finally decided to call them.
As Celestina settled on the sofa with the phone in her lap, hesitating to dial until she worked up a bit more courage, Angel said to Tom, 'So what happened to your face?'
'Angel!' her mother admonished from across the room. 'That's impolite.'
'I know. But how can I find out 'less I ask?'
'You don't have to find out everything.'
'I do,' Angel objected.
'I was ran over by a rhinoceros,' Tom revealed.
Angel blinked at him. 'The big ugly animal?'
'That's right.'
'Has mean eyes and a horn thing on its nose?'
'Exactly the one.'
Angel grimaced. 'I don't like rhinosharushes.'
'Neither do I.'
'Why did it run over you?'
'Because I was in its way.'
'Why were you in its way?'
'Because I crossed the street without looking.'
'I'm not allowed to cross the street alone.'
'Now you see why?' Tom asked.
'Me you sad?'
'Why should I be sad?'
' 'Cause your face looks all mooshed?'
'Oh, Lord,' Celestina said exasperatedly.
'It's all right,' Tom assured her. To Angel, he said, 'No, I'm not sad. And you know why?'
'Why?'
'See this?' He placed the pepper shaker in front of her on the room-service table and held the salt shaker concealed in his hand.
'Pepper,' Angel said.
'But let's pretend it's me, okay? So here I am, stepping off the curb without looking both ways-'
He moved the shaker across the tablecloth, rocking it back and forth to convey that he was strolling without a care in the world.
'— and wham! The rhinoceros hits me and never so much as stops to apologize-'
He knocked the pepper shaker on its side, and then with a groan put it upright once more.
'— and when I get up off the street, my clothes are a mess, and I've got this face.'
'You should sue.'
'I should,' Tom agreed, 'but the point is this?' With the finesse of a magician, he allowed the salt shaker to slip out of the concealment of his palm, and stood it beside the pepper. 'This is also me.'
'No, this is you,' Angel said, tapping one finger on the pepper shaker.
'Well, you see, that's the funny thing about all the important choices we make. If we make a really big wrong choice, if we do the really awful wrong thing, we're given another chance to continue on the right path. So the very moment I stupidly stepped off the curb without looking, I created another world where I did look both ways and saw the rhinoceros coming. And so-'
Holding a shaker in each hand, Tom walked them forward, causing them to diverge slightly at first, but then moving them along exactly parallel to each other.
'— though this Tom now has a rhinoceros-smacked face, this other Tom, in his own world, has an ordinary face. Poor him, so ordinary.'
Leaning close to study the salt shaker, Angel said, 'Where's his world?'
'Right here with ours. But we can't see it.'
She looked around the room. 'He's invisible like the Cheshire cat?' 'His whole world is as real as ours, but we can't see it, and people in his world can't see us. There're millions and millions of worlds all here in the same place and invisible to one another, where we keep getting chance after chance to live a good life and do the right thing.'
People like Enoch Cain, of course, never choose between the right and the wrong thing, but between two evils. For themselves, they create world after world of despair. For others, they make worlds of pain.
'So,' he said, 'you see why I'm not sad?'
Angel raised her attention from the salt shaker to Tom's face, studied his scars for a moment, and said, 'No.'
'I'm not sad,' Tom said, 'because though I have this face here in this world, I know there's another me-in fact, lots of other Tom Vanadiums-who don't have this face at all. Somewhere I'm doing just fine, thank you.'
After thinking it over, the girl said, 'I'd be sad. Do you like dogs?'
'Who doesn't like dogs?'
'I want a puppy. Did you ever have a puppy?'
'When I was a little boy.'
On the sofa, Celestina finally worked up the courage to dial her parents' number in Spruce Hills.
'Do you think dogs can talk?' Angel asked.
'You know,' Tom said, 'I've never actually thought about it.'
'I saw a horse talk on 'TV.'
'Well, if a horse can talk, why not a dog?'
'That's what I think.'
Her connection made, Celestina said, 'Hi, Mom, it's me.'
'What about cats?' Angel asked.
'Mom?' Celestina said.
'If dogs, why not cats?'
'Mom, what's happening?' Celestina asked, sudden worry in her voice.
'That's what I think,' Angel said.
Tom pushed his chair back from the table, got to his feet, and moved toward Celestina.
Bolting up from the couch-'Mom, are you there?' — she turned to Tom, her face collapsing in a ghastly expression.
'I want a talking dog,' Angel said.
As Tom reached Celestina, she said, 'Shots.' She said, 'Gunshots.' She held the receiver in one hand and pulled at her hair with the other, as if with the administration of a little pain, she might wake up from this nightmare. She said, 'He's in Oregon.'
The inimitable Mr. Cain. The wizard of surprises. Master of the unlikely.
Chapter 76
'Boils.'
In a stolen black Dodge Charger 440 Magnum, Junior Cain shot out of Spruce Hills on as straight a trajectory to Eugene as the winding roads of southern Oregon would allow, staying off Interstate 5, where the policing was more aggressive.
'Carbuncles, to be precise.'
During the drive, he alternated between great gales of delighted laughter and racking sobs wrought by pain and self-pity. The voodoo Baptist was dead, the curse broken with the death of he who had cast it. Yet Junior must endure this final devastating plague.
'A boil is an inflamed, pus-filled hair follicle or pore.'
On a street a half mile from the airport in Eugene, he sat in the parked Dodge long enough to gingerly unwind
