Gibbon's Decline and Fall (59 page)

Was she worried about Hal? Leaving him alone this way? That was ridiculous. He wouldn't be alone. Stace and Luce had promised to look in on him tonight, and again tomorrow. Or was she responding to some more global troubling? Something bigger than, worse than, more terrible than …

She made a wordless exclamation, and Ophy looked at her curiously.

“What?”

“Nothing, Oph. Goose walking on my grave, that's all.” She gritted her teeth. When she got back, she'd arrange for an exorcism! Until then … “Begone,” she muttered silently to the dark lurker inside her head. “Get away. Avaunt thee.” She pictured the lurker fleeing, departing, then concentrated on driving, creating a litany out of the dashboard indicators: oil pressure, mileage, temperature, rpm's, reading them over to herself, subvocalizing, then starting over to read them again.

Behind the backseat, curled into a nest of pillows, Lolly thought about going somewhere. She couldn't remember going anywhere ever before. Nobody was hitting her. Nobody was wanting her to do sex. Nobody was wanting anything from her. Here she was, like an egg. The thought came fuzzily, then settled. She'd made one once, in school, for Mrs. Gallegos. She'd made it out of construction paper and crayons. A nest made of scruffled-up pieces of brown paper with a blue egg in it. Waiting for some bird to come sit on her, hatch her into something.

It was an interesting thought. The first she could remember ever having.

A
S
J
AGGER DROVE ACROSS THE
tarmac toward his little chopper, he saw Martin waiting beside it. Jagger frowned, felt the frown collapse into a grimace, then attempted a smile, achieving only a weak and effortful result. Martin wasn't alone.

Should he go on? Or go back? He couldn't go back. They'd seen him. Keepe and Webster both.

He parked the car, making himself look pleased and surprised at their presence.

“This is wonderful,” he said, managing a grin. “Are you here to meet me, or are you headed somewhere?”

There was a pause before Keepe answered, as though suddenly energized. “Both. Mr. Webster feels you may need help.”

“Help? Well,” he allowed himself to look abashed. “I suppose it's possible. I didn't want to bother anybody, though, not until I know whether there's anything to this … this rumor.”

Martin shifted uncomfortably.

Webster spoke smoothly, calmly, as though they were discussing the weather. “More than a rumor, wouldn't you say? Your colleague here, your … associate says these women may know something … everything about what's happened.”

“It's remotely possible,” agreed Jagger, concentrating on keeping his voice even and agreeable. “That's why I was going to follow them.”

“Follow them where?”

“Wherever they're going. They're looking for the missing one, Sophy, the one who's supposed to know what happened. I thought it might be useful to find her.…”

“It's a place called Piedras Lagartonas,” Martin said stiffly.

“Piedras what?” Jagger asked.

Martin replied, “That's what I picked up before they left. The Crespin woman said it was down in the southwest corner of the state. If it's there, it's not on any of my maps. They left about half an hour ago.”

“And how were you going to follow them?” Webster asked.

Jagger swallowed, attempted a boyish smile. “Martin … was going to put some kind of beeper on their car. When they stopped for gas. With a receiver in my bird.”

“I sent someone else to do it,” said Martin. “And the receiver's in that red chopper over there.”

“You're … going yourselves,” said Jagger. There was a lump in his chest. Webster was watching him unblinkingly, and under the force of that gaze the hard lump in his chest swelled and throbbed, pressing on his heart, shutting off his breath.

“Is there some reason we shouldn't?” Webster asked mildly.

“No. No sir. Not if you want to. I was just trying to save you trouble.”

“Oh, I shan't trouble. I'll leave the trouble to you and Martin, and to Keepe. I'm sure the three of you can manage such a very simple thing. Particularly as I have … other things to attend to just now.”

“I see,” murmured Jagger, who did not see.

Webster smiled at him quite terribly before turning that searchlight smile on the others as well. “You'll follow the women until they find this Sophy. If they find her, you'll let me know. If they don't find her, you'll let me know and I'll decide what to do about that. There's no hurry to take off, is there, Martin?”

The man shook his head, swallowed, struggled to get enough saliva in his mouth that he could speak. “No, sir. We'll go a lot faster than they can.”

“Then we have time.”

Webster's face remained fixed in its dreadful smile as he took Jagger by the arm. Jagger staggered beside him, suddenly aware of pain. Heat radiated upward from the arm Webster held, up and across Jake's shoulders and chest, a burning sensation, an incapacitating agony, a horrid intimacy that moved toward his belly and groin, an inward violation, like being impaled on a fiery spear.

Webster said, “Sit here, on this bench. Let's have a little talk.”

Martin and Keepe remained where they were, turned slightly away, as though not wishing to observe whatever was taking place. Martin did this sensibly, as a man accustomed to not seeing too much, or hearing too much. Keepe did it involuntarily but with a horrible conviction that he had already seen and heard too much. His mind had not been his own since that terrible phone call. He seemed incapable of independent thought except at some remote, deep level that was unconnected to his body. His body wasn't his own. He wanted to walk away from this place, and he couldn't make his body do it. Instead, it twitched and jerked as though someone were pulling his strings. Unable to do anything of his own volition, he stood beside Martin, staring across the airport at the distant mountains, trying desperately to be unaware.

Behind them, across the tarmac, Webster and Jake were seated side by side.

“Now,” Webster said to Jake. “Tell me all about these women.”

Jake's mouth opened and words, came out, without plan, without thought. Jagger found himself telling about the aborted trial, quoting swatches of testimony, describing Carolyn as he had encountered her before, saying things he did not know he knew, making conclusions he did not know he had made.

“Excellent,” said Webster. “Very good, Jagger. What a very good candidate you would have made.…”

The words cut through to the self inside. “Would,” he gasped. “Would have made?”

