From the Corner of His Eye (36 page)

Sudden rain spared her the need to finish the sentence. A few fat drops drew both their faces to the sky, and even as they rose to their feet, this brief light paradiddle of sprinkles gave way to a serious drumming.

“Let’s hurry, kiddo.”

Bearing roses upon their arrival, they hadn’t bothered with umbrellas. Besides, although the sky glowered, the forecast had predicted no precipitation.

Here, the rain, but somewhere we’re walking in sunshine.

This thought startled Agnes, disturbed her—yet, inexplicably, it also poured a measure of warm comfort into her chilled heart.

Their station wagon stood along the service road, at least a hundred yards from the grave. With no wind to harry it, the rain fell as plumb-straight as the strands of beaded curtains, and beyond these pearly veils, the car appeared to be a shimmering dark mirage.

Monitoring Barty from the corner of her eye, Agnes paced herself to the strides of his short legs, so she was drenched and chilled when she reached the station wagon.

The boy dashed for the front passenger’s door. Agnes didn’t follow him, because she knew that he would politely but pointedly express frustration if any attempt was made to help him with a task that he could perform himself.

By the time Agnes opened the driver’s door and slumped behind the steering wheel, Barty levered himself onto the seat beside her. Grunting, he pulled his door shut with both hands as she jammed the key in the ignition and started the engine.

She was sopping, shivering. Water streamed from her soaked hair, down her face, as she wiped at her beaded eyelashes with one dripping hand.

As the fragrances of wet wool and sodden denim rose from her sweater and jeans, Agnes switched on the heater and angled the vanes of the middle vent toward Barty. “Honey, turn that other vent toward yourself.”

“I’m okay.”

“You’ll catch pneumonia,” she warned, reaching across the boy to flip the passenger’s-side vent toward him.

“You need the heat, Mommy. Not me.”

And when she finally looked directly at him, blinked at him, her lashes flicking off a spray of fine droplets, Agnes saw that Barty was dry. Not a single jewel of rain glimmered in his thick dark hair or on the baby-smooth planes of his face. His shirt and sweater were as dry as if they had just been taken off a hanger and from a dresser drawer. A few drops darkened the legs of the boy’s khaki pants—but Agnes realized this was water that had dripped from her arm as she’d reached across him to adjust the vent.

“I ran where the rain wasn’t,” he said.

Raised by a father to whom any form of amusement was blasphemy, Agnes had never seen a magician perform until she was nineteen, when Joey Lampion, then her suitor, had taken her to a stage show. Rabbits plucked out of top hats, doves conjured from sudden plumes of smoke, assistants sawn in half and mended to walk again; every illusion that had been old even in Houdini’s time was a jaw-dropping amazement to her that evening. Now she remembered a trick in which the magician had poured a pitcher of milk into a funnel fashioned from a few pages of a newspaper, causing the milk to vanish when the funnel, still dry, was unrolled to reveal ordinary newsprint. The thrill that had quivered through her that evening measured 1 on the Richter scale compared to the full 10-point sense of wonder quaking through her at the sight of Barty as dry as if he’d spent the afternoon perched fireside.

Although rain-pasted to her skin, the fine hairs rose on the nape of her neck. The gooseflesh crawling across her arms had nothing to do with her cold, wet clothes.

When she tried to say
how,
the how of speech eluded her, and she sat as mute as if no words had ever passed her lips before.

Desperately trying to collect her wits, Agnes gazed out at the deluged graveyard, where the mournful trees and massed monuments were blurred by purling streams ceaselessly spilling down the windshield. Every distorted shape, every smear of color, every swath of light and shudder of shadows resisted her attempts to relate them to the world she knew, as if shimmering before her were the landscape of a dream.

She switched on the windshield wipers. Repeatedly, in the arc of cleared glass, the graveyard was revealed in sharp detail, and yet the place remained less than fully familiar to her. Her whole world had been changed by Barty’s dry walk in wet weather.

“That’s just…an old joke,” she heard herself saying, as from a distance. “You didn’t really walk
between
the drops?”

The boy’s silvery giggles rang as merrily as sleigh bells, his Christmas spirit undampened. “Not
between,
Mommy. Nobody could do
that.
I just ran where the rain wasn’t.”

She dared to look at him again.

He was still her boy. As always, her boy. Bartholomew. Barty. Her sweetie. Her kiddo.

But he was more than she had ever imagined her boy to be, more than merely a prodigy.

