Darwinia (28 page)

“Tell them to call me at home.”

He was already running.

“Son of a bitch!” Nick said in the car.

Guilford gave him a distracted glance. “You want to watch that kind of language, Nick.”

“You said it first.”

“Did I?”

“About five times in the last ten minutes. Shouldn’t we slow down?”

He did. A little. Nick relaxed. Summer-brown wildlands fled past the Ford’s dusty window.

“Son of a bitch,” his father said.

Abby was safe, if concerned, and Guilford felt somewhat foolish for hurrying home. Both the fire chief and the sheriff had telephoned, Abby said. “All of that can wait till morning,” he told her. “Let’s lock up and get some sleep.”

“
Can
you sleep?”

“Probably not. Not right away. Let’s get Nick tucked in, at least.”

Once Nick was squared away, Guilford sat at the kitchen table while Abby perked coffee. Coffee this close to midnight signified a family crisis. Abby moved around the kitchen with her usual economy. Tonight, at least, her frown resembled Nick’s.

Abby had aged with supreme grace. She was stocky but not fat. Save for the gray just beginning to show at her temples, she might have been twenty-five.

She gave Guilford a long look, debating something with herself. Finally she said, “You may as well talk about it.”

“What’s that, Abby?”

“For the last month you’ve been nervous as a cat. You hardly touch an evening meal. Now this.” She paused. “The fire chief told me it wasn’t an accident.”

His turn to hesitate. “Tim Mackelroy says a couple of homemade firebombs came through the window.”

“I see.” She folded her hands. “Guilford, why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what’s been bothering you?”

He said nothing.

“Is it something that happened before we met?”

“I doubt it.”

“Because you don’t talk about those times much. That’s all right — I don’t have to know everything about you. But if we’re in danger, if
Nick
is in danger—”

“Abby, honestly, I don’t know. True, I’m worried. Somebody torched my business, and maybe it was random lunacy or maybe somebody out there is holding some kind of grudge. All I can do is lock up and talk to Sheriff Carlysle in the morning. You know I wouldn’t let anything happen to you or Nick.”

She gazed at him a long time. “I’ll go to bed, then.”

“Sleep if you can,” Guilford told her. “I’ll sit out here a while.”

She nodded.

The arson.

The stranger at the door.

The picket.

You leave a thing behind
, Guilford thought, and time passes, ten, fifteen, twenty-five years, and that ought to be the end of it.

He remembered it all vividly, in all the bright colors of a dream, the killing winter in the ancient city, the agony of London, the loss of Caroline and Lily. But, Christ, that had been a quarter of a century ago — what could be left of that time that would make him worth killing?

If what the picket had told him then was true -

— but he had written that off as a fever dream, a distorted memory, a half hallucination -

But if what the picket had told him was true, maybe twenty-five years was the blink of an eye. The gods had long memories.

Guilford went to the window. The bay was dark, only a few commercial vessels showing lights. A dry wind moved the lace curtains Abby had hung. Stars shivered in the sky.

Time to be honest, Guilford thought. No wishful thinking. Not when your family’s at stake.

It was possible — admit it — that old debts were about to be collected.

The hard question. Could he have prevented this?

No.

Anticipated it?

Maybe. He had wondered often enough if there might not one day be a reckoning. Far as the world knew, the Finch expedition had simply vanished in the wilderness between the Bodensee and the Alps. And the world had got on well enough without him.

But what if that had changed?

Abby and Nicholas
, Guilford thought.

No matter what the gods wanted.

He followed Abby to bed a couple of hours before dawn. He didn’t want to sleep, only to close his eyes. The presence of her, the soft music of her breath, eased his thoughts.

He woke to sunlight through the east window, to Abby, fully dressed, her hand on his shoulder.

He sat up.

“He’s back,” she said. “That man.”

He thought of all the ways the continent had changed in the last quarter century.

