Gibbon's Decline and Fall (30 page)

“Martin,” she mused. “And he works for Jagger?”

“Now, that's a guy belongs in here. I oughta switch 'em.”

“Somebody would find out,” she said musingly.

“Nah. You put somebody else in the tank, but you set the
buttons like it was for the first guy, set the humidity control a little high so the faceplate fogs up. Then they'd never know.”

“Until the sentence ran out,” she laughed without humor.

“I s'pose.” He grinned widely, amused at the thought, then walked with her toward the barred door, jingling his keys. “Except the way they change sentences around, they might not even know then!”

“You mean sentences get changed once they're in here?”

“Oh, sure. You got a guy doing ten in New Mexico, you get papers from Montana saying he's supposed to be doing fifteen up there, you just punch in fifteen more and send Montana a FUD form—that's a federal uniform depository form. End of the year you got more out-of-state guys in your tank than you have in-state guys being tanked somewhere else, you get paid for the difference. Why bother shipping the pods around? Hell, all that room we got down at WIPP, might as well make some money on it.”

Outside, the dust devils still chased one another across the desert, much ado about little. The April sun still shone, but the light seemed gray, like February seen through a dirty window. The drive home seemed endless and purposeless, except that Hal was waiting. When she drove in, smoke from the barbecue grill drifted toward her through the budding trees. So he was up and about.

“Where you been? I was getting worried about you!” He put down his cane to pull her into a great two-armed hug, like a hungry bear. She melted against him and they stood there, solidly planted, not wanting to break apart.

He did, however, pushing her out at arm's length. “You got a call.”

“Who?”

“Helen. She said to tell you she heard Jake talking on the phone. She said Jake must be prosecuting a case against a client of yours, because he mentioned your name. She says she's afraid he's up to his old tricks.”

“Did she know who he was talking to?”

“Some guy named Martin. He works for Jagger. She's going to call you in the morning, she says.”

“Second time I've heard that name in the last hour or so.” She told him what Josh had said. “Helen didn't say anything else?”

“That was all. Just the sound of the click and the buzz of the line. She was in a hurry, whispering.”

Carolyn clenched her fists, her jaw, felt every muscle tense. Well, of course Jagger was up to his old tricks! Witnesses would lie, evidence would be created out of whole cloth. He'd arrange it all!

“Do it,” she snarled into the air. “Do it, Jagger. I'm not going to get trapped in a cell so somebody can fake my suicide. If anybody dies this time, it's going to be you.”

“Hey, sweetheart.” Hal pulled her into his arms once again, half laughing, tears at the corners of his eyes. “Hey, there, love. It's me! Remember me?”

She laughed at herself helplessly, without humor. Lord. She was like that ewe-sheep. Stamping her foot and glaring when she hadn't a fang in her mouth or a horn on her head. All this threat and fury when chances were neither she nor Hal could do a damn thing about it. Unless they got some help from somewhere.

Night in Nuevo Los Angeles, and the bag ladies are at it again. “Listen!” is the command they're painting along the concrete bottom and sides of the Los Angeles River. There, in scarlet spray paint highlighted in yellow, each letter fifteen feet high, the message is written: “Listen!” “Pay Attention.” “Think.”

Night in Denver and the Family Values Shock Troops are at it again, working the mall outside the movie house, rushing out at groups of girls, lashing at their legs with whips while the girls scream and scatter like chickens threatened by a fox. “Go home,” the men bellow. “Go home where you belong!”

“I belong here just as much as you do!” one tall girl shouts back. “This is a free country!”

“For men it is,” comes the response from three or four, moving in on her, trapping her. “For men it is.”

When the other girls have gone and the men have dispersed, the argumentative one is still there, prone, blood from her head skeining the tiles. Though the whips had not looked that dangerous, the handles had been weighted with lead. The witnesses creep out, by ones and twos, to pick up the fallen one and carry her away. Later they will call for an ambulance, but they will not go to the police. This isn't the first time, and they have already learned not to go to the police.

Night in Chicago, New Orleans, Charlestown, Detroit. Night in Omaha, Cheyenne, Missoula, Seattle. Everywhere
groups of old ladies here and there, doing incomprehensible things and moving on: groups of men doing equally incomprehensible things, which often leave the wounded or dead scattered behind them.

“Count the dead,” the bag ladies paint on the sides of buildings, on the sidewalks, down the streets. “Lemmings or men, death is the answer.”

“Go home,” shout the men, brandishing their whips. “Go home to your father or husband, where you belong.”

Night in Pakistan. Night in Bangladesh. Night in Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Sicily. Night in London, Rome, Barcelona.

Snag-toothed hags, wrinkled dames, draggle-hemmed women moving down alleys, painting words in a hundred languages. “Girl babies are buried beneath the mango tree. Their blood is in the mangoes.” “Ashes of brides blow on the wind. Do you dare inhale?” “For every man who goes hungry, five women starve. Their blood is in your rice.” “Watch out for women ghosts; they are all around you.”

Stout men, strong men, red-faced and round-bellied; lean men, wiry men, olive-skinned and flat-stomached, whaling away with their whips at any female found on the streets, turning weighted handles on the few who don't take the hint.

So far the two groups have not encountered one another face-to-face. Like antiphonal choruses in a Greek drama, they speak at one another across the waiting stage of the world, readying for the drama to come.

O
N
F
RIDAY, AFTER STOPPING FOR
a few groceries, Jessamine turned into her driveway and hit the code pattern on the security pad, hoping to find the garage empty and Patrick gone. He often went drinking with the half a dozen other expatriates who were his closest friends, sharing gloom and enmity among themselves and getting it out of their systems. No such luck. His car was in the garage.

