Mr. Jones had already done some cackling meant to frighten and had slapped Annette a stinging crack on her face when she had said she would not answer questions. He seemed to favor pain and fear over a machine. But Goodrick had coldly explained that she would answer, whether she opened her mouth or not.
He asked the questions, and whether her response was silence or nonsense, she knew the pen points danced on the paper, putting down the truth her body was telling in spite of her.
Meantime, Mr. Jones hissed in the corner.
Mr. Goodrick was relentlessly patient. He tested again and again, even after she had gone limp in a dreary conviction of helplessness. She’d been sure it was Tony, opened the door, what a fool.…
“Where are they meeting?”
“I don’t know.”
J didn’t know whether he was going to hang around the house because he had planned to do so or because he was at least a coward and perhaps a fool. Maybe Tony Thees and Cousin Annie were only fooling him, the second time around, to keep him in line. All J’s guiding lights were faded and blurred now that he had broken his word, pooped out, weakened, and told Sophia. There was no longer any question of his honor or integrity or any of that stuff to help him.
Worse than this, during the course of telling Sophia again this morning, J had found out what it was that he knew. Sophia was a thorough kind of person. Sophia could narrow in on a problem. She had this power of passionate concentration. She had quickly seen that whatever J knew that he shouldn’t have known must have been said aloud during the time he had lurked in the lavatory eavesdropping. And not afterward. Under the pressure of her resolute concern they had gone over it bit by bit.
Might it be, she had asked, the fact that the visitor (whom J had never seen) was he who must replace (somewhere) the man who was so ill?
J had said if so, that was strange. “Looks like I was going to replace him.”
But Sophia was not to be diverted to worrying about the moon at this time.
Perhaps, she had gone on, it was the visitor’s name? Bright, was it? Something like that? Still, the visitor had walked into the hospital and must have been seen by somebody in the process. How could the secret be his identity? Well, then, was it something scientific—as a formula? To this J replied (getting into the mood of a game here) that he didn’t imagine they’d have repeated a formula out loud. Formulae were always, according to J’s notions, written down in mysterious symbols which J was not at all sure could be pronounced aloud on the human tongue.
J had been relaxed at the moment, feeling a tender amusement, and that was when the secret of the secret had sprung into his mind. Okay, he knew. He knew exactly what Goodrick wanted to know and what Tony Thees wished J not to tell him.
But J had kept himself from telling Sophia, although she, of course, knew at once that it had come to him. She had agreed, with remarkable control, that perhaps it would be better if she did not know, exactly. “Well,” J told her, “it’s not that I can figure out the meaning of it. (It had sounded like a language they’d use someplace like the moon!)
It was that string of syllables “the race must get used to.” It was Poonacootamoowa. The “very top,” hadn’t Barkis said of it?
J was quite sure, because he now remembered that he had repeated that string of syllables during his talk with Barkis. “Poonacootamoowa to the moon,” J had said and called it gibberish. And right then, thereafter, on the top of that, Barkis had pulled out of his brilliant, anxious brain that crazy offer of seven seats to the moon.
Not only that, but J could put together, now, some other things. Poonacootamoowa could be—what? The name of something? But there was a time connected. Goodrick asking about a date? Tony saying a few more days. Barkis mentioning a week and trying to throw J off this notion? A week ago today, J had heard the secret. A time! A place?
Well, J had already made up his mind to stay home today. He had to work on the damned elm, didn’t he? (The forbidden syllables had risen like cream to the very top of his thought, all ready to be skimmed off.) He had better get busy. Turn his mind. He was already wearing a flannel shirt and his old working pants. He got up.
Sophia was holding the ticket to the moon in both hands, studying it. J felt sure no scratch on the metal anywhere had escaped Sophia’s dark, inquiring eye. Now she sighed and said, “I suppose we’d better hide this? Here. You hide it.”
But J, knowing it wasn’t this that Goodrick wanted, put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned down the flap. He went out to unlock his tool cupboard and get on with his homely task.
