Taltos (59 page)

“I told her all that, Dr. Jack,” said Granny. “She’ll nurse the baby soon as you leave, she’s a shy little thing.”

“Come on, Doctor,” said Mary Jane, “I’ll drive you back.”

“Damn, I wish there was another way to get home from here,” he said.

“Well, if I had a broom, we’d fly, now, wouldn’t we?” asked Mary Jane, gesturing for him to come on as she started her thin-legged march to the stairway, loose sandals clopping on the boards.

The mother laughed softly to herself, a girl’s giggle. She looked downright normal for a moment, with a bit of rosy color in her cheeks. Those breasts were about to burst. He hoped that baby wasn’t a snooty little taster and lip-smacker. When you got right down to it, it was impossible to tell which of these young women was the prettiest.

He lifted the netting and stepped up again to the bed. The water was oozing out of his shoes, just look at it, but what could he do about it? It was running down the inside of his shirt, too.

“You feel all right, don’t you, honey?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” she said. She had the jug of milk in her arms. She’d been drinking it in big gulps. Well, why not? But she sure as hell didn’t need it. She threw him a bright schoolgirl smile, just about the brightest he’d ever seen, showing a row of white teeth, and just a sprinkle of freckles
on her nose. Yes, pint-sized, but just about the prettiest redhead he’d ever laid eyes on.

“Come on, Doctor,” Mary Jane positively shouted at him. “Mona’s got to get her rest, and that baby’s going to start yowling. ’Bye now, Morrigan, ’Bye, Mona, ’Bye, Granny.”

Then Mary Jane was dragging him right through the attic, only stopping to slap on her cowboy hat, which she had apparently taken off when they’d come in. Water poured off the brim of it.

“Hush, now, hush,” said Granny to the baby. “Mary Jane, you hurry now. This baby’s getting fussy.”

He was about to say they ought to put that baby in its mother’s arms, but Mary Jane would have pushed him down the steps if he hadn’t gone. She was all but chasing him, sticking her little breasts against his back. Breasts, breasts, breasts. Thank God his field was geriatrics, he could never have taken all this, teenage mothers in flimsy shirts, girls talking at you with both nipples, damned outrageous, that’s what it was.

“Doctor, I’m going to pay you five hundred dollars for this visit,” she said in his ear, touching it with her bubble-gum lips, “because I know what it means to come out on an afternoon like this, and you are such a nice, agreeable …”

“Yeah, and when will I see that money, Mary Jane Mayfair?” he asked, just cranky enough to speak his mind after all this. Girls her age. And just what was she likely to do if he turned around and decided to cop a feel of what was in that lace dress that she had just so obligingly mashed up against him? He ought to bill her for a new pair of shoes, he thought, just look at these shoes, and she could get those rich relatives in New Orleans to pay for it.

Oh, now wait a minute now. If that little girl upstairs was one of those rich Mayfairs come down here to—

“Now don’t you worry about a thing,” Mary Jane sang out, “you didn’t deliver the package, you just signed for it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“And now we have to get back in that boat!”

She hurried on to the head of the lower steps, and he
sloshed and padded right behind her. Well, the house didn’t tilt that much, he figured, once you were inside of it.
Clickety, clickety, clickety
, there it was again. Guess you could get used to a tilted house, but the very idea of living in a place that was half flooded was perfectly—

The lightning let go with a flash like midday, and the hall came to life, wallpaper, ceilings, and transoms above the doors, and the old chandelier dripping dead cords from two sockets.

That’s what it was! A computer. He’d seen her in the split second of white light—in the back room—a very tall woman bent over the machine, fingers flying as she typed, hair red as the mother up in the bed, and twice as long, and a song coming from her as she worked, as if she was mumbling aloud whatever she was composing on the keyboard.

The darkness closed down around her and her glowing screen and a gooseneck lamp making a puddle of yellow light on her fluttering fingers.

Clickety, clickety, clickety!

Then the thunder went off with the loudest boom he’d ever heard, rattling every piece of glass left in the house. Mary Jane’s hands flew to her ears. The tall young thing at the computer screamed and jumped up out of her chair, and the lights in the house went out, complete and entire, pitching them all into deep, dull afternoon gloom that might as well have been evening.

