Summerland (15 page)

"And so now, what? Now the whole universe is going to come to an end?"

"It always was goin' to," Mr. Brown said. "Now it's just happenin' a little bit sooner."

"Ethan? Jennifer T.?" The driver of the second car, behind the pickup truck, had rolled down
her
window now. "You kids all right?"

"Yeah," said Ethan and Jennifer T. Ethan saw how they must look to Mrs. Baldwin, one of the secretaries in the office at school, hanging around the southend ferry dock, talking to some weird old guy in a Cadillac.

"Well," Mr. Brown said, rolling his window up most of the way. "Look like I'm holdin' things up." He put the car in gear with a lurch. The big engine coughed and roared. "You kids enjoy the rest of your summer."

"Wait!" Ethan said, as the drivers, angry now, swerved around Mr. Brown's car and took off one after the other down the hill. "Isn't there anything we can do—I can do—to stop it?"

"You doesn't know magic. You doesn't know baseball." Mr. Brown looked at Jennifer T. "You knows a little about both of them, I reckon, but not much besides." He shook his head. "Plus, you
children
. Tell me how you going to stop Ragged Rock?"

Ethan and Jennifer T. had no reply to this. Mr. Brown rolled his window all the way and drove off. Ethan and Jennifer T. started the long walk back to her house, which was closer to Southend than Ethan's. For a long time they didn't say anything. What can you say, after all, about the end of the world? Ethan was deeply disturbed by the memory of the ruined Birchwood, and by the thought of all those ferishers carted off to be made into horrible little gray bat things. And every time he closed his eyes, he saw the tip of a little red tail, disappearing into a world of shadows. But he could not help being cheered by the fact that when asked, Mr. Brown had not said,
There is nothing to be done
. Merely that he didn't think there was anything Ethan and Jennifer T. could do.

Ethan tried to imagine how the conversation would go when he tried to explain to his father about the ferishers, and Ragged Rock. Few things made Mr. Feld truly angry, but one thing that did was when people insisted that there was more to the world than what you could see, hear, touch, or otherwise investigate with tools and your five good senses. That there was a world behind the world, or beyond it. An afterlife, say. Mr. Feld felt that people who believed in other worlds were simply not paying enough attention to this one. He had been insistent with Ethan that Dr. Feld was gone forever, that all of her, everything that had made her so uniquely and wonderfully her, was in the ground, where it would all return to the elements and minerals it was made of. This satisfied Mr. Feld, or so he said. He would not look kindly on tales of fairies and skrikers and shadows that could come to life and carry off werefoxes into the sky. And yet Ethan could think of no one else to go to for help. He decided he was going to have to tell his father some version of the truth. And then Mr. Feld would call Nan Finkel, the therapist that Ethan had been seeing on and off since their arrival on Clam Island, and Nan Finkel, with her two thick braids that were so long she could sit on them, would have him put in a hospital for disturbed children, and that would be that.

"Jennifer T.," he said. They had been walking for half an hour in silence, and were nearly to the Rideout place. "Nobody is going to believe us."

"I was thinking that."

"You know it's true, right?"

"Everything is true." Jennifer T. spat on the ground. Her spitting was as professional in quality as the rest of her game. "That's what Albert always says."

"I know. I've heard him say it."

They had reached the gap in the trees where a teetering old mailbox, perforated with bullet and BB holes, was painted with Jennifer T.'s last name. One of the dogs came tearing toward them, a big black mutt with his pink tongue flying like a flag. There was a little green parakeet riding on his shoulder.

"We can tell the old ladies," Jennifer T. said. "They believe a lot of even crazier stuff" than this."

