Bobby came up under the baton, right in Manuel’s face, and I thought he was embracing him, which was weird, but then I saw the gleam of the butcher knife, the point against Manuel’s throat.
The new deputy had raced back to the kitchen, and both he and Frank Feeney had drawn their revolvers, holding the weapons in two-hand grips.
“Back off,” Manuel told his deputies.
He backed off, too, easing away from the point of the knife.
For a crazy moment I thought Bobby was going to shove the huge blade into him, though I know Bobby better than that.
Remaining wary, the deputies retreated a step or two, and they relaxed their arms from a ready-fire position, although neither man holstered his weapon.
The spill of light through the dining-room door revealed more of Manuel’s face than I cared to see. It had been torn by anger and then knitted together by more anger, so the stitches were too tight, pulling his features into strange arrangements, both eyes bulging, but the left eye more than the right, nostrils flaring, his mouth a straight slash on the left but curving into a sneer on the right, like a portrait by Picasso in a crappy mood, all chopped into cubes, geometric slabs that didn’t quite fit together. And his skin was no longer a warm brown but the color of a ham that had been left far too long in the smokehouse, muddy red with settled blood and too much hickory smoke, dark and marbled.
Manuel seethed with a hatred so intense that it couldn’t have been engendered solely by Bobby’s smartass remarks. This hatred was aimed at me, too, but Manuel couldn’t bring himself to strike me, not after so many years of friendship, so he wanted to hurt Bobby because that would hurt me. Maybe some of his wrath was directed at himself, because he had flushed away his principles, and maybe we were seeing sixteen years of pent-up anger at God for Carmelita’s dying in child-birth and for Toby’s being born with Down’s syndrome, and I think-feel-know that some of this was fury he could not—would not, dared not—admit feeling toward Toby, dear Toby, whom he loved desperately but who had so severely limited his life. After all, there’s a reason they say that love is a two-edged sword, rather than a two-edged Wiffle bat or a two-edged Fudgsicle, because love is sharp, it pierces, and love is a needle that sews shut the holes in our hearts, that mends our souls, but it can also cut, cut deep, wound, kill.
Manuel was struggling to regain control of himself, aware that we were all watching him, that he was a spectacle; but he was losing the struggle. The side of the refrigerator was scarred where he had hammered the billy club into it, but an assault on an appliance, even a major appliance, didn’t provide the satisfaction he needed, didn’t relieve the pressure still building in him. A couple minutes earlier, I had thought of Bobby as a dry-ice bomb at the critical-evaporation point, but now it was Manuel who exploded, not at Bobby or at me, but at the glass panels in the four doors of a display cabinet, bashing each pane with the baton, and then he tore open one of the doors and, with the stick, swept out the Royal Worcester china, the Evesham set of which my mother had been so fond. Saucers, cups, bread plates, salad plates, a gravy boat, a butter dish, a sugar-and-cream set crashed onto the countertop and from there to the floor, porcelain shrapnel pinging off the dishwasher, singing off chair legs and cabinetry. The microwave oven was next to the display cabinet, and he hammered the club into it, once, twice, three times, four times, but the view window was evidently made of Plexiglas or something, because it didn’t shatter, though the club switched on the oven and programmed the timer, and if we’d had the foresight to put a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s finest in the microwave earlier, we could have enjoyed popcorn by the time Manuel had worked off his rage. He plucked a steel teapot off the stove and pitched it across the room, grabbed the toaster and threw it to the floor even as the teapot was still bouncing around—tonk, tonk, tonk—with the manic energy of a battered icon in a video game. He kicked the toaster, and it tumbled across the floor, squeaking as though it were a terrified little dog, trailing its cord like a tail, and then he was done.
He stood in the center of the kitchen, shoulders slumped, head thrust forward, eyelids as heavy as if he had just woken from a deep sleep, mouth slack, breathing heavily. He looked around as though slightly confused, as though he were a bull wondering where the hell that infuriating red cape had gone.
Throughout Manuel’s destructive frenzy, I expected to see the demonic yellow light shimmer through his eyes, but I never caught a glimpse of it. Now there was smoldering anger in his gaze, and confusion, and a wrenching sadness, but if he was becoming something less than human, he wasn’t far enough devolved to exhibit eyeshine.
