One Door Away From Heaven (52 page)

Although he didn’t know
why
he was smiling, Noah smiled.

Geneva said, “Well, it’s a delicious memory even if it’s a false memory. Honestly, I must admit, I’m something of a wimp when it comes to being naughty. I’ve never had it in me to be a bad girl, so if I hadn’t been shot in the head, I’d never have had a memory like that.”

The sugar content of cookies and cola provided sufficient mental lift to deal with a wide spectrum of intellectual challenges, but, by God, for some things you needed a beer. He didn’t have a beer, so instead of making an attempt to deduce logically the meaning of what she’d said, he asked another question: “You were shot in the head?”

“A polite and well-dressed bandit held up our convenience store, killed my husband, shot me, and disappeared. I won’t tell you that I tracked him to New Orleans and blew him away myself, because that was Alec Baldwin and not a part of my real life. But even wimp that I am, I’d have been
capable
of shooting him if I’d known how to track him down. I’d have shot him repeatedly, I think. Once in each leg, let him suffer, then twice in the gut, then once in the head. Do I sound terribly savage, dear?”

“Not savage. But more vindictive than I would have expected.”

“That’s a good honest answer. I’m impressed with you, Noah.”

She turned on one of those ice-melting smiles.

He found himself smiling, too.

“I’m enjoying our little get-together,” she said.

“Me too.”

Chapter 61

SATURDAY: HAWTHORNE, Nevada, to Boise, Idaho. Four hundred forty-nine miles. Mostly wasteland, bright sun, but an easy haul.

A cloud of vultures circled something dead in the desert half an hour south of Lovelock, Nevada. Though intrigued, Preston Maddoc decided against a side trip to investigate.

They stopped for lunch at a diner in Winnemucca.

On the sidewalk outside the restaurant, swarms of ants were feeding on the oozing body of a fat, crushed beetle. The bug juice had an interesting iridescent quality similar to oil on water.

Taking the Hand into a public place was risky these days. Her performance on Friday, in the coffee shop west of Vegas, had been unnerving. She might have gotten what she wanted if the waitress hadn’t been stupid.

Most people were stupid. Preston Maddoc had made this judgment of humanity when he’d been eleven. In the past thirty-four years, he’d seen no reason to change his mind.

The diner smelled of sizzling hamburger patties. French fries roiling in hot oil. Bacon.

He wondered what the beetle ooze smelled like.

Several men were sitting side by side on stools at the lunch counter. Most were overweight. Chowing down jowl to jowl. Disgusting.

Maybe one of them would have a stroke or heart attack during lunch. The odds were good.

The Hand led them to a booth. She sat next to the window.

The Black Hole settled beside her daughter.

Preston sat across the table from them. His fair ladies.

The Hand was grotesque, of course, but the Black Hole actually
was
fair. After so many drugs, she ought to have been a withered hag.

When her looks finally started to go, they would slide away fast. Probably in two or three years.

Maybe he could squeeze two litters out of her before she’d be too repulsive to touch.

On the windowsill lay a dead fly. Ambience.

He consulted his menu. The owners ought to change the name of the establishment. Call it the Palace of Grease.

Naturally the Black Hole couldn’t find many dishes to her taste. At least she didn’t whine. The Hole was in a cheerful mood. Coherent, too, because she seldom used heavy chemicals before the afternoon.

The waitress arrived. An ugly wretch. The walleyed, pouchy-cheeked face of a fish.

She wore a neatly pressed pink uniform. Elaborately coiffed hair the color of rat fur, with a pink bow to match the uniform. Carefully applied makeup, eyeliner, lipstick. Fingernails manicured but clear-coated, as if they were something sweet to look at, as if her fingers weren’t as stubby and ugly as the rest of her.

She was trying too hard to look nice. A hopeless cause.

Bridges were made for people like her. Bridges and high ledges. Car tailpipes and gas ovens. If she ever phoned a suicide hot line and some counselor talked her out of sucking on a shotgun, she’d have been done a disservice.

They ordered lunch.

Preston expected the Hand to appeal to Fish Face for help. She didn’t. She seemed subdued.

