Dinner at Deviant's Palace (7 page)

“You’ve found your real family now, haven’t you?” Sister Sue asked softly.

If there was a part of his mind screaming in horrified denial, it was well buried. Rivas, totally at peace for the first time in many years, happily breathed the single word, “Yes.”

When the Jaybird band left the city at noon they took Rivas with them. One of the guards at the South Gate, a grayed veteran who had seen this sort of thing many times over the years, wearily walked out of the guard shack and extended his staff across their way to stop them.

“Alto,”
he said. “Whoa.”

Sister Sue beamed at him. “Is there anything wrong, man?”

The guard nodded toward Rivas, who had bumped into, the man in front of him when the group stopped, but was smiling benevolently at everyone.

“Who’s the blurry boy?” the guard asked sternly.

“He’s one of us,” the girl said. “His name is Brother Boaz.”

“Is that right, son?” he asked more loudly. “Son? Jeez, one of you nudge him, will you? That’s got it. Listen to me, do you
want
to leave the city? You don’t have to.”

“I want to go where these people go,” Rivas explained.

“Where are they going?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your name?”

“Uh… they told me, but I forget.”

“Well, that’s fine,” the guard said bitterly, letting his staff tip clack onto the flagstones. He looked at the girl. “And him still dressed respectable. You all sure didn’t waste any time on him, did you?”

“Some are more ready than others to give themselves to the Lord,” she told him serenely.

He opened his mouth for an angry retort, then apparently couldn’t think of one, for he just said,
“Vaya,”
and turned back to the guard shack.

“Vayamos,”
Sister Sue replied, and led her band forward under the high arch of the gate and then across the cobbled wall road and down the gravel slope west toward the Harbor Freeway. The day being clear and sunny, a number of beribboned tents and booths had been set up in random patterns across the face of the slope like some kind of colorful mushrooms brought out by yesterday’s rain, and some of the vendors hooted at the group of pilgrims.

“Hey,
señora
,” yelled one fat old tentkeeper to Sister Sue, “let me give you a bath and a little lipstick and I swear to Jay bush you could knock down three fifths a day!”

The other vendors within earshot laughed, and the laughter doubled when one added, “A jigger at a time!”

Some of the newer Jaybirds looked embarrassed or angry as they plodded their winding course through this irreverent gauntlet, but the smiles on the faces of Sister Sue, Rivas, and the several deteriorated communicants never faltered.

One small time vice-caterer vaulted the counter of his booth and sprinted across the slope to Rivas and waved a piece of paper at him. It was a faded black-and-white photograph of a nude woman, a shabby example of the sort of relic that, bigger and more explicit and in color, could sell for cases of fifths in the fancy galleries in the city.

“You like that, eh?” cackled the merchant.

Rivas’s gaze crossed the picture and then returned to it, and for the first time in a couple of hours his eyes focused and his smile relaxed and was replaced by a frown.

“Oho, don’t like girls, eh?” said the merchant loudly, playing to the delighted audience. “I’ll bet this is what you like, am I right?” And he yanked out of his pocket a pint bottle of cheap Ventura gin and waved it alluringly.

Rivas stopped, and the man behind him bumped into him as Rivas hesitantly reached for the bottle. The attentive vendors roared, pounding on the counters of their booths and rolling on the ground.

“Not all the way birdy yet!” yelled the prancing merchant. He was tugging at the stopper when a hard slap knocked the bottle out of his hands; Sister Sue was in front of him now, leaning toward him, her smiling gaze so intense that the man actually squinted before it as though it were an intolerably bright light.

She whispered to him for a few seconds and then said, “We’ll be back for you, brother.”

She turned to Rivas and said softly, “Follow me, Brother Boaz.” He nodded, and fell into step when the band began moving forward between the now silent vendors, but Sister Sue kept looking back at him, for the tiny creases of frown hadn’t left his face.

The vice-caterer, who’d been wobbling ever since Sister Sue turned away from him, all at once sat down heavily on the gravel, and the ancient magazine clipping slipped from between his fingers and fluttered away across the slope.

