The Croning Part 5

Sat.u.r.day was also Don's day to walk the dog around the tree farm on the other side of Misty Villa. He dressed in sweats and a windbreaker and pocketed a can of pepper spray as a precautionary measure. The packs of roaming neighborhood dogs were unpredictable and vicious, thus a circuit of Schneider's Tree Farm was as potentially fraught with peril as stuffing ham sandwiches into his backpack for a hike across the Serengeti. Don knew this because he had seen them cruising the byways and the unfenced yards-a border collie, a poodle, a beagle (although Don suspected the beagle was just along for the ride) and two or three mixed breeds-and, more succinctly, because the pack had once chased him from the mailbox to his front porch.

The quarter-mile walk went slowly, Thule h.e.l.l-bent on sniffing every bush in the ditch and then hiking his leg for a squirt.

The subdivision was arrayed around the streets of Red Lane & Darkmans like a body on a crucifix. The biggest and boldest house in the neighborhood belonged to the Rourkes, half a block in. Barry Rourke was an executive for AstraCorp (and thus one of Don's current bosses), his wife a semi-retired cellist and fulltime gadfly who played with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and their home was very old and ponderously stylish; a Victorian number raised months after the First World War. Then Red Lane and Darkmans were the only lanes, and made of good, honest dirt. The woods had lain even deeper and darker in those days when wolves roamed the forest, and black bears and cougars from the hills, and according to the coots at the Mud Shack, the occasional escapee from Wharton House, the old asylum that got shut down in the '90s. The wolves were long gone, the feral inmates s.h.i.+pped off to Western or wherever, but coyotes still laired in the woods; deer, and of course the packs of dogs that swelled with the inevitable wave of abandoned pooches each frantic tourist season and encouraged people of wisdom and prudence to arm themselves for the daily stroll.

The Rourke manse and environs had history, all right, were fairly steeped in it like an old blackened tea bag left to wither at the edge of a saucer. Don had several occasions to venture inside the house during the late '70s and early '80s-Kirsten Rourke threw frequent and lavish parties and because Don was a minion of AstraCorp at the time, Mich.e.l.le was invited into the Friday afternoon pinochle club for awhile, and of course, Rourke invited Don over periodically to indulge his impulse for slumming with the help. The place was imposing and decorated in a museum-quality fas.h.i.+on that discouraged touching a blessed thing on pain of arousing the housekeeper's ire.

One could scarcely move in a straight line without tripping across metastasized lumps and growths in every cavernous room, the benighted accretion of ineffable superiority through breeding and fortune: Circa.s.sia walnut Victrolas dredged from the wreckage of East India Company outposts; Flemish oak paneled armoires brought West in the face of marauding red devils; wicker baskets threaded by the cracked fingers of villagers long subsumed unto the dull gray chalk that collects as a mantle over everything everywhere; oil paintings from estate sales and private auctions; Ming vases and Tiffany lamps; Kirsten's million-dollar shoe collection, an affectation she'd contrived after following the exploits of Imelda Marcos. Rourke collected Western European medieval art-swords, s.h.i.+elds, ragged banners and a library of withered books behind gla.s.s. Rourke knew a bit of Latin and recited Olde English poetry when he got drunk, or, as Don suspected, when he pretended to be drunk.

Rourke had been an affiliate member of the John Birch Society; an amiable elitist, a masterful badminton player with a savage left-hand serve. He subscribed to Foreign Policy and a clutch of peer-reviewed journals pertaining to historical research societies of which Don had scant knowledge.

Back in the day when everyone was young and busy, sometimes Don had seen one of the Rourkes in pa.s.sing when he walked down his own long b.u.mpkin drive to fetch the mail or the paper from the roadside mailbox, the old star route, as the postal workers dubbed them-Kirsten cruising in her Jaguar, squiring the two-point-five children (twins Page & Brett, and Bronson Ford the adopted boy from a village in Angola) to or from recital (soccer, ballet, gymnastics, chess club, etc); or Rourke, in his mega-sized diesel pickup, which sounded like a piece of industrial equipment idling in the yard on bl.u.s.tery mornings-and he would wave or nod in greeting. If the elder Rourkes weren't too preoccupied they'd usually return the favor. The platinum blonde girl had regally ignored him (her brother, also a blond, died tragically; Don never heard the particulars), although Bronson Ford sometimes turned in his seat to stare through the rear window, impa.s.sive as a totem mask.

