Joydrop. Esme had a deer-in-headlights frozenness to her voice.
“I wonder if maybe I ought to check on her,” he said. There was no glimpse of Joy in the kitchen. Nora’s empty window caught his attention for a moment, sadness flooding in, but the sweep of more cars along the road diverted him again, and he wondered what the devil was going on.
“I’ll go,” said Laura, getting up from Ward’s rocking chair, Topsy at her back like a clinging lemur. The kids were sitting cross-legged on the bed and Grampa had planted himself on Ward’s gnomish three-legged stool, but they all stiffened at the shattering sound of breaking glass, which was followed by a shift in the crowd murmur, a sway toward muted dismay here, a billow of approval there, shouts and smatters of applause.
Joydrop, Ted. Panic now.
Grampa rose, his mind racing. “Ward, Laura, one of you go up top, call the police, 911, quickly. June, all of you, up the ladder as fast as you can.”
Laura said, “Dad, let me go with you.”
He was about to protest but Esme nodded and he said, “Come on then. They want me, they can have me. Calm the mongrels down, shame them into civilized behavior.”
Topsy said to Laura, Might hurt him.
“Dad, they might—”
“I don’t think so.” He hurried her along, up the lawn and, sliding back the glass door, into the kitchen. “They’ve got their blasted media with them. If nothing else, those bastards with their mikes and cameras will keep the angry villagers from turning into a mob. Joy, where are you?”
“In here, Ted!” The fear in her voice was solid as steel. Grampa raced toward the front room, Laura in tow behind him, shouting caution.
12. Goatscape
They spent a good long time at the hospital and then it seemed prudent and right to leave Tom and Sarah and the baby by themselves. Mindy suggested burgers at an eatery east on Main near Sheridan. On the way back, passing the town square, they saw perhaps fifty people, men and women, adults and kids, sitting on or gathered about the steps of the gazebo. Curious, they drifted in.
No companions here, Carver. Keep it under wraps.
He nodded to Goldie and saw that Mindy heard too. No companions meant, sadly, that they were now set apart from most of the townsfolk, who fell into two camps: those who had missed their chance to bloom and those who had bloomed but had then denied their angels in the wake of an ongoing media assault. Of those who’d maintained their guardians, no one was trumpeting that fact to the heavens, opting for covert smiles and meaningful looks instead.
Al DeSario was seated on the top step, holding forth. His sons sat on either side of him, the older one in black leather, the younger one . . . but Carver saw now that his observation had been mistaken. The effervescent companion he recalled from the day before was still sprightly fizzing above the boy’s head, even as his father inveighed against Jameson and his possessed kids. “Listen,” he was saying, “you see all kinds in Guidance—the good kids, the rotten kids, the devious ones who just want to take advantage of you but haven’t yet learned to hide it. Now these two? A surface of perfection. But underneath is nothing but your basic contempt for your fellow man. Wouldn’t surprise me if they thought the whole thing up themselves and dragged the boy’s nutcase grampa into it.” The younger son’s face blanched and his eyes widened as he registered Carver and Mindy and their angels. Carver reassured him with a pinch of the lips and a subtle shake of his head.
“My dad’s right,” the leather-boy chimed in, his head moving about as if to cast his remarks on particular ears, though he made eye contact with no one. “Somebody should go out there and take ‘em down, teach ‘em a lesson.”
Lyle from the used bookstore spoke up. “Whatever it is, something needs to happen, and quick. I’m old enough it didn’t matter I don’t mind admitting I was fooled. But this town deserves better’n she’s got. And everybody here knows it.” His finger jabbed the air and his head gave an abrupt nod to signal he was done.
“Damn right, old man,” said Al DeSario, and then his boy laid a hand on his shoulder and pointed to Carver and Mindy. “Well if it isn’t Mister and Missus Naked America. I’ll bet you two have plenty to beef about.”
Watch it, Carver. Tell your lie and fade back. Good advice, the best. But what sort of man would he be if he went along like everyone else? Not the time or place for heroism. Was there nothing worth standing up for? Plenty of things. Just save it for later.
