Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, page 39
So much Eckhart knew or could have guessed. But it was not his job to know, nor to guess, nor even to wonder. It was his job, in essence, to light the match. (In this case, the match was actually a digital timer, set for a little past sunset.) And until then, it was his job to set out the canisters, drive a safe distance away, and hunker down in the Suburban. Then wait.
Eckhart was lugging the first canister into a patch of baby woodland when his eye fell on something lying at the base of the sign that said plot 28b. He bent to look at this and saw that it was a denim jacket. One of the lab techs', probably. As a matter of common decency, Eckhart would have picked the thing up, dropped it off later at the front office; but he realized that doing so would connect him to this place where the jacket had been lost. Not that it would matter, probably. But you never knew.
By now, damn it, his curiosity was stirred up. He lowered the canister of homemade napalm. The jacket was a nicely made thing—not a piece of working apparel but the sort of thing you'd order out of a catalog. In fact, it might belong to a woman.
Eckhart thought about this. About a woman's jacket being left out here in Trial Plot 28b. Somehow, the idea pleased him. He did not know what to make of it, but he liked the idea of a woman taking her jacket off in this almost-wild place, with nothing but the trees and the bugs and the breeze any the wiser. And because he liked it, and because it wouldn't matter one way or the other in a few hours, he slung the jacket over his arm. Then he picked up the canister and went back to work.
IMITATIO
Pippa Rede wore a peculiar smile on her face. "I just have a really major feeling," she said, "something amazing is going to happen tonight."
"If this show comes off," said Ludi, "it'll be amazing, for sure."
She glanced at the sky. The sun was low. People were milling around the green. At the entrance of Cold Bay, the red light of the sea buoy had come on, flashing the Morse code for Alpha: [dot dash]
Sort of a Yin thing; appropriate for the great briny Mother.
Pippa said, "Something unusual happened in our circle today."
Ludi kind of heard her and kind of did not. She was scrounging through the grocery box to see how many character masks remained to be handed out. Not too many. The time must be getting close.
"I can't really talk about it," said Pippa. "Because, you know—a secret ritual and all."
"Yeah," said Ludi. "That makes sense."
Nothing about Witches makes sense, of course. The terms are antithetical. If you want sense, talk to a liberal Episcopalian. Ludi wondered who had gotten the Aging Hippie assignments. Those seemed rather pivotal to her. And how about the Minimum Wage Gen-X Type?
"Have you ever heard of Nantosuelta?" said Pippa.
"Nope," said Ludi. "Should I?" She thought about those tragic Latina pop stars to whom now and then terrible things happened before Ludi ever got a handle on who they were, exactly.
"I really shouldn't be telling you this," said Pippa. "But you're cool, right? I mean, you're not like, Xian or anything, are you?"
"Like what?" said Ludi.
For the first time she looked at Pippa—really looked at her—and what she saw was a pleasantly flushed and bright-eyed woman who was beaming like maybe her Food Stamp entitlement had just been adjusted upward.
"Xian," said Pippa. "That means Christian. Like Xmas."
"Ha." Ludi smiled, and Pippa smiled back, and then the two friends hugged each other.
"Anyway," said Pippa, "there's this ancient raven goddess who's in charge of wells or something, and Syzygy invoked Her today at our Midsummer circle and guess what."
"Hey Ludi," someone called.
She turned to see Sefyn Hunter, the guy from Guillermo's men's group.
He said, "I hear you're giving out parts for a play."
"Not exactly a play," she said.
Sefyn looked puzzled and intrigued. Ludi rummaged in the box.
"Feel like being a Native American?" she asked.
"That's exactly what I'm in the mood for," he said.
She handed over his mask. "Do you have a watch?" she asked him.
"Yeah. At home."
Pippa was edging this way and that, trying to stay in Ludi's line of vision. It was kind of appealingly pathetic. Around the gazebo, people had already put their masks on, despite clear instructions to wait until dark. Ludi reflected that nobody reads instructions anymore. This was the era of point-and-shoot, point-and-click, point-and-blame.
