Tumultus (25 page)

The bottle was then brought to his mouth as Mac took a small sip, letting the beer sit on his tongue for a moment.

“I don’t know how they did it – but boys and girls, that there is Budweiser, and I know for a fact the last bottle of that stuff was brewed years ago. Beer don’t keep much past a year, so they got to be brewing it new somewhere, and that sure as hell tastes like a Bud.”

Bear grabbed a bottle from the six pack and opened it up, throwing  the beer back in one large gulp until two-thirds of it was gone.

“Yup.  Tastes like beer.  Need to put it in the fridge though.  I like mine cold.”

Mac took the open bottle, and another unopened one, and walked to the living room where he offered the second bottle to Cooper, who was starting a fire in the large fireplace that was the centerpiece of the room.  Brando had already laid down in front of it in anticipation of the heat.

“Why thank you, Mac, don’t mind if I do.”

Both men sat down in matching pale yellow chairs.  Cooper slowly ran a hand along the fabric.

“These aren’t reproductions – they’re the real deal.”

Mac took another sip of beer and looked down at his own chair.

“Yeah – they’re chairs.  Seem comfortable enough.  What of it?”

Cooper Wyse continued to look closely at the chair’s fabric.

“These are actual chairs from the 1950’s.  Scandinavian design.  These were the chairs of choice for the upper middle class back then.  Pretty rare thing to see a set like this in such good condition.  Goes with the theme of Wilfrid though, doesn’t it?  They’ve re-created a world that hasn’t existed for over eighty years.”

Mac tilted his head and looked at Cooper as if he had suddenly turned into a dancing chicken.

“Now how does some horse training cowboy rancher from Juneau know that much about a goddamn piece of furniture?”

Cooper leaned further into his chair, stretched out his legs in front of him, lowered his hat over his just closed eyes, and took another drink of beer.

“I read a lot.  And I make a living, at least in part, tracking down and delivering stuff people want, and from time to time, that includes certain types of furniture.”

Mac waved a dismissive hand in Cooper’s direction and finished off his own beer.

“To each his own.  Whatever floats your boot-wearing boat, Coop.”

Cooper smiled, his eyes still closed.

“Amen to that Mac.  To each his own…”

Reese and Dublin had ventured upstairs, marveling at how clean every inch of the home was.  Every throw rug over the dark wood floors was immaculate, every piece of trim without a scratch. Each of the five bedrooms was a different shade of either yellow, or blue.  The largest of the bedrooms was downstairs and had its own adjoining bathroom.  The second largest bedroom was upstairs and it too had its own private bath.  The three remaining rooms upstairs shared a hall bath.

Dublin walked into the larger upstairs bedroom and sat on the steel framed queen sized.  The walls were a light blue, and a large window overlooked the driveway below.  Reese sat next to Dublin, put his right arm around her, and gently squeezed her shoulders.

“Quite a house.”

Dublin gave a small nod as she rested her chin against Reese’s chest.  She sat back up and looked at Reese and then toward the room’s window.

“You think we’re gonna make it all the way out to Manitoba, Reese?  To that priest?  It still seems so surreal sometimes.  It wasn’t more than a month ago we were in Anchorage wondering if we might want to go back to Dominatus, build a new home there, and now we’re out here in the middle of nowhere in Canada.  The drone attacks.  Those things screaming in the woods.  Poor Bear falls through the ice.  The bandits.  And now we’re sitting here in this beautiful home in a town that that looks like it’s from a time my grandfather would have been a young man in.  I’m trying to wrap my mind around all of it but…I don’t know.”

Reese didn’t respond to Dublin’s comment right away.  He too was feeling as if things had moved so incredibly fast for them the last few days, as if sometimes he was outside of himself watching everything as it happened.  Instead, he leaned his face into Dublin’s hair and simply allowed himself the pleasure of her being there with him at this moment.

As the smell of the meal Bear was cooking up crept into the room, Reese stood up and walked over to the window and then turned back around to face Dublin.

“How about we call dibs on this room for the night?  That bed looks pretty comfortable.”

Dublin gave a sly smile and bounced on the bed a few times.

“It feels sturdy.”

Reese’s eyes opened wide in mock surprise.

“Why, Ms. Dublin Meyer, I do believe you’ve turned into something of a woman of ill repute.”

Dublin fell back onto the bed and spread her arms out across the thick, cream colored blanket.

“I stopped caring about my repute years ago, Reese.  You done corrupted me with your big city ways.”

Reese walked over to the bed and leaned down to kiss Dublin’s lips.

“I aim to please.”

Dublin’s mouth frowned slightly as she looked back up into Reese’s eyes.

“Well…it took you a while, but your aim has gotten a little better.  Just a little…”

Reese stood back up and nodded toward the door.

“And on that note, I think I’ll go back downstairs and get a bite of food before Bear eats it all.  Just in case I need my strength later tonight.”

Dublin jumped up from the bed and walked with Reese out into the hallway, taking his hand into her own.

XXIV.

