For a long time she was so spent she stood panting. She was on the slim edge of exhaustion. Then her ears picked up a familiar sound; the marauding coyotes were coming. In a moment she saw them on the crest of a rise, silhouetted and still, hunting with their ears and eyes.
She began to feed on the snake’s corpse urgently. She raked his back open and pulled long strips of meat away from his backbone and swallowed. The coyotes of course saw her and bounded down the incline toward her, fanning out in practiced fashion to encircle her.
For her now every morsel counted. Her desperate beak seemed to unzip the snake, and she used both talons and her beak to tear the meat out. She tipped over and lay on her side, working as fast as she could. The coyote in the lead was one of the pups, and he raced up to her with his mouth open and leaped.
Her good wing was ready and it struck him a stunning blow on the snout just in front of the eyes. He winced and fell back. Reluctantly, she abandoned the snake and gave an enormous flap. One of the adults, jumping in the air, closed his teeth on her left talon and pulled her down. She struck his eye with her beak and beat her wings on his head. He let go and she turned to face the rest of the pack. They began lunging at her to avoid those punishing wings, and with perfect timing she flapped and ran and rose in the air. They were too intent on the snake to pursue her.
She landed some distance away from them and watched them eat her kill. Then with some effort she tore open a cactus and gargled in beads of water. When she’d had her fill, she flew up on a cactus and slept.
It was a false dawn when she woke. Above her, up where the sunlight was, she saw a soaring hawk, circling above her.
She shook her feathers, yearning to soar like that. She noted that her hunger was much less. She shook out her wings. She was stronger too. And her hurt wing felt better. The pain had diminished. She sat while the sun rose, watching the soaring hawk above her, then with a great flap she launched herself. The wing held her and she felt the great freedom of flight. She was mobile again. She flew five miles before the wing pain stopped her. That was as far as the wing would carry her that day. But tomorrow would bring a longer flight, much longer.
She would fly after Timothy. Was she already too late?
It was the mountains that stopped Timothy, the Appalachian chain that ran up the east coast through Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York. Had he and the mastiff been fresh when he encountered them it might have been a different situation. But he’d been pressing for days; his feet had fairly flown across the flat midland of America. Gradually, the rising terrain in Kentucky began to slow him. There was no way around the mountains, and soon he was leaning into his stride as he climbed the foothills of the Alleghenies. And beyond them were the Blue Ridge Mountains.
His legs rebelled in West Virginia. His shins began to throb and pull. He turned off the climbing mountain road he was on and into a forest toward the sound of rushing water.
Timothy picked his way through a stand of pines and wild hemlock, past a grove of wild apple trees, through a thicket of bare aspen, clambered over several high boulders and found what he sought beside a rock ledge—a swollen stream, spilling over its banks, roaring with autumn rains. The water rushed downhill, bounding over boulders, spinning in the eddies and sucking up gravel and dirt. He removed his shoes and trousers and lowered both legs into a deep slow pool of icy water. His shins became numb almost immediately. Repentance clambered up on the ledge and settled beside him. The dog began to lick his right front paw.
Timothy looked up, and watched a sharp-shinned hawk coursing over the mountains in long concentric circles, drifting eastward toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, hunting.
He hadn’t seen Satan’s hawk since the desert. Repentance must have done more damage than Timothy had realized. And he patted the dog. The poor creature had waited eons to get his teeth into that hated bird. And it must have been worth the wait.
Once over the mountains, Timothy would be in the gently undulating land of glacial moraines in southern Pennsylvania that would take him through Gettysburg and on to some of the country’s richest farmland around Lancaster. Then the walking would be much easier. But first he had to deal with the mountains.
He took from his coat pocket two rolls of elastic fabric and with them he tightly wrapped his benumbed shins. Then he put on his trousers and shoes and stood up. His legs felt much better, and he led Repentance back to the road and resumed the steep ascent.
An hour later they reached the crest. As far as the eye could see, east and north were rows of mountains in winter grays and browns. Their rounded peaks were touching a lowering sky that was fast filling with snow. The mountains were difficult enough; a heavy snowfall would make them impassable.
Repentance sat and licked his paw again, and Timothy squatted to examine it. The pad was intact but it showed a faint flush in the interstices. The dog was footsore. Timothy’s shin splints were shooting pains up and down his legs.
He stood and looked at the awesome array of challenging mountains. They would be a long time struggling up and down them. Before they went on, they would have to rest. He was going to have to concede great hunks of real estate to the pursuing hawk. As he cast his eyes about for a place to rest, flakes of snow began to fall.
So near. And yet so far. When he tried to walk, Timothy was hobbling.
CHAPTER 6
Thursday Snow
The storm was a monster. It already had covered half the continent from the Rockies to western Pennsylvania with heavy snow. There were fourteen inches on the ground in Chicago, and O’Hare was closed to all air traffic. The storm reached far into Texas, then swung eastward, then northeastward, and was threatening to bury the east coast in more than two feet of snow. It was borne by high winds and was pushed by a massive cold front that sent temperatures plunging below zero everywhere. And flying along the edge of it toward New York City was the black hawk.
