“What’s wrong with you?” Megan bellows at Stone as I grab for the shovel.
“He’s a traitor.”
We wrestle for the handle, and he’s strong, flailing wildly, like someone beating at the bars that imprison them.
“I gave him a gun. He didn’t do the job.”
“What job?” Megan cries, pulling futilely on his shirt. “What job? What job?”
“The boy has turned on me,” says Stone. “The FBI is all around us. What is he? A cocksucking little wimp ass piece of shit.”
“Talk to me, Julius,” I gasp, watching Sara emerging from the dark with a heavy pitchfork. “What do you want?”
Stone’s voice has dropped to a mocking growl. “Tell them about the atrocities. Tell them about the lies.”
“Help me,” Slammer sobs, twisting futilely in his grave.
Sara tries to dig the hard-packed dirt.
Megan is still tugging on Stone’s shirt, sliding her arms around him from behind. “It’s safe,” she croons. “We’re here on the farm and we’re safe. Let’s calm down.”
Stone’s is the grating voice of madness, coming from a hollow gourd: “Direct action is nothing to take lightly. Government lackeys have to die.”
My hands still grip the shovel. “Government lackeys like Herbert Laumann?”
“I want Laumann to die like a pig. Cut his throat, cut it like a pig’s—”
“He can’t hear you,” Megan gasps, wild-eyed.
Stone’s manic desperation short-circuits my ability to think. I have to fix it, take it in, do what it takes to relieve his confusion and pain, as I always did with my grandfather, Poppy.
“All right, all right. You want Herbert Laumann dead. You’re mad at Slammer because he didn’t kill him. It’s not his fault. Leave the kid alone. He can’t do it, but I can. I’ll do it for you, Allfather. I will shoot the guy, okay? I’ll shoot him fifty-two times, until he’s dead, really dead, okay? Give it to me! I can do it.”
He jerks the shovel away from me and raises it to strike, throwing Megan back.
“Darcy, watch out!”
“You’re a liar, too!” Stone tells me.
“I will. I promise! I know what it’s like. I once killed a man.”
Panting, we eye each other in the screaming headlights.
“And I’ll tell you something else!” I’m pointing the finger, dancing with a kind of hysteria. “You think Slammer betrayed your trust? You are not the only one, pal. I know what that’s like, too. When someone you are stupid enough to fall in love with turns on you and completely undermines you and destroys your life and there’s no way back and you have to kill him.”
Even through the blinding paranoid rage, he can see the truth of what I’ve done. What Darcy’s done. Stone lets the shovel drop.
“Come on, baby,” Megan whispers. “I have you, safe and sound. Come on now. You’re with me,” and she guides him through the shadows.
Sara and I dig Slammer out. Encrusted in damp earth for long, torturous hours, he has fouled himself.
We help him to his feet.
Sara is crying. Slammer’s arms are around us both, leaning heavily on our shoulders. As he walks, he sheds loose rocks and torn roots, a man so debased, he is made of dirt.
“We can’t stay here,” Sara whispers, but then she hears the kitten crying from where it is hiding under the truck, and thinks of the orchard of hazelnut trees, and the rescued ducks and goats, and Sirocco and the white foal, Geronimo, all living peacefully on the farm. She can’t understand the contradictions.
“God — I’m so sorry — I couldn’t see you until the last minute.” My voice is genuinely shaking. “What was he doing?”
“He said it was a test. Of fire and ice.”
A light is on upstairs. We move toward the house.
Twenty-seven
A trial of fire and ice. That’s the way you might describe my grandfather’s visit, when he flew out from California to attend my swearing-in as a new agent from the FBI Academy. Steve Crawford and I were in the same graduating class, of course, and had naively planned to announce to our families that we were getting married, anticipating that our excitement, on top of graduation, would make it one hell of a bang-up weekend celebration for all.
My grandfather was booked into the Days Inn at the very same mall where I would play out Darcy’s first contact with the counterfeiters when I returned more than ten years later for undercover school. Back when Poppy stayed there, the motel was newly built and did not smell of urine under the stairs, and behind the property there was just the Dairy Queen, where I would devour that memorable double cheeseburger — not a full-blown shopping strip with a multiplex and gym.
I spotted Poppy from the pool area, striding along the upper deck of the motel. You could tell he was in law enforcement by his sporty disregard of the surroundings (I’m here; get out of my way), an authority he always carried, licensed or not in that particular locality, as if the special nature of his calling extended worldwide supremacy to Everett Morgan Grey. Never mind the only felons were shrieking boys, cannonballing into the pool with huge atomizing splashes; my grandfather’s eyes were fixed on the door of his room with intention to prevail. He wore a white Panama hat, a brown suit, and a sport shirt open at the neck, exposing a freckled chest. His ham hand swung my mother’s old lacquered suitcase as lightly as if it still held dresses for my dolls.
The boys charged off the edge of the pool, gleaming bellies white as those of frogs. I did not jump up and wave at my grandfather. I did not want to leave that lawn chair, ever. It wasn’t just the considerable fear of telling him about Steve, which, by extension would be a statement that I’d actually had sex with a man and was continuing to do so. Even though I had barely left the grounds of the Academy, I realized there in those hothouse corridors, I had finally seized on a clear identity, and in that clarity was liberation. I was free to fall in love, to make mistakes, be harangued and harassed, but they never shut me down. Just the sight of my grandfather threatened my new pride in being Ana; I knew he would turn my achievements into competition with him. Already I was looking back on new agent training as a bright moment of independence, in whose light I was able to shine because I had been on the other side of the country, away from Poppy.
There was a kamikaze scream and tepid water rained on my sandals. You did not just enter Poppy’s world. You surrendered to it. I forced myself out of the chair and headed for the pool gate.
“No running,” I told the boys.
I knocked. The curtain peeled back and there was the man who had raised me, not giving anything to the steamy morning light but a glimpse of grizzled cheekbone and a shank of nose, squinting between the brown folds of fabric like the beat cop he had been forty years ago, cagey as ever.
But then the door opened wide and the sun found his quick blue eyes.
“Annie!” He grinned and crooked an elbow around my neck, pulling me close. His leathery skin smelled of barbershop spice.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Goddamn airlines” was his reply.
The door swung shut. He had not turned on the lights, and the suitcase sat unopened on a shiny quilted bedspread the color of ripe cherries. It occurred to me I had never been in a hotel room with my grandfather.
“Want some ice?”
“What for? It’s cold as a witch’s tit in here.”
