Black Man (12 page)

“I fail to see,” said Norton acidly, “how that gives us back our manhood.”

“That’s because you live in New York.”

Norton snorted and drained his arrack.

His brother watched with a thin smile until he was done. “I’m serious, Tom. You think Secession was about Pacific Rim interests and the green agenda? Or maybe a few lynched Asians and a couple of failed adventures in the Middle East?”

“Among other things, yeah, it was.”

Jeff shook his head. “That wasn’t it, Tom. None of it was. America split up over a vision of what strength is. Male power versus female negotiation. Force versus knowledge, dominance versus tolerance, simple versus complex. Faith and Flag and patriotic Song stacked up against the New Math, which, let’s face it, no one outside quantum specialists really understands, Cooperation Theory and the New International Order. And until Project Lawman came along, every factor on the table was pointing toward a future so feminized, it’s just downright un-American.”

Norton laughed despite himself. “You should be writing speeches, Jeff.”

“You forget,” his brother said unsmilingly, “I used to. Now, think about the situation the way it was back then, the sinking ship of heartland masculinity, bogged down abroad in complexities it can’t understand, failed by its military technology and its own young men. And then you put these new, big, kick-ass motherfuckers into American uniforms, you call them the Lawmen, and suddenly they’re
winning
. No one knows exactly where they’ve come from all of a sudden, there’s a lot of deniability going around, but who ever gave a shit about that? What counts is that these guys are American soldiers, they’re fighting for us, and for once they’re carrying the battle. You just sit there for a moment, Tom, and you think what effect that had, in all those little towns you just flew over to get here.”

Jeff lowered the stabbing finger he had leveled on his brother, looked into his glass, and raised his eyebrows, maybe at his own sudden gust of passion.

“That’s the way I read it, anyway.”

The room seemed to huddle in a little. They sat in the quiet. After a while, Jeff got up and headed for the bar again. “Get you another?”

Norton shook his head. “Got to get back, get up early.”

“You’re not going to stay the night?”

“Well…”

“Jesus, Tom. Do we get along that badly?” Jeff turned from the drink he was pouring, and nailed him with a look. “Come on, there’s no fucking way you’ll get a ferry back across at this time of night. Are you really going to ride a taxi all the way around the bay just so you don’t have to sleep under my roof?”

“Jeff, it’s not—”

“Tom, I know I can be an asshole sometimes, I know that. I know there are things about me you don’t approve of, things you think Mom and Dad wouldn’t approve of, but Christ, you think the old man’s been a saint his whole fucking life?”

“I don’t know,” Norton said quietly. “But if he wasn’t, none of us ever caught him.”

“You didn’t catch
me
. I fucking
told
you about it.”

“Yeah, thanks for that.”

“Tom, I’m your brother for Christ’s sake. Who got you that fucking job at COLIN in the first place?”

Norton shot to his feet. “I won’t believe that. Tell Megan and the kids I said hi. Sorry I didn’t have time to get them a gift.”

“Tom, wait. Wait.” Hands out, placating, drink forgotten. “I’m sorry, that was a bitchy crack. All right, look, I didn’t get you your job, you were well up the list for it anyway. But I spoke well of you in a lot of ears that summer. And I’d do it again. You’re my
brother,
don’t you think that means something to me?”

“Megan’s your wife. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

“Christ, it’s not the same. She’s a woman, not, not—” He stopped, gestured helplessly. “It’s married life, Tom. That’s how it works. You get kids, you get tired, the gloss comes off. You go looking for, for.

Something. I don’t know, something
fresh,
something to remind you that you’re not dead yet. That you’re not turning into two harmless little old people in a Costa Rican retirement complex.”

“That’s how you see Mom and Dad?”

“That’s how they
are,
Tom. You should get down there more often, you’d see that. Maybe then you’d start to understand.”

“Yeah, right. You fucked one of your bonobo refugee clients because Mom and Dad are old. Makes a lot of sense.”

“Tom, you got no fucking idea what you’re talking about. You’re thirty-seven years old, you’ve never been married, you don’t have a family. I mean—” Jeff seemed to be straining to reach something inside himself. “Look, do you really think Megan would care that much if she knew? I mean, sure, she’d go through the motions, the emotions, she’d make me move out for a while, there’d be a lot of crying. But in the end, Tom, she’d do what’s best for the kids. They’re her world now, not me. I couldn’t break her heart anymore, even if I wanted to, even if I tried. It’s
genetics,
Tom, fucking genetics. I’m secondary to the kids for Megan because that’s
just the way she’s wired
.”