A
LL MORNING THE LITTLE
group moved south along the shore of the great inland sea that, though its broad surface now extended north nearly to the walls of Ellay, was still called San Pedro Bay; and though Rivas didn’t particularly slow the group—he climbed over fallen building sides, waded down streets reclaimed by the sea, and plodded across the occasional stretches of gray powder as tirelessly as any of them—his pace remained somnambulistic, his gaze unfocused.

They’d moved into the Inglewood Desolate, a wide band that extended east all the way from Venice; plants grew poorly in the Desolate, but the main reason for its almost complete lack of population was the spectrum of illnesses suffered by long term residents, and the impossibility of having unsporting children here. Several times during their trek lean faces peered longingly down at them from glass-less windows or up from sewer vents, but the hunched, hungry, scarcely human creatures that would have attacked other travelers let Sister Sue’s band pass unmolested, for it was only in and around the cities that the Jaybirds pretended to be pacifists, and the dwellers in the Desolate had learned to stay away from even the most defenseless-looking group of them.

They passed a few piers that had been built recently enough not to have been swallowed by the ever-rising water, but one could only speculate about what businesses might be practiced by the men who moored their boats at them, for the furtive sailors never yelled or waved, and all carried long knives and slingshots.

The area around the Gage Street pier, though, was a sort of Jaybird settlement. Several tents had been erected, and every month a different group of shepherds took over the task of maintaining the boats and making sure all new recruits were shipped on across the bay.

Sister Sue’s group presented no problems. Along with the rest of them, Rivas shambled docilely out to the end of the pier. The Jaybirds’ pier was a result of luck rather than construction, for it was a big, ancient truck lying on its side; the uphill end of it, which was the cab, was half buried in the layers of soil that a dozen winter floods had flung over it, and out at the far end the top side of the box-shaped trailer was nearly awash in the water of the bay. The surface of this pier was rusted and scuffed and riddled with finger-sized punch holes, but a big cross that might once have been red was still dimly visible painted on it, along with fragments of words, after a hundred baking summers. Ordinarily Rivas would have tried to read the words and guess at their meaning, but today they were just patterns on the pavement. Beyond the rear of the truck, silhouetted against to his new masters earlier that day… but now it only deepened his frown. He glanced at Sister Sue and saw that she was watching him, and he looked away quickly.

The nearest horizon was a ragged line of bone-white buildings three miles away across the bay, but the shepherd at the end of the pier was squinting south, where the bay broadened out and one could see, this being a clear day, the distant dot that was Long Beach Island. At the seaward end of the pier Rivas hung back, seeming to find something disquieting about traveling on the water, but a shepherd stepped up impatiently behind him and gave him a hard shove between the shoulders. Rivas wound up making a flailing jump down onto one of the benches, but once he was in the boat he sat down quietly.

Sister Sue stared at him, then turned to the shepherd, shrugged, and resumed getting the rest of her group aboard.

In the midafternoon the boat tacked in to a Jaybird dock at Cerritos, which, being a good two miles below the southern edge of the Desolate, presented an almost tropical front to the bay, with tall trees trailing flowers and vivid greenery over the water. The harsh cries of monkeys and parrots rang for hundreds of yards through the trees up and down the coast, and the warty top halves of a few amphibian heads poked up out of the water to see what the commotion was, but there was no hitch as the shepherd helped everyone up out of the boat and onto the dock. As he pushed away and let the wind fill his main and jib sails for the skate back northwest to the Gage Street pier, Sister Sue’s band plodded up the foliage-roofed highroad that split the narrow band of coastline jungle and led the group finally to the crest of a hill from which they could look down on the Cerritos Stadium. Other groups of Jaybirds were arriving from north and south and inland, and there was a considerable crowd at the gates. Sister Sue led her group down.

Over the stadium’s entrance gates some agile devotee had painted, with more fervor than skill, a mural of the Messiah Norton Jaybush welcoming all of humanity with outstretched, misproportioned arms; and the painted crowd on which he was looking down became, below the long lintel over the gates, the real, animate crowd of smiling Jaybirds jostling up to get inside. They were all silent, and the only sounds were panting, and the scuff of shod or callused feet, and the occasional uncomplaining grunt of a member of the faithful being momentarily compressed against a wall.