THE HOUSE WHERE JENNIFER T. LIVED HAD TWO BEDROOMS.
IN one slept Jennifer T. and the little twins, Darrin and Dirk. In the other slept Gran Billy Ann and her sisters, Beatrice and Shambleau. The toilet was attached to the house and had a roof over it, but it was outside. You had to go out the back door to get to it. There were seven to nine dogs, and from time to time the cats became an island scandal. You came in through the living room, where there were three immense reclining chairs, so large that they left barely enough room for a small television set. One chair was red plaid, one was green plaid, and one was white leather. They vibrated when you pushed a certain button. The old ladies sat around vibrating and reading romance novels. They were big ladies, and they needed big chairs. They had a collection of over seven thousand five hundred romance novels. They had every novel Barbara Cartland ever wrote, all of the Harlequin romances, all the Silhouette and Zebra and HeartQuest books. The paperbacks were piled in stacks that reached almost to the ceiling. They blocked windows and killed houseplants and regularly collapsed on visitors. Island people who knew of the Rideout girls' taste in fiction would come by in the dead of night and dump grocery bags and liquor boxes full of romances in the driveway. The old ladies despised other people's charity, but the free books they seemed to accept as a tribute: they were the oldest women on Clam Island, and entitled to a certain amount of respect. They happily read the abandoned books. If they had already read them before, they read them again. If there was one thing in life that didn't trouble them, it was having heard the same story before.

"The Little Tribe," said Gran Billy Ann. She was sprawled in her chair, the red plaid one, her feet up in a pair of big black orthopedic shoes, vibrating away. "How about that! I remember Pap had stories about them. One time when he was a boy they stole a silver pin right out of his sister's hair. Over at Hotel Beach that was. Before it was a hotel there. But I never heard of this Ragged Rock thing." Gran Billy Ann lit a cigarette. She was not supposed to smoke. She was not supposed to drink, either, but she was drinking a can of Olympia beer. That kind of thing was all right if you were one of the three oldest women on Clam Island. "I don't like the sound of that."

"Ragged Rock," Aunt Beatrice said. "Ragged Rock. I don't remember Pap having anything to say on that score."

"I saw one of them, once," said Aunt Shambleau, in a low voice, almost to herself. "It was in the summertime. A beautiful little man. Naked as a fish. He was lying on his back in the sun."

The other two ladies turned to her.

"You never told me!" Aunt Beatrice said.

"She's lying," said Gran Billy Ann. She scowled at her sister, then turned her scowl on Jennifer T. and Ethan. "You don't want to lie about seeing the Little Tribe. They'll come at night and pinch you till you're black and blue."

"Come over here, girl," said Aunt Shambleau. Though Gran Billy Ann was the biggest grump of the three, Shambleau was the aunt that Ethan feared the most. She had a quiet way of talking and she wore her big, black, wraparound space-warrior cataract-patient sunglasses in the house, for reasons that Ethan was afraid to inquire about. She was the oldest of the sisters, and sometimes when she was lying in her bed you could hear her talking to herself in a strange throaty language of which, though Ethan realized it only much later, she was the last living speaker on the face of the earth. Now she took hold of Jennifer's arm and pulled her close. She studied the girl's face through the impenetrable lenses of her cataract sunglasses. "She ain't lying, Billy Ann. This girl has seen the Little Tribe."

Jennifer T. jerked her arm loose.

"Get off me!" she said. "Old witch. Of course I ain't lying!"

Shambleau laughed delightedly. Her sisters joined in. They always seemed to get a good laugh out of making Jennifer T. mad.

"It's true," Ethan said. He didn't think this was really the time to be laughing. "Ragged Rock is the end of the world."

"What is this I'm hearing?" said a gravel-bottomed voice. Uncle Mo. He was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, with a beer of his own. He was not supposed to be drinking, either. "Who is talking all this crazy talk?"

"Uncle Mo, Uncle Mo," Jennifer T. said. "I was throwing today. Ethan said my fastball was nasty."

