"He"s a very busy man, Momma."
"Not too busy for me," Joyce said. She was in her thirty-ninth year but she behaved like a woman twice that age. The slow way she raised her head from the pillow as if every inch was a triumph over gravity; the fluttering hands and eyelids; that perpetual sigh in her voice. She had cast herself as a movie consumptive, and would not be dissuaded from the role by mere medical opinion. She dressed for the role, in sickroom pastels; she let her hair, which was a rich brunette, grow long, not caring to fashion it or pin it up. She wore no trace of make-up, which further enhanced the impression of a woman tottering on the tip of the abyss. All in all, Jo-Beth was glad Momma no longer went out in public. People would talk. But that left her here, in the house, calling her daughter up and down the stairs. Up and down, up and down.
When, as now, Jo-Beth"s irritation reached screaming pitch she reminded herself that her mother had her reasons for this withdrawal. Life hadn"t been easy for an unmarried woman bringing up her children in a town as judgmental as the Grove. She"d earned her malady in censure and humiliation.
"I"ll get Pastor John to call," Jo-Beth said. "Now listen, Momma, I"ve got to go."
"I know, honey, I know."
Jo-Beth returned to the door, but Joyce called after her.
"No kiss?" she said.
"Momma-"
"You never miss kissing me."
Dutifully Jo-Beth went back to the window, and kissed her mother on the cheek.
"You take care," Joyce said.
"I"m fine."
"I don"t like you working late."
"This is not New York, Momma."
Joyce"s eyes flickered towards the window, from which she watched the world go by.
"Makes no difference," she said, the lightness going from her voice. "There"s no place safe."
It was a familiar speech. Jo-Beth had been hearing it, in one version or another, since childhood. Talk of the world as a Valley of Death, haunted by faces capable of unspeakable malice. That was the chief comfort Pastor John gave Momma. They agreed on the presence of the Devil in the world; in Palomo Grove.
"I"ll see you in the morning," Jo-Beth said.
"I love you, honey."
"I love you too, Momma."
Jo-Beth closed the door and started downstairs.
"Is she asleep?"
Tommy-Ray was at the foot of the flight.
"No. She"s not."
"d.a.m.n."
"You should go in and see her."
"I know I should. Only she"s going to give me a hard time about Wednesday."
"You were drunk," she said. "Hard liquor, she kept saying. True?"
"What do you think? If we"d been brought up like normal kids, with liquor around the house, it wouldn"t go to my head."
"So it"s her fault you got drunk?"
"You"ve got something against me, too, haven"t you? s.h.i.t. Everybody"s got something against me."
Jo-Beth smiled, and put her arms around her brother. "No, Tommy, they haven"t. They all think you"re wonderful and you know it."
"You too?"
"Me too."
She kissed him, lightly, then went to the mirror to check her appearance.
"Pretty as a picture," he said, coming to stand beside her. "Both of us."
"Your ego," she said. "It"s getting worse."
"That"s why you love me," he said, gazing at their twin reflections. "Am I growing more like you or you like me?"
"Neither."
"Ever seen two faces more alike?"
She smiled. There was an extraordinary resemblance between them. A delicacy in Tommy-Ray"s bones matched by clarity in hers which had both of them idolized. She liked nothing better than to walk out hand in hand with her brother, knowing she had beside her a companion as attractive as any girl could wish, and knowing he felt the same. Even among the forced beauties of the Venice boardwalk they turned heads.
But in the last few months they hadn"t gone out together. She"d been working long hours at the Steak House, and he"d been out with his pals among the beach crowd: Scan, Andy and the rest. She missed the contact.
"Have you been feeling weird these last couple of days?" he asked, out of nowhere.
"What kind of funny?"
"I don"t know. Probably just me. Only I feel like everything"s coming to an end."
"It"s almost summer. Everything"s just beginning."
"Yeah, I know...but Andy"s gone off to college, so f.u.c.k him. Scan"s got this girl in L.A., and he"s real private with her. I don"t know. I"m left here waiting, and I don"t know what for."
"So don"t."
"Don"t what?"
"Wait. Take off somewhere."
"I want to. But..." He studied her face in the mirror. "Is it true? You don"t feel...strange?"
She returned his look, not certain she wanted to admit to the dreams she"d been having, in which she was being carried by the tide, and all her life was waving to her from the sh.o.r.e. But if not to Tommy, whom she loved and trusted more than any creature alive, to whom?
"OK. I admit it." she said, "I do feel something."
"What""
She shrugged. "I don"t know. Maybe I"m waiting too."
"Do you know whatfor?"
"Nope."
"Neither do I."
"Don"t we make a pair?"
She reran the conversation with Tommy as she drove down to the Mall. He had, as usual, articulated their shared feelings. The last few weeks had been charged with antic.i.p.ation. Something was going to happen soon. Her dreams knew it. Her bones knew it. She only hoped it was not delayed, because she was coming to the point, with Momma and the Grove, and the job at the Steak House, when she would lose her cool completely. It was a race now, between the fuse on her patience and the something on the horizon. If it hadn"t come by summer, she thought (whatever it was, however unlikely), then she"d up and go looking for it.
