Windmaster's Bane (3 page)

The screen door slammed behind him.

The phone hung on the kitchen wall next to the back door. David took a breath and picked up the receiver. Probably his father calling from Uncle Dale’s, wanting him to come help with the stuck tractor. “Hello?” he said, somewhat apprehensively.

“Well, Sullivan, what’re you
doing
?”
came a voice young as his own, but slower and smoother, more like a lowland river than a mountain stream: his best friend, Alec McLean. An undercurrent of irritation surfaced on the last word.

“Oh, it’s you, Alec,” David said breathlessly, glancing nervously out the back door. “I was just trying to impose a little control on my brat of a kid brother.”

“Well, why don’t you impose a little of it on yourself while you’re at it, and check the time every day or two. You were supposed to pick me up half an hour ago.”

David shot a glance at the yellow electric clock on the wall above the stove and grimaced in dismay: It was nearly four o’clock. He rubbed his eyes absently.

Alec went on blithely. “Camping, remember? If it quit raining? Got me out of bed to ask me? Remember?”

“Son-of-a-gun!” David groaned. “Sorry. I’ll be right over. I just got so engrossed in my reading that I lost track of time.”

Alec sounded unconvinced. “I thought you were controlling your brother; I’d suggest a rack, thumbscrews—”

“Before that, stooge. No, really, it was one of those books I got out of that bunch the library was throwing away:
Gods and Fighting Men
by Lady Gregory. It’s great stuff, Irish mythology. You know, about—”

“Not
now,
David. I’m sure I’ll hear more than I want to about it anyway, before long…at least it’s not werewolves this time,” he added.

“You’ve got something against werewolves?” David replied archly.

“I do when my best friend tries to turn himself into one, like you did last time we went camping.”

“Alec, my lad, I would prefer to forget that unfortunate episode. I’m at least a month older and
infinitely
wiser now.”

“Well, I prefer to remember it—in all its excruciatingly embarrassing detail. I mean, how
could
I forget you running around up at Lookout Rock, stark naked except for the fur collar off one of your mother’s old coats, smeared all over with fat from a dead possum you’d found beside the road, muttering incantations out of another one of those old library books. No, my friend, that’s not an image that dies easily…nor, come to mention it, was it a smell that died easily—and I don’t intend to let you forget it, either.”

David sighed melodramatically. “I thought you were my friend.”

“I am,” Alec replied drily. “If I wasn’t, I’d have taken my camera.”

“Well, I can assure you that
this
is just a plain camping trip—a celebration of the end of this confounded rain we’ve been cursed with the last two weeks, if we need an excuse. And if I time it right, I may get out of having to help Pa. Uncle Dale got his truck stuck, and Pa went over with the tractor and got stuck too, and…”

“David?”

“Yeah?”

“Shut up and come get me.”

“Oh, yeah. Guess so. Be there in twenty minutes.”

“You can’t get to MacTyrie in twenty minutes.”

“
I
can.”

“You coming in a jet or something?”

“Nah, just my Mustang.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Well—try not to set the mountains on fire on your way.”

“It’s been raining for two weeks straight, Alec. The mountains are very, very wet.” David’s voice dripped sarcasm.

Alec turned serious. “Really, Mom almost didn’t let me go this time, because of what she’s heard about your driving—not from me, of course…”

“Of course.”

“…but then Dad came in and said ‘Go! Get! No telling what your wild-eyed maniac friend will do if you don’t!’”

David rolled his eyes toward the dingy ceiling. “Your father thinks I’m a wild-eyed maniac?”

“But he likes you anyway, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked you all to put me up while they’re at that conference next weekend.”

David nodded. “Uh huh. No doubt he thinks you’ll be a good influence on me as well, is that it?”

“Something to that effect, yes.”

“Boy, is he mistaken!”

“Huh?”

“Never mind, old man,” David said. “Gotta go, we’re burning daylight.”

David hung up the phone and flopped back against the doorjamb, grinning mischievously.
Damn, I feel good!
he chuckled to himself.

