China Lake (9 page)

She shook it at me. ‘‘I ain’t even started on you, missy. Look here—page one, nuclear holocaust. How stupid is that? Whole idea’s obsolete. We know things ain’t gonna happen that way. Then there’s your time line. It’s a far future—what, five, six thousand years? That’s so optimistic it’s just plain silly.’’

Anita Krebs approached the table, smiling thinly. ‘‘Madam, would you mind—’’

‘‘Lady, I ain’t talking to you.’’

I said, ‘‘The jig’s up, Anita. Scripture Cop’s got us.’’

Chenille slapped the book cover with the back of her hand. ‘‘This story, it’s fake. You just made it up. There’s only one book tells us the truth, and that’s the Bible. This’’—she held up my book—‘‘this ain’t nothing but a lie.’’

I put down my pen. ‘‘Did you know that you have your head on inside out?’’

‘‘Don’t mock me.’’

‘‘Tell me the truth—how pessimistic am I supposed to be? Do I have time to order a pizza before the plane leaves the gate?’’

‘‘It don’t matter. You ain’t coming.’’

‘‘But I already requested a window seat.’’

She stared at me. ‘‘Luke should not be in your presence.’’

I knocked the chair over backward banging to my feet. ‘‘Get out.’’

She turned on the heels of her baby-blue boots and started walking, an imperious stare on her face. I barged behind, trailing her outside.

Without looking at me she said, ‘‘He is a special little angel, far more precious than you can ever understand. Do you think we will let the dragon devour him?’’

‘‘
We?
There’s no
we
here. You have nothing to do with my family.’’

She looked my way at last, appraising me as though I were pathetic and dim-witted beyond belief. She began humming ‘‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’’ and walked away.

I stood for a moment on the broad sidewalk, with shoppers and tourists rustling past me. Furious, I strode back inside. When I passed the display of my books I swung at it, smacking the whole thing down.

Anita walked up, fists on hips. ‘‘Later, you can explain why you did that. But right now will you finish signing for the people who waited through that show?’’

I looked around. Everyone was staring at me.

The woman with the sunburn said, ‘‘Honey, I’m hooked. Give me two copies.’’

‘‘Forget writing,’’ said the man behind her. ‘‘Start videotaping your life. This beats the dead whale, hands down.’’

By the time I apologized and made nice and tried to snuff my instant reputation for being a stick of human dynamite, I was late picking up Luke from school. I parked across the street from the campus and trotted up the sidewalk, hearing the musical buzz of children’s voices. Slowing at a crosswalk, I tried to spot Luke through the chain-link fence. He knew to wait on the playground until I arrived. Seeing kids swinging on the monkey bars resurrected sensations of calloused palms and skinned knees, the exhilaration of being six. I tried harder not to look rattled and angry.

I couldn’t decide whether Chenille had come to Beowulf’s to catalog books for burning, or simply to harass me. I heard her voice, her peculiar ungrammatical formality—King James English filtered through the trailer park—talking about Luke in terms both pointed and oblique. My head began pounding again.
I ain’t even started on you, missy
.

A truck stopped to let me cross, a green Dodge pickup with oversize tires. Though it had a shiny urban-redneck look, four people and a dog sat in the back, pure
Grapes of Wrath
. As I passed, it accelerated with a muscular grunt.

In the truck bed sat a moonfaced teenager with a ponytail and a miniature-rose mouth. She was looking at the playground. I froze. It was Shiloh, the Remnant’s designated denouncer, and she wasn’t the only one watching the playground. All the Joads were.

The truck was cruising slowly along the fence. I started running after it.

For a few seconds I gained on it, before its engine blatted and it pulled away sharply. I stood blinking, stumbling to clarify what I’d seen in the cab: coils of auburn hair and a woman’s slender arm. The fragmented image assembled itself into Tabitha. I tried to swear, but my throat was too dry.

‘‘Scare tactics,’’ Jesse said.

‘‘Diversionary tactics.’’ I flipped the car’s sun visor down as I curved west and accelerated uphill on West Camino Cielo. ‘‘Chenille Wyoming was trying to keep me at Beowulf’s by causing a scene. She wanted me to get to the school late.’’

Chenille—and Tabitha—didn’t know that Luke had been told to remain on school grounds until I arrived, no matter what. Perhaps they had expected him to walk home alone, or to stand outside, looking around forlornly, until someone called his name and waved to him, beckoning him toward the smiling faces in the pickup truck. . . . Fear trickled cold down my back.