Sophia sat still, listening to the house. It was quiet. She rose and went all around, looking out all the windows except Nanjo’s. She saw nothing unusual. A panel truck parked across the street. Some repairman? Nothing dangerous. Nobody.
Nanjo could hear her mother moving in the house and lay low. She had early skipped out and washed the stockings and the skirt of her dress. They hung behind the closed door of her closet now. Nanjo’s scraped kneecaps were scabbing over. She’d put some flesh-colored adhesive patches on. Her capris lay ready for her to jump into. She’d brushed her hair, hard.
But she knew she had better stay in bed as long as she possibly could, because the concealing of the physical evidence was easy. But to paste some calm-colored patches over the wounds in her mind and memory and imagination—that was harder. Nanjo lay, willing iron into her soul. She would not tell them. She wouldn’t do it! They’d be so upset, so hurt. But she was young! She was stronger and cooler than they. She could take it!
Amy had been sitting in the hospital’s waiting room since six thirty in the morning. No news had come to her. Nothing. Time dragged on. When she was paged, at last, it was her brother calling. She had to tell him that, as far as she knew, Avery was still on the operating table. Win said, “Are you all alone? Somebody should be there!”
“Oh, no,” said Amy, “I don’t want anybody. I’d rather wait by myself.” She went back and sat down and put her head very low, as low as she could, and let it spin. Before somebody else, Amy might have to bear up.
As Win hung up, Marion said, “I’ll go if you could watch the Little kids. It’s too awful! She mustn’t be alone! Nobody should!”
Win heard (in the way he had) the cry she didn’t utter: Don’t ever leave me! He put his arms around her. “If Amy says she doesn’t want us, that’s what Amy means. She’s a character who doesn’t kid herself very much.” He was wondering, Do I?
Marion pulled away in a moment. “My mother isn’t a happy person,” she said in a monotone. “Her house is never hers. Church people always in and out. She has to … serve my father’s profession and never be anything but kind and sweet. I guess I’ve despised her for not being happy. I thought it was easy.”
Win listened carefully, didn’t understand, but said intuitively, “Who told her how she always had to be?”
“She did,” said Marion. “I’m sorry.”
Goodrick was finished. One of the other men had carefully put the machine away, as they had found it, in what must be a rented office. Annette was free of any bonds, free, at least, to sit there. The men behaved as if she were a thing wrung out and of no further use to them.
Goodrick was giving Mr. Jones the results. Yes, the meeting was taking place right now. It had been in session since Thursday. It would break up on Sunday evening. They had so many hours.
“Enough,” purred Mr. Jones. “Go on.”
But the girl did not know the all-important fact. Where? This was the truth. Annette Woods did not know the place. And neither (at least to this girl’s knowledge) did Tony Thees.
Mr. Jones seemed to be going into some kind of convulsion. But Goodrick continued in the same cool way. However, J Middleton Little did, indeed, know the place. The girl believed that, feared that, knew that. Goodrick believed that, too. All they had to do, therefore, was get it out of the man Little. Now they could be sure. He had in his head the one fact they needed.
All the me
n moved to an outer office where Mr. Jones definitely went through a seizure of some kind. At last they were gone. Silence roared in her ears. She stood up, trembling, and reached for the telephone.
What weathermen call an early morning high cloudiness was breaking up; the day was turning out bright and fine. The foliage sparkled. Only the elm was a ludicrous sight. Industriously J dragged branches into a heap back of the garage and attacked the remaining limbs as best he could, not caring so much for the health of the tree (about which he understood very little) but trying to restore to it some of the decent symmetry, the beauty it was born to. Sophia was helping him by sighting at the shape of things and directing him where to place the cutting blade of the awkward device on the end of the pole, and when to pull hard on the string.
They heard the phone ringing. It kept on. (Nanjo must not be awake.) J said, “I suppose that’s my father.”
Sophia thought, Maybe it’s Win. She let him go into the house to answer and drifted to inspect some iris, thinking, I was too hard on Win. I’m a bossy woman. Something, help me?
