The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (9 page)

Alex turned to me. “You
talked to him too yesterday?”

“About Wooly,
yeah.”

“When I think of all the
people,” said Bogash, “trying to make this world a better place,
and then I think about Wooly Cornell…”

“You should go,” Alex said
to me. “You shouldn’t be here.”

I turned to the hallway,
the potted plants, the sanitized paintings. None of it looked like
it belonged on earth. I remembered following Monte down the hallway
yesterday, remembered the broken way he’d talked, the way he’d slap
his palm as he spoke, slapping it with solid whacks. Wooly was
right about him.
He takes his anger out on
himself.

>>>>>>

SATURDAY JUNE 16, 2:50
p.m.

ON THE SLIDE

Wooly had a bottle of beer
in his hands but he wasn’t drinking from it. He just kept turning
it around and around, every once in a while peeling a bit of wet
paper off the label. “Monte wasn’t a bad guy,” he said, his voice
swollen. “Not a bad guy at all. He was just trying to do too much
at once.”

The kitchen was
warm—Genevieve was baking a bean pie. We all sat with him, a silent
four-sided knot around the table. No gloating from him, no I
told-you-so’s. Just a soft moment.

“Diversifying, you know,
it can be a good thing,” he said. “But not the way Monte was doing
it. The way he was doing it, it was ill-assumed. He was sticking
his fingers into too many knotholes.”

“You just stay steady,”
said Genevieve. “Keep up with your calm.” She got up, went to the
oven to check on her pie.

“It’s a sad case, a very
sad case,” said Wooly. “He was hoping for a conquest. Instead he
got conquested.”

“There’s somebody
here.”

Genevieve was looking out
the window closest to the oven.

“Somebody’s out
back.”

I jerked out of my chair
and ran to the window. For like 3/5 of a second I saw something in
the woods, the sun catching someone moving through the
trees.

“I’ve got the house!”
Nickie yelled. “
Go
.”

I had the Glock out by the
time I hit the back yard. No sign of anybody now. Into the woods it
was. The silence fell as soon as I passed through the first fringe
of pines, the background hiss of civilization suddenly giving way
to total wraparound stillness. It was as deep and solid as before,
but there was something different about it now. There was
something, I don‘t know, disturbing about it.

I heard a soft snapping
coming from a southwest direction, the sound of a foot cracking a
twig. Then, as my ears adapted, I could hear faint footsteps from
the same direction, feet landing hard and fast. They lasted a
moment, then got lost in the chatter of crickets and heat-crazed
cicadas.

I set out that way,
picking up the sound again about 20 seconds later, running on a
winding path that was only crisscrossing say about 800 other paths.
I could smell marshes, the swampy water of the actual Hidden Lake.
But then, whoever this guy was, his direction changed, switching
away from the lake and back to the world. He seemed to be sticking
to the outer edges of the woods.

His steps were maybe 12
seconds ahead of me when their pace changed. They got slower,
lighter. The guy had stopped running. A few hundred feet later I
caught a quick glimpse of somebody on the trail ahead. I saw long
reddish-blond hair and a fast-walking pigeon-toed waddle. Then the
trail turned through a cluster of tupelo trees and the guy vanished
from my view.

I made a careful pass
through the tupelos, ready to confront the guy, nothing out here
but me and him and the ghosts of dead Algonquins hovering in the
green silence.

Then it was all gone—the
trees, the bushes, everything. I was standing in an open field of
tiny twisted trees. Dwarf pines, gnarled growths three or four feet
high that looked like something left in Hiroshima after the atomic
bomb hit.

The sun struck my eyes
like bullets. I could just make out the person walking in the
middle of the stumpy trees. I saw the hair, the waddle. I saw a
dirty T-shit and shorts and a soggy posture. I saw the legs, the
hips, the shoulders. It was a woman.

She was moving quickly,
yeah, but the pace seemed natural to her gait. I didn’t sense she
was running away. I put the Glock back.

“Excuse me?” I
yelled.

She stopped and spun
around. It wasn’t a woman. It was a girl. It was a
kid
.

>>>>>>

She said she was 19. I
didn’t card her, but I was guessing 15, 16 at best. She had the
wet-rag slouch and pigeon-toed walk of a mid-teen. She had a baby
face that was still filled with freckles. I was
born
looking older than this
kid.

Her name was Jen, or so
she said. She wouldn’t tell me her last name. She said she’d been
living in the woods for a little over a year. I asked her
why.

“Basically, because nobody
cares,” she said. “Nobody gives a shit.”

“Nice
attitude.”

We moved out of the field
and back under the green shade of the trees. Jen told me about her
survival routines, grabbing a piece of that long reddish-blond hair
every once in a while and smelling it while she talked. Strange
kid, strange habit.

She said she was a
scavenger mostly, living off whatever people in stores, restaurants
and homes threw away. In the mornings she’d usually do a can and
bottle run, using whatever deposit money she made to buy kerosene
for the stove she’d found. The stove was now parked outside her
tent, which was a tarp strung over a tree branch.

Her father had originally
put the tent up. He’d worked in construction, and when he got laid
off and they lost their house, he and Jen became
woodsies.

“He’d been down some rough
roads,” she said. “He said it was a lot easier out
here.”

Except for a few months
ago, when he’d caught pneumonia. She’d taken him to the local
hospital but he didn’t make it. Now she was out here by herself,
carrying on the same life. She took showers in the bathhouses at
the public parks and beaches. She got through the winter by
layering with blankets and keeping the kerosene stove
going.

“There’s a lot of freedom
out here,” she said, “long as you know how to take care of
yourself.”