Once inside the huge weathered bowl of the stadium, Rivas absently noticed eight rickety wooden towers set up at even intervals around the periphery of the wide field, and on the little railed platform at the top of each tower stood a brown-robed, bearded man holding a crook-topped staff. Once free of the press at the gates, the various Jaybird groups became distinct and separate again, and each group set out walking toward the base of one or another of the towers.

There were no visible differences among the hooded, tower-top shepherds, and in this orderly dispersal it was, for once, the most deteriorated and imbecilic member of each group that determined on a specific tower and led his or her band across the weedy field toward it. The tower toward which Rivas’s group plodded was on the far side of the enclosed field, and most of the other bands were already standing at ease in the shadow of other towers by the time his band came to a halt.

As if at a signal, all the tower-top shepherds abruptly opened their mouths and began producing a low, steady note, and a moment later every deteriorated Jaybird in the stadium joined in with a shrill “
eee
” sound; though a ground-rumbling roar now instead of a buzz, it was the same insistent two-tone note that had aided Rivas’s acquiescence to his new masters earlier that day… but now it only deepened his frown. He glanced at Sister Sue and saw that she was watching him, and he looked away quickly.

As suddenly as it had started the sound stopped, and in the moment that the last harsh echoes were rebounding away among the high tiers, Rivas took an involuntary step forward, as if the sound had been something physical he’d been pushing against.

The shepherds slung their staves through their belts and climbed nimbly down from the towers, and Rivas watched the one his group and a couple of others were clustered around. When the man got to the ground he straightened up, hiked his staff free and then strode up to Sister Sue and spoke to her quietly.

She indicated Rivas with a nod of her head and then whispered to the bearded shepherd for nearly half a minute. The expression on the man’s tanned, craggy face didn’t change, but he slowly lifted his head to stare at Rivas, and when Sister Sue had finished he walked over to the new member.

“Welcome to your real family, Brother Boaz,” he said in a deep voice.

Rivas glanced around uneasily, then nodded. “Uh, thank you.”

“How old are you?”

“…Eighteen? I think eighteen.”

The shepherd raised an eyebrow and looked more closely at Rivas’s face and hair. “Hmm. Take off your knapsack, please, and let me have it.”

Rivas looked over at Sister Sue, who smiled and nodded. With evident reluctance he reached up, slipped the canvas straps off his shoulders, shrugged the knapsack off and held it out toward the shepherd.

The man took it, stepped back and began undoing the buckles. Around the arena the other shepherds were also busy taking stock of new recruits, and, except for the low mutter of those conversations, the wind in the ragged high tiers was the only sound.

“Or thirty-one,” said Rivas.

The shepherd looked up. “What?”

“Maybe I’m thirty-one years old.”

The man had got the flap open, but paused to squint at him. “Maybe thirty-one, eh? Have you ever… been with us before?”

“No, sir. I ran away from home yesterday. My father’s a tenant farmer for Barrows. The Currency brandy estates.”

“Let me get this straight,” said the shepherd curiously as he pulled a large cloth-wrapped bundle out of the knapsack. “You leave home at thirty-one and call it running away?”

Rivas was breathing deeply now, clearly trying to resist panic. “No, eighteen,” he said tensely. “That’s right, eighteen. For sure.”

The shepherd opened his mouth to ask another question but shut it again when he saw what was wrapped up in the cloth—Rivas’s second-best pelican.

The gaze he now turned on Rivas was full of suspicion. “What the hell is this?”

After a pause Rivas said, almost in a whisper, “Somebody’s pelican.”

“Somebody’s? It’s not yours?… Damn it, answer me!”

“No, sir.” Rivas rubbed his hand across his mouth. “I have one, but not as nice as that.”

“Well, Brother Boaz, music is one of the things we have to sacrifice.” He opened his hand and the instrument fell to the ground with a discordant
bwang
, and then he lifted a heavy boot and stamped the thing flat.

The shepherd started to turn away, then froze, and an instant later he had whirled back to face Rivas again. “Say, what’s your name?”