End Time (8 page)

Again, maybe a connection to Janet, or Lila, their bodies or souls—wherever they were, wherever God had taken them. Deflated, defeated, Bhakti sighed and went back across the street. Tired, tired to the bone. Once inside, he barely glanced at Eleanor, who still stood by the drawn window curtain; the bed just as he'd left it hours ago looked up at him. And that's the last thing he remembered from that day.

*   *   *

Eleanor was gone when he woke up. She took the extra car, a wad of bills from his wallet, some clothes, and left a note.
Taking a little trip to see my sister. I have my cell.

Bhakti stared at the note. This was all so incomprehensible.

Leave? Now?

He simply stared at the scribbled scrap of paper. That would be sister Lauren; who still lived back east, up in Connecticut. Once upon a time Lauren and Eleanor were close, but then came their aunt's will and the disposition of the Fairfield house, and Eleanor got into a bit of a huff over not even getting a penny of Auntie's estate. The will was clear enough and nobody was in a mind to contest it.… Still, the slight became like a canker, swelling up with emotional pus and dissipating as the years rolled by. Then swelling up again.

Sister Lauren even tried to make amends, offering some money from a recent real estate killing. But Eleanor quietly shrugged it away, a day late and a dollar short, saying,
Well, you and Guy may have kids someday, so keep the money. We're fine.
Still, Bhakti knew it quietly rancored; so the two sisters' relations were in an off-year right now. God, what would Lauren think when Eleanor climbed out of the car without her crutches?

And without Janet? What absurd tale would she tell?
Yeah, Sis, Punjab husband is looking for our kid, so what's new with you?

After a two-thousand-mile trip, she might be back in the chair again. But the wheelchair stood in the living room near the front windows; damn, she hadn't even taken the wheelchair along.

Idly, Bhakti wondered when Eleanor would call and from where. He was so preoccupied with finding Janet he almost didn't notice that all the wives in the subdivision had hit the road for parts unknown. The Biedermeiers, the Stantons—every wife in every house. Vamoosed into thin air. And what was worse, nobody seemed to care. Bhakti watched all the men on the street come out of their respective front doors.

The husbands gathered on the asphalt for a moment in a rough circle, intermittently speaking as though each confirming to his neighbor the missing person in their lives. Then just as quietly they broke apart and went back to their houses, shutting the doors, the subdivision street empty again. This was Sunday morning, but no one came out to mow his lawn; no one played Frisbee or raced his kids' motorized toy cars in the street. No smell of backyard grilling, nothing.

A dismal quiet had descended over every house.

*   *   *

The next two weeks proceeded pretty much as Bhakti had feared in that fruitless car ride home from Sierra Blanca, leaving behind the girls' discarded clothes on the railroad tracks.

Endless days of handing out handbills, the trips to every border patrol post hundreds of miles east and west while the bitter sun stared back at him through his bug-splattered windshield. The calls to Eleanor on his cell that she ignored, choosing instead, distant perfunctory text message replies telling him not to worry—as if a stranger were pressing the keys. Exchanges with his wife raised more questions than they answered, but Bhakti couldn't be in two places at once. It was either look for his daughter or deal with a crazy wife, and the child came first.

The stale menus and meals in diners, the lonely motels with cheap bed coverlets and pillows that smelled faintly of mildew or even more faintly of some stranger's sleep from the night before. Always noticing the streak of dust where housekeeping missed a swipe across the TV screen, or that crooked Emmett Kelly clown oil over the bed.

Bhakti wore out faster than he thought he would. And it shamed him. A man was supposed to be relentless on the hunt, never tiring, never giving up. But two weeks in—he was worn to the bone.

So worn that when he came out of a local police department in Las Cruces, New Mexico, from yet another round of handbill handouts he almost walked right by Madame Zelda's. Dusk was still in the latter half of its magic phase, the sun down but not near night, the kind of blue that still had rose tips in its color, and touches of orange that always made Bhakti think of skies on alien worlds.