“How, Barty? Dear Lord, how?”

“Don’t you feel it?”

His head cocked. Inquisitive look. Dazzling eyes as beautiful as his spirit.

“Feel what?” she asked.

“The ways things are. Don’t you feel…all the ways things are?”

“Ways? I don’t know what you mean.”

“Gee, you don’t feel it
at all
?”

She felt the car seat under her butt, wet clothes clinging to her, the air humid and cloying, and she felt a terror of the unknown, like a great lightless void on the edge of which she teetered, but she didn’t feel whatever he was talking about, because the thing he felt made him
smile.

Her voice was the only dry thing about her, thin and parched and cracked, and she expected dust to plume out of her mouth: “Feel what? Explain it to me.”

He was so young and untroubled by life that his frown could not carve lines in his smooth brow. He gazed out at the rain, and finally said, “Boy, I don’t have the right words.”

Although Barty’s vocabulary was far greater than that of the average three-year-old, and though he was reading and writing at an eighth-grade level, Agnes could understand why words failed him. With her greater fund of language, she had been rendered speechless by his accomplishment.

“Honey, have you ever done this before?”

He shook his head. “Never knew I could.”

“You never knew you could…walk where the rain wasn’t?”

“Nope. Not until I needed to.”

Hot air gushing out of the dashboard vents brought no warmth to Agnes’s chilled bones. Pushing a tangle of wet hair away from her face, she realized that her hands were shaking.

“What’s wrong?” Barty asked.

“I’m a little…a little bit scared, Barty.”

Surprise raised his eyebrows and his voice: “Why?”

Because you can walk in the rain without getting wet, because you walk in SOME OTHER PLACE, and God knows where that place is or whether YOU COULD GET STUCK THERE somehow, get stuck there AND NEVER COME BACK, and if you can do this, there’s surely other impossible things you can do, and even as smart as you are, you can’t know the dangers of doing these things—nobody could know—and then there are the people who’d be interested in you if they knew you can do this, scientists who’d want to poke at you, and worse than the scientists, DANGEROUS PEOPLE who would say that national security comes before a mother’s rights to her child, PEOPLE WHO MIGHT STEAL YOU AWAY AND NEVER LET ME SEE YOU AGAIN, which would be like death to me, because I want you to have a normal, happy life, a good life, and I want to protect you and watch you grow up and be the fine man I know you will be, BECAUSE I LOVE YOU MORE THAN ANYTHING, AND YOU’RE SO SWEET, AND YOU DON’T REALIZE HOW SUDDENLY, HOW HORRIBLY, THINGS CAN GO WRONG.

She thought all that, but she closed her eyes and said: “I’ll be okay. Give me a second here, all right?”

“There’s nothing to be scared about,” Barty assured her.

She heard the door, and when she opened her eyes, the boy had already slid out of the car, into the downpour again. She called him back, but he kept going.

“Mommy, watch!” He turned in the deluge with his arms held out from his sides. “Not scary!”

Breath repeatedly catching in her throat, heart thudding, Agnes watched her son through the open car door.

Turning in circles, he tipped his head back, presenting his face to the streaming sky, laughing.

She could see now what she hadn’t seen when running with him through the cemetery, because she was looking directly at him. Yet even seeing did not make it easy to believe.

Barty stood in the rain, surrounded by the rain, pummeled by the rain,
with
the rain. Saturated grass squished under his sneakers. The droplets, in their millions, didn’t bend-slip-twist magically around his form, didn’t hiss into steam a millimeter from his skin. Yet he remained as dry as baby Moses floating on the river in a mother-made ark of bullrushes.

The night of Barty’s birth, when Joey actually lay dead in the pickup-bashed Pontiac, as a paramedic had rolled Agnes’s gurney to the back door of the ambulance, she had seen her husband standing there, untouched by that rain as her son was untouched by this. But Joey-dry-in-the-storm had been a ghost or an illusion fostered by shock and loss of blood.

In the late-afternoon light, on this Christmas Eve, Barty was no ghost, no illusion.

Moving around the front of the station wagon, waving at his mother, reveling in her astonishment, Barty shouted, “Not scary!”

Rapt, frightened yet wonderstruck, Agnes leaned forward, squinting between the whisking wipers.

Onward he came, past the left front fender, gleefully hopping up and down, as if on a pogo stick, still waving.

