Moo (51 page)

But the conference was over, no two ways about that, and so they were packing to move to another hotel—only three days to go and no reason to change their first-class airline reservations (Dr. Cates had checked to be sure that nothing could or would happen to those). His wife had found them a pleasant hotel even closer to Sea World (he had those tickets right in his wallet), and they were almost ready to load the rental car and leave (in the end, the resort had been happy to accommodate his wish to leave after normal checkout time and not be charged for that day, in exchange for his agreement not to enter into protracted negotiations right there in the lobby—he could tell
they thought that a tall black man with a wife in African garb was capable of anything).

All things considered, Cates had handled the whole thing superbly, and if his son, Daniel, would stop screaming that he didn’t WANT to go to another hotel, he liked THIS hotel, Dr. Cates thought that the boy would agree. In general, Dr. Cates tried to show Daniel by example how it was possible to maintain dignity, keep your voice down, and still get what you wanted. This lesson he expected to seep into Daniel’s consciousness eventually, according to the principle of tedious repetition. Until that time, however, Daniel seemed to persist in a nasty habit of angry tantrums that tried even Dr. Cates’ patience and were probably the reason that he and his wife had never had another child.

His wife came in from the bedroom of the suite, carrying her makeup case, and set it beside the door. That was it for the luggage, so he said to her, “You looked under the bed?”

“What?”

He raised his voice so she could hear him over the screaming. “I SAID, ‘DID YOU LOOK UNDER THE BED?’ ”

She nodded.

“I CHECKED UNDER THE COUCHES AND IN ALL THE DRAWERS. THAT SHOULD BE IT, THEN. READY?”

She nodded again.

He picked up the phone to call for the rental car, but then put it down again. He knew that the bellman would hear the shouting in the background, “Listen to me! I want to stay here! I like it here! Listen to me!” He sat quietly for a moment, waiting, but nothing happened, so he went into the bedroom of the suite and closed the door. The diminution of noise was a welcome relief. He called for the car, and went into the bathroom, closed that door, and unzipped his pants. He didn’t really have to urinate, but he didn’t want to take advantage of his wife by purely and simply hiding out. After expelling the last possible drop, then taking enormous care over washing his hands, he sighed and went out.

Over the years, Daniel had trained himself to sustain a tantrum beyond any normal human limits, thus he was still going full steam when the bellman, exactly the one bellman, an older black man, that Dr. Cates had hoped was off duty, appeared with the luggage cart, and to the accompaniment of Daniel’s shouting, the luggage was loaded on the cart. The three adults moved off, and Dr. Cates knew that the
man was actively restraining himself from knocking the kid’s head against the wall or, at the very least, making some remark, giving some advice on the order of “Say no and mean it.” Daniel followed them, shrieking. At the car, Dr. John Cates did do what he had sworn he would not do and known, in the end, he would do: He gave the bellman a very large tip and a single, uncontrollably sheepish, desperate smile.

O
NCE UPON
a time, Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek had lit a cigarette whenever she picked up the phone. Now, instead, she ran her fingers meditatively over the lump above her left eye. She pressed. It hurt and felt good at the same time. Her interest in touching it did not flag as the days went by.

“This is Dr. Bo Jones.”

“Dr. Bo! How are you? Well, I’m sorry to say that I have some bad news for you, Dr. Bo. It looks like the museum is out of the picture. Yes. No chickens. No nothing. The chicken expert’s report was very favorable, oh yes. No problem with that, but the granting institution seems to have run into some fiscal difficulties. I’m so sorry.”

Elaine knew that she had this habit, when delivering bad news, of sounding like she was having a conversation—replying to questions and remarks—even though her interlocutor hadn’t actually spoken. It was just that they were always so silent; they were no help at all if you wanted to get all the information across as quickly as possible.

