A Dark Matter (46 page)

“Why don’t you tell him?” Don asked. “He just came back in.”

Jason Boatman had just entered the room from the other side, and he seemed riveted by the spectacle presented by his hostess.

“He isn’t moving,” the Eel said. “What’s going on?”

“The poor old blind lady claims another victim,” I said.

“Shut up, you. This is different.”

Deep in his throat, Hootie made a low, gravelly sound expressive of mirth.

“Don’t laugh at us, Hootie. What’s he doing now? Ah. He’s coming toward us, isn’t he?”

“How do you do that?” Don asked. “I mean, is it something you feel, or something you hear?”

“Let me poke out your eyes. In twenty or thirty years, you’ll know all about it.”

“Sorry,” Don said. “Anyhow, here he is, our old pal and reformed bad guy, Jason Boatman. Looking a little strained, a little hornswoggled, if you don’t mind my saying so, Boats.”

“How could I mind,” Boats said, his eyes fixed on the Eel’s face, “when I don’t understand what you’re talking about?”

Hootie regarded the handsome ceiling.

“It doesn’t matter, pay no attention,” said the Eel. “
I’ll
decide how you look, Boats.”

“And I wasn’t a
bad
guy,” Boats said. “I was a professional thief.”

“A fine distinction,” said the Eel. “But let me get a good idea of you, okay? It’s wonderful to have the pleasure of your company again, and I want to take you in.”

“Eel, you can take me any way you’d like,” Boats said.

Lee Truax simply stood before him, her feet in flat back shoes planted on the floor, her head lifted, neither smiling nor not. Eventually she said, “Yes, I see. Hello, Jason.”

“You could always call me Boats.”

“I was just saying that I’m very proud of you. It’s almost a little bit funny, that you went straight.”

“Being crooked put too much wear and tear on the system.”

“Say what you will,
I’m
never going straight.”

I put my arm around her shoulders. “Thank God, that would spoil everything for the rest of us. But what do you think, shall we get started? Now that we’re all here?”

“Go for it,” said the Eel.

“All right, everybody. Drinks, coffee? Whatever you’d like, fellows. Let’s get started. Honey, are you ready?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “Would you please let me have some water?”

“I’ll have a tequila, rocks.”

“Coffee.”

“Welch’s grape juice, please,” said Hootie.

When I returned with the drinks, we took places on the chairs and sofa facing the woman at the center of our attention. She was waiting with an air of deep personal calm. From her posture, from the level angle of her head and the musing expression on her face, the Eel seemed as transparent as the cool water in her tall glass.

“We’re all set now,” I told her.

“I know,” she said.

If Lee Truax had possessed the power of sight, the way she swept her face from one side of the room to the other, taking us in, would have suggested that she wished not be interrupted in the course of her account.

“I’m set, too.” This time, her sightless glance left no doubt as to her desire for every bit of our attention.

“Don, Hootie, Boats, and you, Lee, please understand what is going to happen here. I’m going to describe, as thoroughly as I can, what I witnessed and experienced before, during, and after Spencer Mallon’s ceremony out in that meadow. No matter what happens, please do not interrupt me. Don’t ask questions. Don’t do or say anything that could make me stop talking. I
mean
that. Even if you are alarmed in some way, or if you hate what I’m saying, or are offended by it, please put your emotions aside, and let me go on as well as I can. I can only do this once. I’m not going to repeat myself, and I’m not going to try to explain things nobody could explain, so don’t ask me to try. You understand, guys? You got me?”

“We understand,” I said, and the others chimed in.

“I’ll begin, then.” The Eel put out her hand for the glass of water and wrapped her fingers around it with no apparent groping or hesitation. After taking a sip that might have satisfied a hummingbird, she replaced the glass in exactly its former position. Her hands came to rest in her lap, and she gave all of us the reassuring hint of a smile.

“And I want to start where
we
started that day, in the Coliseum Theater. I wonder if any of you remember the bizarre comment Spencer made before that organist sank down beneath the stage again, and the lights faded, and the curtain folded back. I bet you don’t—I bet you all forgot it.”

“Can we answer that?” Don asked.

“This once, yes.”