“And you fucked Nuying because that’s just the way you’re wired, right?”

Jeff puffed out a breath, looked down, spread his hands up from his sides. “Pretty much, yeah. My wiring and hers, Nu I’m talking about. I’m the big alpha male around the foundation, the patriarch and the most expensive suit in sight. For a bonobo, that’s a bull’s-eye bigger than Larry Lastman’s dick.”

“So you just obligingly stepped into range, right? Just couldn’t bear to disappoint the girl.”

Another sigh. This time, Norton heard in it how the fight had gone out of his brother. Jeff dropped back into his seat. Looked up.

“Okay, Tom,” he said quietly “Have it your own way. I guess you’ve probably never fucked a bonobo in your life, either, so you don’t know how that feels, all that submission, all that broken-flower femininity in your hands like…”

He shook his head.

“Forget it. I’ll call you a cab.”

“No.” Norton felt an odd, sliding sensation in his chest. “I’ll stay, Jeff. I’m sorry, I’m just… it’s been a long day.”

“You sure?”

“Sure, I’m sure. Look, I don’t want to judge you, Jeff. You’re right, none of us is a saint. We’ve all done things”—
Megan, astride him in the motel, feeds him her breasts with eyes focused somewhere else, as if he’s some accustomed household task. Toward the end, she closes her eyes altogether, thrusts herself up and down on his erection and into her climax, grunting
you motherfucker, oh you
fucking
motherfucker
through gritted teeth. It will make him rock-hard just thinking about it for weeks afterward, though he’s close to certain it isn’t him she’s talking to and when, in the aftermath, he asks her, she claims not to remember saying anything at all
—“things we regret, things we’d take back if we could. You think I’m any different?”

Jeff gave him a searching look.

“You’re missing a pretty major point here, Tom.” He raised his hands, palms open. There was something almost pleading in his face. “I don’t regret Nuying. Or the others, because God knows Nu hasn’t been the only one. I just never told you about the others after the way you reacted. Yeah, each time it’s emotional complication, Tom, stress I could do without. But I can’t make myself feel bad about it, and I can’t make myself wish it hadn’t happened. Can you understand that? Can you
stand
knowing that about your brother?”

I can’t make myself wish it hadn’t happened.

Norton put himself carefully back in the other armchair, gingerly, on the edge of the seat. Jeff’s words were like staples taken out of his heart, a sudden easing of a pain he hadn’t fully known he was carrying.

The bright truth about his feelings for Megan welled up in the new spaces. He sat there trying to balance it all out for a moment, then nodded.

“Sure,” he said. “I guess I can stand it. I guess I’ve got to.” He shrugged, smiled faintly. “Brothers, right?”

Jeff matched the nod, vigorously. “Right.”

“So pour me another drink, big brother. Make up the spare room. What time’s Megan getting back?”

They slept in well-worn nanoweave survival bags—
as used by real Mars settlers!,
the fraying label on Scott’s insisted—but always inside.
Too many eyes up there,
Ren said somberly as they stood at the hangar door on the evening of the second day and watched the stars begin to glimmer through in the east.
It’s better if we don’t give them anything unusual to notice
. The abandoned airfield buildings offered shelter from both satellite scan and desert sun; the heat built up inside during the day but long-ago-shattered windows and doorways mostly without doors ensured a cooling through-flow of air.

The walls in the rooms they used were peeled of all but fragmentary patches of paint, stripped back to a pale beige plaster beneath, and none of the lights worked. The toilet facilities and showers, oddly enough, did seem to work, though again without the privacy of doors and only cold water. There was no power for the elevator up to the control tower, but the stairs seemed safe enough, and once up there you had long views over the surrounding tangle of ancient concrete runways and the flat open spaces beyond.

Ren spent a lot of her time up there in the tower, watching, he supposed, for signs of unwelcome visitors, and talking in low tones with the stranger, with Him. And that last part worried Scott, for reasons he could not entirely pin down.

He supposed, finally, it was lack of faith. Pastor William had always said it attacked the so-called freethinkers first and worst, and God knew Scott had been away long enough to get contaminated, rubbing up against all the smut and doubt of West Coast life. He felt a vague, uncontrolled spurt of anger at the thought of it, the bright LCLS nights, the nonstop corrosive stimulus-ridden whirl of so-called modern living and no escape anywhere, not even in church, because God knew he’d gone
there
and tried. All that lukewarm, anything-cuddly-goes sermonizing, all the meetinghouse handholding circles and the flaky moist-eyed psychobabble that never went anywhere except to justify whatever weakling failures of moral vision the speakers had allowed themselves to fall into, three fucking years and more of it, clogging the certainty of his own vision, confusing the simple algebra of good and evil he damn fucking well
knew
was
right, because that was the way it damn fucking well
felt
.

