Zod Wallop (12 page)

“I do think that’s best,” her husband said.

Ada sighed. “Yes.” A big truck rocketed by them, blue exhaust in its wake. Ada snapped open the glove compartment and took out the map. “Did we go through Henderson yet?”

“Good half an hour ago,” her husband said.

“Land, I hope we haven’t missed our turn.”

John Story laughed. “We haven’t. Aren’t you supposed to be navigating?”

Ada laughed too. This was an old, long-married set piece. “It’s this map. It’s written upside down. And the colors are all wrong.”

They drove south into the morning. Oh Raymond. He was the best of boys, the sweetest, but he was so…so melodramatic. The doctors didn’t understand that. They thought something was actually wrong with Raymond’s mind. They diagnosed him as schizophrenic. They said it had nothing to do with the head injury at the swimming pool, and Ada was certain they were right there. Raymond had always been melodramatic. He just wanted the world to be bigger than it was, more fantastic. He wanted to believe in evil trolls and fairies and elves. Other children grew out of such fantasies. Raymond, alas, grew into them. They were very real for Raymond. Did that make him crazy? Doctors thought so, but they didn’t live with Raymond. They didn’t know about the source of her present argument with her husband. They had never seen what was in the trunk.

Cows grazed on a distant hill. Raymond had always been fascinated with cows. “Cawow,” Ada said out loud. She captured her son’s youthful pronunciation but not his exuberance. He would shout the word like a bomb going off.

“What’s that?” her husband said.

“Nothing,” Ada said. “Look, isn’t that our turn?”

When they arrived at the cabin, they were greeted by a large, broad-shouldered woman who said her name was Helen Kurtis and that she was Harry Gainesborough’s agent.

Ada wondered if all authors lived with their agents, decided that probably only the famous ones did.

H
ARRY
S
QUINTED
T
HROUGH
the windshield. The sun was well up now, hanging over forested mountains. Sunlight had gotten into everything, pouring through the branches of pale green trees, dappling the two-lane blacktop, burnishing roadside goldenrod.

It was beautiful, Harry noted. Sweet, meaningless, stupid beauty.

In the backseat, Allan was grumbling. He was flanked by Raymond on his right, Emily on his left.

“Mother will just want to lock me up again,” he said. “She’ll want to lock us all up.”

“Of course she will,” Raymond said brightly. “That’s her nature. Lady Ermine is a very controlling person.”

“We should just go,” Allan said. “We should go to Florida.”

“I was of that opinion myself,” Raymond said. “But I see now that Lord Gainesborough is right. We cannot begin our journey without the Duchess of Flatbend. We’ll need her to petition the Duke.”

Harry, listening, felt no desire for clarification. He was tired. So tired that he had imagined some extraordinary things and ascribed a supernatural cause to what was, of course, only a stain on the roof of a car, some fault in the original paint job. He sought to cheer himself up by thinking that soon he would be rid of this crew. But the thought did not cheer him, and he realized, with panicky dread, that he did not, in fact, believe it.

On the passenger seat next to Harry, Rene was holding the monkey. The monkey was sprawled in her lap. It had discovered a roll of breath mints in the glove compartment and was now placidly stuffing them into its mouth.

The girl leaned forward, kissed the top of the monkey’s head, and said, “Don’t believe what the TVs say, Lord Arbus. You can eat them things all day long, have breath as sweet as a pine tree full of angels, and you still won’t get any pussy.”

The monkey tilted his head back and grinned.

From the backseat, Raymond’s voice rose. “The woman named Helen, Lord Gainesborough’s agent in literary matters, is the Duchess of Flatbend, of course. I don’t know how I missed it, even for a minute. She’s probably the only one who can reach the Duke, who can enlist him in our cause. The Duke is living at the St. Petersburg Arms in Florida according to the address on the occasional written communication he sends Emily, and that is where we must all go as soon as we have persuaded the Duchess to join us.”

“Mother—” Allan began.

