The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (20 page)

The shot had come from Buzz’s left. A red jacket flashed farther up the slope. The General was racing down towards Buzz, who led the way.

The stag was lying on its side on a bed of oak leaves and pine needles. Blood trickled from a hole in its neck just above the shoulder blade. It wheezed. Buzz had never heard a deer breathe. It lay still, then pawed in the leaves with its horizontal front legs. Its hind legs were plainly paralyzed. The antlers tipped back and forth. Bright blood beaded on fur and glittered on the leaves. The smell of smoke, of wood smoke, hot smoke, grew stronger in Buzz’s nose.

Norris was catching his breath through his teeth.

“Good shot,” Buzz said.

“This baby can shoot. You wanna do the honors?”

Buzz’s stomach jumped. “No. Go ahead.”

Norris extended his hand like a surgeon. Buzz fumbled with the thong and placed the machete in the waiting hand. When Norris knelt Buzz shut his eyes. He heard the rip of flesh and connective tissue. He opened one eye. Blood was falling in a fat, fast, lumpy stream from the stag’s opened jugular. Norris smiled. “C’mere.”

Buzz shook his head.

The smile intensified. “
C’mere
.”

Buzz looked blankly away. His eyes burned. The air seemed to be hazing up with smoke. He heard another long rip of flesh. The General had slit the deer’s belly. He stood and put an arm around Buzz’s shoulders. “Your trophy, too,” he said, and led him to the carcass, and pulled him to his knees. The blood steamed, ferric, pungent. Buzz’s old thighs shook and gave way. He slumped back onto his heels.

Dust speckled the deer’s staring eyes.

“Feel the heart,” the General said.

“What?”

“Feel it. Hotter than any Injun bitch.”

Buzz watched the wave of blood sliding from the slit belly. “What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Feel it.”

“Wait a minute.”

“Feel it, Buzz.” The General grabbed his wrist and thrust his hand into the animal, under the rib cage and through the ruptured peritoneum. It was hot. Buzz groped. He located the unbeating heart. It was hot and his whole body grew sick with transformation, heat barreling up through his chest into his brain, the smoke in his lungs and face, throbbing in the passages, searing skin. The animal had defecated. Everything smoked, and Buzz, unhinged by the heat, thrust his other hand in, too. IT WAS HOT.

“All right.” The General was standing over him, smoking a bloody cigar. Buzz pulled away from the gore. His sleeves were crimson and sticky all the way up past the elbows. His fingers began to stiffen in the cold air. “You pass, Buzz boy,” the General said. “You hang this sucker in the den, and remember this the next time she go scratching your palm.”

Buzz looked up with a guilt that felt like love. He’d passed. The General, towering above him, drew heavily on the cigar and exhaled. But the smoke was invisible. The air was white. Buzz’s eyes wandered.

“Oh my,” he croaked.

A giant column of nimbus-gray smoke was rising in the east, from the center of his land. His land was burning.

The General turned. “Jesus.”

Buzz tried to stand up, tipped back, shoved off the ground with his arms, and rose unsteadily.

The General was already running. Buzz ran after him, leaving everything behind, gun, machete, trophy. The General carried his rifle above his head like a spear. His speed was incredible for a sixty-year-old businessman. He left Buzz in the dust.

“General, wait!”

The red jacket swerved and bobbed, receding up the hill on the far side of the meadow.

“Wait!” It was pointless. Buzz stopped and coughed and retched. Big clouds tumbled across the meadow. The sun had dwindled to a hazy beige star.

Call the county fire marshal.—The closest phone?

Kids in the farmhouse. He’d seen the phone lines.

He ran for the corner of his property and fell a dozen times in two hundred yards, landing in briars. Fresh pink slashes opened on the stained skin of his hands. He reached the fence, found the deer gate, and plodded desperately down the old weeded-over road to the farm.

