“Got your letter, boy?” he said.
Daniel presented it.
“Okay. Git in.”
Daniel heard a thunk as of a switch being thrown. The rear door opened.
Several civilians at the far end of the block had gathered to gawk at the car.
“What you dallying for, boy?” the sergeant said.
The seats were butter-colored leather and the surfaces within appeared to be made of fine polished wood, though they were plastic. Daniel discovered that he could see out of the windows more easily than he could see in from outside.
“You’re a dandy,” the sergant said. “She gawn like you.”
“Where are we going exactly?”
“You’ll see,” the sergeant said and he did not speak again for the duration of the journey.
They drove past a military checkpoint at the western edge of town without stopping, and then three miles out into the countryside. The road was in excellent repair the whole way. Daniel was not used to moving through the landscape at such speed. It made him dizzy. He had only the dimmest memory of riding in cars as a small child, except for the vivid discomfort of the plastic safety seat in which he was encased and immobilized like an astronaut. The car climbed a steady, looping grade into some low hills where there were no visible habitations. Then it turned through a gatehouse manned by more soldiers onto a gravel driveway lined with stately tulip trees. An enormous house appeared at a distance. As the car drew closer the house resolved into a chaotic pastiche of historical gestures, architectural conceits, and mixed modular building components made of materials not found in nature. The various parts seemed to be at war with one another: Corinthian columns battling with mansard roofs, corbeled turrets, Victorian chimney pots, Palladian windows, stained-glass windows, leaded oriel windows, and soaring triangular bay windows, vinyl clapboard-clad facades joined to half-timbered facades next to redbrick plastic veneer facades—the whole fantastic heap piled onto a wedding cake of landscaped terraces with statue-like topiaries, including a cavalryman on a rearing horse, a race car of the type Daniel had seen at Carter’s Creek, a fanciful baby elephant, a Tyrannosaurus, and a pair of gigantic praying hands.
The car bypassed the broad porte cochere in front of the mansion, where two other black cars sat parked among soldiers mounted on horseback, soldiers on foot, and a bustle of people coming, going, and confabbing. The car turned around the rear of the building to an inconspicuous gray service door on a far wing, where a lone soldier sat with a complex firearm Daniel had never seen before, a machine pistol. The guard checked Daniel’s pass, opened the gray door, and said, “Gawn up.”
At the top of a short stairway another door opened to a spacious hallway with a vaulted ceiling painted clumsily in the manner of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco. Instead of God and Adam, the vignette portrayed an airborne Jesus reaching to touch the extended hand of an enrobed female figure recognizable as Loving Morrow, recumbent on a pink cloud. Rather than angels and cherubim, Jesus was surrounded by deceased luminaries of country music: Elvis, Dolly, Garth, Waylon, Willie, Tammy, Patsy, Mother Maybelle, June and Johnny. Daniel had no idea who they were. Two more soldiers were posted by a door there. They were in size relation to ordinary soldiers as prize oxen are to common steers. They asked Daniel to produce his “letter of conveyance” and, satisfied, admitted him within.
It was a very grand suite of rooms, each one larger than the entire downstairs of his family’s house back home in Union Grove. The furniture, too, was oversized and overstuffed. Nobody else seemed to be there. The pictures on the wall caught Daniel’s attention. They depicted cottages in idealized twilit landscapes with blazing windows, as though complex thermochemical reactions were happening inside. He was studying one intensely when a door opened deeper within the suite. Footsteps. Moments later, Loving Morrow stood before him. She was shorter than he remembered because she was barefoot. Her hair was held up in a pile atop her head with a big tortoiseshell plastic clasp. She was dressed not in her customary robes of office but in cutoff blue jean short pants with fuzzy frayed hems and a stretchy pink camisole with string straps, with apparently nothing beneath it.
“Hi,” she said. “’Member me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You like that pitchur?”
“The house. It’s so bright. Like it’s about to burst into flames.”
“I’ll tell you, I’m ’bout to burst into flames,” she said. “Mr. Tillman won’t let me run the a.c. as cool as I like it. He knows best, of course, and anyway we got to pinch pennies, so to speak, if we’re going to take the Ohio River from the federals. You got any idea how much it takes in hard cash money to move and supply a battalion of twelve hundred foot soldiers with mounted officers?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You don’t want to know. I got all this junk on my mind twenty-three hours of the day.” She stepped closer so he could feel the heat radiating off her. “Then there’s the blessed hour when I like to forget all that. That’s where you come in.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You are an obliging young man,” she said, and ran an index finger down his breastbone, then executed a dancelike step around him. “This here pitchur is an original Thomas Kinkade,” she said. “He was an old-times artiste of California. It’s worth a fortune. Those others, they’re just reproductions. He was known in his time as the painter of light.”
“That’s a bright house for sure,” Daniel said.
“Do you like my home?”
“I’ve never seen a house like it. It’s . . . roomy.”
“Yeah, and this is just my personal hideaway. You should see the gubment part. Lemme show you around.”
