Pacific (9780802194800) (11 page)

“Just what I'm wearing.”

“We can't have that.”

Terry left the room and after a while came back dragging a big packing box across the orange shag carpet. He leaned into the box and began tossing out coats and boots and sweaters and mittens.

“These belonged to a girl I knew. She stayed with me a couple years ago. She was from Arkansas and I'm pretty sure that's where she went. Just left one summer day and I never heard of her again. Kind of miss her company. She was always talking about Little Rock. She's got some Rollerblades around here. I couldn't say where those are at the moment.”

The clothes made her think she'd been meant to come. She outfitted herself with a knee-length Vikings sideline coat, an orange stocking cap with a tassel, a wool scarf, and a pair of cowled mittens with the Arctic Cat logo. She traded her shoes for heavy socks and Sorel boots with felt liners.

Terry drove Sandra back to Stone City in his truck. She was warm and happy. A hawk flew alongside the truck and turned away, wide and ragged wings beating against the sky. In town she directed Terry to the Continental Hotel.

“This where you're staying?” he said.

“I like it,” she said. “And I like you, Terry.”

She kissed him on the cheek.

“Go home, Sandy.”

That night Tiny's mother went outside to burn the trash in the wire barrel in the backyard. The evergreens sagged with snow-laden branches in the dark. Shrouded in an Army surplus coat, she stuffed pages of newspaper through the wires and lit them.

She walked back to the birdbath in the yard and turned to watch the fire. It was a merry sight—flames twisting, white smoke on the wind.

She heard the noise then, as she had before—a high and far-off moan that sounded like an animal or bird or drinking human. Or was it the wind playing the mouth of an abandoned bottle in a ditch?

Now there was only the wind and the fire. She poked the trash with a stick and it collapsed in a spray of orange sparks. Something bad was going to happen. She knew that much.

Dan sat with the federal agents in the lobby of the Stone City airport, the official name of which is Barney Miale Field. Barney Miale was a barnstormer in the thirties and after the war he started a flight school that was in operation till the seventies. As a teacher he was said to have been impatient and even inconsiderate.

The agents' supervisor was stopping by on her way from Denver to Chicago. She wanted to wind up the Stone City investigation and Agents Anders and Lee thought it might help to have Dan on hand to show local interest.

“My bet is she shuts it down tonight,” said Agent Anders. “It wouldn't hurt my feelings any. I'd be home by the weekend.”

“Where do you live?”

“Vermillion. Me and my wife got a little horse farm up there and a Jack Russell named Patches, seventeen years old, can't hardly see anymore. Still works the horses, though. Gets by on smell alone for that.”

“I got bit by a Jack Russell once,” said Dan.

“Well, the whole breed is off its rocker, but faithful? My God.”

The agent took out his billfold and flipped through photographs in clouded plastic sleeves.

“That's my wife. That's my nephew Bill. And here's old Patches. That's when he could see.”

Louise washed and rinsed her hair in the kitchen sink. Gathering her hair on one side she wrung it out and gave it a shake, drops drumming stainless steel. She looked out the window. A red Mustang was parked in the driveway. She wrapped a towel around her hair and put her shirt on.

The doorbell rang, hollow from disuse. Louise and Dan rarely got visitors at night and no one rang the bell. She went to the living room and opened the front door a bit. A young man on the steps smoothed his hair and licked his lips as if his mouth was dry.

“My name is Jack Snow,” he said. “I need to see Dan Norman.”

“He's not home,” said Louise. “If you have business, go to his office tomorrow in Stone City.”

“What I have to say is better said at night.”

“Oh yeah?” said Louise. “Might best keep it to yourself in that case.”

“Are you Mrs. Norman?”

Louise gave a slight roll of her eyes. “
If you have business
—”

Jack Snow shouldered the door open and moved into the living room, jamming Louise into the corner by the stairs. The towel came loose and fell from her hair. She pushed the door gently, picked up the towel, and folded it.

“Whatever your problem is, Mr. Snow, you just made it ten times worse,” she said.

“Call me Jack. Please.” He strolled about the room like the arrogant house hunters of Louise's imagination. From the bureau by the front windows he picked up a ring that Dan had been given by the sheriffs' association, white gold with a blue stone.

“Put it down,” said Louise.

“I'm just
looking,
” he said. Then he sat down in an easy chair with his hands folded behind his head and smiled. He set the ring on the arm of the chair.

