Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, page 2
This shut the boys up long enough for her to whisper to Tex, "Come on, Bear. Let's go get some fresh air. The show's over."
Channel 5 News, she may have meant. The fat weather dude was on screen now, doing his folksy live broadcast from the back deck, where pots of Fischer geraniums, pumped up on high-phosphorus time-release fertilizer, bloomed so lustily you could practically hear them panting. Then Molly gave him a nudge and he stepped onto the rickety ladder. Someday this thing is going to break, he thought, and somebody is going to fall and get hurt.
"So what do you think?" said Molly, easing up close to him, moving into the little niche between his side and his left arm. "You want to go back to the boat?"
Tex shook his head. Together they stepped out into the chilly evening.
The moon was up, though there was still a good bit of daylight left; a couple days short of full, it sailed high in the sky with a few scrappy pieces of cloud drifting far beneath it. The air smelled like spruce needles, like damp earth, and like stones. In back of Eben's barn a field sloped down to the ocean, which shimmered eerily in the gathering dusk. It was as though some of the day's sunshine had been absorbed by the water and now was seeping back out.
He stopped where he was—boot heels sunk in mud scented with wintergreen, as dark and sweet as chocolate—and turned to Molly. The two of them looked at one another. Moonlight, ebbing dusk and ancient sparkling suns made a fitting light for them. Molly with her Guatemalan peasant vest, a raven feather braided into her straight brown hair, was attractive in an unfussy, earth-mama sort of way. She looked to be early-40ish, softening with age, serene. Tex was a few years older and a piece of work. His hair was still dark, dangling like a rope to his bottommost couple of vertebrae. His mostly gray facial hair was sculpted into sideburns and moustaches that dangled like walrus tusks. He wore a fetish in each ear—little silver likenesses of Bear, the guardian of strength and medicine—and from a leather cord around his neck a Tibetan skull pendant, carved from human bone. He was of medium height and stringy, so that his clothes tended to flap. But what you really noticed were his eyes: so full of energy they appeared to beam messages out at you, independent of the rest of his face.
"Bear?" Molly asked him again. "Ready to go home now?"
He smiled at her. Something mischievous there. The eyes flashed their unbreakable code. "No," he said. "Not yet. Let's go up to the Well."
THE MOON & MARIJUANA
The rusty Saab scraped its butt as it creaked off the town road onto a rain-gullied dirt-and-gravel fire lane marked only by an aged, 3-trunked white birch onto which people had nailed placards announcing, usually, the names of their summer cottages. There was a certain art to this.
CHUTE INN (No Vacancy)
LOCH MESS MONSTERS
CAMP KERFLOP II
OKIES IN EXILE
THE OTHER PENDLETONS
ULTIMA TOOLEY
The moon was close to straight overhead now. Peering down through the almost absolutely black webwork of needles and branches. Beautiful. And scary, sort of. So far away; so ancient and powerful. Inhumanely serene. This would be the moon known as Little Frogs Croak by some Native Americans and as Too Cold to Plant by others, as Willow by the pre-Christian Norse, and as Faerie by the Witches, or at least the Witches that Tex knew personally. (The idea, he guessed, being that now that the weather was relatively decent the Fair Folk would come out again to dance at night in their enchanted glades. And so would the Witches behind the hedge at Pippa's place in Pickup City.) To most people now, of course, this moon tonight had no name at all—no color, no tree, no totem animal, no seasonal handle or magical aspect or anything at all tagged on to it. And there you have the whole sickness of the world, the starvation of its spirit, metaphorically speaking, anyhow. So Tex believed.
Now over the next-to-biggest hill and down into a dale as black and deep as the night itself the old Saab bumped and lurched and scraped its underbelly. Molly began to took alarmed though she had been here before, had made the drive herself under worse road conditions than these. But the physical state of the road isn't everything; there was something about this night distinct from other days and nights; there is always a certain immanence in the instant, the now, and Molly felt the presence and the strangeness of this in a different way than Tex, perhaps (at any rate she was less inclined to blame it on anything), but she felt it all the same. The blackness within the dark. The empty spaces gaping unmarked and hazardous between one quantum of passing time and the next.
