Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, page 16
He smiled. Not a space-alien smile, but scary in a different way. The strong white teeth, all lined up, gave Ludi a little quiver of foreboding. She felt some kind of door creaking open...
"I know this is tacky," he said, pulling something small and greenish beige out of his jacket. "But I had a couple million of these printed up, and I can't figure out who I'm supposed to give them to."
He was—Ludi could hardly believe her eyes—he was handing her a business card. She was momentarily immobilized. She had seen such things in movies, but it had always seemed too ... obvious, too blatant, or something. The card said:
EUGENE DEERE, Ph. D.
Senior Researcher, Biogenetics Division
Goddin Forest Research Station
GULF ATLANTIC •Growing the Future•
«AH!» cried Molly, practically tumbling out of the aether. She should have guessed. And yet somehow, seeing him now through Ludi's eyes, Gene Deere was transformed. The same, but weirdly reprocessed.
"So," said Ludi, fingering the nice heavy-stock card, "you work out at the old Goddin base?"
He nodded. He seemed reasonably proud to confess to this.
"Maybe that's where I've seen you before," said Ludi. Then she reminded herself that she was supposed to remain cautious, protect her cover—the more so, now that she knew for sure this guy was an alien monster.
"You've seen me—" said Gene Deere. His bright eyes squinted up; he stared at Ludi as though trying to picture her in a different light, a different costume.
She turned her face quickly away. But not quickly enough.
"Doronicum magnificum," he declared, triumphantly.
Really: how could she not look up at him, after that? She looked and she saw all those teeth lined up and she felt a foreboding even deeper than before.
"Leopard bane," he said. "You were dressed like a yellow daisy."
She nodded, as though some dark imponderable power were compelling her to do so.
"You were one of those demonstrators," Gene went on. It was like he was doing this for his own benefit, not hers: taking it one tiny step at a time.
"Right," she said. "And you were that pompous twerp in the Range Rover."
"Ha!" (Not a mirthful sound.) "You're not quite so—Well, I might as well say it. Quite so airheaded as I imagined you would be."
Ludi detected something strange in this sentence; perhaps not anything that the guy really intended to say. She thought she heard a certain emphasis on the word you: "the way I imagined you might be." As though Gene had been thinking about Ludi, as an individual person, not just as another daisy in the meadow.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't really think—"
"Apparently not," she said, trying to marshal her resources. Though she suspected it might be too late for that.
"What I really thought," said Gene (and he looked unaffected, puppy-doggish), "what I really thought, if you want to know, was, Wow. What beautiful legs."
«That's true!» Molly remembered. She was amazed that a man would admit to something like this.
"Oh, right," said Ludi. "What a totally brilliant pickup line. I bet you get laid a whole lot using that one."
Gene appeared at least mildly shocked. He worked his jaw, but no reply materialized.
"And as long as we're being so refreshingly candid," said Ludi, "I might as well tell you that you are exactly the kind of left-brain right-wing psychosexually fucked-up corporate lackey that I figured you probably were, just from the way you looked behind the wheel of that pretentious car of yours. Just from the way you pushed the button and rolled your window down. And not even all the way down. Like you're too scared to even commit yourself to breathing the same air as people who give a shit about the planet. So I guess it's been a pleasure meeting you. Because it lets me know that I'm not such a bad judge of character after all."
She stood up, having more or less given herself no alternative, and took a step toward the door. She hesitated. Something seemed to be left hanging, some parting shot to be fired.
Gene Deere rotated on his barstool to stare after her—partly in amazement, partly in some sick male helpless emotion encoded in the DNA: you figure it out. No doubt if he was a cave dude, he would have grabbed her and dragged her outside and raped her.
Well, he wasn't a cave dude, though. He was a scientist. A Senior Researcher, Biogenetics. And he worked directly under the Antichrist.
"So research this," Ludi told him. And she grabbed the remaining 2/3 of the medium Mex pizza, and she raked it onto his stomach.