His head ached.

Had been aching, on and off, since he’d woken in the back of the swaying truck and touched the field dressing wrapped just above his eyes. The doctor Ren took him to that night outside Fresno told him it was a normal symptom for the head injuries he’d sustained; with luck it should fade in a few days.

Head injuries the stranger had given Scott. And how could that be right? At first, he couldn’t make sense of it.

He will return—
Pastor William’s soft tones rolling out over the pulpit like thunder a long way off, thunder you knew was riding in on the wings of a storm coming right your way. They said he’d trained at one of the South Carolina megachurches before he got his ministry, and in the teeth of the gale he blew you could well believe it.
He will return, and how’s that going be, you ask yourselves. Well, I’ll tell you, friends, I’ll tell you,
building now to a roar,
it ain’t going be no cluster-hugging happy clapping day like them niggers always singing on about. No, sir, the day of His return ain’t gonna be no party, ain’t gonna be no picnic and skipping road right up to paradise for you all. When Jesus comes again, He will come in judgment, and that judgment going to be
hard,
hard on man and woman and child, hard on us
all,
because we are
all
sinners and that sin, that dreadful black sin gotta be paid out once and for all. Look in your hearts, my friends, look in your hearts and find that black sin there and pray you can cut it out of you before judgment because if you don’t then the Lor will, and the Lord don’t use no anesthetic when He operates on your soul
.

There was a story Scott remembered from the End Times comics, Volume III Issue 137,
The Triumph in Babylon
. Coat wrapped, the Savior stalks the mirror-glass canyons of New York with a long navy Colt on one hip and a billy club in his hand fashioned from the sweat and bloodstained wood of the cross he died on. He kicks in the frosted-glass door of a coffee franchise off Wall Street and beats seven shades of damnation out of the money changers gathered there. Painted, black-stockinged lady brokers twisting prostrate at his feet, red licked lips parted in horror and abandonment, thighs exposed under short, whorish skirts. Fat, big-nosed men in suits braying and panicking, trying to get away from the scything club. Blood and waxed coffee cups flying, screams. The capitalized
crunch
of broken bones.

Judgment!

Scott touched the bandage around his head again, figured maybe he’d gotten off lightly after all.

In the truck, staring at the gaunt, sleeping face, he’d leaned across and whispered to Ren, “Is it really Him?”

She’d given him a strange look. “Who’d you think it is?”

“Him, Jesus. The Lord, come again.” He swallowed, wet his lips. “Is this, are we living in the, you know, the End Times?”

No response. She’d just looked at him curiously and told him to rest, he was going to need his strength.

Thinking back, he guessed he must probably have sounded delirious with the concussion.

And then the doctor, and other helpers along the way. People Ren seemed to know well. A change of trucks, a house and a soft bed on the outskirts of a town whose name he never saw. Another long, bone-jarring night in an all-terrain vehicle and tipping out at dawn on the airfield’s deserted expanse.

And then the waiting.

He tried to make himself useful. He tidied up after Ren and the stranger, put their bags and bedrolls straight every morning—and, oddly, glimpsed in among Ren’s gear a Bible and a sheaf of curling hardcopy from Republican ministry download sites, some of which he knew well himself; he closed the bag gently and didn’t look again, he wasn’t nosy by nature, but it made him frown all the same. He put it out of his mind as much as he could. Instead he put together a table and three dining places out of pieces of junk he found lying around in the control tower block and the hangars. He discovered a wrecked and wingless Cessna in one hangar corner, halfheartedly draped in thick plastic sheeting that he cut up and made into hanging curtains for a couple of the toilet cubicles and the showers. He took care of the food. The supplies the all-terrain driver had left them were mostly pull-tab autoheating, but he did his best to make meals out of what there was, carried them up to the other
two in the tower when they showed no sign of coming down to eat. Tried not to stare at the stranger. He took the painkillers the doctor had given him sparingly and he prayed, diligently, every time he ate or slept. In an odd way, he felt better about life than he had in months.

“Won’t be much longer now.”

He started. When night fell, the quiet in the derelict building seemed to deepen somehow, and Ren’s voice jumped him like a gunshot. He looked up and saw her standing in the doorway that led through to the tower stairs. Light from the last red-gold leavings of the sunset outside meshed with the bluish glow of the camping lamps he’d lit, picked up a gleam in her eyes and along the teeth of the zip fastener on the ancient leather jacket she wore.

