Junior worried that he might not locate the correct Dumpster among the many. Yet he didn’t switch on the flashlight, suspecting that he would be better able to find his way if the conditions of darkness and fog were exactly as they had been earlier. In fact, this proved to be the case, and he instantly recognized the hulking Dumpster when he came upon it.
After tucking the flashlight under his belt, he grabbed the lip of the Dumpster with both hands. The metal was gritty, cold, and wet.
A fine carpenter can wield a hammer with an economy of movement and accuracy as elegant as the motions of a symphony conductor with a baton. A cop directing traffic can make a rough ballet out of the work. However, of all the humble tasks that men and women can transform into visual poetry by the application of athletic agility and grace, clambering into a Dumpster holds the least promise of beautification.
Junior levered up, scrambled up, vaulted over, and crashed into the deep bin, with every intention of landing on his feet. But he overshot, slammed his shoulder into the back wall of the container, fell to his knees, and sprawled facedown in the trash.
Having used his body as a clapper in the bell of the Dumpster, Junior had struck a loud reverberant note that tolled like a poorly cast cathedral bell, echoing solemnly off the walls of the flanking buildings, back and forth through the fogbound night.
He lay still, waiting for silence to return, so he could hear whether the great gong had drawn people into the alley.
The lack of offensive odors indicated that he hadn’t landed in a container filled with organic garbage. In the blackness, judging only by feel, he decided that almost everything was in plastic trash bags, the contents of which were relatively soft—probably paper refuse.
His right side, however, had come to rest against an object harder than bagged paper, an angular mass. As the skull-rattling gong faded, allowing more clarity of thought, he realized that an unpleasant, vaguely warm, damp something was pressed against his right cheek.
If the angular mass was Neddy, the vaguely warm, damp something must be the strangled man’s protruding tongue.
With a thin hiss of disgust, Junior pulled away from the thing, whatever it was, withdrew the flashlight from his belt, and listened intently for sounds in the alleyway. No voices. No footsteps. Only distant traffic noises so muffled that they sounded like the grunts and groans and low menacing growls of foraging animals, displaced predators prowling the urban mist.
Finally he switched on the light, and illuminated Neddy at ease, silent in death as never in life: lying on his back, head turned to the right, swollen tongue lolling obscenely.
Junior vigorously scrubbed his corpse-licked cheek with one hand. Then he scrubbed his hand against the musician’s raincoat.
He was glad that he’d taken the double dose of antiemetics. In spite of this provocation, his stomach felt as solid and secure as a bank vault.
Neddy’s face didn’t appear to be as pale as it had been earlier. An undertone of gray, possibly blue, darkened the skin.
The Rolex. Because most of the trash in the huge bin was bagged, finding the watch would be easier than Junior had feared.
Okay then.
All right.
He needed to keep moving, conduct the search, find the watch, and get the hell out of here, but he couldn’t stop staring at the musician. Something about the cadaver made him nervous—aside from the fact that it was dead and disgusting and, if he was caught with it, a one-way ticket to the gas chamber.
It wasn’t as if this was Junior’s first encounter with a dead body. In the past few years, he’d become as comfortable with the deceased as any mortician might be. They were as unremarkable to him as cupcakes were to a baker.
Yet his heart slammed hard and heavy against his confining ribs, and fear stippled the nape of his neck.
His attention, as morbid as a circling vulture, settled upon the pianist’s right hand. The left was open, palm down. But the right was crumpled shut, palm up.
He reached toward the dead man’s closed hand, but he couldn’t find the courage to touch it. He was afraid that if he pried open the stiff fingers, he would discover a quarter inside.
Ridiculous. Impossible.
But what if?
Then don’t look.
Focus. Focus on the Rolex.
Instead, he focused on the hand in the flashlight beam: four long, thin, chalk-white digits bent to the heel; thumb thrust up stiffly, as though Neddy hoped to hitchhike out of the Dumpster, out of death, and back to his piano in the cocktail lounge on Nob Hill.
Focus. He must not let fear displace his anger.
Remember the beauty of rage. Channel the anger and be a winner. Act now, think later.
In a sudden desperate burst of action, Junior tore at the dead man’s closed hand, sprang open the trap of fingers and palm—and did not find a quarter. Nor two dimes and a nickel. Nor five nickels. Nothing. Zip. Zero.
He almost laughed at himself, but he recalled the disconcerting laugh that earlier had trilled from him in the men’s room, when he’d thought about stuffing Neddy Gnathic into the toilet. Now he pinched his tongue between his teeth almost hard enough to draw blood, hoping to prevent that brittle and mirthless sound from escaping him again.
