کتاب 04-05

5

The trees were ghosts of themselves in a smokeworld of low clouds and falling snow. The dying afternoon smelled like pinecones burned in an ashtray.

Harper meant every word of what she had promised Allie: that she was going to paddle over to the Fireman’s island, check his condition, and come back. She had left out the part about needing to go home first because the infirmary cupboard was all but bare and she was going to have to hunt through her personal supplies for the things John needed. If Allie knew about that, she might’ve knocked her down and sat on her chest to keep her from going.

She thought she might have a good poke around while she was home. See what else she could find that might be of use in Camp Wyndham. Shampoos and books and socks.

But when she got there she discovered there wasn’t as much to poke around in as she expected. She stopped at the edge of the woods, looking at what was left of her house with a feeling of shock so intense, it approached awe.

The side of the house facing the street had collapsed in on itself, the entire face swept away. Some great force had dragged the living room couch out into the yard and tossed it all the way to the edge of the driveway. Snow had mounded up on it, but Harper could still see the armrests. She guessed there was some more junk scattered across the lawn, but they were just lumps under the snow now. It looked like her house had been brushed by a tornado.

She caught her breath and thought back to the night she left. She remembered a rending crack, so loud it shook the ground. Jakob had climbed into his Freightliner and sideswiped the snowplow through the front of the house, dropped the roof in on what remained of their life together.

Papers hung impaled from bare tree branches, scattered all along the edge of the woods. Harper pulled one down: a page from Desolation’s Plough. She read the first words—despair is no more than a synonym for consciousness, and demolition much the same as art—and let the fretful breeze tug the sheet out of her hand. It flapped away in the wind.

Harper was so dazed, she almost forgot her plan and drifted out of the woods into the yard, leaving footprints all the way. But a car shushed past on the road, making a sound like an admonition to be silent, and reminded her to take care. She worked her way around the house to the south side of the ruin, where trees crowded close to the wall. A single red spruce hung a wet and glistening limb over the snow, reaching out to almost touch the vinyl siding.

In a doctor’s office of the mind, Nurse Willowes—dressed in crisp medical whites—addressed Miss Willowes, six months pregnant, sitting on the exam-room table in a paper gown. Oh, yes, Miss Willowes, I hope you will continue at the gym. It’s important to stay healthy and active for as long as you can do so comfortably!

Harper wrapped both hands around the branch, which was about four feet off the ground, inhaled deeply, and swung. She pendulumed across two yards of snow and reached down with her feet, and her toes found purchase in the icy gravel that bordered the house. She felt herself sliding back, was in danger of letting go and falling onto the frozen ground. She pedaled her feet at the loose rock, lunged, and let go of the branch. Harper fell against the wall, the rubbery lump of her belly bouncing gently off the siding. A little extra cushioning, it turned out, came in handy.

She followed the narrow strip of gravel under the eaves around to the back of the house. The door into the basement was locked, but she did the combination jiggle-kick-shoulder-thump Jakob had taught her and it opened up. She stepped into cold, stale air and pulled the door shut behind her.

When they first moved in they had remodeled the basement into an “entertaining area,” complete with bar and pool table, but it had never really stopped feeling like a cellar. Cheap nubby carpet over cement floor. An odor of copper pipes and cobwebs.

The collapse of the house above had led to much more radical redecorating. The fridge had dropped through the ceiling from the kitchen and toppled over onto its side. The door hung open to show the condiments and salad dressings still nestled on the shelves. Wires dangled from the hole overhead.

The pool table remained curiously undamaged in the center of the room. Harper had never learned how to play. Jakob, on the other hand, could not only run the table, but could balance a pool stick on a single finger and a plate on the end of the cue, another of his circus tricks. In retrospect, Harper supposed it did not pay to be too impressed with a man just because he could ride a unicycle.

The camping supplies—tent, portable gas stove, oil lamp—were in the bank of cupboards against the back wall, and the first aid kit was packed in there with them. They had always liked backpacking. That was one thing she could look back on with fondness: they had both been crazy for sex in the woods.