The nameless deputy watched cautiously through eyes as dark as the windows in an abandoned house, but Frank Feeney’s eyes were brighter than those of Halloween pumpkins, full of fiery menace. Although this uncanny glimmer was not constant, coming and going and coming again, the savagery that it betokened burned as steady as a watch fire. Feeney was backlit by the dining-room chandelier, and with his face in shadows, his eyes at times glowed as if the light from the next room were passing straight through his skull and radiating from his sockets.
I had been afraid that Manuel’s violence would trigger outbursts in the deputies, that all three men were becoming, and that a rapidly accelerating dementia would seize them, whereupon Bobby and I would be surrounded by the high-biotech equivalent of a pack of werewolves in the grip of bloodlust. Because we had foolishly neglected to acquire necklaces of wolfsbane or silver bullets, we would be forced to defend ourselves with my mother’s tarnished sterling tea service, which would have to be unpacked from a box in the pantry and perhaps even polished with Wright’s silver cream and a soft cloth to be sufficiently lethal.
Now it appeared that Feeney was the only threat, but a werewolf with a loaded revolver is a lycanthrope of a different caliber, and one like him could be as deadly as an entire pack. He was shaking, glistening with sweat, inhaling with a coarse rasp, exhaling with a thin and eager whine of need. In his excitement, he had bitten his lip, and his teeth and chin were red with his own blood. He held the gun with both hands, aiming it at the floor, while his mad eyes seemed to be looking for a target, his attention flicking from Manuel to me, to the second deputy, to Bobby, to me, to Manuel again, and if Feeney decided that we were all targets, he might be able to kill the four of us even as he was cut down by his fellow officers’ return fire.
I realized that Manuel was talking to Feeney and to the other deputy. The pounding of my heart had temporarily deafened me. His voiced faded in: “…we’re done here, we’re finished, finished with these bastards, come on, Frank, Harry, come on, that’s it, come on, these scumbags aren’t worth it, let’s go, back to work, out of here, come on.”
Manuel’s voice seemed to soothe Feeney, like the rhythmic lines of a prayer, a litany in which his responses were recited silently rather than spoken. The balefire continued to pass in and out of his eyes, though it was absent more than not and dimmer than it had been. He broke his two-hand grip on the revolver, holding it in his right hand, and then finally holstered it. Blinking in surprise, he tasted blood, blotted his lips on his hand, and stared uncomprehendingly at the red smear across his palm.
Harry, the second deputy, to whom Manuel had at last given a name, was already to the foyer by the time Frank Feeney stepped out of the kitchen and entered the hall. Manuel followed Feeney, and I found myself following Manuel, though at a distance.
They had lost their Gestapo aura. They looked weak and weary, like three boys who had been playing cops with great exuberance but were now tuckered out, dragging their butts home to have some hot chocolate and take a nap, and then maybe put on new costumes and play pirates. They seemed to be as lost as the kidnapped children.
In the foyer, as Frank Feeney followed Harry X onto the front porch, I said to Manuel, “You see it, don’t you?”
At the door he stopped and turned to face me, but he didn’t respond. He was still angry, but he also looked stricken. By the second, his
rage swam deeper, and his eyes were pools of sorrow.
With light entering the foyer from outside, from the study, and from the living room, I felt more vulnerable here than under the gun and the yellow stare of Feeney in the kitchen, but there was something I needed to say to Manuel.
“Feeney,” I said, though Feeney wasn’t the unfinished business between us. “You see that he’s becoming? You aren’t in denial about that, are you?”
“There’s a cure. We’ll have it soon.”
“He’s on the edge. What if you don’t have a cure soon enough?”
“Then we’ll deal with him.” He realized he was still holding the billy club. He slipped it through a loop on his belt. “Frank is one of ours. We’ll give him peace in our own way.”
“He could have killed me. Me, Bobby, you, all of us.”
“Stay out of this, Snow. I won’t tell you again.”
Snow. Not Chris anymore. Trashing a guy’s house is dotting the final i and crossing the final t in finito.