"It really was," Ethan said, momentarily forgetting the end of the world. Mo Rideout would know what to do. He had traveled. After his arm gave out he had served in the Navy, and then in the merchant marine after the war. He had been to Alaska, to Japan, to the Caspian Sea. Though he looked and talked and cursed like an old sailor, he had shown Ethan his diploma from Lutheran College, earned by means of a special correspondence program for seamen. Plus, he was a ballplayer, and an Indian, too. "It had bite."

Uncle Mo, it turned out, knew more than they had ever imagined.

"Ragged Rock," he said, sadly, after Ethan and Jennifer T. told their tale again, this time with help from Mo's big sisters. Jennifer T. brought a chair in from the kitchen and he sat down. "Ragged, Ragged Rock. I can't believe it's true. I gave up thinking about all that business a long time ago."

"Pap never said anything about any raggedy old rock," Gran Billy Ann insisted.

"Not to you," snapped Uncle Mo. "Some things were not meant to be said to girls or women." He looked at Ethan. "Or to white people."

Ethan blushed. "It's like—I mean, it's the, well, the end of the world," he said. "What we want to know is, well. How you stop it. We think it can be stopped. Cutbelly believed that somebody could stop it. Even if it wasn't us."

"A mortal champion," Uncle Mo said, his voice softer. "That's right. A man of the Middling."

"Or a woman of the Middling," Jennifer T. said. "Mr. Brown said I had champion stuff, too."

"Mr. Chiron C. Brown." Uncle Mo's eyes misted over now. "How about that? And this is the day he always worried about, come to happen."

"So you know Ringfinger Brown?" Ethan said. They must have played ball together; Uncle Mo had played a season or two in the Negro Leagues. "Did he tell you what to do?"

"Many times," said Uncle Mo. "Yes. Bear in mind it has been a long, long time and many empty bottles since then." As if to emphasize this point, he took a long swallow of beer. "Ragged Rock is a day, the last day. The last day of the last year. The last out in the bottom of the ninth." He smacked his lips. "The day when the Story finally ends."

"What story?" Ethan said.

"The Story. All stories. All the stories, all of them that anybody ever lived or told or experienced or heard about. All these long years, Coyote's been working to make that day come. See, there are these…
spots
, along the branches of the Lodgepole. Places where the Worlds got stuck together."

"Galls," Ethan said.

Uncle Mo fixed him with a sharp look. "I believe that's the term," he said. "Wherever you have one of these gall things, that's a place where the great adventures begin. The worlds flow together, and travelers tumble through and come out the other side. And they get into all kinds of yarns and escapades. Voyages and misfortunes. So for a long, long time, now, Coyote's been going around
cutting
these knots. Trying to bring all the little stories to a stop so that he can put a stop to the one great Story, the one about you and me and all the creatures that ever lived. He's tired of things the way they are. He's been tired of them almost since they first got this way, which they only did thanks to him."

"What lodgepole?" Jennifer T. said.

"
The
Lodgepole. The mother Tree. The Tree of the whole wide everything. I forget the right name of it just this minute. That holds up all the different worlds. Keeps everything in its proper place."

"There used to be four worlds," Ethan said. "But now there are only three."

"That's—well, that's right, Mr. Feld," Uncle Mo said, looking a little surprised. "How did you know?"

"What happened to the other one?" It was Aunt Shambleau. The other ladies were listening to but not, it seemed to Ethan, quite following their brother's words.

"It was the world of the big
Tahmahnawis
," he said. Aunt Shambleau nodded as if she understood what this meant. "The spirit tribe, I guess you could say, the spirit nation. The other worlds are the Summerlands, the Winterlands, and this one. The Middling. The Lodgepole—what's its name—it holds the worlds in its branches. And then there is a Well, I forget the name of it, if I ever knew. It waters the Tree. That's right."

"A Well," said Aunt Shambleau. "Boiling cold and blue as night. I remember. Pap told me about it."

"Did he?" Uncle Mo said. "I don't remember him ever saying anything about it. It was from Mr. Brown that I heard all this."