We raced up the road, past blue-gray chaparral and sandstone boulders. Jesse’s hair whipped in the cool breeze flowing through the windows. He had on a black Pendleton shirt and khaki jeans over the long brace he wore on his right leg when he walked. It was early Wednesday evening.

‘‘Something else bothers me,’’ he said. ‘‘Chenille didn’t have to read
Lithium Sunset
to cause a scene. She’s taking a close interest in you.’’

But I didn’t have time to think about it. We turned up Tabitha’s driveway, bounced along the rutted dirt path, and pulled up to the house, noticing that the lawn had been mowed, weeds pulled, potted begonias set by the door.

I said, ‘‘Set phasers on be-a-bastard.’’

When I rang the bell, the door opened with a creak. Tabitha stood in the doorway, eyes sprung wide, pressing an artist’s pencil to her lips. Looking elegant for a night home alone with the sketch pad, in a rose cardigan and long floral skirt that draped her figure.

‘‘We need to talk about Luke,’’ I said. Her eyes flicked beyond me, to the Explorer, and I added, ‘‘I didn’t bring him. You aren’t going to see him. You blew it today.’’

The pencil tapped against her lips. ‘‘What’s Jesse doing here?’’

‘‘He’s with me.’’

He was swinging toward us on his aluminum crutches. She stared at him.
Tap, tap, tap.
The pencil, and now her bare, painted toes.

‘‘Tabitha,’’
I said, astonished that I couldn’t hold her attention. ‘‘If you or anybody from the Remnant gets within sight of Luke’s school again, the principal will call the police. If you follow him, or try to speak to him, I will file a restraining order against you. Do you understand?’’

She blinked, and tapped, stippling the pencil with claret-colored lipstick. Finally, as if just now hearing me, she said, ‘‘You can’t stop a mother from seeing her own child.’’

‘‘In this circumstance? You bet I can.’’

The pencil stopped. ‘‘I didn’t think you could be so vengeful.’’

‘‘Excuse me?’’

‘‘All I wanted was one glimpse of him, just to see with my own eyes that he’s okay. One tiny glimpse, but even that’s too much for you to stand.’’

Blood was pounding in my ears. ‘‘Can the act. You walked out on Luke. Brian has sole custody, and from here on, you need a judge’s permission to see him. And of course he’s okay. Now.’’

She crossed her arms. ‘‘How would you know that, for sure? You’re not his mother. You didn’t carry him or nurse him. You’re . . . day care.’’

Why didn’t she just stab me between the eyes with that pencil? I stood there, hurt and speechless. Wishing Jesse would come and back me up—but he was standing by the garage, gazing in.

A shadow appeared behind her in the doorway, a man. It was Peter Wyoming.

‘‘Miss Delaney,’’ he said. ‘‘Tabitha? Invite her in.’’

My eyes widened, but hers jumped. She was nervous, I realized, to the point of twitching. Stiffly she said, ‘‘Won’t you join us?’’

I held back, looking toward Jesse, but he shook his head. Something outside had caught his attention. I heard music in the backyard, and women’s voices. More people were here than I had imagined.

‘‘Come see what Tabitha’s working on. It’s magnificent. ’’ Wyoming motioned me toward the living room, smoothly changing the subject. I wondered if the unexpected civility was a ploy, or simply his offstage persona. His craggy face wore a mild look. His blue and green plaid shirt gave off a
Father Knows Best
aura.

I walked in and stopped short. The walls were covered with drawings: black and white, a stark fantasia of biblical retribution that overpowered the room.

He gestured to a comic strip on the drawing table. ‘‘Edifying, isn’t it?’’

Hardly. Titled ‘‘HELL-o-ween,’’ its illustrations juxtaposed satanists strapping a virgin down on an altar, and Caucasian tots dressing up for trick-or-treating.

He waved a rough hand at the drawings. ‘‘Look at the power in her work. It comes from the purity of her hand. Her line here, it’s so clean.’’

He touched a drawing of a little girl, hands filled with candy bars, carelessly dashing in front of a speeding car. The sparkles on her fairy princess gown couldn’t save her. The final sketch showed her huddled in a rocky corner of hell, costume in rags, flames strafing her limbs.

Clean? The cartoons were grisly, the parallel with the pumpkin-truck accident heartless. And Wyoming’s enthusiasm for the death and darkness in the drawings seemed vaguely . . . pornographic.

He said, ‘‘You look shocked. She looks shocked, Tabitha.’’

Though still jittery, she was pie-eyed, lapping up his praise.

