Agonized by the pain distorting his face, she took his hand, careful of the tubes and clamps. She longed to retract her impulsive decision to justify to this beloved, dying man the deceit of the past year and a half.
“He said they’d arrest you. Exhume Mother’s body. All the publicity ... you’d go to jail ... Dad, I couldn’t let it happen—” The hand in hers gripped firmly, silencing her.
At last her father said, “I loved your mother so very much. Your mother asked ... What I did was—”
“Dad,” she interrupted, “don’t explain. I know how much she was suffering. She was your wife but she was my mother.”
“Joanie,” he said brokenly.
She rose, kissed his wet face.
Some time later he said, “Get rid of Harry now.” Anger had strengthened his voice. “I’d give anything to do it myself. Where is he?”
“Camping as usual,” she said tersely.
“I’ve heard he shares his camper with feminine company.” His face was drawn, grayish, but he looked at her shrewdly.
Her smile was sour. “I know all about her. Not that I care.”
“Give him money, that’s what he wants. Get him away from you.” His voice had risen again. “Promise me. Whatever you need to do.” His hand gripped hers.
“Dad, you have to rest,” she said, alarmed by the darkening gray of his color.
“Whatever you need to do,” he said tiredly, closing his eyes. “Promise me.”
“I promise.”
Her father’s grip loosened; he was asleep, breathing raggedly.
Outside the intensive care unit she asked Doctor Lynn, “How long?”
He cleared his throat. “Hard to tell, Mrs. Randall. But his blood pressure’s dropping fast.”
“How can it be so hopeless?” she demanded. “How could this happen?”
Doctor Lynn ran a hand through his unruly brown hair and said with a trace of anger, “How could your father ignore classic heart attack symptoms till it was much too late to help him?”
Joan lowered her gaze, thinking of her father’s unremitting grief for her mother.
An hour later she sat beside her father’s bed holding his hand again. He momentarily opened his dim eyes to whisper, “You’re Joan Bronson again.” Later he said in a firm voice, “It’s Wilma you need beside you.”
She gaped at him. Wilma Burke was the company comptroller—an important but not vital position. What did he mean?
Not even her mother possessed the uncanny insight into her that her father did ... He might very well have discerned her carefully guarded feeling for Wilma, that her attraction to this big gentle woman had strengthened well beyond admiration. Though she had kept Wilma at arm’s length, having too little of herself to offer her, she knew that beneath Wilma’s quiet, undemanding loyalty was an answering attraction. Could he have somehow guessed?
His eyes might have revealed an answer. But they remained closed.
I do love her ...
As her father shook his head and sighed deeply she wondered frantically, Did I think that—or did I actually say it?
He did not open his eyes as he said, “I love you, Joanie.”
She squeezed her eyes shut to keep back the tears but she could not keep them from her voice: “I love you, Dad.”
He was silent for a long time. When he spoke again he was delirious. Joan realized that his words were endearments to her mother.
In Longview, Washington, at five minutes to six that evening, Saturday, May 17, 1980, Daniel Bronson died.
She did the few things left to be done for her father: preliminary arrangements with Chapman’s, the same funeral home which had buried her mother; the brief but necessary phone calls to Uncle David and Aunt Lucy, to Gerald and Agnes and Donald, the relatives and friends dearest to her father, who received her news with disbelief, then inarticulate grief. She did not call Wilma Burke. She knew very well that the sound of those warm, caring tones would dissolve the fine-edged, fragile control that was allowing her to act.
One last item remained. Now that her father’s body lay in a funeral home, she would not allow Harry Randall to enjoy the Bronson money for one hour longer. She would not wait for Harry Randall to wander home.
Shortly before midnight, she turned off Highway 5 onto the curves and darkness of Highway 504. The smell of pine was sharp, the icy night air engulfed her from the open window, welcome on her flushed face. Driving the Jeep swiftly past the large, orange-lettered signs warning campers away, she remembered how her father had taught her to drive on the roads into the lumber yards and rough logging country of Bronson Paper Products. She always had preferred the Jeep’s honest simplicity to the soft comforts of her other cars. Beside her on the seat were wadded up tissues discarded as she drove. She cried ceaselessly, shaken by grief and bitterness and anger.
