1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  They’re talking, she thought. Talking in their own language. Talking about something very, very important…

  “Swan! Honey, wake up!”

  …talking about something about to happen…

  “Can’t you hear me?”

  …something bad about to happen… real soon…

  “SWAN!”

  Someone was shaking her. For a few seconds she was lost in the hall of mirrors and blinded by the flashing lights. Then she remembered where she was, and she saw the fireflies leaving the window screen, rising up into the night.

  “Goddamn bugs all over the winda,” she heard Tommy say.

  Swan pulled her gaze away from them with an effort that strained her neck. Her mother stood over her, and in the light from the open door Swan could see the purple swelling around her mother’s right eye. The woman was thin and haggard, with tangled blond hair showing dark brown roots; she glanced back and forth between her daughter’s face and the last of the insects flying off the screen. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “She’s spooky,” Tommy said, his thick-shouldered body blocking the doorway. He was stocky and unkempt, with a scraggly brown beard covering his angular jaw, his face thick-jowled and fleshy. He wore a red cap, a T-shirt and overalls. “She’s fucked up in the head,” he said, and he swigged from a bottle of Miller High Life.

  “Mama?” The child was still dazed, the lights blinking behind her eyes.

  “Honey, I want you to get up and put your clothes on. We’re leavin’ this damned dump right now, you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Tommy sneered. “Where you gonna go?”

  “As far away as we can get! I was stupid to move in here with you in the first place! Get up now, honey. Put your clothes on. We want to be out of here as soon as we can.”

  “You gonna go back to Rick Dawson? Yeah, you go on! He kicked you out once before, and I picked you up! Go on and let him kick you again!”

  She turned toward him and said coldly, “Get out of my way or, so help me God, I’ll kill you.”

  Tommy’s eyes were hooded and dangerous. He drank from the bottle again, licked his lips and then laughed. “Sure!” He stepped back and made an exaggerated sweeping gesture with his arm. “Come on through! You think you’re a goddamned queen, come on through!” She looked at her child with a glance that urged her to hurry and walked past him out of the bedroom.

  Swan got out of bed and, clad in her nine-year-old-girl-sized Wichita State University nightshirt, hurried to the window and peered outside. The lights of Mrs. Yeager’s trailer next door were on, and Swan figured the noise had probably awakened her. Swan looked upward and stared open-mouthed with awe.

  The sky was filled with waves of moving, blinking stars. Wheels of light rolled across the darkness over the trailer court, and streaks of yellow fire zigzagged upward into the haze that obscured the moon. Thousands upon thousands of fireflies were passing overhead like galaxies in motion, their signals forming chains of light that stretched from west to east as far as Swan could see. From somewhere in the trailer park a dog began to howl; the noise was picked up by a second dog, then a third, then from other dogs in the subdivision across Highway 15. More lights were going on in the trailers, and people were stepping outside to see what was happening.

  “God A’mighty, what a racket!” Tommy was still standing in the doorway. He bellowed, “Shut the fuck up!” and then finished the rest of his beer with one angry gulp. He fixed Swan with a baleful, bleary-eyed gaze. “I’ll be glad to get rid of you, kid. Look at this damned room, all these plants and shit! Christ! This is a trailer, not a greenhouse!” He kicked over a pot of geraniums, and Swan flinched. But she stood her ground, her chin uplifted, and waited for him to leave. “Wanna know about your mama, kid?” he asked her slyly. “Wanna know about that bar where she dances on tables and lets men touch her titties?”

  “Shut up, you bastard!” the woman shouted, and Tommy spun around in time to stop her swing against his forearm. He shoved her away. “Yeah, come on, Darleen! Show that kid what you’re made of! Tell her about the men you’ve been through, and—oh, yeah, tell her all about her daddy! Tell her you were so high on LSD and PCP and God knows what else that you don’t even remember the fucker’s name!”

  Darleen Prescott’s face was contorted with anger; years ago she’d been a pretty woman, with strong cheekbones and dark blue eyes that communicated a sexual challenge to any number of men, but now her face was tired and sagging, and deep lines cut across her forehead and around her mouth. She was only thirty-two, but looked at least five years older; she was squeezed into tight blue jeans and wore a yellow cowgirl blouse with spangles on the shoulders. She turned away from Tommy and went into the trailer’s “master bedroom,” her lizard-skin cowgirl boots clumping on the floor.