The Rolex.
First, he searched immediately around the dead man, figuring that the watch might still be snared on the coat belt or on one of the sleeve straps. No luck.
He rolled Neddy onto one side, but no gold watch lay underneath, so he let the musician flop onto his back again.
Now here was a thing, worse than the thought of a quarter in the closed hand: Neddy’s eyes seemed to follow Junior as he rooted among the trash bags.
He knew that the only movement in those staring, sightless eyes was the restless reflection of the flashlight beam as he probed the trash with it. He knew he was being irrational, but nevertheless he was reluctant to turn his back on the corpse. Repeatedly in the midst of searching, he snapped his head up, whipping his attention to Neddy, certain that from the corner of his eye, he had seen the dead gaze following him.
Then he thought he heard footsteps approaching in the alley.
He doused the light and crouched motionless in the absolute darkness, leaning against a wall of the Dumpster to steady himself, because his feet were planted in slippery layers of fog-dampened plastic trash bags.
If there had been footsteps, they had fallen silent the moment Junior froze to listen for them. Even over the hard drumming of his heart, he would have heard any noise. The pillowy fog seemed to smother sound in the alleyway more effectively than ever.
The longer he crouched, head cocked, breathing silently through his open mouth, the more convinced Junior became that he had heard a man approaching. Indeed, the terrible conviction grew that someone was standing immediately in front of the Dumpster, head cocked, also breathing through his open mouth, listening for Junior even as Junior listened for him.
What if…
No. He wasn’t going to what-if himself into a panic.
Yes, but what if…
Maybes were for babies, but Caesar Zedd had failed to provide a profundity with which Junior could ward off the what-ifs as easily as the maybes.
What if the stubborn, selfish, greedy, grubbing, vicious, psychotic, evil spirit of Thomas Vanadium, which had earlier pursued Junior through another alleyway in broad daylight, had followed him into this one in the more ghost-friendly hours of the night, and what if that spirit were standing just outside the Dumpster right now, and what if it closed the bifurcated lid and slipped a bolt through the latch rings, and what if Junior were trapped here with the thoroughly strangled corpse of Neddy Gnathic, and what if the flashlight failed when he tried to switch it on again, and then what if in the pitch-blackness he heard Neddy say, “Does anyone have a special request?”
Chapter 69
RED SKY IN THE morning, sailors take warning; red sky at night, sailors delight.
On this January twilight, as
Maria Elena Gonzalez drove south along the coast from Newport Beach, all men of the sea must have been reaching for bottles of rum to celebrate the fruit-punch sky: ripe cherries in the west, blood oranges overhead, clustered grapes dark purple in the east.
This sight that might inspire celebration among sailors was denied to Barty, who rode in the backseat with Agnes. Neither could he see how the crimson sky studied its painted face in the mirror of the ocean, nor how a burning blush shimmered on the waves, nor how the veil of night slowly returned modesty to the heavens.
Agnes considered describing the sunset to the blinded boy, but her hesitancy settled into reluctance, and by the time the stars came out, she had said not a word about the day’s splendorous final act. For one thing, she worried that her description would fall far short of the reality, and that with her inadequate words, she might dull Barty’s precious memories of sunsets he had seen. Primarily, however, she failed to remark on the spectacle because she was afraid that to do so would be to remind him of all that he had lost.
These past ten days had been the most difficult of her life, harder even than those following Joey’s death. Back then, although she had lost a husband and a gentle lover and her best friend all at once, she’d had her undiminished faith, as well as her newborn son and all the promise of his future. She still had her precious boy, even though his future was to some extent blighted, and her faith remained with her, too, though diminished and offering less solace than before.
Barty’s release from Hoag Presbyterian had been delayed by an infection, and thereafter he had spent three days in a Newport-area rehabilitation hospital. Rehab consisted largely of orientation to his new dark world, since his lost function could not be recovered by either diligent exercise or therapy.
Ordinarily, a child of three would be too young to learn the use of a blind man’s cane, but Barty wasn’t ordinary. Initially, no cane was available for such a small child, so Barty began with a yardstick sawn off to twenty-six inches. By his last day, they had for him a custom cane, white with a black tip; the sight of it and all that it implied brought tears to Agnes just when she thought her heart had toughened for the task ahead.
Instruction in Braille wasn’t recommended for three-year-olds, but an exception was made in this case. Agnes arranged to have Barty receive a series of lessons, although she suspected that he’d absorb the system and learn to use it in one or two sessions.
