by Brian Short
The boys, while standing there, drifted with their eyes and seemed lost, maybe a little scared. The Professor looked from one to the other of them, then sneezed.
Outside, the rain had arrived. Broken concrete, formerly dry, released long-contained dust-smell with the first thick drops. Every animal for far around had known that this was coming, had known full well what season it was. “Winter’s here! Everything dies!” called one black raven from a barren tree, while the ownerless retriever, having left behind the small girl to relieve himself against a tire of one of the few parked cars downtown (he knew instinctively better than to mess with any of the Harleys) looked up toward the bird, lolled out his tongue, and said nothing, the reproach in his eyes enough to remind this bird of the rule against using human speech.
Shulamit, inside, returning change to her purse, thought again and poured some coin into the open jar on the counter before her. She said to Proteus, who stood there smiling, oafish, “You’ve taken up the mantle, I see?”
Proteus took a moment to consider what she meant, then realized that he still wore the sheriff’s accessories. “Er, um, I,” he answered.
“He fitted you with these things,” she added. “I remember it. Then you are this instrument of the law, the subject of prophecy.”
“Prophecy?” I said, astonished. And then, “Subject?” I mean: he said. Damn it.
“Zedekiah was our prophet, yes,” she explained, “but hardly the only one capable. In fact, most of us can see into the future, of the seven sister wives. Many of the kids too.”
“Oh,” Proteus said. “You make it sound… common.”
“Kinda,” she told him. “The littlest don’t remember the future as we do, but that’s only ’cause they don’t know what it is. Lack the perspective, see. We’ve seen you, though.”
“Was that,” started Proteus, “before or after –”
Yet she wouldn’t let him finish: “The law was laid upon you, not your choice, though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t ever yours. How would you think that you found it, otherwise? Or that it should find you? Law makes its own choice, in this case chooses you. See. You accept or don’t accept, little difference. You wear the magic, and so you change. You see the future.”
“It’s not something I like to talk about.”
“We’ve been looking for the new land of Zion. We think we may have found it. We await the signs of confirmation, soon to come, yes, very soon…”
And there came a sudden flash, and it came to pass soon after, a crash of terrible thunder, and then, momentarily following this, something not so clearly nor so readily explained: the blazing trumpet-horn sounds, of wrath and terrible thunder, as if from the sky itself, as if from heaven, and the impact sounds, the metal sounds, first of one, then another, then the next and the next and another, and so on, like so many dominoes, falling over…
•
“They…” said Albert, his face aflush with blood, “were in my way.”
“Albert?” began Proteus, head protected somewhat from the rain by his wide-brimmed and ill-fitting sheriff’s hat. “Albert. You’ve hit every last one of these motorcycles.”
The old man remained at the wheel of his little electric hybrid car, which again had jumped the high curb and mounted onto the sidewalk. This time its angle had wedged across the walk on other side of the street, stopping finally with a fender stuck partway through the door of Lily’s Antiques. Its frame and glass were in ruins.
Lily, smiling, stood atop a step-ladder, dusting at one end of a shelf, cat-corner from the wreck of her door; she turned and waved at them, “Afternoon, Sheriff! Hello, Albert!”
The rain fell in floods and doused the two men outside, rat-drowned.
“Ma’am,” said Proteus.
“My dear, hello, once again,” offered old Albert flirtatiously with a tip of his black fedora.
From the door of the Ignatius! coffee! Co! and onto the street had come streaming out those of the Ceres clan who’d been inside, their jaws now all dropped open in disbelief at the level of offense to their rides. Others of the family had appeared from their corners and crannies and nooks and various shops and where-all else they’d got to in town, and when those also saw what had happened, they stood about and stared in shock.
“Albert,” said Proteus, turning back to the white-haired fellow inside the car, “first you rammed every bike to that side, then you swerved wide around and knocked over every bike to this side. They were all legally parked. How could they have possibly been in your way?”
“All it took,” the old man protested, “was a tap to the first in the line. Then they all collapsed and knocked over the next. Nothing to it. Nothing at all.”
“That isn’t the point. The point is… I don’t know what the point is. You shouldn’t be driving.”
“I would like some coffee.”
“Albert, I have to take you in. You give me no choice. I’m revoking your license. I’m impounding your car. Again. This is unacceptable.”
“You, sir,” declared the old man, “are a flat-faced fake. You’re a washed-up dead dog of the sea and, future-seer or not, I do not recognize your authority to do this. Nor to do anything, for that matter. Now bring me some coffee and be gone!” He waved back-handedly at him with haughty contempt.
“YOU,” said Proteus, his tolerance driven to the limit, “ARE UNDER… ARREST!”
TWENTY
The World
[Early Winter, 2005]
“So what did you do?” asked Tunker, wiping down the fine, shiny, though somewhat scarred maple surface of his bar. There was no other soul in the Tooth Or Claw, save for himself and Proteus, despite the fading light outside, the hour somewhat darker at this time of year than any other.
