“Mind if I?”
Ronnie shrugged. Anse filled his glass practically to the brim.
“This fucking meeting,” Anse said in a low, somber tone, when he had put another goodly slug of the grappa away. “This whole fucking Resistance, Ronnie.”
“What about it?”
“What a sham! What a miserable idiotic sham! We hold these meetings, and all we’re doing is making empty gestures. Spinning our wheels, don’t you see? Appointing committees, making studies, cooking up grand plans, sending e-mail about those grand plans to people just as helpless as we are all around the world. That’s a Resistance? Are the Entities giving ground before our valiant onslaughts? Is the liberation of Earth practically within our grasp, do you think? Are we doing the slightest fucking thing, really, to achieve it?—There isn’t any Resistance, not really. We’re just pretending that there is.”
“As long as we go on pretending,” Ronnie said, “we keep the idea of being free alive. You’ve heard the Colonel say that a million times. Once we give up even the pretense, we’re slaves forever.”
“You really believe that shit, bro?”
Some grappa was needed before replying to that one. Ronnie tried to gulp the stuff without tasting it. “Yes,” he said, fixing his gaze squarely on Anse’s squinting bloodshot eyes. “Yes, bro, I really do. I don’t think it’s shit at all.”
Anse laughed. “You sound so amazingly sincere.”
“I am sincere, Anse.”
“Right. Right. You say that very sincerely, too.—You’re still a con man at heart, aren’t you, bro? Always were, always will be. And very good at it.”
“Watch it, Anse.”
“Am I saying anything other than the truth, bro? You can tell me that you believe the old man’s bullshit, sure, but don’t ask me to start believing yours, not this late in the game.—Here. Here. Have some more grappa. Do you some good. Oil up your sincerity glands a little more for the next sucker, right?”
He extended the bottle toward Ronnie, who peered at it for perhaps ten seconds while trying to gain control over the anger that was surging upward in him, anger at Anse’s drunken mocking accusations and the partial truths that lay not very far beneath their surface, at the Colonel’s deterioration, at his own growing sense of mortality as the years went along, at the continued presence of the Entities in the world. At everything. Then, as Anse pushed the grappa bottle even closer, thrusting it practically into his face, Ronnie slapped at it with a hard backhand blow, knocking it out of Anse’s hand. The bottle struck Anse across the lip and chin and went bouncing to the floor. A stream of grappa came spilling forth. Anse grunted in fury and burst from his chair, clawing at Ronnie with one hand and trying to swing with the other.
Ronnie pressed one hand against the middle of Anse’s chest to hold him at bay and tried to push him back into his chair. Anse, eyes bright now with rage, growled and swung again, with the same futility as before. Ronnie shoved hard. Anse went toppling backward and sat down heavily, just as Peggy came scurrying into the room.
“Hey! Hey, guys! What is this?”
Ronnie looked shamefacedly toward his wife. He could feel his. face growing hot with embarrassment. All his anger was gone, now. “We were discussing today’s meeting, is all.”
“I’ll bet you were.” She scooped the fallen grappa bottle up, sniffed at it disgustedly, tossed it into a wastebasket. She gave him a withering look. “Yes, you ought to blush, Ron. Like little boys, the two of you. Little boys who’ve found their way into their father’s liquor closet.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that, Peg.”
“Sure it is. Sure.” Then she turned away from him, toward Anse, who sat now with his head bowed, hands covering his face. “Hey,” she said. “What’s this, Anse?”
He was crying. Great blubbering racking sobs were coming from him. Peggy put an arm around his shoulder and bent close to him, while signaling fiercely with her other hand for Ronnie to get himself out of the room.
“Hey,” Peggy said softly. “Hey, now, Anse!”
