“Of course you do.”
“It says in the letter that he’ll continue his rehabilitation at the VA hospital here, but he can live at home. I’m afraid this puts an A-number one crimp in our own arrangement, at least for the time bein’.”
Marnie’s eyes were full of tears; certainly for poor Digger, but probably, Pace thought, partially for the abrupt cessation of his and her newfound idyll.
“What’s Digger’s real name?” he asked.
“Francisco Madero Bernstein. His daddy was a scholar of the Mexican revolution. Taught at Stanford University, I believe.”
“You’ll visit me sometime in North Carolina, I hope.”
Marnie smiled and let her tears fall.
“Of course I will, darlin’.”
“If you let me know when you’re comin’,” Pace said, “I’ll bake a cake.”
5
Since childhood Pace had been interested in people’s stories about their interaction with extraterrestrials. Most of these accounts were ludicrous if not patently ridiculous, of course, but occasionally someone sounded convinced that he or she had actually been contacted by or had some sort of relation with emissaries from planets other than Earth. Pace rarely read science fiction or watched television shows or movies that involved space travel. What fascinated him was personal testimony, hearing people talk about their intimate experiences with aliens. Usually these individuals could be heard on radio programs in the middle of the night, telling how small gray or tall blue beings, some without mouths or with three eyes, had appeared in barns on isolated farms or kidnapped the subject and taken him to their own planet to experiment upon. Often these witnesses or participants sounded so sincere that Pace knew they believed what they were saying. Delusional or not, Pace remained curious as to what transpired in these people’s minds to allow them to describe in such vivid detail their unearthly experiences.
Sitting at the desk in his cottage late at night, or lying awake in bed, Pace acknowledged to himself that he would not mind having an encounter of the third kind, as such contacts were called. If he was taken away to another galaxy it would unburden him from trying to figure out a reason for existence. Not that he expected to be given or have revealed to him an explanation; it would be enough, Pace decided, to know there was more than one answer or no answer. Pace did not believe in God, he never had, but he understood why doing so was a comfort to so many people. He just enjoyed the idea of going somewhere else, someplace unimaginable.
When he received a letter from Marnie three months after he’d returned to Bay St. Clement, telling him that she had married Digger and was bound to devote herself to his well-being for however long that might be, Pace was not surprised, but for a moment he wished he were on another planet.
6
Pace was walking through a field of high grass in the woods a quarter of a mile from Dalceda Delahoussaye’s house on a cold, cloudy December day, thinking about what most significantly could have occupied Lula’s thoughts during her last fifteen years, the ones without Sailor. His parents’ undying trust in one another was what Pace admired most about them. There were certain people he trusted, of course, Marnie being one, and he had trusted his ex-wife, Rhoda, too; but it was not the same because the bond between Sailor and Lula had endured what for them had been forever.
A six-point buck came thundering through the grass and passed from right to left directly in front of Pace. Before its odor reached his nostrils and before he heard the shot, a bullet entered just to the right and slightly below Pace’s left shoulder blade. He turned and saw a man wearing eyeglasses and an orange hat with earflaps about fifty yards behind him. The man was holding a rifle. He stood still for a few seconds, then began running away from Pace, toward a dense thicket. Pace reached around with his right hand and tried to touch the spot where the projectile had penetrated his back but he could not find it. Before he fell, Pace looked again for the man wearing an orange hat but he was gone. Lying in the tall grass, Pace stared up at the gathering grey clouds and thought, if ever there were a time for him to be abducted by aliens, this was it.
7
The supervising nurse in the critical care unit of Nuestra Hermana de Perdón Hospital in South Nazareth, where Pace had been taken to recover from his wounds, was named Anita O’Day O’Shea, whom everyone on the hospital staff called Lady O. Lady O was seventy-six years old and in her fifty-fifth year of service. Still vigorous, sharp-minded and tart-tongued as ever, her expertise was well-respected by doctors and nurses alike. It was she who oversaw Pace’s case and was the only person with whom he was allowed by the doctors to have a conversation. These exchanges were necessarily brief and consisted mostly of Lady O’s relating to Pace her theory regarding spacecraft having landed on Earth thousands of years before, as recorded in the Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament.
“Ezekiel was a son of Bunzi, a priest, and he witnessed the heavens open and from out of a fiery cloud came an amber-colored spaceship. Four four-winged creatures appeared, walking upright, each with four faces: one a man’s, one a lion’s, one an ox’s, and one an eagle’s. Their vehicle was metallic and formed in the shape of a wheel. When Ezekiel told the elders of Israel about this visitation, they refused to believe him and he was exiled to Babylonia. Mind you, this was around 600 B.C., so there’s the first reliable proof that men from outer space been checkin’ out our planet since forever. You feelin’ better today, son?”
The bullet that pierced Pace had traveled through his back into his heart and exited from his chest. That he had survived was, in the words of the head surgeon at Nuestra Hermana de Perdón, a freak event. Lady O called it a miracle, a sign that God had plans for Pace.
“This is His way of tellin’ you you got work left to do, Mr. Ripley,” said Lady O. What that might be, I can’t pretend to know, but He don’t spare folks for no bad reason.”
