Sandor wanted to spend a second night near the college, so they drove to a hotel not far from the sorority and fraternity houses. While they were in the car, Sandor took up the name book with great glee.
“‘Sandor,’” he read, “‘a variant form of Alexander.’ Shall we take bets on what ‘Alexander’ means?” he asked Gordo over his shoulder, as he flipped through to the front of the book. “I’ll bet you one dollar it means…‘great and noble man of stature.’ What do you think?” Without waiting for an answer, he began reading again. “‘Defender of men.’ Oh, that’s even better.” He sounded delighted. “Defender of men. That’s me, all right.”
“Look up my name,” Gordo said from the backseat.
“Hmm.” Sandor found the page, ran one finger down it. Then he started laughing.
“What?” Gordo sat up, trying to see over the seat.
“‘Gordon,’” Sandor read. “‘From the Old English gor and denn, meaning “a dunghill.”’ Oh, that’s priceless.”
“Let me see that.” Gordo’s hand came over the seat, reaching.
“No, no.” Sandor held the book away. “Let me read the rest of it. It says, “may also be a form of…of…” Can you turn the light on for a moment, Cole?”
“No.”
“…‘Gordius, meaning “bold.”’ Oh, I like that,” Sandor said. “Much better than ‘dunghill.’ ‘Bold’ is definitely the correct meaning of your name. Here, take a look.”
He handed the book to Gordo, who started thumbing through it.
“‘Cole,’” Gordo announced after a moment, “from the Old English, meaning “black” or “dark.”’ Huh. I’m not sure that fits.”
“Of course it does. Look at his hair, and his eyes,” Sandor put in before Cole could say anything.
“I thought his eyes were sort of brown.”
“When they’re that dark of a brown, they can be called black. Now see, Cole, we want that Luxury Inn up there,” Sandor said, pointing. “They have extra pillows in the closets. I like a place that provides extra pillows.”
“I like thick towels,” Gordo said.
“Yes, and an air conditioner that works. And of course Cole must have a pool.”
“Only in summer,” Cole pointed out. He headed toward the place Sandor had indicated. It didn’t make any difference, he supposed, whether or not Gordo knew what most everybody else did: that Cole wasn’t his original name.
In his room alone, Cole picked up the name book and opened it, flipping through.
Ezekiel. God will strengthen.
His parents wouldn’t have known what it meant. They’d been illiterate.
He’d used that name for a long time, and sometimes Zeke. When those became so unusual as to stand out, he’d started using his mother’s maiden name, Cole. It was perfect—a little name, Cole, harmless and light. It truly belonged to him too—that was important; he had never cared for the idea of plucking a name for himself out of the ether.
Now he wondered for the first time how his mother and father had come up with the name Ezekiel, and what it had meant to them. Had he been named after the Bible prophet? Or a long-gone relative? Or perhaps they had just liked the sound of it.
He flipped a few pages, looking for other names he knew.
Johnny. Pet form of John.
John. From the Hebrew, meaning “God is merciful.” Also: Jon, Johannes, Joannes, Jochanan, Johanan, Yochanan, Johon, Jehan, Jan, and so on for a thick paragraph: Jean, Ivan, Hans, Janne, Giovanni, Jock, Juan, Sean, Shawn, Ian, Jenkin, Jovan, Jack.
Johnny had probably used most of those names; he’d spent so many years in so many places that he wasn’t really from anywhere anymore so much as he was from everywhere.
Cole hesitated, then started turning pages till he reached the Ls.
Lulie. From the Middle English lullen, meaning “to lull, to soothe.” That did sound like Ma, what Cole could remember of her—humming, wordless, her heel planted on the puncheon floor, toe rhythmic on the cradle rocker while her hands were busy, always busy.
But Cole could not quite remember what they had been busy with. If he reasoned it out, he could come up with a lot of things: carding, spinning, darning, sewing, shelling, kneading, plucking, stirring. But he couldn’t see any of it, couldn’t remember what his mother’s hands had looked like, or what they had done. All he knew was that they seldom had been still.
