The Crash of Hennington (17 page)

—This isn’t cold feet.

—Of course it is.

—Archie—

—I don’t want to hear anything more, Son. Just take whatever time you need to adjust to things, and that’ll be fine.

—Please don’t make this harder than it is.

—I don’t want to hear this, Luther. What you’re thinking, well, you’re mistaken. I know it seems right to you now, but you’re facing a big decision and you’re just blanching a little. Don’t make it more than it is.

—I’m
not
making it more than it is. I wish I were.

—So what exactly is it that you’re telling me here? Be sure about it, Luther. We’re in unknown territory, and I don’t like it.

—I know. Trust me, I don’t like it either. I detest the fact that this conversation is necessary, but I have no choice.

—There are
always
choices.

—This is life or death for me, Archie.

—It’s a job, Luther. It’s not life or death.

—It’s not who I am. It’s not what I want to be. It’s not what I want my life to be like.

—You’re almost forty. Isn’t it a little late to be deciding what you want to be when you grow up?

—Yes, but hopefully not
too
late.

—So you’re saying to me you want to opt out completely? You just want to chuck it all based on some vague feeling of personal unfulfillment?

—It’s more than that.

—Then quit beating around the fucking bush and tell me what you mean!

—There’s nothing I can say that can properly express my gratitude to you. Nothing. You literally took me out of a desperate situation and became my father.

—You never took my name.

—I know, because I didn’t want to forget who I was. And that’s the problem.

—That you’re going to forget the first ten years of your life?

—Twelve years, but yes.

—So what about the last twenty-odd? Have those meant nothing?

—Of course not. I couldn’t repay you if you lived another eighty years.

—That’s not going to happen. And you
can
repay me by doing what you’ve wanted to do all along. It’s a simple thing, Luther. Don’t let some misgivings fuck up your whole future. And mine. Let’s not forget that I’m involved in this, too.

—I know. That’s what makes it so difficult.

—You really want to quit the whole thing? You really want to just toss a lifetime of my care and love for you right out the window. For what? Some
whore
? Some entertainment who gives you the business?

—No. Peter is the catalyst. He’s not the reason.

—What does that even mean?

—It means that falling in love with him finally let me let go of this rushing inevitability I’ve been trapped in.

—You haven’t been trapped in it, Luther. You could have talked to me
any
time, but goddamnit, what’s the meaning of coming to me now? Now, five days before I retire, when nothing can be undone, when the die’s already been cast.

—I can’t be you.

—I don’t want you to be me.

—That’s not true, and we both know it. I’m the son that
Thomas never was. I’ve tried to be, Archie, and frankly, I’ve succeeded. But I can’t take over Banyon Enterprises for good. I can’t. There’s no going back from that. If I do, then I will have completely sacrificed any chance I had to ever make a life for myself, to ever fulfill what might have been when I lived in Tishimongo Fair.

—You don’t think this is better than what you would have gotten growing up in a pisswater bordertown?

—It doesn’t matter if it’s better. It’s not mine.

—What do you want then?

—I don’t know. I just know that I don’t want this.

—I don’t understand you. Every boy in that town would have killed to get the chances you’ve had.

—But I didn’t kill, and I didn’t choose. It was chosen for me. When my parents died, I somehow just gave up my will to you, to circumstance, to the opportunities in front of me. I decided that I had to accept whatever happened. I was afloat on chance and whatever came my way was supposed to be my future.

—And you’re saying that you’ve realized, just now, just this week when the most important event in the history of Banyon Enterprises is going to take place, you’ve realized just now when hundreds of people and billions of dollars are riding on you, you decide
now
that this has all happened to you rather than you having your own part in it? Because I just want to be clear here, Luther. You’re fucking me because bless your little heart you would rather have been a humble blacksmith instead of the most powerful man in the city. Do I have that correct?

