But Anna had left Agnes Scott in Atlanta at least five years ago, and when he finally reached a hired official in the school's alumnae society and tried to talk her into divulging the present whereabouts of Miss Anna Rivenbark Monegal, class of 1980, he was met with a distant, scrupulously polite, “Sorry—not a chance,” the implication being that he sounded like a rapist, a salesman, or some other unsavory blight on the stately live oak of civilization.
Then, like being sideswiped by a Greyhound bus, it hit him:
Van Luna, Kansas!
Where but Van Luna, Kansas, would his mother and his sister retreat for the Christmas holidays? Nowhere else but!
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Excitedly Joshua put through a long-distance call to the residence of Mrs. William C. Rivenbark of Van Luna, Kansas. In 1972, at precisely this time of year, Old Bill had died of a heart attack in Cheyenne. He and Peggy had come to Wyoming—their second such trip—to visit their daughter and grandchildren for Christmas while Hugo was supervising the loading of B-52 bomb bays at Anderson Air Force Base on Guam. Under decidedly peculiar circumstances, in the bedroom of Pete and Lily Grier, the Monegals’
former landlords, Bill Rivenbark had collapsed and nearly lost consciousness. Pete Grier had been out of state at the time, attending a bowl game in New Orleans with a cousin from Texas, and Lily, in an exemplary dither, had telephoned Jeannette to come and rescue her father before Peggy, asleep in the Monegals’ old apartment downstairs, discovered that her husband was upstairs with Lily rather than stretched out beside her in connubial repose.
Angry and distraught, Jeannette had answered Lily's plea, taking ten-year-old John-John with her to the Griers’ house since Anna was spending the night at a friend's. Upstairs his grandfather had lain supine on another man's bed, his dentures clamped together like a strip of yellow whalebone. The old man's eyes had been as elusive as welding sparks, seeming to go everywhere without settling on anything. Bill had suffered a second heart attack in the hospital's emergency room, and that one had finished him off....
Joshua's recollection of this incident took on embarrassing vividness as the widow's telephone rang.
Maybe this was a mistake. He held the receiver away from his head and considered hanging up.
“Hello?” A cautious female voice, girlish rather than elderly.
“Anna?”
“Who is this, anyway?”
Joshua told her. There intervened a silence like the silence a bowler experiences after lofting a gutter ball.
You couldn't hear a pin drop.
“Come on, Anna, talk to me.”
“What do you want?”
“Is Mom there? I saw Mom's book, the novel.”
“She's not here, Johnny. She may get here for Christmas, she may not. Everything's up in the air. Where are you?”
He wanted to tell her about meeting Alistair Patrick Blair a year and a half ago, but realized that every aspect of the White Sphinx Project, especially the involvement of the Zarakali paleontologist, was classified. Besides, Anna and he were using an unprotected public line. Besides, she probably didn't give a damn.
“Can't talk long. I've been finger-feeding this squawk-box quarters for hours, just trying to run you folks down. ‘Bout out o’ change. Anna, I've got to know if Mom—”
“Are you coming?”
Joshua Kampa, alias John-John (Johnny) Monegal, studied the receiver as if it were the single bone of contention separating him from his family. Deliberately he asked, “You inviting me?”
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“Get out here, you goddamn little defector. Of course I'm inviting you. Of course I'm—” Anna stuck, exasperated or overcome. “Just get on out here, all right?”
* * * *
One young airman claimed that the cylinders were unarmed nuclear warheads, while a paunchy officer in wire-rim glasses pooh-poohed this notion, declaring them experimental plastic cisterns for catching and storing water in certain hypothetical combat situations. Their ultimate destination was Fort Carson in Colorado. Joshua did not wait to see who emerged victorious in the warhead/cistern controversy. He disembarked the C-141 as soon after it had set down as the pilot would permit. It was cold in Wichita, and he pulled his Air Force horse-blanket coat tight about his neck and chest.
Once off base, Joshua walked the right-hand side of the highway to Van Luna waiting for a ride. Finally a captain in a 1956 Nash Metropolitan picked him up and carried him the remainder of the way.
Van Luna, once a farming village as well as a modest bedroom community for people employed in Wichita, had spilled over the countryside like the markers in a vast Monopoly game. Tract houses, convenience stores, and motels were everywhere. The highway between McConnell and Van Luna afforded only an occasional glimpse into the pastureland or the cottonwood copses beyond the roadside clutter; and Joshua, despite a long-term familiarity with the mercantile sprawl of Florida's Miracle Strip, felt betrayed. Even if he had lived here only five years, Van Luna was the Eden of his dreams of childhood. Its streets and fields had represented, at least in memory, the landscape of his choppy evolution toward self-knowledge, a process he still did not regard as complete. This ongoing complication of the simple geometries—the
innocent
geometries—of the original town was demoralizing.
“Damn.”
“You're welcome,” said the captain, letting him out not far from the building that had once housed Rivenbark's Grocery.
The old business district, the cobblestone heart of Van Luna, did not look greatly different from Joshua's memory of it. Although under the proprietorship of a stranger, the grocery was still a grocery. Even better, the façade of the old Pix Theatre had been restored. Joshua walked through an older neighborhood to his mother's mother's house, aware of the townspeople's tentative curiosity and the chilly tingle of the December air.
At the front door of an old-fashioned red-brick house with Tudor trim and ranks of gorgeous evergreen shrubs around the porch and walls, Joshua knocked. No one came. He pressed the buzzer and heard a thin, protracted raspberry deep inside the house. Whereupon the door swung open and there stood Anna, simultaneously smiling a welcome and trying to shush him to absolute silence. She was pregnant, quite far along, and their enthusiastic hug had to accommodate itself to the salience of her belly.
