“So what’s it going to be, then?” his father said. “Are you going to fight me on this?”
“I can’t take care of you,” Pax said tiredly. “I have my job, my—”
“I’m not asking you to take care of me!”
“You can’t do it yourself, Dad. And at Rhonda’s place you’d have your own room, home-cooked meals. They have big-screen TVs even. It’s chub paradise.”
“Don’t be funny with me. You’re doing this out of spite, Paxton. You’re still angry.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not angry about anything. I’m trying to help you.”
His father made a derisive sound. “I raised you. I know when you’re lying.”
“I’m going back to bed,” Pax said.
He stalked back to the guest bedroom. In the morning he’d talk to Rhonda, and by noon he’d be gone. He pulled back the bedclothes, unlidding the dank odor of mildew, and started unbuttoning his shirt.
His father’s shape filled the doorway and Pax dropped his hands.
“She’s selling the stuff,” his father said. “To the young chubs, and anybody else they can sell it to. They get high off it.”
“No she’s not.” Then: “How would you know anyway?”
“People talk. They come visit, say things. What else could she be doing with it?”
“Research,” Pax said. “Scientists are using it to search for a cure for … what happened to you. What’s happening to you.”
His father snorted. “What scientists? Where?”
“It’s a full research program, Dad. The government’s involved.” Actually, she hadn’t mentioned the government, but they’d have to get involved if the academics found a cure. No pharmaceutical company would bother to manufacture a drug good for only a few hundred hillbillies in east Tennessee.
“She told you that?” his father asked.
“You can ask her yourself in the morning—she’s coming by to get the papers. Try to be decent.”
Pax lay on the bed, trying to ignore the noise from the living room. His father had turned the TV on again. Finally Pax sat up, pulled out the stack of papers from beneath the bed, and found a pen on one of the shelves.
He turned to the first yellow sticky, and signed. He sat there on the bed until he’d signed and initialed every blank. Then he rolled onto his side, pulled the pillow over his ears, and tried to sleep.
His father had discovered them a year and a half after the Changes, on an April day drowning in cold rain. Jo and Deke had already dropped out of school, and Pax had skipped that morning to join them at Jo’s house for an impromptu meeting of the Switchcreek Orphan Society. He knocked at her door and Jo called out, What’s the password? She’d insisted that their society adopt a password, and a Morse code knock to go with it: three short, three long, three short.
Deke and Jo were already lying in a nest of blankets in the living room, and he’d felt a stab of jealousy. Then they stripped off his clothes and pulled him into their warmth. Although the three of them had stopped having intercourse weeks before, they still fooled around in other ways. Much of the time, however, they did nothing but lie together in a warm bundle. They talked about stopping even this, but the damage had already been done, and they’d been unable or unwilling to break this cocooning habit.
That morning Jo lay between them, Deke with his arm under both their shoulders, Pax with his head and hand against her round, smooth belly. She’d told them that she could feel the child—they didn’t yet know that there were two—rolling and moving. Pax had pressed gently down with his palm, afraid to hurt her or the baby, but so far had felt nothing but yielding flesh and a steady warmth.
Jo was terrified and excited—keyed up in a way she’d never felt before, she said. Paxton was merely terrified. It wasn’t just that she was pregnant; it was that she was the first person with TDS—argo, beta, or charlie—to carry a child. No one could tell them what the child inside Jo would look like, or even whether Jo’s new body could survive a pregnancy. Only Deke seemed calm.
The rain must have masked the sound of Harlan’s car. Pax found out later the school had called home to report his absence, but he never learned how his father knew to come directly to Jo’s house. He walked straight in—no coded knocks, no “S-O-S”—and froze in the doorway. For a moment his expression was quizzical. Only a moment. Harlan Martin was not the behemoth he would become, but the eighteen months since the Changes had doubled him: his weight, his strength, his anger. His father had developed a hair-trigger temper. And why not: His wife was dead, his church was falling apart, and his only son had insisted on defying him, disappointing him, disgracing him.