She took his hand and led him through a series of rooms. Her hand was small, soft, and warm. One room was an exercise parlor filled with machines that required electricity to make a human being operate her muscles. Flat screen televisions hung on three walls. The screens were dark. Another room had a billiard table at center and video game consoles around the edges.
“This one here is for the boys,” she said. “You like to play pool?”
“I never played, ma’am.”
Loving Morrow shot him a sideways frowny look.
“You a space alien, honey?”
“Not as far as I know, ma’am.”
“Naw,” she said. “You look human enough.”
They came to a kitchen with vast granite countertops, pot racks festooned with copper cookware still bright with their original protective varnish.
“You hungry?”
“No, ma’am.”
“’Course you are. Why, I bet you’re still growin’. I got just the thing for you. We can share.”
Loving Morrow produced two jars from a cabinet. One had brown paste in it and the other white. Then she pulled a bulbous loaf of wheat bread out of a drawer and sawed two slices off it. Of these materials she composed a sandwich and held one end up to Daniel’s mouth.
“Where do you get peanut butter?” he asked.
“They make it for me, special.”
“Been a long time since I tasted that.”
“Poor thing.”
“What’s the white stuff?”
“Didn’t you ever have a Fluffernutter?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You weren’t raised right.”
He watched her address the sandwich as though she were demonstrating how all the various complex parts of her mouth worked: lips, teeth, tongue.
“You know, I was quite the tomboy as a girl,” she said, coming closer to him again. “I’d like to climb you like a tree.” She put the sandwich on the counter and reached up, joined her fingers around the back of his neck, pressed herself against him, and made a pouty face. “I’m still hungry,” she said.
Daniel was experiencing such a bioelectrical surge that he saw little spots of light before his eyes. Theta brain waves battled his hormones and enzymes in a fugue of acute sensation, fear, lust, rage. Behind it all loomed the governor of his emotions: the training. Loving Morrow turned her head up. Daniel noticed that her pupils were dilated, as he had been taught to observe.
“You wanna play with me?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“That is exactly the right answer. You’re good. I can tell already.” She slid her hands down and took one of his in both of hers and guided him out of the kitchen, down a hallway, and into a bedroom. It was heavily curtained and dimly lit. He had never known that there were so many shades and tones of pink as were evinced by the decor in this room. The bed was proportionately as large as the room. It could easily sleep more than two, and at various times had. She backed him up to it and tipped him onto it with a push of her finger. A fierce look of determination came over her face. “You gawn see something very special now, young man.”
She seized the plastic clamp from the back of her head and tossed it aside. Her ghostly silver-blonde hair fell around her shoulders and she swept a knot of it out of her face with an aggressive gesture. She wiggled out of her shorts and let them fall on the floor. Then she crossed her arms and briskly pulled off the camisole. Daniel watched the spectacle in a state of inflamed paralysis as she leaned over him, all soft roundness, and started undoing his things: shirt buttons, belt buckle.
“Skootch up out of that, now,” she said and she pulled it all off. “My goodness, will you look at that.”
Then she was upon him, lightly and softly at first, businesslike, as though trying out the saddlery on a new horse. He was startled to discover that the body of a woman fifty-one years of age was not, in her case, materially much different from the body of a younger woman, and that all their components worked exactly the same way. He obliged her even with the tumult churning inside of him, allowing her to choreograph changes of positions, activities, and themes until he was wedged up between her legs like a plowman and her wet mouth formed a gaping O emitting yelps of animal extremity, and she threw her head back culminating with a choked sob and a tender shriek that subsided into a giggle. In that train of events Daniel, too, spasmed, subsided, and rolled off to her side on the gigantic bed.
“Oh, thank you, Jesus,” Loving Morrow murmured with a conclusive sigh and no irony. She pushed herself up against the padded headboard. “You are good,” she said. “You’ll come back, won’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Of course you will. I’ll order you to,” she said playing at being stern before her mouth turned up again in its high-wattage smile and she bumped his thigh with the heel of her palm, and laughed musically. “Just kidding,” she added.
“I’ll be happy to see you again,” Daniel said.
“My heart,” she said, making a little fluttering gesture with her hand over her bare breast with its broad, pink tip. “I will send for you again. Meantime, don’t work so hard. “You take a little more time to yourself, hear? Save some of that youthful energy for me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I don’t get up until ’bout one o’clock in the afternoon, so our time will be around now, most days. Most nights I’m in the studio recording with the gang until three, four a.m. Once in a while we see the sun come up.”
“What are you recording, ma’am?”
“Why, my music, of course, silly. You wanna watch us sometime. It’s just like seeing a live show.”
“I’d like that, ma’am.”
“I like how you call me that. So polite. I bet you were well raised after all, Fluffernutters or not. Well,” she said, fairly bouncing off the bed, “I’ma shower off my little wet bottom, and put the robes of statecraft back on, and get back on my own job,” she said, and by this time she was closing the door to an enormous adjoining bathroom with only her head still peeking out. “Can you believe I run this whole shebang?”