Gene jumped off the barstool as though that was going to do any good. What it did was make the hot pizza ooze down the front of his shirt and pants: guacamole and sour cream everywhere. He roared from the heat of the melted cheese and tore at his clothing. A couple of shirt buttons popped off. A funny-looking pendant dangled from his chest, swinging at the end of a neon green shoelace.
"You look stupid," said Ludi.
«Wow» thought Molly.
"Yeah, wow," said Dan Dan. Who heard everything.
And as Ludi carried her scorched-earth campaign to the front of the Pizza Scene, Deep Herb held open the door for her.
"I hope you enjoyed your meal," he told her. "I can give you a ride home, if you need one. Only I don't get off till closing time."
"Forget it, Herb," she said, stepping out into the street. "I've had enough of guys for one day."
A Glassport cop and a deputy sheriff named Doug were hanging there in front of the police station, taking a cigarette break. They paused in midpuff to look at her.
"Cave guys," said Ludi, turning partway around so as to include the cops in this. "And gender-free guys. And cute guys with tattoos. And asshole guys stealing my car. And every other kind of guy. And
especially good-looking
science dweeb guys
fucking the
Earth."
all this time Tex was inside an acorn.
* * *
Which is not the same as being an acorn.
More like having your Being in an acorn.
Or having your Being partly in this acorn, and partly not. And the partly not is partly in other acorns, and partly in a place that is No Place at all.
Which is how it is to be a dryad.
And Tex thought it was way, way beyond cool.
He sang to himself: I'm in with the dryads. I go where the dryads go.
When you're in with the dryads, you know what the dryads know.
Ba da dum pah—
Human beings from this perspective were like ants. Not size-wise. But in the frantic bustling herdlike seemingly mindless and all too short character of their lives. Racing here and racing there, consumed things, hauling burdens around, making messes, tidying up, nursing their young, ignoring their old, dispatching enemies or getting killed by them, forming alliances and betraying them, procreating and suffering famine and pestilence and invading new territory and dropping dead and melting into the earth. And all in sprawling anonymous masses. To no apparent purpose. Unless the purpose, maybe, was to see how it all comes out.
Only, of course, it never all came out. It just kept going the way it was going. No end. No resolution. Only successive flowerings, contractions, regrowths, new flowerings, ad eternam.
Meanwhile, in the world outside, the scene had changed again.
DA TURTLE'S HOSTEL
Deep in the woods of the western, piedmontese end of Dublin County lies a ghost town called Applemont. An old farming village, it perished when the last of the farms went fallow. Its church and its general store were overrun by deer mice while moose and black bears and coyotes returned to the surrounding countryside. A young woodland sprouted in derelict cornfields, gardens, pastures, and unpaved streets. This is the way the world goes on.
In a legal and political sense, Applemont still exists. Its boundaries are delineated by dotted black lines in the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer, denoting an unincorporated township. Such needs as its remaining few residents might have (hunting permits, birth certificates, food stamps) are attended to by the county government in Glassport.
There being no town in a strictly functional sense, however, there are no property taxes. There is no mayor. There is no Planning Board, Road Commissioner, or Building Code Enforcement Officer. The Sheriffs Department cruises by on routine patrols, or when summoned to the scene of a domestic spat, but seldom ventures any distance off the two numbered highways. These features exercise a powerful appeal to certain categories of latter-day American, including:
Back-to-the-landers who migrated here in the '70s
Cantankerous backwoods types who want to be left alone
Passamaquoddy Indians, whose ancestors are buried here
Fundamentalist Xian home-schoolers
2nd Amendment cultists
Tax resisters
Feral teenagers
A retired cocaine distributor
And Jesse, thought Tex: focusing. Syzygy. The wolves. The Hostel.
Yes.
An Isuzu Trooper with Syzygy Prague at the wheel and Ari the elf in the passenger seat and Tex the acorn in the way-back turned off the paved highway onto the first of a succession of dilapidated fire roads, logging roads, and finally a glorified bear path. This was Jesse's driveway and Jesse had determined long ago to leave it this way, only marginally and seasonally navigable. Good for business, he had ruled. When you consider the types of people we are dealing with.
