progressing, before Lilly had called paramedics.
Noah had not been present for any of this. He’d heard about it secondhand, from his father.
The old man recounted these events as he might have retold a war story from his youth, as though it had been an adventure, for God’s sake, with eerily few references to the horror that his daughter had endured or to her tragic condition, but with brotherly admiration for Lilly’s quick thinking under pressure. “She is one hard-assed bitch when she needs to be, your aunt Lil. I’ve known men who, in a pinch, would go all female on you sooner than Lil.” His attitude seemed to be, Hey, shit happens, it’s horrible, it’s sad, but that’s the way the world is, there’s no more justice than what we dealt out to Crank, we’re all just meat in the end, so get over it and move on. “Live in the now,” the old man liked to say, which was psychobabble he’d heard spouted by some sociopathic self-help guru on television.
More shit happened two months later, when Aunt Lilly showed up with a far more powerful gun than the one she had used on Uncle Crank and with no concern about neatness, since the house wasn’t hers. Her brother had concealed seven hundred thousand dollars in meth profits. She didn’t want merely an honest accounting; she wanted him out of the business. Even the old man’s appeal to sisterly mercy didn’t persuade Lilly to “go all female” on him: Only Noah merited an I’m sorry from her before she squeezed the trigger.
Double-shot, first certain that he was dying on the front lawn, then later in the hospital when he knew he would survive, Noah had decided that his wounds were what he deserved, punishment for failing to protect his little sister. He wasn’t a bad kid, really. He wasn’t a bad seed, either, not born in his father’s image. His indifference to his family’s criminal behavior had not been nature’s fault; as the parenting experts would put it, his moral drift was the consequence of inadequate nurturing. But abed with time to think, Noah had come to understand that it was immaterial whether nature or nurture was to blame. Only he himself possessed the thread and needles to sew up his shabby life and to transform it into a suit presentable in the company of decent people. Only guilt over his sister’s suffering led him to the conclusion that this difficult tailoring was essential if he was to have any future worth living.
Guilt in fact gave him the power to become his own Pygmalion, allowed him to sculpt a new Noah Farrel from the stone of the old. Guilt was his hammer; guilt was his chisel. Guilt was his bread and his inspiration.
Whenever he heard anyone declare that guilt was a destructive emotion, that a fully self-realized person had to “get past” his guilt, he knew that he was listening to a fool. Guilt had been his soul’s salvation.
Over the past seventeen years, however, he had also arrived at the realization that acceptance of guilt was not an end in itself. Truly taking responsibility for the consequences of your acts — or in his case, the consequences of his failure to act — did not lead to redemption. And until he found that door of redemption, until he opened it and crossed the threshold, the old Noah Farrel would never quite feel that he belonged inside the new man he had created; always he would feel like an impostor, unworthy and waiting to be exposed as the thoughtless boy that he had been.
The only path to redemption that seemed open to him was his sister. After enough years of paying for her care, after thousands of hours of talking to her as she lay unresponsive behind her elsewhere eyes, might a moment come at last when the door appeared before him? If ever she made eye contact with him, soul to soul, however brief, and if in that instant her expression told him that she had heard his monologues and had been comforted by them, then the threshold would lie before him, and the room beyond the door might be called hope.
Now, in the most unforgiving hours of the night, speeding along the streets of south Orange County, Noah was scared as he had never been before, scared worse than when he’d taken Lilly’s two bullets and rolled down the front porch steps with the expectation of taking a third in the back of the head. The prospect of redemption receded from him the faster he drove, and receding with it was all hope.
When be jammed the brakes and slid I lie Chevy sideways into the driveway at Cielo Vista Care Home, despair overcame him at the sight of all the police units parked around the front entrance. The phone call that rousted him from bed, the call that might have been a hoax or a mistake, was proved true and accurate by every pulse of red light and by every chasing shadow that leaped across the face of the building and through the bougainvillea twining the trellises.
Laura.
Chapter 30
Dog dripping, boy dripping, dog grinning, boy not grinning, and therefore dog ceasing to grin, but both still dripping, they stand in the sudden light, Old Teller trying to control her doggy exuberance, Curtis reminding himself to react now as a boy would react, not as a dog would react, trying to work his foot fully back into the shoe that Old Teller pulled half off him.
The pump creaks and groans as declining pressure allows the untended handle to settle into the full at-rest position. The flow from the iron spout quickly diminishes from a gush to a stream, to a trickle, to a dribble, to a drip.
“What the jumpin’ blue blazes you doin’ out here, boy?” asks the man who holds the flashlight.
Not much can be seen of this person. Largely hidden behind the glare, he shines the light in Curtis’s face.
“You leave your ears in your other pants, boy?”
Curtis has just figured out that he should disregard “the jumpin’ blue blazes” from the first question in order to discover the essence of it, and now this second question baffles him.
“They full of horseshit, boy?”
“Who’s ‘they,’ sir?” Curtis asks.
“Your ears,” the stranger says impatiently.
“Good Lord, no, sir.”
“That there your dog?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He be vicious?”
“She be not, sir.”
“Say what?”
“Say she, sir.”
“You stupid or somethin’?”
“Somethin’, I guess
“I ain’t afeared of dogs.”
“She ain’t afeared of you neither, sir.”
“Don’t you go tryin’ to bullyrag me, boy.”
“I wouldn’t even if I knew how, sir.”
“You some sassy- assed, spit-in-the-eye malefactor?”
“As far as I can understand what you might mean, sir, I don’t think l am.”
Curtis is comfortable with a lot of languages, and he believes that he could conduct conversation easily in most regional dialects of English, but this one is challenging enough to rattle his self-confidence.
The stranger lowers the flashlight, focusing it on Old Yeller. “I seen dogs sweet like this here, then you dares turn your back an’ they bite off your co-jones.”
“Jones?” Curtis replies, thinking maybe they’re talking about a person named Ko Jones.
With the bright beam out of his eyes, Curtis sees that this man is none other than Gabby Hayes, the greatest sidekick in the history of Western movies, and for a moment he’s as delighted as he’s ever been. Then he realizes this can’t be Gabby, because Gabby must have died decades ago.
Frizzles of white hair, a beard like Santa’s with mange, a face seamed and saddle-stitched by a lifetime of desert sun and prairie wind, a body that appears to be composed more of leathery tendons and knobby bones than of anything else: He is your typical weathered and buzzard-tough prospector, your weathered and cranky but lovable ranch hand, your weathered and comical but dependable deputy, irascible but well-meaning and weathered saloonkeeper, crotchety but tender-hearted and banjo-playing and weathered wagon-train cook. With the exception of a pair of orange-and-white Nikes that look as big as clown shoes, his outfit is totally Gabby: rumpled baggy
