SelectionEvent (2ed)

  “Our doctor is dead,” Martin said without anger, almost blandly. “My best friend died yesterday. One of our children got sick.”

  “Great is the anger of our god,” Aaron said, “toward those who ignore his word.” He was close enough to Martin that Martin could smell his breath. He had been eating recently.

  Joshua nodded, as did the others, and Martin heard several whisper their yeses.

  “Why wouldn't your god kill me,” Martin asked, again without apparent emotion, “since I'm their leader?”

  “A leader is useful to persuade those that remain,” Leona said with a smile.

  Martin thought about that a moment. They wanted him to be useful — to use him against his own friends. “I see,” he said. He reached under his chair and pulled out a hickory ax handle and stood up.

  It was smooth and cool in his hands, and without anger he swung it from behind his shoulders and hit Aaron on the side of the head, at ear level. It made a dull cushioned thump and Aaron's head snapped to the side. His shoulders slumped forward and his chest came to rest on his knees. With a life of its own, the hickory turned in his hands and slid sideways through the air a second time and hit Aaron's head on the other side.

  By now the others were on their feet and someone shouted, but it was only a vague noise to Martin as he concentrated on the pattern of movements and angles and distances and stepped across the open middle of the room, feinted once, and when the man raised his arms to protect his head, Martin brought the ax handle in level, just below shoulder height and felt it break through the man's ribs.

  Martin turned, measuring and calculating, still without anger, as if he were cutting weeds.

  Leona had grabbed a man and had spun herself behind him, throwing the man toward Martin. Seeing that he was about to be struck, the man screamed and launched himself at Martin, his hands flailing over his head.

  Martin brought the ax handle down through the man's forearms, breaking them, and then into his shoulder beside his neck. The clavicle crisply snapped like a castanet. But the man had rushed him, and even though his legs had buckled and he was falling, his momentum carried him into Martin and his broken arms levered the ax handle out of his grip and it clattered on the floor.

  Leona screeched and came at Martin, her hands held like claws over her head, ready to bring them down across his face.

  Martin regained his balance, stepped aside from the broken-armed man at his feet, and when Leona was close enough that he could see the whites around her eyes, he swept his left arm across in front of him, knocking her hands away.

  He grabbed the front of her shirt with one hand, slid his other hand under her crotch and lifted her over his head in one fluid motion and threw her upside down against the wall. Her back hit with a deadening thump and she crumpled to the floor on her head.

  In the next moment of silence, Joshua said, “I'm sorry, Martin.” He drew an eight-inch survival knife from under his shirt. Light glittered on the serrated edge, like jewels.

  Behind Joshua, August smiled and stepped aside. “I told you we had the power,” he said. “The lord provides.”

  Martin stood in the middle of the room with his hands at his sides. The man with broken ribs whimpered and crawled toward Joshua. The one with broken arms had drawn himself up on his knees but could rise no further and huddled there breathing heavily. Aaron had died in his chest-to-knees slump and thick blood hung in a viscous strand from his face to the floor.

  “Our belief is great,” Joshua said. “Greater than his death, or your death, or that of your doctor, or even of your children.”

  “Amen,” August said.

  The knife glittered. Joshua and August separated from each other and moved a step nearer Martin. “Life on the earth isn't important,” Joshua said, “except as a preparation for the greater life that awaits all of us after death, in Paradise.”

  “The lord provides," August said.

  They came close enough he was within their reach.

  From under his shirt, Martin took out a 9 mm. and shot Joshua twice, high in the chest. He stood there, looking surprised, looking first at the knife in his hand and then at Martin.

  Before August could move, Martin shot him three times quickly, in the chest, higher in the neck, and then through the chin. He reeled over backward, windmilling his arms, and sprawled on the floor. He tried to shout, but he made only spitting noises.

  The knife fell from Joshua's hand, and with great deliberation his eyes moved downward to stare at it. He knelt on one knee, and in slow motion reached for the weapon. Then he fell onto his knees and elbows, tried to get one of his legs under him, failed, and squirmed on the floor.

  Martin aimed the nine at Joshua, down at his face.

  “You're going to kill me, aren't you,” Joshua whispered. He dropped the knife and rolled over, holding his hands against his chest. Blood soaked into his white shirt around his grasping fingers. “You reject the holy love....”

  “This has nothing to do with that, Joshua. You're going to die because you're a danger to my family.”

  Joshua's eyes rolled once. His hand were red with his blood. “I didn't... do this for myself.”

  “I believe you.”

  “I had... higher understanding....”

  “Of course you did. Good luck with the afterlife.” He pulled the trigger and with the noise, Joshua's left eye disappeared into his head. Then blood welled out of it, like a spring.

  Martin checked Aaron's neck for pulse. None. Leona was also dead, her head twisted awkwardly beneath her shoulders. The two with broken arms and ribs pleaded incoherently. Martin walked around them.