“I can’t remember anything he said, except that he’d meet us across the street after the second screening. You don’t mean that, do you?”

“No, I mean what he said about movies and secret messages. Spencer thought that certain movies contained hidden communications that were intended only for the few who were capable of understanding them. That morning, he wanted to tell us about a secret hidden in the ending of
Shane
.
Shane
was one of his favorite movies.”

| Skylarking |

Apart from Lee,
the Eel said
, probably they could all remember how Spencer walked them down the aisle to the second row, but how many of them knew why he did that? The screen shed a light of its own, that’s why, and even when the rest of the enormous theater was in total darkness, the first three or four rows were illuminated by a thin, silvery glow that looked like moonlight. Mallon wanted them to be
visible
.

Years afterward, the Eel thought Mallon wanted to make sure they would stick to his game plan. He was slipping them into a pocket until it was time to take them out again and set them on their way. The Eel had no proof of this, but it seemed very likely to her that their great leader had given an usher five bucks to make sure they stayed in their seats.

An entire invisible world, Spencer thought, had become aware of his band of youngsters, and he wished to shield them from the denizens of that world until all was in proper alignment. And besides that, he had private business to take care of. His supposedly number-one girlfriend, Meredith, was furious with him over a certain wrong he had done her, and he had to make it up to her the best way he knew how, by screwing her until her brains dribbled out of her ears. Pardon my French, as the boys say. That’s the way Mallon talked when he got onto this subject. Pardon my French, please, young lady. What were her ears supposed to be made of, anyhow? Crystal?

Eel Truax knew what was going on, she was no idiot. She didn’t like it—she didn’t like anything about the deal, if you want to know the truth. He put her in a crummy position, and there was nothing she could do about it. And what Mallon chose to tell them—all of them, really, but mainly her, the Eel—didn’t help, not one bit. He wanted to explain something about death.

So death was there right at the beginning. Mallon put it right in front of them. Only they all thought he was just talking about this Western movie from ten years ago, the one with the kid that looked like Hootie. They’d all seen it on TV; they knew what he was talking about. Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, and Jean Arthur, that blond woman who was in a million movies. Jack Palance, the ultimate snaky bad guy. Man comes to town, helps a sod-buster, makes friends with his family and this whole community that’s being threatened by ranchers. Finally the man reveals he’s a famous gunfighter and does battle with the other team’s gunfighter. He wins, everything is fine again, and the gunfighter rides off into the sunset. Only, Mallon told them before he ran out to hump his girlfriend back into a good mood, the gunfighter, Shane, dies at the end of
Shane
.

In the last shot, Alan Ladd slumps over his saddle. The other guy put a bullet in him, and he’s dying, only he didn’t want the boy, Billy, to know that. The movie is about the mystery of death in our culture, how that mystery is hidden. Shane is a killer. That’s what he does. If Shane isn’t a killer, the movie doesn’t work, get it? If he’s just another hired man, Van Heflin, Billy’s dad, is going to be shot down in the muddy street. And if that happens, evil wins. But for most of the movie, this wandering killer, Shane, comes across as just a nice, friendly guy … so his death has to be passed off in a kind of code, in a gesture most people will never even see …

Mallon knew, the Eel now thought. (At the time, she had come to a different conclusion.) He knew what Keith Hayward was, and thanks to her husband, Lee Truax now knew a lot more than she wished she did about
that
subject, and it seemed to her now that Spencer also knew that Hayward was going to be killed out in that meadow. He
told
them all, too, only he told them in code, like his version of the movie.

After that, they sat through two showings of that stupid Alan Arkin movie and stuffed horrible movie-lobby candy into their mouths.

Finally the second showing was over, and they were allowed to troop outside, where good old Guess Who was waiting for them, big big grin on his face. Wonder of wonders, Miss America, Miss Badger Beauty, was nowhere in sight. Which meant that he had ditched her to pick them up by himself.