“I had to run him in, of course. He left me little choice.”
“Regrets.”
“No, not quite, not yet. In fact, there was a certain satisfaction… I almost hate to say it… Of course he wouldn’t come willingly, not easily, not quietly at all. I had to take him by the ear, like a misbehaving child. He screamed the whole way, while I dragged him.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“I don’t drink.”
“That’s right, I forgot. How about some coffee, in that case?”
“Sure, coffee. Thanks.” Though Proteus’s eyes already wiggled a bit in his head.
Tunker poured him a cup, but refused his money. “Old Albert is a truculent one,” he said.
“I’ll say.”
“So where is he now?”
“I left him in the jail cell, that iron cage-thing? At the police department? I guess that’s what it’s there for. He was spitting fire and invectives at me, so I’m letting him cool off for a little while. I was going to bring him some food from Lorelei’s next door – after getting something for myself too – but the place is packed. I’ve never seen it so busy.”
“That crowd,” sighed Tunker. “I guess it’s good for the town and everything, ’cept I can’t say as I expect much love from them, myself.”
“So it seems.”
“I guess they’ll be staying for a while, under the circumstances.”
“It seems to me they were fixing to stay in any case, but yes, I think they’ll be here for a while.”
“Eh. We could do worse. Thanks for coming in though. Pay me a visit. I’m actually quite glad to see you. Professionally… or, how should I say it? Communally? It’s good for people to see the law in here once in a while. You know, to see that it extends, that it reaches into here too. Some folks forget. Of course, it runs both ways, as you’ve a crowd in here you might not see at Ig’s. This puts you into the community as well, see? A presence.”
“Right…”
Tunker noticed that his guest’s attention had fixed somewhere behind him and his face gone ashen pale. Tunker looked around, trying to spot the thing that had caught Proteus’s eye. Failing this, he finally asked, “What is it?”
“That showbill on the wall
behind you.”
“Which one?”
“The Fishkill. The Fishkill. When was Fishkill here? When was this?”
Tunker found the xeroxed showbill stuck among all the many others taped to the mirror and pulled it off, accommodatingly handing it to Proteus. There it was, in high-contrast black-and-white: Vivianne in front with that look, and Vinny a shape at the drums behind her. The lettering in bold sans-serif was printed, white on black, across the top. But there was no date markered into the space left blank for one.
“When were they here? It’s not… I just…”
“Are you okay? You look kind of sick.”
“It’s just… I lost… too much…”
Sensing his distress, and uncomfortable with it himself, Tunker abruptly filled in the silence with a spate of talk: “This was from last summer? Kinda late… In fact, not long before you yourself showed up, if I remember correct. I forget exactly when it was, but they put on a pretty good show. I do remember that. It ended badly, though. This was just before, you know, he left. He showed up to see it, see. He showed up… and that was that for much of what remained of the town – almost everyone who’d turned out for the show. He knew better, too. By then, he knew what he was doing, what would happen. To show up like that… it was bad. It was just bad. And he knew. After that, so many people were gone…” Tunker looked with concern into Proteus’s face, now drained of blood and color, with his jaw dropped open and slack, his eyes looking toward something very far away.
“Can I keep this?” Proteus asked in a stricken voice, his eyes stuck to the paper.
“Sure. Be my guest.”
“I’m… sorry,” Proteus stammered, sliding down off his stool. “I lost… something… once. And she…” He staggered toward the door, showbill clutched in one hand.
Tunker watched him go, puzzled. Once Proteus had stepped out through the door, he picked up the coffee he’d poured for him and sniffed it quizzically.
•
Outside, the sky had darkened, and only a hint of the remaining daylight shone through the thick, broken clouds above and to the west. It had stopped raining, yet everything glimmered with a sheen of new wetness. The rain had fallen heavy and soaked the mountain, and the dry mountain had sucked it up where it could; in the dirt, in the grasses, in trees, in the air now charged with moisture. More would fall again soon, but for the moment it held back, and Proteus clutched at the showbill – now no better than a clump of wadded paper in his hand – as he limped across the empty street. He stopped in the middle and looked behind: there was the Tooth Or Claw, which he’d just left. He looked ahead: Lorelei’s Diner, so full of light, still stuffed full of Ceres wives and children, who bounced and bounded and screamed. The women fussed with the young ones, trying to more or less contain them within specific booths. Some of the older brood, like those two Nephi and Laman, who were all but grown up, kept to certain tables among themselves, discussing events and matters as seriously as might the various wives, who had their own long table in the center, to which they, when they could, returned. Maybe not the entire family was here, but there were enough of them. Amanda in her waitress apron moved swiftly through the diner. Proteus saw that she was helped by Lorelei herself, while he stood in the wide street and watched them. He likely didn’t understand what exactly he was watching, as his eyes had glassed over and his face, though stricken, remained blank. Like this, he stayed for a time that he had no thought to measure – it may have been several minutes – looking first into the blazing light of the diner, then back again at the Tooth, in its darkness and neon haze, then across the valley and into the gathering evening, which he could see from here as a wide patch of blackness where nothing else was, then finally returning to Lorelei’s and the circus within.
