way and that, and Anse and Carole always were put up in the best of the guest suites, which had a big bedroom for them and an adjoining smaller one that long-legged golden-haired Jill, who was nine, could share with her four- year-old twin brothers Mike and Charlie. There was also a nice sittingroom with a view of the sea. Anse was the firstborn son, after all. This was a family that went by the rules.
The Colonel, taking his leave of them, clapped Anse on the shoulder. “Welcome back, boy.”
“It’s good to be back.”
And it was. The ranch was a big, warm, comforting place, nestling securely here on its lofty hillside between the steep mountain wall and the beautiful Pacific, far from the congestion and turmoil and outright daily deadly peril that was most of Southern California. The old stone walls, the slate floors, the sturdy unpretentious furniture, the funny frilly curtains, the innumerable high-ceilinged rooms: how could anyone ever believe, living up here in craggy solitude high above the pretty red rooftops of Santa Barbara, that invincible alien monsters stalked the world at this very moment, randomly choosing human beings to do their bidding as they gradually rearranged the landscape of the world to suit their own incomprehensible needs?
Jill put herself in charge of getting the boys scrubbed up for dinner. She loved playing mommy, and that lifted a big burden from Carole. As Anse unpacked, Carole turned to him and said, “Do you mind if I shower first? I feel so creaky and edgy, after that long drive. And filthy, too.”
Anse felt none too fresh himself, and he had done all the work that day. But he told her to go ahead. The dark signs of strain were evident in her. Her lips were clamped tight, her arms were close against her body, her left hand was balled into a fist.
Carole was still a couple of years short of forty, but she didn’t have much stamina these days. She needed to be coddled, and Anse coddled her. Carrying the twins had taken a lot out of her; and then, two years later, the Conquest, the Troubles—those uncertain terrifying weeks of living without gas or electricity, without television or telephone, boiling all your water and trying to keep clean with sponge baths and cooking your scrappy meals over a Sterno-powered stove and taking turns sitting up all night with the shotgun, in case one of the looting parties that were roaming Orange County just then had decided that it was about time for them to investigate your nice tidy suburban neighborhood—those few weeks had wrecked her altogether. Carole had never been designed for frontier life. Even now she was still only partly recovered from that terrible time.
He watched her out of the corner of his eye as she undressed. One of his little covert pleasures: after eleven years he still loved the mere sight of her body, still youthful, almost girlish—the smooth supple legs, the small high breasts, the cascade of shining golden hair and that tight, springy little triangle, golden also, at the base of her belly. The familiar body, no surprises there but still exciting, still beloved, and yet so often betrayed. What had impelled him to step out on her again and again with those other, lesser women was something that Anse had never been able to understand. Nor had he ever really stopped feeling the pull from time to time.
A defect in the family genes, he supposed. A breakdown of the iron Carmichael virtue. The blood running thin at last, after all those generations of rugged God-fearing super-patriotic righteous-living American folks.
Not that Anse thought for a moment that his father was any kind of saint, neither he nor any of that long line of upright Carmichaels preceding him into the misty past. But he could not imagine the Colonel ever cheating on his wife, or even wanting to. Or flanging up some plausible excuse to get himself out of a dangerous or unpleasant assignment. Or putting a joint to his lips and taking a deep drag to while away some dreary night in Saigon. Or in any other way deviating from the proper path as he understood it. Anse couldn’t really even see the old man tiptoeing into the bedroom of that cute young Peggy of his to grab himself a little late-life fun.
Well, maybe the part about smoking a joint, yes. Considering that it had been the 1970s then, and Vietnam. But not any of the rest of it. The Colonel was a man of discipline, first and foremost. He must have been that way right from the cradle. Whereas Anse’s own life had been a constant struggle between the things he wanted to do and the things he knew he ought to do, and though by and large he did not consider himself to be a disgrace to the family’s staunch traditions, he knew that he had fallen from the true and righteous path many times more than he should, and most likely would again. In all probability his father knew it too, though not the full extent of his sins, oh, no, not nearly.
