Hot Shot (18 page)

"The banks are run by morons. They don't have any vision. They're fossils. Monumental dinosaurs."

He had obviously tried the banks.

She lifted up her sandal and let the sand that had collected under her toes drift out. "What are you going to do?"

He gave her a searching look. "It's what are
we
going to do, isn't it? You're part of this. Or are you planning to run home to daddy and Calvin?"

The schoolyard lights caught the amber flecks in his eyes. She shivered. "That isn't fair."

"I don't give a shit about fair. I want to know. Are you in or out?"

"I want to be with you, Sam."

"That's not what I'm asking."

He was backing her into a corner, and she was frightened. Awkwardly, she slid down off the tire and looked beyond him to the dark borders of the playground. "I don't have any money. In case you were counting on it, you should know that I can't help you. My father controls everything."

"I don't expect money from you," he said angrily. "That's not why I want you with me.

Goddammit! Is that what you think I want from you?"

"No, of course not." But just for a moment, she had thought exactly that. "I don't have anything, Sam—no clothes, no money, no place to stay."

"I didn't ask for a frigging dowry! We'll get you some clothes and you're staying with me.

Are you in or out, Suzie?"

He was so certain, always so certain. The darkness at the edge of the playground suddenly seemed to be full of menace. "I told you. I want to be with you."

"You can't be with me and not be part of this."

What was she going to say? She was a practical person. The only impractical thing she had ever done in her adult life was fall in love with Sam Gamble. "It's not that simple."

She turned away from him, but he came right up behind her.

"Bullshit. I want to know!"

"Don't bully me!"

"I want to know, dammit! Don't keep throwing up all these artificial barriers. Do you have the guts to go through with this or not? Do you have the guts to put yourself to the test?"

She spoke rapidly, pushing out the words before he could stop them. "It's not just a matter of guts. I have to be practical. I need to support myself."

"That's not the most important thing! Supporting yourself isn't the most important thing.

You don't need money or clothes. Those are just excuses. It's your soul. That's what's important. That's all anybody really has. Don't you see? If you want your soul to survive

—if you want it to grow and thrive instead of shriveling up and drying out like it was doing in that mausoleum at Falcon Hill, you have to dare. You have to give the world the finger, and you have to dare."

How he could talk. How this man could talk. She hugged herself against the night and the chill and the menace at the edge of the playground.

He caught her arm. His eyes blazed. "Suzie, listen to me. We're living on the threshold of a new society—a whole new way of doing everything. Can't you feel it? The old ways don't work anymore. People want information. They want control. They want power!

When you look at Yank's circuit board, all you see is a collection of electronic parts. But what you should be seeing is a wave—this little wave way out in the water, far away from shore. This little hump of water that's just starting to form. But this little hump of water keeps coming closer. And the closer it comes, the more it starts to pick up speed.

And then, pretty soon you look up and—Christ!—its not a little hump any longer but a great big wall of water that's risen up so high you can see it looming against the sky. You can see a white crest starting to form on the top like a crown. And that white crest is getting bigger and it's starting to churn and curl over at the top. And then you hear the noise. This tidal wave of water is picking up speed and it's starting to roar. And before long it's gotten so loud you have to hold your hands over your ears. That's when you start stepping backward. You don't want the wave to knock you down, and you're stepping backward faster and faster. And then—that's when you realize it. That's when you realize that no matter how fast you run, that motherfucker is going to slam right down on top of you. It's going to slam right down on top of everybody in the world. That wave is the future, babe. It's the future, and it's Yank's machine. And once that wave hits, none of us will ever be the same again."

He was filling her with his words just as earlier he had filled her with his sex. He was filling up her body and taking it over. The words caught her, heaved her about in their undertow and made it hard for her to breathe. But for all his talk, Sam didn't really understand what it meant to dare. He had nothing to lose. He lived in an ugly little house with a painting of Elvis Presley on the wall. He owned a stereo system and a Harley-Davidson. When Sam talked about not being afraid to dare, he wasn't risking anything.