He wrapped an arm around her shoulder. ‘‘Bull’s-eye! You turned this around and rammed it right back down the devil’s throat, little lady.’’

As she flushed and bit her lip, it came to me: Her cartoon was the Remnant’s riposte to the pumpkin onslaught outside their church.

‘‘You believe the devil assaulted you the other night with holiday decorations?’’

‘‘Pagans hold that jack-o’-lanterns are the repositories of damned souls,’’ he said. ‘‘You don’t think we’ll take that lying down.’’

‘‘My God, what do you do when confronted with a pumpkin pie? Drive a stake through it?’’

‘‘Halloween is a doorway to evil, an aperture through which Satan attacks the physical world.’’

Tabitha said, ‘‘It gives him a fingerhold on children’s souls. We try to stop it.’’

‘‘You’re going to hand this out to kids?’’ I pointed to the comic strip. ‘‘Do you think this will somehow make you look like a caring parent?’’

Wyoming said, ‘‘You’re upset about her absence from Luke’s life. But that’s all ending now.’’

With diminishing patience, I turned to him. ‘‘Will you excuse us for a few minutes? I need to speak to Tabitha alone.’’

Apparently people didn’t ask Pastor Pete to leave a room. He raised his eyebrows at Tabitha, holding my uppityness against her. Her pale cheeks rouged.

Tilting his head toward the kitchen, he said, ‘‘Tell you what. Be a lamb and fix us up a plate of nibbles. There’s a good girl.’’

Nodding, she fled.

In the backyard the music intensified. I glanced out a sliding glass door and saw the baton twirlers rehearsing. Barking commands at them was Shiloh, wearing a huge pink bow in her hair and a coach’s whistle around her neck.

Wyoming stepped toward me. ‘‘I know you don’t believe a lick of what I’m saying. But I’d like a favor. Put a stopper in the wisecracks long enough for me to ask you a question.’’ His voice radiated a quiet heat. He said, ‘‘Have you ever confronted evil? I mean truly, personally, felt its touch?’’

I backed up.

‘‘Ah. You know what I’m talking about; I can see it on your face. Someone once harmed you physically, I’d wager.’’

He nodded, seeing that he had guessed right. It disconcerted and angered me.

I said, ‘‘What do you know about evil? Does it confront you regularly?’’

‘‘Yes.’’ He sounded surprised that I would even raise the question. ‘‘Every time I speak out against depravity. It tries to stop me. When I protest at funerals I can sense it—a force, a blackness, a’’—he sought for the word—‘‘a malignancy. Of course I confront evil. I can feel it in the
air
. Spreading, coiling around me, touching me . . .’’

Behind his pale eyes, emotion cracked open. For a moment I saw a bottomless, heartbreaking terror.

‘‘
Every time
. It lurks, trying to slip past my defenses. . . ."

He swallowed, seeming pained, and shook his head.
Spreading
. Did he actually fear getting AIDS? Then his lizard eyes recovered, constricting to cool focus.

‘‘Evil’s an intimate thing, isn’t it?’’ he said. ‘‘More intimate than love, so much more intimate than sex. It’s the entrapment. Remember how cornered you felt when you realized,
This is really happening to me
. The thick throat, the quaking in your bowels . . .’’

The setting sun cast orange light onto the living room walls, giving a sense of vicious animation to the drawings tacked up all around me.

‘‘Hold on to that feeling.
Know
it. Because the evil that harmed you hasn’t gone away. It’s out there, waiting. And it’s hungry. It lusts to consume your body and your soul. So that when you’re dead, it will possess you. Forever.’’ His voice quieted to a hiss. ‘‘Now, Miss Delaney—now can you start to see the true force of the storm that’s coming?’’

A deep, inarticulate fear seeped through me. I looked away from him, out the back window, and saw Jesse standing at the corner of the lawn. He looked toward the house with an odd expression on his face.

Breaking the spell, Wyoming said, ‘‘Who’s that?’’

‘‘My boyfriend.’’

‘‘He has to leave.’’ Abruptly, he started toward the sliding glass door.

Perplexed, shaken, I said, ‘‘Never mind, we’ll both leave,’’ and strode outside, desperate for fresh air, gooseflesh on my arms. The twirlers were acting flighty, like corraled horses before a lightning storm. Getting closer, I saw that they looked identical: blond, fit, with the artfulness that develops in girls who vie for teen trophies—a blue ribbon, prom queen, the quarterback. They were triplets. Shiloh blew the whistle and shouted, ‘‘Drop and give me thirty!’’ As they went down into push-ups, she marched toward Jesse.