What Came After (23 page)

He stayed there on the floor and sank back on his haunches and thought of Penny and Liz. What a ruin he’d made of everything. How he should have left well enough alone. The two of them were stuck in New York now without him, without him ever, and with no way to get back where they belonged. He’d made no provision for that. He thought maybe Carmichael would take pity on them, but he knew that was a pipedream. Carmichael would feel that he’d been duped. Taken advantage of. Caused to waste the tiniest fraction of his fortune on Penny, on something that meant nothing to him and never would. Weller knelt there on the floor thinking about what he’d said to the old woman. About how he’d kill himself if he had to in order to make Penny’s blindness right. Thinking he should be content, because as far as he knew he’d done just that.

*

The woman came with his supper and asked what was that crash before anyhow, you can be honest with me. Maybe feeling some kind of common cause or maybe not.

He said it wasn’t anything. Just those movies in the cans. He’d bumped into them and knocked them over and the old woman said you’d have to bump into them pretty hard and Weller said he did. Saying they were all over the place now. A mess of film everywhere.

The old woman asked what movies he had in there and he said what did it matter if they couldn’t watch them. They were just film.

She said the last one she saw here was some western. That famous one. Not John Wayne but after him. John Wayne was dead when they made it. The same character but a different actor, she couldn’t remember who. They used to have senior citizen specials for a dollar and now that she was old enough to qualify as a senior citizen they didn’t have them anymore. Just her luck.

He said she was welcome to come in and take a look if she wanted. See what he had.

She said no. Not no thanks, just no. Like she could tell he was angling for her to unlock the door. She just left him his supper and waited to take the plate back. A thin chipped plate made of plastic and no use to him but she always waited for it anyhow.

He got thinking. He asked her how many movies she’d seen here.

She said hundreds. “I lived in Greensboro my whole life,” she said. Her voice was less cracked and labored now that she’d been using it a little from time to time, coming in softer through the ventilation slot. The two of them whispering so nobody could hear. She said she’d seen everything in those days. Nature movies and animated cartoons when she was a little girl and James Bond when she got a little older. James Bond always keeping the world from coming to an end. It was a nuclear bomb or a death ray or something like that every time with James Bond. Remembering put a lightness in her voice, but there was a weariness there too. “James Bond never saw this world coming,” she said.

Later on, in the smoky dark, Weller lay on the hard floor thinking about the end of the world. Thinking that thanks to him his daughter would see the world winding down at last, the way it had been going for his whole life and he hadn’t even paid attention. Crumbling and winding down and Penny seeing it clearly but not really recognizing it because nobody did. Not really. Regardless of how good her vision became she wouldn’t know where the world had been and where it might have gone and how far down it had come. Not the way that the old woman did. The old woman remembered. He watched the firelight flicker up from below and he studied how it made the projector loom up out of one kind of darkness and into another and he had an idea.

*

After breakfast he began to work on the projector. Cleaning the various surfaces with rags and blowing off dust and freeing up stuck parts. Working gently and steadily. The big lens was screwed on tight but he got it loose. It was meditative work that gave him time to think. It was quiet work too, and the old woman didn’t know he was doing it, so he told her when she brought supper. Just to see if she’d object this time and this time she didn’t. Instead she asked again what movies he had in there and he said again that he didn’t know. She scoffed, asking how he thought he’d show one without power anyway, and he said he hadn’t figured that out yet.

*

The man who’d gone to Washington wasn’t back, and it had been a week at least. Enough time, if he hadn’t gotten in trouble. Weller asked about him while he ate his breakfast and she didn’t have any answer. She didn’t know how long her son would wait before he’d make some decision as to Weller’s future without him. Until then there was still hope, she said, but Weller didn’t feel hopeful.

He said remember that six-shooter he used to have and she said yes. He said he used to have a satellite phone, too. He said a condemned man usually gets one phone call. She said she remembered that from some movie. Except she thought it was a cigarette he got. The condemned man.

The rest of the day he kept working on the projector. He had it pretty clean now and he began breaking off lengths of film and attempting to wind them through the various pins and clamps and gates. A maze of them. There was a diagram inside the cover but it didn’t help much because the printing on it was faded and the paper was brown and generations of mice had chewed away parts of it. The film was fragile and it kept breaking. Bits flaking off and getting stuck and Weller blowing at them and sometimes pushing them deeper into the works and having to take everything out and start again.

The frustration nearly killed him.

He took off his glasses and held up the big projection lens and squinted through it to see what he was doing up close. He figured out the drive mechanism and used the broken hinge pin as a crank and made it turn. Greasing it a little and cranking it more and limbering it up. Working himself into a kind of hypnotic rhythm, and rising out of it only when he heard a voice.

It was the old woman down below, singing to herself. Making her rounds with her voice raised up wobbling in the absence of her son and his silent followers, going over some old song that Weller didn’t know. He looked out through the square window and saw the dusty sunlight streaming down through the hole in the roof and the woman down there working with her voice lifted up. The song had the word baby in it a few times but it wasn’t a lullaby. It was some old love song. He listened, wondering how many years it had been since these walls had heard such a thing and guessing that the old woman probably wasn’t even aware of what she was doing.

