Whatever Lola Wants (24 page)

Three weeks into November she complained of head congestion. An hour later her brain roared and her vision blotched. She held herself upright until Milton got her to Emergency. There she crumbled.

Aristide Boce, Vice-President Financial for Terramac, reported Theresa's infirmity to John Cochan. “Old women should stay out of what doesn't concern them, hmm?”

But Cochan took no satisfaction from Dr. Magnussen's ill health. Challenges and crises were rarely brought on by the solitary individual. Mainly he wanted to explain to her why she was wrong, so wrong.

•

“He doesn't care who he hurts. And at what cost.” Lola's lovely lips pressed together tight, grim.

I glanced down and a little farther ahead. “Well,” I said, “maybe even he can get hurt.”

“Poor Theresa,” Lola whispered. She glanced at me, her face filled with a knowledge of the future contaminated by doubt. “But she gets better, we know that, you've told me. Right?”

I nodded. “Shall I go on?”

“Please.”

•

2.

Benjie Cochan's guidelines were set
by his father. If the boy said exactly where he'd be going—around the side of the hill, to the pool below the waterfall—he could roam the fields and woods with his friends Barney and Tick. Three feral puppies, they found rabbit holes and raccoon burrows, bees swarming, mica sheets with shiny jagged blades thrusting out from granite. They explored the twists and backwaters of the stream. They dared each other to climb higher trees.

Their antics unnerved Johnnie. Benjie, just short of eight, could be reckless and bold. He supplied the boy with alternatives: his own big room, a microscope, the newest electronic games, a Yamaha keyboard, an electric train set, baseball mitts. But Johnnie could only contain the extremes: not so late, not like that, less far.

More complex was his son's desire to see Terramac, the invisible part. “Soon,” Johnnie'd say. “Right now there's nothing there, just darkness and bugs. You'd hate it. I want you to love it.” Because when Benjie did come to love what Johnnie had brought into being, found it the grandest place ever built, then he'd have succeeded. Less would be failure.

The last of the snow in the hills had melted, the water in the river flowed clear again, open spaces in the woods smelled wet and green. On a warm Saturday in early May, the afternoon before Deirdre's birthday, Benjie said to his dad, “Tomorrow, can I take Dee with us, into the woods? Just to the pool, okay?” He wanted her to catch a trout.

“No. She's still too little.”

“I'll look out for her.”

“Did you hear me?”

“We'll be careful, we'll—”

“I said no.”

His father rarely shouted, not even quietly. “You said if I said where I'm going—”

Priscilla arrived with Melissa, already toddling. “What's going on?” They talked, Priscilla, John, Benjie. They were reasonable people.

After a bit his father conceded. “You take special care of her.”

“No problem!” He hated it when his father made the asking so difficult. Before they moved into to the farmhouse, his dad had always been so easy with him. Now they didn't play much. Which was one of the reasons he wanted to take Deirdre fishing, to have somebody to fish with. He found Dee. “Tomorrow, want to come exploring with us?”

Deirdre nodded with care, to keep her hope from building too high. “Is it all right?”

“Sure. Why?”

“I mean, with Barney and Tick?”

“They don't get to say. You're old enough.” He grew up a little right then, telling her like that. It felt good to be in charge.

Tomorrow she'd be six. She smiled at the pleasure to come, a real birthday present, best thing ever if Benjie made them take her along.

Barney and Tick arrived on their bikes at the Cochan farmhouse. Deirdre sat on the porch steps. Benjie, arms getting spring-brown, his ruddy hair uncombed, spoke with authority. “Dee's coming with us.” It was his land they were reconnoitring.

“She's too slow,” Barney grumped. He and Benjie were the real friends. Tick was slow too, sometimes.

Deirdre listened. She stared down, she didn't dare watch.

“She can keep up,” Benjie said. “Okay, Dee? You'll keep up?”

She nodded, her eyes following a snail's progress on the grass.

Barney sneered, “Look how short her legs are.”

Tick said, “Aw, she'll be okay.”

She looked at Tick.

He was grinning her way. “Come on, let's go.”

She bent down to pick up the snail. The boys grabbed their fishing rods and started off. The snail pulled back into its shell. She set it down at the edge of the bushes and ran to follow.