It was neither J’s father nor J’s son on the phone. It was Annette.
“Good morning, Mr. Noah,” she said in a high voice, terribly gay. “This is your girl guide calling. We are having a little practice launch. Just a trial run. Don’t prepare. Go on doing what you’re doing, but when the Ark comes up the river, go with it?”
“Where would I be going?” said J sourly.
“There is news for you,” she sang out, still too gay. “My boyfriend now agrees with me. Just get aboard, and you will hear all about it.”
“Why not now?”
“No, no, not on the phone. Pixies could be listening in!”
“I am getting pretty goddamned sick and tired of this whole idiotic bit,” J exploded. “All I know is, I am not going to leave my wife and daughter and go anywhere on any Ark or anything else, and you can just take that and—and like it!”
“Don’t hang up,” she cried, her voice ready to crack. “Bring them, too. Please? Help us?”
“I may, and I may not,” snapped J and hung up.
Annette, resting her head on one hand, dialed again, spoke for the second time to Tony. “Okay. I did what you said. If it’s bugged, I doubt I did very well. But I think he’ll go along.”
“Damn right, he’ll go.”
“If you take his females, too.”
“All right. There’ll be room.”
“Hurry?” she said. “If they did have his line bugged, they’ll hurry.”
“The car will be bullet proof, at least. Not that they’d shoot him. Can you make it back to your room, sweetheart?”
“I’m all right. I don’t know, so they don’t want me. They don’t want you, either.”
“So I’m safe. And it’s all laid on for our Little man,” Tony said soothingly. “I’m going ahead to scout it out, right now.”
He hung up, and the girl said, “I didn’t say you were safe.” She went wobbling to the hallway and down and out of the building, squinting at the street signs to find out where she was.
Nobody was watching her.
At J’s house the phone rang again and he, having been standing right next to it (unwilling to move, resenting cryptic orders), picked it up.
“Oh, Mr. Little, I don’t know if you heard. Oh, Mr. Little, that boy, he’s in jail. Oh, I knew …”
“What boy is this, Mrs. Arriola?”
Sophia had come into the house. “Let me. I’m used to her.” J mutely handed her the phone.
“Oh, Miz Little, is that you? Oh, I knew something bad was going to happen to that boy. Oh, poor Miss Nancy, how’s she feeling about this?”
J drifted off to his bedroom. Something told him he wasn’t going to do any more work on the elm today. He began to change his trousers. What did she mean, trial launching? Why couldn’t she say what she meant? Did she mean that somebody listened in on his telephone? Well, if the Ark is going, he thought irrationally on another level, they can’t put me off with three instead of seven. I was promised.
Sophia poked her head in. “Cary Bruce,” she said grimly. “Arrested last night in some brawl in a beer joint. Does Nanjo know about this?”
J turned. “She was pretty late,” he said alertly.
“I’ll see,” said Sophia with retrospective intuitions.
But the phone rang. J got it this time, right here in the bedroom.
His daughter Amy said, “Pops? I’ve got some news that isn’t very good.”
“Shoot, Amy,” he said, bracing, so that Sophia flew to his side to listen in.
“They operated on Avery this morning. It took hours. He’s out of it now, but it’s not so good, Pops. He’s probably going to be almost totally blind.”
“Ohhhhhh,” said J on a falling note of sorrow. “Where are you, sweetie?”
Amy told him. “And also, Pops …”
Sophia said briskly, “What can we do, dear?”
“Oh, Mom? Pops, are you there? I guess I need some money. Win came and gave them some last night, but now I need … Oh, gosh, I’m going to need … Could you come?”
“I sure could,” said J. “I’ll be there in two shakes. You hold everything. I’m on my way.”
As he put down the telephone Sophia said, “Me, too! Oh, God, poor Avery! Poor man! Poor soul! Poor Amy!”
J said, “What about Nanjo?”
Sophia blinked and braced. “All right. You go to Amy. I’ll deal with Nanjo and be there later.”
