by Drury, Tom
“How are you?”
“I got a girlfriend, Dad.”
The news made Tiny feel old. He sat down and moved the phone over to his good ear.
“A girlfriend, Micah.”
“Her name is Charlotte. She rides horses.”
“You open doors for her, all right? And don’t let her get cold.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“They get cold easy. Or, you know, I’m sure they all don’t, but a good many.”
“I’ll get her some gloves.”
“There you go. And if there’s a chill take your coat off and put it on her. That means a lot for some reason.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“All right, Micah. Love you.”
He put the phone down, turned the TV off, and took the necklace out back to see it in moonlight. It was a thousand-dollar necklace. The links glowed silver blue in his hand.
A possum moved slowly along the tree line. The wind changed direction and the possum stood on its hind legs and opened its mouth wide, as if it had just said something hilarious and was waiting for the big laugh that would follow.
People who thought that nature was a happy playground should spend some time looking into the mouth of a possum.
Tiny retreated to the porch and sat in one of the church chairs rolling a smoke. The cigarette flared at the touch of the match and he held it upright like a candle till the flame died down.
Louise’s mother and Hans Cook dozed in her living room, and Mary Montrose dreamed this dream:
Her old aunt from Council Bluffs had invited her to share an apartment in a tall building from the future. Long dead in reality, her aunt had been a masseuse in the fifties and wore red lipstick and pointed black glasses with rhinestone highlights.
Small airplanes of triangular design flew in and out over a bay. The atrium of the building went up to the sky. Mary’s aunt lived on the twenty-fifth floor in a shabby apartment with spongy counters and soft appliances that would not hurt the falling elderly.
There was a hole in the middle of the kitchen floor, through which you could see the hole in the floor of the kitchen below, and so on, to the bottom of the building, if your eyes were good enough.
“I’m content where I am,” Mary said.
“Well, they asked me to show you,” said her aunt.
“Who did?”
“This guy from the leasing company. He’s been after me—tell Mary, tell Mary. They have properties all over the world.”
“Well, you told me, and I thank you, but I will be going now.”
Leaving the building Mary saw a redhead reading a book in a cafe. She held the book in one hand and touched two fingers to her lips before turning the page. Mary knew her but could not remember why. And, when Louise looked up, she smiled agreeably, as if she too had forgotten that they were mother and daughter.
Dan and Louise slipped over to Grafton to make sure Mary had got to bed all right. Hans Cook met them in the kitchen.
“Louise,” he said.
She ran to the living room.
Mary lay motionless in her chair beneath a green crochet, an arm resting on the side table. Her radio had fallen to the floor.
“Don’t go,” said Louise. “Don’t leave me.”
Dan took Mary’s wrist as the radio droned this feeling shared by so many of us, your host included, of being at a crossroads, of our lives, of our planet, it’s no accident, it’s very real. . . .
Dan shook his head.
“Hans,” said Louise.
“Yeah.”
“Would you please shut the radio off.”
Dan carried Mary to her bed. Louise turned on the orange lamp that had been on the dresser for years. She covered Mary with a blanket, knelt by the bed, and took her hand.
“You call the ambulance?” said Dan.
“They’re coming from Margo.”
“My mother,” said Louise.
“She woke up. She’d seen you in her dream. Said you were very beautiful.”
That was too much. Louise lowered her forehead to her mother’s hand. Hans stepped out of the room. Dan put his hands on her shoulders.
Rollie Wilson and a younger EMT came from Margo in the ambulance. Dan went out to let them into the house. The red strobe of the emergency lights swept the front of the house.
“She all right?” said Rollie.
Dan shook his head.
Rollie whistled under his breath. “Mary Montrose. I’m not believing that.”
“You go on in.”
Dan stood in the yard looking around. The streetlights of Grafton shone on the abandoned feed warehouse across the street. The wind came up from the south, warmer than the air. The season was changing. “Mary Montrose is dead,” he thought. It seemed as untrue as any sentence one could say. She had left town. He turned back to the house. It didn’t seem right that it was still there. There was nowhere to go and nothing to say but goodbye. Mary had never liked Dan all that much except in comparison to Tiny. She had tolerated Dan. She was a little wary of everyone but Louise. Louise and Hans.
More than a hundred people came to the wake at Darnier Funeral Home in Morrisville. The room was gold and green and there were sandwiches to eat and coffee and whiskey and cranberry juice cocktail to drink. The children gathered in Sunday clothes on the stairway making sly observations about the older ones.
Louise sat with her sister June from Colorado and people were glad to see them together again and beautiful still, though it was another kind of beauty, having to do with light in the eyes, slant of shoulders, and the ease they felt with each other and their surroundings.