She was carried at a dizzying speed by the upper winds. To the east of her the weather was clear with the earth showing the browns and duns of January. To the west of her the storm itself was a towering gray wall that rolled toward the Atlantic like a tidal wave, whiting out the earth as it moved. Pittsburgh had five inches on the ground, while the greater part of the storm was still to come.
With gale warnings posted on the Chesapeake Bay, the fleets of fishing boats were fighting the vicious chop of the water to get back to their docks and piers where the fishermen would ride out the storm around wood-burning stoves.
The hawk passed over Annapolis, just before the snow began there. She looked down on the Naval Academy by the Severn River, circled West Street and the state capitol building, then, satisfied, resumed her flight northward to the home of Brendan Davitt. She was only a few hours away now.
Father Joseph, the monk who had baptized Brendan Davitt in Ireland twenty-four years before, was already in New York City. He lay under two khaki army-surplus blankets on a cot in the men’s dormitory of the Christian Help Men’s Relief Center in the Bowery. He was listening to the winter wind seething at the sides of the building. He sensed that he still had a fever.
Weeks before, he had left Father Ambrose in the California desert because the poor man was unable to keep up. And now he himself had been brought down with the flu. Five days he’d lain in this cot, waiting for the fever to burn itself out. This morning he was still feverish. But he could waste no more time: He had to get to Brendan Davitt’s home today.
Father Joseph had become an old man and he didn’t have much sleep in him. A few hours, perhaps three or four at most, were enough, and now the need for haste diminished even that. Yet here he lay, hearing the wind, seeing a leaden snow sky through the window and eyeing an icicle that hung from a roof gutter. It had grown in length; the weather had turned still colder. He dreaded going out into that winter day. But he had already slept far later than he had planned.
Down the corridor at the far end of the dormitory hung a pay phone. It would have been
very easy to call Brendan Davitt’s home. It would have been equally easy to take a taxicab to Brooklyn, even a subway. But nearly sixty years ago, he’d lain prone on the ancient stone floor before the altar in that monastery in County Clare and had taken his vows to model his life on the simple life of Jesus, to live the life of the celibate, to pray for sinners, to beg for his food in the streets and to shun all modern conveniences unknown to Christ, tools so often of the archfiend. He had made those vows on pain of loss of heaven. And since that day he’d not once set foot on any form of transportation, nothing on wheels, or sleds or four legs, nothing airborne or submarine. Only ships—they were the only vessels permitted.
How easily he’d made those vows sixty years ago—when his legs were young and his body strong. He raised his head from his pillow and gazed at the telephone. Because he clung to those vows another soul was in danger. Brendan Davitt. If he didn’t find Brendan quickly, the young man was the one who would suffer, not Father Joseph. Now he had to ask himself if clinging to his vows wasn’t really a form of personal vanity, a terrible sin.
He would not break his vows; he struggled to one elbow, then sat up. He knelt on the cold floor by his cot to pray. He asked for strength. He had to face that terrible winter day. And he asked God to protect Brendan Davitt.
“God bless,” Father Joseph murmured to the few men who were awake and watching him at prayer. “God bless mankind.” He struggled to his feet and walked weakly past the recumbent forms of homeless men.
As he reached the far end of the dormitory, Father Joseph pushed several numbered buttons on the telephone. It would have been so easy to make a phone call. Were Jesus alive today, would he refuse to use the phone?
Through the steamy mirror in the lavatory his lathered face was frightening. He was aware that he’d lost a great amount of weight. The face that looked back at him, partially hidden by shaving lather, told him he was still gravely ill. The steam pipes in the walls banged. The radiator hissed the odor of rusty plumbing. Outside the winter wind rocked the frozen sticks of a bare sumac tree. He had to go out into that weather. It made his skin contract.
He told himself he must eat. He was dangerously weak. The flu and the fever had stolen his precious store of strength. He still had a slight fever. For the last three days he’d been unable to remember his given name. Father Joseph, yes—but also Michael Dunovan, wasn’t it? Wasn’t he born Michael Dunovan? It was a long time ago.
He sighed at the razor. It seemed so heavy. Father Joseph, born Michael Dunovan, was far away from his monastery in Ireland … much nearer to heaven. He sensed he would not see Ireland again.
When he’d dressed, he went down the stairs and walked toward the glass front doors. The deskman said, “Snow. Six to ten inches predicted with high winds, Father. Why don’t you wait until tomorrow?”
Father Joseph began the long slow walk to find Brendan Davitt, now aged twenty-four.
Under a gray sky that promised snow, Brendan Davitt strolled up Ninth Avenue with a container of coffee and a danish in a brown paper bag. He was a counselor with the Wandering Child agency for runaway children, and as he walked he was groping in his pocket for the office key. His hand located a piece of paper and he pulled it out.
The note was in Aunt Maeve’s handwriting: “Don’t forget. You’re bringing Anne home with you tonight for dinner. At six. It’s her birthday.” The last three words were heavily underlined.
He reminded himself that he was also having lunch with her.