My god, she thought—am I turning into a Young Fogy?
The green was getting crowded. Over Indigo's boom box, the Music of Your Life station was doing its regular evening "Stardust" feature, in which a different version of everybody's favorite pop standard was played every night. The theory was, apparently, that this could continue forever. So you'd just have to keep listening, even if this entailed unimaginable suffering in the form of commercials for the hearing-aid center by whom this popular feature was brought to you, nightly.
Nightly at what? Ludi tried to remember. Seven o'clock? Eight?
"It has something," Pippa whispered, as soon as Sefyn had wandered out of earshot, "to do with Tex and Molly. Which of them was called Raven?"
"Melo-dee," sang the boom box, "haunts my memory."
"Molly," said Ludi. "Why do you say was?"
Deep Herb, appearing from nowhere, said, "Can I be the token African-American?"
"Somebody's already taken that," Ludi told him. "Why don't you be the Corporate Executive?"
"Hey, look," said Herb, digging through the drama box. "A Vegetable!"
Innocent Pippa said, "Perfect."
BEDROOM SCENE
Gene Deere was awakened by his beeper. He opened his eyes on the unmade bed next to Tex the bear, who was just waking also. The two of them looked at each other. The beeper continued to beep. Gene smiled helplessly at the animal in his bed and the bear pounced on top of him and promptly clawed a hole through his chinos.
"Damn it," said Gene—not at the bear, nor even the beeper, but at himself for the way he felt: confused and headachy from having slept at the wrong time and awakened at dusk. He lurched upright and went over to the telephone, dragging the animal that had wrapped its paws around one leg. Step and drag, step and drag. Dance of Yu, he thought. Then he wondered what that meant. Something Ludi had mentioned?
"Deere," said the voice of the Antichrist over the handset. "What's become of you? I had to give the King a tour of your cloning lab all by myself."
"Sorry," Gene said untruthfully.
"Don't fret. You can make it up to me." Chas sounded jolly. The day must be going well for him. "The security types from Houston want you to go through your logs and pinpoint the time the irregularities occurred. S'pose you can take care of that tonight?"
"Tonight?"
"Is there a problem?"
Gene thought about Ludi's play. Presumably this would not constitute a problem in Chas's eyes. "Can I do it over the modem?" he asked.
"Negatory. The security guys are worried about the integrity of our data lines. Some network node they can't account for. Got to do this in situ, I'm afraid."
Chas did not sound afraid. Of anything. He sounded like a man who's got the world by the short hairs.
"So," said Gene, conversationally, "was the King pleased with your presentation?"
"Too early to tell. No indication to the contrary, however. He didn't seem concerned about the problem with the 4.3.2. As long as we've got enough tissue stock to repropagate. I showed him the damaged trees we've potted up and he mentioned maybe doing some kind of public relations thing."
"Great," said Gene, thinking this at least had nothing to do with Operations. "Then I guess I'll be there in a half hour or so."
"I won't," said Chas. "The King wants to do a little tour of Dublin, so I thought we'd drive down to the village green in a bit. Some kind of annual hoopla going on there tonight, I hear."
"So I hear."
"Toodles, amigo."
Gene looked at Tex. The bear was growing bigger. As well he should, having chewed on everything in the bungalow.
"Want to go for a ride?" Gene asked him. "Want to see where Daddy works?"