Out of sight of the house, Benjie said they had to climb the slope where they'd sledded down in winter.

“It's not on the way,” Barney grumbled. He knew it'd come to detours.

Up the hill Benjie showed Deirdre a depression between some rocks. “This is where the ladyslippers came from.” Last year he'd picked three for her birthday. Their mother, calm yet irked, had explained that ladyslippers when they're cut don't grow again next year. It was true, he saw no ladyslippers coming up there now.

In the woods Deirdre tripped on a root, landed on her elbow, skinned it. Benjie glared: Don't you dare cry.

Barney said after all the side trips the sun was too high for fishing. Benjie said they'd give it an hour. He turned rocks over and made Deirdre pick up the worms. They left a glow of slime. She carried them to the stream in some wet dead leaves and wiped her hands on her jeans. Benjie told her to get up on the big boulder that stuck out five feet into the pool, casting was easier from there. “Look. Here's how you thread the worm on. Hold the hook like this.”

She nodded.

“Next time you do it yourself.”

When Barney wasn't looking Tick gave her some dates from his lunch. Barney wanted to search for caves. “There aren't any here,” Benjie said. “They're all way underground. Way down, in my dad's city.” His dad told him everything, all his plans; used to anyway. Just one place Benjie couldn't go, the most important, down to Terramac. The entrance to Terramac was on the far side of the land, too far to walk to. But sometimes when he was alone in bed or by himself he heard Terramac call, Come see me, come see me, Bennn, come see me …That scared and thrilled him.

Deirdre caught one small trout. They were back at the farmhouse by three, as promised. Her party started at four. She insisted on eating the trout. Her mother fried it and deboned it before the other kids came, two tiny filets. “Where'd you catch it?”

“In the pool by the waterfall.”

Priscilla nodded. “The rocks by the water are slippery.”

“My boulder isn't. It's beautiful.”

“You'll be careful.”

“Sure.”

Deirdre came to be included in the gang. After Barney and Tick, the next nearest kids lived more than seven miles away, Benjie's dad's land was so big. Pastures, orchards, forests. His dad had torn out the walls of the old farmhouse there and built it over, straight and clean.

Benjie, Deirdre, Barney, and Tick explored and discovered. They fished at half a dozen spots in the stream. The dark pool below the waterfall was Dee's favorite, thirty feet wide and very deep. They could shout and wouldn't scare the fish because the falling water, a curtain of diamonds from the precipice thirty-five feet above, shattered into foam with a whirling roar. At the end of the pool the stream widened and got shallow where it flowed away over small rocks.

“Some of the water runs into the ground near here,” Benjie told Deirdre. “Barney's uncle told him that.” Barney's uncle was a plumber.

Benjie would see the underground Terramac soon, he told Deirdre, their dad had promised him. When it's finished and beautiful. “Now it's all caves and hollows,” he said, “but we'll transform them, now they're wet slimy stones. You wouldn't like it.” Benjie heard in his dad's voice two wonderful things. Terramac was the most important thing ever. And Terramac had called to his father, too.

“I bet there's no water in those caves down there,” Deirdre said.

Benjie smirked. “Sure there is.”

Benjie knew the trout in the pool were growing, feeding on bugs and grubs that got washed down over the waterfall. They'd been stocked, little fellows, in the fall by a couple of Johnnie's assistants for Benjie and his friends. Benjie didn't know that his father was trying to keep the kids in one or two safe places. Or that touching a live fish made his father cringe.

In late May Barney and Tick went to France for three weeks with their parents. Nobody for Benjie to play with, just Deirdre. Benjie worked up a plan. “Daddy? Let's go camping for a night, you and me.”

“Now? With all those blackflies?”

“We'll use anti-bug goo. Please? Please?”

“Benjie—” But Benjie wore him down, and Johnnie agreed.

Benjie chose the place: by the pool. Planning details filled him with tingles of possibility. Enough propane for the little stove? Maybe cook only with wood. Get the big tent, or maybe just the pup tent but with insect netting. Maybe Terramac would call to him, right there. Maybe he'd hear it call to his father. Had it called to his father recently? His father seemed changed.