Once or twice a month, more often if he could manage to scrape up the gas, Steve Gannett descended the mountainside from the ranch and made his way down the battered and dilapidated highway that was Route 101 as far as the city of Ventura, where Lisa would be waiting for him downtown, near the San Buenaventura Mission. Then they would continue on together in her car along the Pacific Coast Highway, past the abandoned Point Mugu Naval Air Station and on into Mugu State Park itself. They had a special place there, a secluded woodsy grove up in the hilly inland part, where they could make love. That was the deal, that he drove as far as Ventura and Lisa would drive the rest of the way. That was only fair, considering the current tight gasoline quotas.
It still amazed Steve that he had a steady girl at all. He had been such a lumpy, ungainly, nerdy kid, fat and awkward, good for very little except working with computers, at which he was very good indeed. Like his father Doug, he had never fitted very well into the Carmichael family, that tribe of crisp, strong, hard, cold-eyed people. Even when they were weak—the way the Colonel was weak, now, getting so old and vague, or Anse was weak, hitting the bottle whenever he thought nobody was looking—they were still somehow strong. They would give you a look with their blue Carmichael eyes that said, We come from a long line of soldiers. We understand what the word ‘discipline’ means. And you are fat and sloppy and lazy, and the only thing you know how to do is fool around with computers. Even his twin cousins Mike and Charlie had given him that look, and they were only little boys.
But Steve was half Carmichael himself, and by the time he had been living at the ranch a few years that part of his heritage had at last started to show. The outdoor life, the fresh mountain air, the need for everyone to put in some hours of hard manual labor every day, had done the trick. Gradually, very gradually, the baby fat had burned away. Gradually his coordination had improved and he had learned how to run without falling on his face, how to climb a tree, how to drive a car. He would always be chunkier and less agile than his cousins, his hair would always be floppy and unruly and his shirt-tails would always have a way of working their way out of his pants, and his eyes would never be icy Carmichael blue, but always that mousy Gannett brown. Still and all, by the year he turned fifteen he had shaped up in a way that surprised him immensely.
The first real sign that he might actually be going to have a life came when Anse’s daughter Jill allowed him to take some sexual liberties with her.
He was sixteen then, and still hideously unsure of himself. She was two years younger, a slim leggy blonde like her mother Carole, handsome, athletic, lively. It would not have occurred to Steve that anything might happen between them. Why would such a gorgeous girl—and one who was his cousin, as well—be interested in him? She had never given the slightest sign of caring for him: had, in fact, always been cool toward him, remote. He was just her nerdy cousin Steve, which is to say, nobody in particular, simply someone who happened to live at the ranch. But then, one hot summer day when he was far up the mountain by himself, in a sheltered rocky place out beyond the apple orchard where he liked to come and sit and think, Jill appeared suddenly out of nowhere and said, “I followed you. I wanted to see where you went when you went off by yourself. Do you mind if I sit down here?”
“Suit yourself.”
“It’s pretty up here,” she said. “Quiet. Real private. What a great view!”
That she had any curiosity about him at all, that she would give even a faint damn about where he might go when he went off by himself, astounded and bewildered him. She settled down beside him on the flat slab of rock from which he could see practically the entire valley. Her proximity was unsettling. All she wore was a halter and a pair of shorts, and a sweet, musky odor of perspiration was coming from her after the steep climb.
Steve had no idea what to say to her. He said nothing.
Abruptly she said, after a time, “You can touch me, if you like, you know.”
“Touch you?”
“If you like.”
His eyes widened. What was this? Was she serious? Cautiously, as if inspecting an unexploded land mine, he put his hand to her bare knee, gripped it lightly with his fingertips a moment, and then, hearing no objections, moved his hand upward along her long smooth thigh, scarcely allowing himself to draw a breath. He had never felt anything so smooth. He reached the cuff of her shorts and paused there, doubting that his fingers would reach very far beyond that point. And in any case he was afraid to risk the attempt.
“Not my leg,” she said, sounding a little annoyed.
Steve looked up at her. Thunderstruck, he saw that she had opened the clasp of her halter. It slid down to
