sun broke over the rimrock. The glare reflected in his rearview mirror, blinding him, so he changed into his sunglasses. The light chased him, bright and hard, across the desert. It was a good day for driving. He would have to ditch the rental car along the way, but he could buy a secondhand beater to get him out to the coast. Maybe an old VW. He switched on the radio, scanning the airwaves for classic rock, then laughed as he recognized the lyric.

“You are the crown of creation . . .”
Gracie sang,
“and you got no place to go. . . .”

The little goddess on the dashboard was sticking her tongue out at him. He rolled down the window and chucked her out the window.

With no place to go, he felt like he was going back to the beginning.

In early October the
New York Times
ran an article with the news that Cynaco's main rival in the life-sciences industry had decided not to sell seeds sterilized with Terminator technology. The CEO had written an open letter stating that his corporation was committed “not to commercialize gene-protection systems that render seed sterile.” Geek printed out the article, and the Seeds gathered around the computer and surfed the Net for reactions. The alternative presses were declaring it a victory. TERMINATOR TERMINATED! read more than one banner headline, but Geek shook his head.

“It's a total lie. A PR maneuver. The Terminator issue is too hot right now. They're just distancing themselves from it. Going underground.”

“But it sounds so positive,” Lilith said.

Geek shook his head. “It's completely meaningless. Sterilization technologies are years away from commercialization. They'll just quietly continue with the R&D, and when it's ready to take to market, they'll announce they've changed their minds again. Terminator will be back, I guarantee.”

Y finished reading the article. “Hey, it's a start,” he said, handing it back. “Geek, man, you gotta snap out of it. I mean, you're probably right and all, but the little victories count.”

Geek shut off the printer. “Not when you've lost the war, dude. It's over.”

“What's over?” Frankie asked.

“Nature.”

 

 

They were planning to leave after harvest. They were helping Will get the potatoes out of the ground, and he was paying them for their labor, after deducting the costs of his damaged crops.

“We said we'd pay you back for the potatoes we destroyed, and we will,” Geek told him. “But we're not harvesting the NuLifes.”

“You were perfectly willing to harvest them awhile ago,” Will pointed out, but in the end he agreed.

They were pooling their wages to buy a used Winnebago, which they'd found in Idaho Falls. They would have to run it off fossil fuels until Geek had time to convert it to biodiesel, but the engine was solid. They were planning to drive it down to Frisco for the winter, after making a detour to Seattle, where there was a huge demonstration building.

“It's gonna be massive,” Y told Frankie. “Global. The whole concept of the nation-state is an anachronistic fiction, a comforting smoke screen for the multinationals. The WTO is the throbbing heart of the new world order. It's a new millennium, dude.”

They would make a stop in Eugene, Oregon, to rally and to organize.

“It's a radical scene,” Lilith said. “You'll totally dig it.”

They were in Will's office before supper, waiting for Geek to finish inputting Will's harvest data so they could use the computer to surf the Net. Tibet was lying on her back on the meeting table, watching Frankie play with her toes. Lilith was practicing mudras with her fingers, and Phoenix slouched next to her staring at a chart of potato diseases on the wall.

“You should come with us,” Lilith said to Phoenix.

Phoenix shoved his hands into his pockets and slumped deeper into his chair. “Yeah,” he said. “Pahoa's lame. It's, like, totally cut off from reality.”

Lilith held up her hand. “Pahoa's cool, too. You just gotta choose your choice, you know? Go with the flow.”

Frankie snorted. “That's a pile of hippified crap.” He let Tibet grab hold of his fingers and pulled her up by the arms. “Look at how strong she is! She's gonna be a real fighter. Look at her punch. Pow, pow . . .” The baby was flailing her arms and legs. “You wanna come? Come,” he said to Phoenix. “We're gonna kick some ass.”