Part of me admired this
kid’s guts. Part of me was horrified. I kept thinking about my
daughter. What if, a few years from now, she decided to take off
and live in the shadows like this? I’d go insane. I remember a
time, when she was 2, I took her to the playground. She was playing
in the sand by the slides and I looked away for a moment—really, 10
seconds at most. When I looked back she was gone. The sandbox was
empty. Then I saw her—she was halfway up the ladder of one of the
slides. I was floored. She could never climb the ladders before.
She’d never even shown any interest in the slides. Now there she
was, halfway to the top, climbing there all on her own.

Jen was smart not to tell
me her family name.

“I spotted you from a
house,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. The crazy
guy’s. Wooly Cornell’s. I usually go there at night. This time his
wife saw me from the kitchen.”

“You go there
much?”

“They put out good
garbage. It’s one of my preferred sources. He’s a prime waster—he
throws a lot of good stuff away.”

“You know much about
him?”

“I’ve heard
stories.”

“Like what?”

She pulled a handful of
her hair to her nose and gave it a sniff. Something was on her
mind.

“I know he takes walks in
the woods,” she said. "He goes to this rock.”

“That’s him.”

I looked at the trees
around us. Nothing was moving. I took a 20 out of my
wallet.

“You want to make some
money?”

Jen wrapped her arms
around her shoulders, hugging herself. Her freckles became lost as
the blood rushed to her face. “I don’t do things like
that.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean
I’ll pay you for information.”

“What kind?”

“The guy, Wooly? He’s in
some trouble. He’s got someone on the premises, guarding the
house.”

“I’ve seen her. Hispanic
woman, scarred face.”

“But she’s on the inside.
We need somebody watching the outside, the woods. Something might
happen to Wooly, especially in the next five days. You see anything
that’s off, you let me know.”

She took the money. “I can
do that.”

“You stay out of trouble,
but if you see anybody hanging out back there, you let me know. You
have a way to get in touch? Is there a pay phone
anywhere?”

“I don’t need a pay phone.
I have this.”

Jen pried a cell phone out
of her shorts. “I found it. It’s a pre-paid. It works.”

“Good. I’ll give you my
number—call me if you see anything. Can you do that and stay out of
trouble?”

“I can stay out of
trouble.” She put the cell back in her pocket, then grabbed another
noseful of hair and looked out at the field of dwarf pines. There
was nothing there to look at as far as I could see, but she kept
looking at it.

“Can I ask a
question?”

“Depends,” she said, a
little guarded.

“Why do you keep doing
that thing with your hair?”

“It’s a tic.”

“I know, but why? Does it
remind you of something? What does your hair smell
like?”

She thought for a moment.
“Hair.”

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

CHAPTER 4

PASS THE DRAGON

>>SUNDAY JUNE 17 (4
days to go)

SUNDAY JUNE 17, 9:00
a.m.

HE’S JUST HIM

A day of rest, a day of
peace. At least that’s the way I was looking at it. I woke up
thinking about Monte’s suicide, thinking too about the talk I’d had
with Jen. It just felt like a day to make things right.
Specifically, like a day to sit Wooly down with Georgiana Copely
and let them hash their differences out. I didn’t know who’d been
taking shots at Wooly, but it was true—as he’d spared no pains to
point out—that it’d all started with Georgiana’s prediction. It was
time for them to make amends.

I told Nickie my idea when
she woke up. She agreed. Psychologically, at least, she thought it
would be a good move.

We found Wooly in his Bugs
Bunny PJs, finishing off his stack of a dozen pancakes while
Genevieve made coffee. He was open to the notion. What happened to
Monte, he said, had left him in a contrite mood. Maybe it
was
time to make
nice.

I called Georgiana’s
assistant, Marco Sung, told him what was on our minds. He conferred
with his boss. Yes, she was certainly willing to talk. She was more
than willing to put their differences behind them. We set a
meeting.

The ugly undercurrents of
the past few days seemed to be running dry. Things, as the weather
people say, were milding up.

“I been thinking,” said
Wooly, “maybe it’s time to recalibrate the attitude, you know?
Maybe it’s high time to cultivate more positive thoughts.” He got
up from the table. “Though if she pulls out a pair of ballcutters
on me, I’ll blow her fucking
head
off.”

He toddled off to get
dressed.

Et cum spiritu
tuo
. And may the spirit be with
you.

“Don’t mind him,” said
Genevieve. “He’s just him.”

“There’s probably some
kind of medal,” said Nickie, “for living with him.”

“I knew what I was getting
into,” Genevieve sighed, “knew it from the start.” She sat down.
“Knew it from our wedding day. He’d paid for the whole thing—my
family didn’t have a dime. We’d ordered a vanilla cake with
chocolate mousse inside. Suppose to signify interracial love, all
that. We cut the cake, it’s all vanilla. Vanilla cake, vanilla
mousse. He starts hacking at it with the knife—where’s the
chocolate, where’s the fucking chocolate? The caterer runs up and
says there must’ve been a mistake. Wooly picks up the whole three
tiers and throws the cake at the caterer. I start yelling you’re
ruining my fucking wedding, he yells it’s
my
fucking wedding too and it all
went berserk from there on in. He fought with the waiters, he
fought with the guests, he fought with the cops when they came.
Finally I had enough. I walked out, got in our car and started
driving away. He comes running out—you can’t leave without me!—and
throws himself on the hood of the car. That’s how we left for our
honeymoon. Me driving in my wedding dress, him straddled on the
hood of the car.”

>>>>>>

SUNDAY JUNE 17,
noon

THE COLOR PURPLE