The Devil's Alphabet (31 page)

Weygand smiled, took another bite of his sandwich. After a moment he said, “The thing they’re all wondering about is, what if it’s not a natural virus? What if it’s been genetically engineered?”

“Ah. The massive government conspiracy I’ve heard so much about.” It was by far the most popular explanation for the Changes, at least in the early days of the quarantine. Several people in his church had been certain that secular humanist scientists had experimented on them without their knowledge. Second most popular was the cover-up-of-high-tech-accident theory—Switchcreek as a genetic down-winder story.

“Not our government, man,” Weygand said. “They can’t even keep their top-secret torture prisons out of the news. I’m talking about those other universes. What if the Changes are a deliberate incursion?”

“The other universe is attacking us? Sure, that makes sense. Every fifteen years they take out some town in the boondocks. In 2030 they’ll finally get the Eskimos.”

“‘Attack’ is the wrong word. Think immigration. Colonization. They’re trying to cross over.”

Pax laughed. “My dad may be a bull elephant, but he’s still my dad. I find it hard to believe that he’s a colonist from Planet Fat Boy.”

“Bull elephant?”

“I meant chub. Charlie. My dad is—” Pax inflated his cheeks, exhaled. “—big.”

“Oh, shit. I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Pax said. “There’s a lot of it going around in this town.” Weygand didn’t seem to know what to say to that. He seemed genuinely sorry. After a moment Pax said, “I think I know what you’re getting at. It’s not my dad, per se.”
Per se
. This may have been the first time he’d said that aloud. “You mean his DNA.”

“Exactly,” Weygand said. “Any species that could learn to send its genes across the universes would go a long way to ensuring its own survival. The invaders would soon run into competition, though, because whatever species it colonized would
have
to figure out how to replicate too, because now it’s competing not only with all the other species on its planet, but with all its alternate selves across the universes.”

“Arms race,” Pax said, suddenly getting it. Or maybe he wasn’t understanding it on his own, he was … syncing up. Andrew’s thoughts seemed to be spilling into his own. “Argos versus chubs versus blanks.”

“Yes!” Andrew said. “And them versus
us.”
He hopped up, excited now. “Think about how weird it is that three
distinct
species came out of the Changes. It’s almost as if … Okay, say that the argos discovered the trick first. Maybe they even did it by accident. But anyway, they replicate into the universe of the betas. Then the betas figure it out—they engineer the virus to work for them. Now argos and betas are together in one universe, and together they invade the universe of the charlies. And so on and so on, across the universes, until they get to us. We’re at the front wave of a three-part war.”

“Wow,” Pax said.

“Yeah, wow.”

“So this is what your Homeland Security guy thinks? We’re at war?”

“He’s not
in
Homeland Security,” Weygand said. “He’s only nineteen. He writes about them.”

“Oh. Sure.”

For some reason they both laughed. Weygand sat down next to him. “This is the crappiest couch in the world,” he said.

“I should throw it out,” Pax said. Weygand’s arm was a few inches from his own, radiating heat.

A minute passed, maybe two.

Weygand said, “So, Paxton. What are you thinking right now?”

“I … I don’t know.”

Weygand laughed kindly. “Fair enough.” He leaned forward, knees on elbows. Pax regarded the architectural curve of his back, the frets of his spine. “I’ve been down this road before. Listen, why don’t you sober up and we’ll talk some more.”

Pax lifted his hand, then set it down between Weygand’s shoulder blades. Pax felt both his hand against his skin and the heat against his back; touched and toucher at the same time.

After a moment Weygand shook his head, laughing to himself. Or maybe laughing
at
himself. Then he started to get up, and as he rose Paxton’s palm slid down his back, each knuckle of his spine delivering a gentle tap. And then the contact was broken.

“I’ve got to get downtown,” Weygand said. “Maybe by the time I get back the twins will have shown up.”

Pax nodded.

“And get something to eat, okay, Pax?”

The twins didn’t come all that day, or the next.

They’d stayed away before, sometimes for days at a time, but this was the first time Paxton had waited for them, worried for them. The atmosphere in town had grown tense over the weekend. Friday afternoon a dozen beta women had driven to the Lambert Super Wal-Mart for their weekly Co-op shopping trip and walked into a line of pro-quarantine protesters. No one was hurt, but there’d been pushing and shoving; the betas had been forced to leave without their groceries. The store manager said that he’d arranged for the food to be delivered to the Co-op, but he’d made it clear to the reporters that he preferred that the Switchcreek people stayed at home until the protests died down.