II.
n.o.body seemed to walk much in this town, Howie noticed. On his three-quarter-hour stroll up and back down the Hill he encountered only five pedestrians, and they all had children or dogs in tow to justify their waywardness. Short though this initial journey was it took him to a fair vantage point from which to grasp something of the town"s lay-out. It also sharpened his appet.i.te.
Beef for the desperado, he thought, and selected But-rick"s Steak House from the eating places available in the Mall. It was not large, and not more than half full. He took a table at the window, opened the tattered copy of Hesse"s Siddhartha, and continued his struggle with the text, which was in the original German. The book had belonged to his mother, who had read and re-read it many times-though he could not remember her so much as uttering a word of the language she was apparently fluent in. He was not. Reading the book was like an interior stuttering; he fought for the sense, catching it only to lose it again.
"Something to drink?" the waitress asked him.
He was about to say "c.o.ke" when his life changed.
Jo-Beth stepped over the threshold of Butrick"s the way she had three nights a week for the last seven months, but tonight it was as if every other time had been a rehearsal for this stepping; this turning; this meeting of eyes with the young man sitting at table five. She took him in with a glance. His mouth was half open. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. There was a book in his hand. Its owner"s name she didn"t know, couldn "t know. She"d never set eyes on him before. Yet he watched her with the same recognition she knew was on her own face.
It was like being born, he thought, seeing this face. Like coming out of a safe place into an adventure that would take his breath away. There was nothing more beautiful in all the world than the soft curve of her lips as she smiled at him.
And smiling now, like a perfect flirt. Stop it, she told herself, look away! He"ll think you"re out of your mind staring. But then he"s staring too, isn"t he?
I"ll keep looking-as long as she keeps looking -as long as he keeps looking- "Jo-Beth!"
The summons came from the kitchen. She blinked.
"Did you say a c.o.ke?" the waitress asked him.
Jo-Beth glanced towards the kitchen-Murray was calling her, she had to go-then back at the boy with the book. He still had his eyes fixed on her.
"Yes," she saw him say.
The word was for her, she knew. Yes, go, he said, I"ll still be here.
She nodded, and went.
The whole encounter occupied maybe five seconds, but it left them both trembling.
In the kitchen Murray was his usual martyred self.
"Where have you been?"
"Two minutes late, Murray."
"I make it ten. There"s a party of three in the corner It"s your table."
"I"m putting my ap.r.o.n on."
"Hurry."
Howie watched the kitchen, door for her re-emergence Siddhartha forgotten. When she appeared she didn"t look his way but went to serve a table on the far side of the restaurant He wasn"t distressed that she failed to look. An understanding had been reached between them in that first exchange of gazes. He would wait all night if need be, and all through tomorrow if that was what it took, until she had finished the work and looked at him again.
In the darkness below Palomo Grove the inspirers of these children still held on to each other as they had when they"d first fallen to earth, neither willing to risk the other"s freedom Even when they"d risen to touch the bathers, they"d gone together, like twins joined at the hip. Fletcher had been slow comprehending the Jaff"s intention that day. He"d thought the man planned to draw his wretched terata out of the girls But his mischief had been more ambitious than that. It was the making of children he was about, and, squalid as it was, Fletcher had been obliged to do the same. He was not proud of his a.s.sault. As news of its consequences had reached them his shame had deepened. Once, sitting by a window with Raul, he had dreamed of being sky. Instead his war with the Jaff had reduced him to a spoiler of innocents, whose futures they had blighted with touch. The Jaff had taken no little pleasure in Fletcher"s distress. Many times, as the years in darkness pa.s.sed, Fletcher would sense his enemy"s thoughts turning to the children they"d made, and wondering which would come first to save their true father.
Time did not mean to them what it had meant before the Nuncio. They didn"t hunger, nor did they sleep. Buried together like lovers, they waited in the rock. Sometimes they could hear voices from the overground, echoing down pa.s.sages opened by the subtle but perpetual grinding of the earth. But these s.n.a.t.c.hes offered no clue to the progress of their children, with whom their mental links were at best ten-uous. Or at least had been, until tonight.
Tonight their offspring had met, and contact was suddenly clear, as though their children had understood something of their own natures, seeing their perfect opposites, and had unwittingly opened their minds to the creators. Fletcher found himself in the head of a youth called Howard, the son of Trudi Katz. Through the boy"s eyes he saw his enemy"s child just as the Jaff saw Howie from his daughter"s head.
This was the moment they"d waited for. The war they"d fought half way across America had exhausted them both. But their children were in the world to fight for them now; to finish the battle that had been left unresolved for two decades. This time, it would be to the death.
Or so they"d expected. Now, for the first time in their lives, Fletcher and the Jaff shared the same pain-like a single spike thrust through both their souls.
This was not war, d.a.m.n it. This was nothing like war.
"Lost your appet.i.te?" the waitress wanted to know.
"Guess I have," Howie replied.
"You want me to take it away?"
"Yeah."
"You want coffee? Dessert?"
"Another c.o.ke."
"One c.o.ke."
Jo-Beth was in the kitchen when Beverly came through with the plate.
"Waste of good steak," Beverly said.
"What"s his name?" Jo-Beth wanted to know.