One reason, he knew, was the imminent return of good weather—just a little sunshine did wonders for his state of mind. And partly it was the promise of getting out of the house and off the farm for a while, away from the oppressive ordinariness of his family. And, too, there was the anticipation of good fellowship—he and Alec had not had a good long bull session in some time, and there were things that needed discussing.

But there was something deeper underlying it all, he realized as he started down the hall to pack. It was that rare and almost mystical elation which accompanied the discovery of some new thing that he somehow instinctively knew would be of lasting significance for the rest of his life. When it happened right, it was like the opening of a door in a high stone wall; and this particular door had opened when he had begun
Gods and Fighting Men.
From its first ringing line, the book had filled him with that same wild and unexpected joy he had felt when he’d first read
The Lord of the Rings
two years before. That book had given him “a new metaphor for existence”—that was the phrase Alec’s English-teacher father had used. And now he had another.

He grinned again, in fiendish anticipation. He would tell that infidel Alec all about it—whether he wanted to know or not.

*

David’s slim, blond mother was leaning against one of the back porch posts when he emerged from the house five minutes later. A frosted glass of ice tea tinkled in one hand; white flour patterned her faded blue Levis. She looked tired. “Somebody’s dead,” she observed flatly, pointing down the hill.

“Somebody’s always dead.”

She frowned, so that the crow’s-feet in the tanned skin around her eyes deepened, as they had of late. “Don’t get smart, boy!” she warned.

“Oh, I already am—got it from my mother.” David flashed her his most dazzling smile as he leapt from the shadowed gloom of the low porch into the sudden glare of sun-dappled yard, his worn knapsack flapping loosely on his back as he sprinted toward the car. Little Billy was nowhere in sight.

In the harsh light the Mustang seemed somehow to shine even redder than usual, as if the steel of which it was made had been rendered red-hot by the afternoon sunshine. Its narrow chrome bumpers glittered so brilliantly they made David blink and his eyes water. Indeed the very air seemed to sparkle in some uncanny way, as if every floating dust mote were a minute, perfectly faceted diamond that materialized out of nowhere to gyrate crazily before him in a swirl of multicolored particles like iridescent dust thrown before a wind, briefly outlining every tree and leaf and blade of grass with a glittering halo of burning, scintillating color.

David stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth hanging open in curious incredulity, then wrenched off his glasses and stared at them foolishly. Though the lenses appeared clean, he wiped them on a corner of his shirttail and glanced up again, blinking rapidly.

The effect had ended.

A shrug. “Too hot, or something,” he muttered to himself.

Little Billy came out from where he had been lurking behind the car. He stared at David uncertainly and extended the blue volume. “Here’s your book, Davy. I’m sorry I bothered you.” David blinked again, smiled absently, and ruffled his brother’s tousled hair. “No problem, kid.”

Little Billy’s eyes were wide, hopeful. “You’re not
really
gonna give me to the undertaker, are you?”

“Couldn’t get enough for you, squirt,” David grinned. “No, of course not. Thanks, though, for getting this for me.”

As he unslung the knapsack to stuff the book inside, David glimpsed the name neatly stenciled on the fading khaki canvas:

SULLIVAN, D.

A chill passed over him, and he paused and looked up to see the crowds of people still clustered among the weathered tombstones and scruffy oak trees across the road. It was startling how clear the air had suddenly become, how much more sharply focused everything seemed. He almost felt as if he could read the names carved on the stones, count the leaves on the trees, see the tears glistening on those grief-stricken faces.

And David remembered another funeral three years before. SULLIVAN, D—not himself, but that other David Sullivan, his father’s youngest brother, after whom he had been named; David-the-elder, Uncle Dale had called him, to differentiate the two.

David-the-elder had embraced life with a burning enthusiasm not often seen in his family—and had found a sympathetic outlet for that enthusiasm in his precocious young nephew, whom he had taught to read by the age of four, and how to fish and hunt and camp and wrestle and swim and drive and a hundred other skills before David was twelve.