“Yes, I do, ma’am.”
“I mean, I got help and all. But still. Sheesh . . . Oh, the car’s outside down below whenever you wanna go. Bye now.”
In the days that followed, Daniel made regular visits to the place that everybody in the capital of the Foxfire Republic called the White House, with all its multiple layers of meaning. Loving Morrow’s temperament was steady and generally buoyant, her appetites reliably avid. Daniel always received his written instructions by ten o’clock in the morning and was able to plan his day with the object of meeting the sergeant and the car late in the afternoon in a different place near the center of town each time, “for security,” he was told. Every morning, after checking in and out of the Logistics Commission office, he rode his horse Ike on a twelve-mile loop across the patchwork of farms and plantations outside of town, down crop lanes and through woodlots, pastures, cornfields, and meadows, even jumping the hedgerows here and there. In the process, he became a better rider. And it was only on these lone sorties away from the bustle of Franklin that he forced himself to think about his mission and tried to plan exactly how he might carry out the primary deed itself, and what he would do in its aftermath to get away successfully. The Service people back on Channel Island had taught him many skills, given him many ideas, and run through many scenarios for the carrying out of his mission, but it was left to Daniel to determine the final details of execution, depending on what he discovered about conditions in place, as the jargon had it during training.
He fretted over these matters while riding Ike and he hoped somehow to formulate a final plan that would allow him to escape from Franklin on horseback. He looked for places outside the town checkpoints where he might be able to stash Ike and his tack for a few hours while he carried out the mission and got away from the scene. Being adjacent to the Foxfire capital, the farms and plantations surrounding the town were well-run operations. There were no run-down barns or abandoned sheds as he’d seen just about everywhere else in the country, though he noted several fenced pastures that were occupied by numbers of horses where he might hide Ike in plain sight among them for a little while.
And whether he brooded directly on one plan after another, or just let the matter percolate at the margins of his consciousness while losing himself in the exertion of riding through a landscape that had turned the russet colors of autumn, he could not arrive at a course of action that might accomplish its main objective as well as save his skin.
He continued to receive his pay in silver, and he saved a lot of it to finance his escape, but he allowed himself a leisurely lunch every day in one of several restaurants in town, his favorite being the dining room of the Yancey Hotel, which served a fried chicken special with onion rings, collard greens stewed with bacon, wheat biscuits and fresh butter, and, at this time of year, an excellent squash pie for dessert. Before leaving home, he had never eaten in a restaurant. When he was not diverted by riding or eating he was increasingly conscious of a generalized bad feeling inside himself, a vivid corrosion of the spirit in which he seemed to be marinating. He soon identified it, with a certain strange relief in doing so, as self-hatred. And having done that, he just as readily recognized the source of it as the dissonance between the pleasure he was taking in the company of Loving Morrow and his very deliberate intention to murder her. Even as he ruminated darkly on these things, he also consciously took pleasure in the leisurely routines that allowed him these ruminations, his mornings on horseback, the fine napery of his table at the Yancey, his meals, his pie, his chicory root and barley “coffee,” his fine clothes and boots, and the illusion of his independence.
Then, one late afternoon, as instructed, he met the big black car behind the Methodist Church off Cummins Street and was surprised to find Loving Morrow in the rear compartment with a splint basket and a guitar. The sergeant was behind the wheel as usual.
“How you
doing, sugar?” she said as he climbed in beside her.
“I’m just fine, ma’am,” he said, sensing she was not.
They drove off through the checkpoint, out east on the Lewisburg Pike a mile or so out of town. Loving Morrow remained quiet, pensive. She chewed on the pad of her thumb, looking out the window at the passing landscape.
“Where are we going, ma’am?” Daniel said.
“You’ll see,” she said with a pained smile. “My special place.”
Daniel felt himself slip into a state of heightened alarm.
They passed tobacco barns, orchards, work gangs stooping in the fields digging yams and picking squashes and okra, people gawking in their dooryards at the queer sight of the automobile rolling along the bumpy road.
“How I’m gonna feed all these moochers, I’ll never know,” Loving Morrow muttered to herself.
“Something wrong, ma’am?”
“That goddamn Milton Steptoe is laying siege to Chattanooga now,” she said. “Just what I needed.”
The car turned onto an inconspicuous dirt lane in a patch of woods. A quarter mile up the road stood a little log cabin of impeccably accurate historic design, complete with dovetailed corners, moss chinking, a mud-and-daub chimney, and a broad porch. It stood on a bank yards from the lazy Harpeth River. The car stopped and Loving Morrow got out with the guitar.
“Grab the basket, would you, sugar?”
Daniel climbed out behind her. She was wearing a cotton print dress with a button-front pink sweater and beaded moccasin slippers on her small feet. She looked like a schoolgirl, Daniel thought.
“Why don’t you take off, Rusty,” she told the sergeant.
A History of the Future Page 31
