Black House (57 page)

Jack realizes that he has been neatly rebuked, but coming from her, it doesn’t sting. He allows himself to be led through room after room of the great and ancient hospital. As they go, he gets a sense of how really huge this place is. He also realizes that, in spite of the fresh breezes, he can detect a faint, unpleasant undersmell, something that might be a mixture of fermented wine and spoiled meat. As to what sort of meat, Jack is afraid he can guess pretty well. After visiting over a hundred homicide crime scenes, he
should
be able to.

It would have been impolite to break away while Jack was meeting the love of his life (not to mention bad narrative business), so we didn’t. Now, however, let us slip through the thin walls of the hospital tent. Outside is a dry but not unpleasant landscape of red rocks, broom sage, desert flowers that look a bit like sego lilies, stunted pines, and a few barrel cacti. Somewhere not too far distant is the steady cool sigh of a river. The hospital pavilion rustles and flaps as dreamily as the sails of a ship riding down the sweet chute of the trade winds. As we float along the great ruined tent’s east side in our effortless and peculiarly pleasant way, we notice a strew of litter. There are more rocks with drawings etched on them, there is a beautifully made copper rose that has been twisted out of shape as if by some great heat, there is a small rag rug that looks as if it has been chopped in two by a meat cleaver. There’s other stuff as well, stuff that has resisted any change in its cyclonic passage from one world to the other. We see the blackened husk of a television picture tube lying in a scatter of broken glass, several Duracell AA batteries, a comb, and—perhaps oddest—a pair of white nylon panties with the word
Sunday
written on one side in demure pink script. There has been a collision of worlds; here, along the east side of the hospital pavilion, is an intermingled detritus that attests to how hard that collision was.

At the end of that littery plume of exhaust—the head of the comet, we might say—sits a man we recognize. We’re not used to seeing him in such an ugly brown robe (and he clearly doesn’t know how to wear such a garment, because if we look at him from the wrong angle, we can see
much
more than we want to), or wearing sandals instead of wing tips, or with his hair pulled back into a rough horsetail and secured with a hank of rawhide, but this is undoubtedly Wendell Green. He is muttering to himself. Drool drizzles from the corners of his mouth. He is looking fixedly at an untidy crumple of foolscap in his right hand. He ignores all the more cataclysmic changes that have occurred around him and focuses on just this one. If he can figure out how his Panasonic minicorder turned into a little pile of ancient paper, perhaps he’ll move on to the other stuff. Not until then.

Wendell (we’ll continue to call him Wendell, shall we, and not worry about any name he might or might not have in this little corner of existence, since
he
doesn’t know it or want to) spies the Duracell AA batteries. He crawls to them, picks them up, and begins trying to stick them into the little pile of foolscap. It doesn’t work, of course, but that doesn’t keep Wendell from trying. As George Rathbun might say, “Give that boy a flyswatter and he’d try to catch dinner with it.”

“Geh,” says the Coulee Country’s favorite investigative reporter, repeatedly poking the batteries at the foolscap. “Geh . . . in. Geh . . . in! Gah-damnit, geh in th—”

A sound—the approaching jingle of what can only be, God help us, spurs—breaks into Wendell’s concentration, and he looks up with wide, bulging eyes. His sanity may not be gone forever, but it’s certainly taken the wife and kids and gone to Disney World. Nor is the current vision before his eyes apt to coax it back anytime soon.

Once in our world there was a fine black actor named Woody Strode. (Lily knew him; acted with him, as a matter of fact, in a late-sixties American International stinkeroo called
Execution Express.
) The man now approaching the place where Wendell Green crouches with his batteries and his handful of foolscap looks remarkably like that actor. He is wearing faded jeans, a blue chambray shirt, a neck scarf, and a heavy revolver on a wide leather gun belt in which four dozen or so shells twinkle. His head is bald, his eyes deep-set. Slung over one shoulder by a strap of intricate design is a guitar. Sitting on the other is what appears to be a parrot. The parrot has two heads.

“No, no,” says Wendell in a mildly scolding voice. “Don’t. Don’t see. Don’t see. That.” He lowers his head and once more begins trying to cram the batteries into the handful of paper.

The shadow of the newcomer falls over Wendell, who resolutely refuses to look up.

“Howdy, stranger,” says the newcomer.

Wendell carries on not looking up.

“My name’s Parkus. I’m the law ’round these parts. What’s your handle?”