The boy wasn’t translucent, as his father’s ghost had been on that drizzly January night almost three years ago. The same drowned light of this gray afternoon that revealed the gravestones and the dripping trees also revealed Barty, and no radiance from another world shone spectrally through him, as it had shone through Joey-dead-and-risen.

To the window in the driver’s door, Barty came with a repertoire of comic expressions, mugging at his mother, sticking one finger up his nose and exaggeratedly boring with it as though exploring for nasal nuggets. “Not scary, Mommy!”

In reaction to a terrible sense of weightlessness, Agnes’s two-fisted grip on the steering wheel grew so tight her hands ached. She held on with all her strength, as if at real risk of floating out of the car and up toward the source of the raveling skeins of rain.

Beyond the window, Barty failed to do any of the things that Agnes expected of a boy not fully enough part of the day to share its rain: He didn’t flicker like an image on a static-peppered TV screen; he didn’t shimmer like a phantom figure in Sahara heat or blur like a reflection in a steam-clouded mirror.

He was as solid as any boy. He was in the day but not in the rain. He was moving toward the back of the car.

Turning in her seat, craning her neck, Agnes tried to keep her son in sight.

She lost track of him. Fear knocked, knocked, on the door of her heart, because she was sure that he had vanished the way ships supposedly disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle.

Then she saw him coming forward along the passenger’s side of the car.

Her awful sense of weightlessness became something much better: a buoyancy, an exhilarating lightness of spirit. Fear remained with her—fear for Barty, fear of the future and of the strange complexity of Creation that she’d just glimpsed—but wonder and wild hope now tempered it.

He arrived at the open door, grinning. No Cheshire-cat grin, hanging disembodied on the air, teeth without tabby. Grin with full Barty.

Into the car he climbed. One boy. Small. Fragile. Dry.

Chapter 57

FOR JUNIOR CAIN,
the Year of the Horse (1966) and the Year of the Sheep (1967) offered many opportunities for personal growth and self-improvement. Even if by Christmas Eve, ’67, Junior would not be able to take a dry walk in the rain, this nevertheless was a period of great achievement and much pleasure for him.

It was also a disturbing time.

While the horse and then the sheep grazed twelve months each, an H-bomb accidentally fell from a B-52 and was lost in the ocean, off Spain, for two months before being located. Mao Tse-tung launched his Cultural Revolution, killing thirty million people to improve Chinese society. James Meredith, civil rights activist, was wounded by gunfire during a march in Mississippi. In Chicago, Richard Speck murdered eight nurses in a row-house dormitory, and a month later, Charles Whitman climbed a tower at the University of Texas, from which he shot and killed twelve people. Arthritis forced Sandy Koufax, star pitcher for the Dodgers, to retire. Astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee died earthbound, in a flash fire that swept their Apollo spacecraft during a full-scale launch simulation. Among the noted who traded fame for eternity were Walt Disney, Spencer Tracy, saxophonist John Coltrane, writer Carson McCullers, Vivien Leigh, and Jayne Mansfield. Junior bought McCullers’s
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
and though he didn’t doubt that she was a fine writer, her work proved to be too weird for his taste. During these years, the world was rattled by earthquakes, swept by hurricanes and typhoons, plagued by floods and droughts and politicians, ravaged by disease. And in Vietnam, hostilities were still underway.

Junior wasn’t interested in Vietnam anymore, and he wasn’t in the least troubled by the other news. These two years were disturbing to him only because of Thomas Vanadium.

Indisputably croaked, the maniac cop was nevertheless a threat.

For a while, Junior half convinced himself that the quarter in his cheeseburger, in December ’65, was a meaningless coincidence, unrelated to Vanadium. His short tour of the kitchen, in search of the perpetrator, had given him reason to believe the diner’s sanitary standards were inadequate. Recalling the greasy men on that culinary death squad, he knew that he’d been fortunate not to discover a dead rodent spread-eagle on the melted cheese, or an old sock.

But on March 23, 1966, after a bad date with Frieda Bliss, who collected paintings by Jack Lientery, an important new artist, Junior had an experience that rocked him, added significance to the episode in the diner, and made him wish he hadn’t donated his pistol to the police project that melted guns into switchblades.

During the three months preceding the March incident, however, life was good.

From Christmas through February, he dated a beautiful stock analyst and broker—Tammy Bean—who specialized in finding value in companies that had rewarding relationships with brutal dictators.