She had badly twisted an ankle when they were hiking in Montana, and Jakob had cheerfully carried her piggyback the last mile to the Granite Park Chalet. She had bought the first aid kit as soon as they got home, to be prepared for the next time one of them banged themselves up on a hike, but there was no next time, and after a few more years there was no more hiking.

The kit was better stocked than she remembered. It contained a stack of compression bandages alongside ice packs and burn cream. But the real prize was shoved in next to the first aid supplies, and was the thing she had wanted most, her central reason for returning: a black elastic elbow brace, left over from two years before. Jakob had wiped out, playing her in racquetball, and sprained his arm. They hadn’t ever played after that. Jakob claimed the elbow still sometimes gave him a twinge and said he didn’t want to risk straining it again, but she had sometimes imagined he quit racquetball for far less understandable reasons. She had been shutting him out at the time he smashed his elbow into the wall. It wasn’t so much that he hated losing. It was just that he hated losing to her. In their relationship, he was the coordinated one, and Harper was comically, adorably clumsy. He took it personally when she stepped out of character.

She rooted around in the other cupboards and found a long box of Gauloises, shoved back on a high shelf, the cellophane peeled off and a few packs missing. Jakob had announced, a year before—a million years before—that he had quit smoking cold turkey and felt sorry for people who didn’t have the willpower to do the same. For once she was glad he was full of shit. As in any guerrilla economy, there was no underestimating the value of cigarettes these days. People had been wrong to hoard gold for the collapse of civilization. They would’ve been better served to stock up on Camels.

She went around behind the bar to see what they had for booze. Facing the counter, at her back, was a smoked-glass door that opened into an empty hole where they had planned to put a stereo someday. Hadn’t got around to it. Jakob had insisted on a Bang & Olufsen system that cost almost ten thousand dollars and any plan to save for it had remained strictly hypothetical.

She crouched for a look in the liquor cabinet and found a bottle of thirty-year-old Balvenie that would taste like smoke and fill a person with angel’s breath. There was also a bottle of cheap, banana-flavored rum that would be just fine if you wanted to get sick. Harper wondered what John Rookwood might tell her about Dragonscale after a Balvenie on the rocks or three.

She was still hunched down behind the bar when someone wiggle-kick-shoulder-thumped the basement door.

“Grayson!” cried a hoarse, wheezing, loud, somehow familiar voice, and Harper choked on a cry. Didn’t reply, didn’t move. Hunched there frozen, waiting for whoever it was to tell her what to do.

“Grayson!” the man shouted again, and Harper realized he was not outside shouting in, but inside shouting out. “It worked! We’re in.”

“I wanted to get that lock fixed. I was always worried someone was going to come in and steal the good whiskey and rape my wife,” Jakob said. “I had very protective feelings toward the whiskey.”

His voice was a knife, a thing she felt in the abdomen as much as heard.

Harper opened the tinted glass door into that hole where they had planned to stack a stereo. It was as deep as the footwell under a large office desk, nothing in it except some dangling cables. She climbed in with the first aid kit and the brace and the cigarettes, squeezing herself tight around the beach ball of her stomach. Three days ago she had climbed through a smoke-filled drainpipe with this stomach. She didn’t think she would be able to do it now. She eased the glass door shut behind her.

“Right,” said the first man, in a voice that made Harper think of a fat guy wheezing over a plate of scrambled eggs and a double order of bacon. “I get that. You don’t want some reprehensible scumbag drinking up your stash of expensive booze. Unfortunately for you, you led me right to it.” He laughed: a sound like someone squeezing a broken toy accordion, a kind of musical gasp. “Why don’t you head upstairs and have a poke around? See if she’s been here. We’ll secure the basement. And by ‘secure’ I mean drink your whiskey, play pool, and look for dirty home movies.”

“She hasn’t been here. I come out here now and then, you know. Keeping an eye on the place. I figured she’d come back, sooner or later. For her books or her favorite pajamas or her old Pooh Bear. I swear, sometimes I felt like a child molester, sleeping with her. We had to watch Mary Poppins every Christmas. As soon as we were done opening presents.”