Wendell refuses to respond, unless we can call the low grunts issuing from his drool-slicked mouth a response.

“I asked your name.”

“Wen,” says our old acquaintance (we can’t really call him a friend) without looking up. “Wen. Dell. Gree
.
.
.
Green.
I . . . I . . . I . . .”

“Take your time,” Parkus says (not without sympathy). “I can wait till your branding iron gets hot.”

“I
.
.
.
news hawk!
”

“Oh? That what you are?” Parkus hunkers; Wendell cringes back against the fragile wall of the pavilion. “Well, don’t that just beat the bass drum at the front of the parade? Tell you what, I’ve seen
fish
hawks, and I’ve seen
red
hawks, and I’ve seen
gos
hawks, but you’re my first
news
hawk.”

Wendell looks up, blinking rapidly.

On Parkus’s left shoulder, one head of the parrot says: “God is love.”

“Go fuck your mother,” replies the other head.

“All must seek the river of life,” says the first head.

“Suck my tool,” says the second.

“We grow toward God,” responds the first.

“Piss up a rope,” invites the second.

Although both heads speak equably—even in tones of reasonable discourse—Wendell cringes backward even farther, then looks down and furiously resumes his futile work with the batteries and the handful of paper, which is now disappearing into the sweat-grimy tube of his fist.

“Don’t mind ’em,” Parkus says. “
I
sure don’t. Hardly hear ’em anymore, and that’s the truth. Shut up, boys.”

The parrot falls silent.

“One head’s Sacred, the other’s Profane,” Parkus says. “I keep ’em around just to remind me that—”

He is interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps, and stands up again in a single lithe and easy movement. Jack and Sophie are approaching, holding hands with the perfect unconsciousness of children on their way to school.

“Speedy!” Jack cries, his face breaking into a grin.

“Why, Travelin’ Jack!” Parkus says, with a grin of his own. “Well-met! Look at you, sir—you’re all grown up.”

Jack rushes forward and throws his arms around Parkus, who hugs him back, and heartily. After a moment, Jack holds Parkus at arm’s length and studies him. “You were older—you looked older to
me,
at least. In both worlds.”

Still smiling, Parkus nods. And when he speaks again, it is in Speedy Parker’s drawl. “Reckon I did look older, Jack. You were just a child, remember.”

“But—”

Parkus waves one hand. “Sometimes I look older, sometimes not so old. It all depends on—”

“Age is wisdom,” one head of the parrot says piously, to which the other responds, “You senile old fuck.”

“—depends on the place and the circumstances,” Parkus concludes, then says: “And I told you boys to shut up. You keep on, I’m apt to wring your scrawny neck.” He turns his attention to Sophie, who is looking at him with wide, wondering eyes, as shy as a doe. “Sophie,” he says. “It’s wonderful to see you, darling. Didn’t I say he’d come? And here he is. Took a little longer than I expected, is all.”

She drops him a deep curtsey, all the way down to one knee, her head bowed.
“Thankee-sai,”
she says. “Come in peace, gunslinger, and go your course along the Beam with my love.”

At this, Jack feels an odd, deep chill, as if many worlds had spoken in a harmonic tone, low but resonant.

Speedy—so Jack still thinks of him—takes her hand and urges her to her feet. “Stand up, girl, and look me in the eye. I’m no gunslinger here, not in the borderlands, even if I do still carry the old iron from time to time. In any case, we have a lot to talk about. This’s no time for ceremony. Come over the rise with me, you two. We got to make palaver, as the gunslingers say. Or used to say, before the world moved on. I shot a good brace of grouse, and think they’ll cook up just fine.”

“What about—” Jack gestures toward the muttering, crouched heap that is Wendell Green.

“Why, he looks right busy,” Parkus says. “Told me he’s a news hawk.”

“I’m afraid he’s a little above himself,” Jack replies. “Old Wendell here’s a news
vulture.
”

Wendell turns his head a bit. He refuses to lift his eyes, but his lip curls in a sneer that may be more reflexive than real. “Heard. That.” He struggles. The lip curls again, and this time the sneer seems less reflexive. It is, in fact, a snarl. “Gol.
Gol. Gol-
den boy. Holly. Wood.”

“He’s managed to retain at least some of his charm and his joi de vivre,” Jack says. “Will he be okay here?”