Pax scrambled to his feet. Harlan strode across the room and grabbed Paxton by both arms, spun and slammed him into the wall, shaking a framed photograph loose from its hook, and pinned him there. Jo screamed and perhaps Deke spoke, but Pax couldn’t remember anything that was said. He only remembered his father’s face, pressed close to his own, twisted by shock, fury, loathing—too many emotions to name.
“My God, Paxton,” his father said, his voice filled with disgust. “What in heaven’s name have you done?”
Paxton had fallen asleep to the sound of the television blaring in the next room, and when he jerked awake sunlight was pouring through the window and the TV still babbled from the living room. It felt like less than a minute had passed, but it must have been hours.
Behind the noise of the TV he heard the telephone ringing.
A few seconds more and the ringing stopped. He didn’t think his father owned an answering machine. He closed his eyes, lay there for a time, and then opened his eyes again. He couldn’t hear his father snoring.
He sat up, found his watch where he’d put it on the floor. Eight-thirty. He pulled on his pants and shirt, walked barefoot out to the living room. The couch was empty. He went to the kitchen, then opened the door to his father’s bedroom, then checked the bathroom.
“Shit,” Pax said aloud. His father was gone.
He went out into the backyard and circled around the house, calling his father’s name. The wet grass washed his feet. Both Pax’s Tempo and his father’s Crown Victoria were still parked in the driveway. The Crown Vic’s driver’s-side door was ajar.
He walked toward the car, a sick feeling in his stomach. He came around the back bumper to see through the open door—and there was no one inside. He started to shut the door, and then saw a set of keys hanging from the ignition.
Pax leaned in, turned the key. The engine didn’t even click. Stone dead. The dome light was off too.
He put the keys in his pocket and slammed the door. He was walking into the house when his cell phone began to vibrate.
It was Deke’s number. Pax flipped open the phone. “Tell me you know where my father is,” Pax said.
“He’s at the church,” Deke answered in that sub-basement voice. “You better hurry.”
“The church? What’s he doing at the church?”
“By the looks of it, getting ready to baptize somebody.”
Pax went into the bathroom, peed. At the sink he splashed his face with tepid water, ran his wet hands through his hair. In the mirror he looked like a wild man. His father’s son, all right.
It almost took him longer to get the Tempo started than to get to the church. It was just two and a half miles away down a twisty and hilly stretch of Piney Road. But his father must have walked there. How could a man who weighed six or seven hundred pounds walk it? Two days ago he could barely get off the couch.
Deke’s open-topped Jeep was in the parking lot, as well as a dark blue Buick. Pax parked, tiredly climbed the steps, and paused with his hand on the door. From inside someone called out, and even without being able to make out the words he recognized his father’s voice—his preaching voice.
The Reverend Harlan Martin was bringing the Word.
Pax pulled open the creaking door and went inside. The vestibule was dim and empty, but the double doors to the sanctuary were prop
ped open. Inside, light shimmered from the yellow-paned windows on the eastern wall, making the tops of the pews gleam.
A broad aisle led down the center of the church to the raised pulpit. Set into the wall behind the pulpit was a recessed archway that contained the baptistry, a cement pool sunk below the floor.
His father stood in the pool, water up to his waist, praying or preaching or both at the same time.
His cheeks shone with tears. One hand gripped the panel of glass that acted as a kind of splash guard for the pool, and the other was raised above his head, fingers spread. He wore a white dress shirt, too tight to be buttoned over his stained T-shirt. His hair had been combed back from his head.
“Forgive us, Lord!” he called, his voice echoing. His eyes were tightly closed, his face anguished. Blisters stretched across his forehead and cheeks, larger than Pax had ever seen them. What he’d taken to be tears could have been oil from ruptured sacs.
His father clenched his raised hand into a fist, opened it again. “Let your mercy come down on us. Forgive us now, our weak flesh, our corruptible hearts …”
Deke and a beta woman in a skirt and loose shirt stood off to the side of the sanctuary, next to the organ, talking in low voices. They saw Pax and waved him forward.