The opening DeSario had offered them could have been smoothed over with mindless reinforcement, all he wanted, and then he would have nattered on to the next thing. But Carver could not bring himself to gloss over the ugliness of this man’s mood, nor could he betray the implicit bond he felt with DeSario’s younger son.
“Yes, I guess so,” Mindy offered. Then she tugged at his arm, whispering “Let’s go.”
“You guess so?” DeSario leaned forward, a smile on his face. “Lady, they had you stripped naked under that tree over yonder, you and your rummy boyfriend here, all your parts hanging out for everyone to see. ‘Course, it may be you liked that. I got to tell you I liked seeing you that way. Maybe you’d like to come up here right now and give everybody another look.”
No, don’t say it.
“There’s no call to talk like that.” The words came out louder than Carver had intended.
“Maybe you don’t mind being—” The beefy man cocked his head at him in disbelief. “What did you say?”
“I said you owe the lady an apology.”
DeSario sprang up, came off the steps. “Listen here, Haskell, I don’t need any drunken bum telling me what I do and don’t owe to anyone.” He jabbed at Carver’s chest, a stung point on the breastbone. “You sit around week after week, stinking up the square with your mewling and puking, spoiling it for the rest of us; and now you have the gall, after what that creep Jameson did to us, to tell me I owe an apology to your hot-shit floozy here. I don’t suppose you’re on his side of this—?”
It got to him, DeSario’s jab and his pressing forward to throw Carver off-balance and force a retreat (no don’t) and then the renewed insult to Mindy (oh jeez Carver, he’s bigger than you) so that his best instinct took over and his hand hauled back and the slap hit the approaching bear loud and solid across the cheek. His head turned and his fat lips quivered, and then the head snapped back enraged and he was upon Carver, tooth and claw.
*****
Mike loved his dad. That angel crap had sidetracked them both, but now that that had been blown away, he felt a deeper kinship with his father than ever. No way could a man let the motherfuckers sneak any bullshit by him; he needed to see it coming, rebuff it, and force them to eat it twenty times over as punishment. It felt good to dish it out. It had felt real good dishing it out to Patti in his bedroom yesterday, and it was going to feel real good helping his dad take this wino down a few pegs in front of his big-titted bitch.
He knew, as he came down the steps, how football pros felt breaking onto the field. The crowd was with him all the way—angry moms, shopkeepers with burnished glints in their eyes, wimpy bureaucrats from City Hall showing mean streaks he’d never have suspected in a million years—all of them shouting encouragement to him and his dad, helping bind them tighter. Scrannel-throated bastard dodged about so that Mike’s dad was only able to glance a few off his jaw at first, and the drunken fucker landed a lucky punch or two that snapped the larger man’s head back. But then Mike shot in on his father’s left and knuckle-punched the sucker in the stomach, doubling him over and exposing his pained face to their fists. It was a prideful thing, the drubbing they dealt him—DeSario blows: his dad an expert at them, the no-nonsense pistoning of his fists, as if he were pounding dough, a familiar rhythm Mike had suffered under until he was Calvin’s age and fought back; and Mike himself, leaving the face to his father, concentrating on raising bruises on the bastard’s upper body, his arms and his back, keeping him on his feet by adjusting his balance with counterblows. Still, the man was
bound to collapse, and when he did, Mike’s boots were ready. The big-titted bitch sweetened it all with her high-pitched protests and her feeble attempts to intervene.
But suddenly something plowed into him, throwing him against his father and hurtling him to the ground. Mike’s head fell back and struck hard earth, making the sky spin. When he sat up, his dad had Calvin by the gazebo, smacking him with his open hand, shaking him by one tightly gripped arm, bellowing obscenities at him. The wino and his bitch were halfway across the park, her trying to rush him along as fast as she could. Mike toyed with the idea of dashing over there and doing enough damage to put them both in the hospital or the morgue, but dismissed it. There’d be time enough later and he had a feeling he’d much prefer dealing with the woman indoors someplace alone.
“You little prick,” his father was shouting, “what do I have to do, cripple you? Because I will. I’ll snap you the fuck over my knee if I have to.” To the crowd: “Look at him. My pride and joy. Fucking turncoat.”
