shopping-mall thing, the way Cindy was, and she was in Washington to tell the chiefs of staff what she had seen. She ran into Cindy while she was aboard the alien ship, incidentally.”
“Small world.”
“Very small. Peggy says she thought Cindy was pretty nutty.”
“No argument there. And Peggy and the Colonel—?”
“Colonel needed someone to help him with the ranch, and he liked her and she didn’t seem to have any entanglements in L.A., so he asked her to come up here. That’s about all I know about her.”
“Quite an attractive woman, wouldn’t you say?”
Anse let his eyes glide shut for a moment, and breathed slowly in and out.
“Don’t mess with her, Ron.”
“For Christ’s sake, Anse! I simply made an innocent comment!”
“The last innocent comment you made was ‘Goo goo goo,’ and you were seven months old.”
“Anse—”
“You know what I’m telling you. Leave her alone.”
An incredulous look came into Ronnie’s eyes. “Are you saying that she and the Colonel—that he—that they —”
“I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but I doubt it very much.”
“If there’s nothing between them, then, and I happen to be here by myself this weekend and she happens to be an unattached single woman—”
“She’s important to the Colonel. She keeps this place running and I suspect that she keeps him running. I know what you do to women’s heads, and I don’t want you doing anything to hers.”
“Fuck you, Anse.” Very calmly, almost amiably.
“And you, bro. Will you be kind enough to put your shoes on, now, so that we can go up front and have drinks with our one and only father?”
For the past hour the locus of the tension had gone sliding downward in the Colonel’s body from his head to his chest to his midsection, and now it was all gathered around his lower abdomen like a band of white-hot iron. In all his years in Vietnam he had never felt such profound uneasiness, verging on fear, as he did while waiting now for his reunion with his last-born child.
But in a war, he thought, you really only need to worry about whether your enemy will kill you or not, and with enough intelligence and enough luck you can manage to keep that from happening. Here, though, the enemy was himself, and the problem was self-control. He had to hold himself in check no matter what, refrain from lashing out at the son who had been such a grievous disappointment to him. This was the family Christmas. He dared not ruin it, and ruining it was what he feared. The Colonel had never particularly been afraid of dying, or of anything else, very much, but he was afraid now that at his first glimpse of Ronnie he would unload all the stored-up anger that was in his heart, and everything would be spoiled.
Nothing like that occurred. Anse came into the room with Ronnie half a step behind him; and the Colonel, who was standing at the sideboard with Rosalie on one side of him and Peggy on the other, felt his heart melting in an instant at the sight at long last, here in his own house, of his big, blocky, blond-haired, rosy-cheeked second son. The problem became not one of holding his anger in check but of holding back his tears.
It would be all right, the Colonel thought in giddy relief. Blood was still thicker than water, even now.
“Ronnie—Ronnie, boy—”
“Hey, Dad, you’re looking good! After all this time.”
“And you. Put on a little weight, haven’t you? But you were always the chunky one of the family. Plus you’re not a boy any more, after all.”
“Thirty-nine next month. One year away from miserable antiquity. Oh, Dad—Dad—it’s been such a goddamn long time—” Suddenly they were in each other’s arms, a big messy embrace, Ronnie slapping his hands lustily against the Colonel’s back and the Colonel heartily squeezing Ronnie’s ribs, and then they were apart again and the Colonel was fixing drinks, the stiff double Scotch that he knew Ronnie preferred and sherry for Anse, who never drank anything stronger nowadays; and Ronnie was going around the room hugging people, his sister Rosalie first, then Carole, then his moody cousin Helena and her even-tempered brother Paul, and then a big hello for Rosalie’s clunky husband Doug Gannett and their overweight blotchy-faced kid Steve, and a whoop and a holler for Anse’s kids, sweeping them up into the air all three together, the twins and Jill—
Oh, he was slick, Ronnie was, thought the Colonel. A real charmer. And cut the thought off before it ramified, because he knew it would lead him nowhere good.
Ronnie was introducing himself to Peggy Gabrielson, now. Peggy looked a little flustered, perhaps because of the way magnetic Ronnie was laying on the beguiling introductory charisma, or maybe because she knew that Ronnie was the family pariah, a shady unscrupulous character with whom the Colonel had had nothing to do for many years, but who now for some reason was being taken back into the tribe.
Loudly the Colonel said, when the highballs had been handed around, “You may be wondering why I’ve called you all here tonight. And in fact I have a very full agenda for the next few days, which calls for a great quantity of eating and drinking, and also some discussion of Highly Serious Matters.” He made sure they heard the capital letters. “The drinking is scheduled to occur—” He paused dramatically and shot back his cuff to reveal his wrist- watch. “—at precisely 1900 hours. Which is in fact, right now.
With dinner to follow, and the Highly Serious Discussion tomorrow or the day after.” He hoisted his glass. “So: Merry Christmas, all of you! Everyone that I love in the whole poor old battered world, standing right here in front of me. How wonderful that is. How absolutely wonderful.—I’m not getting too mushy in my old age, am I?”
They agreed that he was well within his rights to get too mushy tonight. But what they did not yet know and he did was that most of the mushiness—not all, but most—was little more than a tactical maneuver. As was the reconciliation with Ronnie. The Colonel had things up his sleeve.
He went around the room clockwise, giving a little time to each in turn, and Ronnie went around the other way, and eventually they were face-to-face again, father and son. The Colonel saw Arise watching protectively from a distance, as though considering the merits of joining them as a buffer; but the Colonel shook his head almost imperceptibly, and Arise backed off.
In a quiet voice the Colonel said to Ronnie, “I’m tremendously glad you came here tonight, son. I mean that.”
“I’m glad too. I know we’ve had our problems, Dad—”
“Put them away. I have. With the world in the mess it’s in, we don’t have the luxury of carrying on feuds with our own flesh and blood. You made certain choices about your life that weren’t the choices I would have wanted you to make. All right. There are new choices to make, now. The Entities have changed everything, do you know what I mean? They’ve changed the future and they’ve damned well blotted out the past.”
“We’ll find a way of getting them off our backs sooner or later, won’t we, Dad?”
“Will we? I wonder.”
“Is that a hint of defeatism that I hear in your voice?”
“Call it realism, maybe.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing Colonel Anson Carmichael III saying any such thing.”
“Strictly speaking,” said the Colonel, smiling obliquely, “I’m a general now. In the California Army of Liberation, which hardly anybody knows about, and which I’m not going to discuss with you right now. But I still think of myself as a colonel, and you might as well too.”
“I hear that you went face-to-face with the Entities in their own lair. So to speak. They don’t actually have faces, do they? But you went right in there, you looked them in the eye, you gave them what-for. Isn’t that true, Dad?”
Actually seems curious about it, the Colonel observed. Actually appears to be interested. That in itself is pretty unusual, for Ronnie.
“More or less true,” he said. “Rather less than more.”
“Tell me about it?”
“I’d just as soon not, not right now. It wasn’t pleasant. I want tonight, this whole week, to be nothing but pleasant. Oh, Ronnie, Ronnie, you scamp, you miserable rogue—oh, how happy I am to see you here—”