—Archie, it’s not like that—

—You selfish whiny little prick. I’ll say it again, I don’t understand you. I don’t know where this is coming from, except that all of a sudden you seem to have given up a lifetime
of levelheadedness to start thinking with your dick. You come in here and tell me that I can’t retire, that all my great plans for you have to be canceled because you haven’t been able to grasp some destiny that you can’t even articulate?

—Archie—

—No, not another word. You’ve hurt me, Luther, where no one else ever has. I’m blindsided and dumbfounded. Everything is ruined now. Do you realize that? Do you realize the extent of this?

—Yes, I—

—No, no. I can’t listen to you any more. Go. Get out. I have to think. I have to … get out, Luther. I can’t believe you’ve done this to me. I just don’t believe it.

—All right, I’ll go …

—Luther?

—Yes?

—One question.

—Yes?

—Are you sure? Because there’s no going back. If I say you don’t want it, you’ll never have credibility in this business ever again. If you say no now, it’s no forever.

—I’m sure, Archie. I’m sorry, but I am.

—Then never set foot in this office again.

38. Maggerty on the Move.

Step. Step. Step. Step.

The sun draped its heat over Maggerty so that it felt like he was walking under a great heavy blanket. He’d had nothing to eat all day and had vomited up the muddy water he had taken at the pond in the Arboretum. Something was wrong. His head was a miasma of fever and hot visions that buzzed
with terrible colors. His wound throbbed, making him feel all the sicker. And this heat …

He was having trouble keeping up with the herd, sometimes losing sight of them as the last animal disappeared around street corners and behind buildings. He had been sick before, many times in his life, colds, flus, injuries from falls, a bout of Battery Pox which had nearly killed him until an angel in a white room had stabbed him gently in the back several times with the thinnest of knives. After a brief, cool, honey-like time of white cloth and bright sunlight, he awoke again, healed, surrounded by the herd in the fields just south of Hennington. Yet, save for that one occasion, he had never completely lost them. A part of him knew that he wouldn’t now, but the fear that this could be, would be the first time he lost them for good drove him forward step by step by reluctant step.

In those rare moments when he could piece together a coherent thought, Maggerty suspected his current illness had to do with yesterday’s walk along the Bracken River, northeast of Hennington. The Bracken was befouled, a perennially murky strip of water over loose, salty clay that had worked its way into the surrounding soil, killing all local foliage except for a few gnarled elms that grew out of the red landscape like angry plumes of smoke. From where the Bracken emerged at the edge of the Brown Desert to the small, violent delta where it met the sea, the surrounding land was essentially dead, a breeding ground only for the viciously biting desert gnat, otherwise devoid of both humans and animals alike except for members of either group who came near the Bracken only while in the process of heading for the other side.

But The Crash had not crossed the Bracken, and Maggerty was at a loss as to why they had even gone. The lead animal had walked them out of the city’s northeast corner, through
a suburban neighborhood of brightly colored houses and whitewashed fences. Maggerty sensed something unusual when they walked past the area’s only park – a small, sandy place, but with some grass nonetheless – and headed on towards the river. He felt some uneasiness among the animals as well, though he had imagined such things before to no result. But when the herd reached the red, crumbly bank of the Bracken, he definitely heard some low moans among some of the animals waiting near the back of the group where he stood. The ground was not easy to walk on even for Maggerty, much less for the animals, some of whom approached four tons. It gave in odd spots, was alternately soft and hard, and filled with jagged agate stones that could cut through even the thick-soled feet of members of the herd. The air swarmed with inflamed desert flies, irritated that their underground nests were being trampled upon. Maggerty’s hands worked in a flurry trying to keep them from biting his exposed skin. Why had she brought them here?

Then he saw the river. The shock of it momentarily flash-burned away the fog in his brain. The Bracken had somehow
shrunk.
More, judging by the change in the color of the clay, it had shrunk by nearly half. The briny, sick smell of it was even more pungent than he remembered, and the color was the ominous, slightly evil color of bloody pus, something with which Maggerty, through his ever-present wound, was thoroughly acquainted. A cloud of vague terror insinuated itself across his mind. There was some awful clue here that he was missing.