She was also a cat lover, working with the Kitten Konservatory to save abandoned felines from death in the city pound. She was the charity’s investment manager. Within ten months, Tammy grew twenty thousand in Konservatory funds into a quarter million by speculating in the stock of a South African firm that hit it big selling germ-warfare technology to North Korea, Pakistan, India, and the Republic of Tanzania, whose chief export was sisal.

For a while, Junior profited enormously from Tammy’s investment advice, and the sex was great. As a thank-you for the hefty trading commissions she earned—and not incidentally for all the orgasms—Tammy gave him a Rolex. He didn’t mind her four cats, didn’t even care when the four grew to six, then to eight.

Regrettably, at 2:00
A.M
., February 28, waking alone in Tammy’s bed, Junior sought her out and found her snacking in the kitchen. Forsaking a fork in favor of her fingers, she was eating a horsemeat-based cat food out of the can, and chasing it with a glass of cream.

Thereafter, he was repelled at the prospect of kissing her, and their relationship fell apart.

During this same period, having subscribed to the opera, Junior attended a performance of Wagner’s
The Ring of the Nibelung
.

Thrilled by the music but unable to understand a word of the play, he arranged German lessons with a private tutor.

Meanwhile, he became an accomplished meditator. Guided by Bob Chicane, Junior progressed from concentrative meditation with seed—the mental image of a bowling pin—to meditation
without
seed. This advanced form is far more difficult, because nothing is visualized, and the purpose is to concentrate on making the mind utterly blank.

Unsupervised meditation without seed, in sessions longer than an hour, entails risk. To his horror, Junior would discover some of the dangers in September.

But first, March 23: the bad date with Frieda Bliss, and what he discovered in his apartment when he came home that night.

As spectacularly busty as the not-yet-dead Jayne Mansfield, Frieda never wore a bra. In 1966, this free-swinging style was little seen. Initially, Junior didn’t realize bralessness was a declaration of Frieda’s liberation; he thought it meant she was a slut.

He had met her in a university adult-extension course titled “Increasing Self-Esteem Through Controlled Screaming.” Participants were taught to identify harmful repressed emotions and dissipate them through the authentic vocal imitations of a variety of animals.

Highly impressed by the spot-on hyena scream with which Frieda had purged herself of the childhood emotional trauma inflicted by an authoritarian grandmother, Junior asked her to go out with him.

She owned a public-relations firm specializing in artists, and over dinner she rhapsodized about the work of Jack Lientery. His current series of paintings—emaciated babies against backdrops of ripe fruit and other symbols of plenty—had critics swooning.

Delighted to be dating someone who lived neck-deep in culture—especially after two months with Tammy Bean, the money maven—Junior was surprised that he didn’t score with Frieda on the first date. He was usually irresistible even to women who
weren’t
sluts.

At the end of their second date, however, Frieda invited Junior up to her apartment, to see her Lientery collection and, no doubt, to take a ride on the Cain ecstasy machine. She owned seven canvases by the painter, received as partial payment of his PR bills.

Lientery’s work met the criteria of great art, about which Junior had learned in art-appreciation courses. It undermined his sense of reality, left him wary, filled him with angst and with loathing for the human condition, and made him wish he hadn’t just eaten dinner.

As she commented on each masterpiece, Frieda grew steadily less coherent. She had drunk a few cocktails, the better part of a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, and two after-dinner brandies.

Junior liked women who drank a lot. They were usually amorous—or at least unresistant.

By the time they reached the seventh painting, alcohol and rich French cuisine and Jack Lientery’s powerful art combined to devastate Frieda. She shuddered, leaned with one hand on a canvas, hung her head, and committed an act of bad PR.

Junior hopped backward just in time, out of the splash zone.

This ended any hope of romance, and he was disappointed. A less self-controlled man might have seized a nearby bronze vase—fashioned to resemble dinosaur stool—and stuffed her into it or vice versa.

When Frieda finished retching and passed out in a heap, Junior left her on the floor and immediately set out to explore her rooms.

Ever since he’d searched Vanadium’s house, over fourteen months ago, Junior had enjoyed learning about other people by touring their homes in their absence. Because he was unwilling to risk arrest for breaking and entering, these explorations were rare, other than in the homes of women whom he’d dated long enough to justify swapping keys. Happily, in this golden age of trust and easy relationships, as little as a week of hot sex could lead to key-level commitment.

The sole drawback: Junior frequently had to change his locks.

Now, since he didn’t intend to date this woman again, he grabbed the only chance he might ever have to learn the intimate, eccentric details of her life. He began in her kitchen, with the contents of the refrigerator and cupboards, concluding his tour in her bedroom.