The dry breeze quickened as Don trudged by the Rourkes' iron gate. When had he last spoken to them? Ages-Kirsten was shriveled as a prune. Don chuckled wryly. Ah, but haven't we all? Too late to speak with Rourke now, anyway. The smug b.a.s.t.a.r.d had vanished in the Olympic Mountains years ago. Very mysterious circ.u.mstances. There were rumors of banking scandals, embezzlement, a Cayman Islands account. A number of folks agreed Rourke probably parachuted out of his loveless marriage and collapsing business empire and ran out the clock on a tropical beach.

Don scrutinized the lengthy gravel drive, the looming outlines of the house and the dazzles of gla.s.s and metal through the hissing trees. Shadows rose and fell like inhalations and a man, probably a gardener, in a s.h.i.+ny red s.h.i.+rt flickered briefly across a swath of razor-precise green lawn and vanished when the s.h.i.+fting branches clasped leaf to leaf.

Don and Thule continued down to the cul-de-sac and its trio of pedestrian homes. A footpath curved into the shallow copse of alders and termite-bored stumps of fallen pines and a man had to watch his step for the all the mounds of dog- and horses.h.i.+t. About two hundred yards farther on, the trail intersected a dirt road, a combination of rutted gravel and mucky sand, that divided and divided again like the spokes of a wheel and cut numerous paths through the many acres of tightly packed dwarf evergreens; none crowned more than eight feet tall; a veritable forest of Christmas trees.

The farm had been around since forever; it was a formidable enterprise bordering a stretch of the distant Yelm Highway and sprawled inward from there in the shape of an irregular fan some four miles wide at the junction of its service road and the path from the Misty Villa Home Owners a.s.sociation. The road was popular with joggers, dog owners and rowdy teens on dirt bikes. Dirt bikes, four-wheelers and the like were expressly forbidden, not that such edicts ever discouraged kids hopped up on testosterone, and drunken rednecks who'd achieved the adult instar stage, from roaring around the track after dark, tearing up the place and leaving beer cans everywhere.

A wooden sawhorse with a peeling gray placard was jammed upside down into the teeth of a row of trees near the entrance. The placard shouted in huge, black letters, KEEP OUT! THIS AREA.

HAS BEEN SPRAYED WITH PESTICIDE!.

DANGEROUS TO PEOPLE & PETS NEXT 14 DAYS!.

YOU ARE ON PRIVATE PROPERTY!.

The sign migrated about the perimeter of the farm and had done so perpetually for several years.

A yellow lab trotted past and lifted its leg to hose a baby Douglas fir before moving on, snout to the earth. Thule strained at his leash and whimpered excitedly. The lab's owners, a couple of yuppie kids in matching polo wear, ambled along a few dozen yards behind Don, placidly oblivious to the cryptic sign or their wayward pet. Far off, somewhere beyond pickets of greenery, a saw whined. Everything smelled humid and bittersweet and gnats danced in his hair.

The workers who tended the farm were around this morning. A crew of seven or eight arrived every few weeks to clean the undergrowth, trim the branches and remove any diseased specimens. The laborers were uniformly male, organized by a patriarchal countryman with a barrel chest and a frightful scowl. They wore coveralls and wide-brimmed hats and swung machetes with the casual efficacy of butchers.

Don a.s.sumed them to be Hispanic because he'd heard them conversing in Spanish, albeit overlaid with another language he couldn't identify. He'd never spoken to the workers, just nodded in pa.s.sing; a friendly smile or wave, which was always reciprocated. His Spanish was bad to nonexistent. That last detail aggravated and mystified him in equal measure since the day last winter he'd rummaged through some long-lost files and discovered journal notes he'd written entirely in Espanol during his youth. These were field notes he'd taken while surveying a cave system in the Aleutians during the Nixon administration. Long time gone, but G.o.d... How did a man forget a language? How did a man forget he'd even once known that language? Wracking his porous brains, he couldn't dredge much detail regarding the expedition either. Darkness, a cavern, him suspended by a line above an abyss, his headlamp beam not touching anything solid, the drip and gurgle of water everywhere...He blinked and shook himself as Thule did after coming in from the rain, and kept moving. Moving forward from a past that became more the realm of a shadow life every day.