Along the bottom of the gulch between the biggest and the next-to-biggest hills the spring runoff had carved a channel for itself. Water gushed through, more clearly heard than seen. Before them the headlights picked out fallen logs, rocks laid naked by erosion, and a set of muddy fissures made by the tires of somebody's ATV. The snowmelt revealed itself as a chain of ripples, slithery, like the skin of some faintly glowing snake, as colorlessly effulgent as moonlight. The Saab crept closer, halted inches short.
"Think you can make it, Bear?"—sounding much more anxious than she had expected or wanted to, Molly asked him. Tex said nothing. In truth, he thought nothing, one way or the other. Nothing he could have said. He yanked up the hand-brake and left the engine chuttering in neutral, stepped onto the wet road, and leaned down to plumb the water with his hand.
It was so cold his fingers felt severed from his body. When they brushed the pebbly bottom of the ditch his nerve endings barely signaled it. He kept his hand down needlessly long, just for the sensation of doing so. Digging it: the altered state. Finally he stood back up because his back began to hurt. Middle age & such shit. Up in the air again, the fingers felt changed into something different, shards of thrilling pain, the sort of feeling that energizes you.
"It's cool," he said, climbing aboard and slamming the door too hard. "It's not too deep. Just freezing."
Molly rubbed his fingers on the gearshift knob. (Wrong hand, though.)
"I love you, Bear," she said.
"I love you too, Raven," he told her. And they splashed through and over the water and up again, ascending the biggest hill.
At the top was a good place to park—the disused driveway of the oldest cottage in these woods, a Craftsman-style, mail-order bungalow, probably put together back when the ghost village of Applemont, down the other side of the hill, was still breathing. Tex swung the Saab into the drive and only belatedly noticed twin sets of tire tracks leading through the grass and goldenrod stalks and baby fir seedlings ahead of him. "Somebody's been sleeping in my bed," he growled.
"They sure have," said Molly. "In fact, they're sleeping in it right now."
Barely, near the limit of their range, the headlights caught something way up the drive, something that glinted back, red and silver.
"Too much," said Tex. "Who could it be?" Molly shrugged. "I wonder if it's still cool to park here."
Tex made a scowly face and he said, "I'll just leave it in the road, I guess."
The second weird discovery of the evening was that, right where the path branched off into the woods that led, eventually, to the Well, a sign had been posted. And not just your ordinary tacked-up plastic no hunting sign, but an elaborate custom job.
NOTICE
Private Property
Trespassing for any reason
is strictly prohibited.
"Property rights," Tex said darkly, as though uttering an epithet.
Molly took his hand and they started up the trail together.
Even with the moon as high and bright as it was, you could barely see where you were walking. It was easier to let your eyes lose their focus and your feet find their way by pure bodily intuition. This was an excellent path, that way. After they had got into the rhythm of it—left foot, right foot, mashing down and springing off the loam, bodies swaying, breaths and heartbeats in sync—Tex produced from somewhere in the mysterious depths of his vest an awesomely fat finger's worth of last year's homegrown. He fired it up with his Navy Zippo, a relic older than the Saab, and Molly was glad to take it. Somehow the skunky smell and the mold-and-must taste (it had been an indica x sativa clone, selected for its pretty purple-tinged leaf color as well as its truly Plutonian head) seemed to normalize the situation, to reattach her to the things that were most pertinent. The buzz coming on felt like when you raise your head suddenly, realize you've half nodded off—still groggy a little, confused for a second or two, so you make a sort of cursory psychic inventory, a rapid mapping-out of the gestalt.
Tex began to whistle. Molly strained to identify the melody. Something wistful: it eluded her, though the memory of what it was seemed close at hand.