Webster patted him on the shoulder. “Would have made. Not now. You were disobedient, Jagger. Emmet Swinter wasn't supposed to die, Jagger. You were supposed to do exactly, precisely as you were told.”

“But … but … Father …” The words came out in
a quavering bleat, like a sheep, a goat,
Baa … baa … Faaather
.

Laughter boomed like thunder, cracking the sky. Across the field Keepe reached out and clung to Martin's arm, held on to him, his eyes fixed firmly on the ground, not to see, not to look. A tearing sound came from behind them and ran between them, a real rip in the fabric of the earth, a tear that propagated itself across the tarmac, endlessly opening. It widened gapingly, a tongue of shadow licked out, and the rift closed with a noise like a gulp.

Martin removed Keepe's hand from his arm and stared blindly at the mountains. He wasn't here, he told himself. He was somewhere else.

Webster whispered, “Surely you don't mean that word, Jagger. I, Jagger? I? Look at you. Did you really think I would beget a son like you?”

There was a mirror in the air between Jagger and Webster, a consolidation of space, a shining surface in which Jake saw himself, naked, potbellied, and pig-eyed, dribbling urine, dripping saliva, shivering, his hands twitching, stinking of fluids, no better than a woman.…

“What,” Jagger gulped, the words coming up like knives in his throat. “Who. Who are you?”

“Oh, my boy,” Webster whispered to him from out of a radiant smoke. “You should have asked that question a long time ago.”

The drive southwest took the DFC straight through Santa Fe, down the highway to Albuquerque, then south toward Las Cruces, between the Black Mountains and the Jornada del Muerto.

“Journey of death?” asked Agnes. “Not a good omen.”

“Not an omen at all,” said Carolyn crisply. “It's historic comment, Aggie, not fortune-telling. When the Spaniards came through, they found no water and a lot of hostile warriors. A lot of the invaders died out there.”

“As we may,” said Aggie.

“Now, Aggie.” She made herself smile. “Come on! Nobody is going to bother us.”

“You don't know that. Someone … something could.”

“Aggie?” Bettiann leaned toward her, putting her hand on the other woman's arm. “Please. We're going to be all right.”

“Sorry.” Agnes shuddered. “I'm scared, and not just for my life.”

“Well, we're all scared,” said Jessamine from behind her.

“You didn't see what
I
did. In San Francisco.”

“No. I didn't. But I don't think it was diabolical. I don't believe Sophy was a devil. Nonetheless, we're all equally apprehensive about what we're trying to do, so let's try to keep up our spirits.”

“If I'm guilty—” Aggie started to say.

“You don't have any monopoly on guilt,” Ophy interrupted. “Maybe we're all guilty, we don't know. We don't know where we're going, or what we'll find, if and when we get there.”

“We don't have to go,” said Carolyn over her shoulder. “We can go back home, forget it.”

“No,” Aggie grated. “No, we can't do that.”

There was silence for a time.

“Where are we going to sleep?” Bettiann asked, her nose slightly wrinkled. “It doesn't sound as though we'll find accommodations where we're going.”

Carolyn responded, “If we get near Cloverdale, which probably isn't there anymore, we'll sleep on the ground. There are seven sleeping bags in the roof carrier. Ours and the ones Hal borrowed from the neighbors. There are three five-gallon water cans up there and my camp kit as well. I haven't used it in a while, but I remember how to light the stove.”

“Food?” asked Ophy.

“We'll stock up in Deming. With all the retirees moving down there, it's become quite a good-size town.”

“If one of my friends did this, I'd tell them it was a dumb idea. Six … seven women going off alone like this?” Bettiann sighed plaintively.

“What are you afraid of, Bets? Rape?” Faye laughed, making a hiccupy, burroish sound, ee-yaw, ee-yaw.

“Not funny,” Bettiann replied.

“Not really, no,” Faye agreed.

They fell silent again, all of them convinced they were doing a ridiculously dangerous thing, going off into nothingness like this. Carolyn read their minds. “I ask again, anyone want to go back?”

Silence. After a long time Faye said, “We can't. We swore an oath not to decline and fall. Not making this journey would be a fall. Whatever we can do, we must do.”

Murmurs from all the others: agreement—some strong, some weak, but agreement.

And Lolly's voice, “Who you lookin' for?”

Faye said, “An old friend of ours. Sovawanea aTesuawane.”

“That's a funny name. Sounds like the people my grandma used to know when she lived in the south in Terrenos Perdidos.”

Carolyn pulled the car to the side of the road and turned slowly around, speaking into the silence. “Terrenos Perdidos, Lolly?”

“That's what she called it. The place she lived when she was little.”

“It means ‘lost lands.' Did she live there with people?”

“She tole me about em. They wasn't people, not ezackly. They had names like that one you said. Okeah was one. And Setwon. And Toulenae. Those was my grandma's sisters.”

“Your grandma was Spanish, Hispanic?”

“She could talk it, but she said her sisters was something else.”

“Where was this place? Do you know?”

“Down south, she said.”

“And what did she call the people?”

Lolly shrugged. “She never called 'em anything. No, she did, I just remembered. She said they'd been there a long time, longer than us, so they was the real first Americans. Then she'd laugh.”

“Right,” said Carolyn. The others sat in stunned silence while she pulled the car back onto the road, which dropped off before them to allow the view of a hundred miles of open desert. At the edge of vision, beyond Las Cruces, was El Paso and then Mexico. That way lay a populated, traveled road. The way they were going, there'd be no one at all. Jackrabbits. Kangaroo rats. Javelina. And Terrenos Perdidos? Where in heaven's name had that come from?