Today, he spotted a couple of the younger men near the road, and instantly knew something was different, wrong somehow. Thick and broad, their coveralls caked in dust and sap. Flat, sallow faces already alight with sweat, they muttered and hacked at dead limbs, dropped them into wheelbarrows like tangled stacks of deformed arms and legs. Yes, there was a difference in their movements, a queer, vaguely inimical aura radiating from them and their half smiles that resembled sneers. He glanced down and noted that Thule's fur was ridged and ruffled as when he was pointing toward a threat such as a hostile dog or an unknown critter in the bushes.

The pair gradually became aware of Don's presence and ceased their labors to study him and converse furtively. One called out in a shrill, fluting voice to his brethren hidden among the deep rows and the eerie cry was immediately returned from several, widely scattered locations.

His mouth, my G.o.d! Don gasped and averted his gaze from the man uttering the strange bird cry; the fellow's mouth shuttered like an iris, a toothless hole as big as a fist. The other man licked his lips and slid his machete against his pants leg in the manner of a barber stropping a razor.

Don nodded with a sickly smile, pretending obliviousness of this most palpable unwelcome and ambled onward as fast as dignity permitted. Their deadly obsidian eyes swiveled to track him until a curve of the road intervened. He spasmodically gripped the pepper spray in his pocket. His teeth chattered.

Too many joints in their necks. He hadn't noticed that during his previous encounters with the crew. Both of these men had possessed the same deformity, and a crazy, paranoid thought occurred to him-the pair were actors, doubles in a film who stand in for the name actor, always filmed from behind, or in soft focus. Put a uniform on someone and that person could pa.s.s as your best friend from a distance. Crazy and paranoid in spades. Who the h.e.l.l would bother to impersonate migrant laborers on a country tree farm? Why did he have a sneaking suspicion he'd seen them before under different circ.u.mstances?

They watch. They watch you, Donald. They love you.

The impingement of this unbidden whisper from his subconscious galvanized him even as he crammed it back down into the cellar with his childhood fears of spiders and the boogeyman. He trotted all the way back to the house, racing the storm, the devil.

A pot of coffee later, Thule growled and headlights turned into the driveway. Don squinted at his watch, Here they are.

Kurt and Kaiwin arrived in a rental car. Kurt owned four cars, including a Lexus and a cla.s.sic, fully loaded Mini Cooper that formerly belonged to a B List action star; but as he once remarked, it'd be a cold day in h.e.l.l before he'd risk one of his babies on the back roads around Olympia. The sky had brightened by inches, outlining the soft shapes of the barn, the trembling magnolias. They emerged from the car and splashed through a mud puddle and burst into the kitchen.

Kaiwin was dark-eyed and slender, delicate, yet wiry, like a dancer. She dressed simply in a peach summer dress and sensible shoes and no makeup and appeared much younger than her likely age. Her purse was transparent plastic, the current affectation of trendy metropolitan girls and girlish women everywhere. She stood nervously, wiping raindrops from her eyes. Her eyelids were painted a delicate b.u.t.terfly-wing blue.

Thule sniffed her warily, and then wriggled and frantically kissed her hands. Don, who beyond a short conversation at the wedding reception, hadn't chatted with the lady, accepted her then and there sans reservation. Kurt's judgment was suspect. On the other paw, anyone good enough for Thule was A-okay in Don's book.

"Pop. We made it. A real s.h.i.+t storm out there." Well into middle-age, Kurt was nonetheless tall and bronze and built like a power lifter; he'd played ball in high school and college, a first team linebacker at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton. He might've been on his way to a business meeting, such was the elegance of his hand-tailored suit, the slick blue-black sheen of his three-hundred-dollar haircut; the kind of haircut the governor himself might've favored. "This is Winnie." He put his ma.s.sive arm around her fragile shoulders. She nodded and smiled a bright, superficial smile.