Syzygy hadn't objected. It was not the sort of thing she cared about. And Ari didn't care, and the other kids that came and went (the balance remaining slightly toward the Came column) got a kick out of it. It put them one step—giant and muddy—further removed from whatever they were running from.
After bouncing and plunging and sliding up the bear path for half a mile or so, the Isuzu came to a big rustic sign suspended from an overhanging oak limb.
DA TURTLE'S HOSTEL
Home of
PROPHETS OF DELIRIUM
and
HOWLING-AT-THE-LOON NEST, C.A.W.
"If you don't like it, you can't have any!"
Syzygy slammed the Trooper to a halt.
"I can't wait to tell Jesse," said Ari, popping his door open. He bounded off before Syzygy could get a reply organized. She sighed instead. It was the most ordinary sound Tex had ever heard her make.
From the parking area, a network of well-marked and maintained trails led into the forest. The one Syzygy chose ran between a male-and-female pair of extraordinarily cold-hardy American hollies—a species almost never encountered north of Boston—and then sloped up a hillside between mature red oaks. The path had been neatly stepped-off in a series of landings secured by sawn logs, in the Civilian Conservation Corps manner. This was Syzygy's private path. Jesse lived at the downhill end of the compound, near the open marshes and the pond, where the animals were more comfortable. The kids lived about halfway between, in a refurbished Adirondack-style hunting lodge that had been falling down from neglect when Jesse bought the place.
Syzygy's house she had built herself, after taking a 3-week intensive course at the Shelter Institute. Someday architectural historians will recognize, even celebrate, the distinctive school of owner-built homes the Institute has spawned all over the North Woods. People will seek them out, like Usonian houses on the Prairie. In the meantime, you had to respect them chiefly in terms of what they were not. They were not mobile homes. They were not painted white. They were not likely to lure undesirable elements like retirees from Connecticut.
Syzygy kicked open the heavy, Z-braced plank door and left Guillermo's cloak on a rocking chair just inside the living room. She stepped past the huge Russian fireplace at the center of the house to check for e-mail in the kitchen. That was Syzygy's headquarters: she made her living by writing a cooking column called The Kitchen Witch which ran in a number of alternative tabloids. The column was distinguished by its jumble of old-fashioned country cuisine, exotic dishes culled from Syzygy's Irish-Romany heritage, and magical potions you could concoct with items you probably already had lying around the house. Lately she had opened a site on the World Wide Web. There too she quickly acquired a following. Her in-box was seldom empty. It was a quirky, peaceable, satisfying life.
Then, of course, there were the kids. And the weird thing with Jesse. It got stranger and stranger. But Tex had never wanted to get into any of that.
A loud knock came on the door and Syzygy yelled, "An de bheoaibd no de mhairbh thu?" without looking around. She was busy, flipping through the day's messages, checking the charge on the batteries connected to the photovoltaic panels, spooning out vittles for her skulk of coon cats. The big door groaned open and Guillermo Goban stepped through.
"I understand you've got something of mine," he said.
"What?"
Syzygy's head was inside the giant, high-efficiency refrigerator. Guillermo stepped cautiously into the living room.
"Who's that?" Syzygy's muffled voice came out.
Guillermo said nothing. He was staring around the room, taking in the assortment of furnishings. Most of them had been either reclaimed from the dump or knocked together out of scrap wood. There were hand-loomed rugs, Penobscot brown-ash baskets, and books stacked up in high, Pisa-style towers. The pelt of a huge buck, gathered and tied into a pouch, hung from an exposed beam at ceiling height. Syzygy had found the animal, wounded by a hunter, bleeding to death in the woods. She had strangled it with her bare hands and then, with an ordinary kitchen knife, she had gutted it, buried its meat and entrails, and wrapped up the bones in its bloody skin. That's what the old sorcerers of the steppes had done, to ensure that the spirit of the animal would be reborn. The practice had also found its way into such unlikely places as the Lakota legend of the Buffalo Dance. So Syzygy thought it only prudent to haul the bones and skin back home, as a token of hospitality toward any other wandering spirits who might happen by. And that's what the thing was, hanging in her living room. It kind of made you stop and think.