Before the rest of them got home and she went quiet he tried threading some film through again and this time he had it right. It didn’t break against the sprockets now that he could turn them with the makeshift crank. There was a little gate or window that opened and closed when the film passed in front of it and at first it didn’t want to open or close at the right time, but he got that worked out. He settled on a speed that seemed good. Just feeding the same length of film through again and again and looking through the gate to watch the shapes on it move in the light from the hole in the roof. She sang some other songs, one of them a religious one that he knew, and then the light began to fade and her son returned and that was the end of it.

*

She came in the night with the satellite phone. She must have. It was there in the morning, right beside him. It was dented and cracked from the crash of the Harley, with the battery pack loose and the antenna cocked to one side, but that was good news. About the battery pack anyhow. Because as long as the phone had been without power, Bainbridge didn’t know where he was.

*

While he ate his breakfast he told the old woman he’d been looking over some of the film from the cans. The labels were ruined so he couldn’t tell what was what but he’d been studying what he had. Time on his hands and all.

She asked was there anything like that movie
National Velvet,
and he said he didn’t know. She said it was a horse movie with a girl. She didn’t remember if she’d seen it here or on the television but it was a nice story and nobody told stories like that anymore. She’d had a horse herself when she was young, and thinking of the movie made her think of her own horse. He said he hadn’t seen any horses so far but he’d keep an eye out. He’d let her know if he found
National Velvet.
She said it would do her heart good just knowing it was there. Just knowing it was somewhere and not only in her memory.

He told her thanks for the phone, and she said what phone.

It turned out later that the battery was weak but still good. Locating the satellites took a couple of minutes and the phone beeped a number of times in the process and Weller was glad that everybody down below was gone except for the old woman. Clamping his hand over the little speaker grate and realizing how much trouble he could have caused her. Thinking that her son might have gone ahead and taught her not to talk to strangers as a result.

The phone connected, but Bainbridge didn’t answer. Some assistant instead. Weller said, “Hurry up and get him. My battery’s about gone.”

The general came on saying he could plug that into the cigarette lighter on that fancy car or had he forgotten.

Weller said, “How did you know I’ve got the car?” Glad that the other man had come up with the idea himself. It was easier than lying.

“What a kidder,” Bainbridge said. “You’re in Greensboro. You’re on your way home.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch.”

“No shit, sonny. We were worried sick.”

“All for nothing.”

“I can see that,” Bainbridge said. “So tell me about my old friend Marlowe.”

“First you tell me about Penny. Given how well she was doing before, I’d think she’d be making really good progress now.”

Bainbridge hesitated. Weller got uncomfortable when Bainbridge hesitated. It meant he was thinking. “The main thing to keep in mind,” he said, “is that
you’re
making good progress.”

“I am.”

“Keep it up, then. Keep it up because—to tell you the truth—she’s had a couple of setbacks.”

“What kind of setbacks?”

“Her mother didn’t give me the details. The only thing she said was
setbacks.”

“I don’t like hearing that.”

“Who does? Bottom line is it’s time for you to put the pedal down and come on home. That’s all you can do.”

“I was thinking you could talk to Carmichael and have him get the two of them home without me.”

“Just come back and see her with your own eyes. Get yourself home with your little girl.”

Bainbridge the motivator. Weller picturing himself dying here without ever knowing how Penny’s and Liz’s stories would end. Cursing himself for having made this call and broken his own heart.

Bainbridge asked about Marlowe again. How he was holding up. What kind of arrangements he’d made for himself down there in the wilderness.

Weller wanted to hurt him. “You wouldn’t believe your eyes,” he said. “He’s living like the king of some tropical island.”

“No.”

“He’s so happy it would make you sick.”

“Honest? I can’t believe it.”

“Believe what you want,” said Weller. “But tell those doctors it’s time to get serious. And have Carmichael get them home the minute she’s ready, in case I get held up.” The battery was blinking red and the blinking was getting slower, dying out. “Tell everybody I’m on my way.”

*

Later on, running the film between his fingers and holding it up to the light, he found a sequence with a barnyard in it. No horses, but at least a barnyard. People moving around in a dirt yard in front of a house and going in between the house and a barn. Black and white images but brown with age. A storm brewing and a snakelike cloud whipping the sky and a little girl hurrying down a path with a suitcase in her hand. He didn’t know if maybe this was part of that
National Velvet
the old woman remembered. Most of the film was sticky and rotted and glued together at some molecular level and he’d never get the loops of it separated from one another so he’d never know for sure, but there were still parts of it that he could make out. He fed one length into the projector and got it clicking along and looked through the gate. Watching the girl hurry down the path. A dog alongside her or maybe a cat that she stopped to pick up. Shooting a desperate look around and getting that dog or cat before she dared go on. Weller thinking she looked like she wanted to get home. Looking at the girl and thinking of Penny. Thinking that if he ever got home he’d get her a dog or a cat. Whichever she wanted.

The film ran out and slid into a pile on the floor and he bent to retrieve it. Stood up and put his arm out the square window holding it like a caught snake and called down to the old woman. Saying he’d found something.

She came up and asked what it was.

He told her. He said he had no idea if it was that horse movie she’d seen once upon a time, but it had a little girl in it and a barnyard so it might be the one. Either way it was only part. A few seconds. But he had the projector sort of going and you could see the pictures move against the light that came in from the hole in the roof, so if she wanted to take a look, now was the time. Her people would be back soon. Her son. And then she’d have to wait.