Aunt Rhonda kept appearing on his TV screen, pushing for support of her new relief fund: Helping Hands to Babahoyo. She’d announced an 800 number; a software company in Memphis had already put up a supporting website. Three times Pax had seen her give what Weygand started calling the Azzamurkin speech: “As Americans, we’ve always been the first to reach out to those struck down by tragedy. As Americans, we
must share the hard-won knowledge we’ve gained about TDS. As Americans …” The flag pin on her lapel and the green ribbon—for the victims in Ecuador, she said—had become permanent accessories.

Weygand said, “You see what she’s doing?” Pax thought, Running for office? But Weygand didn’t wait for an answer. “At the same time that she says she’s supporting the Ecuadorians, she’s saying, They aren’t us.
We
are Americans,
we
are Christians. They’re just brown people who live far away and happen to have the same disease. She might as well be raising money for earthquake victims.”

“I bet they’d rather have had an earthquake,” Pax said. The death toll had stalled at 6,500, but only because the Ecuadorian government had clamped down on reporters. Babahoyo had been quarantined “for their protection and ours.” Rhonda announced that one of the first tasks of her charity would be to send volunteers to the city—and some of those volunteers would be Switchcreek citizens, led by the mayor herself.

“I’ll say this,” Weygand said. “She moves fast.”

Nothing sexual had happened with Weygand; they never even touched each other after that moment Thursday afternoon. By the time Weygand came home from Rhonda’s press conference Paxton was asleep on the couch, and when he awoke Weygand was in the kitchen burning soy burgers and the attraction Pax had felt had vanished. For perhaps an hour he’d been someone Pax desired, someone he
understood
—and then he wasn’t.

The next day Weygand helped Pax work on the yard. Pax kept trying to apologize and Weygand repeatedly told him not to worry about it. Pax wanted to explain that he wasn’t like one of those gay-for-a-day frat-party lesbians—he’d slept with a
couple of men. A few women too. And it wasn’t the vintage that made him suddenly want Weygand—or not
just
the vintage. He’d been this way since leaving Switchcreek. Most of the time he wasn’t attracted to anyone at all, and then he was—for a few hours. His desire for whatever body ended up next to him never seemed to last longer than it took him to put on his pants.

Women thought he was gay. Men thought he was straight but playing tourist. And Pax thought he was … waiting. The last time he’d felt anything real—the last time
he
felt real—was with Jo and Deke. The three of them had been perfect together, a completed circuit. Everything since had been pantomime.

On Sunday afternoon Weygand told him that he was driving back home in the morning—friends in Amnesty International were organizing a group to drive into Ecuador from Colombia and record what was happening inside the city. Pax thought he was crazy; he could end up in a South American jail. Weygand shrugged it off. “What about this laptop thing? Are we going to do this or not?”

Paxton had no phone number for the twins, and he didn’t even know where they lived inside the sprawl of trailers at the Co-op. Nothing to do for it but go over there and ask. “How about you drive?” Pax said.

The gates to the Co-op—the Whitmer farm’s old iron cattle gates—were closed. Two teenage girls in white scarves, perhaps a few years older than Rainy and Sandra, sat on the other side in lawn chairs.

“Everybody’s getting paranoid in this town,” Pax said to Weygand, and got out of the car.

The girls looked at him but didn’t get up. A small black music player rested on one of their laps, and they were sharing a single red headphone cord, one earbud apiece.

“Hi, girls,” he said. “I’m looking for Sandra and Lorraine—the Whitehall twins?” Stupid: of course they had to know who Sandra and Rainy were.

“Nobody told us you were coming,” one of them said.

“I didn’t know I needed reservations.” He smiled. They watched him with small tight mouths. “So. Can I come in?”

The girls looked at each other. One of them pulled the bud from her ear and walked off toward the center of the compound. She could at least run, Pax thought. The remaining girl inserted the other earpiece and immediately lost interest in him.

Pax looked at Weygand through the windshield, shrugged.

