Crawlers (12 page)

There was no answer. Just the overloud pendulum tocking of that antique grandfather clock Moms had bought. The whole house was furnished in expensive antiques Donny was afraid to touch.

He looked at his watch. Sometimes they went to bed by this time.

He went up the stairs and listened in front of their bedroom door. He didn’t hear the bed squeaking, so it wasn’t that. He tapped on the door to their bedroom. “You asleep?”

Still no answer. He felt as if he should assume they were asleep, and just go down and get on-line or watch TV or something.

But he couldn’t assume that. He didn’t know why, but he had to
see
them in there, asleep, together. He had to know they were all right.

Like my parents are my kids,
he thought, chuckling nervously at himself.

He opened the door softly, not wanting to wake them. There they were, lying side by side.

They were lying on the bed, on their backs, fully dressed. They just lay there, silently.

They had their eyes wide open.

For a moment he had a frantic thought that they were dead, because they were so still and it was as if they weren’t even breathing.

Then they both turned their heads, at exactly the same moment with exactly the same motion, and looked directly at him.

“Hello, son,” Pops said.

“Um.” His mouth was so dry it was hard to speak. He licked his lips. “You guys—okay?”

“Certainly,” Moms said.

“Certainly,” Pops said. “We’re just resting. Having a talk.”

“Son,” Moms said, “there’s a blood test coming up at the school soon—”

Then she broke off, and turned her head as if listening to some willfully intrusive thought. “No,” she murmured. “Not yet.”

“Okay, whatever,” Donny said.

He closed the door and went to his own room, thinking,
It wasn’t
like it seemed. What’s wrong with me?

Endless delays, trying to leave the school. Bert and Lacey cornered by the chatterbox who organized class schedules, the security guard confused about his parking pass . . . But Lacey had already taken to calling him Bert.

A light rain started up, as Bert finally drove Lacey out of the parking lot in his old Tercel. He hoped to God the little car didn’t break down on the road again. The ramshackle little vehicle embarrassed him even when it ran.

Bert shook his head, wondering at himself again. He hadn’t really cared what anyone thought of his car until today. Had it been so long that a little attraction made him irrational? But it had been only six months since he’d last gone to bed with a woman, though that thing with Emily hadn’t lasted long. Nothing had lasted long since Juanita. He had convinced himself he was going to ease into a comfortable bachelorhood and accept a lonely death with existential fortitude.

The rain was just enough to require wipers. When he switched them on they almost scratched the glass. He was way overdue to have them replaced.

“Must be tiring, teaching a class so late in the evening,” she said.

“I’m sort of used to it. Keeps me out of trouble.”

“Me, too,” she said gravely. “I’d be gambling away my life savings if I weren’t in the class.” He looked at her curiously, and she laughed. She was kidding. “Everything’s a gamble—that’s what I got from that passage you read, from Whitman.”

They spoke of Whitman and Auden—she had a liking for Auden, it seemed—until they got to Quiebra Valley Road. Here every sort of tree, each type in its clump, hunched thick green mysteries in close beside the narrow highway. Now and then on the shoulders of this dark, curving stretch of wet asphalt were white wooden crosses with artificial flowers and deflated mylar balloons.

She turned her head to look as they passed another cross. “Those are all from people who died here? Jeez, that’s three or four now on this one stretch of road.”

“We had a big speeding problem on this road. It’s really twisty and narrow. They killed kids with their cars, and the families put up those crosses. We got a good commander over at the Quiebra PD, guy named Cruzon, he put up a whole series of checkpoints to catch the drunks. Got the DA to do some prosecution, too, improved the situation some. But those kids are still dead.”

He glanced at her, wondering how she’d take that hint of his basic pessimism. He could see the good in things, but the dark side was always there, too. And he wouldn’t turn his back on it. Foolish to turn your back on it.

But she was nodding. “Yeah. People lose their kids, there really isn’t any closure, any resolution to how they feel.”

The wipers screeched and swished across the windshield; the rain beaded and blew in trails, up the hood of the car.

They were quiet. He thought about how he had just met her. It wasn’t wise to ask a student for a date, even an adult like Lacey. But then—

Something fell from an overhanging tree limb, clattered and sparked onto the hood, and scuttled up onto the windshield.