While Guillermo was thinking, and Syzygy was excavating something from the geologic depths of her refrigerator, a small animal—a red squirrel—squeezed through the gap between the jamb and the Z-braced door. The squirrel, behaving as though it had been sent here on a definite mission (which is how red squirrels always act), rose on its hind legs and darted its eyes about the room. Only Guillermo: no problem.
Speedily, purposefully, it leapt onto the rocking chair and rooted with its front paws among the folds of the Wizard cloak. It dug for a second or two, then paused and lifted its head to check for danger, then dug some more. Within half a minute, it unearthed the floppy disk. It grabbed this with its mouth and dropped it onto the floor.
At the small clatter, Guillermo looked around.
"So," Syzygy's voice came from the kitchen. "You were saying what? Were you looking for me, or Jesse? Have we met, by the way?"
"Um, I don't, no," said Guillermo, distracted.
The squirrel plunged once again, hurriedly, to its task. It dug and rooted and finally found the little brown acorn with Tex inside it. This it seized between its paws and stuffed into one bulging cheek. Then, its quarry secured, it jumped down from the chair, made an irreverent chitter and scooted out the door.
Syzygy's mother blamed this kind of thing on the Fair Folk. Sometimes she was correct. Either way, the outcome was much the same.
Away, away the red squirrel ran. Over the storm drain and through the woods. To its great-great-grandfather's house. Currently unoccupied. Where it paused to dart its eyes about, red-squirrel style. And expostulate: Cheet cheet.
Cowering in his acorn, held snugly in the warm moist cheek-pouch, Tex felt breathless. That was a purely metaphorical sensation, like the pain of a phantom limb.
Down, down the red squirrel scurried. Into an old garter snake's cold-weather hole. Under a greenstone boulder, its underside damp and smelling of lime. Finally out into an open chamber, its roof supported by an arch of yew roots whose curve traced out the sacred Palladian ratio of 2 units of rise per 9 units of linear extension. Here, the red squirrel opened its mouth and disgorged the acorn onto a bed of dry pine needles.
Tex was prepared to be eaten. He regarded the prospect with an odd abeyance of emotion, as though it couldn't be that much worse than anything else that had happened lately. But the squirrel turned and scampered away.
And Tex found himself alone
in the darkness
of the Underworld.
FAMILIARS
Close on the squirrel's heels (if a squirrel has heels) Syzygy appeared from the kitchen holding a Tupperware container labeled organic miso.
Yeah, right, thought Guillermo. He said, "I came for my cloak. You had no right to take it."
"Stop," said Syzygy. She held the plastic vessel before her, as though it contained a powerful ward (as it might well have, if only Guillermo knew). "I don't do conflict with males. You'll have to wait till Jesse gets here."
"Men," said Guillermo.
Syzygy lifted the ward higher. "What?"
"Please say men," he told her, "not males. Unless you'd like to be called a female instead of a woman."
"I don't care what you call me," she said honestly. "I told you, I don't do conflict. Jesse takes care of that. He'll be here in a minute."
Less than a minute. Ari had found Jesse down among the breeding pens and lured him up the hill with the promise of a magic cloak with an enchanted acorn and a floppy disk inside it. Implausibly as it must have seemed to Guillermo (though this happened with Syzygy all the time), the heavy door swung open precisely on cue, and the wild boy blew in. Followed by his short and unintimidating daddy. Followed by a large full-blooded timber wolf.
"Hey," said Jesse, glancing noncommittally at Guillermo. He wore large dirty Bean boots and an auto mechanic's coverall, olive drab. He was dark, like Ari, but more heavily built.
"Mom," said Ari, "where'd you put it?"
"Rrrrrr," said the timber wolf, whose name was Gus.