Artificial eyes were on order. He would soon return to Newport Beach for a third fitting before implant. They weren’t glass, as commonly believed, but thin plastic shells that fit neatly behind the eyelids in the cavities left after surgery. On the inner surface of the transparent artificial cornea, the artificial iris would be skillfully hand-painted, and movement of the ocular prosthesis could be achieved by attaching the eye-moving muscles to the conjunctiva.
As impressed as Agnes had been with the sample orbs that she’d been shown, she allowed no hope that the singular beauty of Barty’s striated emerald-sapphire eyes would be re-created. Although the artist’s work might be exquisite, these irises would be painted by human hands, not by God’s.
With his empty sockets draped by unsupported lids, Barty rode home wearing padded eyepatches under sunglasses, his cane propped against the seat at his side, as though he were costumed for a role in a play filled with a Dickensian amount of childhood suffering.
The previous day, Jacob and Edom had driven back to Bright Beach, to prepare for Barty’s arrival. Now they hurried down the back porch steps and across the lawn, as Maria followed the driveway past the house and parked near the detached garage at the rear of the deep property.
Jacob intended to carry the luggage, and Edom announced that he would carry Barty. The boy, however, insisted on making his own way to the house.
“But, Barty,” Edom fretted, “it’s dark.”
“It sure is,” Barty said. When only a mortified silence followed his remark, he added: “Gee, I thought that was kinda funny.”
With his mother, his uncles, and Maria hovering just two steps behind, Barty followed the driveway, not bothering with the cane, keeping his right foot on the concrete, his left foot on the grass, until he came to a jog in the pavement, which apparently he’d been seeking. He stopped, facing due north, considered for a moment, and then pointed due west: “The oak tree’s over there.”
“That’s right,” Agnes confirmed.
With the great tree ninety degrees to his left, he was able to locate the back-porch steps at forty-five degrees. He pointed with the cane, which otherwise he had not used. “The porch?”
“Perfect,” Agnes encouraged.
Neither hesitantly nor recklessly, the boy set off across the lawn toward the porch steps. He maintained a far straighter line than Agnes would have been able to keep with her eyes closed.
At her side, Jacob wondered, “What should we do?”
“Just let him be,” she advised. “Just let him be Barty.”
Forward, under the spreading black branches of the massive tree, receiving continuous green-tongued murmurs of encouragement from the breeze-stirred leaves, Barty was Barty, determined and undaunted.
When he judged that he was near the porch steps, he probed with his cane. Two paces later, the tip rapped the lowest step.
He felt for the railing. Grasped at the empty air only briefly. Found the handrail. He climbed to the porch.
The kitchen door stood open and full of light, but he missed it by two feet. He felt along the back wall of the house, discovered the door casing and then the opening, probed with the cane for the threshold, and stepped into the doorway.
Turning to face his four trailing escorts, all of whom were hunch-shouldered and stiff-necked with tension, Barty said, “What’s for dinner?”
Jacob had spent most of two days baking Barty’s favorite pies, cakes, and cookies, and he’d prepared a meal as well. Maria’s girls were at her sister’s place this evening, so she stayed for dinner. Edom poured wine for everyone but Barty, root beer for the guest of honor, and while this couldn’t be called a celebration, Agnes’s spirits were lifted by a sense of normality, of hope, of family.
Eventually, dinner over, cleanup finished, when Maria and the uncles had gone, Agnes and Barty faced the stairs together. She followed, holding his cane, which he said he preferred not to use in the house, prepared to catch him if he stumbled.
One hand on the railing, he ascended the first three steps slowly. Pausing on each, he slid his foot forward and back on the carpet runner to judge the depth of the tread relative to his small foot. He ran the toe of his right shoe up and down the riser between each tread, gauging the height.
Barty approached stair climbing as a mathematical problem, calculating the precise movement of each leg and placement of each foot necessary to successfully negotiate the obstacle. He proceeded less slowly on the next three steps than he had on the first three, and thereafter he ascended with growing confidence, pumping his legs with machinelike precision.
Agnes could almost visualize the three-dimensional geometric model that her little prodigy had created in his mind, which he now relied upon to reach the upper floor without a serious stumble. Pride, wonder, and sorrow pulled her heart in different directions.
Reflecting upon her son’s clever, diligent, and uncomplaining adaptation to darkness, she wished that she had described to him the dazzling sunset under which they had made their journey home. Although her words might have been inadequate to the spectacle, he would have elaborated on them to create a picture in his mind; with his creative skills, the world that he’d lost with his sight might be remade in equal splendor in his imagination.