“Jameson got to him!” someone shouted.
“Damned right he did,” his father answered, and Mike, face flush with fervor, chimed in his agreement. “And the only way we’re going to set things right is to pay a visit to our resident hot-shot and take it out of his hide.”
“We can’t do it alone,” said a woman with rolling-pin arms and no neck. “We need more people.”
Mike spoke up. “There’s lots of people were here all week, here or under the fucker’s treehouse a few days ago. Bet they’re just as pissed off as we are.”
“My boy’s right. You know who they are. Call them. People who were here, whose lives were turned upside down by Jameson and those kids. People who have come to their senses and all they’re doing is steaming about it at home or at work. Let’s do it. Everybody think of five people and call them now. Tell them to haul their asses over to Jameson’s place by two o’clock. One way or another, we’re going to make the son-of-a-bitch pay.”
Football again. It was like breaking out of a huddle only lots of folks came over to shake his and his father’s hands, just one quick hard-edged thanks, the rage spilling out of them like righteousness. Mike standing shoulder to shoulder with his dad: It felt good, felt exceeding good, his knuckles still stinging, his brother slumped in shame against the side of the gazebo, his mind weighing the pros and cons of phoning up Richie Feit and Joey Russo and Greg Gormezano and the others, before coming down decisively on the pro side.
*****
Harold Porter felt an amused tickle inside. His wife was so steamed at him, she was pretending he was invisible even as she never for one moment let him out of her sight. At the moment, she was pacing her office, waiting for his brother Joe to arrive.
Just a little frantic, isn’t she? There was sympathy in Caroline’s voice.
Feeling under the gun I guess, Harold replied, being careful this time not to vocalize; poor woman looked like she needed to take up smoking.
Someone had wheeled in a TV monitor on a tall stand, a dormant VCR chained to a shelf below it. A sour-faced Brian Forrester stood beside it, his white hairless hand holding it down as if he expected it to levitate without his lent gravity. The sound was off. Luke Petrakis, a garment bag slung over one shoulder, deplaned and waved away questions for the umpteenth time. An immaculately coiffed and manicured Ken-doll read copy, his empty head giving reassuring nods as his thin lips shaped the words. Then, there was Thea at her press conference not an hour before, a jump-cut to Harold at the lectern—looking not at all like himself, he thought—and then the rush toward the door as they hustled him from the room.
“Where the hell is he?” Thea said, addressing no one in particular. Onscreen, the blue-blur footage ran again. “Jesus!” she swore, bristling past Forrester to toggle the damned thing off. It crackled into blackness.
Bess Condon’s Valium voice honeyed over the intercom: “Mayor Cosgrove, the sheriff is here to see you.”
“Dammit, Bess,” Thea shot back, thumb on the button, “I told you to send him in as soon as he arrived. Now do it. And wipe that smirk off your face. I can feel it in the wires and I swear I’ll fire you right out the door if I see a trace of it ever again.”
“But, Mayor Cosgrove, I—”
“Just do it!”
A moment later Joe walked through the door, sidearm snapped shut by his side. He nodded to everyone, then a glance at Harold. “Hey there, big brother,” he said, “I hear you caused quite a stir this morning.”
“Joe,” said Thea, “the next time he opens his mouth, I want you to put a bullet in his brain.” It didn’t sound like a joke. “I had things well in hand and then, I don’t know what I could have been thinking, I gave him the mike. We’ve got to come down hard on Jameson, deflect attention from this morning’s disaster. Go easy on the kids though. Could backfire too easily. But I want that man in jail by three o’clock at the latest. The sooner the better.”
Joe shrugged. “Disturbing the peace?”
“If that’s the best you’ve got. Conspiracy charges, vagrancy, drunk and disorderly conduct, I don’t care what it is, just put him away. Let’s train the cameras on him for a change.”
“The girl’s missing.”
“June Lockridge?”
Joe nodded. “Parents called a few hours ago. She ran away this morning. I’ve had squad cars cruising the streets. Nothing.”
