Ancient Shores (22 page)

The format was conversational, but there was nothing particularly noteworthy about the conversation, which ranged from wringing hands over the ejection of God from the schools to pointing out disturbing similarities between violence on TV and the Roman games. Midway through the show, Bill’s special guest, an author who had written a book detailing how she had recovered from a life of alcohol abuse and freewheeling sexual misbehavior, described an incident in which her twenty-year-old son had taken advantage of her insobriety to persuade her to cosign a loan for a new car. A few weeks later, the son had announced he could not keep up the payments.

Bill was always visibly overwhelmed by such tales. His viewers loved to watch his reactions to accounts of human weakness and gullibility. He had
been known to pound his fist on the table, to splutter his indignation, sometimes to squeeze his eyes shut and simply sit with tears running down his cheeks. When the crisis of the narrative arrived, the producer dutifully switched to a full frontal close-up.

On this occasion, Bill merely sat, a man in pain. The viewers could see his large chest rising and falling. And then he waved his hand in front of his face as if to clear the air. “There are times,” he said, “when I truly wonder why the Lord stays His hand. I would not second-guess the Almighty, but I can tell you that if I were running the world, things would be different. I would actively protect the innocent. And I would rain fire on the heads of sinners.” He heaved a great sigh. “But our God is a merciful God. And a patient God.”

If anyone in his vast listening audience thought there might have been a touch of blasphemy in the remark, it didn’t show up in the mail.

Mike Swenson, who owned Mike’s Supermarket in Fort Moxie, was a fan of the show. He heard the comment, and something about it unnerved him. He had to think about it a long time to realize why, and the reason didn’t come to him until late that afternoon, when he was preparing the week’s order.

Look out what you wish for
.

They loved Governor Ed Pauling in North Dakota. He’d found ways to finance the schools and simultaneously reduce the sales tax a full point. He had reorganized the state government, reducing costs while he made it more effective. He had created jobs, had found federal funds to restore crumbling bridges and roads. And Ed had even helped the farmers. Under his direction, North Dakota had moved into the sunny uplands.

From Bismarck, however, he’d watched the storm
building in Johnson’s Ridge. The collapse of the financial markets had, within a matter of days, ruined the state’s economy and undone everything he had accomplished over the last three years. Every major bank in North Dakota had been pushed to the edge. Several corporations were in trouble. And a lot of people to whom Ed owed favors were cashing them in.
Do something
.

He knew that a phone call from the president was inevitable. When it came, they got him out of a meeting with his economic advisors. He went back to his office, closed the doors, and turned off the tape machine. “Hello, Mr. President,” he said. And, with no attempt to conceal the irony: “How are we doing?”

“Hello, Ed.” If things were spiraling out of control, Matt Taylor would never let you know. In fact, the impression was that with Taylor, things could
never
spin out of control. It was the essence of the man’s magic. “We’re doing fine,” the president said.

“Good.” He let it hang there.

“Ed, I don’t want a record made of this call.”

“The machine’s off.”

“You and I haven’t talked yet about the Roundhouse.”

Ed laughed. “I saw a poll yesterday indicating that seventy percent of adult Americans can’t find North Dakota on the map.”

“That’s about to change,” said the president.

“I know.”

“Ed, is there anything you can do to shut that monstrosity down?”

Had he been able to do so, it would have been done by now. “I’d love to,” he said. “But it’s on Sioux land. That’s the closest thing there is to sacred territory out here. What we need is for you to declare a national emergency. Do that and I’ll send in the Guard.”

“That’s a little ham-handed, Ed. The Sioux don’t present any kind of military threat. They’ve committed
no crime. I can’t just send the troops in. They’d beat me to death with it next fall.” He managed a deep-throated laugh that was half growl. “I can see the editorial cartoons now, with me as Custer.”

Ed sympathized. “Have you tried to buy them out? They must have a price.”

“I would have thought so. I’m beginning to wonder if our Native-American brothers haven’t decided to get even with the United States.” He fell momentarily silent. “Ed, do you have a suggestion?”

“If the public safety were at stake, we could seize the place. Of course, even then I’m not sure what we’d do with it. It’s the goddamnedest hot potato I’ve ever heard of.”

“I can’t just trump something up,” the president said. “The media won’t let you get away with anything anymore.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” said Ed. “Maybe something will go wrong and you can move in.”