  “Hey,” Tommy said, giggling. “Don’t run off mad!”

  Swan began to take her clothes out of the dresser drawers, but her mother returned with a suitcase, already full of gaudy outfits and boots, and shoveled as much of Swan’s clothes into it as would fit. “We’re goin’ right now!” she told her daughter. “Come on.”

  Swan paused, looking around at the roomful of flowers and plants. No! she thought. I can’t leave all my flowers! And my garden! Who’ll water my garden?

  Darleen leaned down on the suitcase, pressed it shut and snapped it. Then she grasped Swan’s hand and turned to go. Swan had time only to grab her Cookie Monster doll before she was pulled out of the room in her mother’s wake.

  Tommy followed behind them, a fresh beer in hand. “Yeah, you go on! You’ll be back by tomorrow night, Darleen! You just wait and see!”

  “I’ll wait,” she replied, and she pushed through the screen door. Outside, in the steamy night, the howling of dogs floated from all directions. Banners of light streamed across the sky. Darleen glanced up at them but didn’t hesitate in her long stride toward the bright red Camaro parked at the curb behind Tommy’s souped-up Chevy pickup truck. Darleen threw the suitcase in the back seat and slid under the wheel as Swan, still in her nightshirt, got in the passenger side. “Bastard,” Darleen breathed as she fumbled with her keys. “I’ll show his ass.”

  “Hey, lookit me!” Tommy yelled, and Swan looked. She was horrified to see that he was dancing in her garden, the sharp toes of his boots kicking up clumps of dirt, the heels mashing her flowers dead. She clasped her hands to her ears, because she heard their hurting sounds rising up like the strings of a steel guitar being plucked. Tommy grinned and capered, took off his cap and threw it into the air. A white-hot anger flared within Swan, and she wished Uncle Tommy dead for hurting her garden—but then the flash of anger passed, leaving her feeling sick to her stomach. She saw him clearly for what he was: a fat, balding fool, his only possessions in the world a broken-down trailer and a pickup truck. This was where he would grow old and die without letting anyone love him—because he was afraid, just like her mother was, of getting too close. She saw all that and understood it in a second, and she knew that his pleasure at destroying her garden would end with him, as usual, on his knees in the bathroom over the toilet, and when he was through being sick he would sleep alone and wake up alone. But she could always grow another garden—and she would, in the next place they went to, wherever that was going to be.

  She said, “Uncle Tommy?”

  He stopped dancing, his mouth leering at her and a curse on his lip.

  “I forgive you,” Swan said softly, and the man stared at her as if she’d struck him across the face.

  But Darleen Prescott shouted, “Fuck you!” at him, and the Camaro’s engine fired like the roar of a cannon. Darleen jammed her foot down on the accelerator, laying rubber for thirty feet before the tires caught and rocketed them out of the Highway 15 Trailer Park forever.

  “Where are we going?” Swan asked, cuddling Cookie Monster after the noise of the shrieking tires had faded.

  “Well, I figure we’ll
find us a motel to spend the night in. Then I’ll go by the bar in the mornin’ and try to get some money from Frankie.” She shrugged. “Maybe he’ll give me fifty bucks. Maybe.”

  “Are you going back to Uncle Tommy?”

  “No,” Darleen said firmly. “I’m through with him. He’s the meanest man I’ve ever known, and by Christ I can’t understand what I ever saw in him!”

  Swan recalled that she’d said the same thing about both “Uncle” Rick and “Uncle” Alex. She paused thoughtfully, trying to decide whether to ask the question or not, and then she drew a deep breath and said, “Is it true, Mama? What Tommy said about you not knowing who my daddy really was?”

  “Don’t you say that!” she snapped. She riveted her attention on the long ribbon of road. “Don’t you even think such a thing, young lady! I’ve told you before: Your daddy’s a famous rock ‘n’ roll star. He’s got blond, curly hair and blue eyes like yours. The blue eyes of an angel dropped to earth. And can he play a guitar and sing! Can birds fly? Lord, yes! And I’ve told you time and again that as soon as he divorces his wife we’re going to go out and live in Hollywood, California. Won’t that be somethin’? You and me on that Sunset Strip?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Swan said listlessly. She’d heard that story before. All Swan wanted was to live in one place for more than four or five months, so she could make friends she wouldn’t be afraid of losing, and go to the same school for a whole year. Because she had no friends, she turned all her energy and attention to her flowers and plants, spending hours creating gardens in the rough earth of trailer parks, boarding houses and cheap motels.