New harbors, settlements, naval bases. Rail and roads to the interior. Mines and refineries. Airstrips.

The new District system, the elected Governors, the radio networks. Homesteads on the Russian steppes, this side of the volcanic zone that divided Darwinia from Old Asia. Skirmish battles with Arabs and Turks. The bombing of Jerusalem, this new war with the Japanese, the draft riots up north.

And so much land still empty. Still a vastness of forest and plain into which a man might, for all purposes, vanish.

Abby had given the stranger a seat at the breakfast table. He was working his way through a plate of Abby’s flapjacks. He handled the knife and fork like a five-year-old. A dewdrop of corn syrup lingered in his thicket of beard.

Guilford gazed at the man with a torrent of emotion: shock, relief, renewed fear.

The frontiersman speared a last bite of breakfast and looked up. “Guilford,” he said laconically. “Long time.”

“Long time, Tom.”

“Mind if I smoke?”

A fresh briar. A tattered cloth bag of river weed. Guilford said, “Let’s go outside.”

Abby touched Guilford’s arm questioningly. “District police and the fire chief want you to call them. We need to talk to the trust company, too.”

“It’s okay, Abby. Tom’s an old friend. All that other business can wait a while. What’s burned is burned. There’s no hurry now.”

Her eyes expressed grave reservation. “I suppose so.”

“Keep Nick in the house today.”

“Thank you kindly for the meal, Mrs. Law,” Tom Compton said. “Very tasty.”

The frontiersman hadn’t changed in twenty-five years. His beard had been trimmed since that awful winter, and he was stockier — healthier — but nothing
fundamental
had changed. A little weathering, but no sign of age.

Just like me
, Guilford thought.

“You’re looking well, Tom.”

“Both of us are healthy as horses, for reasons you ought to have figured out. What do you tell people, Guilford? Do you lie about your age? It was never a problem for me — I never stayed in one place long enough.”

They sat together on the creaking front-porch of the house. Morning air came up the slopes from the bay, fresh as cool water and scented with growing things. Tom filled his pipe but didn’t light it.

Guilford said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yeah, you do. You also know I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. So let’s not shovel too much shit, okay?”

“It’s been a quarter century, Tom.”

“It’s not that I don’t understand the urge. Took me ten years, personally speaking, before I broke down and said okay, the world’s fucking up and I been tapped to help fix it. That’s not an easy thing to believe. If it’s true it’s fucking frightening, and if it’s
not
true, then we all ought to be locked up.”

“We all?”

The frontiersman applied match to bowl. “There are hundreds of us. I’m surprised you don’t know that.”

Guilford sat silently for a time in the morning sunlight. He hadn’t had much sleep. His body ached, his eyes ached. Just about twelve hours ago he had been in Fayetteville staring at the ashes of his business. He said, “I don’t mean to be inhospitable, but there’s a lot on my mind.”

“You have to stop this.” The frontiersman’s voice was solemn. “Jesus, Guilford, look at you, living like a mortal man, married, for Christ’s sake, and a kid in there, too. Not that I blame you for wanting it. I might have liked that kind of life myself. But we are what we are. You and Sullivan used to congratulate yourselves for being so fuckin’ open-minded, not like old Finch, making history out of wishes. But here you are — Guilford Law, solid citizen, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, and God help anybody who doesn’t play along.”

“Look, Tom—”

“Look yourself. Your shop burned down. You have enemies. The people inside this house are in danger. Because of you.
You
, Guilford. Better to face a hard truth than a dead wife and child.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have come out here.”

“Well pardon my hairy ass.” He shook his head. “By the way. Lily’s in town. She’s staying at a hotel in Oro Delta. Wants to see you.”

Guilford’s heart did a double beat. “Lily?”

“Your daughter. If you remember that far back.”

Abby didn’t know what the burly backwoodsman said to her husband, but she could read the shock in Guilford’s face when he stepped back through the door.