“So,” he said. “Here's my problem. I lost my bookkeeper. I lost my partner. And my
understanding
is that Dan Norman drove her off. That's why we need to talk. Because without her, I don't know where the fuck anything is.”

Louise held the towel to her chest and spoke calmly. “I'm telling you one time to get out.”

“I have friends in Omaha.”

“Yeah, well, congratulations.”

Louise went to the kitchen, laid the towel on the table, and slid her stocking feet into snow boots. She grabbed a coat from the pegs on the wall, put it on, and zipped it up. Then she took a baseball bat from the broom closet and returned to the living room. Jack Snow was still relaxing in the chair.

“Hello, Red,” he said. “Are you going to club me now?”

Louise headed for the door. “I'm going to beat on your car,” she said.

She moved down the steps and into the yard. Jack Snow tackled her and she landed facedown in the snow with the bat beneath her. He rolled her over, sat astride her, and twisted the bat from her hands.

One part of Louise was scared, but the other part thought, Okay, he's out of the house. Jack Snow threw the bat toward the steps and pinned her head to the ground with his hand.

“This is what it comes to,” he said.

He got up slowly, still holding her face. He edged away as one would from a wild animal. Louise did not move. He hurried toward his car. She sat up, scrubbed her face with snow.

“Go to hell,” she said.

Jack Snow drove up to turn around by the barn. Louise stood and retrieved the bat. Her right wrist hurt but she could manage. She walked to the driveway and as the Mustang went past she swung the bat with both hands. Splinters of red flew up, suspended in the cold air.

Louise ran to the house, locked the door, and sat on the davenport. Her nose was bleeding and she tipped her head back and wiped the blood on the sleeve of her coat. Then she remembered Dan's ring. She slipped to the floor and crawled across the rug till she found it beneath the chair.

“Thank you, God,” she said aloud.

She put the ring on her finger, went to the phone, and dialed Dan's number.

Jack drove to the warehouse. He knew his business was done and he felt he must have wanted it done. Leaving the car running, he got out to see the damage. The spoiler was folded and one end had come loose. He breathed the blue vapor of the exhaust gratefully and looked at the sky. The stars were out.

He jingled the keys from his pocket, but there was no need to unlock the bay door. Someone had pried it open. Not surprising, he thought. He pushed the door up and walked in. The relics had been rifled. Trinkets crunched and cracked underfoot. That was fine. He would get his money, drive through the night, be in another place when the sun came up. Start a life like others.

A light shone in the office windows, and he opened the door. A woman sat on the desk facing him. She wore a long purple coat, orange hat, and, around her neck, a silver torc from the inventory. He knew her at once, though it had been years since they'd seen each other.

“Sandy Zulma,” he said. “Jesus Christ but I'm glad it's you. The night I've had, a familiar face . . .”

She leaned her long body toward him. “I want the rock,” she said.

“What rock?” he said.

Sandra told him, as she had Louise and Dan, adding this time that it might be the stone of power that Red Hanrahan saw in the other world.

“Honest to God, I don't have a rock,” said Jack. “Everything is on the tables. Or the floor. If you didn't find it, I don't have it.”

“Of course you wouldn't leave it out for anyone to find,” said Sandra. “You would hide it. I respect that. But now you must give it to me, or we fight.”

“I'm leaving, Sandy. No fight. You win.”

“Warriors don't run.”

“I'm not a warrior. I'm a businessman. We were children. They were stories. Now we're grown, and we don't believe in such things.”

“The stories are true,” said Sandy. “You choose the weapon.”

“Excuse me,” said Jack, stepping to the desk. He opened a drawer and took out the revolver.

“Guns are for cowards,” said Sandy. “That said, I will see what I can do with a gun.”

“The thing is, I only have the one.”

“We both need weapons. That's just common sense.”

He raised the gun toward the ceiling and pulled the trigger. The pin clicked. He brought the gun down, swung the cylinder out: empty.

“Damn it,” he said.

“You have swords,” said Sandy.

Jack put the gun back in the desk. “Sandy,” he said. “How can I put this so you will understand? Remember those daughters?”

“Which ones?”

“Oh, you know. They had one eye. I forget the name. Cúchulainn killed their dad.”

“The children of Calatin.”

“That's right. And the witchcraft they did. So Cúchulainn thought that clovers were soldiers and his land was being destroyed.”

“Sorcery.”

“That's right,” said Jack. “And out he went, before his army could get together, and what happened? He died. You're like him. You're under a spell.”

“Yes, but Cúchulainn would not have met his destiny otherwise,” she said reasonably.