“Maybe this kidnapper is that guy on the news,” I said.
“What guy?”
“Snatches kids. Three, four, five little kids. Burns them all at once.”
“That’s not what’s happening here.”
“How can you be sure?”
“This is Moonlight Bay.”
“Not all bad guys are bad just because they’re becoming.”
He glared at me, taking my observation personally.
I got to the unfinished business: “Toby’s a great kid. I love him. I worry about what’s happening. There’s such a terrible risk. But in the end, Manuel, I hope everything turns out with him like you think it will. I really do. More than anything.”
He hesitated, but then said, “Stay out of this. I mean it, Snow.”
For a moment I watched him walk away from my vandalized house into a world that was even more broken than my mother’s china. There were two patrol cars at the curb, and he got into one of them.
“Come back anytime,” I said, as if he could hear me. “I’ve still got drinking glasses you can smash, serving dishes. We’ll have a couple beers, you can bash the hell out of the TV, or take an ax to the better pieces of furniture, pee on the carpet if you want. I’ll make a cheese dip, it’ll be fun, it’ll be festive.”
As sullen and gray and dark as the afternoon was, it nonetheless stung my eyes. I closed the door.
When a loved one dies—or as in this case is lost to me for another reason—I invariably make a joke of the pain. Even on the night that my much-loved father succumbed to cancer, I was doing mental stand-up riffs about death, coffins, and the ravages of disease. If I drink too deeply of grief, I’ll find myself in the cups of despair. From despair, I’ll sink into self-pity so deep that I’ll drown. Self-pity will encourage too much brooding about whom I’ve lost, what I’ve lost, the limitations with which I must always live, the restrictions of my strange nightbound existence…and finally I’ll risk becoming the freak that childhood bullies called me. It strikes me as blasphemous not to embrace life, but to embrace it in dark times, I have to find the beauty concealed in the tragic, beauty which in fact is always there, and which for me is discovered through humor. You may think me shallow or even callous for seeking the laughter in loss, the fun in funerals, but we can honor the dead with laughter and love, which is how we honored them in life. God must have meant for us to laugh through our pain, because He stirred an enormous measure of absurdity into the universe when He mixed the batter of creation. I’ll admit to being hopeless in many respects, but as long as I have laughter, I’m not without hope.
I quickly scanned the study to see what damage had been done, switched off the light, and then followed the same routine at the entrance to the living room. They had caused less destruction than Beelzebub on a two-day vacation from Hell, but more than the average poltergeist.
Bobby had already turned off the lights in the dining room. By candlelight, he was addressing the mess in the kitchen, sweeping shattered china into a dustpan and emptying the pan into a large garbage bag.
“You’re very domestic,” I said, assisting with the cleanup.
“I think I was a housekeeper to royalty in a previous life.”
“What royalty?”
“Czar Nicholas of Russia.”
“That ended badly.”
“Then I was reincarnated as Betty Grable.”
“The movie star?”
“The one and only, dude.”
“I loved you in Mother Wore Tights.”
“Gracias. But it’s way good to be male again.”
Tying shut the first garbage bag as Bobby opened another, I said, “I should be pissed off.”
“Why? Because I’ve had all these fabulous lives, while you’ve just been you?”
“He comes here to kick my ass because he really wants to kick his own.”
“He’d have to be a contortionist.”
“I hate to say this, but he’s a moral contortionist.”
“Dude, when you’re angry, you sure do get foul-mouthed.”
“He knows he’s taking an unconscionable risk with Toby, and it’s eating him alive, even if he won’t admit it.”
Bobby sighed. “I feel for Manuel. I do. But the dude scares me more than Feeney.”
“Feeney’s becoming,” I said.
“No shit. But Manuel scares me because he’s become what he’s become without becoming. You know?”
“I know.”
“You think it’s true—about the vaccine?” Bobby asked, returning the battered toaster to the counter.
“Yeah. But will it work the way they think it will?”
“Nothing else did.”
“We know the other part is true,” I said. “The psychological implosion.”
“The birds.”
“Maybe the coyotes.”