Of course, the astrology shop front wasn't called Madame Zelda's, but a little sign read:
SENORA MALVEDOS
. A narrow glass window, next to a narrower door lacquered up in dried and flaking robin's egg blue paint. The window glass showed a decal of palmistry, and another old decal of a Tarot deck—cracked red and orange and purple decals, blistered from endless New Mexico suns.

The palmistry decal showed five fingers and different regions of the human hand: Love, Marriage, Life, Heart, Head. Then the fingers named after ancients gods: Mercury, Apollo, Saturn, Jupiter. A dusty cactus sat at the base of the window, next to a crucifix with hanging Jesus dying for eternity.

A faint light shone through a crack in the velvet curtains behind the window: so somebody was home after all.

Bhakti pushed open the paint-flaked door and found himself in a front parlor: a couple of worn chairs, some magazines, a side table with perhaps two dozen icons of Catholic saints clustered together like a crowd of friends at a party. Bhakti, no expert in Catholic saints, couldn't tell one from the next. Maybe Saint Francis, because he held a bird in his palm.

Over the table an old flat-screen TV hung from the ceiling, playing to empty chairs. Another infomercial with that weirdo wearing the top hat and tails again—no,
a game show
this time; an enormous woman, naked to the waist, clutched her massive breasts and coyly exposed her back to the camera. The show's name: “Peer Pressure!”

The lanky creep in the tuxedo held a large mop and was swabbing off the woman's naked back with soapy water while the audience hooted and hollered.

Who the hell
was
this guy? The next “big thing”?

Then a midget in a tiny tuxedo came out throwing fistfuls of rainbow-colored goose feathers in every direction, many of which stuck to the soapy wench, making her look like an enormous rainbow chicken. A huge graphic blazed out of the screen, demanding,
So Who's Next?

The women in the audience clamored wildly, “Pick me! Pick me! Feather! Feather! Feather me next!”

Bhakti shook his head; people watched such crap.

The entranceway to the “inner sanctum” was a mere open door with thick ropes of dirty wooden beads. The beads clicked gently as Bhakti tore his eyes from the TV. A little Spanish girl of about nine stood there, thoughtfully biting the end of her thumb. She smiled coyly at him and twisted a lock of her black hair.

For the first time since he'd left the subdivision, Bhakti smiled back at someone. “Hello.”

But the little girl didn't answer, just smiled in that pert
I've got a secret
way so endearing in children under ten before they change into quasi-adults with adolescent sensibilities and advanced human flaws. Not knowing how to keep on with her, Bhakti asked, “Is Senora Malvedos available?”

A woman's voice came out of the inner sanctum, raspy as a crow's with a subtle cough. A lifetime of cigarettes. “Pick a saint.”

Bhakti hesitated, staring at the little girl, who hadn't moved from her spot at the beads. There was something different about her—not her looks, but beneath the skin. The words
child of the Magi
popped into his head. A child who walked before the Three Kings, an innocent brought into this world to see ahead, through cloud and storm, keeping those who searched, who sought redemption, on the true path—no matter how difficult or daunting. When Bhakti looked at her he could almost see her shining halo—that stylized golden circle in a thousand years of Christian art. And he had never felt or seen as much on any child before, even his own.

This blessed child was destined, fated for something. But what?

Could she mark his own path to Janet?

He had no clue.

Bhakti stared back down at the table covered with the little statuettes. There were so many saints, some with crowns, some holding little baby Jesus, some with rays of power emanating from their robes, some with wings and swords like angels, others with the globe of the world in their palms—how was he to pick? The voice cleared its throat again.

“You choose, you choose, and by your choice I can know.”

Still he hesitated. His hand strayed to one and then another, then fluttered back again.

The raspy cigarette voice came one last time, “Or let the girl pick.”

 

5

Frozen Smoke

The fortune-teller could tell a thousand things about people the moment she laid eyes on them. Whether they'd slept well the night before, whether they'd had sex in the last two months. Whether they were rich or poor. And whether they were faking about either. The first thing every palm reader learns is how to read the body, the clothes, the mannerisms. The way a person moved, crossed his legs, or sat down—you could always tell whether he was keeping a secret or trying to confess. Mostly it was both.