He lit a cigarette, felt the wind, and stood there, watching. When the cigarette was half-burned, he turned and headed home toward the Warehouse, muttering as he walked and staring at his shoes the whole while.
•
“Good Christ, not again…”
Yes, the night had grown thick and darker even than before; the gathering night, with Proteus in the Warehouse, brooding – less thinking of his missing Vivianne (though he knew perfectly well that she had never been “his” Vivianne) than feeling the ache of the vicious gut-punch of her disappearance, and the shape of the hole inside him, a thing he’d more or less until now learned to live with and ignore, if not quite forget – and once he’d settled for the night on his mattress on the floor, eventually to’ve fallen asleep, as they say, to dream…
“What is it? What do you want?” The petulance in his own voice sickened him.
Each footstep fell soft and steady, as always. It descended from the ceiling down the staircase that wasn’t there, followed steadily to where he lay in the center of the Warehouse floor.
“Would you please just leave me alone?”
But of course it wouldn’t. For all he knew, it couldn’t. And once the steps had reached him, and stopped their steady fall, and the invisible body, after a moment’s thought, sat… right… through him, to impress the foam mattress with its ghost-weight, to make him slide into the indent, he heard the voice, only just soft, through some subtle displacement, a place slightly different from this (yet only just a little), and this voice was a woman’s, a voice he thought he knew, asking him, or asking somebody near him, “What were the skies like when you were growing up?”
“Oh, they went on forever,” Proteus told her.
He was again in the blue room, the bright room, the bedroom, with the girl. There’d been no transition, and it hadn’t occurred to him there should be one. All was as it needed to be: clear sunlight spread in through the sheer, translucent curtains that covered the windows and fluttered in the slight breeze. The girl at the window stood just as naked as he lay on the bed, atop the covers. Her back was to him, her blonde hair fanned back over one shoulder. The light played in faintest gradients over her ribs and the fine muscles along her spine. “I’ve often wondered,” she said, still facing the window, staring out through the opening where she’d lifted the fabric aside, her eyes fixed on something far off. When she turned to face him, he was startled to both recognize her and not, at once. “So much,” she said, “has changed since then. I don’t remember the skies at all.”
“Amanda?”
“I’m not the girl I was, then.” She stepped toward him. It was her face, but her expression was different: softer somehow, not as he’d ever seen her before.
His cock had become achingly, suddenly hard.
“I’m not the girl I am now,” she said, a little sadly.
The closer she got with each slow step, the more he could not stand it.
“I’m not the girl you think I am.” Her eyes flicked up and met his.
He came in hot, slow bursts.
When Proteus awoke to find that he’d soiled the sheets and mattress again, he groaned. As he stood, something in a far corner of the Warehouse flicked and shifted its weight, knocked against some tottering object, and scurried off. He dimly realized then that there was something important he’d needed to remember. But what was it? He’d not eaten; Lorelei’s had been too busy… So he’d wandered home, discouraged… and he’d forgotten…
Oh, fuck! Albert!
•
It hadn’t been that long, he told himself as he struggled up the hill against the night, fighting the gale that had suddenly appeared from nowhere. It hadn’t been that long, that the old man might by now be dead. Right? Sure, he’d be hungry. Maybe… he was diabetic? Lack of a regular meal could kill him… O-or maybe he required medications? And maybe he would be dead… Oh fuck! Oh fuck!
Proteus’s furious pace had left him breathless, winded easily by the altitude, in the thin air. Smoking again, he knew, helped nothing. He clutched the jacket he’d wrapped hastily around himself tight against his body, a slim protection at best against the cold that, just like the wind, had appeared from nowhere and all of a sudden. At le
ast it wasn’t raining. Right?
He looked up. Thick drops smattered – one, two, now another – against his face.
O-or at least I’ve not far to go, he told himself. He looked uphill, past the lights of the town, which were few now; all the shops were closed, the Tooth Or Claw was closed, Lorelei’s had long ago closed. All windows everywhere were empty or curtained and cold and dark. Because most everyone would be asleep by now – see how the houses were dark? Streetlights shone his way through downtown. Some dotted and warmed the winding culde-sac appending the highway, where several houses stood (or once had stood). But beyond these, toward the summit, where he needed to go, there was only darkness, thick and living, thick and heavy, blowing strangely humid wind straight into his upturned face.
He had no food.
He stopped there in the street in dumbfounded paralysis right where he stood and stared into the dark up at the summit.