Raising Stony Mayhall (24 page)

Delia stared at him. Stony glanced at Crystal, and she held out her arms for the baby. She was angry, but she wasn’t going to yell.

He led Delia out to the garage, then shut the door behind her.

“You’re ditching me here,” he said.

“You’d rather be somewhere else? You told me you wanted to visit.”

“Not like this. Not during whatever it is that this is. I know you think I’m having some kind of breakdown.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Then let me go back to L.A. to move the house. You go to Salt Lake—”

“Forget it,” she said. “I really do need someone here. Blunt needs someone here. Does Crystal have a gun?”

“What?”

“Never mind, you should have one of your own.” She went to her casket, retrieved the Commander Calhoun backpack, and pulled out a black, thick-bellied revolver. “Do you know how to kill an LD?”

“That’s a gun. How long have you had a gun?”

“Answer the question.”

“Everybody knows that,” he said. It was in every movie about the undead ever made—including the documentaries. “You shoot him in the head.”

“No,” she said. “You’ll miss. You shoot him in the chest”—She slapped her palm against him—“and you knock him the fuck down. Then you walk up close, about two feet away.
Then
you shoot him in the head. Then you burn him.”

I’m not going to do that, he thought.

She put the pistol in his hand. “This is an S-and-W model nineteen. You hold it with two hands or it will fucking jump up and smack you in the face. Keep the safety on at all times, until it’s time to take it off.”

“How would I know when that is?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions. I’ll leave you a box of shells, but frankly, if it’s not over in six bullets, fifty’s not going to save you.”

He thought, I’m not shooting anyone—not an LD, not a living person, not a jackrabbit. He could not even shoot Billy Zip. But if he told her that, she wouldn’t trust him.

She took the gun from him, checked the safety, and put it back in the bag. “I’m going to give you some phone numbers and some instructions. I’m not going to write them down, and neither are you. Ready?”

A panel truck—for all he knew, the same one that had carried them from the congress—backed up to the garage a few
hours later. Stony stayed out of sight. When the truck left, Delia was gone with it, and he was left holding the bag: Commander Calhoun’s smiling face hiding a pistol, two packs of Virginia Slims, and more cash than he’d ever seen in one place. Emergency money, Delia had called it.

What he should do, he thought, is give it to Crystal. Before the baby she’d worked thirty hours a week at a public library, but now she wasn’t working at all, and it was clear she was living close to the bone. Her furniture was either secondhand, or a substitute for furniture: wicker lawn chairs for real chairs, cinder blocks and planks for bookshelves, orange crates for end tables. An old-fashioned TV cabinet, not even plugged in, doubled as a banquet table, its wood veneer top crowded with candles and a southwestern-style nativity scene with wooden llamas and ceramic cacti. Fringed afghans disguised fraying upholstery, and throw rugs covered bare patches in the carpet. The whole place needed a paint job.

More worrisome, she didn’t seem to have any real food in the house. Lunch was a plate of lumpy, purplish vegetables he didn’t recognize, and a bowl of spiky leaves that had obviously evolved to rip apart the throat of any mammal stupid enough to eat them.

“It’s a salad,” Crystal said, defensively. “Do you want some?”

He’d given up eating while living with LDs, but he supposed he could resume his bulimia for old times’ sake. “Sure. It looks great.”

She filled a bowl and plate for him. He held Ruby in one hand and shook some ranch dressing over the greens. “So,” she said. “You’re a smoker now.”

He looked up guiltily. “I guess you can smell it, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. I got nostalgic. I gave it up when I got pregnant.”

“I promise I’ll never do it in the house.”

“You’d better not.” After a minute she said, “Smoking, swearing. Mom wouldn’t know what to think.”

Ah. There it was. He poked his fork into the purple thing. “Have you talked to her?”

“Stony, nobody’s talked to her in three years—not even her lawyer. Alice is spending all her free time on a lawsuit to allow access, but it’s slow. We don’t even think our letters are getting through to her. Certainly none of hers are getting out.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I never meant for that to happen.

Mom—”

“Mom knew what she was doing,” Crystal said. “She knew what you were when she picked you up.”