It was a handful of somethings. Little pieces of irregularly shaped metal—or metal-threaded glass? Driven by the wind and the slap of the wipers, he supposed, they seemed to twist about to reorient themselves, fitting together, almost in the shape of a little animal, a lizard or—

“Look out!” Lacey burst out.

Then he saw it, too.

Headlights were blazing toward them, a truck’s horn was blaring. Working hard to keep from jerking the steering wheel in a panicky way, he steered sharply onto the shoulder. The little car fishtailed, bouncing, heading toward the gorge. Then it stopped on the edge of a steep drop-off to Quiebra Creek, so abruptly that both of them whiplashed.

The car shuddered, and the engine died.

10

December 3, night

Vinnie Munson sat with Mother Munson; Vinnie on the small sofa; Mother, a scrawny, wispy-haired woman, twisted half-sideways in her heavily padded recliner, under a comforter. Just the two of them in the cluttered, close little living room of the bungalow. He was watching MTV with the sound turned off; she was giving him her usual running commentary.

Sometimes Vinnie looked at the screen directly, but when he felt the pictures pushing on his eyes, he had to look away and follow it out of the corners of his eyes, with quick glances. Taking in the mostly naked girls dancing around behind the black rap stars with big gold chains swinging over their taut chest muscles; girls spilling out of limousines behind the man as he came out posing and rapping, tilting his head rhythmically this way and that so his dark glasses caught the light. Mother explained why it was bad, as he listened and watched.

“You see that’s whore behavior right there, please,” Mother was saying. “That’s unsuitable. Showing your boomies because you want to be in that man’s video. For money. On the
Dean Martin Show
he had some dancers in short skirts, but it wasn’t whore dancing like this. That’s just unsuitable.”

Mother’s eyes sparkled. They were having a great time. She’d have been disappointed if he’d turned off this disgraceful programming.

The video ended, and they had one of those crazy MTV animations where the word
MTV
blew itself up and reassembled like a monster or something. Vinnie had to look away. He didn’t like that. It was too much like the brain cartoons that tormented him at night.

“I won’t be in that rectangle when they’re washing my hair that way,” Vinnie said.

“Well, I should think not,” Mother said. She always had something agreeable to say to him, though she understood him only about half the time. But half the time was ten times more than anyone else. She liked to criticize the things they saw together, but she meant it kindly. When on Sundays they went to the International House of Pancakes they all knew her there and they made sure to heat up her maple syrup and there was one girl who brought Vinnie extra pancakes, extra bacon. He couldn’t look directly at her, when she was there, but he saw her in window reflections, or out of the corner of his eye, and she was a thin little woman like his mother, only young. Mother talked about how Vinnie had charmed that girl, and he sometimes actually laughed his barking laugh at that. It took a lot to make him laugh.

Next they were going to have
The Real World
on. Mother let him turn on the sound for that. She liked to comment on how badly behaved those kids were and feel sorry for the ones who sounded lost. There was one on lately named Lorena who would start crying about how the others put her down, and Mother would say, “Oh, the poor honey. You see what she’s gotten into? She’s a good girl and they act like that. Oh, that’s a shame, Vinnie. Do you want some cocoa?”

She made him cocoa and popcorn, and they ate it together, watching young people whine on
The Real World
. He loved cocoa. He loved popcorn. He loved his mother. He wished he could let her give him a hug more often, like she wanted to, but it took a lot of inner preparation for that. Anyway, she knew he loved her. He always made her a valentine with his own hands, for February 14.

So they just sat in the living room together and watched
The
Real World
. As much as he could watch it directly. He didn’t have to think about the machine blue jays or the pill-bug squirrels. He didn’t have to think about the voices from his seizures. He could be with Mother, and they were happy just being together like this.

It was bliss.

“Oh, hell,” Bert muttered as the engine died. “I’m sorry, Lacey. Son of a bitch. I can’t believe it. Are you all right?”

“Yes.” She rubbed at her neck. “It’s okay. Not even any real whiplash, I don’t think. You?”

“I’m just mortified, is all. Something fell on the hood and I was staring at it and I must’ve crept over the center lane—just after my self-righteous speech about the drivers around here!”

She chuckled, nodding. “The world likes to remind us.” “When we’re being pompous? Definitely. Holy cow, my heart’s pounding.”