Cass Deekin returned from Eden in a state of mind that could only be described as euphoric. He was a botanist and his pockets were filled with samples of flora from a nonterrestrial evolutionary system. He wasn’t supposed to bring anything back, had in fact signed an agreement stipulating he would not, but the security guards couldn’t be everywhere, and it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

He had just stepped off the grid with Juan Barcera, who was an astronomer from Caltech, and Janice Reshevsky, an Ivy League mathematician. An impassive Native American stood by the icons with a clipboard. He checked off their names. There had been twelve altogether on the other side of the port, of which Cass’s group was the first to return.

He and his companions were talking excitedly about the experience of actually
walking
on another
world, barely able to contain their emotions, when the grid lit up.

The guard glanced at the icons, which Cass (like everyone else on the planet) knew controlled the transportation device.

He peered into the blossoming light, expecting to see more of his party appear. The guard said, under his breath, almost to himself, “Wrong icon.”

Cass had no idea what he meant, but it was obvious something had happened. The guard’s hand came to rest on, but did not raise, his weapon.

The golden light, which had been intensifying for several seconds, stabilized and began to fade.

No one was there.

But Cass felt something move deep inside his head, and his senses swam. The curved walls of the dome spoke to him; its unbroken space brought a tightness to his throat. He
flowed
into the air and rode the warm currents. They mingled with his blood, and he drifted past the long window, gasping great tears of joy, finding and filling the open passageway, pouring through it and racing toward a patch of daylight that opened out into an emptiness that swept on forever.

Cass was looking at the insides of his eyelids, feeling the world spin, feeling hands lifting his head. His face was cold and wet.

“Wait,” said someone. “Don’t try to move.”

Another voice: “You’ll be okay, Cass.”

And someone shouting, “Over here.”

Cass opened his eyes. The person speaking to him was the Native-American guard. “Take it easy,” he said. “Help’s coming.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m okay.”

But the dark came again, crept over him like fog. He heard people talking somewhere. And he heard again the guard’s startled reaction:
Wrong icon
.

Cass Deekin knew his colleagues would be waiting to hear
him talk about Eden. But he was still shaken. He’d flown back to Chicago, unable to sleep either on the plane or in his bed. He’d left lights on in the house all night. And he had suffered a series of bad dreams.

In the morning he called in sick, and then, feeling the need for company, he went down to Minny’s Cafe for breakfast, and then to the Lisle Public Library.

At a little after eleven he showed up at the Collandar Bar and Grill. Cass didn’t particularly like to drink because he put on weight too easily. But this was a special occasion.

He collected a beer and soon struck up a conversation with a salesman from the Chevrolet dealership across the street. The salesman was middle-aged, personable, not quite able to pull back from his marketing persona. But that was okay; Cass didn’t mind listening to chatter today.

The salesman was talking about the current
uncertainty in the industry and simultaneously extolling the pleasures of cruising America’s back roads. “Let me tell ya,” he said with a grin, “even if they could do that
Star Trek
thing and walk into a booth here and come out in Bismarck, it’ll never replace a Blazer. I don’t care what anybody says.”

After a while Cass became aware that the salesman was watching him closely. “You all right, buddy?” he asked. His name was Harvey, and the smile had been replaced by a frown.

“Yes,” said Cass. “I’m fine.”

“You sure? You look a little out of it.”

That was all it took. Cass told his story, described his flight through the dome in exquisite detail, his sense of having been
absorbed
by something, his conviction (now that he had had time to think about it) that he had been invaded. “Whatever it was,” he whispered, his eyes wide, “it was invisible.”

The salesman nodded. “Well,” he said, looking at his watch, “got to go.”

“It was
there
,” Cass went on. “God help me, it came through the port. The guard knew it, but he wouldn’t say anything.” He knocked over his glass. “Listen, I know how this sounds. But it’s true. They’ve turned something loose up there.”

Ten minutes later a reporter was trying to interview him. By then Cass had decided to say nothing further. It was, of course, too late.

Curt Hollis was walking past a flatcar loaded with lumber. He was headed toward the depot, about two miles away, when the wind spoke.

He had been working with J. J. Bender, the train dispatcher, opening boxcars for customs inspection. They’d finished the train, which was 186 cars long, and had just started back. Bender and the customs inspector were ahead of him, maybe forty yards or so, hands shoved into their pockets, clipboards trapped against their sides.

Bender and the inspector kept close together, their heads bent into the wind, which was out of the northwest. They were all walking on the east side of the train, using the cars for shelter. Curt didn’t mind the weather as much as the others. Bender and the customs inspector had spent most of their lives indoors. Curt, on the other hand, had done track work and construction jobs, had loaded tractor-trailers and laid roads. His face had turned to leather when he was still in his early thirties.

