wrapped in regret and anxiety. And still the pacing. Wearing out the rug. The clock moved, edging past midnight. Ian got more and more worked up, haunted by ghosts only he could see, driven—so much so that he finally punched the mirror, broke it, and drew blood.
“Jesus, Ian.”
“Sorry, buddy.”
Ian walked to the washroom and cleaned himself up. Gerry heard running water. He tried to concentrate on the stills of the phytosphere, but thought of the damned Tarsalans instead, coming all this way, reminding him of born-again Christians because they were all so smug, so sure of themselves, as if they
had seen the Kingdom of Heaven. Ian came out of the washroom. He had a white towel wrapped around his fist. He radiated desperation.
“But there’s still time, isn’t there, buddy?”
“Time for what?”
Ian became distracted by his own thoughts. He went to the refrigerator, got a little booze bottle, twisted the cap off, sucked the contents into his mouth, but then spit the whole works out, not bothering to swallow, and uttered a string of obscenities, telling Gerry he had to
“That’s it, Gerry. I’m through with booze. I’m walking the straight and narrow from now on.”
“Sit down for a while. I’ll make some coffee.”
Gerry played a role he knew well—the role of sponsor—remembering his own sponsor, Pat Turnshek, an old guy he’d met first at Bellwood, then at all the meetings afterward. When his own demons haunted him, Pat would make coffee, the magic elixir of A.A. meetings, the thing that made everything all right, even when everything was horribly wrong. So he made coffee, and soon it was dripping into the pot.
Ian sat in one of the chairs and rocked, as nervous as could be. “I always manage to say the wrong thing, don’t I?” Another cryptic utterance, one Gerry couldn’t immediately make sense of. “How did you do it, buddy? How did you marry such a nice wife?”
How his wife got into it, Gerry wasn’t sure—Ian was all over the place.
He could have offered Ian the usual platitude, that he was lucky, but knew that it went far beyond luck, that it was his wife’s compassion and forgiveness, and that she wasn’t going to give up on him no matter how bad things got.
The test pilot motioned out the window. “I hate looking at it. It reminds me of all the terrible things I’ve done. I’ve got a lot to make up for, Gerry. I’ve got a whole list of bad things I’ve done to people. I’ve got to make things up in a hurry.” He motioned out the window. “Before we run out of time.”
Gerry stared at the coffeemaker. If they could all just drink enough coffee, maybe the phytosphere would disappear. Maybe the Tarsalans would go home. Maybe they would stay away from Georgia.
And North Carolina. Ian started talking about the Tarsalans: how they creeped him out, how it wasn’t natural for them to come all this way, and how sentient species were meant to stay on their own planets and make their own isolated homes surrounded by their own isolating light-years. And then it was back to Maggie Madsen again.
“In the pool, buddy. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Ian, I’m sorry about Maggie Madsen.”
But Ian bluffed, saying, no, that was all right, we were just kids, we didn’t know any better. “You’re unlikely to do the same thing again, aren’t you, buddy, steal a girlfriend out from under me?”
All Gerry could say was the same thing again. “Ian, I’m sorry.”
They lapsed into morose silence after that.
They sipped coffee.
Gerry tried to bolster Ian’s spirits by telling him it was never too late, and that Maggie Madsen wasn’t the only woman in the world.
But all Ian could do was sit there and shake his head. “That green thing over the Earth—it gives me a whole new outlook.”
23
Glenda stayed on the roof for close to a minute. Her heart pounded. Maynard didn’t move. She thought of the ramifications. Cop killer. What difference did it make? The cops weren’t cops anymore; they were just a band of desperate men in a land of kill or be killed. She didn’t have to worry. There were no judges. No juries. No penal system at all. And the court was closed.
She at last got up from the roof. She descended the ladder, then shifted it, sliding it over the side of the mudroom eaves. She went down the rungs to the backyard, wondering if it was safe to whistle yet, or if any more men would come, or if she had killed the body by killing the head. The mist thickened and the moonlight brightened. She walked toward Fulton.
She knelt next to him, half believing that he might still be alive. But he was dead, lying on his stomach, his arms straight at his sides, his rifle under him, his finger twisted up under the trigger guard. Her hands started to shake.
“You prize-winning piece of shit,” she said.
Tears flooded her eyes and she sobbed, a choking sound in the thick, stinky air of the dead woods out back.
“Mom?”
She turned.
The nightmare kept getting worse.
Buzz Fulton had a chokehold around her daughter’s throat, and a gun pointed at her head. The two approached out of the woods. As they got closer, Buzz glanced at his brother.
In the gathering moonlight, Glenda saw a strange emotion play over the younger Fulton’s face. His jaw protruded and the unshaven whiskers on his pale chin looked like a gunpowder tattoo. His eyes widened, then narrowed, then moistened, and for a few seconds he looked entirely unsure of the situation. He twisted his head to one side, as if he were wearing a too-tight necktie, then to the other side, and in the moonlight she saw a band of sweat glimmer down his left cheek like a silver ribbon.
Hanna was wheezing and wheezing, like a punctured bagpipe, and looking at her with wide, scared eyes.
“You killed him?” asked Buzz.
How to explain it to him? What lie would he possibly believe?
“Bullets started flying, Buzz, and I—”
“I heard only two bullets. And they both came from the same rifle. Yours. Poor Bren is dying back there. So don’t go lying to me, Glenda.”
She saw that the whole situation was at a bad dead end.
“I didn’t want to, Buzz.” And then she remembered what that guy in the supermarket had said to her during the Stedman’s looting. “But it’s every man for himself.”
“Guess I’m going to have to shoot your daughter, then.”
“Buzz, please…” She threw her weapon down, got to her knees, and clasped her hands in entreaty. “I was only trying to protect my children, like any good mother would. And if you’ve got to shoot someone, shoot me.”
Buzz’s lips stiffened in barely controlled anger. “Does that make sense to you, Glenda? That I should give you the easy way out and shoot you dead right now? While I’ve got to stay alive and suffer like this?” His voice was shaking now, and his eyes had clouded over with tears. “Doesn’t it make better sense that I shoot your daughter so that you can suffer like I’m suffering?”
“Please don’t shoot her, Buzz. I’ll do anything. I swear I’ll do anything. I’ll come and join the girls at headquarters if you want.”
“I don’t hold truck with what the boys are doing with those girls at headquarters.”
“Then I can give you food, Buzz. We’ve got food. All kinds of it.”