She whetted and fanned her anger with vivid memories of Harry’s face—a weak face mirroring the true character of a man she had once believed she could trust, a face she had even fleetingly thought poetically handsome. The face that had distorted into an ugly mask of gloating as he made his blackmail demands. Then there had been the slow torture of his increasing extortions. The town gossip over his flagrant infidelities with his former girlfriend Bonnie Davis, who looked at Joan with bold, contemptuous eyes. The camper Joan had been forced to buy—but at least that had been a good investment; for the past three months Harry had been gone much of the time with Bonnie Davis.
She had had no choice but to stand loyally with her father. Every other option in her life was closed off. She could only live from day to day and work hard and prepare herself for the time she had assumed would be far distant—when she inherited Bronson Paper Products.
The bright yellow camper was parked on a bluff overlooking Spirit Lake; the headlights of the Jeep picked it out easily.
Harry finally answered her insistent pounding.
“What the hell’re you doing here?” Bleary-eyed, with a heavy stubble of beard, he stood in the camper’s doorway, his arms crossed over monogrammed blue silk pajamas. The camper exuded the sweet brackish smell of marijuana.
“My father’s dead,” she said evenly, staring at him with unblinking contempt.
He stared back at her. “You’re not kidding, are you. You look terrible. When?”
Her tone was vitriolic. “This evening. A massive heart attack.”
Scratching his beard, he contemplated her.
Loathing this man who had degenerated beyond the simple decency of speaking a word of condolence, Joan said, “Go back and pack up your things and get out. Take whatever you want. I want every trace of you gone.”
“Not so fast.” Bonnie Davis pulled a fleecy red robe around her as she came to the door. She pushed disheveled dark hair out of her eyes. “Not so fast, sister.” She turned to Harry. “I thought you were smart. Don’t you see what’s happened? This is beautiful! You’re married to an heiress, to all that money!”
“I had that figured out already,” Harry said, but his dark eyes were stunned. “The jackpot, we’ve hit the jackpot!”
Joan cursed herself for her shortsightedness. “You ... leech!” She spat the word at him.
“You’ll pay for that.” His voice was low and cold. “Try and guess what the leech’s gonna do now.” He turned to Bonnie Davis. “Just listen to how smart I can be.” He jerked a thumb at Joan. His grin was slow, malevolent. “She gives us what we want or we swear she told us all about her father bumping off her mother. That makes her accessory to murder—”
“You can’t do this,” Joan uttered.
“No? Just watch.” Harry’s voice rose. “And I’m gonna love every sweet minute. How do you think I felt when you and your snob father looked at me like I was nothing, like I belonged in a garbage dump!”
“You’ll show ’em now, honey.” Bonnie Davis linked her arm possessively, triumphantly through Harry’s.
He was glaring at Joan as he said, “We’ll both show ’em, baby. How�
�d you like to run Bronson Paper Products with me?”
Frozen with the vision of this new nightmare, Joan whispered, “You can’t do this.”
“Just watch me.” His narrowed eyes drifted over her heavy wool shirt, her corduroy pants. “So, Joanie-phony, climb in your big dyke Jeep and beat it.”
“Yeah,” Bonnie smirked. “Get lost, dyke.”
Harry slammed the door. Faintly, Joan heard laughter.
Her father had said: Whatever you need to do.
She unlocked the glove compartment of the Jeep and took out the .32, fitting the cold, foreign shape into her fingers. She stared at the gray metal object, trying to summon up reserves of determination.
Then, struck by an idea, she put the gun down on the seat and sat perfectly still, appraising the position of the camper on the bluff.
Suddenly she started the engine, gunning it hastily as if the camper would move of its own volition if she did not act quickly on her impulse.
She aligned the front of the Jeep with the rear of the camper. The thought occurred that the camper’s emergency brake would be on. She floored the Jeep’s accelerator. The camper lurched forward and stopped.
Desperately, she gunned the powerful engine. The camper skidded slowly forward across the soft dirt of the bluff.