He rested his forearms on the top of a gate and looked up at Mount Clyburn. It was the first week of October, but the afternoon sunlight was still summer-strong. It wouldn’t be long until the leaves began to turn, crowning the mountain, then seeping down in a months-long wave until the valley was drenched in color. He’d forgotten how long spring and fall were in Tennessee—in Chicago those seasons went by in a blink, just a couple weeks to toggle the thermometer between Too Damn Cold and Too Damn Hot. Why in the world had he stayed up there? When he turned eighteen he could have moved south, could have moved anywhere. For some reason he’d made the choice binary—Chicago or Switchcreek.

The girl who’d walked off was returning with another beta, a man wearing a baseball cap. Tommy. Sandra and Rainy were nowhere in sight.

Pax ran a hand across the back of his neck. He and Weygand
could leave now, but that would look like they were doing something wrong. Pax waved hello and waited.

Tommy stopped a few feet from the gate. “What can we do for you, Paxton?”

“I was worried about Sandra and Rainy,” Pax said.

Tommy tilted his head. “Why would you be worried?”

Pax couldn’t read Tommy’s tone. Did he know that the twins had been visiting him?

“I heard about the stuff in Lambert Friday, at the Wal-Mart. I thought maybe they’d be upset by what was happening.” It sounded lame even to himself. “I can see you guys are taking precautions.”

“There are hooligans on the road. Knocking down mailboxes, vandalizing. We thought it better to keep an eye out.” Then: “The girls are fine.”

“That’s great,” Pax said. “Do you think I could see them?”

“Who’s your friend?”

Pax looked back at the Prius. “His name’s Andrew. He was a friend of Jo’s.”

“No he wasn’t,” Tommy said.

“You didn’t know all her friends, Tommy.” He wasn’t about to tell Tommy anything about Andrew, or about Brother Bewlay and Jo’s online life. “So how about I talk to Rainy and Sandra for a while, and then leave you alone.”

Tommy stepped forward and put his hands on the gate. The man was trembling—from rage? Something else?

“The girls are staying home, Paxton. You may be too distracted to notice, but there’s a crisis going on. We’re not going to have them—
I’m
not going to have them—running around unsupervised, not until it’s safe. But even then, even when this blows over?” He glanced at the two girls sitting a few feet away
and lowered his voice. “I can’t believe you have to be told this. They’re twelve-year-old girls, Paxton. You’re a grown man. If you come around looking for them again, or if you ever bring them into your house, I’ll call the police.”

“What? I’m not—”

“I don’t know how this works up in Chicago, but here in Tennessee the cops do
not
tolerate pedophiles.”

Paxton stepped back, his face hot.

“Good-bye, Paxton.” Tommy stood with his hands at his sides, unmoving. After a long moment, Paxton turned, got back into the car.

Tommy was still standing there when the car pulled away.

“W
E CAN
NOT
BE
late for the appointment,” Donna told him as they stepped down from the Jeep. “The egg-timer is going off.”

Deke laughed and plucked the plastic sacks from behind the driver’s seat. “They’ll keep warm for a couple more minutes. We’ll just drop this off and leave.”

The only other cars in the Martin driveway were the Reverend’s old Crown Vic and Paxton’s Tempo—no Prius in sight. He’d heard that Andrew Weygand had left town again, and it looked like he hadn’t come back—yet.

The house was looking better than it had in several years. The lawn had been cut sometime in the last week, and the tall growth that had been encroaching on the yard had been hacked back several feet. The old swing set had been dismantled and lay in a pile beside the driveway, next to the ancient plaid couch. Deke made a mental note to take care of those for him—Amos could haul them to the dump in the company truck.

The front door was open. Deke knocked on the frame and leaned in. “P.K.! You up?” It was 9:30 in the morning. He wasn’t sure what kind of hours he was keeping.

Paxton walked into the living room, drying his hands on a kitchen towel. “Hey, Deke. Hey, Donna.”

He’d lost more weight, and he hadn’t been fat to begin with.
At the town meeting a couple weeks ago he’d looked too thin for a skip, but now he was gaunt, his head too big for his neck. If he’d been growing taller at the same time he was thinning out you’d have thought he was turning argo.

Pax motioned them in. He asked them how they were doing, if they’d like something to drink.