“What you doing?”

“Praying.” Half defiant, because he certainly hadn’t noticed her doing it in the last few days.

She nodded. Moved into the room and folded herself down onto her sleeping bag with unconscious grace.

“We need to talk,” she said, and he thought she sounded weary. “Why don’t you come over here.”

He nearly jumped again. “What for?”

“I won’t bite you, Scott.”

“I, uh, I know that. I can hear you from here, though.”

“Maybe you can. But I’d rather we didn’t have to shout. Now, come over here.”

Tight-lipped, he got up from his own bedroll and walked over to hers. She nodded to her left and he squatted awkwardly beside her, not quite sitting down. Her scent washed over him, faintly unclean with desert sweat—he thought she hadn’t showered since early the day before. She looked into his face, and he felt the same old flip in his chest. She nodded upward, toward the ceiling and the tower above.

“You know who that is up there,” she murmured. “Don’t you.”

Exhilaration sloshed in his guts, chased up and met the feeling she’d made under his ribs. He managed a jerky nod of his own. “It is, isn’t it.”

“Yeah, it is.” She sighed. “This is difficult for me, Scott. I grew up in a big family that had some Christians in it, but I wasn’t one of them. My religious experience is… very different from yours. Where I’m from, we accepted that other beliefs were possible, but we always thought they were just other ways of looking at the same truths we believed in. Less accurate, less enlightened paths. I never thought that maybe
our
truth would be the less enlightened one, that the Christians would be the ones who got it right. That—” She shook her head. “I never considered that.”

He felt a warm, protective affection for her surge up inside, like flames. He reached out and took her hand where it lay in her lap, squeezed gently.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You were true in your beliefs. That’s what counts.”

“I mean, you have to believe what you see with your own eyes, Scott. Right?” Her eyes held his. “You have to believe what you’re told when nothing else makes any sense, right?”

He drew a deep breath. “This makes perfect sense to me, Carmen.”

“Yeah, well here’s the thing, and I don’t know if there’s anything in your Bible that covers this, because it certainly isn’t what I was taught about the final cycle. He says”—another upward tilt of her eyes—“that he’s come early, that it’s not time yet and he has to gather his strength. He has work to do here, but his enemies are out there and they’re still strong. And that means we have to protect him until it is time. He’s chosen us, Scott. Sorted us from the, uh, the—”

“The chaff?”

“Yeah, the chaff. You saw what he did with Nocera and Ward? They were servants of the darkness, Scott. I see that now. I mean, I never liked Nocera, and Ward, well, I thought he was okay but—”

“Satan has a thousand snares,” Scott told her. “A thousand masks to wear.”

“Right.”

He hesitated, looking at her. “Are you His—” He tasted the word, awkward on his tongue. “His handmaiden?”

“Yes. That’s what he’s told me. Until one of the, uh, the angels can come to take on the task. Until then, he says he’ll speak through me.”

He was still holding her hand. He let go, pulled his own hands back as if she were hot to the touch. He tried not to stare at how beautiful she was.

“You are. So worthy of it,” he said hoarsely. “You’ll be filled with light.”

Then her hand was on him, on the buckle of his belt, pulling him to her. She leaned in and brushed her parted lips across his mouth. Pulled back again.

He gaped. Blood hammered in his head. Below the belt buckle, he felt suddenly trapped and swollen.

“What are you doing?” he hissed.

She gestured at the ceiling. “He’s up there, Scott. Staying up there, keeping watch for us. It’s all right.”

“No, it’s—” Shaking his head numbly. Trying to explain. “—it’s a, a sin, Carmen.”

He wanted to move away from her, but in moving he only tipped back over in his awkward crouch and wound up sitting slumped against the wall behind him, still on the bedroll. He hadn’t succeeded in opening the distance between them at all. Or maybe—he’d wonder about it afterward—maybe he just hadn’t wanted to move away from her after all.

“Carmen,” he pleaded. “We can’t be sinners. Not now. Not here. It’s
wrong
.”

But Carmen Ren only hooked a thumb inside the neckline of her shirt, looked down at her own hand, and tugged. The static seam split with a tiny crackle and she ran her thumb downward, opening the shirt on the molded lift of her breasts in their profiler cups. He could see through the clear plastic sheen to where her nipples were pressed flat against the inner surface of each cup. She looked up again and smiled at him.

“How can it be?” she asked simply. “Scott, don’t you see? Don’t you feel it? This is meant to be. This is a sacrament, a purification for both of us. A gift of his love. Reach inside yourself.
Don’t
you feel it?”

And he did.