As Pax drew closer to the pulpit he could smell the spicy-sour tang of vintage. His father was still praying—We ask you, Lord, hear us, Lord—eyes shut, hand up like a drowning man. For as long as Pax could remember his father prayed for “we” and “us.” Pleading on behalf of the entire church, or the world.
Deke said, “Paxton, have you met the Reverend Hooke?”
Pax recognized the woman’s clothing, if not her face. She’d worn a shirt and vest like that when she’d led the singing at the funeral. They shook hands, and Pax said, “I’m sorry about this, Reverend. How long has he been in there?”
“I got here a half hour ago,” Hooke said. “Who knows how long he was here before that—long enough to overflow the baptistry. I turned off the water as soon as I realized what was going on. I don’t even know how he got in.”
“Probably still got his keys,” Deke said. He was keeping his volume low, as if reluctant to disturb Harlan’s praying.
“Probably,” Pax said. “Or he could just come in the side door—you just have to yank on it to get it to unlatch. They ever fix that?”
Hooke did not seem amused. “He won’t listen to us at all, and of course we can’t go in after him—look at him.”
The blisters. They were afraid of touching him.
“Okay,” Pax said, “why don’t we let him finish? Whatever he’s doing.”
The reverend shook her head. “We can’t let him stay in there all day. Now Paxton, you may have heard that your father and I had our differences, but that’s got nothing to do with this. I respect him as a man of God. But it just isn’t safe to have him in there, not with … not in his condition. I told Deke we ought to call Aunt Rhonda, and have her boys—”
“But I said that was your call to make,” Deke said to Pax.
“No, you’re right,” Pax said. “My dad didn’t want to go with her, but … look at him.” He should have brought the papers with him. Rhonda had guards, gates, medical equipment—everything to stop this kind of thing from happening. “I don’t think I can handle this.”
“Well, today you’re gonna have to,” Deke said.
Pax felt his face flush. He didn’t look at Deke, instead turned to the reverend and said, “Call Aunt Rhonda. I’ll try to get him out of there. You have any rubber gloves? Or some plastic I can put over my hands?”
The Reverend Hooke said she had some garbage bags in her office, and Pax followed her up the steps of the pulpit and through the narrow door behind the podium, to the hallway that led back to the offices and Sunday school rooms. To their right was a door, left ajar, that opened onto the baptistry.
“I’ll be right back,” Hooke said, and headed down the hall.
Pax opened the baptistry door. Steps led down into the pool, and the water was as high as the top step. His father was within arm’s reach. His huge body almost filled the pool, and every movement sent water lapping over the edge.
This close, the smell of the vintage was strong, made heavier by the moisture in the air.
“Dad,” Pax said. Then, louder, “It’s me, Paxton. It’s time to go home.”
His father’s eyes remained closed. “—to die in the flesh, Lord,” he prayed. His voice bounced around the enclosed space, but it seemed both quieter and more desperate. “And yet to be resurrected in the spirit. We ask these things in your name, amen.”
“Dad, you’re hallucinating.”
The Reverend Harlan Martin opened his eyes, turned. His face looked like it had been pummeled, a mass of protuberances and swelling flesh. It took him a moment to focus on Pax through eyes closed almost to slits.
He smiled and extended an arm to him. “Don’t be afraid, Son,” he said, his voice low, as if to keep a congregation from hearing. “Take my arm and I’ll help you down.”
The surface of the water seemed oily, reflective.
“I’m not coming in there, Dad.” Pax breathed in through his mouth, tasting the vintage. “Step out now, okay? Can you climb out?”
His father glanced toward the front of the church. Who was he seeing, out there—and when? Pax remembered standing in this spot when he was twelve, his father reaching out to him exactly like this. Paxton’s mother had bought him a new white dress shirt and had told him to wear an undershirt so he wouldn’t look naked when the water soaked through.
