The Book of Joby (55 page)

Getting rich had done little for it either. Two years after winning the California lottery, her life offered little more satisfaction than it ever had.

She sat back down, wincing at the pain in her spine, and the wind in her stomach.

Now she had a beautiful mansion in the Oakland Hills. Surrounded by lavish gardens it was a true estate. But this had only left her coping with
swarms of annoying housekeepers, gardeners, and administrative assistants whom she kept having to fire for betraying details of her private life to solicitors or the press.

The one thing she really had hoped for after her sudden rise to riches was influence. All her life she’d watched the world go to ruin around her while the nation’s rich and powerful seemed to pursue no greater purpose than keeping themselves comfortably entertained. This outrage had fostered a cold fury within her breast for so many years that she could no longer remember being without it. Then her numbers had come up, one after another on that fabulous, impossible evening, and she’d thought that, finally, she’d have the power to halt the disintegration of at least some small portion of her world.

Since then, she’d sent sizable checks to an impressive array of politicos, attended countless fund-raising dinners and exclusive salons, even stooped to speaking up at public meetings. But all her ideas about restoring some semblance of decency to modern society were still ignored. Oh, for what she paid them any number of public officials were happy to sit there nodding for as long as she had breath to go on. But while her money, it seemed, interested them as much as anyone else’s, her thoughts on law and order did not.

Memories of that disgraceful riot in Berkeley two months past resurfaced like putrid bubbles of marsh gas in her mind. To have put people through all that just days before Christmas!
Should have shot them all,
she thought crossly.

Feeling weary, she pushed her plate away unfinished and stared out the window at her garden, suddenly imagining a quiet little village full of charming cottages where life went on graciously from day to day, as it had done in better times. Someplace at the edge of the world, where the urban madness encroaching on her here was still just a dim, unpleasant rumor.

Vivid pictures bloomed in her mind: neatly trimmed lawns, a rose-covered arbor, a sunny table on a bluff top, tea laid out against a backdrop of blue summer sky and untroubled ocean bordered in clean white surf.
Yes,
she thought.
Out on the coast there must still be any number of quiet, isolated little towns.

Suddenly afire with dreams of escape, she left the remains of her breakfast for what’s-her-name, the latest housekeeper, and went upstairs to pack. It was a lovely day for January, and she’d still gone hardly anywhere in the sporty little car she’d bought that fall. A pleasant drive up the coast seemed made to order. Who knew? Perhaps she’d find her little Shangri-la, and leave this squalid city to collapse under the weight of its own depravity.

“Thank you for making the time, Jake.”

“My pleasure, Father Crombie.” Jake stomped as much of the mud and sawdust off his boots as he could, then wiped them thoroughly on the rectory’s broad straw mat before following the old man into his living room. “So what’s the problem?”

“Well, it may not be a problem. It concerns Joby Peterson.”

“Ah,” Jake said, seeming unsurprised.

“What do you think of him?” Crombie asked.

“Nice enough. A little unsure of himself. Spends a lot of time fixin’ things that aren’t broken, but good at heart, I think.” Jake paused, seeming to study Crombie before adding, “And maybe a Trojan horse?”

“Yes, I was certain you would notice,” Crombie sighed.

“Well, there was that little quake, and then that little storm, within hours of his arrival,” Jake drawled grimly. “You know something more specific, I take it?”

As Crombie related his first encounter with a nine-year-old boy seeking advice about fighting the devil and asking questions about the Grail, Jake listened with quiet intensity. Crombie went on to describe Joby’s reference to a grandfather from Taubolt, and the other small fragments he’d gleaned of Joby’s more recent past during their occasional chats since Christmas. “Do you recognize the name?” Crombie asked at last. “Emery Emerson?”

“I remember him,” Jake said. “Left here as a boy. Haven’t seen or heard of him since. So what are you suggesting, Father?”

“That Joby may, in fact, be involved in some conflict with Hell of which he has become unconscious through the years and, therefore, may both need our help and pose a threat to our well-being.”

“Interesting theory.” Jake smiled. “You’ve waited to tell me all this ’cause . . .?”

“I’m not certain of these assertions,” Crombie shrugged, “and thought others here should have a chance to know the boy better before judging him.” He looked down and sighed. “I like him, Jake. I’ve liked him since the day we met, and I feared that, on the heels of that storm, he might not receive the fair hearing he deserved.” Crombie looked up expecting to see dissapproval on Jake’s face but found there a broad smile instead.

“You’ve been smart to keep this to yourself,” Jake said. “Spread such tales, he’d get wind of it soon enough, and if he really doesn’t know such a thing about himself, there could be some damn good reasons he’s not supposed to.”

“Then, should the Council know?”