“Not much with ary brain in its head comes near the Little Sisters’ tent,” Parkus says. “He’ll be okay. And if he smells somethin’ tasty on the breeze and comes for a look-see, why, I guess we can feed him.” He turns toward Wendell. “We’re going just over yonder. If you want to come and visit, why, you just up and do her. Understand me, Mr. News Hawk?”

“Wen. Dell.
Green.
”

“Wendell Green, yessir.” Parkus looks at the others. “Come on. Let’s mosey.”

“We mustn’t forget him,” Sophie murmurs, with a look back. “It will be dark in a few hours.”

“No,” Parkus agrees as they top the nearest rise. “Wouldn’t do to leave him beside that tent after dark. That wouldn’t do at all.”

There’s more foliage in the declivity on the far side of the rise—even a little ribbon of creek, presumably on its way to the river Jack can hear in the distance—but it still looks more like northern Nevada than western Wisconsin. Yet in a way, Jack thinks, that makes sense. The last one had been no ordinary flip. He feels like a stone that has been skipped all the way across a lake, and as for poor Wendell—

To the right of where they descend the far side of the draw, a horse has been tethered in the shade of what Jack thinks is a Joshua tree. About twenty yards down the draw to the left is a circle of eroded stones. Inside it a fire, not yet lit, has been carefully laid. Jack doesn’t like the look of the place much—the stones remind him of ancient teeth. Nor is he alone in his dislike. Sophie stops, her grip on his fingers tightening.

“Parkus, do we have to go in there? Please say we don’t.”

Parkus turns to her with a kindly smile Jack knows well: a Speedy Parker smile for sure.

“The Speaking Demon’s been gone from this circle many the long age, darling,” he says. “And you know that such as yon are best for stories.”

“Yet—”

“Now’s no time to give in to the willies,” Parkus tells her. He speaks with a trace of impatience, and “willies” isn’t precisely the word he uses, but only how Jack’s mind translates it. “You waited for him to come in the Little Sisters’ hospital tent—”

“Only because
she
was there on the other side—”

“—and now I want you to come along.” All at once he seems taller to Jack. His eyes flash. Jack thinks:
A gunslinger. Yes, I suppose he
could
be a gunslinger. Like in one of Mom’s old movies, only for real.

“All right,” she says, low. “If we must.” Then she looks at Jack. “I wonder if you’d put your arm around me?”

Jack, we may be sure, is happy to oblige.

As they step between two of the stones, Jack seems to hear an ugly twist of whispered words. Among them, one voice is momentarily clear, seeming to leave a trail of slime behind it as it enters his ear:
Drudge drudge drudge, oho the bledding foodzies, soon he cummz, my good friend Munshun, and such a prize I have for him, oho, oho—

Jack looks at his old friend as Parkus hunkers by a tow sack and loosens the drawstring at the top. “He’s close, isn’t he? The Fisherman. And Black House, that’s close, too.”

“Yep,” Parkus says, and from the sack he spills the gutted corpses of a dozen plump dead birds.

Thoughts of Irma Freneau reenter Jack’s head at the sight of the grouse, and he thinks he won’t be able to eat. Watching as Parkus and Sophie skewer the birds on greensticks reinforces this idea. But after the fire is lit and the birds begin to brown, his stomach weighs in, insisting that the grouse smell wonderful and will probably taste even better. Over here, he remembers, everything always does.

“And here we are, in the speaking circle,” Parkus says. His smiles have been put away for the nonce. He looks at Jack and Sophie, who sit side by side and still holding hands, with somber gravity. His guitar has been propped against a nearby rock. Beside it, Sacred and Profane sleeps with its two heads tucked into its feathers, dreaming its no doubt bifurcated dreams. “The Demon may be long gone, but the legends say such things leave a residue that may lighten the tongue.”

“Like kissing the Blarney Stone, maybe,” Jack suggests.

Parkus shakes his head. “No blarney today.”

Jack says, “If only we were dealing with an ordinary scumbag. That I could handle.”

Sophie looks at him, puzzled.

“He means a dust-off artist,” Parkus tells her. “A hardcase.” He looks at Jack. “And in one way, that
is
what you’re dealing with. Carl Bierstone isn’t much—an ordinary monster, let’s say. Which is
not
to say he couldn’t do with a spot of killing. But as for what’s going on in French Landing, he has been used. Possessed, you’d say in your world, Jack. Taken by the spirits, we’d say in the Territories—”