Senora Malvedos was good at reading people, always had been. And Little Maria was going to be very, very good. The saint statuette the girl brought in from the parlor wasn't Madonna of the Streets, or Saint Joseph—but Santa Judah. Saint Jude. The patron saint of lost causes. Little Maria's own reading of the tired, sad man before her—absolutely spot-on: a desperate human being, trapped in his own web perhaps, or crushed under an unbelievable burden. But Little Maria's choices were also warnings for the Senora, for these were not people with hopes, but people without hope, and they could turn on you in a flash. Harbor some crazy grudge. Come back later for revenge.

Yet the second she saw him, Senora Malvedos knew this man had no violence in him. Not for her, at any rate, not even if she told him he would die of cancer in six months. Or that his child was dead—

The hand
touched the back of her neck.
Oh God, not now. Not the real thing.
She feared and despised
the hand
; how to know if it came from God or the Devil? Oh, God, not now. Little Maria saw the flash of fear in the old woman's eyes, placed the statuette of Saint Jude on the table, and slowly shrank into a corner.

The last one had been easy, a year ago at least. The last time
the hand
had touched the back of the Senora's neck the client had been a brassy middle-aged woman who pulled up in a Ford Torino muscle car like a character out of a 1970s cop show. She wore a curious combination of biker leather pants, denim jacket with a small Confederate flag patch on the shoulder, and reading glasses like Mr. Geppetto specs out of
Pinocchio
. The woman had limped into the parlor, stumping along on crutches, and sat heavily at Senora Malvedos' table without even being asked. She seemed to have been pretty banged up, a car wreck maybe, but a little red scar under her ear told a different story, a stab wound? Maybe … but that wasn't the insight.

Without waiting for Senora Malvedos to perceive all manner of secrets, this strange gruff broad spilled her guts in bits and pieces. Wandering the deserts of New Mexico on a tourist visa from life she was trying to decide her future, lost as any stray. Whether to live out here in the clean wasteland until she healed up—or return to her saloon, Big Bea's Bar and Grill, where she polished beer mugs and fed her government disability into the business when things got tight.

Not to mention, she was worried sick over a wayward brother who had recently drifted away; an egghead, a bookworm—now they'd lost touch. But she was too beaten up, too bruised to go on the hunt for him.

On that day a year ago, Little Maria had brought in Saint Lucy, the blessed Virgin Lucy. A young woman in robes martyred by a Roman emperor; a gruesome image, the woman held a plate, and on the plate sat her plucked-out eyes. Yet for all that, a good saint to bring to the table, for Saint Lucy stood for virtue, zeal, and fidelity. The legend told of how when she rejected her pagan bridegroom, Roman centurions gouged out her eyes, and yet she still could see. So when the single finger touched the back of Senora's neck the vision had come like a welcome rain.

She saw the brother sitting in a darkened modern amphitheater, carefully tapping into his notebook. The lecturer, an egghead scientist, pointed at a light screen, his voice a nasal whine. There were no windows in the darkened amphitheater, but Senora could feel the weather outside. Rain lashed down across rolling hills. It had rained for many nights before; this had to be back east someplace, the Midwest maybe. Ohio …

New Job—that's where Younger Brother was hiding. Senora caught a fragment of the light screen images in the amphitheater: genetics, genetic engineering, rDNA—recombinant DNA.

“Not to worry,” Senora Malvedos told Big Sis. “He got that job he wanted. Engineering people, tiny threads in people. That very research position with that very special laboratory—”

The relief washed over the gruff woman's face. “That's right,” she said. Then with a smile, “Webster, that little brat told me it might be hush-hush. Believe it or not I helped him get that job—”

But the Senora had stopped listening; the hand gone. Her part done, now it was up to the both of them. Brother and Sister. Find each other or not. Money was shoved across the table, but Senora never took the money when the hand touched her. There was something grotesque and wrong about charging for her gift. So she just shook her head. “Not this time Senorita, maybe next.”

Now, right now with this sad brown man, no such luck. Only bad news coming for him. The man stared quietly across the table over the statuette of Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes.… The hand touched Senora Malvedos and she knew the question to ask.