Faded work clothes and yellowed underwear hung on sagging lines behind the farmhouse. He rapped on the back door and looked over his shoulder. The smoke column was widening and slanting south in the gentle, seasonable wind. On a day like this a fire would spread faster than a man could walk. Buzz rapped again, tried the door, and found it unlocked. He went inside. There was a nasty smell in the kitchen that seemed to come from the sink, where the remains of a bright orange stew were floating in a pot. Buzz saw cookbooks on the windowsill.
Whole-Grain Treasures. Laurel’s Kitchen. Staples of India. Deena’s Guide to Cooking with the Weed
. On the wall by the stove was a phone. He dialed zero and asked for the fire marshal.

The marshal said the fire had been reported. Local departments had been notified and a man had been sent up to dust.

“A plane?” Buzz said.

“Yes sir. What’s the water situation?”

“Not good. The streams are pretty low.”

“Firebreaks?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“We’ll do our best.”

The line went dead. Buzz ran out of the house and retraced his steps across the pasture and up the road. In the meadow, he stopped. The smoke had thickened, piling on in layers, shifting, settling, choking. Manpower, neighbors: he needed help with the fire, but he didn’t know his neighbors. There was too much wood, not enough field, and apple trees were growing in the middle of the only roads in. It took a plane…

He heard it. Approaching from behind him, the plane cut into
view above the trees, still high but dropping. Tufts of orange fire retardant fell from its pipes. Reverently he watched it glide overhead and dive towards the smoke. The engine quieted, and as the wings cut into the downwind fringes of the column, he heard a gunshot. He heard two more, at two-second intervals. He dropped to his knees and clutched his hair.

Another shot.

“General,
stop
!” he yelled.

Another shot.

Its engine groaning afresh, the plane banked up and away from the smoke without releasing its load. It veered off to the south at a dangerous angle. Buzz lost it in the trees, and the General, his magazine empty, ceased his fire.

“Martin? It’s Norris.”

“Oh.” Probst’s eyes fell shut. “Morning.” Saturday morning, eight o’clock. Raindrops were inching down the windows, the gutters were creaking, and water splashed quietly in the bathroom as Barbara showered. “What can I do for you, General?”

“Martin, are you busy?”

“I was sleeping.”

“Reason I’m calling so early—you mind looking out your front window?”

“Maybe you could just tell me what’s out there,” Probst said.

“My car. I’m speaking from my car. Are you busy?”

“I have a tennis date at eleven.”

“We should be back by three or four.”

“I see.” Probst stretched his leg into the cool territory on Barbara’s side of the bed. “Where are we going?”

“Mexico.”

“Mexico. I see.”

“I’ll explain,” the General said. “Don’t worry about breakfast. I’ve got that under control.”

“You’re under the impression I’m going to Mexico with you?”

“Just come on out. I’ll explain.”

“Look, General. I can’t go waltzing off for the entire day.”

“I would’ve called yesterday, Martin, but the element of surprise.”

“I’m surprised all right.”

“Not you. Them. It won’t take but a few hours. This is important.”

“If it’s about Jammu again—”

The General hung up. Probst kicked back the covers and rolled out of bed. His head ached. Last night they’d had hot Szechuan platters and a lot of beer with Bob and Jill Montgomery, out in Chesterfield. He strode to the bathroom and turned the doorknob.

Locked?
Locked?

“Just a minute!” Barbara sang.

What the hell? Locked the door?

He stormed back across the room, around the corner, down the hall, and burst into the bathroom through its unlocked flank. The Vitabath-saturated steam took his breath. Barbara poked her head through the shower curtain and gave him a puzzled, smiling frown. “What?”

“I want to shave.”

She frowned more deeply, hurt. “Go ahead.”

“Haven’t you been in there long enough?”

Her head disappeared. The water stopped. She never gave a thought to how much of it she used. “Hand me a towel.”

He grabbed a towel from her rack and parted the curtains. She jumped, shuddering, to make him feel like a stranger and a brute.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “General Norris is sitting in his car out in front.”

She wrapped herself in the towel without drying off and left with a slam. He opened the door and called after her, “I’m sorry!”

“Whatever for?”

Things had been bad since Luisa left.