His father chuckled, shook his head. “All righty then.” He turned toward Pax, sloshing water over the sides of the pool, and moved toward the steps.
“That’s it. Come on out and we’ll get you dried off,” Pax said.
His father grasped Paxton’s forearm, his fingers surprisingly strong.
It’s okay, Pax thought. His arm was covered by his sleeve, no skin contact. “Easy does it,” he said.
“That’s the spirit,” his father said. He backed up, pulling Pax down to the second step. Pax yelped and grabbed the door frame with his free hand. The water splashed cold against his shins.
“Dad! Stop it!”
“In the name of the Father,” his father said. He looped an arm around Pax’s waist. “And of the Son—”
He yanked Pax toward him. Pax lost his grip on the door frame and fell onto his father’s chest. The big man overbalanced and tipped backward and they plunged under the water.
Cold water surged into Pax’s ears, his mouth.
Pax’s left arm was smashed between his father’s body and the side of the pool, his right arm trapped at his side. Pax arched his back, trying to get his head up above the surface. His father’s arm cinched tighter, hugging him close.
Someone else was in the water with them. Pax felt something grip the back of his neck, slide down to tug at his elbow, freeing it. Pax reached up, found the top of the glass panel, and held on.
Pax got his legs under him, pushed. The arm around his waist loosened and his head broke the surface. He gasped, and immediately coughed up water.
From the sanctuary, murmurs of “amen.”
Deke stood in front of the baptistry, reaching down, his arm covered to the elbow by a black plastic bag. Behind him the room was full of light, the pews crowded. The women wore colorful summer dresses. The men, in white shirtsleeves because of the heat, draped their arms across the pew backs. All of them were unchanged—not an argo or chub or blank among them. The organ played “Rock of Ages.”
My church, Pax thought, but it was his father’s voice saying it. My church, my church. Pax felt the tightening in his chest, love and gratefulness and sorrow blossoming like heat.
Chapter 7
EVERY PAYDAY A gang of charlie men gathered in the lobby of the Home like eager pups. Rhonda Mapes could hear them outside her door, talking and joking, eager and impatient. Every week they came earlier and earlier. Well
they could keep waiting. Rules were rules.
At fifteen before the hour, Everett knocked on her door, then leaned in apologetically.
Rhonda looked up from the accounts book. “It’s not eleven yet,” she said. “Tell the boys—”
“It’s not about that,” Everett said. He glanced to his side, and a young charlie poked his face around the side of the door. Travis was seventeen, hired as an orderly last year. Where Everett was bald, Travis wore a thick wave of black hair and long sideburns.
“He’s doing it again, ma’am,” Travis said.
Rhonda sighed, took off her reading glasses. “Is he producing?”
“No ma’am. But he’s pretty worked up, and it looks like he’s having trouble breathing. I was wondering if you wanted to do the sedative thing again, or—”
“No! I told you, he’s got to come through this.” She closed the accounts book. “Go back to the room, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Travis’ face disappeared. Everett stepped into the office and closed the door behind him. “You want me to do payday?” he asked. “The boys have been out there a half hour, we can get rid of them early.”
“Certainly not!” She got to her feet and walked to the floor safe, a squat black thing about the height of a two-drawer filing cabinet, and bent to squint at the dial. “Give it to ’em a half hour early, pretty soon they’ll take an hour, and the next thing you know they’ll be showing up on Mondays.” She opened the safe with a few practiced spins, withdrew the key ring for the coolers downstairs, and tossed it to Everett. “You can get the bonus out, but don’t give them a drop until I get there. I’m going to find out what Travis needs. Then after we pay the boys, we’ve got some errands to run.”
The charlies in the lobby all stood when she walked out of her office. Twelve well-built men, the strongest in the clade, from boys not much older than sixteen to a couple of elders who were only a step or two from becoming Home residents themselves. She employed them all, but most didn’t work at the Home; they were distributors and messengers, her hands, the means by which she touched every member of the clade.
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