Swan Song (66 page)

“And what?” Sister prompted.

He hesitated, trying to find the words, and then he lifted his gaze to hers. “I used to tell him that real beauty is deeper than skin. I used to tell him that real beauty is what’s inside, in the heart and soul.” A tear trickled down Caidin’s right cheek. “Now Ben… looks like I always knew he did, deep down inside. I think that now… the face of his soul is showing through.” His own visage was stretched between laughing and crying. “Is that a crazy thing to think?”

“No,” Sister answered. “I think it’s a wonderful thing. He’s a handsome boy.”

“Always was,” Caidin said, and this time he let himself smile.

The man returned to his family, and the others walked back through the muddy maze to the road. They were quiet, each occupied by private thoughts: Josh and Sister reflecting on Caidin’s story, wondering if and when their own Job’s Masks might reach the point where they began to crack-and what might be revealed underneath; and Swan remembering something that Leona Skelton had told her a long time ago: “Everybody’s got two faces, child-the outside face and the inside face. A face under the face, y’see. It’s your true face, and if it was flipped to the outside, you’d show the world what kind of person you are.”

“Flipped to the outside?” Swan recalled asking. “How?”

And Leona had smiled. “Well, God hasn’t figured a way to do that yet. But He will…”

“The face of his soul is showing through,” Mr. Caidin had said.

“But He will…”

“… face of his soul…”

“But He will…”

“Truck’s comin’ in!”

“Truck’s comin’!”

Approaching along the road was a pickup truck, its sides and hood pitted with rust. It was coming at a crawl, and around it surged a tide of people, hollering and laughing. Josh imagined it had been a long time since most of them had seen a car or truck that still actually ran. He put his hand on Swan’s shoulder, and Sister stood behind them on the roadside as the truck rumbled toward them.

“Here she is, mister!” a boy shouted, scrambling up onto the front fender and hood. “She’s right here!”

The truck came to a stop, trailing a wake of people. Its engine sputtered, popped and backfired, but the vehicle might have been a shiny new Cadillac from the way folks were rubbing the rust-eaten metal. The driver, a florid-faced man wearing a red baseball cap and clenching the stub of a real cigar between his teeth, looked warily out his window at the excited crowd, as if he wasn’t quite sure what kind of madhouse he’d driven into.

“Swan’s right here, mister!” the boy on the hood said, pointing at her. He was talking to the man on the passenger side.

The passenger’s door opened, and a man with curly white hair and a long, untrimmed beard leaned out, craning his neck to see who the boy was pointing to. His dark brown eyes, set in a tough, wrinkled old face, searched the crowd. “Where?” he asked. “I don’t see her!”

But Josh knew who the man had come to find. He raised his arm and said, “Swan’s over here, Sly.”

Sylvester Moody recognized the huge wrestler from the Travelin’ Show-and realized with a start exactly why he’d worn that black ski mask. His gaze moved to the girl who stood beside Josh, and for a moment he could not speak. “Sweet dancin’ Jesus!” he finally exclaimed, as he stepped out of the truck.

He hesitated, still not sure it was her, glanced at Josh and saw him nod. “Your face,” Sly said. “It’s all… healed up!”

“It happened a few nights ago,” Swan told him. “And I think other people are starting to heal up, too.”

If the wind had been blowing any harder, he might have keeled flat over. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Oh, Lord… you’re beautiful!” He turned toward the truck, and his voice quavered: “Bill! This here’s the girl! This is Swan!” Bill McHenry, Sly’s nearest neighbor and owner of the truck, cautiously opened his door and got out.

“We had a hell of a time on that road!” Sly complained. “One more bump and my ass would’ve busted! Lucky we brought along extra go-juice, or we’da been walkin’ the last twenty miles!” He glanced around for someone else. “Where’s the cowboy?”

“We buried Rusty a few days ago,” Josh said. “He’s in a field not too far from here.”

“Oh.” Sly frowned. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. I’m awful sorry. He seemed like a decent fella.”

“He was.” Josh tilted his head, peering at the truck. “What are you doing here?”

