“Look in the case.”
Lone Boy looked. His expression betrayed his puzzlement.
“Use those instead of conventional ammo. They’ll knock him out for a while. That satisfy your goody-two-shoes conscience?”
“How many?”
“Just one. The extras are if you miss. Precautionaries, I s’pose you could call ‘em.”
Lone Boy was staring at the pistol, hefting it. Twitchell gave him an empty shoe box from the trunk and told him to put the pistol and the tranqs away.
“Tell you something else you need to know. This Cal Pickford you’re supposed to be tailin’—his wife’s mother kicked off last night. The funeral’s tomorrow at two. There’s gonna be some sort of get-together afterward at Brown Thrasher Barony, the farm that Dr. Bonner’s brother works on. The whole clan’s probably gonna be out there. At least until dark.”
“You expect me to do it in the daytime?”
“You got an excuse for every other time.” He did, too. And, Twitchell noted with pleasure, this simple remark had sobered him. Loan was staring into the shoe box with pursed lips and a furrowed brow. Weighing the merits of the suggestion.
“Okay,” he said presently. “Okay.” He walked back toward the rear entrance to the mall, clutching the shoe box under his arm like something salvaged from the wreckage of a tornado.
Twitchell lifted his imaginary flamethrower and squeezed off an imaginary burst at Le Boi Loan’s narrow ass. Gotcha, he silently exulted, gotcha gotcha gotcha, my gooky gook gook you.
16
THE WORST has to be over, Cal thought as he escorted Lia from her mother’s grave to the silver limousine. They would ride with Jeff and Suzi Bonner and the Bonners’ children, Martin and Carina, from the cemetery to Brown Thrasher Barony. Everyone who had ever cared about—who had ever had even a nodding acquaintance—with Miss Emily would drive out to the farm, too, bringing platters of chicken and ham, bowls of cooked vegetables, pitchers of tea, pie tins of various desserts—enough stuff to keep the British and the Argentine warriors in the Falklands going for weeks.
It would be an ordeal, this postfuneral reception but not as much of one as the two days they’d spent in the Meriwether Memorial Hospital after Miss Emily’s devastating heart attack in the Eleanor Roosevelt Nursing Home. At the hospital, they’d known almost from the beginning that they were simply waiting for her to die. And certainly the reception would be less of an ordeal than their trip to the mortuary in LaGrange to view the body. There, Lia had cried so much—cool psychotherapist or no—that it looked as if each eye had taken the impact of a hard-hit tennis ball.
In fact, she still looked that way, and Cal kept pulling her to him in the backseat, squeezing her shoulder, tracing the enflamed circles under her eyes with a solicitous finger—until, tiring of this attention, she grabbed his wrist and gently settled his hand into his own lap.
The worst has to be over, Cal reflected. Miss Emily’s in the ground, the eulogies have all been spoken, and folks are gathering around Jeff and Suzi, Martin and Carina. And Lia and me. Even me, Cal Pickford, the outsider son-in-law whom Miss Emily sometimes seemed to regard—unfairly—as the Angel of Death.
Suzi and the boy Martin were in the backseat of the limousine with Lia and Cal. Jeff and the girl Carina were up front with the callow young driver from the funeral home.
The Bonner kids, eleven and nine, respectively, were downcast imps today, grieving as deeply as any adult—but with more hurt and less understanding—and saying nothing at all.
Good kids, Cal decided. Really admirable, first-class little persons. He had never noticed their dignity before. They had always seemed to him standard-issue children, adequately tousled and freckle-ridden, neither marvels of brilliance nor monsters of brattiness. But now their grief was bringing them into focus for him, distinguishing them in startling ways. They had lost someone who mattered, and Cal could empathize.
As for Suzi, well, she was a decent person, too. Oddly solemn even on happy occasions; aware, maybe, that Martin and Carina were growing up in a different world. Nowadays you didn’t make waves. If you danced, you danced to the music of the ski-nosed piper. The solemnity that her kids were displaying today would stand them in good stead later. They wouldn’t have much to laugh about if things kept going as they were, and Suzi—even from a position of moderate privilege—knew it.