“Please,” Raymond said, “our course is set, Lord Allan. It is a hard path, and we might wish for a smoother one. But it is Blodkin’s choice, not ours.”

Blodkin
, Harry thought. The great windbag god of Zod Wallop, a vain idiot obsessed with protocols and the precise arcana of his worship, always arguing with his high priests, urging ever more elaborate rituals. Not a terrifically supportive deity. Even in the later, happy version of the book, Blodkin had been an ineffectual ruler and it had been left to a small, impatient girl to rally him to a sense of duty.

The big car crested a hill, and Harry studied a billboard of cartoon camels smoking cigarettes with sleepy style.
Camels
, Harry thought,
would be more inclined to chew tobacco, being such accomplished spitters
. But advertising agencies and their media-besotted public cared nothing for aptness.

A gas station crouched beyond the sign, advertising
FOOD
and
SOUVENIRS
as well as fuel.

“I’ve got to pee,” Rene said.

Harry was already pulling into the station, having glanced reflexively at the gas gauge. The needle lay flat on its back.

Harry pumped gas while his traveling companions went off to use the restrooms. He saw the undeniable staining of the car’s rooftop, the sinister black rivulets that scarred the door, and quickly looked away. He saw Raymond pushing the wheelchair that contained poor crumpled Emily. Raymond was headed toward the side of the building. He moved through the sunlight and dust as though he were at the head of a parade.

Rene came out of the ladies’ room and took the wheelchair from Raymond. While he held the door, she pulled Emily within. The door closed. Raymond clasped his hands behind his back, rocked on his heels, waited.

Harry leaned over the pump, the gasoline fumes rising up like old ghosts, conjuring up other trips. He was assaulted by an image of his ex-wife, Jeanne, playful, unharried by circumstance, pre-Amy, pre-marriage.

Jeanne was wearing a black-and-white checkered bikini. Her flesh was pale—they had embarked that morning on their summer’s first beach trip—and seemed faintly scandalous in the brash sunlight. She came up behind him and, giggling, mussed his hair while he pumped gas. Then she ducked past him, lifted herself on the bright red fender, and sat, legs straddling the inserted pump.

She smiled and leaned forward in woozy, exaggerated lust, reaching down with her hands to touch the pump’s curved nozzle.

He leaned forward and kissed the top of her head, a thicket of black, short-cropped curls. She looked up into his eyes; her own were black, bright, surely the most alert and impetuous in the entire world (until her own daughter arrived). “I’m gonna razzle you,” she said, undulating slowly, pursing her lips, sighing loudly.

Her parody of eroticism was profoundly arousing, and Harry was instantly hard as he leaned into her kiss. When he finally surfaced he was shocked to discover an elderly couple climbing out of a car not ten feet to his right. That other people should inhabit the world had seemed, for the moment, wildly improbable.

That night, in a big, wooden house on stilts, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Harry Gainesborough and Jeanne Halifax had conceived Amy. Jeanne’s pregnancy delighted them both—and neither was surprised.

The gas pump shut off with a thump, and Harry replaced the nozzle in its slot.

Inside the convenience store it was cool; an overhead fan stirred watery shadows. Harry walked to the register, fished a crumpled twenty from his pocket, and handed it to the cashier, a tanned teenager in a blue uniform.

“Eighteen fifteen. And eighty-five makes nineteen, and one makes twenty,” the young man said.

Harry looked up, blinked into oddly familiar blue eyes, saw the tufts of sunbleached hair poking from the sides of the baseball cap.

I’ve seen you before
, Harry thought.
I’ve—

Some other part of his mind rudely fetched this thought, snatched it and jerked it offstage. Harry turned and headed back toward the screen door, certain of only one thing: he had to get out of this place.

As Harry approached the screen door, it opened and Raymond, pushing Emily, entered, followed by Allan and Rene. The monkey was cradled in Rene’s arm, and a nimbus of golden light seemed, for a moment, to surround them all, as though, dipped in a soup of sunlight, they could not be instantly drained of brightness by the relative gloom of the store. They exuded a reckless, irreverent energy. Allan, who had struck Harry as a serious boy, was laughing loudly, his head thrown back, his mouth open wide.