Jack took out the cash box, opened it, and stuffed the bills into the pocket of his coat. “I really do have to go.”

She followed him from the office into the warehouse. He would carry on as if she were not there. Something hit him hard in the shoulder.

“Sandy, that hurt,” he said.

He turned toward her. She had the point of a sword at his chest. And so, despite his misgivings, they took up swords and shields. In the old days they would have used sticks and the lids of garbage cans.

“You poor lost thing,” said Jack.

The fight lasted perhaps fifteen minutes, though it seemed longer. They hacked and parried, charged and retreated. Sandy was better with the sword. Jack would use his shield as a blunt weapon to drive her back. Once he bashed her knee with the hilt of his sword, and she paced, limping, watching him with bright eyes. Jack was tired and bleeding from a cut on the leg. He wondered where they had found the energy when they were children.

With a cry of frustration he made a run at her. She slipped aside and struck his arm with her sword as he went past. Jack stood still. His arm no longer worked. He told it to lift his shield. It couldn't.

At the same moment, Sandy said, “The handle of my shield has broken.”

Jack turned. The shield lay on the floor and the handle was in her hand. Her sword flashed in the warehouse light and landed above his collarbone. He dropped to his knees and fell onto his side.

Sandy put her sword down. She sat on her heels with long fingers resting on her knees. “Say the stories are true.”

“The stories are true.”

“Say you shouldn't have forgot me.”

“I shouldn't have forgot you.”

“Say you're sorry.”

“I am sorry.”

“You were my friend, Jackie.”

Jack lost consciousness. A child again, he stood beneath a lilac and watched a girl walking down the sidewalk. She was new in town, arms gangling at her sides. Breathing the scent of lilacs, he sang a little song as if he hadn't noticed her and their eyes met and they smiled.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

T
HE HEADMASTER'S
instinct proved correct: Micah made a fine volleyball player. The game came easily to him. Playing, there was no past or future, just breath going in and out.

The uniforms of the Deep Rock Lancers were black with red stripes down the side, a handsome, menacing combination. The shorts were long, the jerseys sleeveless. Micah liked riding the team bus and putting on knee pads and heating his legs with Tiger Balm.

The Lancers' coach believed that volleyball embodied many elements of life. The dig was survival, the bump was cooperation, and the set was prayer. The spike, he said, was going home.

He was unusually philosophical for a coach and in fact taught Introduction to Philosophy. Yet he hated to lose and would say things like, “Tonight I found out who has guts and who doesn't,” leaving each player to wonder if he had guts or not.

The Lancers' record improved to 5 and 5 in the Conference of the Golden Sun. One night they played an away game against the conference champions, the Meteors of Mary Ellen Pleasant Country Day. Parents and students filled the bleachers, twiddling their phones, confident of another win.

The Meteors' gym was a vaulted palace compared with the Lancers' crackerbox. Rows of blue-white lights shone from the rafters. Nervous and disorganized at first, the Lancers fell behind. Micah took it upon himself to bring them back with a run of topspin serves that caromed backward from the Meteors' arms. Playing front court, he split the seams of the defense.

The Lancers won the first set, lost the second, and won the third, deciding the match. They danced in wide-eyed celebration, realizing the team they had become.

“Not in our house,” said the Meteors. “Not in our house!”

“It's our house now,” said Micah.

One winter's day, Micah and Charlotte went running along the concrete trough of the Ballona River. After a few miles they rested in a concrete underpass.

“Do you want to go to a show?” said Charlotte. “My mom got tickets from a magician she's dating.”

“Sure.”

“Or maybe you and Thea could go.”

“Don't you want to?”

“Not if you and Thea have your hearts set on it.”

“You and Thea have this weird thing.”

“You are the weird thing that we have.”

Then an old man, his face lined by the sun, came along pushing a grocery cart filled with cans and bottles. He stopped and looked at them, arms resting on the handle of the cart.

“I have beautiful handwriting,” he said. “I use the Palmer Method. All the muscles of the shoulder and the arm must work together. Do you know it?”

Charlotte and Micah said they did not.

“Well, it's hardly surprising,” he said. “The Palmer Method is a thing of the past. Only a few of us keep the memory alive. Watch now. I will show you and perhaps you will become interested and your generation will not forget the old ways.”

He produced a newspaper and pencil from the pockets of his raincoat, asked their names, and stood writing in quiet concentration.

“Done,” he said. “Come see.”

The capitals began with ornamental rings and flowed into looping letters. This is what the man had written:

Charlotte and Micah fix their gaze upon the youthful river.