She—on the other hand—was risking it all.

He touched her. He cupped her face in his hands and stroked her cheeks with his thumbs.

The wave washed her up on shore, and she experienced that helpless feeling women throughout the centuries have known when they realize that loving a man means loving his vision as well, that it means traveling across oceans, across continents, that it means being uprooted from family and giving up the safe for the unknown. "I—I need to think about this. Tomorrow, while you're at work, I'll think about it."

"I'm not going to work tomorrow."

"Why not?"

"I quit. I'm
in
, Suzie. I'm in all the way."

"You quit your job?" she said weakly.

"Last week. Now how about you? Are you in or out?"

"I—I don't know."

"Not good enough."

"I need time."

"There isn't any."

"Don't do this, Sam. Please don't badger me like this."

"I want to know, Suzie. Right now. Make up your mind. Are you in or out?"

She felt as if she were eons older than he was instead of only a year—millennia older in experience. A lifetime of dinner-table conversations drifted back to her. She saw hurdles he couldn't imagine, difficulties his visionary's eyes hadn't begun to glimpse. Everything she had learned from the day she was bom urged her to tell him she couldn't help him and then to run back to Falcon Hill and beg her father's forgiveness.

But she loved him, and she loved the new spark he had ignited inside her—a spark that had been lit by his reckless energy, a spark that wanted to grow brighter and become stronger. A spark that was urging her to follow this restless young man she had so unwisely fallen in love with right off the edge of the earth.

When she finally spoke, her voice was shaky and barely audible. "I'm in."

Chapter 10

Yank's Duster coughed like an emphysema victim as Susannah drove north to Falcon Hill several days later. She had owned high-performance automobiles all her life, and until this moment she hadn't realized a car could behave like this one. She thought about using the car as an excuse to go back, but then imagined how Sam would scoff at her if she returned without getting the things she needed.

Each day it had grown more difficult for her to live without her possessions. Sam had given her money to get a new prescription filled for her birth control pills, and although that had been her most pressing need, it was only one of them. She needed her reading glasses and her driver's license. She needed clothes to replenish her borrowed wardrobe.

No matter how much she wanted to avoid it, she hadn't been able to postpone going home any longer.

The gates loomed ahead of her. Sam had given her the small electronic gadget he had used to release the locks, but she didn't need it. It was Thursday morning and the gates were open for a grocery delivery. As she turned into the drive, she remembered the newspaper gossip column from last Sunday's paper that she had stumbled upon. It had contained a sly account of what had happened at her wedding and was accompanied by a picture of herself and Cal "in happier times." Sick at her stomach, she had tried once again to reach her father, this time at his office. His secretary had pretended not to know who she was and informed her that Mr. Faulconer was currently out of the country.

Her trepidation grew as she parked the Duster in the motorcourt and climbed the front steps to the house. While she waited for someone to answer the bell, she wished a familiar household retainer would appear—one of those mythic housekeepers of fiction who would welcome her home with a tart scolding and a warm plate of cookies. In reality, Falcon Hill's current housekeeper had a small tattoo on the back of her hand and had only been with them a few months.

The slim hand that opened the door, however, bore no tattoo.

"Paige?"

"Well, well, the runaway bride returns."

Susannah was astonished to see her sister, but even more surprised to see that Paige was wearing one of Susannah's own silk dresses instead of her customary blue jeans. Antique gold earrings glimmered through her hair. They were the ones Joel had bought Susannah as a high school graduation present.

A smirk distorted Paige's pretty mouth. "I can't believe you have the nerve to come back."

"What are you doing here?"

Paige's eyes skimmed Susannah's tidy hair and untidy outfit, then flicked to the battered Duster in the driveway. "Falcon Hill is my home, too. Or have you forgotten that?"

There was an expression of such smugness on her sister's face that Susannah felt sick.

"I'm just surprised, that's all. Is Father home?"