Cal looked at the back of Jeff’s head. His sister’s brother. A guy who didn’t deserve a wife and kids as neat as these. Not that he was a jerk—only that he had surrendered to the status quo. He managed a horse farm for an indulgent absentee landlord, a man named—truly now—Denzil Wiedenhoedt, who’d made his money back in the 1950s selling and installing wall-to-wall carpet.
Jeff had it too good under Wiedenhoedt: The injustices worked by this administration on folks less well-connected meant nothing to him. Jeff was ignorant of these injustices; he strove to remain ignorant of them. Which was one reason that he disliked Cal and wished that Lia had married a local boy.
Maybe you’re not being fair, Cal cautioned himself. After all, there’s a black stablehand—Kenneth “Horsy” Stout—at the farm, and Jeff keeps him on the payroll.
And when you first got here and were struggling to find work, Lia asked Jeff to hire you—not as a replacement for Stout, but as a supervisor or an extra hand, roles that Jeff was already filling himself. So possibly, Mr. Pickford, you resent Jeff.
Cal began to fret. Did he resent not only his brother-in-law but the black stablehand? Certainly, if not for Stout, Cal might have had a job on the horse farm from the beginning …
Suzi broke into his worry: “I’m surprised that Grace Rinehart and Secretary Berthelot came, Lia. You must really be impressing her. For her to put in an appearance, I mean.”
That’s what it was, Cal thought. An appearance. The woman is super at making appearances. Her life is an appearance.
Aloud he said, “Just what we needed at Miss Emily’s funeral, a couple of bigwigs and some gun-toting Secret Service geeks.”
“She really looks great, doesn’t she?” the limousine’s driver said. He was wearing a dark suit and, despite the balmy weather, a pair of calfskin gloves.
“I’d rather have security at a funeral than not,” Jeff said, without turning around. “What’s the matter, Cal. Did they make you nervous?”
“It was a show, Jeff. Neither of those people knew your mama, and neither of them really gives a”—the kids in the car dictated Gal’s word choice—“a fig that she’s died. It’s all politics.”
Lia said, “I’m not crazy about the way Grace goes about doing some things, but she’s not an unfeeling person. Her coming to the funeral today was a show, all right—a show of concern.”
“It was sweet she came,” Suzi agreed.
“And what about Hubby Hiram?” Cal asked, annoyed.
“He came because he was home from DC and Grace wanted him to come. That’s just the way good husbands behave. He could’ve been a no-show easily enough. I imagine he’s got plenty to do, what with his cattle, and his Brezhnev bears, and all the hassles over price supports and so on.”
“But the agents in their green berets,” Jeff said, still facing front, “they make poor ol’ Calvin antsy. Something must be eating Calvin. Probably his conscience.”
Fuck you, Cal thought. But he said, “I don’t like the Gestapo, Jeff, and I don’t care what color their hats are.”
“Gestapo?” the driver said. “You mean Germans?”
“Secret Service men aren’t No-Knocks,” Jeff replied. “They’re not even all that secret. They wear their berets to show us that they’re completely on the up-and-up.”
“To intimidate us, you mean.”
“Cal, you’re a true paranoid.”
“I’d like to wear a beret some day,” Martin said.
“You’d look silly in it,” Carina told him, a disembodied voice from the front seat.
Suzi kept Marty from replying, and the driver, looking i
nto his rearview mirror, said, “They’ve got the next three cars after this one, folks. If one of you all’s antsy about ‘em bein’ along, well, you’re gonna have ‘em at the party to be antsy about, too. Hope there’s plenty of food.”
Cal glanced over his shoulder. The next car in the procession was Grace Rinehart’s cordovan-colored Cadillac. Today, though, it carried a pair of beret-wearing agents. Miss Rinehart and Hiram Berthelot were in the backseat of the trailing auto. Behind that one, visible when the mortuary limousine turned onto a county road, was a third armorplated luxury car. Dozens of other cars of all shapes, sizes, and makes trailed after.
This isn’t a funeral procession, Cal thought. It’s a goddamn convoy.
“I invited Grace to come,” Lia said. “I phoned her yesterday and said she was welcome. Secretary Berthelot, too. Was that all right?” Lia looked past Cal to Suzi for a yea or a nay.
“Sure, it was,” Suzi said. “Our house is your house, Lia. You know that. Invite anybody you like.”
Tiglath-pileser the Third, Cal thought. Attila the Hun. Adolf the Hitler. Anybody at all.