“I don’t consider myself a Christian,” Pace told her. “I don’t hold much for organized religion of any kind, though I respect your beliefs and I am thoroughly grateful for your encouragement as well as your ministrations and devotion to my well-being.”
During the earliest stage of his recovery, Pace had been under heavy sedation and had experienced an alternately entertaining and troubling, if not horrifying at times, series of dreams. In one, he found himself being devoured by an enormous crocodile, helpless to prevent it; but then Pace became the crocodile, gorging himself on a Chinese girl, a child, really, swallowing her head first, watching her legs kick until her top parts were chomped to bits. In another, Pace was in a city that was a combination of Paris, France, and Chicago; it was winter, snow was falling, and he wandered through the dimly-lit streets until he saw a woman he thought was Siempre Desalmado getting into a taxi. Pace ran after the taxi but he could not catch up. It disappeared and he fell down in the road and was soon covered by snow.
When at last his dreams became less intense, Pace forced himself to recall what happened, that he had been gunned down in the woods in a hunting accident but had somehow survived. When Lady O asked Pace if a bullet through his heart could not kill him, what could? Sailor and Lula’s only child said, “That’s not the only question I don’t have the answer to.”
8
Pace spent five weeks in the hospital before returning to Bay St. Clement. A private caregiver, Addie Mae Longbow, a septuagenarian, half-Cherokee woman who had worked with Lady O for a number of years before retiring from full-time nursing, attended Pace for almost a month, after which time he was able to take care of himself. Though still not at full strength, Pace got around well enough, he could drive and prepare his own meals. He resumed writing but resolved to do something for the good of others, to devote a portion of what energy he had to charity work. This desire did not stem from any righteous or empty feeling; it was just that Pace felt a considerable amount of disgust at what he deemed selfish, wasteful and narcissistic behavior, including his own. Fear
, he concluded, was what drove people to behave as they did, and fear took many forms. Pace could not claim to be free of fear, but for whatever reason he felt less afraid than he ever had before.
Addie Mae Longbow was a member of an organization based in a warehouse in North Nazareth called Jesus Sees Us, which fed, clothed and provided free medical care to anyone in need. Pace donated three afternoons and evenings a week to Jesus Sees Us, serving lunch and dinner. It was while dishing up mashed potatoes and gravy on a Thursday evening three months after he had begun helping out there that Pace recognized the man wearing glasses and an orange hat with earflaps who had shot him.
Pace said nothing to the man as he passed in the serving line and then carried his food tray to a table, where he sat down and began to eat. Pace had had only a momentary glimpse of the delinquent hunter, but was certain this was he. As Pace continued to dole out potatoes, he kept an eye on the person who had plugged him and fled, trying to decide what to do. When the man in the orange hat finished eating and got up to go, Pace noticed that both of the lenses in his eyeglasses had cracks in them and that his green army field jacket was torn and dirty. As Pace watched him walk out of the dining area, the tension that had overcome him upon spotting the man gradually drained from his body. Pace felt not unlike he imagined Lazarus must have once he understood that he was truly again among the living.
“Mister, ain’t you gonna spoon me some of them smashed ’taters?”
Pace looked at the stooped old woman in the line standing across from him, waiting to be served. Her deeply creased face and grizzled gray hair were filthy but there remained a distinct beam of brightness in her chestnut eyes.
“I surely am, ma’am,” Pace said, scooping potatoes onto her plate. “Do you want gravy?”
9
It was early on a Sunday morning when Pace heard a car drive onto the property and stop. He looked out the front window of his cottage and saw a white Chevrolet Malibu parked between the cottage and Dalceda Delahoussaye’s house. A woman climbed out of the driver’s side, opposite the cottage, and stood for a moment with her back to him, shaking her long, blonde hair. He felt a chill in his back and shoulders and shivered even before the woman turned and faced his way. It was Rapunzelina Cruz, appearing in Pace’s life for the third time.
She saw Pace behind the window, smiled and raised her right hand and gave a little wave. Pace did not acknowledge her overture. He could not move. Punzy may not have been the last person Pace expected to see but she was close. He did not want to be there with Punzy waiting for him to invite her inside. She looked almost too beautiful standing next to the white Malibu, a light breeze wrinkling her little blue dress, the sunlight purifying her, as if this image could be enough to cleanse from his brain those terrible, indelible pictures housed there. When Pace made no sign of welcome, Punzy’s smile faded and she waited until it became clear to her that he was not going to allow her to interrupt his existence this time around. After a couple of minutes, Punzy got back into the car, started it up and backed down the driveway.
Once the Malibu was out of sight and sound, Pace thought about the importance of confronting one’s demons, the man in the orange hat and Rapunzelina being only two transitory tests of his resolve and understanding. Pace then considered the possibility that the manifestations of both the hunter and Punzy might have been apparitions. If he had learned anything, he reasoned, what was the difference, really? He had let them go, and that was what mattered.