Agnes hoped that the boy would spend a night or two in her room, until he was reoriented to the house. But Barty wanted to sleep in his own bed.
She worried that he would need to go to the bathroom during the night and that, half asleep, he might turn the wrong way, toward the stairs, and fall. Three times they paced off the route from th
e doorway of his room to the hall bath. She would have walked it a hundred times and still not been satisfied, but Barty said, “Okay, I’ve got it.”
During Barty’s hospitalization, they had graduated from the young-adult novels by Robert Heinlein to some of the same author’s science fiction for general audiences. Now, pajamaed and in bed, with his sunglasses on the nightstand but his padded eyepatches still in place, Barty listened, rapt, to the beginning of Double Star.
No longer able to judge the boy’s degree of sleepiness by his eyes, she relied on him to tell her when to stop reading. At his request, she closed the book after forty-seven pages, at the end of Chapter 2.
Agnes bent to Barty and kissed him good-night.
“Mom, if I ask you for something, will you do it?”
“Of course, honey. Don’t I always?”
He pushed back the bedclothes and sat up, leaning against the pillows and headboard. “This is maybe a hard thing for you to do, but it’s really important.”
Sitting on the edge of the bed, taking his hand, she stared at his sweet little bow of a mouth, whereas before she would have met his eyes. “Tell me.”
“Don’t be sad. Okay?”
Agnes had believed that through this ordeal, she’d largely spared her child from an awareness of the awful depth of her misery. In this, however, as in so many other instances, the boy proved to be more perceptive and more mature than she’d realized. Now she felt that she had failed him, and this failure ached like a wound.
He said, “You’re the Pie Lady.”
“Once was.”
“Will be. And the Pie Lady—she’s never sad.”
“Sometimes even the Pie Lady.”
“You always leave people feeling good, like Santa Claus leaves them.”
She gently squeezed his hand but couldn’t speak.
“It’s there even when you read to me now. The sad feeling, I mean. It changes the story, makes it not as good, because I can’t pretend I don’t hear how sad you are.”
With effort, she managed to say, “I’m sorry, sweetie,” but her voice was sufficiently distorted by anguish that even to herself, she sounded like a stranger.
After a silence, he asked, “Mom, you always believe me, don’t you?”
“Always,” she said, because she had never known him to lie.
“Are you looking at me?”
“Yes,” she assured him, though her gaze had dropped from his mouth to his hand, so small, which she held in hers.
“Mom, do I look sad?”
By habit, she shifted her attention to his eyes, because though the scientific types insist that the eyes themselves are incapable of expression, Agnes knew what every poet knows: To see the condition of the hidden heart, you must look first where scientists will not admit to looking at all.
The white padded eyepatches rebuffed her, and she realized how profoundly the boy’s double enucleation would affect how easily she could read his moods and know his mind. Here was a littler loss until now shadowed by the greater destruction. Denied the evidence of his eyes, she would need to be better at noting and interpreting nuances of his body language—also changed by blindness—and his voice, for there would be no soul revealed by hand-painted, plastic implants.
“Do I look sad?” Barty repeated.
Even the Shantung-softened lamplight blazed too bright and did not serve her well, so she switched it off and said, “Scoot over.”
The boy made room for her.
She kicked off her shoes and sat beside him in bed, with her back against the headboard, still holding his hand. Even though this darkness wasn’t as deep as Barty’s, Agnes found that she was better able to control her emotions when she couldn’t see him. “I think you must be sad, kiddo. You hide it well, but you must be.”
“I’m not, though.”
“Bullpoop, as they say.”
“That’s not what they say,” the boy replied with a giggle, for his extensive reading had introduced him to words that he and she agreed were not his to use.
“Bullpoop might not be what they say, but it’s the worst that we say. And in fact, in this house, bulldoody is preferred.”
“Bulldoody doesn’t have a lot of punch.”
“Punch is overrated.”
“I’m really not sad, Mom. I’m not. I don’t like it this way, being blind. It’s…hard.” His small voice, musical as are the voices of most children, touching in its innocence, spun a fragile thread of melody in the dark, and seemed too sweet to be speaking of these bitter things. “Real hard. But being sad won’t help. Being sad won’t make me see again.”
“No, it won’t,” she agreed.
“Besides, I’m blind here, but I’m not blind in all the places where I am.”
This again.
Enigmatic as ever on this subject, he continued: “I’m probably not blind more places than I am. Yeah, sure, I’d rather be me in one of the other places where my eyes are good, but this is the me I am. And you know what?”