Ephraim. That was from the Bible, he knew, but according to this book it meant “fruitful.” True enough, Cole supposed. Pa’d had eight children before he died—but only four had lived past infancy.
Now he looked through the Gs. Finally he found it—Guerdon.
Reward.
Now, holding the name book, he thought not about sitting up with Guerdon’s body, nor the nightshirt Ma and Polly and Hannah had torn up to sew into his shroud, but about how out in the woods Cole and Guerdon had tried to cut off Guerdon’s snake-bitten finger in an effort to keep him alive.
Guerdon was a year younger, but he knew as well as Cole what ought to be done. The two punctures were ugly red between the first and second knuckle, and the flesh had already started to swell. Both boys had skinned plenty of animals, but only Cole had his own knife. And besides, he was older. So he was the one to do it.
The knife was the clearest picture left in Cole’s mind now. It had suddenly seemed so awful small when he pulled it from its sheath, the blade terribly short, and though it was sharp it sure wouldn’t slice easily through bone. No, anybody who could cut off a finger with that knife would have to be both cool and fearless.
Cole had been neither; he could still see that moment like a snapshot—the moment the blade started trembling. He’d held it in the exact right place it needed to be, poised at the joint just above the palm—but at the moment it should have come down strong and firm, it instead hung in the air over Guerdy’s familiar hand and began to quiver.
In the end, the knife had dropped nervelessly onto the ground and he had grabbed Guerdy and bolted for the cabin, a half mile away. Too far; and now Cole realized that the run back, with frightened, fast-pumping hearts, probably hadn’t helped his brother any.
Huh. Now he remembered the feeling he’d had, looking up from those two punctures to see Guerdy’s frightened face.
That’s what it was; that’s why Gordo had called his brother to mind. It wasn’t anything about the kid in particular, nothing physical. It was his need that was the same. That was something neither Guerdon nor Gordo had been aware of but which Cole now saw clearly: a floundering need for someone to step in and be steady, to take charge and follow through and do what needed to be done.
Okay, so that mystery was solved. The bottom line was that Guerdon had died in the end, and all the woods were gone and his grave long erased by wind and weather, his bones turned to powder and lost under tons of concrete.
But Cole, who had gone off in the woods alone to cry till he puked, was still sitting here, and still in his eighteen-year-old prime. Cole had no doubt that he would now be able to cut off a poisoned finger without so much as blinking an eye.
Lucky for Gordo.
It was almost dawn. He smoothed the page with his fingers, thinking that he ought to go to bed.
Instead he turned the pages quickly, to look up his sisters.
Hannah. Favor, or grace.
Polly. Variant form of Mary.
All right, he thought, and turned to the Ms.
Mary. Derived from Miriam, meaning “sea of bitterness.”
That was Polly, all right. What he remembered most about Polly was her nagging, wagging tongue. Don’t think you can sneak off and read your silly book while others do all the work. Not a crumb you’ll get from this table so long as you shirk your share. Not a crumb, Ezekiel—you can starve, as far as I’m concerned.
“Not likely,” he said out loud, brushing Polly away with a flick of the pages.
Then he found himself turning the pages to look up another name.
Bess.
> A pet form of Elizabeth. Of course; he knew that.
Elizabeth. Oath of God.
A mistake—a stupid, stupid mistake. There had been fear, he remembered that, how she’d trembled, white arms soft and clinging, how he’d guided her to the feed, full of power and control. The shame, the conceit of it.
But time eventually pressed all one’s joys and sorrows into indistinguishable lumps. That was the good thing about time.
He shut the book and got ready for bed.
As he lay on his back, however, covers up to his neck, waiting for sleep to overtake him, another almost-forgotten memory came drifting into his head. Probably brought up by the name book.