The camper door was flung open and Bonnie’s broad, astonished face gaped at her. The camper inched ever so slowly ahead.
“What the hell you doing!” Bonnie screamed. “Harry!”
Joan picked up the gun, waved it out the window. To her amazement, splinters flew from the wood frame of the camper doorway: she had pulled the trigger. Bonnie stared for a single unbelieving instant, then slammed the door.
Joan looked at the gun; it slipped from her fingers into her lap. She pushed it off frenziedly, as if it were a snake. What was she doing? How could she conceivably act as executioner of two human lives? She threw the Jeep into reverse gear, clouds of dust rising as the wheels spun in the soft dirt.
The camper door was jerked open. Harry peered out at her. In a surge of revulsion she seized the gun; he dodged backward. She hurled the weapon far out into the water.
“Bitch, you’re dead!” he screamed, leaning out the camper door. “Tomorrow your ass is in jail, tomorrow you’re gonna ...”
She roared off in the Jeep, cutting off further invective.
On her way back to Longview she calculated that perhaps a dozen more hours of freedom were left to her. Harry would roll out of bed late as usual, then come down the mountain and have her arrested for attempted murder. His evidence would be incontestable: the bullet hole, the tire track marks on the bluff, scratches and paint chips on the front of her Jeep. She had thrown a gun registered to her into the water; the weapon could be found. Even though activity in the area where Harry liked to camp had sharply decreased after all the warnings, some of the few remaining campers and hikers had probably heard the gunshot. And the motive for attempted murder would be obvious. She smiled wryly. Joan Bronson’s mind had snapped after the death of her father, and the long-suffering, jealous wife had come after her philandering husband and the other woman.
Dispirited, grieving, exhausted, she parked the Jeep and went into her house and sank onto the sofa and dissolved into tears.
Asleep in her clothes on the sofa, she was jarred awake by the telephone. It was shortly after eight-thirty in the morning. She was unprepared for the gentle, reproachful voice of Wilma Burke.
“Joan, I just heard. I can’t believe Daniel’s dead. I can’t believe you didn’t call me last night.”
“Wilma, I ... I needed time.”
“I can understand that. But ...” She sighed. “Joan, I ... I always felt you’d call me if you needed ... help.”
“I do need help, Wilma. I need you more than you know,” Joan said shakily. “More than you want,” she added.
“Not possible,” Wilma said softly. “Joan, I’ll be here.”
Unable to speak further, sickened by the vision of the night before, Joan hung up. Harry would be coming down the mountain soon now, and then the police would be here ...
Her eyes were drawn and then riveted to an expanding, exploding cloud of darkness outside her living room window. The horizon was slowly vanishing in an enveloping mass of boiling blackness.
Hair pricked along the nape of her neck. She thought numbly, Is this it, an atomic attack? Or—
She ran to the radio, searched for a news broadcast.
“... about eight-thirty this morning. A scientific team is believed encamped on the slopes, their fate is unknown at this time. Nor is the fate of others in the vicinity, including famed eighty-four-year-old recluse Harry Truman who refused to be evacuated from his home near Spirit Lake. The cloud of volcanic dust and debris from Mount St. Helens has spread many miles into the atmosphere and is moving at this very moment over the city. Longview city officials urge all citizens to remain indoors, to be calm—”
The phone shrilled. “Did you hear? Do you see what’s happening?”
“Wilma,” she said in a trembling voice, “Harry was there ... right beside that mountain in a camper ... and I—”
“After all the warnings? The fool! Why on earth—” She broke off. “As if you haven’t been through enough with Daniel. Let me take care of this, Joan, notify the authorities. Everything’ll be done that can be done.”
“Wilma, wait, You don’t understand—”
“I do understand, trust me. You need to rest, take care of yourself. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.” She hung up.
Absently, her eyes fixed on the cataclysmic sky, Joan sleepwalked her way to her radio and turned it up, then switched on the television set.
Hours later, sitting on her living room sofa very close to Wilma Burke who held her hand in loving comfort, Joan was still listening to the disaster reports, still staring in bemusement at the sky as pale ash coated her grass and flowers and trees and house.