Jake shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not yet at least. It’s lucky you’ve
got such a good line on the boy. Forewarned is forearmed and all. But you could be right about that fair hearin’. Folks are still pretty skittish after what went on here over Christmas. I say we just watch him like hawks until the evidence points to somethin’ clearer. In fact, we should keep him where he’d be visible to more people more of the time.”

Crombie allowed himself a smile at last. “I’m relieved that you feel this way, Jake. It so happens I have a notion about what we might draw him into, if you think it safe to put him in closer contact with the children.”

“Nothin’ more watched or better guarded ’round here than the children,” Jake said. “What’d you have in mind?”

As he wheeled another load of newly split firewood toward the backyard, Joby couldn’t help feeling proud of how good the inn was looking. Mrs. Lindsay had kept him working hard, chopping and stacking wood, repairing her fence and gardens, hauling away storm wrack, fixing the eaves. Taubolt had recovered from the storm with amazing speed. The whole town had worked together, until there was hardly a reminder to be seen of the “hundred-year storm” as people were calling it.

Joby was really getting into the whole country living thing. Jake had come around after Christmas with the load of wood that Joby was splitting now. He had taught Joby what a “cord” was—and the distinction in utility between softwoods and hardwoods—without once making Joby feel foolish for not knowing. He’d even shown him how to swing a maul, “so they won’t think you’re new,” he’d said with a wink.

By far the strangest bit of rural lore Joby had encountered so far had come when Mrs. Lindsay sent him to the hardware store for “a bottle of lion piss.” Sure he must have heard wrong, he’d asked for clarification, and she’d explained that squirting it on her gardens kept the deer away. So Joby had headed for the hardware store apprehensive that this was some kind of joke played on newcomers. But Franklin Clark had handed him an eight-ounce squeeze bottle of mountain lion urine without cracking a smile, and Joby had chuckled all the way back, trying to imagine how they got mountain lions to piss into a bottle, and wondering if deer could really be dumb enough to think there were lions hiding in some little clump of geraniums.

All in all, not an evening had come since Joby’s arrival that he did not climb into bed feeling dazed with gratitude for the way his life had been so suddenly transformed.

Nonetheless, he was aware of another, darker feeling that sometimes lurked
behind his gratitude. He’d done his best to forget the strange experiences he’d had in church on Christmas morning, but in the rare, undistracted moment late at night or when he hadn’t anything to do, Joby still felt hunted . . . by what, he didn’t know. Nor, to be honest, did he want to. He just did his best to focus on the future and hoped that time would erase whatever strange discomfort was continuing to plague him.

Shaking off these shadows yet again, he went back to the wheel barrow just as Mrs. Lindsay leaned out an upper-story window and called down that Bridget O’Reilly had just phoned to ask if Joby would mind coming up to see her at the high school.

“Want me to finish up the wood first?” he asked.

“There’s no hurry about that, dear. You’d best go see what she wants.”

Perched just below the church on a hillside above the headlands north of town, Taubolt’s high school was a single, surprisingly modern building: square, with low white walls and high red-tiled roof, like a squat pyramid. A circle of teenagers stood in the pale winter sunshine on the small front lawn, deftly using their feet, knees, and foreheads to pass three small cloth balls through the air between them. A second group sat clustered in animated conversation near the school’s main doors; one wore a giant foam-rubber top hat, while a taller boy with large obsidian eyes and handsome, dusky features had wrapped his brown shirt turban-like around his head, like a young maharaja.

Jaunty greetings forming in Joby’s head evaporated as the Hacky Sack balls fell to earth with quiet slaps and everyone turned to watch his arrival in silence.

“Hey.” He smiled as he approached the group beside the doors.

“Hi,” replied the turbaned boy. Two others tentatively raised their hands.

Careful to keep smiling as he pulled open the large plate-glass door, Joby felt their scrutiny like the sudden silence after a trapeze accident at the circus. Then he stepped into a single large room, two stories high, reverberating with the musical roar of forty or fifty more kids laughing, chasing, teasing, tossing, ebbing, and flowing like a swirling flock of blackbirds. At first he thought the whole building just a shell around this one huge chamber. Then he saw doors and interior windows opening onto this central hall from what he surmised were classrooms and offices. Ample light found its way in through a crazy assortment of windows, skylights, and glass-block walls.

Once again, however, as the kids began to notice Joby, a sudden silence swept the room as everyone turned to look at him.

“Hi, Joby,” said Rose, emerging from a group of girls across the room.

“Hi, Rose.” He smiled, feeling a palpable shift in tension around the room, as if some corporate intake of breath had been released. But still, no one spoke. “Is Mrs. O’Reilly around?” Joby asked.