Brendan was the first to arrive at the office, and even from the bottom of the stairs he could hear all the phones ringing already—each a cry for help, each a bleat of pain. And they would ring like that all day and well into the night long after everyone had gone—callers from across the country, looking for runaway children. And already there were more than two dozen teen-age derelicts on the broken steps, most of them either asleep or floating on drugs.
Brendan started each day feeling overwhelmed: Wandering Child was absurdly understaffed. Located on Ninth Avenue in the mid-Fifties, the old paint-worn walls were almost hidden by the cartons containing manila folders on missing children from all over the country and Canada. And every day the mail brought dozens more. The phone would never stop ringing and the adolescent derelicts would never stop appearing on the stairs, sitting on benches in the office, waiting to be interviewed, wanting to go home, and not knowing how to break the ice, make the advance, ease the way. Many were rebellious wrongheaded spoiled brats. Many others had been beaten, robbed and raped at home, then beaten, robbed and raped on the road. Most were sick, malnourished, alive with lice and looking out at the world with the furtive eyes of hunted animals on their last reserves of strength. Many were drug addicts, alcoholics or both. Many of them were broken beyond repair, lackluster, filled with hostility and distrust. Not a few were suffering from psychoses. The counselors counseled many of the strongest not to go home.
He stepped around them on the stairs, unlocked the office and answered the nearest phone. The day had begun.
“Hello. Yes. Davitt. Yes, I plan to bring him in for identification around ten. Yes. He has a partial set of her fingerprints and her dental charts.” The morgue treated him as a fellow employee. It had made tentative identification of a small Caucasian girl, (91 pounds, 60 inches) approximate age 14, and Davitt was to bring to the morgue a terrified man from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who might be her father.
The first derelict in line was a boy about fifteen or sixteen. Without invitation he slouched into the chair beside Brendan’s desk. He had a familiar expression on his face. Brendan had seen it hundreds of times.
“What can I do for you?” Brendan asked.
“I want to go home.”
“You want half a danish?”
“No.”
“You want a whole danish?”
“No.”
Brendan gave him half. “You want some coffee?”
“No.”
Brendan handed him the container and the boy drank some eagerly. The rest of the danish disappeared in two bites and the boy washed it down with the rest of the coffee.
“It’s cold,” he said to Brendan. “The coffee, I mean.”
“How could you tell?” Brendan asked.
The boy poured out his story. He was noble and good and all-wise and understanding; his parents were mean, unfeeling, stupid, shallow.
“Dreadful,” Brendan said. “You’re a terrible victim. Why do you want to go back? Think they’ve learned their lesson by now?”
The boy answered by dabbing up all the danish crumbs with a wet forefinger.
“What’s the number?” Brendan asked.
The boy told him, a Nebraska area code—401.
“Hello,” Brendan said. “This is Wandering Child, a social agency in New York City. Do you have a son named—”
“Bobby,” the boy volunteered.
“Bobby? You do. Have you heard from him recently? Yes. My name is Brendan Davitt. Davitt. On the staff of the Wandering Child agency. Yes. This is a bona fide phone call. This agency handles cases of lost and runaway children.”
“I will pay anything for news of my son,” the woman’s voice said. It now had a high tremolo in it. “Dear God. Is he all right?”
“Would you like to get him back?”
“Yes, Oh, yes. More than anything in the world. We’ve been searching for him for weeks and weeks. Is he all right? Do you know where he is?”
Brendan held the phone out to the boy, who put it to his ear.
“Mom? Yeah. It’s me. Don’t cry.” And then he started to cry. He curled over the phone like a comma and rocked back and forth as he talked, murmuring and weeping, his hand gripping the phone like a lifeline.
Brendan had timed these phone calls many times. And there came a moment when the deal was struck—usually after five minutes: The parents would want to speak to the “social worker.” (“Can you put him up somewhere until we get there? We’ll catch the first plane.”
)
If the phone conversation lasted less than five minutes, it was usually a failure. The parents would hang up. And Brendan would have another abandoned adolescent to find a bed for. If he said the right things he could talk the youth into trying a foster home for a while. If he said the wrong thing, though sick and tired and dirty the boy or girl would walk out. Brendan rarely saw any of them again.
As the boy talked to his mother, the man from Chapel Hill entered, his eyes mutely pleading with Brendan as if Brendan could make the dead girl not his daughter.
Father Joseph shambled along Bowery past Hester Street. Not the finest Irish wool could keep his bones warm in that wind. He paused in a doorway of a shop. USED SEWING MACHINES, the sign said: detritus from the sweatshop days of the old Lower East Side. Machines, long disused, slept in the window covered with dust. Inside by a glowing electric heater an old man napped in a chair, his head fallen back and his mouth open, looking as if he’d been shot. The shimmering red elements bathed him with abundant heat.
Father Joseph stepped back onto the sidewalk. The traffic was heavy and pedestrians went hurrying by, heads down, eager to be out of the wind. The sky was darker; the snow closer. Before Father Joseph got to the corner, a policeman stepped from a patrol car and gripped him by the shoulder.
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