CREATURES OF DARKNESS
Guillermo stepped through the hole in the chain-link and entered enemy territory. His olive drab coveralls were all but invisible in the fading light. Besides the heavy-duty wire snippers which he now returned to his backpack, he carried a flashlight, a collapsible shovel, a plastic trash bag, a canteen of water and seaweed extract (to lessen the shock of root disturbance), a QuickTake point-and-shoot digital camera, and a small electronic device whose function he did not understand but which he was supposed to clip around an L.A.N. cable somewhere, assuming he could identify one. His mission tonight:
1. To obtain evidence of corporate misdeeds, and
2. To lay the groundwork for the next phase of the campaign to save the Great North Woods.
What he wanted, above all, was to obtain an actual specimen of the gonzo killer hybrid spruce that Gulf Atlantic intended to insert, as the in-house jargon went, by ihe earliest and most expeditious means, in order that the long-term position of Gulf Atlantic in the Great North Woods will have been definitively secured. Guillermo still felt a shiver when the words of the stolen briefing document ran through his mind. But tonight the shiver included an element of excitement. Because tonight the North Woods were striking back.
Behind him, in the tall grass and black-eyed Susans and goldenrod, he heard a rustling. A faint sound, not much louder than the wind might have made. But it had not come from the wind; Guillermo's instincts told him that. (He had intincts for such things, no matter what Ludi thought.) He dropped to a crouch and moved quietly around a signpost, reasoning that the white-enameled placard that identified this patch of trees as "Plot 29d'' would make him even more inconspicuous.
He rested on his haunches, waiting.
The sound behind him came again, at regular intervals There could be no doubt now that he was listening to footsteps. They drew closer and closer, then seemed to hesitate, and stopped. Guillermo tried to silence his breathing. He was afraid even to open his eyes.
Very nearby—within kicking distance—a voice whispered: "Hey, are you there?"
Not the sort of voice he expected: it sounded young—kidlike.
Then there was a new set of footsteps. These came from behind, among the trees. Guillermo turned, too late—someone's hands dropped over his eyes, and a weight fell onto his back, pushing him forward. His elbows broke his fall, scuffing on gravel.
With a burst of violent energy, Guillermo twisted in the grip of his assailant. He threw the person to the ground and fumbled in his pack for the high-intensity flashlight.
"Hey," the first voice said again, louder now. "What are you guys doing?"
Guillermo flicked the flashlight on. In the oval of bluish light, Ari Prague, dressed in his crazy-quilt hand-sewn clothes, lay blinking and shielding his eyes.
"Surprise," the boy said. He raised a dirty bare foot to fend the flashlight away.
"What the fuck," said Guillermo. He swung the beam around and caught Thistle Herne just as she got a hand up to cover the lens.
"Would you please put that out?" she whispered forcefully. "What're you trying to do, get us caught?"
Baffled into obedience, Guillermo clicked off the light. "What are you kids doing here?" he demanded.
"Kids?" said Thistle, bristling. "Who are you—somebody's dad?"
"Sorry," said Guillermo. Wondering what he should have said.
"Anyway, Ari's an elf," Thistle reminded him.
"That's right," said Ari.
Guillermo sighed.
"We hid in the back of your car," Ari told him, proudly. "Underneath that old blanket."
"That blanket," said Guillermo, "was intended to conceal the evidence while I get away from here."
"That's cool," said Thistle. "We'll ride up front on the drive back."
Guillermo looked at them seriously. "Now listen. If you two are going to come along, then you've got to stick to the plan, okay? Keep close to me and don't make any ruckus. Thistle, you can help me figure out what an L.A.N. cable looks like. And, Ari, maybe you can hold the flashlight or something, while I'm bagging the plant."
"Yeah," said Ari.
"Don't worry," said Thistle. "This isn't exactly like breaking into Fort Knox."
"I wouldn't take too much for granted," said Guillermo. "These big corporations have tighter security than the Feds, nowadays."
"Not Gulf Atlantic"—with a clear note of disdain in her voice. As though she really knew what she was talking about.
"No?" said Guillermo, trying to study her expression in the dark.
She only shrugged. "So why don't we get moving? I kind of wanted to catch the show in Dublin after this is done."
Guillermo shook his head. Youth, he thought. No sense of priorities.
MASQUE
Ludi was down to the last couple of characters. Which was good because it was definitely just about dark. There was a moon—2nd quarter, still waxing, moving up off Cold Bay and glowing the color of a nightlight in a child's bedroom.