"Luckily for you, no. You've been declared persona non grata for the rest of your natural life. He's left orders that your name is no longer to be spoken in this house. You're being disinherited, spurned—I actually think he's trying to find a way to un-adopt you. Right out of the Old Testament."

Susannah had known it would be bad, but not this bad.

Like someone deliberately probing a sore tooth, she inquired, "What about Cal? How is he?"

"Oh, he's just peachy—considering the fact that he's been publicly humiliated. It's a miracle the newspaper story hasn't gotten bigger play, but you've still managed to make him look like the Bay Area's biggest asshole."

Susannah didn't want to think about what a terrible thing she had done to Cal. She couldn't bear any more guilt.

"Actually, it's been pretty interesting around here. It's starting to feel as if you never existed. As if you never came into our lives."

Susannah didn't want to hear any more. She moved forward, ready to slip past Paige and get what she needed, but Paige sidestepped, blocking the way. "You can't come in, Susannah. Daddy's forbidden it."

"But that's ridiculous. I need to get some of my things."

Triumph glittered in Paige's eyes. "Maybe you should have thought of that before you ran off with your stud."

"He's not a—"

"I thought you were a virgin. Isn't that a hoot? If you had to have a toy boy, Susannah, you could at least have been nice enough not to wave him in Daddy's face."

Susannah mustered her dignity. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone. I just couldn't help it."

"Don't tell me you couldn't help it!" Paige's smugness dropped away, and for a few moments she looked as befuddled as a child. "I thought I knew you, but that's not true at all. The person I knew wouldn't have run off like that. God, Susannah…" And then her hostility slipped back into place like the click of a lock. "Not that I care."

Susannah tried to make her understand. "I couldn't stand it any longer. I love Father, but I felt as if he was choking me to death. And Cal was becoming an extension of him. They were making me feel old. I'm only twenty-five, but I felt like an old lady. I didn't really expect either of them to understand, but I thought you would."

"I don't understand any of it. All I know is that perfect Susannah isn't so perfect anymore.

For the first time in my life, Daddy has stopped waving all those unlimited virtues of yours in my face. Do you know how long I've waited for this? He talks to me at dinner now. He tells me about his day. He doesn't even miss you, Susannah!"

Susannah felt weak under the strength of Paige's antipathy. A bittersweet image passed through her mind of a crayon picture Paige had drawn when she was in kindergarten. The two of them had been holding hands and standing together under a rainbow. Whatever had happened to those two little girls?

"We're sisters," Susannah said. "I've tried to watch out for you."

"Half sisters. And you're not the only one who knows how to play Lady Bountiful. Wait for me here. I'll put some of your things together and bring them out to you."

Before Susannah could react, the door to Falcon Hill had been firmly slammed in her face.

Paige delivered Susannah's possessions in two shopping bags from Gump's. She had included the reading glasses and driver's license as well as miscellaneous pieces of clothing, none of it Susannah's best. There was no jewelry, nothing of monetary value.

When Susannah returned to the Gamble house, she put the clothes neatly away in Sam's closet and tried not to dwell on Paige's vindictiveness.

While the printed circuit boards were being finished, Sam had been trying to raise money to buy the parts they needed. He brought his former coworkers to the garage and enveloped them with his rhetoric, speaking of a new society in which ordinary people would have the power of the universe at their fingertips. Exactly what they were to do with that power, he never defined. Gradually Susannah realized that he had only the vaguest idea himself what ordinary people would really do with a computer.

Even as she stood mesmerized at his side, she found herself growing increasingly uneasy.

Not only didn't they have a definable market for their product—they couldn't even tell future customers what to use it for. By the weekend he had raised less than eight hundred dollars. It was only a fraction of what they needed.

She spent all of her spare time at the local library reading everything she could find about starting a small business.

She wanted to learn as much as possible so that she could set her discoveries before him as small gifts of her love. But it didn't take her long to discover that they weren't doing anything right. They had no money, no denned market for their product, no experience.