She looked at the hood of the car and along the edges of the windshield. “I don’t see anything now.”

“Oh, but it was there. It must’ve been something like tinsel blown off one of those mylar balloons—from the crosses. I thought it was going to block my vision, and by God it did, just by being distracting.”

“I know, I saw it, too! I mean, it’s not there now. Whatever it was. It didn’t look like tinsel. Little shiny things, like tiny puzzle pieces. My guess is it’s something from a power pole. An electrical conductor thingie that broke off or . . . something.”

He tried to start the car, but it wouldn’t, and from the whining, clicking sound of it he’d jarred something loose in the already balky starter. “It’s probably nothing major but . . . Last time I tried to fix the car myself I broke it worse. Do you have a cell phone?”

“I do. Right here in my purse.”

But the phone didn’t work; it crackled and muttered and wouldn’t connect.

“Wouldn’t you know it. The one time you really need one. Well. Shall we walk till we find one of those yellow call boxes?” He peered up the road. “Those emergency phone things.”

“Sounds like a plan.” They got out into the rain—slackened, now, to a fine mist. Once more, Bert squinted down the road, looking for a call box. There wasn’t one.

She whistled softly, and he went to stand beside her on the verge of the drop-off to the creek. “Look at that, Bert!”

They stared off into the darkness, below the road—the darkness he’d almost plunged the car into. They’d hit the shoulder right where the screen of trees parted for an opening into the narrow gorge of Quiebra Creek, maybe a hundred feet below. “Jesus! It must be the deepest part of the canyon here! The damn car would’ve turned over two or three times on the way down!”

Then he looked at her, wondering if he’d scared her, saying that.

But she was grinning. “I know! That’ll sure as hell wake you up, won’t it?”

A lot of other women would have been angry, or at least anxious, at a close call like that. But she reveled in having survived, at the closeness of it.

“It’s funny there isn’t a guard rail here,” she said, leaning to look into the gorge. “Oh! I see! There was—only it’s down there now!”

Bert followed her gaze and could just pick out the twisted white metal ribbon of the guard rail, tangled with the hulk of an old SUV, crumpled into a cluster of boulders, forty or so feet below. “Oh, yeah. I remember that one. That SUV’s been down there for months. Leaking gas into the creek, no doubt. They really should’ve hauled it out by now. And fixed the guard rail. But for the grace of God, we could be down there with it.”

Lacey turned back to the road, set her face toward Quiebra.

“Shall we?” she said matter-of-factly.

They buttoned up and started off toward town. The rain stopped altogether, and clouds broke open around the moon. The trees dripped. The moonlight was strong when the clouds allowed it; sometimes it was muted as the clouds slid past and the darkness would mass around Bert and Lacey.

He glanced back at his car and sighed. “I’m sorry. That truck. I shouldn’t have let anything distract me.”

She looked at him; her smile caught the moonlight through the trees. “Not at all. It’s not so cold now. Not an unpleasant night for a walk. I was startled by that stuff on the windshield, too. I’d have done the same thing.”

Bert growled to himself. “That . . . blankety-blank trucker.”

“You can say it! Tell it like it is! Witness!”

“That
fucking
trucker should have stopped to make sure we were all right.” After a moment he grunted to himself, conceding, “Could be, the dumb son of a gun didn’t even see us go off the road. It happened around the curve from where he went.”

The night released the sound of their footsteps and not much more. He started to relax a little, look around, enjoy the walk a little; the trees dripping, the mulch exhaling a delicious, deep odor of leafy decay—odd how some kinds of decay could be pleasant. Maybe because it hinted about life closing the circle, about energy being released from what had been inert.

“It’s funny,” he said, “we’re not far from town. There are ranches around, and freeways on the other side of those hills. But this area here is sheer wilderness. Nature keeps asserting herself. We destroy one aspect of the wildness and it finds a way to come back.”

“But sometimes it’s like some alternative nature keeps trying to grow out of our society—machines, electronics, media. Nature co-opting technology—it’s like technology has become a—a wilderness.”

He nodded. “I know what you mean. People are in such a strange state now. They’re so much at a remove from real life, at least in America. It’s like we live in ‘media world,’ like . . . in a dream. And we just kid ourselves into forgetting about the wilderness—about the
wildness
. But—” He gestured at the woods lining the road. “—it’s savage and it won’t go away. Maybe it just finds new shapes.”