For Anse the mitigating factor in all this self-flagellation was that he was hardly the only member of the family who was something less than perfect. In the Colonel’s generation there had been Mike, Anse’s brooding, irascible uncle, dutifully putting in his time in the military for a little while, and just as dutifully doing the volunteer- firefighter thing that ultimately had killed him, but otherwise living such a strange reclusive irregular life, and eventually marrying that weird loopy jewelry-making Los Angeles woman whom the Colonel had loathed so much. And Anse’s own siblings had the taint too: Rosalie, for instance, whose adolescence, Anse knew, had been one long secret circus of frantic promiscuity that would have sent the old man into apoplexy if he had the slightest inkling of it, though she had long since cleaned up her act. Or brother Ronnie—Oh, God, yes, brother Ronnie—
“We’re all invited to the ranch for the holidays,” Anse had said to brother Ronnie two weeks before, in the deepest Southland where all three of the Colonel’s children had their homes. “Rosalie and Doug, and Paul and Helena, and Carole and me and the kids,” Anse said. “And you.”
Ronnie was the southernmost sibling of all, in La Jolla, just outside San Diego. Anse had driven all the way down there to deliver Ronnie’s invitation in person. Once upon a time La Jolla had been about an hour’s trip from Costa Mesa on the San Diego Freeway, but it wasn’t an easy trip any more, nor a safe one. His brother lived a lively bachelor life in a nice oceanfront condominium there, pink walls, thick carpets, sauna and spa, big picture windows, a million-dollar place purchased with the profits from some shady pre-Conquest venture Anse had never wanted to know anything about. The less Anse knew about his younger brother’s daily existence, the better: that had long been his policy.
Some houses on the landward side of Ronnie’s street were heaps of blackened rubble, destroyed in the Troubles and never rebuilt, but Ronnie’s own place looked fine. That was the way Ronnie’s luck worked.
“Me?” Ronald Carmichael had cried, throwing up his hands in that smarmy mock-astonished way of his. The color deepened on his already ruddy face. He was a big-boned fair-haired man who looked as if he might easily run to fat before long, though in fact his body was muscular and solid. “You’ve got to be joking. I haven’t exchanged a word with him in five years!”
“You’re invited, though. He’s your father and he says come for Christmas, and this year he put a little extra spin on it. I don’t know why, but he made it sound urgent. You can’t say no.”
“Sure I can. He made it perfectly clear to me way back then that he didn’t want anything whatever to do with me, and I’ve made my peace with that. We’ve been getting along very nicely without each other and I don’t see any reason to change that now.”
“Well, I do. This year, apparently, something special is up. He said you were on the guest list this year, and this year, pal, you’re going to be there. I’m simply not going to let you throw your own father’s Christmas invitation back in his face.”
But there hadn’t been any invitation, had there? Not directly from the Colonel to Ron, no. The old man had asked Arise to do the dirty work for him, and Ronnie took quick, easy advantage of that fact: “Look, Anse, let him speak to me himself, if he wants me there so badly.”
“That’s asking a lot of him, Ronnie. He can’t unbend that far, not yet, not after all that’s happened between you. But he wants you to come, that I know. It’s his way of making peace. I think you ought to come. I want you to come.”
“What the hell does he want me there for? Why do you? Obviously he still despises me. You know that he thinks I’m nothing more than a con man.”
“Well? Aren’t you?”
“Very funny, Anse.”
“This year he’ll stay off your case. I promise you that.”
“I bet he will. Look, Anse, you know goddamned well that if I show up, there’ll just be another fight. It’ll spoil Christmas for everyone.”
“Ronnie—”
“No.”
“Yes,” Anse said sharply, looking straight into his brother’s tricky, hooded, intensely blue Carmichael eyes and doing his patented imitation of the Colonel’s crispest I-take-no-prisoners tone of voice. “I’m notifying him of your acceptance. You be there, that’s all.”
“Hey, now, Anse—”