In the kitchen half-melted ice filled a bowl beside the sink; a bottle of Scotch stood half-empty beside a cutting board that held a knife and shreds of lemon peel.

“Hi,” she called in a carefully neutral voice. “I'm home.”

“And how's the little working wife?” he asked from the door. The glass held at his mouth was almost empty. He'd been lying down; his sandy hair stuck out in all directions. “Here she is to break my tedium. Maybe she can fix the TV, it's on the blink.”

“It was fine this morning. I watched the news.”

“The movie channels are all messed up. I can't tell a boob from a bottom.”

“Tragic for you.”

“Boring. So. Amuse me. What exciting tales of the office and labs does she have to relate?”

“Not much, Pat. Sorry. One dull meeting, otherwise same old cross-match project.”

“Ah, yes. Same old, same old. Same old Jessy. Same old Pat. Aren't you a little tired of that?” The rhyme came out unintended, surprising him, and he giggled, the sound that identified an intermediate stage of drunkenness. Past the early cozy, sexy stage, but not yet nasty. Into that little-boy stage, ain't we devils, hyuck, hyuck. If he went on, he'd get nasty, then weepy, then he'd be sick, and finally he'd fall asleep. Jessamine had it down to a mantra: sexy, funny, nasty—weepy, sicky, out.

She dropped into a kitchen chair. “Well, Pat, I'm not tired to the point of desperation yet. Are you?”

“Yeah,” he said, dropping all pretense, setting the glass on the table, pulling out a chair for himself, spearing her with a jabbed index finger, all at once blearily businesslike. “I'm tired of it, Jess. I want something for me. I want you to go back to California with me. I want you to have a baby for me. I want a son.”

She took one long, shuddering breath, then another. Well, well, well. So he'd been waiting for her, getting his demands all marshaled.

“I've thought about it,” she said, forcing herself to be calmly reasonable. “And I don't want to be part of the senescent fertility movement, Pat. I think it's obscene.”

He raised an eyebrow, his lips sneered. “What happened to love, honor, and obey, Jess?”

“I never said ‘obey,' Pat. And I've always honored you.”

“You call this honor!” His gesture included the house, the state of affairs, everything.

She shut her eyes wearily. “I didn't cause the earthquake, Pat. When Bio-Tech moved here, you chose to come with me. And you chose to turn down all the jobs you were offered once we got here.” None of them had been world shaking, true, but some of them had been interesting, and any of them might have led to something better.

“Well, now I choose something else. And if you won't do what I want for a change, then t'hell with you, I want a divorce.”

She recoiled from that anger as from a snake, her skin prickling, her mind seeking cover, a moment's dizzy cowering before she rejected such evasion. He had only said what she herself had thought recently, what she'd said to Val, what she'd almost hoped Patrick would say, so she wouldn't have to.

Her reply surprised even her with its tone of weary composure. “Then let's have a divorce. Whenever you like.”

His eyes opened wide, as though he'd been struck, hit from some totally unexpected quarter. “J-j-just like that?”

“What do you want me to say, Pat? We've had two children, Peg and Carlotta. That's the number we agreed on. I'm not going to be dosed with hormones to bring one more child into a world that's already dying from excess people. But that's only my point of view. Yours is yours. You want to get back into politics, and you've said yourself that you have the wrong religion to have a political future here in Utah. I presume you will have a future if you move back to California.”

“I've been ap-approached by the Alliance. They wan' me for a candidate, yeah,” he snarled, trying to be dignified and succeeding only in sounding drunkenly spiteful.

Another deep breath. “The Alliance. They've always claimed to be nonpartisan. Are they sponsoring candidates these days?”

“Now they are. An' they have an inner—interesting platform.” He stared at her blearily, the drink dissolving his normally well-defined features, turning him sodden. “And maybe you're right, I need somebody a little younger.…”

“All right, Pat. If you say so.”

“You don't even sound like you care!”

She laughed, truly amused. “I'm up on the social and mating habits of primates, Pat, so they don't surprise me much. Any more than Bettiann's baby boy looking a lot like you surprised me much. If you really want a son, adopt him. I understand William would let him go cheap.”

He said furiously, “Goddamn. You didn' say a word, and you knew all along!”

Had he really thought she hadn't? She wasn't stupid, or blind. Bettiann had had miscarriages, one after the other. William had a low sperm count, so she said. And then, suddenly, February 4, 1970, nine months after their first meeting in San Francisco, a fine red-haired baby boy. So let it alone. She shouldn't have mentioned it.

Pat wouldn't leave it alone. “You didn't say anything! You never even acted upset!”

“Pat, if you want the honest-to-God truth, I had mixed emotions. I was a tiny bit angry for me. I was a tiny bit glad for Bettiann, because she wanted so badly to give William a son. And I was a tiny bit curious as to how you managed it, considering
Bettiann's problem with intimacy. What did you do? Get her drunk? Convince her you could cure her? Or did you do it with your clothes on?”

The anger leaked away, leaving his face vacant and rather foolish. “All right,” he mumbled. “So you knew. So all right.”

Abruptly, he heaved himself up and ran for the bathroom off the front hall. She heard him vomiting noisily, heard water running. He'd gone right through nasty to sick without stopping at the weepy stage, where he usually complained about his mother's having preferred Pat's sister to him. Thank God for small favors. She laughed, cried a little, shook her head at herself, unable to decide whether this was tragedy or farce.

Whatever it was, finish it. Don't let it die a lingering, painful death. Put an end to it. When he didn't return to the kitchen, she went looking for him, finding him supine on his bed, arm over his eyes.

“Do you feel like talking?”

He
arummed
at her, gave what passed for a nod.