He was almost seventy now, and his body was starting to break down. Shoulders, knees, and hips ached all the time. He had diabetes and occasional chest pains. But he was afraid to see a doctor.

He slogged steadily through the snow. There would be more work for him when they got back to the depot. He was therefore content to dawdle while the others moved quickly ahead. Curt liked the long walks back after they’d cleared the train. It was late afternoon, and
the sun was sinking. A couple of diesels waited on a parallel track to be exported. Between cars, he caught glimpses of Route 75. A pickup was headed north toward the border.

Curt was alone now. His kids had long since gone to live in California and Arizona. Jeannie, who had been his wife for thirty-seven years, had died in the spring.

The wind blew through the twilight. It lifted the tags on the lumber loads and peppered the boxes with dust. And it sighed his name.

Curt
.

He stopped and looked at the gray sky.

His companions trudged resolutely ahead. A blue jay perched atop a tanker, watching him.

Curt
.

Clearer that time. A cold breeze touched his face.

Out on Route 75, a tractor-trailer roared past, headed south, changing gears. Other than the customs inspector and the dispatcher, there was no one in sight. The cars were squat and heavy and rusting in the dying light.

“Is someone there?” he asked.

The blue jay leaped away at the sound and tracked through the sky, headed southeast. He watched until it disappeared.

Curt
.

It was a whisper, a distant sigh.

Puzzled, almost frightened, he stopped. Ahead, the customs inspector had also stopped and was looking back at him.

There was no one hiding on the other side of the train. No one in the empty boxcar beside him. No one anywhere other than the two people with whom he’d been working.

His heart pumped.

His vision shifted, blurred, cleared. He looked down on the boxcar from
above
.

And on himself
.

If he had been afraid, the fear subsided, drained
away. He felt the calmness and indifference of the sky. He saw without emotion his own image, lying on the ground.

And he felt Jeannie’s presence. Young and laughing and fearless, as she had been before the long winters and the money problems had beaten much of it out of her. Her eyes were bright and she leaned toward him.

Then the light changed, dimmed, and he saw it was Bender kneeling beside him. The old sense of loss returned.

“Curt? What happened?”

He didn’t know. “Got sick,” he said. And then: “I heard my name.”

“What? Listen, just lie quiet. I’ll call the depot. Get a car out here.”

“There’s something here,” Curt said, struggling with Bender.

“He’s right,” said the customs inspector, her eyes wide. “I heard it, too.”

The deer had begun to bleed.

Jack McGuigan eased his snowmobile past a screen of heavy shrubbery and looked down the trail. Bright red drops glistened on the light snow.

He could, of course, have killed the animal hours ago, but Jack enjoyed tracking. Run it down by inches. Give the beast a fair chance. But it wasn’t running anymore. The prints were no longer clean and precise. The front edges were scuffed, and there were marks in the snow indicating uncertainty and, occasionally, that it had stumbled.

He caught glimpses of the animal frequently now. It was getting weaker, approaching exhaustion. He stopped and took off his ski mask and pulled a sandwich out of his utility pouch. Give it time. It didn’t really matter at this stage. No need to hurry.

He poured coffee from his thermos.

The woods were full of birds today. Jack
loved
the creatures of the forest. He loved the smell of the woods and the sky wrapped over the trees and the wind moving through the branches and the clean oiled clack of a rifle bolt being slid home to remind you how alone you were. It was easy to lose yourself out here, to forget the concrete and the kids.

At home in God’s woods. That was how a man was supposed to live.

Sometimes, toward the end of a hunt, he almost came to feel guilty. The prints looked pitiful. He wondered, as he had many times before, about the almost mystical connection between hunter and prey. No anger. No animosity. The buck is resigned, will accept the final round while trying to scramble from its knees, but it will know who he is, and it also will feel the bond, the ineffable connection tracking back to the other side of the ice age.

Jack did not pretend to understand it. Like the buck, he simply accepted it. In his compassion, he drank slowly. When he was done, he folded the cellophane bag in which his sandwich had been wrapped and pushed it carefully into his pouch. (He had seen people drop trash in the woods from time to time, and nothing enraged Jack like litterers. Last year, about this time, he had come upon one, a guy leaving a trail of beer cans, and he’d left him bleeding by his campfire.)

Time to end it.