She led them away soon after, but not before Maggerty had been bitten almost beyond recognition by the desert flies. His face and hands swelled overnight, and the itching was enough to push the worry away for a while. This morning, he had begun to feel sick, something the gnats had passed
along to, or taken from him in the blood they had sucked. Maggerty was friends with misery, though. He had been through worse, and now his only worry was becoming permanently separated from the herd. When they had awoken and set off for the day, he had struggled to keep up almost from the beginning.

(Dora McKinley sat in her idling car, the back seat stuffed with groceries, waiting for The Crash to pass. Turning up the air conditioner against the heat, she examined her fingernails and vowed for the third time that week to stop chewing them. She looked up and caught sight of Maggerty stumbling up the road. As she put the tip of her index finger to her teeth, she murmured to herself, —He looks even worse than usual, poor thing.)

As the sun beat down, he watched the last animal disappear yet again around a station wagon. He quickened his step, lurched around a streetcorner lamp, and saw with frantic relief that the animals were stopped in a small green park on the side of a hill, grazing on the green grasses that sloped up through a small grove of trees. Good. They would stay there for a while eating. He would have time to rest. Good. He had already forgotten the questions that had been bothering him. His only thoughts were to get out of this heat, lie down in the shade, and hopefully fall into some sort of feverish sleep. After a lifetime filled with steps, Maggerty yet again mustered the will to take the next one.

39. The Frustrating Aspects of Prophecy.

Jarvis closed his eyes and sighed. His hand, wrapped deep under bandages covering four frightening wound clamps,
throbbed whenever he moved it too quickly. Dr Henreid had given him Pilonnopin, but after he had taken the first one and then slept for twenty-one hours, Jarvis decided that aspirin would be a little more practical, if markedly less effective. He had spent every spare moment since returning from the hospital reading and rereading the section of the Book of Ultimates he had seen in his vision or hallucination or whatever it had been. He opened his eyes and read again, many hours removed from the hundredth time.

And in a time of sunlight, a dark wind will encroach, obscuring the truth,

And in the time of dark wind, a light wind will encroach, revealing the truth.

The verses were infuriating and vague in the way typical of all of the Book of Ultimates. Decades of debate had never quite settled whether the Book even rightly belonged in the Sacraments, and no wonder. The Sacraments was one of the few texts that Pistolet had permitted to pass untouched, at least for a while. He had even used the opaque teachings of these very verses to justify the Great Immolation, associating it with the ‘light wind’ and thereby prompting murmurings that he had written the Ultimates himself, an idea vitiated only by the fact that, in his usual style, he then contradicted himself and placed the Sacraments, Book of Ultimates and all, on the list of things to be destroyed, which by that point had grown to include effectively everything that
could
be destroyed, including every man, woman and child who could be killed before Pistolet himself finally fell. Fortunately, his last gasp had not reached as far as he had hoped, and a few things survived into the Recent Histories, copies of the Sacraments among them. The survival of the Sacraments then came
to be thought of as the ‘light wind’ that revealed the truth, and the stories of Pistolet’s possible authorship, while still hovering in the background, were mostly put to rest.

For Jarvis, though, along with many of his colleges, the Ultimates never sat well. He found most of the verses obscure to the point of meaninglessness. If something could be interpreted to mean anything at all, then in effect it meant nothing. The Ultimates was rarely taught in the Bondulay canon, often being treated, certainly by Jarvis, as nothing more than a quaint addendum of suspect origin. The truths it contained were covered in better fashion elsewhere in the Sacraments, and any differences written there were evasive to the point of futility.

Which would be easy to dismiss, Jarvis thought to himself, if they hadn’t caused so much harm.

And in a time of sunlight, a dark wind will encroach, obscuring the truth,