Polly’s and Hannah’s muffled giggles—that’s what had woken him, tugged him out of sound sleep in a long-ago darkness, warm under quilts with Guerdon’s soft snores uninterrupted beside him. How old had Cole been then? Five? Six? He did not move, did not make a sound, but peeked out, the air sharp and cold on his nose and cheeks. His sisters’ white nightcaps and nightgowns were bright bobbing patches against the dark, long braids spilling over their shoulders. They stood in the moonlight that shone through the one small window their father had cut into the end wall of the loft, a kindness and a luxury that would let breezes through on sweltering summer nights. This night it had been fall, not summer, and the shutter shouldn’t have been open; but Polly and Hannah needed the moon. Cole could see it framed in the window, visible through the black, shifting fingers of the mostly leafless trees.
He watched them taking turns looking over their shoulders into Ma’s precious hand mirror. He did not know what they saw nor what they were looking for—just that they were doing some kind of fortune-telling. He could not hear what they said, only the quiet murmur of their voices, the intermittent bursts of smothered giggles. And he remembered that when the shutter was back in its rightful place bolted tight against the night, and his sisters were finally safely back in their shared bed, he’d pulled the covers over his head against the frosty air, huddled closer to his brother’s warm back, and drifted back into a warm quilted sleep.
There was nothing important in the memory. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing even particularly striking. Just a feeling that wasn’t worth lingering over, because it was no longer possible: a feeling of contentment, and of safety taken for granted.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE next night, as usual, Cole went to collect Gordo and Sandor for the evening feed. The carpet muffled his steps; there was no sound. No outside light came into the hallway. It could have been midnight or noon. There was no way to know without a clock.
Through their door he could hear the tinny sound of the television and a low muted hum—that was Gordo’s blow-dryer. Same as last night. And the night before.
He knocked on the door. Here he was again, he thought, retracing the same steps he’d carved out that first night the three of them were on the road. The same thing over and over again for days, weeks, months. The good thing for Gordo was that falling into a routine was second nature.
But this was Castile, Ohio, home of Sandor’s favorite party school, and when Sandor opened the door, Cole saw immediately that he was dressed differently. He wasn’t wearing jeans, not even khakis, but dark slacks, black shoes, a button-down shirt.
And a tie—it wasn’t tied yet, but there it was, ends dangling down Sandor’s chest. “Come in, come in,” he said, holding the door open. And when Cole walked in, Sandor did not fling himself on the bed to watch the news but went to stand in front of the bureau mirror.
Cole stared as Sandor fastened the top button on his collar. “You two are on your own tonight, if you don’t mind,” he told Cole, looping the tie around and through itself in practiced movements. “I have a date.”
Cole had not sat down. He stood by the armchair—this hotel had an armchair and no desk—speechless.
Gordo’s blow-dryer hummed on and on. “A date for what?” Cole asked. Perhaps he had misunderstood.
“A date for taking someone out and talking and dancing and having a good time and whatever else that may lead to.”
“A someone. What kind of someone?”
“This someone has brown hair. Nice body—”
“An omni.” Cole squeezed his eyes shut. “Sandor. If you want to feed, just feed. If you want to have sex with somebody, just do it. But don’t go on a date, for heaven’s sake.”
“Why not?”
“You’re setting a bad example for Gordo.”
“I don’t agree. I’m just going to have a conversation with someone who is not one of us three. It will be a nice change.”
“Omnis are not a nice change. They’re dull.”
“Again, I do not agree.”
“Especially the young attractive ones. They have nothing to say, and they know it, so they try to let their bodies do the talking. And if you don’t want them for sex, their bodies have absolutely nothing to say.”
“Oh, Cole, that reminds me. You’ll never guess what Gordo asked me last night. Out of the blue, mind you. He asked if I were gay.”
“Oh. And you said?”
“I asked him whether he meant gay in the sense of ‘merry,’ or gay in the sense of ‘enjoying sexual pleasure with men,’ and he said the second one. So I told him that if he meant exclusively with men, then no, I’m not gay, but if he meant when the occasion arises, then yes, I am definitely gay.”
“And what did he say?”
“Nothing. He just got an uncomfortable look about him.”
“Charming.”