Don had to wonder exactly how fluent her English might be. He gave her a kindly smile and told them to hurry up and grab a seat. He took their coats and poured more coffee, although it developed Winnie wasn't much for coffee, tea being her preference, and in that case, Kurt no longer drank coffee either. More for me, Don said, and scrounged in the cupboards until he unearthed a rusty tin of herbal tea that likely gathered cobwebs before the kids ever left for college.

Once Kurt and Winnie were sipping their tea, Don washed potatoes and started peeling them, a task he'd become rather adept at over the years, if only as a matter of self-preservation. Mich.e.l.le was many things, but a cook wasn't one. He made small talk, noting Kurt's expression of mild boredom; the lad drummed his fingers when his attention began to wander. Don had always harbored the suspicion his son suffered from attention deficit disorder. Mich.e.l.le disagreed, noting that Don wasn't a sparkling conversationalist and an appreciation of rural life certainly hadn't trickled down through the paternal genes. Nonetheless, he'd always wanted to try Ritalin on the boy in the interest of science. He inquired about his son's job as the vice president of operations at an aeros.p.a.ce contractor in Seattle.

Kurt's was a position that required extensive travel-the company outsourced its manufacturing of electronic components to Taiwan and China, which was incidentally how he met Winnie. The youngest daughter of a minor Hong Kong executive, they'd sat adjacent at a dinner party. The marriage date was arranged a mere six months later.

Kurt's job also necessitated absolute secrecy and draconian security procedures. He showed Don the back of his left hand. "The company implanted a chip under the skin, right there-microscopic, like a grain of rice. It has my security clearance, medical information. They track it via satellite so I can move freely throughout our office and from building to building. There are a dozen checkpoints, sealed doors, security elevators, you name it. It'd be a flaming nightmare without this puppy."

"Are they tracking you now?" Don said. He looked at the ceiling.

"Uh, no, Dad. That'd be an infringement of my privacy. I'm on vacation for Pete's sake." It was always difficult to tell whether Kurt's exasperation was a reaction to Don's dry needling or impatience with his father's presumed ignorance. Kurt was far from stupid, but even farther from imaginative.

"Yeah, but how do they know where you are, who're you're talking to? Jeez, this could be a nest of commie spies."

"I signed a nondisclosure form. Standard procedure. The penalty for violating that is about twenty-five years and forfeiture of my left nut, minimum. Besides, we provide ops a detailed itinerary of where we're going and what the purpose of the visit might be. b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, this tea tastes like rotten leaves. Winnie, you don't have to drink that." He gently extricated the teacup from Winnie's hand and slid it across the table. Her eyes glinted dangerously, a glint that subsided almost in the exact same instant. Kurt remained oblivious. "We got any of that coffee left?"

Holly and her girlfriend Linda arrived around nine o'clock during a respite in the weather. Holly, independent and rugged as ever, piloted the ancient Land Rover her mother once s.h.i.+pped to South Africa for a six-month odyssey across the Dark Continent; she'd bequeathed it to Holly as a college graduation gift. Don guessed the engine had clocked enough miles to reach the moon and slingshot back to Earth.

Holly leaped from the truck and seized her father in a bone-crus.h.i.+ng embrace. Short and stout, her hair a s.h.a.ggy blonde shot with gray; her tanned face bore the pits and pocks of an adventuresome existence. Like her mother, she possessed a quality of essential agelessness, a quirky, youthful pa.s.sion toward life that did not engender frailty, be it physical or otherwise. Her eyes flashed with bleak humor, no doubt born of twenty-odd years as an elementary school teacher.

"Hullo, brother," she said when Kurt ambled onto the porch, smoothing his fantastical hair. She socked him in the arm, hard, and Don winced in sympathy; he'd roughhoused with her when she was a teenager and even then her scarred fists were clubs.