She looked into the darkness where the breeze made the tree-tops toss and hiss. When the wind eased, he could just hear the creek, like a crowd of whisperers. He was surprised they hadn’t heard any owls yet. But the moon shone on him and Lacey between the shadows of the trees.

Maybe this little adventure could turn out to be a good thing. Maybe they would look back and laugh someday at how they’d gotten closer sooner because of his shaky driving. She’d say, “And you should have seen him, slapping his forehead, ‘I’m so mortified!’ ”

Fantasies,
he thought.
I’m turning into a damned teenage boy around
this woman. Errol would say, “Aha, see, what’d I tell you!”

He glanced at her and she returned his glance. He looked self-consciously into the darkness of the gorge to their right.

That’s when he heard the soft, rattling, scraping sound, of something following them, down there.

Mason refused to get out of the van and refused to say why.

“He’s paranoid ’cause he was smoking that dope,” Waylon muttered. “Forget him, let him stay in the van.”

Adair looked at Mason and thought,
There’s something he’s not
telling us.
He’d hardly said anything since he’d picked them up.

She shrugged and followed Waylon through the rain down toward the shattered dock. There wasn’t much evidence left of all the activity, now; the rain had erased most of it. Just the interlaced tire tracks of big vehicles, some torn yellow police tape lying on the ground like old Halloween streamers.

She paused for a moment to look at this arm of the bay, as Waylon pushed obliviously on ahead.

Occasionally a gibbous moon broke through the clouds and splashed a silver path on the slowly heaving water; this inlet of the bay dappled with sprays of rain that chased each other across the surface. Out toward the middle she could just make out the dark line of waves created by the current from the Sacramento River flowing into the delta and the bay. Adair could see, almost on the farther shore, the lights of a small boat chugging along, toward the bridge. She couldn’t quite make out the boat itself; it looked like a cluster of lights laboring along, dipping with the rhythm of the waves. It was about the same size as
Skirmisher
.

She wanted to go out with Dad on the boat again. She got sea-sick in winter weather and it was cold out there, so she usually avoided it—but now she wished they could be out on the bay together. Only, Dad hadn’t taken
Skirmisher
out since the satellite.

In fact, he hadn’t done any work that she knew about for weeks. What were they living on? Maybe he’d gotten the check from the government for hauling that satellite up. But he hadn’t mentioned it.

She sighed, and her gaze lifted to the hills on the other side of the bay, where someone had their Christmas lights up already— well, it was already December—and the strings of lights sparkled in candy-tone colors between the ghostly orbs of streetlights.

“Hey! Adair!” Waylon called.

She joined him on the wrecked edge of what remained of the dock. She pushed with her foot at a mostly broken-off end of timber, and a nail-studded chunk came loose, fell spinning into the water. It sank, then bobbed up again, drifting to clunk against a tarry, barnacled pylon. She said, “You know, it’s weird to think a fucking satellite crashed right here at our feet.”

Waylon nodded. “I heard that. Shit. Look at that—the edge of the wood all charred. What’s weird is that anything of the dock made it. Man, I’d think there’d be just, like, splinters left.”

She turned to him in a sudden burst of conspiratorial excitement. “When Cal was working on it with Dad, he heard someone say something about the satellite slowing itself down. It was like the way they said it. That it didn’t exactly crash. It was more like it landed.”

He stared at her. “Holy fuck. It landed?”

“Well, crash-landed. I mean, if you think about it. It’s amazing that it, you know—”

“—that the satellite wasn’t smashed to pieces! Damn! You’re right!”

She felt a sort of glow inside. She’d shown Waylon she could help; she could be part of his quest. Maybe she could get him to make some kind of move, anyway; because maybe he appreciated her now a little more.

Mason honked the horn on the van, behind them. She glanced back, could just see the outline of his head. “He’s getting nervous alone back there. Or bored.”

Waylon muttered, “Just cool your fucking jets, Mason. Shit. We’ve only been here, like, a minute.”

She shivered and hugged herself. “It’s cold out here.”

She looked at him sidelong, hoping the hint would get him to put his arm around her, but he just kept staring into the water.

Clueless shithead,
she thought, suddenly angry.
You don’t know
what you’re missing.