The tall beauty was screaming her head off. She was taller than he was!

“Shhhh, shhhh, Morrigan, stop!” shouted Mary Jane, running towards her. “It’s just the lightning knocked out the power! It will go back on again!”

“But it’s dead, it’s gone dead!” the young girl cried, and then, turning, she looked down and saw Dr. Jack, and for one moment he thought he was losing his faculties. It was the mother’s head he saw way up there on this girl’s neck, same freckles, red hair, white teeth, green eyes. Good grief, like somebody had just pulled it right off the mother and plunked it down on this creature’s neck, and look at the size of this beanpole! They couldn’t be twins, these two. He himself was five foot ten, and this long, tall drink of
water was at least a foot taller than that. She wasn’t wearing anything but a big white shirt, just like the mother, and her soft white legs just went on forever and ever. Must have been sisters. Had to be.

“Whoa!” she said, staring down at him and then marching towards him, bare feet on the bare wood, though Mary Jane tried to stop her.

“Now you go back and sit down,” said Mary Jane, “the lights will be on in a jiffy.”

“You’re a man,” said the tall young woman, who was really a girl, no older than the pint-sized mother in the bed, or Mary Jane herself. She stood right in front of the doctor, scowling at him with red eyebrows, her green eyes bigger than those of the little one upstairs, with big curling lashes. “You are a man, aren’t you?”

“I told you, this is the doctor,” said Mary Jane, “come to fill out the birth certificate for the baby. Now, Dr. Jack, this is Morrigan, this is the baby’s aunt, now Morrigan, this is Dr. Jack, sit down now, Morrigan! Let this doctor get about his business. Let’s go, Doctor.”

“Don’t get so theatrical, Mary Jane,” declared the beanpole girl, with a great spreading smile. She rubbed her long, silky-looking white hands together. Her voice sounded exactly like that of the little mother upstairs. Same well-bred voice. “You have to forgive me, Dr. Jack, my manners aren’t what they should be yet, I’m still a little rough all over at the edges, trying to ingest a little more information, perhaps, than God ever intended for anyone of my ilk, but then we have so many different problems which we have to solve, for example, now that we have the birth certificate, we do have that, do we not, Mary Jane, that is what you were trying to make plain to me when I so rudely interrupted you, was it not, what about the baptism of this baby, for if memory serves me right, the legacy makes quite a point of the matter that the baby must be baptized Catholic. Indeed, it seems to me that in some of these documents which I’ve just accessed and only skimmed, that baptism is a more important point actually than legal registration.”

“What
are
you talking about?” asked Dr. Jack. “And where in God’s name did they vaccinate you, RCA Victor?”

She let out a pretty peal of laughter, clapping both of her hands together, very loudly, her red hair rippling and shaking out from her shoulders as she shook her head.

“Doctor, what are
you
talking about!” she said. “How old are you? You’re a fairly good-sized man, aren’t you, let me see, I estimate you are sixty-seven years old, am I right? May I see your glasses?”

She snatched them off his nose before he could protest, peering through them into his face. He was flabbergasted; he was also sixty-eight. She became a fragrant blur before his naked eyes.

“Oh, now this is major, really, look at this,” she said. And quickly put the glasses back on the bridge of his nose with perfect aim, flaring into detail again, with plump little cheeks and a cupid’s bow of a mouth just about as perfect as he’d ever seen. “Yes, it makes everything just a fraction bigger, doesn’t it, and to think this is but one of the more common everyday inventions I’m likely to encounter within the first few hours of life, eyeglasses, spectacles, am I correct? Eyeglasses, microwave oven, clip-on earrings, telephone, NEC MultiSync 5D computer monitor. It would seem to me that later on, at a time of reflection on all that’s taken place, one ought to be able to discern a certain poetry in the list of those objects which were encountered first, especially if we are right that nothing in life is purely random, that things only have the appearance from different vantage points of being random and that ultimately as we better calibrate all our tools of observation, we’ll come to understand that even the inventions encountered on two stories of an abandoned and distressed house, do cluster together to form a statement about the occupants that is far more profound than anyone would suppose at first thought. What do
you
think!”