Brown Thrasher Barony nestled about six miles northwest of Pine Mountain. It comprised sixty acres of land, a dozen high-strung thoroughbreds, possibly twenty quarter horses, and a stable vastly larger than the Bonners’ house.
Although no tightwad, Denzil Wiedenhoedt felt that most of the money spent at the Barony should go toward maintaining its fences and grounds and toward feeding and caring for the horses. However, upon learning of Miss Emily’s death, he had wired the Bonners a thousand dollars to have a huge canopy erected in front of their house (an ill-disguised doublewide trailer) and church tables moved onto the lawn to accommodate all the people, himself included, attending the postfuneral reception. He had also provided for portable toilets, valet parking, and a jukebox draped in ebony bunting.
This jukebox was playing the sort of pious music that caused Cal’s teeth to ache. From the roots up.
Under the high, fringed canopy, Lia was being consoled by ten different people at once; the Secretary of Agriculture was talking with Wiedenhoedt; and Miss Grace was standing at one of the tables politely declining autograph requests and spooning out field peas, candied yams, and greens (turnip, mustard, or collard) to whoever walked past her with a designer paper plate. Probably thinks she’s Jesus washing the feet of the disciples, Cal decided.
Two Secret Service men hovered near the Liberty Belle, while four other agents guarded Berthelot and Wiedenhoedt, peering at the crowd like yard bulls casing a hobo jungle for troublemakers.
It seemed to Cal that everyone in Pine Mountain, plus a hundred other souls, had showed up. Mr. Kemmings was there, and Cal took him a plate at a table near the doublewide and talked with him for several minutes. Then he saw Shawanda Bledsoe with some of her friends and family members and waved them up to the serving tables so that, later, they could brag that Grace Rinehart—yes, the Grace Rinehart—had actually slopped them some sweet ‘taters and greens at a white folks’ funeral whoop-de-doop. Cal tried to signal Lia a couple of times, but it was no use—she was beset by comforters. Finally, he abandoned the front lawn and hiked down the neat dirt road from the Bonners’ house to the stables. Pearl bushes and flowering quince danced their colors at him. Meanwhile, the music from Denzil Wiedenhoedt’s idiot jukebox, along with the folksy hubbub from the tables, began to fade, and he could hear faint whinnyings from the barn. The acrid, provocative smells of horseflesh also swirled out to greet him. The stable’s huge doors—big enough to admit a couple of trucks—stood open, revealing facing rows of gray-painted stalls, maybe twenty on each side, and a floor of poured concrete so well scoured that it gleamed like ivory. The door at the far end of the barn looked as far away as Italy, but skylights in the steepled ceiling shed sunshine across the entire distance, pillars of crisscrossing butterscotch. Dust motes and pieces of either hay or straw swam in these beams, reminding Cal of unknown life-forms in a colossal but waterless aquarium.
He walked down the row of stalls, listening to the hollow tap of his Sunday oxfords and looking at the nervous thoroughbreds. My God, he thought, they’re beautiful. Each horse had its name on the stall: Golightly, Divine Intervention, Radioactive, Ubiquity, and so on.
Beyond the far doors, more horses were grazing; therefore, some of the stalls were empty, and Cal paused at an empty unit to study its design. He noticed immediately that Horsy Stout had built a ledge around this stall at the same height as the concrete water trough—so that he could stand on this platform to wipe down and curry his charges.
Me and Horsy Stout, Cal thought. Two men in the same general line. Him with his horses, me with my Brezhnev bears.
Aloud, Cal said, “I need a hit.”
He searched for a place. The aisle between the stalls wasn’t it. Thoroughbreds were sensitive. Smoke annoyed them, and they’d whicker and rear if you lit up around them. If you upset them too much, they’d bang around in their stalls—almost willfully—until they’d gashed a flank or splintered a hoof, as if conscious of the fact that doing themselves damage was the best way to make you rue your behavior. We’re expensive suckers, their attitude said, and if you don’t treat us right, we’ll go into your goddamn pockets to punish you. At last, Cal came to the saddle room. It had racing saddles resting on sawhorses or stacked on a plywood table. And because Wiedenhoedt had quarter horses for both farm work and recreational riding, three fanny-burnished Western saddles hung from one wall. An assortment of bridles, blinders, and bits depended from wooden pegs next to them.