  He stepped outside, into the cool afternoon breeze. Out in the air, it was a completely normal, unchanged day. Down the road, in the pasture, the horses grazed, tails switching — wood-brown against a dozen shades of green. Dust-blue squawking jays swooped from branch to branch in the eucalyptus trees, and Martin wondered once more what he had become.

  A year and a half before, emerging like a blind man from the underground, disoriented and directionless, the world was an enigma. Now... now he was immersed in his life in a way he could never have dreamed. He had a family and had killed to protect it. He hardly knew what he was now — no one he could ever have dreamed — and what was next?

  Still, there was one more ugly thing to do.

  “Martin?” It was Roy. He had come from around the side of the house with Charlie. They both carried shotguns in the crooks of their arms. “You're all right?”

  He nodded. “I'm fine, and it's taken care of. Behind the house someone left a flat-bed cart. Could you bring it around?”

  Charlie ran to get it.

  They loaded the four bodies on the cart. With a length of rope they tied the two with broken arms and ribs down on top of the dead; they shrieked howled as the ropes were cinched tight. Then Martin and the others pulled and pushed the cart up the dirt road to Joshua's encampment. They could see the bonfire from several hundred yards away and could hear singing even before that. The road leveled off, so the last twenty yards, Martin pushed the cart alone while Charlie and Roy walked alongside with their shotguns in their arms.

  The bonfire was huge and hot. When they appeared in the camp's clearing, the fifteen to twenty people ceased singing, and those that had been sitting stood up. Their mood reversed in seconds.

  Martin pushed the cart near the fire. The two on top yelped and begged.

  “We would have set their bones, but you killed our doctor.”

  He took Joshua's knife from beneath his corpse and cut the rope in several places. He lifted one end of the cart and dumped the bodies near the fire. Joshua's feet dropped limply into the edge of the coals and his shoes began to smolder, yet no one rushed forward. Except for the two injured, who scrabbled away from the fire, no one moved at all, not even Paul, who stood behind others, staring at his wife's unpeaceful face.

  “I personally killed them,” Martin said, pulling the cart back and stepping a
way from it. “In one hour, if any of you are here, these two will hold you down, and I will cut your throats. Paul, you'll be first.”

  No one spoke or moved. There was only the sound of the fire. All at once, they began gathering their possessions and stuff-bags.

  Martin, Roy and Charlie stood aside and within ten minutes, some were already gone.

  “Get rid of these,” Martin called out, nodding at the three bodies. No one had moved Joshua, and the burning leather and flesh were beginning to stink.

  “Paul!”

  He turned.

  “We'll leave you the cart. Take these with you.”

  “What if I don't?”

  “Roy, kill him.”

  Roy shouldered the shotgun with surprising rapidity.

  “No! Wait! Wait!” Paul raced forward and grabbed the cart. “I'll do it.”

  In less than half an hour, the campsite was empty. Some of Joshua's people had left their tents standing, but Charlie and Roy circled around, pulled them out of the ground, and with whatever else left behind, threw them on the fire. When the flames died, the three of them threw dirt on the embers, stirred and scattered the ashes, and went home.

  Chapter 78

  In the late afternoon, the wind blew all the clouds from the sky. The sun was bright, and out in the meadow, in the middle, they stood over three ovals of newly spaded dirt and remembered Winch and Xeng and Rusty. Early that morning, it was discovered that Dora had gone and Rusty had been laid out on his bed, in his best clothes, neatly covered with a sheet.

  Rusty's younger wife, Christie, who, a surprise to everyone, had moved out of their house several days before, now wept silently, said only, “Goodbye,” and stood back from the filled grave.

  Over the fresh-dirt mound, beneath which Winch lay wrapped in a white sheet, Martin said simply, “He was my friend, he helped me when I most needed help, and I loved him.” Ross clung to his waist, stricken by the return of death to his world.

  Jan-Louise held two gatherings of wildflowers and laid one on Winch's grave. “He was the first man I ever loved.” On Xeng's grave she laid the second bunch of flowers and said, “I loved him hardest,” and wept.

  Solomon stepped forward and said, “Xeng was my teacher. I want to be like him.” He knelt and pressed his hands into the soft dirt, leaving his small handprint. Martin heard him quietly say, “Goodbye.”

  They stood a minute longer, and across the field one of the horses neighed and tossed its head and crows swooped cawing out of the surrounding trees. Twenty yards away, Mona crept through the meadow grass, stalking white butterflies. Suddenly she leaped four or five feet into the air, paws widespread, missing the butterfly, and then fell back into the grass and disappeared. Missa giggled.

  “Let's go back now,” Catrin said quietly.

  That evening, to put an end to the horrific day, Jan-Louise insisted they all gather at her house. It was filled with the smells of baking bread. Roy brought out six bottles of wine, and together, they ate and grieved and hoped.