Kurt grunted and rapped his knuckles on her forehead and Don stepped between them to defuse the semi-playful aggression before matters escalated and his children were rolling in the mud pulling each other's hair and biting; his role of referee had become reflexive over the years of broken noses and bruised egos. Nothing changed; they would hit the big five-oh come December, and yet they reverted to adolescence at the drop of a hat. The friend, Linda, joined them on the porch. An attractive, albeit hard-bitten, woman with a buzz cut. She wore a heavy flannel s.h.i.+rt, khakis and logger boots. She shyly said h.e.l.lo to everyone and her voice was quite soft; she meticulously enunciated in a fas.h.i.+on that suggested European nativity.

Rain closed in again mere moments after the luggage was unpacked and piled inside the front entryway. The house had many smallish windows, but the structure was built to 19th century standards. The rooms, staircases and connecting halls were low-ceilinged, narrow and dark, especially in dismal weather. A house of nooks and crannies, funny doors and storage cabinets in unusual and unexpected locations. Throughout childhood, Holly expressed an abiding fear of certain rooms. She complained of scratching and whispering emanating from her closet and the staircase that led to the attic. Some nights she refused to sleep in her own bed.

The cellar was right out because she swore that once when she ventured down to fetch a jar of preserves, the venerable tomcat Boris (whom they'd inherited along with the house) had chuckled from his perch high up on a wine rack, and crooned, I'm a good kitty. Boris wandered off one day not long after that alleged incident and they didn't get around to bringing home another cat, despite the perennial mice problem.

Kurt had mocked Holly by saying maybe what she heard was one of Mom's little people. Don immediately shushed such talk with uncustomary bluntness. Mention of The Little People, so called, was strictly verboten around the Miller household. He knew from bitter experience precisely how sensitive his wife was regarding even the most innocent slight of her decades-long investigation into the existence of uncontacted tribes and hidden cultures. As a man well-acquainted with similar foibles, such as cryptozoology, he tended toward sympathy.

Yet Mich.e.l.le had pursued the topic with evangelical zeal, albeit in quasi secrecy, as only cryptobiologists such as her once great friend and mentor Louis Plimpton and the more radical members of the scientific community like renowned kooks Tos.h.i.+ Ryoko and Howard Campbell could be trusted to keep a straight face while discussing such esoteric theories. Thank the heavens she'd later given up before it wrecked their marriage and drove herself or Don, or both of them, to lunacy.

These days, Don didn't often think of Mich.e.l.le's quest, that apocalyptic obsession she'd cultivated during her early years at university of proving the existence of a particular extant family of men, likely tribal, who dwelt on the hinterlands of civilization-the Antarctic, deep in the jungles of New Guinea, or the amid the wastes of the Gobi, or, if her painstakingly collated sources were to be trusted, in all of these places. The theory was absurd, of course, and would've gotten her laughed out of mainstream academia had she not also demonstrated reliable brilliance in traditional research, or if she hadn't written two nonfiction books that sold sensationally and garnered overwhelming critical praise. The powers that be chuckled at her Hollow Earth theories and wrote them off as regrettable, but perhaps essential kookiness in an otherwise genius scientist.

To the twins, the mountains of data, dry as chalk and coupled with thousands upon thousands of hours logged on planes, boats, and in hard library seats, had always boiled down to "Mom's looking for little people!" Cute when the kids were kids and Mich.e.l.le's optimism and humor were peaking, less so with each pa.s.sing year, until finally at a family dinner she'd grimly announced sans preamble that her research (thank the G.o.ds a sideline to her real work) had all been a wild goose chase and was officially terminated. Henceforth, her spare time would be devoted to a genealogical survey of her extensive family tree. Afterward she drank half a bottle of white wine and fell asleep on the living room floor. The subject was seldom mentioned in the wake of that extraordinary evening and within weeks everyone stopped talking about it altogether.

As for Holly's contention she'd heard the cat talking, Mich.e.l.le scoffed; as with many old houses, the pipes knocked and moaned, shrews nested in eaves, and above all, kids were endowed with hyperactive imaginations.