“I knew you folks were goin’ to Mary’s Rest. That’s where you said you were headed when you left my place. I decided to come visit.”

“Why? It’s at least fifty miles of bad road between here and your house!”

“Don’t my achin’ ass know it! God A’mighty, I’d like to sit on a nice soft pillow.” He rubbed his sore rump.

“It’s no pleasure trip, that’s for sure,” Josh agreed. “But you knew that before you started. You didn’t say why you came all that way.”

“No.” His eyes sparkled. “I don’t reckon I did.” He gazed at the shacks of Mary’s Rest. “Lord, is this a town or a toilet? What’s that awful smell?”

“You stay around long enough, you’ll get used to it.”

“Well, I’m just here for one day. One day’s all I need to pay my debt.”

“Debt? What debt?”

“What I owe Swan, and you for bringin’ Swan to my door. Throw it back, Bill!”

And Bill McHenry, who’d gone around to the rear of the truck, pulled back a canvas tarpaulin that covered the truck’s bed.

It was piled full of small red apples, perhaps two hundred or more of them.

At the sight of the apples, there was a collective gasp that went back like a wave over the gathered onlookers. The smell of fresh apples sweetened the air. Sly started laughing, laughing fit to bust, and then he climbed up into the truck’s bed and picked up a shovel that was lying there.

“I brought you some apples from my tree, Swan!” Sly yelled, his face split by a smile. “Where do you want ’em?”

She didn’t know what to say. She’d never seen so many apples outside of a supermarket before. They were bright red, and each one about the size of a boy’s fist. She just stood staring at them, and she figured she must look like a dumb fool-but then she knew where she wanted the apples to go. “Out there,” she said, and she pointed to the people crowding around the tailgate.

Sly nodded. “Yes ma’am,” he said, and then he dug the shovel into the pile of apples and let them fly over the heads of the crowd.

Apples rained from the sky, and the starving people of Mary’s Rest snatched them as they fell. Apples bounced off their heads, shoulders and backs, but no one cared; there was a roar of voices as other people ran from the alleys and shacks to grab an apple, and they were dancing in the showers of apples, capering and hollering and clapping their hands. Sly Moody’s shovel kept working as more and more people came flooding out of the alleys, but there was no fighting for the precious delicacies. Everyone was too intent on getting an apple, and as Sly Moody kept throwing them into the air the pile hardly seemed to have been dented. Sly grinned deliriously, and he wanted to tell Swan that two days before he’d awakened to find his tree burdened down with hundreds of apples, the branches dragging on the ground. And as soon as those were picked there were already new buds bursting open, and the whole incredibly short cycle was going to be repeated. It was the most amazing, miraculous thing he’d ever seen in his life, and that single tree looked healthy enough to produce hundreds more apples-maybe thousands. He and Carla had already filled their buckets to overflowing.

Every time Sly’s shovel tossed the apples there was a roar of whooping and laughing. The crowd surged in all directions as apples bounced off them and rolled on the ground. Swan, Sister and Josh were jostled and pushed apart, and suddenly Swan felt herself being carried along with the crowd’s momentum like a reed in a river. “Swan!” she heard Sister shout, but she was already at least thirty feet from Sister, and Josh was doing his best to plow through the people without hurting anyone.

An apple hit Swan’s shoulder, fell to the ground in front of her and rolled a few feet. She bent to pick it up before she was swept away again, and as her fingers closed on it someone in a pair of scuffed brown boots stepped to within three feet of her.

She felt cold. A gnawing, bone-aching cold.

And she knew who it was.

Her heart hammered. Panic skittered up her spine. The man in the brown boots did not move, and people were not jostling him; they avoided him, as if repelled by the cold. Apples continued to fall to the ground, and the crowd surged, but nobody picked up the apples that lay between Swan and the man who watched her.

Her first, almost overwhelming impulse was to cry for help from Josh or Sister-but she knew he expected that. As soon as she stood up and opened her mouth, the burning hand would be on her throat.