“I’ll call you,” said J. He grabbed his checkbook and hurried through the family room into the kitchen, to the garage, into his car, and popped it out of the driveway, reversed, and tore away.
There seemed to be some confusion as he went.
A car coming in the opposite direction braked in shock. A second car swerved to pass the first. (J slipped between.) In the first car Goodrick said, “That was him!” In the second car Tony Thees uttered suitable words.
The first car began to move, going into a U-turn. The panel truck from across the street moved and blocked it. The truck driver leaned out and said, “Can you tell me how to get to Stowe Park?”
A man came sidling around a shrub, went to the hood, unlatched it, and raised it. Mr. Jones began to scream that he had no right! Goodrick got out, went up to the door of the house, and rang the bell.
From Nanjo’s window Sophia saw who it was. She refused to answer. “But mother …”
“Ssssh.…”
“Where is everybody?” said Goodrick at the curb to one of Tony’s men. “Who was in that car?”
“What car?” the man said.
Tony, who had driven around the block, passed at the corner. He was hurrying. But as he took the turn to start downhill, he realized that Goodrick and Co.’s car was loosed and after him. So Tony let J keep his long lead. He himself drove at a smart enough pace, with a deceptive air of purpose, and took a right turn up onto the Golden State (having seen that a certain speck in the distance had not). Goodrick and Co. fell into the trap and followed Tony.
But J had already raced around the entrance ramp and was down on the Ventura.
After a while Tony, having lost the hounds, stopped playing fox and found a phone booth.
“Tony,” Annette said at once, “he’s gone! Nobody answered the door, and his car’s gone.”
“Yep. He’s gone where the wild goose goes,” said Tony. “Tell the boys with the armored car to go home.”
“Tony, they didn’t get him?”
“Nope. Not they. They were on my tail. Any news?”
“Yes,” she said tensely. “Old Coughdrop. Says it’s all over.”
“What! What happened?”
“There was a big flap,” she said, speaking fast and nervously. “The religious prayed all the time, and it made the scientists nervous, and they got into a flaming row among themselves about whether or not God was dead. So they’ve gone home in a huff, I guess.”
Tony collapsed against the
wall. He couldn’t help laughing hysterically. “Mission accomplished,” he croaked at last.
“Tell Goodrick and Co.! Mind you do that,” she said sharply.
“Right.” Tony came out of the booth, wiping his eyes. No Goodrick and Co. was to be seen, of course. He had lost them two miles ago.
Their car was parked, and Mr. Jones was screaming at them all.
CHAPTER 28
Saturday Afternoon
“Does he know?” J asked his daughter Amy in that waiting room. “How’s he feeling, poor kid?”
“Yes, he knows,” she said. “He’s not feeling much yet. I told him myself. I wouldn’t let anyone else.”
“Ah, good girl,” said J, his heart aching.
“Pops, it wasn’t curable last week or last month or even last summer.”
“I see,” J sighed because he had been afraid. Now he reached for his checkbook. “How much would you say … Oh, oh!” He stared at his balance. “My checking account—humph! Never mind. I’ll fatten it up first thing Monday morning.”
“There’s more in it than you think,” said Amy. “I tore up three hundred and fifty dollars’ worth the other day.”
“Why?” said J, astonished.
Amy shook her weary head. “I don’t feel like telling you why, Pops.”
“Okay,” said J promptly. “The thing for me to do is talk to them at the desk. We’ll fix it.”
Amy’s eyes were ringed with dark smudges of fatigue. She looked utterly beautiful. Her smile was nearly too much for her father. So he began to ask brisk, practical questions. What kind of care did Avery need here? How about private nursing? How long must he stay? Where would Amy take him later on? What kind of dwelling would be best for them? Could J help her find it? Wouldn’t Amy want to stay home with Avery and so give up the thought of working?
Amy said, “No. I want to keep on working, Pops. I think I’ll keep this job as long as I can. I had to take yesterday off, but they were nice about it. I’ll go back Monday.”
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