“Come in,” she whispered. “Don't stand out there in the cold—come in, Johnny, come in.”
He did not budge. “What's the deal, Anna? You married?”
There in the doorway she explained that, yes, she was married; her husband was a man named Dennis
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Whitcomb, but Anna had not taken his last name. An ensign in the Navy, Whitcomb was stationed aboard the nuclear carrier
Eisenhower
, which was presently at rest in the harbor of the new naval facility at Bravanumbi, Zarakal.
“Zarakal!” Joshua exclaimed in a high-pitched whisper.
“Mutesa Tharaka's country, Johnny. You know, the place where all those people starved to death a few years ago. On special occasions he wears some sort of early human skull on his head.”
“Your husband?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Right, I do. It's a habiline skull, Anna. President Tharaka wears it to celebrate the origin of humanity in his own backyard. It's also a sign of his own preeminence in Zarakal.”
“Good for him. Do you mind if we go inside?”
“Lead the way.”
Anna, who had not yet spoken above a whisper, led him to a sofa upholstered in a satiny floral print.
She made him sit down, but did not herself take a seat. Instead, one hand in the small of her back, she paced a threadbare Oriental rug whose faded pattern reminded Joshua of a paisley shirt he had owned in Cheyenne. The room smelled of camphor, cedarwood, and, strangely, peppermint. It was shuttered, curtained, and wallpapered. The miasma of Peggy Rivenbark's widowhood drifted from room to room like nerve gas, and Anna, suddenly, appeared to be suffering a convulsion of memory.
“Do you still have those dreams, Johnny?”
“Sometimes, yeah, I do. But I'm undergoing a treatment that's supposed to help me control them.”
“I was afraid the damn things would kill you.”
“They might yet.”
“But if you're learning to control them—”
“Scratch ‘They might yet,’ Sis. Melodramatic license. I'm fine.”
“You've joined the Air Force. Following in Dad's footsteps?”
“Not too far, I hope.” Anna took his meaning, and he said, “The President ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to waive the height limitations for me. A blow for the civil rights of short people.”
“Now you have a reason to live.”
“Amen, Sister.”
“Are you being sent overseas, too?”
“Right after New Year's.”
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“Where?”
He decided, unilaterally, that this much, at least, he could divulge to his own sister. “Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base in—”
“
Zarakal!
”
“I thought we were supposed to be whispering.”
Halted in front of Joshua, Anna lowered her voice again: “Maybe you'll be able to meet Dennis.—No, probably not. They're set for a long cruise in the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. I don't know exactly when. Soon, though. The
Midway
and the frigate
T. C. Hart
were strafed recently by American-made jets flown by—well, they think they may have been PLO sympathizers in the Saudi Arabian Air Force.
No one knows for sure. They're keeping it out of the news, Dennis says. It's weird. Weird and scary.”
“Yes.”
“I met Dennis in Athens.”
“Greece?”
“Georgia, you turkey. He was going to the Navy School there. Did you know that Roger Staubach went there in the sixties?”
“No, I never did.”
“Anyway, I'd gone over to Athens for one of the University of Georgia's drama productions.
Buried
Child
by Sam Shepard. During the second intermission I bumped into Dennis.”
“Which intermission resulted in
that
bump?” He nodded at her belly.
“You mean ‘intromission,’ don't you? Well, we've never kept count. And I don't remember you being such a wise guy.” Anna eased herself onto the sofa beside Joshua and kissed him daintily on the temple.
“Welcome home, short stuff.”
* * * *
“Should I go in to see her?” Joshua asked.
“I don't think we even need to let her know you're here.”
“She still associates me with that night, doesn't she? I let it slip where Mom and I had found Bill, and I'm still the evil messenger of the Rivenbark household.”
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“It's been a damn long time, honey. Peggy's convinced herself that you're dead. This probably isn't the best time to show her you're still kicking.”
“Okay, I'll play. No ghosts for Grandma.”
“Good.”
Before he could ask Anna about their mother, she rose by pushing off against his shoulder and beckoned him into the sunny kitchen on the house's southwest side.
Green glass canisters for sugar, flour, and tea. Knotty-pine cabinets. A bay window overlooking a margin of neat, winter-brown lawn, the kind of lawn that cries out for touch-football players and blithely romping dogs. Van Luna's suburban sprawl was nowhere in evidence here.
Joshua sat at a wrought-iron table with a Formica top while Anna served him coffee and leftover biscuits. When the heater kicked on, she spoke without whispering for the first time since he had entered the house.
“You just about killed Mom, you little twerp. For two years she was strung out like an elastic clothesline, almost ready to snap. She tore up
Eden in His Dreams
and couldn't get anything else going. The third year, well, she spent that right here in Van Luna, as if this house were a sanatorium for terminally bereaved females.”
“Where is she now, Anna?”
“Maybe I'm not ready to tell you.”
Alarmed, Joshua ate crumbs off his fingertips. More than likely he deserved to be taunted in this tender, hair-trigger fashion. If Anna really squeezed, though, he would go off like his grandfather's heart, in either apoplectic anger or tearful remorse. The latter if they were lucky. He remembered how Hugo had used to ascend from a grumbling snit into one of his infrequent but terrifying Panamanian eruptions....
“You got any Fritos, Anna?”
She turned and faced him, her arms folded on the ledge of her pregnancy. “Jesus, you've got the recall of an elephant.”
“Dumbo the Dinothere at your service.”
“I remember almost everything about that little expedition—but, of course, I was twelve. I
ought
to remember.”
“What about Mom? Where is she?”
Anna crossed the little kitchen, walking on her heels, and patted him on the head. “Neat diversion, John-John. I got a cable from her yesterday. You won't be seeing her this year.”