Of course Mallon had just climbed out of her bed, that much was obvious no matter where she was at this moment, and poor Eel felt like a big stupid knife had been stuck in her guts, but something came to her as their little band filed across the street to join the other two. It was a sudden insight about the Golden Girl, Meredith Bright, everybody’s ideal woman, and probably it could only have come to the Eel when its subject was nowhere in sight. When Meredith was around, she was too distracting! You know what it was, Eel’s insight? That there wasn’t much
to
Meredith, and she’d be trading on her looks way into middle age. All she had was this strange combination of innocence and greed, and once the innocence was taken away from her, as it undoubtedly would be, the greed would be all that was left: greed, wrapped in a pretty package. Meredith didn’t even know that she was going to hate Mallon one day, but she would, all right, because Spencer Mallon was never going to satisfy all that need, all that
desire …

In a way, Meredith reminded the Eel of Boats, but Boats lusted only for
things
, stuff you could pick up and jam into a sack. The things that got Meredith all hot and bothered were on another scale altogether. Power and money, the ultimate American package, that was what she was after.

While Mallon was taking them to their rendezvous point with Hayward and Milstrap, they walked straight into a hellacious protest riot, with cops on horseback and fire hoses, and kids getting clouted in the head with nightsticks, people yelling into bullhorns, complete chaos. Total uproar.

The cops had gone out of control by the time their group got close to the scene, and they were all about busting heads and throwing kids into paddy wagons. It
infuriated
the cops, that the protest leaders had dared to stage an action off campus. Taking it to the citizens broke the fragile contract that had been the only thing keeping the cops to some sort of standard of behavior. They were pissed off and didn’t mind showing it, and that made the protestors more and more outrageous. The clamor they had been hearing came from the students screaming and yelling up University Avenue, not to get away from the cops and their shields and horses but to provoke them into the brutal excess and lawlessness that was their true condition as agents of the state. And, boy oh boy, did it work! By the time Mallon and his core group had made it to North Charter Street through the running crowds, the place was a battleground.

Except for one last-minute stroke of luck, whether good or bad is up to you, they would inevitably have been drawn into the maelstrom, struck with clubs, trampled by horses, assaulted, beaten, and dragged off to jail. But Mallon looked over his shoulder and saw a big new parking garage, and that was all he needed. He pointed, he turned and ran, and the four of them followed him, a second before the firemen arrived with high-pressure hoses and began bowling the students over and sweeping them away. They got out just in time to avoid being turned into waterlogged refuse.

Of course it wasn’t all over when the firemen went into their act. Plenty of students were still primed to do battle, and most of the police were having too much fun to quit. You can only aim a hose in one direction at a time, after all. So once they were all safe behind their concrete wall, there was still a lot to watch. Only, the Eel saw more than she wanted to, and it all seemed to flow from what Spencer Mallon had told them about the end of
Shane
after they had taken their second-row seats.

At the beginning, though, she saw Keith Hayward and Brett Milstrap, and for the first time really took in how strange they were, both as a couple and individually. When the Eel caught sight of the frat boys, they were slipping along the fronts of the buildings on University, staying as far back as they could from the sidewalks and the street, where all the action was taking place. They were making their way toward the intersection on the same side of the street as the parking garage, so the Eel was able mainly to see the boy in front, Hayward. Behind him, Milstrap appeared in flashes and snatches. They were creeping along like spies, their hands flattened on the walls at their back, slightly bent at the waist, eyes on the commotion. Hayward was
loving
what he saw—the Eel should have known how he’d be, but when she saw his reaction to chaos, she was shocked.

It was so inhuman, that joy, so perverse … so innately wicked. His eyes were alight; he was grinning and bobbing his chest up and down in an unconscious, delighted chicken dance. Hayward didn’t even know he was doing it, the Eel thought. Probably he was chuckling, too. The strangest part of it was the cold, terrible impersonality of his body’s movements.

Which was the moment a dire perception snapped into focus. Mallon said, Shane dies at the end of the movie: wasn’t Mallon their version of Shane? It seemed so obvious to the Eel, she could not imagine why she had not understood him immediately. He had given her the message, and she had fumbled it in her hands all the while they had trekked after him through the streets of Madison into this grinding chaos. Mallon had told her that he was going to lead them into the moment of transformation and pay for it with his life. That was why he had been so explicit about leaving them after the end of his ceremony, and they had one and all misunderstood him. Mallon was not just leaving town. When he said leaving, he meant
leaving
.