The path curled leftward, widdershins, and became a sort of fissure etched in the downward slope. Big rocks stood around them, luminous with condensation and draped with opulent velvet coverlets of moss. Ferns raised their fiddleheads toward the moon, and the whole schmeer of ice-white spring wildflowers—trillium, blood root, foam flower, Canada mayflower, goldthread, creeping anemone—sparkled against the dark forest underfloor like a reflection of the stars overhead. All of these plants had older names and older uses than anyone now remembered. Tex's business partner Jesse knew some of them from his grandmother but there was so much even she had forgotten; nobody explained to her as a little girl that an Age of Information was dawning in which Wisdom and Understanding would count for zip, and that she and girls like her were the only hope that something would be saved. Anyway she was gone now. Gone to the Summerland, as the Witches would tell you. Or perhaps simply dead.
Down, down. At the bottom of the hill the path did a peculiar thing, sort of tucked itself into this giant heap of boulders that just seemed to have plopped here. Really, it was hard to think of a plausible geological explanation for this place. It was pretty weird: don't get Tex started on it.
"Look how well they sealed it up," he said, sounding very pleased, getting started on it all by himself.
Molly tried and could not remember how she and Tex had gotten past the rocks before. There was some way through, but it was hard to orient yourself by just moonlight. That well-known flattening-out or dimensionless effect.
Tex took a last wheezy gasp of the pot and tossed the little stub among the rocks: an offering. When he exhaled the smoke came out in two streams that made his long moustache appear to be magically growing. Molly wondered if they were too stoned, really, to be attempting this.
"The last ones," Tex resumed, "when they realized that they were the last ones—that the people coming after wouldn't know what the Well was or how to take care of it—they brought all these rocks here, the same way Merlin brought the bluestones from Ireland to Stonehenge. That same power. And they made this kind of a maze out of rock that you would have to figure out if you were going to get inside. That way, they made sure the spirits would be safe and they could sleep in peace for as long as it look till they were needed again."
Molly said nothing and began to hope that Tex would not remember the way through.
"They were ultra-cool, the Old Ones," he said gravely.
He flashed his dilated pupils in her direction, as though inviting a challenge or an Amen to this. Then he laughed: that chesty, always surprising Bear laugh that was so rich and spontaneous that you couldn't help, usually, laughing along, even if you had no idea whatsoever what was so funny. As was generally the case. Molly smiled and she thumped him on the arm, hard enough to test his balance. He did not move or flinch at all; it was like knocking against a wall.
Tex halfway turned to confront the wall of rocks, then he stopped himself. He patted the part of his chest where his Tibetan bone pendant should have hung.
"Damn," he said.
The story with these pendants was, as long as they stayed on you, you were fine. But when the bone wore away, or the pendant came loose, or you otherwise got separated from it—then boom. It wasn't carved out of bone for nothing.
Carefully Tex moved backward, reversing his last couple of steps, to where he had stood when he flicked the roach away. A thumb-sized object caught the moonlight near his feet. Thank you, he thought, scooping it up, slipping it deep into one of his pockets.
"That was close," he said. "The cord must've broken or something."
Then so easily—barely seeming to glance where he was going—he turned and stuck his foot into a notch in one of the boulders, grabbed some invisible handhold, and pulled himself onto the narrowest of ledges. And he took it from there. The way through the rocks was not actually hard—each step of it was quite doable, given a certain mood of abandon and the absence of gross physical impairment. It only, at every step, seemed impossible. Being high helped you to overlook that.
Soon they were inside: past the stones, peering into the darkness of the Well. They stood shoulder to shoulder on a gently sloping face of rock, wide enough but a little slippery. The mouth of the Well was a pace in front of them, so big you could drop the Saab into it. (And how long, Molly wondered, would you have to wait to hear the splash?)
"Hey," said Tex loudly, to hear the way his voice sounded, swallowed up by blackness. He always did this; a matter of personal ritual. "Dig that."
"I dig it, Bear."
Tex dug around in his pockets and flaps and other hiding places and came up eventually with a small object that glinted in the moonlight. Molly could not guess what it was.
"It's a copper fitting," he told her. "From a gas line, I think."