The moment had come, and Jack would finish it, as he always did, with a single shot.

“I’m coming,” he said, his ritualistic response to the final phase. He climbed onto the snowmobile, turned the ignition key, and felt the surge of power through his loins. Startled birds launched themselves into the wind.

He rolled back onto the trail, running behind the prints. Here the animal had paused and slipped into the underbrush. There it had scrambled down a steep slope. He had to go almost a mile out of his way to get
to the bottom. Minutes later he followed it across a frozen stream.

It was an eight-point buck, and when he finally came upon it, the creature was trying to hide in thick snow-covered vegetation. But of course it could not conceal its tracks. He unsnapped his rifle and inserted a cartridge. Their eyes locked, a final moment of mutual recognition, and it tried weakly to back away.

Jack raised his weapon, put the animal’s heart in his sight, and squeezed the trigger. The shot ricocheted through the woods. Surprise flickered in the buck’s eyes. The trees came alive, and a storm of birds fled into the sky. Blood appeared on the buck’s breast.

The animal’s front legs sagged. It went down, spasmed and relaxed.

He stood enjoying the primal beauty of the scene, waiting for the quivering to stop. When it did, and the deer lay still, he turned back to the snowmobile for the sheet of plastic in which he would wrap the carcass. In that moment something dark passed across the sun.

He looked up, expecting to see a cloud. But the sky between the tangle of branches was hard and white. He retrieved his plastic, and the snow crunched under his boots while he spread it out beside the carcass and smoothed it down. The animal had got tangled up in a bush, and he had to break off a few branches to get hold of the front legs.

The temperature began to drop.

He glanced nervously back along the trail to the point at which it curved out of sight, roughly thirty yards away. And ahead almost as far, where it topped a low hill.

A gust of wind shook the trees. Deep in his psyche, far back in the emotional tangles among which the real Jack McGuigan lived, something stirred. Some
thing
that was not part of him.

And he felt waves of anger.

Crazy.

Birds and small game were everywhere. A warm air current touched him. The distant rumble of traffic, out on the highway, merged with the pristine silence. He grew disconnected, detached. And he was watching with sudden rage the deer and the snowmobile and a standing figure that could only have been himself.

He felt the treetops, warm and alive, under his hand. They shook. Snow and broken twigs rained down.

Something moved among the branches. The sunlight changed, shifted, coruscated. Someone was here with him. He lifted his weapon and turned to look behind him. The air was getting warmer, and the deer’s blood was bright on the snow.

“It’s a nightmare,” Taylor said. He muted the sound and pushed back in his chair.

Tony Peters massaged the place over his left eye where his migraines always started.

The television images were from the UN, where a demand for international access to the Roundhouse was about to be presented to the Security Council. “Where,” the president said gloomily, “we will have to veto the damned thing.”

Peters thought they could ride out the storm, and he knew his role now was to reassure the president, to prevent precipitate action. “They all know,” he said, “that you can’t just give away sovereign territory. We couldn’t do it if we wanted to. It’s private property.”

Taylor laughed. “Don’t know,” he said. “There’s plenty of precedent for giving away private property. But it really doesn’t matter. It would be
wrong
.”

“It would also be political suicide.”

“So you think all that’s happening here is that we’re being sent a message?”

“No. Of course not. Everybody’s scared. But there are still a lot of people who wouldn’t want to miss a chance to embarrass us.”

“They’re doing a hell of a good job of it.” The president refilled his sherry glass and offered the bottle.

Peters shook his head.

“Tony, who would have believed there’s oil in paradise?” Matt Taylor sighed. “We just don’t get a break.”

“It shouldn’t matter,” the aide said. “How much oil can you throw into the world market bringing it through that whatsis one barrel at a time?”

That was a point, and the President seemed happy for that small bit of good news. “But it will matter,” he said. “Eventually. If there’s a lot of the stuff out there, we’ll find a way to get it back. And everybody knows it. But that isn’t really the problem, is it?”

“No.”

Taylor understood there was more at stake here than economics and elections. Incredibly, a stairway into the sky had opened. He hardly dared consider the implications. He did not want to close it down. The man who did that would not look good a century or two from now. And Matt Taylor, like any president, was determined that history think well of him. He had believed attaining the White House would be enough. But once in the door, he began to envy Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and Truman. Theirs was a rank he had thought would be denied him because greatness is possible only in crisis. Every administration had its problems, but until the Roundhouse surfaced, his had been relatively mundane: no government to establish, no Union to save, no Hitler to oppose.