Don seldom reproached his daughter, however. He too dreaded the attic and the cellar. There were other little incidents, a string of them, in fact, that he wrote off as a product of his phobias, or, when expedient, promptly forgot. He'd become very good at putting these unpleasant details from his mind until the next time Mich.e.l.le went away and it was late and the power flickered and something b.u.mped in the night-a tipped chair, a cracked vase, the tinkle of gla.s.ses moving in the kitchen cabinets, things of that order. Items went missing; food, forks and knives. The knives bothered him; it was always the big ones, the butcher knives and the cleavers. Sometimes Thule whined like a puppy and glared at the walls and the ceilings. Then Don's fears came home to roost.

He bustled room to room clicking on lamps. The cheery glow comforted him, although the light could only do so much as the cubbies and corners lay in deepest shadow. His foremost lament regarding life at the old Mock residence was the fact he couldn't utterly banish the darkness.

Soon chaos descended. Luggage lay strewn from the front door to the landing below the attic which doubled as a guestroom. Kurt and Winnie agreed to accept residence therein, although he grumbled at the tight quarters, predicting he'd whack his skull on the beams. Holly told him to shut it and be a trooper. He responded with a colorful epithet. They preferred to converse while each was in a separate room, if not on a separate floor, which necessitated shouting, and set the dog to barking and bounding up and down the stairs. Mich.e.l.le loudly admonished them to lower the racket because she was hung over. The phone rang off the hook. As it was never for Don anyway and Mich.e.l.le refused to answer the b.l.o.o.d.y thing, he appointed Holly receptionist pro tem, and she in turn pa.s.sed the buck to poor, sh.e.l.l-shocked Linda who walked around in a daze with a pencil stub in hand.

"Argyle is coming for dinner," Linda said. "He's bringing champagne."

"In this weather?" Don said as thunder rumbled. Argyle Arden was a phylogeographer who'd retired from Caltech, then again from Saint Martin's, and currently served the Redfield Museum as a consultant. The kids still referred to him as Uncle Argyle.

"He won't drown," Mich.e.l.le said. "Besides, we can't leave him alone in that huge house of his; we're bound to lose power. Can you get that suitcase for Win, dear?" She'd drawn Winnie, Holly, and Linda away from Kurt on some pretext or other. They sat on the leather couch in the parlor with a box-worth of photo alb.u.ms spread open on the chairs and the floor. The quartet seemed perfectly content to camp there indefinitely.

"Which one?" Don morosely eyed a full set of matching designer luggage.

"The heavy one." Mich.e.l.le waved absently.

They all looked heavy to him. He decided this was his cue to slip away and take his arthritis medicine with a belt of Glenlivet he'd cunningly cached in the pantry behind a row of mason jars and cans of stewed vegetables. He didn't indulge much these days; just when stressed. He poured a triple, estimating this would suffice as an anesthetic until Argyle arrived to rescue him from the clutches of his wife and children.

Kurt stumped into the kitchen and caught him red-handed. "For the love of Christ and the Apostles, hand that over quick!" He barged into the pantry, s.n.a.t.c.hed the bottle and reduced its contents by a quarter. "I hope you haven't become a closet lush, Dad," he said after wiping his mouth with his knuckles, then registered they were currently holed up in a pantry the length and width of a janitor's closet. "Literally."

"Well, gee, son. I don't guzzle whiskey like soda pop."

"Yeah, yeah. I need to mellow. My blood pressure's through the roof the last few weeks. We might lose a contract to Airbus and the machinists are threatening a walk-off. Another strike! Can you believe that garbage? They get a sweet new contract three years ago and look how they repay us. Extortionist b.a.s.t.a.r.ds." Given Kurt's lofty position and the attendant responsibilities, hypertension seemed an obvious occupational hazard.

"Ah, well, I live with your mother." Don retrieved the bottle and had another dose. Before he knew it, the bottle had run dry and he was beginning to take the entire hullabaloo quite philosophically. He and Kurt eventually emerged, snickering at their own witticisms like a pair of prep school cadets, and tackled the daunting task of dragging a half dozen bags up the stairs, a ch.o.r.e that proved surprisingly hilarious, all the more so when Kurt admitted five of them were his.