  “Let’s get us some music on the radio,” Darleen said. She switched it on, and rock ‘n’ roll blared from the speakers. The volume was turned so loud that Darleen didn’t have to think about the lie that she’d told her daughter time and again; in truth, she only knew that he was a tall, blond hunk whose rubber had broken in mid-thrust. It hadn’t mattered at the time; a party was going on, and in the next room everybody was raising hell, and both Darleen and the hunk were flying high on a mixture of LSD, angel dust and poppers. That had been when she was living in Las Vegas nine years ago, working as a blackjack dealer, and since then she and Swan had lived all over the west, following men who promised to be fun for a while or taking jobs as a topless dancer wherever she could find them.

  Now, though, Darleen didn’t know where they were going. She was sick of Tommy, but she was afraid of him, too; he was too crazy, too mean. It was likely he’d come after them in a day or so if she didn’t get far enough away. Frankie, at the High Noon Saloon where she danced, might advance her some money on her next paycheck, but then where?

  Home, she thought. Home was a little speck called Blakeman, up in Rawlins County in the northwest corner of Kansas. She’d run away when she was sixteen, after her mother had died of cancer and her father had started going crazy on religion. She knew the old man hated her, and that’s why she’d left. What would home be like now, she wondered. She imagined her father would drop his teeth when he found out he had a granddaughter. Hell, no! I can’t go back there!

  But she was already calculating the route she would take if she did decide to go to Blakeman: north on 135 to Salina, west through the sweeping corn and wheat fields on Interstate 70, north again on arrow-straight country roads. She could get enough money from Frankie to pay for the gas. “How’d you like to take a trip in the mornin’?”

  “Where to?” She clutched the Cookie Monster tighter.

  “Oh, just somewhere. A little town called Blakeman. Not much going on, the last time I was there. Maybe we could go there and rest for a few days. Get our heads together and think. Right?”

  Swan shrugged. “I guess,” she said, but she didn’t care one way or the other.

  Darleen turned the radio down and put her arm around her daughter. Looking up, she thought she saw a glimmer of light in the sky, but then it was gone. She squeezed Swan’s shoulder. “Just you and me against the world, kid,” she said. “And know what? We’re gonna win out yet, if we just keep on sluggin’.”

  Swan looked at her mother and wanted—wanted very badly—to believe.

  The Camaro continued into the night along the unfolding highway, and in the clouds hundreds of feet above, living chains of light linked across the heavens.

  Five

  King’s Knight

  11:50 P.M. Mountain Daylight Time

  Blue Dome Mountain, Idaho

  A gunmetal gray Ford Roamer recreational vehicle climbed the narrow, winding road that led to the top of Blue Dome Mountain, eleven thousand feet above sea level and sixty miles northwest of Idaho Falls. On both sides of the road, dense pine forests clung to harsh ribs of stone. The RV’s headlights bored holes in a lowlying mist, and the lights of the instrument panel glowed green on the drawn, tired face of the middle-aged man behind the wheel. In the reclined seat beside him, his wife was sleeping with a map of Idaho unfolded on her lap.

  On the next long curve, the headlights hit a sign on the roadside that said, in bright orange luminescent letters: PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.

  Phil Croninger slowed the RV, but he had the plastic ID card they’d mailed him in his wallet, so he kept going past the forbidding sign and onward up the mountain road.

  “Would they really do that, Dad?” his son asked, in a reedy voice, from the seat behind him.

  “Do what?”

  “Shoot trespassers. Would they really?”