“Christ,” said the one with the fat man’s voice, and at last Harper knew why he was familiar to her. She had heard the Marlboro Man often enough on the radio. “And you waited until she got sick to try and kill her?” He bawled with laughter at his own joke. Another man—not Jakob—confirmed the cleverness of this bon mot with a shrill titter.

“You can see no one has been here from the snow. No footprints,” Jakob said.

“You’re probably right. But we’ll look anyway. Just to be sure. You know about me and the secret broadcast? I ever told you about that? The radio in my head? No? When I was twelve, I could put my hand on a silent radio and close my eyes and I could hear the DJ introducing ‘Walk This Way.’ I could hear him in my mind. Like I was the antenna, pulling the signal right into my brain. I’d tell my buddies, I’ll bet every one of you that if we turn on the radio, it’ll be playing ‘Walk This Way.’ Everyone would pitch in a buck. I’d turn on the radio, and Steven Tyler would be right there, braggin’ how his girl is a real good bleeder. Or, like, when I was old enough to drive. I’d be sitting in my friend’s crap Trans Am, the car turned off, waiting for him to come out of a corner store with a six-pack of Schlitz. And suddenly I’d know Mo Vaughn had just slugged a home run. I’d know. My pal would come out, turn the keys—and all of Fenway would be cheering for the big hit, Joe Castiglione shouting about how far Mo smashed it. For a long time I thought maybe I was picking signals up on my fillings somehow. But ever since the plague days started, I’ve been hearing new signals. Sometimes I’ll hear my own voice on the secret broadcast, reading a news report. I’ll hear myself talking about how a dozen burners were discovered hiding in the basement of Portsmouth Library, and they were shot dead by a heroic Cremation Crew. So I’ll get the gang together and we’ll go down there, and sure enough—burners, hiding in the cellar. Remember that, Marty? Remember the time I said we ought to go down to Portsmouth Library and check things out? We killed every one of those motherfuckers. It all went down just exactly the way I heard it on my telepathic news report.”

“That’s true!” cried the third man, his voice piping and obsequious. “You knew they were going to be there, Marlboro Man! You knew before any of us.”

“So that’s why we had to come over here today? You had a psychic tickle that my wife might’ve come home?” Jakob asked. He didn’t sound like a believer.

“Maybe. Maybe I heard a little voice that said why not run by and have a look. Then again, maybe I just remembered you saying you had some good Scotch and I wanted a taste. Why don’t you have a peek around and we’ll find out which it is.”

“Sure,” Jakob said. “Check behind the bar. See what’s left.”

A door opened across the room. Sheetrock and shattered lath tumbled out with a crash. Jakob cursed. The one named Marty made hyena sounds that approximated laughter. Jakob clambered away over sliding, tumbling, clattering debris.

Someone approached the bar. Harper could dimly see a man in snow pants through the tinted glass. A skinny guy with a bushy Afro of reddish wiry hair bent over, opened the liquor cabinet, pulled out the Balvenie.

“Is this stuff good?”

“Fuckin’ A. Hand it over. Let me have a look.” Silence. “Goddamn, this costs more than I used to make in a week. You think his wife is half as nice as his pool table and his whiskey?” said the Marlboro Man.

“Don’t matter,” Marty said. “She’s got the skeeve. You ain’t gonna fuck that.”

“True. Speaking of skeeve, see if there are some glasses. I don’t want your backwash in the bottle.”

The skinny guy bent and dug around and came up with tumblers.

“You want music? Based on his pool table and his whiskey, I bet he’s got a sweet fuckin’ sound system,” Marty said. He turned toward the stereo cabinet and pressed the magnetic catch. The glass door sprang open half an inch. Harper shut her eyes and thought, Despair is no more than a synonym for consciousness.

“No power, asshole,” said the Marlboro Man. “A Porsche is just a half ton of worthless iron if there’s no gas in the tank.”

“Ah, fuck. Good point, Marlboro Man! I wasn’t thinking!” He pushed the cabinet door shut without looking in.

“There’s some breaking news.”

Neither of them spoke for a few moments. She heard the gurgle of whiskey splashing into the glass, swallowing, and reverential sighs.