“It’s not as though the chicken museum was undeserving of support. That’s not it at all. It is entirely a failure on the other side, and so”—Dr. Bo had been silent for a very long time, and Elaine found herself making a promise that she hadn’t by any means intended to make—“this office has decided to find another granting organization that might take over the chicken idea, because it is still an excellent idea. Dr. Bo?”—wasn’t he just the type—big and florid—for a heart attack?—“Dr. Bo?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Are you all right?”

“Why, yes, I am. I never wanted a chicken museum and I couldn’t abide that so-called chicken expert. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some packing to do, because I am leaving on a very long trip to central Asia.”

“Then you don’t support continued efforts to find a funding organization—”

“Do what you want, young lady.”

After she hung up, Elaine found that she was pressing so hard on her lump that it was giving her a throbbing headache. When she took her fingers away, the headache subsided with an almost liquid, flowing feeling. It was a wonderful sensation, and she decided to try it just once more before beginning on the rest of the afternoon’s work.

“M
ARTIN’S
F
LAVORBUST?”

“B
Y
T
EXAS BILLIONAIRE STANDARDS
, the ranch near Spur where Arlen Martin has retreated isn’t much, a hundred thousand acres more or less. Unlike some other west Texas ranches, it isn’t depicted in any atlas. Under state law, whatever happens to Martin and his tangle of corporations, the ranch, his homestead, will continue to be inalienably his, along with his Lear jet. ‘My mule,’ says Martin. ‘That Lear jet is just like a mule, and in Texas you can’t ever be so poor that they can take your mule.’

“There are a few cattle roaming the landscape, but Martin considers them of little more interest than the scrub cactus and the mesquite. ‘Look over there!’ he exclaims, slamming the Land Rover to a halt. ‘Ah, you missed it.’

“ ‘What?’

“ ‘One of the boars! The place is teeming with wild boars we brought in from Asia. Best hunting there is. If I retire, and I’m not saying I will and I’m not saying I won’t, I could do worse than hunt boar everyday. I bet you didn’t know that wild chickens are pretty vicious, too. When most folks think of the chicken, they think hen, they think egg. Not me. I think about that beady rooster gaze, that focus—’ ”

Dr. Lionel Gift set down the
Texas Monthly
article he was reading, noting the author (Lawrence Wright), and allowed himself a little smile at Arlen Martin’s expense. It was clear that Martin had learned little from the collapse of Seven Stones Mining and the subsequent, probably fatal, weakening of the whole TransNational empire. He showed none of the philosophical perspicacity that he, Lionel Gift, showed. But Dr. Gift was certain that Arlen Martin, who, according
to the
Wall Street Journal
, was undergoing “reorganization,” too, would eventually feel the same thrill of appreciation Dr. Gift felt at the operation of hidden truths in the lives of men. The market, after all, had acted to correct TransNational’s overextension—that was one thing—and Dr. Gift had long ago cashed all checks and invested all monies accruing to him through his contract with the company—that was another. He had invested the money in high-tech ceramics, a wave of the future.

But it did not matter, really, who he was or who Martin was, where, in particular, the money came from or where it went. Individuals and individual companies were but flickering pauses in the eternal exchange of fiscal energy. Restlessly it flowed here and it flowed there. No one man could stop it or direct it; all were equally doomed to watch the golden streams flow through their clutching fingers. Finally, you had to take solace and even inspiration from that very evanescence. As he told his packed house of fifteen hundred customers, we spend our whole lives thinking that value is an object, and collecting gold, or diamonds, or stocks and bonds, but even while you are piling it up, even while you are watching it, value is flowing ceaselessly into and out of it.

The customers left the auditorium hushed and chastened, and back in his office, Dr. Gift jotted down a bon mot about teaching, “As old as I am, and I’ve seen two generations of ‘students,’ as it were, by now, even I am still evolving. Experiences teach teachers, too, you know.” After jotting it down, he admired it a little, then filed it under “Interviews: Teaching.”