He wet his beard with an inefficient one-handed tossing motion. Water coursed down his chest to the waistband of his pajamas, and he tried to hip-check it into the sink, but it had already gained the inside of his leg, trickling down as if unzipping him. He squirted a blob of shaving cream onto his left wrist, above the curved aluminum splint, and lathered his face with his right hand. He’d always used his left hand for lathering. His face felt unfamiliar, full of inaccessible nooks and crannies.

After he’d fought his way into the clothes he’d worn the night before (they smelled like restaurant), he went down to the kitchen
and had Barbara tie his laces. She double-knotted them. The General honked the horn of his Rolls long and loud.

Probst was halfway down the front walk when Barbara spoke his name. He turned back. “Call me?” she said.

The horn honked again. He smiled in her direction and nodded. The door shut, and Barbara walked into the green gloom of the living room. She watched the car, the black hearse, swallow her husband. Alone, she let her gaze travel the length of the living room and back, and wished Luisa might step out of the closet, might step out and say anything, anything at all, say, “The big bowl was too hot, the middle bowl was too cold, but the little bowl, it was ju-u-u-u-u-u-st right”: Luisa, the conditional Goldilocks who’d arrived to steal the porridge and break the chair and left again to live happily ever after elsewhere, in the land of human beings…. Mama Bear padded through the enchanted forest to the kitchen and poured herself some coffee. She sat down at the table, and wiped her eyes, and sniffed. She would write Goldilocks another letter. Although they spoke on the phone every day, she and Goldilocks, it wasn’t enough. She wrote the date on the top page of her letter pad, December 9, and smoked a Winston, reworking her addiction, doing it consciously this time, noticing how. She never begged Goldilocks to come back. Goldilocks wasn’t an object, wasn’t an appliance. She was a person. She was acting one way now, but someday, soon, she’d act another way. For now, it pleased Mama Bear to see Papa Bear’s equilibrium upset. She wasn’t going to fix his life for him. But she wasn’t going to shut up, either. In an hour she’d call. For now, Dear Luisa. I’ve been Christmas shopping.

The smoke was bothering Probst. “Can I open a window?”

The General opened his own window and threw his cigar into the rain. It landed in the far gutter, like a roll of dog dirt. The traffic light turned green. Through the green-tinted windows it looked almost white. The engine hummed as the General accelerated up a wet empty ramp onto the Inner Belt. Probst looked again at the note he’d been given when he got in the car.

Probst slapped his thigh. “Gosh, it’s been ages since I was in
Mexico
.”

Norris gave him a severe look, but handed him another doughnut.

“So how’s Betty?” Probst said, munching.

“Betty’s well. President of the school board now.”

“I guess that means textbook hearings?”

“Not if she can avoid it.”

The northern extension of the Inner Belt cut between young apartment complexes and young windowless commercial facilities and brown morsels of parkland. In St. John, in the rain, Probst caught a glimpse of a tall old man in a bathrobe hanging a wreath on his balcony railing.

“Do you mind if I use your phone?” he asked.

“Go right ahead.”

He punched in the Ripleys’ number and got Audrey. He couldn’t resist telling her: “I’m calling from a car.”

“Oh really.” Her voice was dull.

“Could you tell Rolf I have to cancel this morning?”

He hung up with a pleasant feeling of irresponsibility. He turned to the General, who was wearing a black raincoat and, underneath, a very fine-looking cotton shirt with broad vertical stripes, maroon and black.

“Where’d you get that shirt?”

“Neiman.” The General was now driving through an industrial park somewhere east of the airport. At the rear of the park was a high fence with green plastic slats woven through its mesh and a cantilever gate at one end. He lowered his window, consulted a card, and pecked a string of numbers onto a telephone plate. The gate rose and they entered a lot in which eight or nine cars were parked. Behind the cars stood an unmarked hangar-like building with bulging Plexi-glas skylights. The pavement ran straight up to the bottom tier of its cinder-block walls without even token bordering, as if the building, like the cars, merely rested on the surface and could be moved.