Whatever Lola Wants (31 page)

Instantly Theresa's face told Carney he shouldn't have asked: “Device of the devil! Any fool can barge into your life by sticking his finger into a few holes and turning a dial. Never in my home.” She shook her head. “Ti-Jean and Feasie, they've got a cell phone. Turned off when I'm around.”

She had whispered, but her face was white; could any conversation turn unhealthy? She rolled toward the cornfield. “We built up most of this, me and Milton. And the children, when they were small. All his life he's been a farmer, Milton has, a farmer and a good man. We used to have a hired couple. These days Ti-Jean does most of the work, plowing, planting, milking, and so on.” She thought about him. “Another good man.” She nodded. “A man of single syllables, Ti-Jean Seymour.” She chuckled. “Those as gets irritated with him pronounce it Say-more, if they like him it's See-more. He'll be back late, his mum's sickly.”

Carney nodded. “So the Grange is self-contained. Or nearly.”

“Can't be self-contained any more. State bureaucracies, corporate bureaucracies. Nobody lets us be.” She rubbed her forehead.

“At least your family owns the land.”

“Sure. But we're rare birds. Capitalism, self-ownership, it could've made good lives possible for everybody. But it turned venal, it destroyed real ownership.”

Glad she wasn't his enemy. He laughed. “You're supporting the capitalist state?”

“No! Capitalism's a soup of putrefaction that breeds madness and villainy.”

“Easy.” He liked her rhetoric, felt concern at her anger. “Stay calm.”

“Sure.” She stared up at Carney. “But how can I? With those soups poured into the cauldron of our brain”—her whisper scratched, her eyes held Carney tight—“soups festering in our psyches for eons, drowning the senses inside-out, drowning us with everything that money buys, money, money, more blessed money. The diseases of individualism, run ay-cursed-mok.”

Carney had to say, “But you're an individualist, no?”

“Individualist? This old crone, my friend, is only an anarchist. All the difference in the universe. In the individualist state where you and I live, a few self-select individuals dominate over everybody. But in an anarchist society you create vast space for the development of every human being's individuality.” Her eyes, still on Carney, glowed sad.

Her renewed intensity …Bad. “Shall we go back?”

She pointed. “That's our well. Couple of years ago we learned the water—a hundred ninety-three feet down, Carney—it had a coliform count 2.1 times beyond safe. A couple of centuries to get the drainage of night soil down there, but now even in water that deep we've got the shit of our lives. Ain't humans wonderful, boiling water brought up from near two hundred feet? And that's before Cochan spreads his blight across the terrain.” She wheeled herself along the path, staring straight ahead. “I'll destroy that bastard. If it's the last thing I do.”

Carney said, “Easy, Dr. Magnussen.”

Theresa nodded, again to herself. “It's Theresa to you.”

“Okay, Theresa. Back to the house?”

In her eyes, a new gleam. A twitch came to her lips. “May I tell you something?”

“You have to ask permission?”

“You might think this is a different order of thing. It isn't.” She paused. “I've given some thought, lately, to immortality.”

Carney cocked his head. “From what I've read, mortality and death, you've wrestled with those a long time.”

“No, I said
im
mortality.”

“Isn't that the other side of the coin?”

A slow shake of Theresa's head. “Maybe it makes no sense to talk about.”

“Tell me.”

She squinted at him. She shrugged, she discharged significance from her words. “I have, you see, something new in my life. Starting soon after my stroke.” She made a nasal snort, derisive. “A regular visitor.”

“Who?”

“Suddenly she's there. As if she'd walked through the wall. She gives me a hard time.”

“The anarchist and her ghost?”

“No. How should I know? She seems corporeal. Except of course she can't be.”

“You mean you're having conversations in your mind? We all do.”

“No no no no no. My embodied morality, my—ethical visitor. She's simply there. External. She sits in a chair. Pretending to be all-knowing. Always judging. A large young woman. She sneezes. She's slim but heavy-breasted, she adjusts her bra. Her hair is short and blond, her mouth is small. We have rambling conversations, if you can believe that.”

•

Lola blinked and her forehead went wrinkled. “Is it—one of us?”