Her performance the previous day had been unnerving, but he was disappointed that she didn’t try again. He enjoyed the challenge posed by her recent rebellious mood.

While they waited for their food, the Hole chattered as inanely as always she did.

She was the Black Hole partly because her psychotic energy and her mindless babble together spun a powerful gravity that could pull you toward oblivion if you weren’t a strong person.

He was strong. He never shied from any task. Never flinched from any truth.

Although he conversed with the Hole, he remained less than half involved with her. He always lived more inside himself than not.

He was thinking about the Gimp, brother to the Hand. He had been thinking about the Gimp a lot lately.

Considering the risks that he had taken, he’d not gotten enough satisfaction from his last visit with the boy in the Montana woods. Everything had happened far too quickly. Such memories needed to be rich. They sustained him.

Preston had more elaborate plans for the Hand.

Speaking of whom: Nonchalantly, almost surreptitiously, she slowly swept the diner with her gaze, obviously looking for something specific.

He noticed her spot the restroom sign.

A moment later she announced that she needed to use the toilet. She said
toilet
because she knew the term displeased Preston.

He’d been raised in a refined family that never resorted to such vulgarities. He far preferred
lavatory.
He could endure either
powder room
or
restroom.

The Hole stood, allowing her daughter to slide out of the booth.

As the Hand got clumsily to her feet, she whispered, “I really gotta pee.”

This, too, was a slap at Preston. The Hand knew that he was repulsed by any discussion of bodily functions.

He didn’t like to watch her walk. Her deformed fingers were sickening enough. He continued exchanging stupidities with the Hole, thinking about Montana, tracking the Hand with his peripheral vision.

Abruptly he realized that under the
RESTROOMS
sign, another had indicated the location of what she might really be seeking:
PHONE
.

Excusing himself, he got out of the booth and followed the girl.

She had disappeared into a short hall at the end of the diner.

When he reached that same hall, he discovered the men’s lavatory to the right, the women’s to the left. A pay phone on the end wall.

She stood at the phone, her back to him. As she reached for the receiver with her warped hand, she sensed him and turned.

Looming over her, Preston saw the quarter in her good hand.

“Did you find that in the coin return?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she lied. “I always check.”

“Then it belongs to someone else,” he admonished. “We’ll turn it in to the cashier when we leave.”

He held out his hand, palm up.

Reluctant to give him the quarter, she hesitated.

He rarely touched her. Contact gave him the creeps.

Fortunately, she held the coin in her normal hand. If it had been in the left, he would still have been able to take it, but then he wouldn’t have been able to eat lunch.

Pretending that she had come here to use the lavatory, she went through the door marked
GALS
.

Maintaining a similar pretense, Preston entered the men’s lavatory. He was grateful it wasn’t in use. He waited inside, near the door.

He wondered who she’d intended to phone. The police?

As soon as he heard her exit the women’s restroom, he returned to the hall, as well.

He led her back to the booth. If he had followed her, he would have had to watch her walk.

Lunch arrived immediately after they were seated.

Fish Face, the ugly waitress, had a mole on the side of her nose. He thought it looked like melanoma.

If it
was
melanoma and she remained unaware of it even for a week or so, her nose would eventually rot away. Surgery would leave her with a crater in the center of her face.

Maybe then, if the malignancy hadn’t gotten into her brain and killed her, maybe
then
she would at last do the right thing with a tailpipe or a gas oven, or a shotgun.

The food was pretty good.

As usual, he didn’t look at his companions’ mouths while they were eating. He focused on their eyes or looked slightly past them, studiously avoiding the sight of their tongues, teeth, lips, and masticating jaws.

Preston assumed that occasionally someone might look at his mouth while he chewed or at his throat as he swallowed, but he forced himself not to dwell on this. If he dared think much about it, he would have to eat in private.

During meals, he lived even more inside himself than he did at other times. Defensively.

This posed no problem for him, required no special effort. His major at Yale and then at Harvard, through his bachelor’s and master’s and doctoral degrees, had been philosophy. By nature, philosophers lived more inside themselves than did ordinary people.

Intellectuals in general, and philosophers in particular, needed the world less than the world needed them.