Stony choked down the salad and the purple things, which turned out to be eggplant. Ruby also had lunch. Before today, he would have thought it embarrassing to have his sister whip out her boob in front of him, but Crystal acted like this was perfectly normal, which of course
made
it normal. Crystal ate one-handed while Ruby sucked enthusiastically. When she finished, her head lolled drunkenly back from the nipple, her eyes half closed. Crystal quickly changed her diaper—the kid seemed to poop every thirty seconds—and then began to button her into a tiny snowsuit. Which seemed extreme, considering it was above fifty degrees outside.

“I’ve got to run some errands,” Crystal said.

“I can watch Ruby,” he said. “Look, she’s already asleep.”

“Stony, I can’t show up without my baby; people will think I threw her in the Dumpster. Plus, people want to see her.”

“Is she allowed to go out?”

“It’s just going to be for a couple of hours. Just don’t answer the door. I’ll make sure to pull the drapes.”

“Trust me, I’m used to this,” Stony said.

He peeked through the front window as she walked out to the driveway to a rusting ’76 Honda Civic and belted Ruby into her car seat. When the car pulled away it sounded like a Cessna taking off. A leak in the rear differential, probably. If she pulled it into the garage he could work on it without anyone seeing. Delia’s money could pay for parts.

He walked around the house for a while, picking up books and setting them down, and finally ended up back in the sunroom. It was odd to be alone. At the safe house people were always underfoot, and even when he was up in the attic or down in the basement he could hear his housemates talking, or listen to the babble of the TV. He should use this solitary time to gather his thoughts, to think through what might happen with Blunt and Zip, to visualize what he’d do if someone came after them in the house. Or maybe not. Maybe he should do the opposite, and
empty
his thoughts. Meditate.

He moved off the couch and sat cross-legged in front of the big window. A living person would listen to his heartbeat, or to his own breaths. He’d have to do something else, perhaps concentrate on the sound of the wind whisking the walls of the house. He closed his eyes, and the dead man was looking at him. His neck had been ravaged down to the bone. One hand rested proprietarily on the tangle of intestines that lay beside him.

Stony jumped to his feet. He paced the house, then eventually ended up in the spare bedroom where Crystal was letting him stay, and where Ruby would sleep when she left the bassinet. The walls were covered in ugly, purple-striped wallpaper. Leaning in the corner was a cardboard shipping container the size of a door—a crib that Alice had bought.

By the time Crystal returned, he’d assembled the crib, then partially disassembled it again so that he could move the pieces
into the hallway, because he’d realized that the wallpaper
had
to come off if Ruby was ever going to get a night’s sleep.

“I need a real scraper,” he told her.

“Why are you attacking my walls?”

“Also brushes,” he said. “Your choice on the paint. You want pink? No, that’s not you. Too cliché.”

Crystal said, “Are you all right? You don’t have to do anything. Just read a book or something.”

“How about yellow? Yellow is nice.” From his back pocket he produced a few hundred dollars in twenties. “Or two colors. We can alternate walls.”

“Where did you get that?”

“From Commander Calhoun.”

“You robbed a Calhoun’s?”

“Delia left it. For housekeeping expenses. You should get some food, too—you hardly have anything in the fridge. People will think you’re LD.”

“I’m not using your money.”

“Of course you are. Look, let’s pretend we argue about this for two hours, and maybe I make you cry, and then you make me cry, and then you grudgingly admit that we can use the money—because that is what’s best for little Ruby.”

“Do you remember the taxi game?”

“Uh …”

“When you and Junie were little, I used to get you to clean my room. I’d give you something to put away, and the taxi would have to carry it to my closet, or to my dresser.”

“That’s child abuse.”

“You both loved it. You’d beg me to play.”

“You obviously wrecked my ability to distinguish work from play. So, you’ll get me my paint?”

“The nearest paint store’s in Moab. For now, how about I find some scrapers, and you and I finish the wallpaper?”

“Fine, except for the part where you scrape. There could be lead paint under this stuff. You can’t inhale toxins and pass them to Ruby.”

“There isn’t any lead paint here, Stony.”