Tiny Darling wore a gray suit, tight in the shoulders and long at the cuffs. A tag hung from the back of the sleeve, and the old undertaker Emil Darnier appeared discreetly with small golden scissors to snip it off.
“I seen Mary over to Trinity Church last summer,” Tiny told Louise. “There’s this guy’s going to make it apartments, but Mary said it wouldn’t happen. She was just going by.”
The sisters thanked him for coming, and he gave Louise a narrow black box tied with a ribbon and moved on.
Out of habit Dan had stationed himself where he could see the door, and Tiny crossed the funeral parlor to Dan standing by the cloakroom.
They had been rivals for Louise at one time and on opposite sides of the law at another and they’d hadn’t said anything to each other in years.
“Glad you could make it,” said Dan.
“Are you?”
“I just said so.”
“Say I bought you a beer,” said Tiny. “Would you drink it?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Some people got strange ideas.”
Dan took a drink of Connemara. “If you want to argue go find someone who will.”
“I’m only talking.”
“How’s your kids?”
“Micah moved to Los Angeles with his mom. Seems to be doing quite well by it. Lyris is around here somewhere, I believe.”
“They’re good kids.”
“You know them pretty well, huh.”
“Just what I hear.”
“They are good kids. They’re both smarter than I am, and that’s how it should be.”
Louise and June watched the conversation curiously from across the room.
“Didn’t Tiny beat him up once?” said June.
“It was a no-decision,” said Louise.
“What did he give you?”
“This.” She placed the necklace in June’s hand. Delicate silver links with a bar-and-ring clasp.
“Jesus,” said June.
“I know.”
Louise took the necklace and dropped it into her purse. “Not the p
lace, not the time,” she said.
Dan and Louise went through Grafton on their way home from Morrisville, as Louise worried she might not have locked Mary’s house. They got out of the car and tried the front door, then the back door. Locked, locked. It was dark and cold. There was no reason to go in. Half a dozen deer tearing up grass in the backyard froze, then bolted, thumping haunches and vaulting hedges. There were deer everywhere in those days.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JOAN LAY on her back on the grass in the park, stage blood pumping from her breast, running hot and sticky down the grooves in her rib cage.
Her body twisted and she ripped handfuls of grass from the ground and then she lay still as the camera dollied around her on circular rails.
It was the last of Sister Mia. For the final episode of the season she had been gunned down by rogue police at a rally for immigration reform.
Rogue police made a useful plot element, because they implied that the rest of the police were all right. The camera held on the blades of grass in Joan’s fist.
And cut.
And moving on . . .
Joan got up and stepped outside the camera circle and walked off bleeding in the sun. In her trailer she took off her clothes and the rig that pumped the blood. She took a shower and washed her hair and stood for a long time beneath the hot water holding her hair back with one hand.
She put on a soft white terry robe and sat drying her hair on a couch by the window. The hair drier sounded like wind in the desert, reminding her she was due to see her fortune-teller. Someone knocked on the door and she turned off the drier and called out that it was open.
Edward Leff, creator of Forensic Mystic, came in with flowers and Mia’s rosary beads. He had discovered Joan in the St. Paul production of Accidental Death of a Trapper, in which she’d played a troubled game warden.
“You died beautifully,” said Edward. “Thought you should have Mia’s beads.”
“I’m sorry it ended this way.”
“A call had to be made, I made it.”
“That is what you do.”
“It won’t please everyone.”
“It doesn’t please me.”
“The people in the living room will wish it was me getting shot. To lose a character they love, it hurts. It’s risky.”
“She could recover.”
“Wouldn’t be true to the nature of violence.”
“No. That would be stupid.”
He put his hand on her shoulder.
“We began this show, Joan, you and me, at that bar in Minneapolis. I mean, Mystic was in the works, but so unformed.”
“I remember. The Hilltop Tavern.”
“Without you, there is no show. Without me, you’re still in the boonies. What we did, we did together. What we did was good.”
“Oh, be quiet.”
There was a basket of fruit on the table and Edward picked up a pear and polished it on the sleeve of his jacket and took a bite.
“Just putting the emotion on the page.”
Joan resumed the drying of her hair, and Edward left the trailer.
She hung the rosary beads from the mirror of her car and drove up to Shadowland to pick up Micah at school.
Everything was changing. It would be absurd for Mia to survive the shooting in the park. Moving on, and she would, as she always did. The sky opened wings of blue over the mountains.
Joan cooked spaghetti as Micah wrote a book report.
They’d moved into a new place following the breakup of Joan and Rob, their marriage nullified thanks to Joan’s existing marriage with Charles, which made things simpler.
Now she and Micah lived in an apartment building on Rossmore with green gates and a fountain with the points of the compass etched on a bronze disk where the water fell.
Rossmore was a few streets west of Gower, which Joan told Micah was named for her. He knew better, of course. That was part of the joke. They had a furnished apartment on the seventeenth floor.