Mac looked up into the bright, warm Louisiana sunshine of his small backyard.  He could hear his mother preparing lunch in the kitchen that was just inside the small poured concrete patio where his dad would barbecue his favorite spiced chicken wings every Friday afternoon for family and friends who would visit, drink, and talk late into the evening while Mac’s mom would tell everyone to stop cursing in front of the children.

It was mid-July, and the weather forecast was for temperatures to reach nearly ninety degrees by late afternoon.  The humidity was causing Mac’s t-shirt to cling to his chest.  It was the kind of day his dad called “hotter than a billy goat in a pepper patch.”

Mac could hear his mother walking outside from the kitchen.  He turned to see her dressed in the light blue summer dress with the white lace collar she wore so often this time of year.  Her reddish hair was tied neatly behind her and her lean, unlined face smiled down at him with the love and affection Mac had always remembered emanating from her.  Where his father’s moods could quickly turn dark, Betty Walker seemed perpetually in good spirits, even during times of challenge, and in 1973, there was plenty of challenge facing the people of Carville, Louisiana. 

In his mother’s hands she carried a paper plate with a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich cut neatly in half with the crust taken off, just as Mac liked it.  On the side she had placed four apple slices sprinkled lightly with cinnamon.  While the thousand or so adults of Carville faced uncertain economic times and still rampant racial tensions, for kids like nine year old Mac Walker, the place was a refuge of small town simplicity tucked away just a short drive from the big city of Baton Rouge, alongside the banks of the Mighty Mississippi.  Mac’s father, Merle Walker, was an assistant administrator at the Carville Leprosy hospital, a facility that had, by 1973, served patients of that terrible disease for nearly a hundred years.

“You make sure to come inside if it gets too hot out here Mackenzie.  There’s cold lemonade in the fridge if you want.  Just remember to wash out your glass and put it in the sink when you’re done.”

Mac’s mother always called him by his full name.  To everyone else, he was simply Mac.

Her thin fingers tousled Mac’s blonde-brown hair before she turned to walk back into the house.  Mac watched her go, and then focused fully on the food.  As was his habit, he took each of the apple slices and placed them inside the sandwich, two for each of the halves.  Having completed that task, both sides were soon to be devoured.

Mac remembered last summer when he felt his father’s eyes staring at him as he placed the apple slices in between the slices of white Wonder Bread as he had just done.

“Mac – why don’t you just have your mother put the apple slices in the sandwich when she’s making it?”

His father’s voice had always scared Mac.  It issued forth from him like a deep, scratchy rumble that often bordered on an outright shout.

“Answer your father, Mackenzie.”

Mac had looked to his mother and then glanced back at his dad.  He feared if he stared too long into the hazel green eyes that looked out from behind his father’s thick framed glasses, they would find something wrong that would cause him to yell at Mac.

“Well…if Mom did it, then I wouldn’t get to do it myself.”

Mac’s dad sat looking down at his son for what seemed to Mac like an eternity.  Finally he looked over at Betty and smiled, while pointing a finger back at Mac.

“That makes sense to you, honey?”

Betty placed a hand on her husband’s knee and looked down at Mac and smiled.

“Why, yes, I think it makes perfect sense.”

Merle Walker looked back at Betty and then down at his son and smiled as well.

“Ok, then – fair enough.”

Today though, Mac was able to finish the sandwich without being watched.  Or so he thought.  From the back of the yard, emerging from the shadows of the old Juniper tree that Mac had spent hours climbing for as long as he could remember, a tall ,uniformed bald man was walking toward him.  There was a light blue patch on the upper right chest of the man’s uniform, and he was grinning so widely, Mac thought the man might be able to touch each of his ears with both sides of his mouth.  The smile reminded Mac of illustrations of the Big Bad Wolf.  He even had a row of abnormally large, white teeth.  Though only nine years old, Mac already sensed the man was very dangerous to him.

Instinctively he turned to look back toward the house, where he knew the safety of his mother could be found.  To Mac’s horror, his house was no longer there.  Behind him now were only miles of dessert – the sanded wastelands of Libya, just outside Benghazi.

You’re dreaming.

Mac told himself what he was seeing wasn’t real.  He had been dreaming of his childhood and then for some reason he was now dreaming of Benghazi.  Mac turned to see the soldier still approaching him from the back of the yard. 

“Hello again, Mac.  I told you I would be seeing you again, in a way at least.  That gift I promised you.  I’m here to make sure it was delivered.  Once a gift is promised, it must be delivered, right, Mr. Walker?”

Mac looked down at his hands and saw they were still those of a nine year old boy.  At the same time, his dreaming consciousness was screaming the name of the tall man with the wolf-smile that now stood over him.  It was the man who had come to Dominatus two years ago, and brought with him the destruction and horror of the drones.  The man who Mac had personally fought in hand to hand combat atop the frozen ground of the Alaskan wilderness.

“Stand up, Mac.  Stand up and look at me.”

Mac didn’t want to stand, but in his dream, his limbs were no longer his own.  He kept his eyes looking to the ground as he felt himself rise up.  August Hess was no more than a foot away from him.  Mac could feel his warm breath on top of his head.

“Look at me.”

Mac screamed for his head not to look up, screamed for his eyes to close tight and not look at the monster, but they wouldn’t listen.