L
OREN
S
TROOP WASN’T
fooled by this little inner blossom of energy and well-being. Nor was he surprised that it coincided with the snowstorm he had been listening to them talk about on the weather radio. It was full day when he finally sat up and put his feet on the floor, but the old house was creaking in the gale and the fireplace damper was rattling, too—he could hear it two rooms away. That damper didn’t start to rattle until the wind speed hit about forty-five from the northwest, so, Loren reflected, it was blowing pretty good out there.

Loren reached for his cane and pushed himself up out of the bed, then turned his head carefully, all the way to the left, to see with his right eye if he’d left anything lying in his path. It turned out that if he watched himself, he could get around the house well enough, because, unlike in that rehab place, long familiarity supplied information that his senses did not. Even outside, where he’d been only a few times since his return, he felt much less disoriented than he did up at that place.

Lots of days, Loren waited to rise until the visiting nurse or one of the Millers came over, but one look out the window was enough to tell him that no one was going to get here today. On the kitchen calendar, he ran his finger over the laboriously x-ed-out days until he came to the first blank one—March 2. That would be today. Well, people would be saying that this was a late storm, but it wasn’t. Just ask him. With his right eye, he gave the clock a gander, too. It was after nine. After nine, March 2, 1990. He pushed the button of the weather radio with his right forefinger and a soothing voice filled the room: “… has blanketed the region. At eight o’clock at Red Stick International Airport, snow accumulations measured four inches, with three to five more inches expected. High winds, gusting to fifty-five miles per hour—” The thing was, he no longer looked at the TV at all, not even CNN. Every day, all day, he listened to the round of voices from the weather bureau giving nature’s news. Highs, lows,
precipitation, weather advisories, road conditions, sunshine, wind, temperature ranges. If he wanted something visual, then he looked out the window. It was the exact combination of the ephemeral and the eternal that a dying man needed to know about.

The Millers and the visiting nurse had prepared him for the possibility of no one being able to get through to him for a day or two. Joe Miller had bought him one of those phones that you could keep with you, and if you wanted to dial, you just had to push one number, not seven or eleven. “Mem 1” was the Millers, “Mem 2” was the cops, and “Mem 3” was the visiting nurse. Plus, there was food in the freezer that he just had to defrost in the microwave, instant coffee, you name it. They had even paid up his heat through the end of April, so that couldn’t go out. The electric, too. And Joe Miller had rigged up a deal that turned all the lights on, in the house and in the yard, at sundown, then turned them off about midnight, all except the pole lights by the barn, which stayed on all night as a deterrent to the FBI, the CIA, and the big ag companies. Oh, he was well taken care of.

Loren opened the kitchen closet and found what he was looking for, his bulletproof vest. He put it on over his pajama shirt and zipped it up. It fit kind of loose, which told him how much weight he had lost—it had fit kind of snug before. Then he pulled his chair over to the closet and sat down on it and put on his boots. They were plenty stiff, and he didn’t have any socks on, but that was okay. Everything was okay.

After the boots and the vest, he was kind of winded, so he rested by looking at the clock (almost ten-thirty) and the calendar (still March 2) again. Then he stood up and took his insulated coat off the hanger. He hadn’t had to button for himself since the brain attack, but he managed by watching his left hand rest right by the button, and then pushing the buttonhole against it with his right. Three. That was enough.

What this blossom of energy was for was getting out to the barn and having a look at the machine. Then, he knew, nature would take its course.

The boots were surprisingly heavy—that was the measure of how weak he was now, weak as a cat, and it wasn’t so easy to open the door, either, until the wind took it and slammed it back against the house. You didn’t want to leave it like that, letting all the heat out, but he didn’t have much choice. He stood with his cane in the doorway. Behind him, the one girl who worked for the weather bureau
was saying, “There was heavy snowfall reported south-southeast of a line extending from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and this storm system was moving east at approximately thirty-five miles per hour.”