Death Qualified (9 page)

    A little after noon a UPS delivery van pulled up to the door of the big house. James spoke to the driver, who drove down to Nell's house. She met him at the door.

    "Mrs. Kendricks?"

    "What is it? I'm not expecting anything."

    He looked at his clipboard and shrugged.

    "It's for Mrs.

    Nell Kendricks and Travis Kendricks. Either one of you can sign for it."

    He went back to the van and brought out a large box, set it down, and brought out another one. When he came back with it, she pointed to the living room floor. He put both boxes before the couch and she signed his sheet, then stared at the boxes without touching them. A computer and monitor. She knew they were from Lucas.

    After Carol was born, after she was certain Lucas was not coming back, she had gone to the university library and looked up every reference she could find concerning the effects of puberty on cognition, perceptions, belief systems.

    The literature had been scant; evidently this was not a heavily researched area. But she had found the book written by a woman psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Brandywine, and she had recognized it from what little Lucas had said about it.

    The text had been difficult, not very well written, full of jargon and statistics, and the text interrupted so often by references to other works that it had been nearly impossible to follow the thesis. What Brandywine had said, or at least what Nell had got from it, was that the periods immediately before puberty and during puberty were the most efficient times to instill in children systems of belief and behavior that seemed to have effects lasting well into adulthood, possibly for the rest of their lives. She had cited rites of passage, baptisms, circumcisions, initiations into many different kinds of groups.

    And now a computer, for her and for Travis, who would be twelve in August. She remembered when she and Lucas had read the ad in the school newspaper. Dr. Frobisher was hiring students to participate in a study of perceptions.

    Ten dollars each, they had said. With that money they could take off a day or two and head for the coast, eat clam chowder, camp out on a beach. They had gone to Dr. Frobisher's classroom and signed up. The test required them to sit before a computer; they were to watch computer images and pick out from an assortment of images which one should follow one that was given. She thought of the first image as blob (possibly a bear), then blob (possibly a dog), blob (possibly a horse), and many blobs that were abstract. She picked one that was blob (possibly a cow). And so the hour had gone. She had thought it silly, but when she compared notes with Lucas later, it had been apparent that either he saw things she had not seen, or he had had a different set of images altogether.

    He was called to come back and continue with the next sequence, and the next and next, until by the end of the term, he had quit his part-time job at Kinko's and was working for Emil Frobisher.

    All computers, she was thinking. Then, later, even when he came back home six years ago, it was still all computers.

    And now he had sent a computer for Travis. She remembered what he had said that last night down on the beach: By the time Travis reaches puberty, five or six years, the whole thing will be ready.

    She shook her head. No! She wanted to take an axe to the boxes, but she backed away and went to the door again. She had to get out, leave the house, walk, move, talk to Grampa.

    She looked up at the trees. Talk to Grampa.

    Today she was not aware of the trail, the steepness of the last part of the climb, how hot she had become when she grasped a rock to help with the last step or two. Just before she climbed the last foot, before the level clearing, she came to a complete stop. Lucas!

    He was the Lucas of her girlhood, a laughing boy, happy, with the same light in his eyes that she had loved when they were both nineteen. This was how he had looked when they sledded down the long driveway to the big house; when they dammed Halleck Creek and swam in the frigid, impounded waters; when they struggled through the sand dunes at the coast stalking geese in the freshwater lakes.... He said, in exactly the same way he had said it a hundred times before, a thousand times, "Watch this!"

    In disbelief she closed her eyes hard, paralyzed; when she opened them again, he was gone. She scrambled to the ledge and caught a movement from the corner of her eye. She jerked around to see him on the far side of the ledge, near the drop-off, still laughing. Before she could focus her gaze, there was an explosion of a rifle shot;

    Lucas was thrown backward and sideward into a boulder.

    He rolled off it, rolled over the side of the ledge, down into the gorge.

    She screamed and screamed, and, screaming, began to run back down the trail she had just climbed.

    EIGHT

    barbara holloway watched the two customers without interest. They were giggling over a red sequinned dinner dress, one of them holding it up to her body. She was too fat for the skinny sheath from the thirties. Both women were too fat, Barbara decided, for anything in the shop to please them. She hated fat women who blamed the clothes.

    She was holding her finger in her book, waiting for them to wander outside again. A teenage girl darted in and pulled the door shut after her; Winnie's voice rang out from the back room: "Don't close the door, please."

    The girl looked at Barbara suspiciously.

    "Swamp cooler," Barbara explained.

    "It works with fresh air."

    "I don't think it works at all," one of the women said.

    "This place is stifling."

    "So beat it," Barbara said under her breath. She raised an eyebrow at the woman and looked down at her book.

    The one holding the dress tossed it over a rack, and the trio left, closing the door on the way out.

    "Bitch," Barbara said, going to the door. It was late afternoon, Friday, August, Phoenix. She had finally arrived in hell, she thought, gazing out at the strip mall and the half dozen or so shoppers. The women who had just left were being steered into the Navajo jewelry shop by the girl. She shrugged. It would be just as stifling in there;

    they used the swamp cooling system, too.

    "How's this look?" Winnie asked, coming out from the back room. She was wearing a skin-tight black satin evening dress, slit up to her thigh. A rope of fake pearls hung down below her waist.

    Barbara whistled.

    "Gangster's moll. Terrific." Winnie certainly was not too fat for the garment she had spent the afternoon altering. She looked wonderful. Barbara didn't actually envy Winnie's slender figure; she was too philosophical about herself for that, but there was little in the shop that she would have been willing to try on. Hippy, she thought of herself. Muscular. Practical body, service able. Ms. Mid-America herself, average in every way.