Rose Moon, Ludi thought.
Near the gazebo, a middle-aged man strolled dreamily over the green, hands in his pockets, looking at everything closely as though appraising it for resale value. The man was dressed in the kind of expensive but personality-deficient clothing that Ludi diagnosed as a symptom of aesthetic impairment. She thought, Now this is the kind of guy who, if you read him a beautiful poem, would listen carefully and then say: Is that it? Which is fine—it takes all kinds; there's no need for everyone in the world to recognize the beauty in things—except that these people then conclude that there is no such thing as beauty, or at least nothing important about it, and they try to take it away from everyone else. To stamp it out, or pave over it, or at the very least make damned good and sure their tax dollars aren't being spent to perpetuate it.
Or I don't know, thought Ludi. Maybe I just don't know the guy.
She approached him, carrying her box. The man didn't notice her until he was about to knock her over. He blinked and saw the box and drew back; like maybe she was a Hari Krishna or Scientologist or something.
"Would you like a part in our performance?" she asked him.
The man seemed puzzled for a moment and then he smiled. "Ah," he said grandly: "a thespian."
Ludi shook her head. "You're the thespian," she said. "I'm just the author."
This seemed to please him even more. "So very nice," he said, "to meet a young person nowadays who actually writes."
Ludi sized him up. His face possessed that refined, over-elaborated ugliness that she associated with unusual breeds of dogs. "Let's see now," she said, shuffling through her masks. "You could be the Welfare Witch. No, I don't think so. How about a Gun-Toting Survivalist?"
The man frowned. Ludi guessed he preferred to let somebody else do the shooting for him.
"Well, there's not much left," she said. "How about Somebody's Dad?"
The man looked surprised. He stared into her eyes for a moment as though trying to remember if he'd ever met her before. Majorca? Last year, the end of the season? No?
"Take this," she told him. "Really. You'll do a great job, I can tell. You look like somebody's dad."
He took the mask. He glanced at the card, which read:
Meme SD
Just hanging on till he can get the kids through college.
He looked up at Ludi again. Something wistful in his expression now. "Do I put this on?" he said.
"That's all there is to it." She smiled, to reassure him. "Then if you'll just glance over this sheet of paper here, it explains what the start-up conditions are. Then it's totally up to you."
The man glanced quickly through the instructional material, as though accustomed to processing information rapidly. "What's this here," he said, without glancing up, "about an Unforeseen Development?"
"I can't tell you that," Ludi said, "or it wouldn't be Unforeseen, would it?"
He smiled at her, patricianly. He slipped the mask over his face. He looked neither more nor less imposingly bland than before.
She patted his arm. "Look, I've got to take off now. We're about to get started. I hope."
"A pleasure meeting the author herself," said the man in the mask, as Ludi was walking away.
It always disturbed her to meet someone of this type and to discover that he might be all right; he might not be totally heartless. At least as long as he got his daily feeding of raw meat at the appointed time.
At the gazebo, two dozen people were hanging out with masks on. Some of them had taken it upon themselves to supplement the masks with odds and ends of costumes, props, set pieces. The Law Enforcement Officer, whose ponytail hung down to his colorfully stained painter's pants, carried a neon water pistol. The Ancient White Oak wore branches strapped to her head, like antlers. The TV News Reporter—who appeared to be a polite Canadian tourist—was videotaping everything in sight, and asking people to say things into his microphone. The Guy Slinging Pizza had slicked his hair back, trying to look Italian. Deputy Doug (the Lipstick Lesbian) had tramped himself up in thrift-store regalia, right down to the trailer-park-queen high heels. Ludi felt sort of touched, seeing everybody getting into it like this.
She climbed up on the deck of the gazebo, staring apprehensively over the crowd. It felt funny, looking at all these people and not being able to tell who was who, behind the masks; then realizing that they weren't the audience, they were the actors, and everything that happened next was going to be up to them; and then thinking that she herself was sort of invisible, now. Refined out of existence.