Harry’s fear, pricked by his companions’ noisy entrance, dwindled and the need to flee dissolved.

Instead, he turned and moved down an aisle to his right, asking himself what it was that had panicked him so.

He moved past rows of suntan lotion, gaudy towels, a mound of rubber sandals, a rotating display of postcards (blue skies, blue seas, bright scrawls of sand). Idly, he turned the display to the accompaniment of a thin squeaking. He paused and snatched up a postcard of a huge pink hotel.

Before he could examine the card, the thought that had been nibbling at the edges of his consciousness bit through.

He knew what was wrong here. Oh yes, this was a generic roadside oasis, a tourist stop for gas and snacks and sodas and novelties that were only purchased in the impulsive delirium induced by long hours in a rolling automobile. It was an unremarkable store. But it was in the wrong place. This was the middle of North Carolina, and this store should have been somewhere where you could smell the salt in the air, where bare feet tracked sand across the gray-planked floor, where the cries of seagulls (spice for the ear) spiraled from the sky.

He turned the corner then, the postcard still clutched in his hand, and looked down another aisle. He blinked at a row of blue plastic beach buckets with red handles. Something bounced from a nearby shelf and rolled toward him. It was a beach ball, divided into green and blue and yellow pie slices of color. He backed away from it, recognizing it—just as he had recognized the beach buckets. The inflated ball came to rest in the middle of the aisle, silent and ominous.

Harry turned sharply down another aisle.

A cardboard cutout of his daughter, smiling coyly, arms folded to display her decorated bicep, greeted Harry under a display for temporary tattoos of butterflies and puppy dogs. Amy had loved these play tattoos, and Harry had wondered whether indulging her in her formative years might not lead to needle-etched flesh and body piercing in later life, but had decided, in a moment of rare acceptance, that Amy would steer her own life.

Now he stopped, stunned, in front of this cardboard Amy. She was wearing her green bathing suit…yes…there to his left was a full shelf of the bathing suits and a sign, a blue-and-white unadorned sign whose block letters explained everything, made it clear why so many painful memories were lodged in this landlocked store:
AMY
SOUVENIRS
the sign read.

Harry slowly turned, his eye now effortlessly recording the artifacts of his daughter’s life: the fuzzy pillow that was shaped like a flounder with big crossed cartoon eyes, the yellow magic telescope that rendered all images in a shimmering, rainbow aura, the giant sunglasses with plastic diamonds embedded in their pink frames, the stuffed Hemingway doll (one of a line of dolls called Pen Pals and featuring Poe, Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and Faulkner). Gingerly, Harry lifted the Hemingway doll, which flopped limply in his palm. Papa was about ten inches long, full of good, solid beans—a clout to the side of the head with a Pen Pal could stun a prize-fighter—and wore a plaid hunting shirt and khaki-colored pants. His cloth silk-screened face was half burned away, the result of a carelessly dangled cigarette. Amy had refused to relinquish the scorched Hem, carrying her disfigured doll everywhere as a reminder to her forgetful father that smoking was very, very bad and nasty. And Harry had stopped, a good, obedient father when it meant something.

Harry nodded slowly, as though agreeing with the doll. A good Amy Souvenir department would, of course, have the genuine article, the doll with the cigarette burn.

Harry returned the doll to the shelf, watched his hand float back to him, inserted his hand into his pocket and walked down the aisle past the cardboard image of Amy.

He was walking down memory lane. All the colorful childhood things that crowded at the corners of his vision were freighted with meaning. He wasn’t going to look, although he might scream.

He saw Raymond at the end of the aisle. Alone and large, a bulky shadow with light splintering behind him like jets of water from a high-pressure hose.

“My Lord Gainesborough,” Raymond said, “we must leave here at once.”

“Yes,” Harry said, although perhaps he did not actually speak the word out loud.