    Even her dark brown hair and blue eyes, right down the middle of the norm in most places, that was. Here in Phoenix she felt sometimes that she was an alien among all the dark-skinned people with their lovely shiny black eyes. Winnie had black hair and black eyes, long straight black hair; she was the perfect model for the slinky gown from the early thirties.

    The shop was called Play It Again, Sam, with nothing more modern than from the fifties. Barbara had been here for nearly nine months now, but it was time to head north, away from the sun, away from the heat. The shop made so little money, it was ridiculous to pretend it could sup port two women as a real business. Winnie's ex made it possible for the shop to exist at all; Winnie was possibly the world's worst businesswoman, and Barbara would have found it impossible to care less if the shop made money or not. Out of gratitude for Barbara's help in getting the divorce that had turned out to be financially successful, Winnie had said, "Honey, you've got a job as long as you want it, and the apartment upstairs, if you want that." She had added, mystified, "But why you don't hang up your shingle and make a killing as a lawyer is more than I can see."

    Because, Barbara would have said if pressed. But Winnie never pressed anything. She had gone back to peel off the gown; then it would be closing time, and Barbara would go upstairs to the apartment, shed most of her clothes, and sit before a fan, near the air conditioner, with a tall, frosty drink. And finish her book.

    Her apartment was a sauna day and night. The air conditioner blew hot air and a fan pushed it around some more, but the air never cooled. Moving hot air was better than dead hot air. She turned on both the fan and the air conditioner as soon as she entered, then began to strip. In passing, on her way to get ice, she also turned on her answering machine, which was blinking. Why an answering machine, Winnie 'had asked--a legitimate question, since Barbara had known no one but her in Phoenix at the time. Because, she would have answered, if she had bothered at all. Some things traveled with her, that was all.

    The answering machine, a laptop computer, a hair dryer, a very good radio with a shortwave band, a complete set of Sherlock Holmes.. ..

    She stopped banging ice cubes from the tray when she heard her father's voice.

    "Call me." That was all.

    Damn him, she muttered, and finished making her drink--a glass filled with ice, a dash of vodka, and a lot of bitter lemon. Why couldn't he be like other people?

    Winnie's mother talked to the machine until the tape ran out. Winnie claimed her mother preferred the machine; it never talked dirty, never contradicted her, never sassed or hung up on her. Another friend, Maria, once played back a tape from her mother that she said was typical:

    "You tell her to call me when she gets in, you hear me?

    And tell her not to wait until the price goes down, either.

    I want to talk to that girl this afternoon. Now you just tell her I said this afternoon." They both had laughed.

    And her father simply said, "Call me." No identification, no number, no time of day. He expected her to recognize his voice, no matter what was going on. Yet, it wasn't really an order, she understood. It was the way he might say, "Put some gas in the car," or "Hand me that book."

    Then, sprawled in front of the fan, holding the drink that was dripping ice water on her stomach, she began to think of that cool, green river out in front of his house, and the cool, dim woods all around, and nights with a blanket on the bed throughout the summer.

    She never had lived in the house in the woods, but she had been there enough to remember how cool it was, how quiet. He had bought the house before his semiretirement, a place where he and her mother had gone weekends; after her death, after he decided he didn't have to work so hard, he had given up the house in town and moved out all the way.

    She rubbed the cold water off the glass and pressed her fingers to her forehead, her cheeks. Finally she put the drink down and reached for the phone.

    "Hi," she said cheerfully when he answered on the second ring.

    "How are you. Dad?"

    "Can you come stay with me a while?"

    She shook her head at the suddenness of his request.

    She had expected him to ask, but not like this, not cutting through the niceties.

    "I don't know. Are you ill? What-" "Bobby, I need you."

    A second shock hit her. Her father never had needed anyone in his life.

    "What's wrong?" she asked.

    His voice dropped lower.

    "Honey, I'm afraid I've bitten off more than I can chew. But I don't want to talk about it over the phone. Can you come?"

    She hesitated, the silence broken by noises from her clanking machines, line noise, a faint humming, a fainter burst of static, a click. All the reasons for saying no surged through her mind he was trying to manipulate her; she was through with everything he represented; she needed to get a job somewhere that wasn't Phoenix, that wasn't a hundred degrees by seven in the morning, but that wasn't Oregon. He would hate what she was becoming.... A sharper thought emerged: Just what the hell difference did it make where she was? And it would be cooler. At least it would be cooler.

    "As it happens," she said then, "I was going to leave here in the next day or two, head up to Minneapolis. Guess I could detour a bit, go by way of Oregon."

    "Good! Good. And honey, you'll be on payroll from this minute on, as a consultant. I'll be watching for you.

    Drive carefully." The line went dead.

    Damn him, she breathed as she banged down her receiver Damn him. She had responded to his simple statement of need; he had turned it into something else.

    She got up and made another drink, contemplated the telephone, reached for it, drew back, reached again, and shook her head. Then, the silent struggle resolved, she sat down before the fan again and let ice water drip on her midsection.

    She would drive the desert part by night, she decided.

    That night. Hit Las Vegas before twelve, stay holed up with the slots tomorrow, and make Reno the second night.

    After that, in northern California, on up through Oregon, it would be cooler. She would decide later how to continue She was thinking at the same time about her last lover, Craig, who had said she had something she had to settle in herself before she could settle anything with him.