The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (20 page)

Genevieve’s answer was
slow to form. “Okay,” she said in a low, low voice. “Okay, I’m
here.”

She took his hands and
held them. Neither of them said a thing. Silence.

A poignant moment—until
Nickie opened her mouth.

“Oh my God,” she said,
looking completely rattled. “Oh my God, it’s all here.”

We all looked at
her.

“Diamonds,” she said.
“Seven fingers. It’s the
prediction
. Diamonds, seven,
Genevieve trying to leave. It’s all
here
.”

Wooly swayed to his feet.
“What? What did she say? What did she word-for-word
say?”

Nickie reeled it off:
“
When the thunder comes, it will bring you
great turmoil, it will bring you great strife. When the thunder
comes…thunder and diamonds…when the thunder comes, the empress will
try to abandon her throne. The number seven will decide.
It’s all here. Everything she said is
here.”

It sure looked like she
was right. All the bits and pieces of the prophecy had been sucked
up like trash in a tornado and flung together in the same place at
the same time. Georgiana’s prediction had materialized, had come
true. And there was just one more left after that, one more
prediction to go.

“Are you serious?” said
Genevieve. “Is she serious?”

That was all anybody said.
We just stood there, lost in the living room, lost in the house.
The house, I don’t know, it suddenly seemed too big. The rooms were
too wide. The ceilings were too high. The windows were too tall and
too broad and too exposed. It was like the house had suddenly
gotten too large for us. Or had we suddenly gotten too
small?

>>>>>>

WEDNESDAY JUNE 20, 9:30
p.m.

WHY DID YOU DO
IT?

I stayed for dinner—an
uncharacteristically quiet and subdued meal chez Wooly. He’d
continue to apologize for his behavior every once in a while.
Genevieve would say, “Man was made from dirt, woman was made from
bone,” and that would end it. I tried to talk to him about the
Serenity Prayer. You’ll be fully protected tomorrow, I said. It’ll
be important for you to stay calm. Whatever’s gonna happen, it’s
out of your hands. Whatever happens, take it on faith and try to
accept it.

He nodded like he
understood, but he looked like he was two breaths away from a
coma.

Nickie paid no attention
to me the entire time. She was all sullen attitude. The message was
clear: I was dead to her.

Not something guaranteed
to make you feel welcome. When dinner was over I said I was going
back to the hotel. I needed to rest, I needed full sleep. I told
Wooly I’d be back early in the morning.

“You fucking better,” he
said.

The rain had ended. The
storm was over, leaving the sky clear enough for a nervous moon to
rise over the woods. I drove back on the still-wet roads, thinking,
thinking. The most accurate measurement of time in the world is the
cesium atomic clock. I felt like I had one inside me, could feel
the atoms vibrating in my head.

I parked in the hotel lot
and started walking to the front entrance, still thinking about
things said and not said, done and not done. The street was dusted
with mist. Wind-blown debris was plastered to the curbside cars.
The Hidden Lake Hardware awning was just barely hanging on, draped
over half the store’s exterior.

Looking back at that
moment, I did catch some tiny movement on the side of the building,
some gleaming motion, but it was as small as the flick of an
eyelash.

It didn’t register. I
didn’t think about it until one of the hotel windows blew apart in
a nova of radiating stars.

It never occurred to me to
duck down, jump out of the way. That’s how surprised I
was.

Then a second window
shattered and its pieces fell to the pavement with the music of a
thousand percussive triangles. My throat shut tight like a
methedrine rush. I dropped to the ground and belly-crawled for the
parked cars.

More shots. It was like it
was raining again. This was a hailstorm of gunfire. One
consolation: Whoever was shooting didn’t seem to be a very good
shot.

I got to a car and pulled
the Glock.

A voice yelled from across
the street.
Why did you do it? Why did you
have to do it?

I moved to the front of
the car, looking for an angle.

I heard steps running, a
car engine turning over. I looked out. Nothing there but smoke from
the gun, merging with the mist and rising in the light until it
disappeared.

>>>>>>

“You
now?” Alex Tarkashian said when he first got on the scene.
“What is it,
contagious
?” He took weary notes while the other two members of the
Hidden Lake constabulary tried to corral the bystanders back into
the hotel bar. This show’s over, folks.

“I’m sorry,” said Alex,
staring at his pad, “but again. This has something to do with
Wooly? Or this has nothing to do with Wooly?”

“Your guess.”

“My
guess. I’m just trying to get a grasp here. I’m at a
loss.”

“Then there’s two of us.
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.”

“Jesus fucking. Okay, what
you heard, it was
Why did you do
it?”

“Yeah.
Why did you do it?
And then
Why did you have to do it?”

“And what does that
mean?”

“I’m sure I did
something
, but I don’t
know what.”

“How about the vehicle?
You see it? Was it the Grand Cherokee??”

“I never saw.”

“Did you see
anything
?”

“I told you what I saw and
that’s all I can tell you.”

“End of story.”

“There you go.”

“God, the bunch of you.”
He flipped back through his notes. “That’s some group you’ve got
out in that house. Between the lot of you, I’m going to need a new
pad real soon.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

CHAPTER 8

TOO LATE TO STOP
NOW

>>THURSDAY JUNE 21
(Solstice Day)

SOLSTICE DAY 7:00
a.m.

THE BUDDHA DIET

In terms of daylight
hours, the solstice, of course, is the longest day of the year. It
felt like the longest day of my life.