“How do you know? These walls are ancient. Besides, if you helped, I might finish too quickly and start looking for more projects.” He thought he was doing a good imitation of the lighthearted uncle, but Crystal was frowning at him. Had Delia told her what had happened at the congress? Had she overheard them talking?

“Okay,” she said finally. She smiled to signal that she was consenting to play this game, to banter and joke and pretend everything was okay. “Just promise me you won’t dig a bunker under my house.”

“That’s crazy,” he said. “I’d need dynamite to blast through that rock.”

Each night after midnight he’d leave the house and walk north. He walked parallel to the road, staying in the dark thirty yards off, tripping over rocks and roots. When a car approached from either direction he crouched and shielded his face, wary of his pale skin catching the light. This was a rare occurrence. Mostly he was alone in the dark, Halloween night again.

His first waypoint, about a mile from Crystal’s house, was a double-wide trailer whose tiny windows glowed each night with blue television light. Inert vehicles, half of them up on blocks, surrounded the trailer like sleeping buffalo. He gave the place a wide berth. He would have liked to ask Crystal who lived there and why they were up at all hours, but he hadn’t told her about his nightly walks.

The next mile was in the dark, lit only by the moon, until he topped a small rise and saw the light of the Sinclair sign. He never rushed toward it. When he was a few hundred yards away, he began to move in a long sweeping U that let him survey the gas station from all sides, scanning for teenagers, late-working clerks, drunks, anyone loitering under the light of that grinning, green Sinclair brontosaurus, who looked extremely happy to have his old bones fuel your car. Stony liked the corporate mascot because it was one of the few that unashamedly reminded you of exactly what had died to make your life easier. Like the El Pollo Loco chicken crazy with desire to become your lunch, or Charlie the Tuna desperate to be canned, the dinosaur was a corpse with a job. One of the undead of the ad world.

When he was satisfied the station was deserted, he would walk quickly to the pay phone on the side of the building and make his call. Delia had given him seven numbers, one for every day of the week. He’d dial the day’s number, then enter his personal access code, and every night a recorded voice would tell him that he had no messages. But that, itself, was a message. No one has reported in. You are not needed. Go back to your sister.

On the fifth night, a Thursday, the machine voice said,
You have one message, delivered at eleven … p.m. … yesterday
. Two hours ago!

He held on to the receiver, scanning the dark around the station, and then the voice came on. He’d expected to hear from Delia, but then he recognized Mr. Blunt’s reedy voice, the way his T’s ticked like clockwork.

Bit of trouble, my boy. I’m trying to reach our motorcyclist and getting no answer. Hopefully she’ll be in touch with you. Tell her that our short-fingered boy is on the move and may be accelerating his
plans. Half the people in the house just emptied, in a U-Haul. I’m having our A-1 driver follow the truck. I’m at 750 East, 400 South watching the leftovers. Tell her I’ll wait for her word as long as I can, and I would appreciate a few more hands on my side. But if they start to move, I’m going to have to knock on the half-wit’s door
.

A car horn blared in the background of the message.

Must go. Oh! And give my love to your sister. I understand congratulations are in order
.

Stony pressed the key to erase the message and hung up the phone. Suddenly it seemed much too bright under the Sinclair sign. He hurried off into the dark, but he did not head for home. He sat down behind an oil tank and tried to figure out what he should do. The “motorcyclist” was Delia. Where was she that she couldn’t get to a phone? Had the Diggers picked her up? Had Zip—the half-wit—turned her in?

The whole point of a Big Bite was that it had to be big: geographically distributed, with attacks on so many fronts that it would be impossible for the government to put down. If Zip was starting the bite now, then did that mean he’d already set up a nationwide network—or global network? Or else the “acceleration” Blunt mentioned meant that they’d forced Zip to act before he was ready. He hoped that was true.

He waited another half hour and called the number again.
No new messages
, the voice told him. He hurried back to his hiding place.

If Delia wasn’t captured, he might be the only link between her and Blunt. And if she was captured, he might be the only one left who knew what Blunt was doing.

He called the number again twenty minutes later. This time the voice didn’t pick up. The phone on the other end rang and rang: eight rings, nine, ten. The system never picked up. Had he misremembered the number? He tried it again, and still got no answer. Then he tried Saturday’s number, and Sunday’s.