He tore the page carefully and gave it to Charlotte, who folded it and put it in her hip pocket. Then he took up his cart and moved on.

Soon it began to rain. They could see big round drops splashing in the mossy stream. In the distance the handwriting man opened a red umbrella.

White light flashed around the underpass, followed by thunder, at which point the rain changed from light to heavy, falling straight and bouncing in fine spray from the concrete as the river began to move in rainbow swirls.

Seeing there would be no drier time soon, Micah and Charlotte walked into the rain. They were soon wet to the skin, locks of hair pasted to their temples.

After six months of living in California, this was the first real rain Micah'd seen. He and Charlotte raised their faces, laughing. There was nothing bad in hard rain once you accepted you were in it.

Micah drove Charlotte's pickup northeast through the city. He had no license, and was not old enough, but she had been giving him lessons in the empty lots of Mission Road. It was cold in the cab and she turned on the heater, which blasted old and rubbery air. Charlotte shivered and smiled with excitement.

The city looked like another place in the rain. The bright colors faded and you could see buildings as they were, old and patched with plaster and corrugated metal. Micah sometimes felt that if Tiny could build a large city he would build Los Angeles.

Charlotte lived high above North Main. A river flowed down her street, floating garbage bins of black and blue. Micah drove slowly up the hill, hardly able to see where he was going.

A neighborhood of small stucco houses gave way to open hilltops. Charlotte's house had three stories and was made of concrete with long terraces supported by wooden posts. It was unfinished and didn't look altogether safe.

Charlotte's mother was home in the living room trimming a fern that grew by the window, surrounded by a fringe of cuttings.

“You got caught in it,” said Mrs. Mann.

“I thought you'd be working,” said Charlotte.

“They canceled the flight because of a snowstorm in Chicago.”

She snipped a leaf from the fern and leaned back to survey her work and dropped the leaf on the floor.

“Because you see, everything in the flying world is interconnected,” she said.

“This is Micah.”

Mrs. Mann stood and gave him a pretty smile, much like Charlotte's only with tiny wrinkles around her lips.

“You need dry clothes,” she said.

She went to another part of the house and came back with paint-spattered white coveralls in a neat soft square.

“These belonged to my husband,” she said. “He was an artist and went to Big Sur to do his art, and that was the last we heard of him.”

“Aw, Mom,” said Charlotte, giving her a hug.

Micah waited in Charlotte's room as she showered. Horse trophies and ribbons lined the bookcase. He put the coveralls on the desk, picked up a journal, and leafed through it as gusts of rain battered the house.

Last night got falling down drunk which I know because I fell down. Had not had that much . . . or so I thought! 1 whiskey + 3 glasses of wine. But then I went outside for a cigarette and put it out on the ground and being thoughtful to the environment tried to pick it up. And that is when I fell over and hit my knee on a block of granite. It still hurts today. Know I should not smoke but sometimes I just do in spite of myself.

Feeling guilty, Micah closed the journal and put it back on the desk. Charlotte entered the room in a robe, the long black curls of her hair washed and shining.

Smiling bashfully, she opened the robe for a moment and closed it again and tied the belt.

“Now you know what that's all about,” she said.

He blushed and looked away. She was eighteen and he wondered if three more years would make him so at ease. Doubtful.

Charlotte rummaged in a dresser, coming up with white socks and a T-shirt that she put on top of the coveralls for Micah to wear.

When the cuff of her robe rode up, he got a glimpse of red marks on her arm.

“Did you do that?” he said.

She pushed the sleeve up her arm and looked at the broken skin. “I should hope so.”

“You've got to calibrate that bite, Char.”

She pushed her hair behind her ears. “Yeah, kind of got away from me, that one.”

Micah took a shower. Bottles of hair products lined the tiles and he looked at quite a few before finding one that was shampoo and said so in English. There were ciments and exfoliants and seaweed and other things that sounded like you would buy them in a garden store. Womanhood seemed highly complicated.

He dried off, got dressed, and went out into the house in stocking feet, happy as he'd ever been. Charlotte and her mother stood looking out the kitchen window at lawn chairs and tricycles and brightly colored toys sliding down the hill in the flood.

“People leave everything out,” said Mrs. Mann.

She had made stew with meat and carrots and onions and ginger and small red potatoes. She dipped a ladle in and brought it up.

“Micah, tell me what this needs.”

Micah put his hand on her hand and tasted the stew.

“It's perfect.”

“It needs something.”