"Nothing important, I hope."
She could feel his shoulder twitch in a shrug—so characteristic. Molly was surprised to realize, all of a sudden, that she was tired of this shit. Some of it, anyway. Tired of the endless hippie trip, the traipsing from one thing to the next with no map, no mileposts, no destination.
"Now when the Druids came here," Tex was saying— picking up his Well rap—"they would usually offer like pins or clasps or something to the Spirit Behind the Face of the Water. So see, I figure this connector doobie is sort of the same thing, sort of a thing that clasps one thing to another, right? And that's the important idea, you know what I mean?"
Molly would almost always, invariably, have said "Right" or smiled and rubbed his arm fondly. Tonight, though ... tonight for some reason she felt like: I may be stoned, but I'm not that stoned.
"How could there have been Druids here?" she asked ton. "This is Maine, remember?"
Tex drew back a tiny bit, insofar as the width of the rock allowed it. "Of course there were Druids here. Can't you feel it?"
Molly shook her head. All she felt was damp. And tired. She wanted to be in her bunk on the houseboat. "Besides, even if there were," she said, "how does anyone know what the Druids did? I mean, are there eyewitness accounts or something?"
She thought this was a rhetorical question, but Tex had a quick answer. "Sure there were: the rocks were the witnesses. And the trees, and the Well. Some of those old Druids, you know, they were practically immortal. They could go to the Summerland and then come back whenever they wanted to. Or they could transfer their souls into a rock or an oak tree and wait basically forever for the right time to come. That's how we know. The rocks and the trees tell us."
"Oh, come on, Bear."
"You come on." He looked down into the void of the Well—bottomless, for all they knew, for all you could tell by staring at it—and his eyes blinked quickly as though a brief light or vision had danced across them. "Mmm," he said, very softly.
"What?" said Molly.
He looked up at her as though surprised. "What? Oh, hey. I just had this—I sort of flashed onto this—"
His arm stretched out, holding the copper connector. "Make a wish," he told her.
Molly wished to be home in bed.
Tex closed his eyes, wishing his own thing. He wobbled a little. His eyes popped open. "Whoa," he said. "I almost—"
He seemed to gesture way out over the lip of the Well, as though calling Molly's attention to something. She looked where he was gesturing
—a mistake: took her eyes off Tex for one second
—and when she looked back again he was leaning in an odd way against the damp slope of the rock, the way you lean against a swell on a rocking boat. It came to her slowly, in a stoned-out way, he is trying to grab on to something
—then Tex gave her a funny sort of expression, a quizzical or bemused flickering smile
—he has lost his balance and he is falling
"Bear!" she yelled. Grabbing for him.
"What the fuck," he said, still apparently not getting it. The arm that was above the Well, pointing or reaching, waved helplessly, grasping for something that was not there
(of course this all happened
very
quickly)
and then he was falling, really falling.
Molly thought she shrieked, though she did not hear herself. Tex's body was way over, half-toppled into the blackness. She held him by pieces of clothing, but it was like grabbing an empty husk, a Player's costume. Inside there's a body writhing away, a skeleton doing its bone-dance, but that's in a parallel universe.
Stop, Molly willed.
She willed it hard enough that for a moment Time did come to a halt. Tex was not sliding into the Well and she was not losing her grip on him.
Then Time gave a lurch, and they were both sliding into the Well. The slope of the rock got steeper as they inched closer to the big drop-off.
"Let go!" Tex yelled to her. "Let go or you'll fall! Listen to me—Raven!"
She did not listen to him. She called out "Bear!"
and she held on, and
they both fell in
together.
there was no Time.
* * *
Time was not theirs.
There was no Time there, and there was no There there.
What was was.
But it was not Then.
& actually, while there was no There and no Then, there were many somewheres, neatly superposed like a deck of cards; and there was a single drawn-out, loop-the-looping when. This when soared and plunged like a roller coaster. Or like the flight pattern of a paper airplane. That's what Time was, here: all motion, convolution, a kinesthetic labyrinth.