  Chapter 79

  As summer warmed the fields and the ocean breezes cooled them, their lives fell into an easy pattern, yet Martin grew restless. It kept running through his head that he wanted to return to Santa Miranda — not with the idea staying there, but, as he said it to himself, to tie up the last loose end of his life, to see one last time the place he'd always thought of as home and to say goodbye to all the things and ways he'd thought he would be heir to.

  Roy went along, their journey by horse taking nearly a week.

  Santa Miranda was a weed-choked ruin. Martin looked into to the cave where he had spent a year. They stood in the dark, holding candles, looking at the stacks of books from another world that Martin had read, the pens and pencils he had used, still arranged on the desk, and the cot where he had slept for fourteen months.

  Martin's parents' house had burned, but he carefully searched through the debris near the blackened kitchen sink and found their two coffee cups. After gently dusting away the ashes, he could still see the dark coffee rings in the bottoms. These cups he packed in his saddle bags.

  Santa Miranda was now consigned to memory.

  ....

  They returned to their village in early midday. They pulled up their horses to watch Charlie and Ross in wide-brimmed hats, surf fishing out beneath the circling gulls. They were far enough away that their voices were inaudible, but every once in a while the wind carried their laughter back to them.

  It was then that he and Roy heard a faint buzzing noise.

  He looked back at the village, but it wasn't coming from that direction. It was coming from the south, along the oceanside highway, and it was growing louder. Roy shaded his eyes and looked down the highway.

  It was loud, whatever it was. Very loud. The engine revved too fast for a car. Down the highway, at the curve, a motorcycle and sidecar rounded the corner at high speed.

  Diaz? Could it be Diaz?

  The rider wore an old-fashioned tight leather helmet and shaded aviator goggles.

  The motorcycle had been new sometime in the recent past, but now it was splashed with mud, and most of the paint now looked like primer. The sidecar was stuffed with bedding.

  And there was blond hair flying from under the leather cap.

  The motorcycle roared up to them and choked to a stop. She wore scuffed leather pants and a heavy leather jacket that smelled hot from the sun. When she pulled the cap off, her hair fell loose. “One of you Martin Lake?” she asked, a Midwestern twang in her voice.

  “Yes, I am.”

  She stepped off the bike and extended her hand. “I'm Cloris Danse. Diaz sent me.” She reached over to the sidecar and pulled back a tattered blanket. “That there's his son, Diaz Junior. And my dog, Felicity.” The dog was a sleepy-eyed black-spotted Australian shepherd. The child looked almost a year old, with wide dark eyes and fat cheeks.

  He had left her, she explained, promising to come back, but he didn't. And then, many months later, a woman had passed through El Dorado Springs and had handed her this.

  She pulled from a pocket a palm-sized square of paper that had been folded many times. Just off-center, there was a half-inch diameter hole in it, and the back layers of paper were stained dark brown.

  “That's his list,” Martin said quietly. “There's blood on it.”

  Cloris nodded. “He had it wrapped in a piece of paper with my address on it, saying to notify me if... you know.”

  Martin nodded. Another death in his life.

  “So this woman she found me. She told me he was protecting her with his body when he was shot, stood in the way of the bullet, and she lived because of him.”

  Martin nodded. “He'd do that.”

  “Yes, he would. You know what all those names and dates are?” She took the paper back. “He never told me.”

  “He told me they were friends. He had their names so he wouldn't forget any of them. The dates are when they died.”

  Cloris stood quietly looking at the paper in her hands. “I loved that crazy guy,” she said. Martin thought she might cry. Then she looked up and spoke strongly. “I shed all my tears a long time ago. I had a hell of a time finding you, but down in San Luis Obispo I mentioned your name and they said, 'Oh yeah, that guy.' They said about a year ago you lodged a few small caliber objections in some local messiah.”

  “We had a difference of values.”

  Martin heard Isha barking only a moment before she appeared, running full speed toward them. She danced in his arms and licked his face.

  “Diaz said I could trust you and that you'd take me in. Will you?”

  “Consider yourself at home.”

  At that moment, laughing and talking with friends at the edge of land and ocean, it seemed that he had just stepped out of his year of isolation, had come up from the underground, and stood in the sun for the first time. Though it was threaded with the despair of loss, the brilliant day swarmed through him, light made life.

  A Note on
Diaz

  Till his death, Diaz and I knew each other longer than anyone except our families. His preferred ride was a 1946 Indian, fully restored to the highest of glosses. In the 1960s we were both students at San Francisco State during the Haight-Ashbury business. That was memorable. Most of all, Diaz wanted to be an actor and I thought his best role would be to play himself. Before he died, he read this novel and was pleased. His brain was plugged into the 220 version of life and the only fuse was death.

  A Final Note

  With any project, I always wonder, “Where did I goof it?” “What am I not seeing?” If you see textual irregularities you think I should know about or correct, please let me know. Or if you have comments, my email is open.

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