Of the curiosities Junior uncovered, Frieda’s weapons interested him most. Guns were stashed throughout the apartment: revolvers, pistols, and two pistol-grip shotguns. Sixteen altogether.

Most of these firearms were loaded and ready for use, but five remained in their original boxes, in the back of her bedroom closet. Evidently, considering the original bill of sale taped to each of the five boxed handguns, she must have acquired all the weapons legally.

Junior didn’t find anything to explain her paranoia—though, to his surprise, he discovered six books by Caesar Zedd in her small library. The pages were dog-eared; the text was heavily underlined.

Clearly, she had learned nothing from her reading. No sincere and thoughtful student of Zedd would be as sorely lacking in self-control as Frieda Bliss.

Junior took one of the boxed guns, a 9-mm semiautomatic. Months would probably pass before she noticed the pistol missing from the back of her closet, and by then she wouldn’t know who had taken it.

A supply of ammunition lined the bottom of all the dresser and bureau drawers, concealed by underwear and other garments. Junior appropriated a box of 9-mm cartridges.

Leaving Frieda unconscious and reeking, a condition in which her bralessness had no power to arouse him, Junior left.

Twenty minutes later, at home, he poured sherry over ice. Sipping, he stood in the living room, admiring his two paintings.

With a portion of his profits from Tammy Bean’s stock picks, Junior had bought a second painting by Sklent. Titled
In the Baby’s Brain Lies the Parasite of Doom, Version 6,
it was so exquisitely repellent that the artist’s genius could not be in doubt.

Eventually Junior crossed the room to stand before Industrial Woman in all her scrap-metal glory. Her soup-pot breasts reminded him of Frieda’s equally abundant bosom, and unfortunately her mouth, open wide in a silent shriek, reminded him of Frieda retching.

His enjoyment of the art was diminished by these associations, and as Junior turned away from Industrial Woman, his attention was suddenly captured by the quarters. Three lay on the floor at her gear-wheel-and-meat-cleaver feet. They had not been here earlier.

Her metal hands were still crossed defensively over her breasts. The artist had welded large hexagonal nuts to her rake-tine fingers to suggest knuckles, and balanced on one nut was a fourth quarter.

As though she had been practicing while Junior was out.

As though someone had been here this evening to teach her this coin trick.

The 9-mm pistol and the ammunition were on the foyer table. With trembling hands, Junior tore open the boxes and loaded the gun.

Trying to ignore his phantom toe, which itched furiously, he searched the apartment. He proceeded carefully, determined not to shoot himself in the foot accidentally this time.

Vanadium wasn’t here, alive or dead.

Junior phoned a twenty-four-hour-a-day locksmith and paid premium postmidnight rates to have the double deadbolts rekeyed.

The following morning, he canceled his German lessons. It was an impossible language. The words were enormously long.

Besides, he couldn’t any longer afford to spend endless hours either learning a new language or attending the opera. His life was too full, leaving him insufficient time for the Bartholomew search.

Animal instinct told Junior that the business with the quarter in the diner and now these quarters in his living room were related to his failure to find Bartholomew, Seraphim White’s bastard child. He couldn’t logically explain the connection; but as Zedd teaches, animal instinct is the only unalloyed truth we will ever know.

Consequently, he scheduled more time every day with the phone books. He had obtained directories for all nine counties that, with the city itself, comprised the Bay Area.

Someone named Bartholomew had adopted Seraphim’s son and named the boy after himself. Junior applied the patience learned through meditation to the task at hand, and instinctively, he soon evolved a motivating mantra that continuously cycled through his mind while he studied the telephone directories:
Find the father, kill the son.

Seraphim’s child had been alive as long as Naomi had been dead, almost fifteen months. In fifteen months, Junior should have located the little bastard and eliminated him.

Occasionally he woke in the night and heard himself murmuring the mantra aloud, which apparently he had been repeating ceaselessly in his sleep. “Find the father, kill the son.”

In April, Junior discovered three Bartholomews. Investigating these targets, prepared to commit homicide, he learned that none had a son named Bartholomew or had ever adopted a child.

In May, he found another Bartholomew. Not the right one.

Junior kept a file on each man, nevertheless, in case instinct later told him that one of them was, in fact, his mortal enemy. He could have killed all of them, just to be safe, but a multitude of dead Bartholomews, even spread over several jurisdictions, would sooner or later attract too much police attention.