After the second trip to the attic, Don slumped on the double bed, which Mich.e.l.le had taken pains to beautify with new sheets and a counterchange quilt, and tried to catch his breath. He considered himself in decent shape for a flabby-a.s.sed geezer. He ran every other day and lifted a set of dumbbells Kurt had left in the garage. This, however, was a bit much. He put his head between his knees. Thunder crashed much closer than before. From this height, the crow's nest as it were, the storm was impressive. The roof seemed as if it might be torn apart at any moment. Gray, bloodless light came through a single window smudged with grime and fly droppings.

The room was crowded by racks of mothballed clothes, bookshelves crammed with moldy picture books and magazines such as Life and Time-and an array of antique dolls. Aunt Yvonne had been a collector; some of the dolls went back to the Civil War; she'd even acquired a wooden Indian, the kind shopkeepers once set on the sidewalk. It waited in the shadows, dust-caked, its termite-riddled aspect rather ghoulish, hatchet-edged and emaciated; the portrait of a Cherokee chief cut down by starvation and smallpox, an angry soul condemned to haunt the attic.

Tucked in an alcove was an ancient Westinghouse projector alongside dozens of film canisters whose labels were mostly illegible due to yellowing and that awful Mock handwriting. Those few that proved comprehensible were pure argot: Hierophant Exp. 10/38; Mt. Fuji Exp. 10/46; Crng (Beatrice J.) 10/54; Astrobio Smt. 5/76(keynote T. Ryoko & H. Campbell), Ur-trilobite organizational patterns (L. Plimpton) 8/78, Ekaltadeta spinal column, Duin Barrow 11/86, CoOL 9/89, and so on. Stacked in the corners were dusty wooden crates and steamer trunks papered with stamps from exotic ports of call. A handful of these objects were newer, holdovers from Mich.e.l.le's expeditions to Africa, Malaysia, Polynesia, and a dozen other regions.

Several oil paintings lay under canvas, propped against an easel, and largely unfinished; the labors of an unknown artist. The pieces were disquieting. Impressionist work; the subjects were deformed humanoids dwarfed by unwholesome man-beast figures and indistinct objects of unremittingly baroque dimensions. These latter struck him as tribal renderings of anthropomorphic G.o.ds and the cyclopean ziggurats wherein such beings would naturally dwell, the whole as filtered through the lens of someone possessed of a Western European sensibility. Possibly someone with a psychological disorder or a deviant fetish for the grotesque. He'd avoided mentioning the paintings to Mich.e.l.le for fear she'd form a morbid attachment to them and insist on hanging the "masterpieces" in prominent locations.

Even worse was a poster-sized black and white photograph of a tall, gangling figure in half profile looming over a misshapen dwarf against a featureless background of white and gray. Both wore stiff suits and Homburgs; the freakishly proportioned thin man, whose hands and neck possessed all too many joints, wore rimless black gla.s.ses while the dwarf grinned at the camera through a devilish beard. The photo was likely shot during the Prohibition or Depression era going by the striations and patina of composition, although identification was difficult due to yellowing and a layer of dust. R & friend was scribbled in the corner. Don didn't care for either of the men and wondered who they were and what became of them.

He smiled wryly-if this was what Mock men looked like in their declining years, no wonder they maintained a low profile. Behind the photograph were several others, but these were scorched and ruined, edges curled and charred from flame, giving the impression someone had tossed them in a fire and then relented too late, and neither heads nor tails could be discerned regarding the subjects.

"I see you never got around to clearing out this junk." Kurt lighted a cigarette. "It's stuffy as h.e.l.l in here. And those b.l.o.o.d.y dolls. They scared the c.r.a.p out of me when I was a kid."

"Ahem, you can't smoke in the house." Don widened his eyes melodramatically and drew his thumb across his throat. He pointed at the floor where m.u.f.fled laughter occasionally echoed through the grillwork vents. "It's the law." He'd quit tobacco periodically since Sputnik.