MOTHER WAS AN ALIEN
The idea to smuggle Mother off Verna III came to father when Ted Peterman fell down a hill of keteraw and proceeded to smother in a pile of mutherac, managing to do this in spite of all his training and thorough briefings on the planet’s topography. Father, his crew chief, found him, and in disgust kicked him further down the hill, starting an avalanche which buried poor Peterman forever.
Why would Father risk years of severe punishment to bring an alien to Earth? Mother looked like one of the Sirens of Earth legend. Glossy dark silken hair reached to her voluptuous hips and covered cantaloupe-sized breasts. As if that wasn’t enough to capture a young Earthman, there were her extraordinarily beautiful eyes—the color of pure emerald. And Mother, an inexperienced Vernan child of only forty-five, was enthralled with Father’s virility and willing to go with him anywhere.
Father cut Mother’s hair to collar length and concealed her remarkable eyes in gray infra-protect lenses. Judicial application of plastisculpt coarsened her nose and chin and ears. The barest touch of a surgiscope knife added temporary lines around her eyes and mouth. Still, his plan would never have worked except for the flappy tents the space crews wear which hid Mother’s cantaloupes.
Exercising his authority as crew chief, Father accused “Peterman” of violating Earthcode MCLVIII—sexually harassing a female alien, a misdemeanor—and imposed a sentence of solitary confinement for the duration of the return trip to Earth. Of course, only Mother’s days were solitary.
Upon arrival on Earth, poor “Peterman” vanished, AWOL from the Service. And Father took Mother to the pleasure capital of Vega where he married her. So long as she did not have to be fingerprinted or have her blood tested she could easily pass as an Earth female, albeit spectacularly endowed; and given her extreme youth it was unlikely that she would face exposure through medical discovery for many years. Perhaps by then, Father reasoned, the laws would have changed. And so Mother and Father set up housekeeping in Calivada.
Mother did have her idiosyncracies. She made noises at
night—sometimes like the klaxxon warning of a fluorocarbon alert, sometimes reminiscent of nineteenth century war-whooping Indians. She was by now pregnant and since Vernan babies become conscious in the womb after the first month, the first words I heard were from Father, grumbling during one of her spectacular effusions: “Great Calvin Coolidge, can’t you hold that down a little? Everyone in the neighborhood knows what we’re doing.”
“A Payrungasmad curse on the neighbors. Can you do that again, dear?”
Father was furious when he learned of her pregnancy. “Great James Garfield, how could you let that happen!” he bellowed. “We’ve been married only six weeks! You said you’d take ovavoid!”
“No, I didn’t, you just gave me the pills,” Mother informed him coolly. “I did what all Vernan females do when their males leave it up to them. Each time before we made love I concentrated hard and thought negative thoughts.” She shrugged. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
For a while Father screamed incoherently, then asked in a hoarse voice, “Why didn’t you take the pills? Why why why?”
“Those things have never been perfected in three hundred years. Imagine what they’d do to a Vernan. At least we don’t have to worry about birth control for a while, dear,” she said seductively. “Isn’t that good?”
Father, who was accustomed to adjusting swiftly to emergencies in space, had calmed down somewhat. But he said plaintively, “What do we do now? I’ll have to find someone, pay a huge bribe. Then worry about blackmail. Maybe I can think of a way to smuggle you back to Verna-Three.”
“Don’t worry,” Mother said. “I’ll manage.”
Meanwhile, reports of Mother’s foibles had spread throughout the district, especially after she daily emptied tea leaves from the vacuum tubes and explained to a curious neighbor that she always sprinkled tea leaves on her floors, tannic acid being wonderful for the disposition. And when another astonished neighbor watched Mother pluck choice leafy tidbits from the front hedge and eat them for her lunch, Father realized that even in Calivada Mother was a bit too outre. So he hustled her off to an isolated but fully mechanized farmhouse near the border. She did not mind in the least; pregnant Vernan women crave solitude. She spent much of her time telescanning Earth’s history and culture and learning agronomy and hydroponics, which she realized we would soon need.
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