Micah wrote longhand in a three-ring binder. He stopped and looked up.
“This place smells funny.”
Joan sniffed the air. “How so?”
“Like propane.”
“No it doesn’t, Micah. We just need to settle in.”
“What if it explodes?”
“The apartment?”
“What if it does?”
“Micah. People have lived in this building for hundreds of years. Famous people, some of them, and not one of them exploded.”
“Like who?”
The wall between the kitchen and the living room had a horizontal cutout that seemed to invite communication between rooms, but the top of the opening was so low that if you were in the kitchen you had to crouch in order to see more than the legs of someone in the dining room.
Joan rested her arms on the countertop and tilted her head playfully though necessarily.
“Have you heard of Milly Birdsong?”
“No.”
“She was an ice skater. She won the Olympics I don’t know how many times. Probably one of the best skaters there ever was. But you can’t skate forever, so she came to Hollywood to be in the movies. Later on she broke her ankle on an escalator and ended up in radio instead. She played Hedda Gabler in a radio version of Hedda Gabler.”
“Is that the most famous one?”
“I doubt it. I’ve only begun to learn the history of the building. People are a little slow to open up but that’s only natural. I’m sure we’ll learn lots of things we didn’t know.”
Joan put spaghetti and clam sauce on the table, and Micah set his work aside to have supper. Someone was playing the piano, and they could hear the music in the walls.
“That’s a pretty song,” said Joan.
Micah slouched with legs stretched under his desk in the back of the classroom. Miss Remora, teacher of American history, walked back and forth at the head of the room with a red rose in her hands.
The rose had no bearing on the lesson. Miss Remora just liked to keep her hands busy. She cried sometimes. She asked Micah a question about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
“Who disobeyed orders from the president to get the treaty signed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you do the reading?”
“Not all of it.”
“Are you sick?”
“No, I’m fine, thanks.”
Miss Remora wrote out a slip and sent Micah to see the headmaster. Micah wore a red sweatshirt and denim jacket and as he walked down the hallway he put the hood of the jacket up.
Mr. Lyons was soldering a circuit board. He taught shop class, in which the students were going to build kit radios.
“Now what do you want?”
“I didn’t do the reading.”
“Why not?”
“I fell asleep.”
The headmaster dropped a bead of silver solder on the circuit board. “Are you tired now? Should I fetch a pillow and blanket?”
“Yeah, that would be nice.”
“Put your hood down. I’m glad you stopped by. I understand you’ve started a club.”
“The New Luddites.”
“And this is what?”
“We don’t like what computers are doing.”
“Too bad for you, goat boy. Deep Rock Academy is going into the cloud.”
“What does that mean?”
“In practical terms?”
“Any terms.”
“I want that club killed.”
“Can you do that?”
“Do you see the sign on my desk? What does it say?”
“You know what it says.”
“Fuckin’ A I can ban your screwy little clu
b. It sends the wrong message to our corporate partners.”
“But if it’s what we believe . . .”
“Clubs are for medieval music and chess and harmless crap like that. What is it you don’t like about computers anyway?”
This question pleased Micah, as it was the first of the day that he could answer.
“One, it’s all about money. Two, the social stuff is a Trojan horse. Three, people do not see what is around them. Four, virtual talents are not talents. Five—”
“How many points are there?”
“Eleven,” said Micah.
“I think I get it.”
“I’m not going to disband the club.”
The headmaster sighed. “We tell you to do the reading, you fall asleep. We tell you to fold the club, you won’t.”
“I play volleyball.”
“That club is done. Get the word out. Do you understand?”
And with that the headmaster sent Micah to study hall to find out who disobeyed orders to get the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed.
The decree to shut down the New Luddites came just as the club had scheduled its first action, in which the Luddites would commandeer the school’s network and public-address system during fourth period. They liked using words like “action” and “commandeer.” It would disrupt the school, if only for a while, and probably get them into trouble in the best of circumstances. And now this.
Micah called a meeting after school at the stone wall down the hill where they could not be overheard. The Luddites assembled—Cilla, Rafa, Dakota, Micah, and Silas—joined by Eamon with his black guitar case.
“Rafa will update us on the action,” said Micah.
“We’re through the firewall,” said Rafa. “Ran two tests from home the other night. Put up a photograph of Emily Browning and played some Mozart for precisely ninety seconds. The network resumed without incident.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m tight with John the janitor. I give him weed from time to time. He confirmed from the teachers’ lounge.”
“Excellent,” said Micah. “Eamon. Where are we with music?”
“It’s been a while since we talked about this,” said Eamon, and Micah got his meaning—they’d been living in the same house when the plan was first considered. “I didn’t want anything too obvious. So my recommendation is ‘Fake Empire’ by the National.”