  “You know it. They don’t want anybody up here who doesn’t belong.” He glanced at the rearview mirror and caught his son’s green-daubed face floating like a Halloween mask over his shoulder. Father and son closely resembled each other; they both wore thick-lensed eyeglasses, had thin, lank hair and were slight and bony. Phil’s hair was threaded with gray and was receding rapidly, and the thirteen-year-old boy’s was dark brown, cut in straight bangs to hide the height of his forehead. The boy’s face was a study in sharp angles, like his mother’s; his nose, chin and cheekbones all seemed to be about to slice through his pallid skin, as if a second face were underneath the first and on the edge of being revealed. His eyes, magnified slightly by the lenses, were the color of ashes. He wore a T-shirt done in military camouflage colors, a pair of khaki shorts and hiking boots.

  Elise Croninger stirred. “Are we there yet?” she asked sleepily.

  “Almost. We should see something pretty soon.” It had been a long, tiring trip from Flagstaff, and Phil had insisted on traveling at night because, by his calculations, the cooler temperatures were kinder on the tires and boosted gas mileage. He was a careful man who took no chances.

  “I’ll bet they’re looking at us right now with radar.” The boy stared toward the woods. “I’ll bet they’re really taking us apart.”

  “Could be,” Phil agreed. “They’ve got about everything you can think of up here. It’s a terrific place, wait’ll you see it!”

  “I hope it’s cool in there,” Elise said irritably. “God knows I didn’t come all this way to cook in a mine shaft.”

  “It’s not a mine shaft,” Phil reminded her. “Anyway, it’s naturally cool, and they’ve got all sorts of air-filtration systems and safety stuff. You’ll see.”

  The boy said, “They’re watching us. I can feel them watching us.” He felt under his seat for what he knew was hidden there, and his hand came out with a .357 Magnum. “Bang!” he said, and he clicked the trigger toward the dark woods on his right. And another “Bang!” to the left.

  “Put that thing down, Roland!” his mother told him.

  “Put it away, son. We don’t want it out in the open.”

  Roland Croninger hesitated and grinned slyly. He pointed the gun at the center of his mother’s head, pulled the trigger and said quietly, “Bang.” And then a “Bang” and a click of the trigger at his father’s skull.

  “Roland,” his father said in what passed for a stern voice, “stop kidding around, now. Put the gun away.”
/>   “Roland!” his mother warned.

  “Aw, heck!” He shoved the weapon back under the seat. “I was just having some fun! You two take everything too seriously!”

  There was a sudden jolt as Phil Croninger planted his foot on the brake pedal. Two men in green helmets and camouflage uniforms were standing in the middle of the road; both of them were holding Ingram submachine guns and had .45s in holsters at their waists. The Ingram guns were pointed right at the RV’s windshield.

  “Jesus,” Phil whispered. One of the soldiers motioned for him to roll down the window; when Phil had done so, the soldier stepped around to his side of the RV, snapped on a flashlight and shone it in his face. “ID, please,” the soldier said; he was a young man with a hard face and electric blue eyes. Phil brought out his wallet and the ID card and handed it to the young man, who examined Phil’s photograph on the card. “How many coming in, sir?” the soldier asked.

  “Uh… three. Me, my wife and son. We’re expected.”

  The young man gave Phil’s card to the other soldier, who undipped a walkie-talkie from his utility belt. Phil heard him say, “Central, this is Checkpoint. We’ve got three coming up in a gray recreational vehicle. Name on the card’s Philip Austin Croninger, computer number 0-671-4724. I’ll hold for confirmation.”

  “Wow!” Roland whispered excitedly. “This is just like the war movies!”

  “Shhhh,” his father warned.

  Roland admired the soldiers’ uniforms; he noted that the boots were spit-shined and the camouflage trousers still held creases. Above each soldier’s heart was a patch that depicted an armored fist gripping a lightning bolt, and below the symbol was “Earth House,” stitched in gold.

  “Okay, thank you, Central,” the soldier with the walkie-talkie said. He returned the card to the other one, who handed it to Phil. “There you go, sir. Your ETA was 10:45.”

  “Sorry.” Phil took the card and put it away in his wallet. “We stopped for a late dinner.”

  “Just follow the road,” the young man explained. “About a quarter mile ahead you’ll see a stop sign. Make sure your tires are lined up with the marks. Okay? Drive on.” He gave a quick motion with his arm, and as the second soldier stepped aside Phil accelerated away from the checkpoint. When he glanced in the sideview mirror again, he saw the soldiers reentering the forest.