Thea pointed at him. “Tack on kidnapping charges. I’ll bet you even money she’s with Jameson.”
“Could be. We tried calling there, but the phone is busy, or more likely disconnected, what with the TV folks trying to autodial their way through.”
Harold surveyed his brother, saddened that he too had lost his guardian. But then even as a child, Joe had been more serious and stiff-minded about things, frustrated to tears over jigsaw puzzles Harold could remember going into hysterical fits of laughter over.
Richer now.
He glanced at Caroline, her face bathed in whimsy, a wisp of impishness there. She was right. His brother was once more rigid with business—but his edges, though hard, seemed subtly rounded, as if he’d come out of belief into not resentment but some sort of completeness. What’s your opinion? he thought to his angel.
I’d say there’s hope for brother Joey.
Harold laughed, then stifled it.
Thea stopped talking and skewered him with a glance. “And he goes with us. I want him close by at all times. Joe, I know he’s your brother and you love him, and I love him too”—(a politician’s lie, he thought; a wife’s lie to herself)—”but we need to wait a couple of days, at least until the TV people move on to the next big story, before looking into professional help for him. Brian here’s got a short-list of doctors and deprogrammers at his desk.”
Don’t say it. Caroline caught him on the brink of protesting that he was the healthy one, that they were the ones in need of deprogramming. She might change her mind and put you away right now. And that was so. Not that he believed for an instant that they could hold him, nor that attempts to commit him would stick. But he didn’t want to miss out on witnessing what was to come next. He didn’t want to let Thea out of his sight, no, not for the time it took to take a leak.
Forrester nodded like solemnity itself, to which Joe said, “I say we defer any talk of doctors until Harold and I have had a chance to sit down over a beer and hash this thing out.”
“Sure whatever,” she said, a hand waving dismissively in the air, “but it’s time to remove the beam from the eye of this city.” She bulled out from behind her desk, fully expecting—and she was right, of course, which amazed and tickled him anew—that he and his brother would follow in her wake. Bess Condon put on her best attempt at sobriety as Mayor Cosgrove passed by her desk, but Harold winked at her and she lowered her face into a smile. Thea found the brass doorknob, grimaced back at them, said, “Repeat after me: No comment!” turned the knob, and then they were out beyond the safety and quiet of the mayor’s antechamber—Thea followe
d by Harold and Caroline and Harold’s brother Joe—arrowing through a Stock Market’s worth of frantic faces and news-hunger and a yammering after scoops that both saddened and elated Harold, and there she was, the lovely woman from the front row, and her sweet beautiful mouth was moving too in its lovely wide scarlet way, and her eyes were inviting him anew to drown himself in her, and he thought of Dawn and her, the two of them together in his arms, luscious womanhood—but then Joe hustled him along, and the smartly-dressed vision that was one of his lady-loves (You must find out her name!) was swallowed up behind him in a sea of roil and ravin.
*****
Looks like bad news, his guardian offered, her golden flesh reddening momentarily in odd counterpoint to Mindy’s acute blanching as she nodded into the phone.
“No kidding,” said Carver, his face throbbing inside as if a work crew with jackhammers had taken up residence in his bones. The old armchair felt good against his bare skin except for the left shoulder blade—instinctively kept away from the faded green cushion—which DeSario’s boy had brutalized near to breaking.
“They are? I . . . yes, Mrs. Fleischer, that’s . . . well, I’m sure she . . . oh no, we’re . . . I don’t think we can . . . uh huh . . . uh huh . . . okay, I’ll discuss it with him . . . all right.” She hung up.
“Minister’s wife?” One side of his face was bruised and puffy as if ineptly Novocained and his words came out sounding like fizzled popovers.
Following Angelina in from the kitchen, Mindy sat in front of him once more beside the card table decked with gauze and bandages and a basin of warm water with a blood-streaked washcloth floating in it. “Yes. She got a call from Lyle Quinn.” Mindy seemed distracted, and the color did not want to return to her face. Lightly, she brushed her fingertips along his hand where it rested on the arm of the chair. She looked at him, the fret not having left her eyes since the fight began. “Are you all right?”
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