Micah searched his mind for spices. He didn't want to get off on the wrong foot by recommending something ridiculous. “Salt,” he said.

“I think you're right.”

The three of them held hands around the table and Mrs. Mann said a prayer and they ate. The storm had made them hungry, and the sound of silverware in the rain was pleasant rather than tense. After supper they cleared the table and Charlotte washed the dishes and handed them to Micah to dry with a dishcloth. A small TV on the counter played scenes of flooded intersections, unmoored trees, snapping power lines.

“I'd better get home,” said Micah.

Mrs. Mann was standing on a chair and moving things around in the pantry.

“I'm not going out in this, and I'm not sending Charlotte out in this,” she said. “But look what I found.”

Charlotte and Micah turned from the television. Mrs. Mann held a cardboard box with yellowed tape binding the split edges.

Charlotte groaned. “Not Risk. I hate Risk.”

Her mother stepped down from the chair and brushed dust from the cover of the box.

“Charlotte loves Risk,” she told Micah. “She's just trying to sound grown-up because you're here.”

Micah called Joan. He spoke to her as Mrs. Mann gestured for the phone.

“Hi, Joan, do you believe this? . . . I know. I know. They're only guessing like all of us. I rather like it, to be honest. . . . So true. Anyway I have a couple of drowned kittens who turned up at my door, and they will be safe with me till morning.”

Charlotte shook her head, hands covering her face. She dragged her fingers slowly down, showing crescents of red beneath her eyes.

“Drowned kittens,” she whispered.

They played Risk on the floor by the woodstove in the living room. Mrs. Mann took Australia right away and captured Asia in stages. She would win, of course, as this is how anyone wins Risk. Micah based his pieces in Africa and Europe, and Charlotte kept raiding from the west, her mother from the east.

Mrs. Mann smoked a cigarette and tipped the ash on a plate on the carpet.

“It's always hard to win in Europe,” she said sympathetically.

The night went on, wood falling in the stove and dice rolling softly. Around ten o'clock Charlotte's mother invaded Alaska with a force too large to dispel, and no one had the resources to take Asia or Ukraine from her.

Micah spent the night on the couch. Light flickered behind the stove grate and the house joints creaked in the wind and rain.

He slept restlessly. The shapes in the room were not the shapes he was used to. He dreamed of soldiers sitting around in a hangar. One played a harmonica. Ethan Frome came in from his school reading wearing a flier's scarf and asking if anyone had seen Mattie.

Micah woke in the dark with a hand on his mouth. Charlotte stood by the sofa in a white nightgown with roses on it.

“I can't sleep,” she said.

Micah lifted the blankets for her to crawl under. He was still wearing the painter's coveralls.

“Can you take those off?” she said.

He stood and took the jumpsuit off. Underneath he wore only the T-shirt and socks she'd given him. Now he had seen what no one saw of her and she had seen the same of him.

They got under the blankets, face-to-face.

“I love you,” said Micah, too fresh from dreams not to say what he meant.

She said, “Charlotte and Micah fix their gaze upon the youthful river.”

A few days later, Micah was home in his room, still reading
Ethan Frome
. The characters could not catch a break. It was the fifth day of rain. They'd awoke to the sound of news helicopters over a house that might fall into the arroyo. The helicopters hovered most of the day before peeling off to the south when the house didn't fall.

Joan's husband knocked on the door. He came in with a box and sat down on the edge of the desk, hitching up the leg of his pants. There was something so adult about the gesture that it made Micah shudder.

“I've noticed something,” said Rob. “In the mornings. You've been having trouble with your face.”

Micah opened the box. It was an electric shaver. “Thank you,” he said.

“It's the same model that Eamon has.”

The shaver felt nice and heavy in his hand. “My dad would never get one of these.”

“There are good arguments on both sides.”

“Well, he saw this television show called
The Twilight Zone
.”

“Oh Christ, Micah.”

“Did you see it?”

“The shaver, the guy, the shaver comes alive, like a cobra, in the bathroom. . . .”

“So yeah, he saw that.”

“
‘A Thing About Machines.' That's what it was called. There's nothing like
The Twilight Zone
in contemporary television.”

“He's a different sort of person.”

Joan and Rob attended a fund-raiser for film restoration at the New Gaslight Hotel in Hollywood. They were photographed in a step-and-repeat before a white backdrop with the restoration society's logo. A woman held paper signs identifying them, for surely, Joan thought, no one would know otherwise:

JOAN GOWER

FORENSIC MYSTIC

ROB HAMMERHILL