she said, cutting the connection before Martha could say 'You're welcome.'
Virginia said to Crosley, 'I was afraid the Chamber might have been dumb enough to line up one of those rock‘n’roll bands. That wouldn't square with the Windshake image, now, would it?'
Crosley grunted, a pastry crumb falling from his lips. 'I'll keep things under control, Mayor.'
Virginia nodded, only half listening. There would be at least a couple of thousand visitors this weekend, drawn up the mountain by the lure of Appalachian crafts, folk art, old-timey storytelling, and a chance to spend big-city money. They weren't voters, but the income greased the wheels of Windshake commerce and thus the wheels of local politics. What was good for Windshake was good for Virginia.
She planned on being highly visible. She mentally rummaged through her closet, selecting an outfit that would be regal without being ostentatious. She had forgotten Crosley.
'Is that all, Mayor?'
She waved him away and heard him groan in a duet with his chair as he stood, his rump wobbling like a sack of wet pastries as he left. Then she was back in her closet, trying on clothes.
The thing that had been Sylvester Mull shambled through the trees. It still had shards of Sylvester's memories and personality, but added to that, like a cancer that mimicked a healthy cell, was the consciousness of the space spore that had sparked this rebirth. Energy coursed through his flesh, pulsing in rhythm to the distant parent’s metabolism. Sylvester wondered why he didn't care that he had left his beloved gun behind. Perhaps because now he wanted to merge with the wildlife instead of shoot it.
He dimly remembered his encounter with Ralph, only he recalled his conversion with pleasure, not pain. He wished he could have thanked Ralph, because Sylvester saw that his whole life had been spent wandering in the wilderness. Now he had purpose. Now he served.
But Ralph had stumbled away in the opposite direction, on a separate mission and beyond the intimacies of gratitude. He was following the call of his own inner voice.
Sylvester leaned against a wild cherry tree, his hands pressing into the coarse strips of split bark. He felt the tree's cells in their photosynthesis, converting light to energy, and that energy now flowing back through him and feeding the parent-creature. He felt the white roots plumbing the ground, tapping into the water table and drawing nitrates from the dark loam. The tips of the branches were his fingers, ready to explode into glorious bud. He was joined, no more tree or man, only dust and energy bound in bizarre and wondrous form.
Sylvester fell back, his head swirling with the tree's memories, memories of a bursting seed-germ, its agonizing fight through the soil, its climb into the light. He writhed in the damp dead leaves, absorbing the thick rot and bacteria, drunk on the teeming microscopic life, stoned on the richness of cellular activity. He rolled onto his hands and knees, his face erupting into a tortured beatific smile. The joy of realization drummed in his dead heart. His mind was singing green.
Sylvester rose under the crazy tilted sky, the great blue ceiling with its clouds like distant kin, all part of one big, loving biosystem. He walked on the earth that was only a garden, grown to feed the planet-eating parent. Sylvester shared the parent’s hunger, was the hunger; the conversion had not snuffed his hunter's instinct.
Their united drive was to consume and move onward, to reap nature's bounty, to excrete dark matter. He flowed like water, swept along on currents that carried all things toward one destination.
Home.
Paul Crosley looked out the window of his Silverstream. Jimmy Morris’s pickup was in the Mull driveway. That could only mean one thing.
Hell, you could practically see the back end of the trailer bucking up and down like an old seesaw. Jimmy must be doing the boot-scootin’ boogie like there’s no tomorrow.
Not that Paul blamed him. That was some right good stuff, as he remembered it. And he planned on heading over after Jimmy left and refreshing his memory.
Paul adjusted the patch over his right eye. The damned thing was itching like hell today. Maybe he should have gotten a glass eyeball like those VA doctors had recommended. But it was enough trouble just putting in his teeth every morning. He didn't want to mess around with a bucketful of other body parts.
One of the Mull kids walked around the corner of their trailer. It was the oldest one, the one in the army jacket that Paul had seen smoking dope out in the tool shed this morning. Little bastard ought to be in school, doing his book-learning. No wonder society was going to hell the way it was.
Why, back in Paul's day, his daddy would have blistered his ass with a hickory switch if he'd have skipped school. And that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was having to go out and cut your own switch. And you'd better not bring back some slender little twig that was limper than a strip of licorice, either. You'd better get a good healthy sapling, or by God, Daddy would get his own, and then the skin and blood would really fly.
Now they couldn't even raise a hand against them at school. Damned liberals were coddling these snot-nosed delinquents like the brats were the victims. Paul had seen the cops bring the boy home once. Peggy had stood in the doorway in her crusty flower-patterned nightgown and nodded her tired bleached head and said Yeah, Officer, I'll keep an eye on him from now on and I know he really ain't a bad boy at heart and I don't know why he'd ever do such a thing.
And the cops had just shrugged and nodded back and driven away.
And the brat had the balls to wear the uniform of the United States military, when that boy had 4-F written all over him. Ought to be a law against that.
Paul watched as the boy put his ear to the trailer door and turned, rage reddening his sharp young face. The boy kicked the gravel and spat in disgust. Then his eyes narrowed to slits, viper's eyes, as he looked around the trailer park. Paul ducked back into the shadows, knowing he'd be invisible because of the bright sunshine outside.
The boy quietly opened the door of Jimmy's pickup and rummaged around. Paul heard the faint clatter of tools and saw an oily rag fall to the gravel driveway. The boy lifted a bottle from under the seat, and Paul saw its brown liquid contents glinting in the light. The boy tucked the bottle into his army jacket with a secretive smirk and jogged toward the stand of scrub pine at the back end of the trailer park.
And he's a little thief to boot. What that boy needs is a good ass-whooping. I've been whooped by hickory switches and thumped with the Bible and ground under the boot of the military and it ain't hurt me not one little bit.
He strained his ears toward the Mull trailer. A window was open, and he could hear bedsprings groaning in rhythm. And Peggy was panting in that way that half the town knew. The wrinkled fingers of Paul's left hand cupped the jar of moonshine while his right hand went down to salute the old soldier.
Preacher Blevins looked up from his lunch. He wished he hadn't.
His wife, Amanda, was looking at him through the greasy black slits of her eye-liner. He choked down the throatful of bland tuna salad and reached for his coffee cup.
Was she trying to become the next Tammy Faye Bakker? One was enough. He didn't need a caricature trophy, a tin-voiced verse-spouter sitting on his shoulder.
'Do you like your sandwich, Armfield?' she asked in her whiny Georgia twang. She stretched his name into three syllables: Ahmm-fee-yuld.
'It's just fine, dear.'
'I'm going down to Belk's today to buy me a new dress for Blossomfest. What color do you think I should choose?'
Armfield thought she'd look good in funeral black, with her dewy eyes sewn shut and the Alamo Rose troweled off her lips. Those big puffy lips that he'd once made her use in the way that had gotten the Sodomites burned. The image of him slipping on top of her while she was in her coffin popped into his head. Not that she could perform much worse dead than she did while living.
The devil was at him again. He took a gulp of coffee and said, 'Get whatever kind of dress you want, dear.'
'Maybe I'll get something that will work for Easter, too. Maybe something robin's-egg blue with a touch of pink lace and a yellow chiffon scarf.'
He took another bite of his sandwich. Damn that Sarah and her whole-wheat bread. Now she had taken to