When Marty spoke again, his voice was pitched low. “He’s kinda scary, don’cha think?”

“Who? Public Works?”

“Yeah. Jakob. With that burn on his neck. That black hand—cooked right in the skin. And his eyes, you know? Like dusty old glass. Like doll’s eyes.”

“Listen to you. You’re practically Lord Byron, with the similes.”

“Tell you what. I think he’d rather find the Fireman here than his wife. I think he’s got a bigger hard-on for him than he does for the runaway bride.”

“There ain’t no Fireman.”

There was an uneasy silence.

“Well,” Marty said. “Marlboro Man . . . someone burned his neck. And the other night? Eighty guys saw the devil, two stories high, down by the police station. Eighty guys. And Arlo Granger, in the fire department, he wrestled with some dude in the smoke. Some dude with a British accent, dressed up in a fire helmet and everything. Arlo would’ve kicked his head in, except the Fireman had friends, like five friends, and they ganged up on him . . .”

“I know Arlo Granger, and that guy is a fuckin’ liar. He told me once that he got backstage at a Rush concert and snorted coke with Neil Peart. I wish the guys in Rush snorted coke. Maybe it would amp ’em up and they’d try playing some real rock and roll for once, instead of that limp-dick prog-rock bullshit.”

“My cousin is in the National Guard. Amy Castigan, you’ve hung out with Amy—”

“Amy . . . your cousin Amy . . . maybe. Yeah, I think she sucked my dick once.”

“Yeah, yeah, me, too, but listen, listen, Marlboro Man. Amy was manning the checkpoint on the Piscataqua Bridge back in September, middle of the night . . . and she sees this red blaze coming up the river. Like someone shot a rocket at them. Her and the other guys hit the deck and just in time, too. This giant fuckin’ bird of flame, thirty feet from wing tip to wing tip, dive-bombed ’em. It dived so close the sandbags caught fire! And while Amy and the guys in her unit were duckin’ for cover, a car ran the checkpoint and some burners escaped into Maine. That was him, too! That’s what he does! He’s figured out how to weaponize Dragonscale, man.”

“That’s one possibility,” the Marlboro Man said. “The other possibility is your cousin is the biggest fuckin’ ho-bag on the East Coast, and someone ran the checkpoint while she was treating her entire unit to the Amy Castigan blow-job special. There ain’t no Fireman. And Satan didn’t turn up at the police department last night. People see things in flame. Freaky faces and stuff. That’s all.”

Harper thought, inevitably, of the girl in John’s furnace: Sarah Storey, she was sure. The Marlboro Man could believe what he liked, but sometimes the face in the fire really was someone looking back at you.

Boards and plaster sheeting slid and thumped in the stairwell.

“Nothing,” Jakob said. “Nothing and no one. I told you. If someone had been here, there’d be tracks. She’s six months pregnant. I doubt she can go a hundred paces without running out of breath.”

“That is a fair point, squire,” said the Marlboro Man. “My ex, when she was pregnant, if she wanted anything—cigarettes, beer, ice cream, anything—she’d make me get it, even if it was only in the next room.

“Sorry the psychic flash didn’t work out. But at least you found the Balvenie. We can take it with us. That’s five hundred dollars a bottle, so drink it slow.”

“What’s the hurry? Have a couple drinks and I’ll polish you off in a game of pool.”

“I’d need more than a couple before that would happen,” Jakob said.

“Want to wager on it?”

“With what? Money isn’t what it used to be.”

“I win, you have to go upstairs and find me a pair of your wife’s panties,” said the Marlboro Man.

“If I win, you have to wear them,” Jakob said.

“Hey, what if I win?” Marty asked.

“What if you invent a cure for fuckin’ Dragonscale? What if you didn’t laugh like a thirteen-year-old girl with the hiccups?”

Marty laughed like a thirteen-year-old girl with the hiccups.

“Who breaks?” Jakob said.

There was a loud crack as one ball struck a dozen.

“Is this single elimination?” Marty asked. “Or best of three?”

“Whatever,” said the Marlboro Man. “I don’t have anyplace to be.”