Part Five
1
On the eve of Pace’s seventieth birthday, he realized that he had been living alone for almost eleven years. Not since his brief residence with Marnie Kowalski in New Orleans, which had followed the debacle that was his relationship with Rapunzelina Cruz, did he have any real interest even in keeping steady company with a woman. Pace was regular in his habits, maintained his writing routine, adding steadily to his monumental meditation—currently in excess of two thousand manuscript pages—on the lives of Sailor and Lula, and did what work needed to be done around the cottage and Dalceda Delahoussaye’s house. It was practically a hermit’s existence; other than necessary exchanges with shopkeepers in Bay St. Clement and periodic telephone conversations with Marnie, who was now beginning her second decade of marriage to Digger Bernstein, Pace eschewed personal relations. To his surprise, after so many years of being at the very least a nominally social being and world traveler, Pace discovered that he preferred this solitude. To be left alone was not the worst of circumstances; not by far, he reasoned, especially as it had been largely his own doing.
Dalceda and her husband, Louis, had acquired during their lifetime a rather interesting, if eclectic, library, and during these last several years Pace had read many of the books they had accumulated. Louis, it seemed, had a taste for poetry, most particularly ancient Chinese verse in English translation, along with a complementary collection of books on Asian art. Pace had met Dalceda’s husband only a couple of times, he had died when Pace was still a child, and this seemed a good way to get to know Louis Delahoussaye, through his library.
A poem that Pace came upon in one of the Chinese anthologies, attributed to an unknown poet of the T’ang dynasty who had been a government official before being exiled as a result of a political scandal to a remote province in the mountains, where he lived by himself until his death, particularly impressed Pace:
READING IN THE STUDY IN THE BAMBOO GROVE
Lonely for conversation,
the scholar in the mountain hut
goes on reading.
Pace identified with the poem and it continued to resonate for him more than any others. Marnie, he knew, would call the next day to wish him a happy birthday and invite him, as she often did, to visit her and Digger in N.O. He would be pleased to hear her voice and would thank her for remembering the occasion, and decline the invitation for now. Perhaps later in the year, he would offer, and Marnie would counter with, “We’re not gettin’ any younger.” This he knew and did not mind knowing. In fact, Pace had written a poem that succinctly expressed his view of the landscape:
LITTLE MIDNIGHT BUDDHIST POEM
Don’t take
your Self
so seriously
Remove the I
from I don’t mind
you have
Don’t mind
which, after
All, is all
you’ll need
or ever
have
2
On Pace’s birthday, Marnie called, but it was to tell him that her husband, Francisco Madero “Digger” Bernstein, had died in his sleep three nights before.
“I guess it’s too soon to ask you how you’re feelin’, now Digger’s gone.”
“Oh, I’m all right. He needed me and truly appreciated my doin’ for him. I’ll have time to take up some other things now.”
“What about the bakery?”
“I got a couple of women run things there pretty good these days. It’s still popular. Happy birthday, by the way.”
“Thanks. You’re the only one knows about it any more.”
“You finish that book yet?”
“Might never will. I keep writin’ on it, like Proust did on his, even on his deathbed.”
“I hope you’ll let me read some of it one of these days.”
“I will, Marnie, I promise. Thanks for callin’. Sorry about Digger.”
“You were really great about our havin’ to part after he got blown up. Am I ever gonna see you again?”
“I have a sincere feelin’ you will.”
“What’re you doin’ to celebrate beginnin’ your seventh decade on the planet?”
“It’s strange thinkin’ about how I’ve now outlived Sailor Ripley by five years. Anyway, I’m about to go into town and buy myself a bottle of good single malt Scotch. The Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban, if th
ey’ve got it.”
“Maybe next year we can celebrate together.”
Pace drove into Bay St. Clement, stopped in the liquor store and bought the only bottle of Glenmorangie they had. When he walked back outside, he noticed a sign on a door in a building across the street that read: CRUSADER RALPH’S FOLLOWERS. He’d heard or read something about this bunch, men and women from all over the world who subscribed to the teachings of a former mercenary soldier who had escaped from prison in Mali, where he’d been sentenced to death for attempting to assassinate the president of that African country on behalf of a tribal warlord who opposed the government’s ties to Al Qaeda. The president had branded Ralph as a CIA operative and it was most likely the CIA that had helped him get away. Supposedly he now lived on an undisclosed island in the South Pacific from where he communicated to his followers exclusively via the internet. Pace knew little else about Crusader Ralph, as the man began calling himself after fleeing Mali, and he was surprised to learn that the ex-merc’s influence now extended to a little town in North Carolina.
When he got back to his cottage, Pace checked out Crusader Ralph on his computer. There wasn’t much information available on the man’s website, only a notice that said for an admission fee of five hundred dollars a person could submit him or herself for consideration to become eligible to receive the teachings, along with instructions for making payment. Pace then went to Wikipedia and read what it said there about Crusader Ralph: “According to his Followers, Crusader Ralph is the one True Teacher in the universe. Other than he is believed to have been born in Akron, Ohio, no facts about his life are available and his Followers are forbidden to divulge his teachings to those outside the organization. For further reference go to www.crusaderralph.com.”
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