Now it was his turn to let out the peal of laughter. He slapped his leg. “Honey, I don’t know what I think about that, but I sure do like the style with which you say it!” he declared. “What did you say your name was, you’re the one that baby’s named after, Morrigan, don’t tell me you’re a Mayfair, too.”

“Oh yes, sir, absolutely, Morrigan Mayfair!” she said, throwing up her arms like a cheerleader.

There was a glimmer, then a faint purring sound, and on came the lights, and the computer behind them in the room began to make its grinding, winding, start-up noises.

“Ooops, there we go!” she said, red hair flying about her shoulders. “Back on line with Mayfair and Mayfair, until such time as Mother Nature sees fit to humble all of us, regardless of how well we are equipped, configured, programmed, and installed. In other words, until lightning strikes again!”

She dashed to the chair before the desk, took up her place before the screen, and began typing again, just as if she’d completely forgotten he was standing there.

Granny shouted from upstairs, “Mary Jane, go on, this baby’s hungry!”

Mary Jane pulled on his sleeve.

“Now wait just a minute,” he said. But he had lost the amazing young woman, totally and completely, he realized that, just as he realized that she was purely naked under the white shirt, and that the light of her gooseneck lamp was shining right on her breast and her flat belly and her naked thighs. Didn’t look like she had any panties on, either. And those long bare feet, what big bare feet. Was it safe to be typing on a computer in a lightning storm in your bare feet? Her red hair just flooded down to the seat of the chair.

Granny shouted from above.

“Mary Jane, you got to get this baby back by five o’clock!”

“I’m going, I’m going, Dr. Jack, come on!”

“ ’Bye there, Dr. Jack!” shouted the beanpole beauty, suddenly waving at him with her right hand, which was at the end of an amazingly long arm, without even taking her eyes off the computer.

Mary Jane rushed past him and jumped in the boat. “You coming or not?” she said. “I’m pulling out, I got things to do, you want to be stuck here?”

“Get that baby
where
by five o’clock?” he demanded, coming to his senses, and thinking about what that old
woman had just said. “You’re not taking that baby out again to be baptized!”

“Hurry up, Mary Jane!”

“Anchors aweigh!” Mary Jane screamed, pushing the pole at the steps.

“Wait a minute!”

He took the leap, splashing into the pirogue as it rocked against the balusters and then the wall. “All right, all right. Just slow down, will you? Get me to the landing without dumping me into the swamp, would you do that, please?”

Clickety, clickety, clickety
.

The rain had slacked up a bit, praise God. And a little bit of sun was even breaking through the heavy gray clouds just enough to shine on the drops!

“Now, here, Doctor, you take this,” said Mary Jane, as he climbed into the car. It was a fat envelope just full of bills, and, he saw by the way she ruffled them with her thumb, all new twenties. He eyeballed that to be a thousand. She slammed the door and ran around to the other side.

“Now that’s just too much money, Mary Jane,” he said, but he was thinking Weed Eater, lawn mower, brand-new electric shrub clippers,
and
Sony color TV, and there wasn’t a reason in the world to declare this on his taxes.

“Oh, shut up, you keep it!” she said. “Coming out on a day like this, you earned it.” There went her skirt, back down to her thighs. But she couldn’t hold a candle to that flaming darling upstairs, and what would it be like to get his hands on something like that, just for five minutes, something that young and that sleek and fresh and that beautiful, with those long long legs! Hush now, you old fool, you’re going to give yourself a heart attack.

Mary Jane threw the car into reverse, wheels whirring in the wet shells of the road, and then made a dangerous one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and headed off over the familiar potholes.

He looked back at the house one more time, the big hulk of rotting columns and wood towering over the cypresses, with the duckweed muck lapping at its half-sunk windows,
and then at the road ahead. Boy, he was glad to get out of here.

And when he got home and his little wife Eileen said, “What all did you see out there at Fontevrault, Jack?” what was he going to tell her? Not about the three prettiest young women he’d ever seen under one roof, that’s for sure. And not about this wad of twenty-dollar bills in his pocket, either.

W
E INVENTED A
human identity for ourselves.

We “became” an ancient tribe called the Picts, tall because we came from the northern countries where men grow tall, and we were eager to live in peace with those who would not disturb us.