Camping in blackfly season? The worst. Gnats, mosquitoes, ticks crept across Johnnie's eyeballs, under his skin, into his brain. But Benjie wanted this camping thing. Such intensity from the boy. Okay, Johnnie could do it. For one night.

Should they build twig mattresses or carry in inflatables? Eat only fish? Hamburgers too?

Two days before the trip a crisis hit. In a rifle shop in east-central Florida's Mangrove Mall, built six years ago by Intraterra, a man was told he'd have to wait five days for his hunting rifle. He went berserk, killed the shop's owner and two customers, was now in hiding somewhere in the mall's maze of subterranean passageways. John Cochan knew those basements. He had to go, the police needed him. He came into Benjie's room. “I'm sorry, it's necessary.”

“But why?”

“It's my job.” He didn't tell Benjie about the crazy killer. “You can understand that.”

No, Benjie couldn't. He held back a sob. “Sure, okay, yeah.”

Others knew the guts of that mall as well as John Cochan. He could have delegated the problem away. But it was better to go, he and Benjie would replan their camping for later. After the bugs were gone. Maybe by then Benjie would have given up on the idea.

His father left for his mall. Benjie told his mother he was going camping by himself.

“I don't think that's a good idea.”

“Come on. I'll be okay.”

“Your father will be angry.”

Benjie would risk his father's anger. “He doesn't like flies and things. He'd let me go.”

“Aren't you afraid?”

How'd she know? “Of what?”

“Being all alone?”

“Course not.”

She stayed quiet for a few seconds, then asked, “Why don't I come with you?”

No. He wanted his dad there. Or even by himself alone, there he might find out why his dad was different these days. Something had happened to his dad in Terramac. What? He loved his dad too much, please don't let anything bad happen to him. “Okay. But not the girls.”

The girls stayed with Diana the nanny. Benjie and Priscilla unrolled their sleeping bags a few feet back from the pool. They put on more insect repellent. They made a fire. This was good but Benjie sensed something more, a distant excitement. They ate trail-mix, and cooked burgers. They slapped at blackflies and mosquitoes. Priscilla hugged Ben. “Goodnight.” They lay down in the tent behind the screening but with the fly open and heard rustles in the woods, tree branches swaying slowly, thin whines in the air. Benjie watched the embers go black. He heard his mother's breathing slow into sleep. He listened to water splash in the pool and heard it flow down, it breathed at him, …nnn … nnn …ennn, like a little song. Go look? He didn't want to. He had to. He found the flashlight. He pulled himself out of the sleeping bag. His mother rolled over. He froze. No, she hadn't wakened. He crept up on the big boulder by the edge. He turned off the light…. ennn …ennn. He saw stars floating in the water, light broken by ripples. He stared down. Black. He heard the water's breath, he felt something, down there, below the water. He flicked on his flash. A face! Quivering. His own face but not quite, his and part his father's. Why there on the surface? He turned around fast, flashed his light up. Nothing. He looked again. A face far below. Out of Terramac? He shuddered. Go? He'd have to risk it; one day. He crept back to his sleeping bag. He stared at the sky, black as water. He slapped and scratched. At last he slept. They woke, packed up, returned home.

“So. Enjoy it?”

He made light of it: okay, just too many insects, his father was right.

Priscilla never told Johnnie that she and Benjie had gone camping overnight.

School ended. Benjie took to sleeping late, head under the sheet. Outside the house lay the strong draw of Terramac.

Before Terramac, Benjie would throw the ball and his dad would run for it, or in the house they'd play Go Fish and things like that. That didn't happen any more. Or was he just a spoiled selfish kid, did he want to be down in Terramac really for himself, hear its stream from up close? He turned in bed, he listened for a whisper of song. Nothing. Too far away? He had to be there, down inside. But also he had to save his dad. Before Terramac— Before it sucked out from inside his dad the thing that made him his dad.

Deirdre teased Benjie for not getting out of bed, a lazy fweep. He snapped at her. “Fweep! Fweep!” she cried, giggling. He nearly jumped up to hit her, but then held back. Without Tick and Barney, Benjie and she had to be each other's best friend.