Then he had joined the army.

Two years later he was dead, blown to pieces where he wandered off duty on a Middle Eastern street. “An unprovoked terrorist action,” the government called it. A twenty-minute funeral had marked barely twenty years of life. Not enough. But that night twenty-one shots had sounded over the family cemetery at Uncle Dale’s farm, and a clench-jawed David-the-younger had fired each one into the star-filled darkness. It had been the least he could do. David felt his eyes mist over as he fished for his car keys. Once they had been David-the-elder’s keys.

“You okay?” Little Billy asked hesitantly, concern shadowing his small features.

David shook his head as if to clear it, and smiled wanly, feeling too good to keep long company with such dark thoughts. “Yeah, sure.”

He got in the car, cranked it, and turned on the radio. The nasal twang of some female country singer berating her long-suffering husband about “drinkin’ and runnin’ around” that suddenly assailed his ears sent David hastily fumbling in the glove box for a cassette instead. The song reminded him too much of home, sometimes.

Big Country, maybe—or U-2? No, that wasn’t quite what he wanted. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers? Close, but maybe something a little older. Ah—he knew just the thing.

A moment later, the Byrds’s recording of “Mr. Tambourine Man” pulsed and jingled through the car. David found himself singing along as he paid token obeisance to the stop sign at the end of the gravel road and turned left onto the long straightaway that passed through his father’s river bottom on its way from Atlanta to the resorts of western North Carolina. His tires chirped softly, leaving twin black streaks as he accelerated off toward MacTyrie. He frowned. There was a buzz in one of his new rear speakers.

He had already forgotten the funeral.

*

Seven minutes later David slid the car to a halt at the intersection that marked the effective center of downtown Enotah, where the MacTyrie road ran into Georgia 76. Twin signs pointed west toward Hiawassee and eastward to Clayton. To his right a hundred-year-old courthouse raised crumbling Gothic spires. The only traffic light in Enotah county blinked balefully overhead. Abruptly the car’s engine stumbled. “Damn,” he cursed as he glanced down at his gas gauge. It barely registered.

Fortunately he was in sight of Berrong’s Texaco, where he had worked the previous summer pumping gas. A moment later he pulled in by the self-service pump, got out, and unscrewed the cap between the taillights. Behind the pyramid of oil cans in the station’s plate glass window David saw chubby Earl Berrong nod and give him a thumbs-up sign. He grinned in turn, unhitched the nozzle, and inserted it into the car, drumming his fingers restlessly on the red paint as he watched the numbers roll by. Always something when he was in a hurry; he’d never make MacTyrie in twenty minutes now.

A Loretta Lynn song blared from a tinny speaker in the litter-strewn parking lot of the Enotah Burger across the highway, mingling discordantly with a car radio playing heavy metal—Def Leppard, maybe?—and the voices of the several youthful loiterers lounging by the service window.

One of the crowd laughed loudly, and they all looked in David’s direction. A female voice called out something, but David couldn’t catch it, and then the view was blocked by the bulk of a familiar black Ford pickup that pulled into the lane beside him.

His face lit up when he saw who it was.

A slender, red-haired girl stuck her head out the passenger’s window. “Well, hello, David Sullivan, how’re you a’doin’?” she drawled, her slightly pointed features sparkling with amused self-mockery. It was the way she always began a conversation with him.

“Well, Liz Hughes! I ain’t seen you in a bear’s age!” David took up the ritual greeting in his best mountain twang. He was at once delighted to see a friendly face, especially Liz’s, and a little uncomfortable about the proximity of the group across the street—who might get ideas he was not quite ready for them to get yet. Liz had been a recurring theme in his thoughts lately, and David found that a touch unsettling. She’d always been a friend, but recently…

Beyond her, David could see Liz’s mother talking animatedly to a red-faced Earl Berrong, who looked as though he would like to escape soon but didn’t dare.

“What’s up?” David asked after a moment’s pause.