“Course not. That's impossible.”

She pulled away.

Why was she upset? I leaned over to take her hand.

“Since the stroke, she said. Is it oncoming senility?” Lola half folded her arms, skin aglow in clinging light.

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“Yeah? Let's see.”

“If it happens, Lola. Then.”

She sulked. I put my hand out, touched her wrist. No response. I dared, I bent to kiss her fingers. She winced. “Should I go on?”

She nodded but wouldn't look at me. I stroked her hand. She pulled away, long inches.

A new distance. Come on since Edsel's lordly scolding? She'd returned from romping with the Gods. She sits so close. Feigning coolness, or is it real? She stabs my bloodless heart.

What can I give her? A few thousand words, such paltry weapons. Stories of desire, chance, promise, brought from the down below. Against the rules of heaven, what hope is there?

•

Carney considered Theresa's
visitor. “I believe Theresa Magnussen could banter with the devil.”

“Thank you. I'll take that as a compliment.” She squinted at Carney. “You're pretty quick yourself.”

Carney accepted, with a nod. “Do you have exchanges with this—incarnation.”

“Arguments. Difficult arguments.”

“About?”

“Not the question to ask, not right now.”

A third-grader, facing a surprise quiz. Then he knew the answer. Or rather, the question. “Anybody else observed this apparition?”

Theresa's head twitched no.

“And you recognize her because she looks like—?”

Theresa's head bobbed up-down two-three-four times. “Yes. Like me. Forty years ago.”

“And you're turning her into what? Some kind of household god?” The god word tasted stiff in Carney's mouth.

“Not a god.”

“A godlet?”

Theresa shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Of judgment.”

“And rancor.”

“Because you're not the woman you used to be.”

“Because I'm not the honest woman I used to be.”

“Why should Theresa at twenty be wiser than Theresa today?”

“Along the way”—again she looked tired—“I've seen myself falter.”

“And this ethical godlet? If she's an earlier you, she's mortal, right? If you die, so does she. So she can't provide immortality.”

“Correct, Carney. Even gods are mortal.”

•

Lola started to smile. Then she shuddered instead.

•

Theresa sighed. “We
make our gods, we forget them. The ‘me' she looks like, that's gone. Literally dead and gone if you talk about cellular matter. But still she visits, she keeps returning. Unbidden. She challenges.”

“Challenges how?”

“What I'm thinking.”

“Like about Terramac City?”

“Even that. She made me rethink asking you to come back. Your report there in April really pissed me off, you know that?”

Carney laughed. “I do that to people.”

She grunted. “There's something going on at that place, Carney. Something vile. We keep getting rumors. No question there'll be a putrid cancer on the skin, but we think in the guts it's something even worse. He's blasting down in the bedrock, I'm sure of it. I tried to enjoin the work till we could figure out what it was. But we signed that cowpiss agreement and now the bastard's suing me.”

Carney wondered. “But the agreement gives him underground rights, doesn't it?”

“Yeah, but how far down? Into the bedrock? Below it?”

“You mention that in your injunction request?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

She shook her head. “No proof.”

We heard a call, “Gramma!”

Theresa said, “It's Ginette.” She looked up at Carney. “Feodora's stepdaughter. Please, Carney. It's bad. Find out what's going on. Some proof.”

Ginette set her hand on Theresa's shoulder and kissed her cheek. “You okay, Theresa?” Despite the heat Ginette wore a black sport-coat, her miniskirt was black, black tights to her ankles, flat black fourteen-lace Doc Martens. A pretty face, late teens, her hair crew-cut. She introduced Yves. His T-shirt was black, his painter pants baggy and white. A gold ring passed through his left earlobe, a mouse-tail of blond hair dropped down his nape.

“I'm fine, fine. We're having a good talk.” She smiled, great affection for Ginette. “Ginette's a cabinet-maker.”

Ginette grinned. “Construction and carpentry, Gramma.”