The saddle room also had clothing lockers, a television set, a couple of easy chairs, and a refrigerator full of soft drinks and beer. Even better, a shower for weary riders was wedged behind the half wall supporting the lockers.
Privacy.
Cal eased through the little room and into the shower stall. No one had used it recently—its avocado-colored tiles were dry. And so he had no compunction about slumping into its corner in his good suit and rummaging his pockets for reefer makings.
From an inside jacket pocket, he took his Pouch House paperback of The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt— from the set that Le Boi Loan had hand-delivered to him in the Pet Emporium the day before Miss Emily’s heart attack. With a fresh imprimatur from the Board of Media Censorship, this was the only mainstream Dick title that Cal had not read yet. Because of the hospital vigils and the dither of funeral preparations, he had had no chance to crack this copy until now. He felt a bit guilty about reading while the reception was going on, but nobody was really missing him, and he didn’t plan to be gone that long, anyway.
Cal toked once or twice on his cigarette before turning to page one, chapter one.
Instantly, he had a vision of Miss Emily lying in state in an odd dimension beyond time. This vision, he knew, had nothing to do with the marijuana. It was a mental image conjured not by Cannabis saliva but by grief, his own and Lia’s
There, at the shower stall’s open door, Miss Emily floated up before him, levitating on a cloud or a shroud (a shroud or a cloud, Cal thought in silly singsong), her thin face waxen and her hands beside her like plaster-of-Paris claws.
“Once alive but now dead.” The most profound banality, or the most banal profundity, that any human being could utter.
A mystery.
The paperback of Thisbe Holt slipped from Cal’s grasp. He kept his eyes on Miss Emily, but took several quick drags—violating every code of reefer etiquette known to him—to sustain this image of his dead mother-in-law.
Not possible.
Almost at once she began to mutate, her features melting as if hot lights had struck them, then re-forming as if unseen hands were shaping them from underneath. A shocking rearrangement of cheek bones, brow, nose, chin, eye sockets, mouth. Lia’s mother’s face, gone. From its waxen slag, a second female face emerged, this one belonging to Cal’s own dead mother, Dora Jane Pickford.
Cal couldn’t move. He felt the reefer burning his fingers, but did
not drop it. This face was his mother’s, all right. As she had looked in ‘71. As he imagined she had looked in her casket—even though he had never seen her in it.
Before he could speak to her, Dora Jane’s face began to alter. This time he had an idea what to expect, but even when the features slumped, pooched upward again, and came together to reproduce the face of Royce Pickford, his father, Cal was startled in spite of himself. Taken aback.
Miss Emily’s death, he knew, had triggered this vision, but knowing that did nothing to make the sight of his long-dead parents less heartbreaking. Just as his sympathy for his wife’s loss did nothing to make his sympathy for himself any less trenchant.
Finally, Cal dropped his cigarette and, sucking the blisters that had popped up on his hand, scooted forward to touch Royce Pickford’s floating corpse. Immediately, his father dissolved and Cal was squatting on the edge of the shower stall—about to topple headlong into the saddle room. About to bellow like a steer going under the sledgehammer.
King Richard’s first-term vice president has come into Denver a day before the Victory Rally. The city has scheduled a parade down Colfax Avenue, and “Speero the Heero”—as the kids in Boulder enjoy referring to him—is going to be its ringmaster.
Cal has driven up from Arvill Rudd’s ranch in Gardner to see the show. At five or six different roadblocks, he has assured the state police that he is a gung-ho patriot, not a depraved hippie, and he has pulled off this improbable stunt by stuffing his Indian braid under his Stetson, saying yessir and nosir twenty-thousand times, and repeatedly demonstrating that the carrier in his pickup contains tiny American flags—not Molotov cocktails.
On Colfax, Cal positions himself near a group of soldiers from Fort Carson. Business people, well-dressed mothers with preschool children, college students in coats and ties, and a wide variety of other onlookers—none of them, tellingly, counterculture bohemians—line the same sidewalk. Cal is astonished that the makeup of the crowd is so different from what it would have been only two years ago, when nearly every longhair, Jesus freak, and raving peacenik in the land would have converged on Denver to tell Speero the Heero where to stick it and why.
Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas Page 21