“Yes, well, he’s just a boy. Practically a baby. I told him that if in three hundred years he hasn’t dipped a toe in the other end of the pond, to contact the newspapers because that will be a first.”
“And he said?”
“Nothing. But he looked at me with so much mistrust I could not bear it, so I told him something. I said, ‘Gordo, my friend, I think you’re a nice fellow, but I expect to be acquainted with you for many centuries, and it would not be wise to risk bad feelings with one of the few people I am able to get attached to. So you need never hesitate to bend over and pick up the soap, so to speak.’”
In the bathroom, the blow-dryer stopped.
“Sandor—,” Cole began.
“I would like to take the car, if that’s all right. There are half a dozen places within walking distance for you two to feed. So taking the car isn’t a problem, am I correct?”
“Yes, but—”
“Cole, life would be dull if we never did anything different. I refuse to be one monotonous note all the time: bong, bong, bong. I will be very careful with your car. And I’ll be back before dawn. Ah, here comes Gordo.”
Here came Gordo indeed, with his plastic bag of dirty clothes and his now neatly zipped Ziploc bag. For all the time he spent on his hair, to Cole it just looked like…hair, no different from Cole’s own, which was towel-and-air-dried.
“Listen, Gordo,” Sandor called to him as he walked over to his open suitcase. “After you two are back here, you should ask Cole to show you his photos. Some of them are really quite extraordinary.” He turned to the mirror again and looked his reflection up and down. “Do I look all right?”
“You look fine. But Sandor, do you really think—”
“Cole, I really do. Now, don’t wait up for me!” Sandor checked his wallet to make sure he had his key, and then with a bounding step, he was gone.
“He’s sure happy,” Gordo remarked wistfully. He had dropped his bag of dirty clothes into his suitcase and was mashing it down to make it fit.
“Mmph,” Cole said. It wasn’t that he disapproved, exactly. It was just that Gordo might not understand what a pointless exercise dating was. If you found an omni you liked, what could you do with it? You couldn’t keep it for long. If you fed from it much it would get addicted. If it didn’t get addicted, it got jealous. Even if you didn’t feed from it at all, you could only keep it a few years, at best, before it started noticing that you didn’t age
or—if it had any spirit—carping at the restrictions of your night life. Cruel, anyway, to take it from its friends and family, which is what you had to do if you wanted to spend any reasonable amount of personal time with it.
“Sounds like he’s going to have fun,” Gordo said as he zipped up his suitcase.
“That’s beside the point. You are not to have a date. Sandor knows how to read omnis, to play them and release them none the wiser. You do not. Dates are for people who wear self-control and restraint like a second skin—”
“Take it easy. I don’t want to go on a date.”
He said it so positively that Cole was taken a little aback. “Oh,” he said. “Good.”
“Are we ready?”
“Yes.” Now Cole was wondering why Gordo wouldn’t want to go on a date. Wasn’t that what omnis did? Omnis, and Sandor?
He thought about it some more as he and Gordo left the hotel. Gordo already seemed older than he had back in New York. Cole saw him silently observing their surroundings—taking in the wide street, the columned and bricked campus buildings, the muted colors of the passing cars. The only omni-like moment came when a group of girls paused on the opposite sidewalk.
It would not have occurred to Cole to enjoy their appearance, but when he noticed Gordo’s eyes lingering appreciatively over them, he took a second look. And now that he thought about it, that one with the blonde hair did have a rather attractive line from neck to shoulder, from shoulder to waist—fragile bone structure but generous breasts.
As they walked on, leaving the girls behind, Cole had the sudden feeling that he was skimming the surface of his own life.
It was silly; what was he supposed to do about seeing omnis on a public street anyway?
Nothing, that’s what.
“Hey, Cole,” Gordo said, turning to look over his shoulder after a girl in fishnet stockings, “you know the street dance last night?”
The headlights of the stopped cars were uncomfortably bright, and you couldn’t see who was behind the wheel of any of the cars.
“Yes,” Cole said. He was trying to recall exactly what Johnny had said, back in four-and-a-half.
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