They followed Carney and Theresa back to the house. Milton, an older version of the man in the wedding picture, but easily recognizable despite the white hair, had returned while Carney and Theresa were talking. On his cell phone Carney called the Intraterra office in Richmond. No, neither Mr. Cochan nor Mr. Boce were in. Mr. Carney would find Mr. Boce at Terramac, would Mr. Carney like to be connected? Sure. He spoke with Aristide Boce: Of course Mr. Carney could come by tomorrow. Mr. Boce would do all in his power to assure the presence of John Cochan. Because Mr. Cochan so admired Mr. Carney's work, and Mr. Cochan very much wanted to meet Mr. Carney. Early afternoon would be best time. Say two?

Over supper the family each let loose their anger at the Terramac project. So few months; so much new development. It's a quiet evening, said Theresa, and suddenly the earth shakes under your feet like you were fencing on a trampoline. The ground flowing like a boat on hard waves, said Yves who'd had two years in the Coast Guard. Sometimes like a Richter 4.5 earthquake, said Feodora. And Milton: Like a dozen silent jackhammers breaking cement in a circle around you.

Carney listened. Tomorrow he would find out more about what was happening there, this heavy-duty construction begun since his earlier visit. Clearly the Magnussens were deeply distressed. Well, he might be too if he lived here day by day. They spoke of Terramac in different terms, but with a single voice. Strange thing, a family.

IMMUNE

Then the earth was alert, bones braced,

thymus of rock ready,

lymphic streams ready.

Virus Radiation Bacteria Cancer.

Number uncountable,

power nigh infinite,

through sores and lacerations

the antigens invade the earth.

Attack, maim, rot, kill.

Fungi Chemicals Parasites.

Where are the rivers of monocytes,

where the macrophages of liberation,

where the cleansing filtering sands?

R.F. June 1–4/03

4.

After supper Carney drove off
to fish Gambade Brook. “Work your way upstream from the covered bridge,” Milton had told him. “Too much activity 'round the Grange.” Carney liked Milton, gruff but gentle. Especially compared with Theresa.

At the bridge he pulled off the road. Tomorrow he'd check out Terramac, meet Cochan. Despite all the invective, nothing said about the place sounded damning, and blasting was an inevitable precursor to construction. He felt irritated, letting Milton rope him in. The fishing better be good.

No wind. He worked his way upstream. After a hundred yards sweat had drenched his shirt, but the ache in his leg seemed gone. Now every might-be mama mosquito within fifty feet needed Carney blood. An oozing film of repellent coated his hands and face, his neck to chest and shoulder blades. He was the essence of repulsion but still the mosquitoes whined blood blood blood!

Fly rod in hand, tackle bag over his shoulder, he searched for deeper pools in the low water. He was a believer in solunar tables, charts of times when fish and animals are most active in their foraging, and by the book a period of major activity began twenty minutes ago. The mosquitoes were proof positive. And a mayfly hatch was in progress—he saw the swirls of an occasional trout feeding where the surface lay quiet. Over half an hour he had eight solid strikes, took and released three good fish, two browns and a rainbow. He called it a first-class brook if the little ones stayed away till their elders finished eating.

He followed the bone-dry shoreline over rocks and silt, stepping into the flow mainly to cool his feet. He waved mosquitos away from his eyes. On the stream's ledges hairy moss had dehydrated to gray. He reached a run draining a long pool beside a field of grass and flowers. Across, an angled maple overhung half the stream. A dark, pretty place.

Still the mosquito monsters swarmed, inches from his face; a stand-off. He examined the pool. The mosquitoes gathered tighter, hovering by his eyelids where the repellent lay thinnest, ready to attack his eyeballs if he stopped blinking.

He felt a buzz in his chest: Mot, his seventh sense, foreboding activated. But years of fishing pleasure spoke louder: go on, there's a couple of good fish down in there.

Half a dozen dragonflies darted over, gorging themselves on mosquitoes. He waited, one distraction at a time for these trout. The bushes lay far enough back to make careful casting possible. He set his bag down and whipped the fly, a just-hatching mayfly larva imitation, to the head of the run. But he set it down badly; Mot's buzz must be throwing his timing off. He twitched the fly downstream, some underwater spurts. Nothing. A better cast, a third. Enough. The water was too delicate. Let it rest.