She didn’t know exactly what she was going to do, but she was so scared she was about to wet herself. And then she clenched her teeth and slowly, gracefully, stood up with the apple gripped in her hand. She looked at him, because she wanted to see the face of the man with the scarlet eye.

He was wearing the mask of a skinny black man, wearing jeans and a Boston Celtics T-shirt under an olive-green coat. A red scarf was wrapped around his neck, and his piercing, terrible eyes were pale amber.

Their stares locked, and Swan saw a silver tooth flash in the front of his mouth when he grinned.

Sister was too far away. Josh was still fighting the crowd. The man with the scarlet eye stood three feet away, and to Swan it seemed that everyone was swirling around them in nightmarish slow motion, that she and the man stood alone in a trance of time. She knew she must decide her own fate, because there was no one else to help her.

And she was aware of something else in the eyes of the mask he was wearing, something beyond the cold, lizardlike sheen of evil, something deeper… and almost human. She remembered seeing the same thing in the eyes of Uncle Tommy the night he’d crushed her flowers, back in the Kansas trailer park seven years ago; it was something wandering and longing, forever locked away from the light and maddened like a tiger in a dark cage. It was dumb arrogance and bastard pride, stupidity and rage stoked to atomic power. But it was something of a little boy, too, wailing and lost.

Swan knew him. Knew what he’d done and what he would do. And in that moment of knowledge she lifted her arm, reached out her hand toward him-and offered him the apple.

“I forgive you,” she said.

His grin went crooked, like the reflection in a mirror abruptly shattered.

He blinked uncertainly, and in his eyes Swan saw fire and savagery, a core of pain past human suffering and so furious that it almost ripped her own heart to shreds. He was a scream wrapped up in straw, a little, weak, vicious thing gnashing inside a monstrous façade. She saw what he was made of, and she knew him very well.

“Take it,” she told him, and her heart was beating wildly, but she knew he’d be on her at the first smell of fear. “It’s time.”

The grin faded. His eyes ticked from her face to the apple and back again like a deadly metronome.

“Take it,” she urged, the blood pounding so hard in her head she couldn’t hear herself.

He stared into her eyes-and Swan felt him probe her mind like a freezing ice pick. Little cuts here and there, and then a dark examination of her memories. It was as if every moment of her life was being invaded, picked up and soiled with dirty hands, tossed aside. But she kept her gaze steady and strong, and she would not retreat before him.

The apple snagged his attention again, and the cold ice pick jabbing within Swan’s mind ceased. She saw his eyes glaze over and his mouth open, and from that mouth crawled a green fly that weakly spun around her head and fell into the mud.

His hand began to rise. Slowly, very slowly.

Swan didn’t look at it, but she sensed it rising like the head of a cobra. She was waiting for it to burst into flame. But it did not.

His fingers strained for the apple.

And Swan saw that his hand was trembling.

He almost took it.

Almost.

His other hand shot out and grabbed his own wrist, wrenched his arm back and pinned the offending hand underneath his chin. He made a gasping, moaning noise that sounded like wind through the battlements of Hell’s castles, and his eyes almost bulged from his skull. He shrank backward from Swan, his teeth gritted in a snarl, and for an instant he lost control: one eye bleached to blue, and white pigment streaked across the ebony flesh. A second mouth, full of shiny white nubs, gaped like a scar across his right cheekbone.

In his eyes was hatred and fury and longing for what could never be.

He turned and fled, and with his first running stride the trance of time broke and the crowd was whirling around Swan again, grabbing up the last of the apples. Josh was just a few feet away, trying to get through to protect her. But it was all right now, she knew. She needed no more protection.

Someone else plucked the apple from her hand.

She looked into Robin’s face.

“I hope this one’s for me,” he said, and he smiled before he bit into it.

He ran through the muddy alleys of Mary’s Rest with his hand trapped beneath his chin, and where he was going he didn’t know. The hand tensed and shivered, as if trying to fight free with a will of its own. Dogs scattered out of his path, and then he tripped over debris and went down in the mud, got up and staggered on again.