Kurt puffed vigorously with the rapturous expression of a satiated addict. "Screw going outside in this s.h.i.+t. If I don't have a drag my head will explode. Want one?"

"Lord yes." Don practically s.n.a.t.c.hed the proffered cigarette. They smoked in contented silence for a bit and Don's whiskey buzz began to evaporate, usurped by the rush of nicotine. He said, "So, what's the occasion?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, we get Holly once a year, if we're lucky. And you, you're always busier than a one-armed paper hanger. But here both of you are; out of the blue I might add. So, what gives?"

Kurt puffed smoke from his nostrils. "Mom threatened us. You telling me you aren't in on it?"

"Postcards suit me, son. I cherish my peace and quiet. Threatened you how?"

"With being disinherited, what else?"

"She's too late."

"Ha-ha. I'm kidding-she asked Holly to visit, not me. I came because I want to talk." Kurt dragged on his cigarette, face screwed up in concentration, as it always had when he confronted a problem too big for his eminently prosaic brain. "It's...Well it's weird."

"Uh-oh," Don said. "Quick!" He crushed his cigarette and hid the evidence in the front pocket of his s.h.i.+rt and frantically swiped at the smoke circling his head.

"Oh, boys," Mich.e.l.le called from the landing. Backlit by a lamp, her shadow flickered on the ceiling where the stairs slanted downward. "How's it coming?"

"Er, ahem-fine, dear! Almost done," Don said, fighting the itch in his throat, the maddening urge to cough.

"Fabulous. Come right down, if you please. Holly has another trunk on the porch and we can't have her spraining something trying to lift it, can we?"

"Right, right, she's a delicate flower," Don said. He shrugged at Kurt. "Hold the thought, eh?"

"Yeah," Kurt cracked the window enough to create a whistling suction and smoke streamed forth into the maelstrom. "We'll talk about it later."

There came a golden and crimson break in the weather. Black and purple for miles all around, Jupiter's gory eye fixed directly overhead. The girls sent Don and Kurt into town for emergency supplies-more wine coolers and candles.

Don decided to make the best of a raw deal and took Kurt to visit Grandpa Luther, a ch.o.r.e he'd neglected for six months, much to Mich.e.l.le's growing irritation-she coming from the blood is thicker than water set. Don shrugged off her disapproval, turtled stubbornly. Luther had been a force of nature and Don didn't like visiting the old man's patch of dirt. It reminded him of his own crow's feet, how the flesh of his triceps had begun to loosen, dimpled and pallid as a plucked turkey.

Kurt drove him to the cemetery and said, "Hey, do your thing. I'm no good with this sentimental c.r.a.p. I'll get the booze and swing around to grab you in a bit."

Don lingered a moment in the entrance lot, breathing in the salt tang mixed with decomposing soil and wet gra.s.s. He walked slowly then, a bouquet of parti-colored supermarket flowers drooping from his fist. On the left was the mausoleum, a low, brick rectangle, crosses graven at intervals where windows might've served. To the right, a dirty white marble Christ knelt upon a knoll, hands clasped, face upturned. The stone split along Christ's jaw and temple; a scar. Perhaps this was his portrait after Golgotha, the wounds yet sharp. Behind the statue, a storm fence leaned crookedly, a spine of plastic slats and mesh separating the cemetery from a warren of duplexes and tract houses.

Numerous bedroom windows overlooked this field of crumbling markers; he considered the irony of how at night the living and the dead slept crown to crown. Did the flimsy barrier represent something more than its makers intended? Possibly a subconscious demarcation between the Here And Now and the Hereafter.

Pa.s.sing a naked flagpole near the granite Civil War Monument, he came toward the oldest sections, the plots where the founders of Portland were buried. The rough-cropped turf was largely innocent of paths. Those that existed were uneven, asphalt-rutted from the crush of years, and slimy with needles and pollen. Trees reared in disorderly copses. Evergreens dominated, limbs heavy and low, creaking as the wind nudged them. Birches hunkered as poor relations at a banquet, their mottled skins cold and white, black branches haggard even in summer. Periodic attempts to dress up the grounds were evidenced by the symmetrical shearing of hedge trees.