Throughout lunch, he upheld his end of a conversation with the Hole while he recalled Montana.

The sound of the boy’s neck snapping…

The way the terror in his eyes darkened into bleak resignation and then had clarified into peace…

The rare smell of the final fitful exhalation that produced the death rattle in the Gimp’s throat…

Preston left a thirty-percent tip, but he didn’t surrender the quarter to the cashier. He was certain that the Hand hadn’t found the money in the pay phone. The coin was his to keep, ethically.

To avoid the government-enforced blockade of eastern Nevada, where the FBI was officially searching for drug lords but was—in his opinion—probably covering up some UFO-related event, Preston turned north from Winnemucca, toward the state of Oregon, using Federal Highway 95, an undivided two-lane road.

Fifty-six miles inside Oregon, Highway 95 swung east toward Idaho. They crossed the Owyhee River, and then the state line.

By six o’clock, they arrived at a campground north of Boise, Idaho, where they hooked up to utilities.

Preston bought takeout for dinner. Mediocre Chinese this time.

The Black Hole loved rice. And though she was wired again, she was nevertheless still compos mentis enough to eat.

As usual, the Hole directed the conversation according to her interests. She required always to be the center of attention.

When she mentioned new design ideas for carving her daughter’s deformed hand, he encouraged her. He found the subject of decorative mutilation stupid enough to be amusing—as long as he avoided looking at the girl’s twisted appendage.

In addition, he knew that this talk terrified the Hand, though she hid her fear well. Good. Fear might eventually burn away her delusion that she had any hope of a normal life.

She had chosen to thwart her mother by shrewdly playing along with this demented game. Listening to the Black Hole enthuse about going at her with scalpels, however, she might begin to realize that she had not been born to win any game, least of all this one.

She had come out of her mother broken, imperfect. She was a loser from the moment that the physician slapped her butt to start her breathing instead of mercifully, discreetly smothering her.

When the time arrived for him to take this girl into the forest, perhaps she would have come to the conclusion that death was best for her. She should choose death before her mother could carve her. Because sooner or later, her mother
would.

Death was her only possible deliverance. Otherwise, she would have to endure more years as an outsider. Life could hold nothing but disappointment for someone so damaged as she.

Of course, Preston didn’t want her to be
entirely
pliable and eager to die. A measure of resistance made for memories.

Dinner finished, leaving the Hand to clean the table, he and the Hole took evening showers, separately, and retired to the bedroom.

Eventually, reading
In Watermelon Sugar,
the Hole passed out.

Preston wanted to use her. But he couldn’t discern whether she’d been hammered by drugs into deep unconsciousness or whether she was just sleeping soundly.

If she were merely sleeping, she might awaken in the middle of the action. Her awareness would ruin his mood.

Waking, she would be enthusiastic. She
knew
that the deal they had made didn’t permit her active participation in physical intimacy. Yet she would be enthusiastic nonetheless.

The deal: The Hole received everything that she needed in return for this one thing that Preston wanted.

He was mildly nauseated by the thought of her enthusiasm, her participation. He had no desire to witness the more intimate bodily functions of anyone.

And he was loath to
be
observed.

When suffering from a head cold, he unfailingly excused himself to blow his nose in private. He didn’t want anyone to hear his mucus draining.

Consequently, the prospect of having an orgasm in the presence of an interested partner was distressing if not unthinkable.

Discretion was underrated in contemporary society.

Uncertain as to the nature and reliability of the Hole’s current state of unconsciousness, he turned off the light and settled on his own side of the bed.

He contemplated the babies that she would bring into the world. Little twisted wizards. Ethical dilemmas awaiting firm resolutions.

SUNDAY: BOISE TO NUN’S LAKE. Three hundred fifty-one miles. More-demanding terrain than what Nevada had offered.

Usually he didn’t hit the road until nine or ten o’clock, with the Black Hole still abed, the Hand awake. Although they were seeking a close encounter, their mission wasn’t as urgent as it was dramatic.

This morning, however, he hauled the Prevost out of Twin Falls at 6:15
A.M
.

Already the Hand was dressed, eating a granola bar.

He wondered if she had discovered that all the knives and sharp utensils had been removed from the galley.