“I’d feel totally super-mellow about all this,” Bobby said, returning the butcher knife to the cutlery drawer, “if I didn’t know your mom’s bug is only part of the problem.”
“Mystery Train,” I said, remembering the thing or things inside Hodgson’s suit, Delacroix’s body, the testament on the audiotape, and the cocoons.
The doorbell rang, and Bobby said, “Tell them if they want to come in here and bust things up, we have new rules. A hundred-dollar cover charge, and everyone wears neckties.”
I went into the foyer and peered through one of the clearer panes in a stained-glass sidelight.
The figure at the door was so big that you might have thought one of the oak trees had pulled up its roots, climbed the steps, and rung the bell to request a hundred pounds of fertilizer.
I opened the door and stepped back from the light to let our visitor enter.
Roosevelt Frost is tall, muscular, black, and dignified enough to make the carved faces on Mount Rushmore look like the busts of sitcom stars. Entering with Mungojerrie, a pale gray cat, nestled in the crook of his left arm, he nudged the door shut behind them.
In a voice remarkable for its deep tone, its musicality, and its gentleness, he said, “Good afternoon, son.”
“Thank you for coming, sir.”
“You’ve gotten yourself in trouble again.”
“That’s always a good bet with me.”
“Lots of death ahead,” he said solemnly.
“Sir?”
“That’s what the cat says.”
I looked at Mungojerrie. Draped comfortably over Roosevelt’s huge arm, he appeared to be boneless. The cat was so limp that he might have been a stole or a muffler if Roosevelt had been a man given to wearing stoles and mufflers, except that his green feline eyes, flecked with gold, were alert, riveting, and filled with an intelligence that was unmistakable and unnerving.
“Lots of death,” Roosevelt repeated.
“Whose?”
“Ours.”
Mungojerrie held my gaze.
Roosevelt said, “Cats know things.”
“Not everything.”
/> “Cats know,” Roosevelt insisted.
The cat’s eyes seemed to be full of sadness.
20
Roosevelt put Mungojerrie on one of the kitchen chairs so the cat wouldn’t cut his paws on the splinters of broken china that still littered the floor. Although Mungojerrie is a Wyvern escapee, bred in the genetics labs, perhaps as smart as good Orson, certainly as smart as the average contestant on Wheel of Fortune, smarter than the majority of the policy advisers to the White House during most of the past century, he was nevertheless sufficiently catlike to be able to curl up and go instantly to sleep even though this was, by his prediction, doomsday eve and though we were unlikely to be alive by dawn. Cats may know things, as Roosevelt says, but they don’t suffer from hyperactive imaginations or prickly-pear nerves like mine.
As for knowing things, Roosevelt himself knows more than a few. He knows football because he was, in the sixties and seventies, a major gridiron star, whom sportswriters dubbed the Sledgehammer. Now, at sixty-three, he’s a successful businessman who owns a men’s clothing store, a minimall, and half-interest in the Moonlight Bay Inn and Country Club. He also knows a lot about the sea and boats, living aboard the fifty-six-foot Nostromo, in the last berth of the Moonlight Bay marina. And, of course, he can talk to animals better than Dr. Dolittle, which is a handy talent to have here in Edgar Allan Disneyland.
Roosevelt insisted on helping us clear up the remaining mess. Although it seemed peculiar to be doing housework side by side with a national monument and heir of Saint Francis, we gave him the vacuum cleaner.
Mungojerrie woke when the vacuum wailed, raised his head long enough to express displeasure with a quick baring of his fangs, and then appeared to go to sleep again.
My kitchen is large, but it seems small when Roosevelt Frost is in it, regardless of whether he’s vacuuming. He stands six feet four, and the formidable dimensions of his neck, shoulders, chest, back, and arms make it difficult to believe that he was formed in anything as fragile as a womb; he seems to have been carved out of a granite quarry or poured in a foundry, or perhaps built in a truck factory. He looks considerably younger than he is, with only a few gray hairs at his temples. He succeeded big time in football not merely because of his size but because of his brains; at sixty-three he is nearly as strong as he ever was and—I’m guessing—even smarter, because he’s a man who’s always learning.