According to the
algorithms of the scientists who calculate these things, the sun
would reach its maximum elevation at 3:37 p.m. today. Good to know.
However, Georgiana had never said exactly
when
her prediction would come to
pass. Her prophesies, regrettably, rarely came with timetables. So
as far as we knew, death could visit the house at any hour of the
day.

Which is why everyone was
already up when I got to the house. Wooly and Nickie were sitting
quietly at the kitchen table. Genevieve, on the other hand, was on
a royal tear. She was defiantly cheerful, militantly
happy.

“They’ll be no long faces
around here today,” she said, ripping the words out like she’d
entered a speed-talking contest. “No moping, nothing like that.
It’s a beautiful day. It’s too beautiful for anything to
happen.”

Genevieve was putting as
much industry into cooking as yapping. She was making scrambled
eggs, poached eggs, sunnyside up eggs, over easy eggs. She was
making bacon, sausages, pancakes, waffles. Nobody ate anything,
nobody had any appetite, but she kept cooking away, letting all the
food heap up cold on the counters.

Wooly, by contrast,
remained calm and still, strangely unagitated. He sat with his
gauzed-up arms in front of him, the fattest of all the fat
Buddhas.

“I thought about what you
said about acceptance,” he said to me. “I’m taking it to heart.
I’ve accepted the notion of acceptance. Whatever happens, happens.
Que fucking sera, sera.”

“Well it’s a beautiful day
for it,” said Genevieve. “It’s one of the most beautiful days I’ve
ever seen.”

“And you know something?”
said Wooly. “It
works
. It actually works. I don’t feel so afraid. I’m not so
worried, and I feel, I actually feel lighter. No shit, I feel like
I dropped 75 pounds.”

Of course, there are
limits to tranquility.

“It’s just a beautiful
day,” said Genevieve. “It’s just a beautiful, beautiful
day.”

“All
right
!” he snapped. “We get it! It’s
a beautiful day. Now leave it the fuck alone.”

>>>>>>

Solstice Day 7:30
a.m.

THE DANCING GODS

I told them about last
night’s shooting. Genevieve was mortified. Wooly nodded sagely.
“
Feh
,” he said.
Nickie showed concern but tried not to display too much of it. She
asked for details, was I all right, but then she pulled back into
her own static.

Things between us might
never be the same, too bad, but this wasn’t the day to dwell on it.
I was too wired to dwell on too much of anything. I hadn’t slept
last night, or I might’ve been in the stage where I did sleep but
it felt like I was wide awake. I might’ve been in that limbo where
I’d actually been sleeping but was too amped up to
dream.

“You should come with me
to the rock,” Wooly said. “Do you some good. If I’m still around at
3:37, I’m going out to see the solstice.”

“You’ll have to go with
him anyway,” Nickie said. “I can’t walk all that way.”

Wooly began talking about
the solstice, how it was called different names by different
people. The Feast of St. John the Baptist. Gathering day.
Thing-Tide. And of course midsummer, as in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. They
called it midsummer back then because it happened just about in the
middle of the growing season.

“You look at the countries
in the northern hemisphere,” he said, “most of ‘em, they made a big
deal out of it. England, Germany, Ireland, even China. Here, too.
The Natchez celebrated it. The Hopis, that’s when they got dressed
up as those gods, those dancing gods.”

Genevieve was looking over
at Nickie’s leg. “When’re you getting those stitches looked
at?”

Nickie hesitated before
she said the word. “Tomorrow.”

“Kachinas
,” said Wooly. “That’s what
the Hopis called the gods. Kachinas, the spirits of rain and
fertility. Fertility was a big solstice thing, a big theme. It was
like the prime day for love magic, for love prophecies. Like the
Druids, here’s a for instance. The Druids, which were the Celtic
priests, they’d build bonfires that night. They’d hold fire
festivals, and they’d ask lovers to pair off, hold each others hand
and jump through the flames. It was supposed to bring luck. The
higher the couple jumped, that’s how high the crops would
grow.”

We heard swishing sounds.
Genevieve, her back to us, was grabbing Kleenex and crying into the
tissues.

>>>>>>

Solstice Day 9:00
a.m.

TESTING

The action, such as it
was, shifted to the living room. Genevieve insisted a change of
scenery was needed. We sat stiffly on the furniture, conscious of
the empty wall space where Georgiana’s photo had hung. Wooly took a
chair by one of the windows, where he sat staring outside. His
fixed position irritated his wife.

“Can you stop doing
that?”

“I’m trying hard,” he
said, “not to be a nuisance.”

Outside the window, the
day wasn’t so beautiful anymore. The air was turning thick and
yellow with humidity, and you could feel the heat building in the
house. Wooly had set the a.c. on high. He wanted to avoid profuse
sweating, he said, on this day of all days.

Genevieve stood up, hands
wrapped around her arms to ward off the chill. She went over to one
of the other windows and tugged on the lock. “Is this okay? Was it
checked?”

“It’s good,” Nickie
said.

“How about the rest of the
house?”

“Everything was fine when
I looked 20 minutes ago.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I’m
just asking.”

Nickie understood. She
limped off on yet another tour of the place, testing every window,
every door.

Genevieve was pacified
when she got back. Until Wooly got up and started walking out of
the room.

“What’re you doing?” she
panicked “Where you going?”

“To the
bathroom.”

“Make sure you come right
back.”

“I gotta take a squat.
Could be a while.”

“Somebody go with him.
Make sure he’s all right.”