“Abby,” he said, “I think maybe you and Nick ought to pack a few things and spend a week with your cousin in Palaepolis.”

She came into his arms, composed herself, looked up at him. “Why?”

“Just to be on the safe side. Till we sort out what’s going on.”

You live with a man this long
, Abby thought,
you learn to listen past the words.
There wouldn’t be any debate. Guilford was afraid, deeply afraid.

The fear was contagious, but she kept it tied in a knot just under her breastbone. Nicholas mustn’t see it.

She felt like an actress in a half-remembered play, struggling to recall her lines. For years now she had anticipated — well, not
this
, certainly, but something, some climax or crisis invading their lives. Because Guilford was not an ordinary man.

It wasn’t only his youthful appearance, though that had become more obvious — strikingly obvious — over the last few years. Not just his past, which he seldom discussed and jealously guarded. More than that. Guilford was set apart from the ordinary run of men, and he knew it, and he didn’t like it.

She’d heard stories. Folktales. People talked about the Old Men, by which they meant the venerable frontiersmen who still wandered through town now and again. (This Tom Compton being a prize example.) Stories told on the long nights between Christmas and Easter: The Old Men knew more than they said. The Old Men kept secrets.

The Old Men weren’t entirely human.

She had never believed these things. She listened to the talk and she smiled.

But two winters ago Guilford had been out back chopping firewood, and his hand had slipped on the haft of the old axe, and the blade had gone deep into the meat of his left leg below the knee.

Abby had been at the frost-rimed window, watching. The pale sun hadn’t set. She had seen it all quite clearly. She had seen the blade cut him — he had
wrenched
it out of himself, the way he might have wrenched it out of a slab of wet wood — and she had seen the blood on the blade and the blood on the hard ground. It had seemed as though her heart might stop beating. Guilford dropped the axe and fell, his face suddenly white.

Abby ran to the back door, but by the time she crossed the distance to him he had managed, impossibly, to stand up again. The expression on his face was strange, subdued. He looked at her with what might have been shame.

“I’m all right,” he said. Abby was startled. But when he showed her the wound it was already closed — only a faint line of blood where the axe had gone in.

Not possible
, Abby thought.

But he wouldn’t talk about it. It was just a scratch, Guilford insisted; if she had seen anything else it must have been a trick of the afternoon light.

And in the morning, when he dressed, there wasn’t even a scar where the blade had cut him.

And Abby had put it out of her mind, because Guilford wanted it that way and because she didn’t understand what she’d seen — maybe he was right, maybe it wasn’t what she had thought, though the blood on the ground had been real enough, and the blood on the axe.

But you don’t see a thing like that
, Abby thought,
and just forget it.
The memory persisted.

It persisted as a subtle knowledge that things were not what they seemed, that Guilford was perhaps more than he had allowed her to know; and that, by implication, their life could never be a wholly normal life. Some morning will come, Abby had told herself, when a reckoning is due.

Was this the morning?

She couldn’t say. But the skin of illusion had been broken. This time the bleeding might not stop.

The two men sat on the grassy slope beyond the elm tree Guilford had planted ten years ago.

Abby packed a bag. Nick packed, too, happy at the prospect of a trip but aware of the change that had overtaken the household. Guilford saw the boy in the doorway, peering at his father and at the bearded apparition with him. Apprehension colored his eyes.

“I didn’t want this either,” Tom Compton said. “Last thing I ever wanted was to have my life fucked up by a ghost. But sooner or later you have to face facts.”

“ ‘Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why then should we wish to be deceived?’ ”

“Wasn’t that one of Sullivan’s sermons?”

“Yes, it was.”

“I miss that son of a bitch.”

Nick brought a baseball and glove out of the house, playing catch with himself while he waited for his mother, tossing the ball high overhead and running to intercept it. His dirty blond hair fell into his eyes.
Time for a haircut
, Guilford thought,
if you want to play center field.