Gibbon's Decline and Fall (61 page)

“ ‘Learning even this superficial information has cost several agents their lives, none of them FBI because we've been told to keep our hands off. With the help of some friends in the IRS, we have been able to trace some Alliance income sources. Though most support comes from Mideast oil, I've been more professionally interested in support from inside the U.S. I've enclosed information that may surprise you. Or maybe not
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“ ‘Last item: No one has any information on Webster. We didn't know anything about his father and we don't know anything about him. Except for the difference in age, they could both be the same man. This one is said to have succeeded his father as head of the Alliance about forty years ago
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“ ‘Destroy this after reading
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“ ‘Mike.' ”

Carolyn passed out the papers that had come with the letter. They moved from hand to hand, quietly rustling. Agnes muttered brokenly.

“What?” murmured Fay.

“This sheet traces the flow of money from a certain archdiocese in the U.S.,” she said in a tight voice.

“Was that why your archbishop wanted to cut off the money for your school?” asked Carolyn. “So he could support this?”

“I don't know,” Aggie said, pushing the pages away. “The Church does want us to return to our more … traditional roles.”

Ophy looked at her curiously, wondering at her tone. “How do you feel about that?”

“Perhaps … perhaps it's time we did,” Aggie said.

“You don't mean that,” whispered Faye.

“I'm not sure. Perhaps I do. Perhaps I've been misled, about a lot of things.…”

Ophy shook her head as she leafed through the papers on her lap. “There's a Hasidic group here that's supporting the Alliance. They're pouring money from the diamond trade into Alliance coffers. Their headquarters is just down the street from Misery. I've treated some of the women.”

Jessamine murmured, “And I seem to have been working for other supporters of theirs. The NRA supports them, too. And the so-called prolife people. Shit.”

Bettiann asked, “What does he mean, the FBI has been told to keep their hands off?”

Carolyn said, “The one and only time I ever saw Webster was at the FBI. Albert took me there when I was about eighteen. Webster was with the FBI director, which would lead me to assume the top FBI people may be members of the Alliance.”

They did not have many questions. The pages were numerous. The ones that might have been hard to understand had been notated in a precise hand with arrows and parenthetical explanations.

“Shall we burn them as Mike requested?” asked Carolyn.

“Yes,” said Faye. “Quickly. This is all disgusting.”

She crumpled the papers, lit a spill from the stove, and set them alight, pushing the unburned portions into the flame. A thin smoke rose into the last of the sunset, drifting, dissipating. A small wind stirred the few tiny scraps of paper that had only partially burned. They sat looking at the ashes, stunned, seeing there all their lives and purposes, reduced to ashes. If the Alliance succeeded, there would be no women doctors, sculptors, scientists. There would be no women lawyers or philanthropists or managers of fisheries. Though Aggie was pretending that might be a good thing, that's all it was. Pretense.

Darkness swallowed up sight. Each of them went to her own sleeping place and lay there, staring at the stars popping out in the darkening sky, listening to cricket noises. Then Carolyn sat up, aware of another sound. To the north a chopper passed and returned, passed and returned. They all heard it, whop, whop, whop, nearing, then fading; low, then high, like a circling mosquito.

It began to come toward them. To the north Carolyn saw a light from the sky.

“Quickly,” she cried. “Gather up your stuff and get into the car. All of it. Hurry!”

They variously rolled or leaped from sleeping bags, gathered up bags and clothing, ran or hobbled toward the Land Rover. Ophy ran back to get something. Carolyn seized up the stove by its handle. The sounds of the chopper were coming closer as they struggled into or behind the car, against the clay wall.

“Roll down the outside windows,” Carolyn instructed. “So they won't reflect light. Put the sleeping bags out to cover
the sides of the car. Ophy, put your sleeping bag over the windshield and top.”

She herself reached through the open window and turned the rearview mirror down, away from the sky.

The whop whop whop came closer, louder.

“Lolly,” whispered Jessamine. “She's still out there!”

She started to get out, but Carolyn grabbed her arm. “Leave her. She's all rolled up. If she doesn't wake …”

Then the chopper was above them, its searchlight probing the desert, peering behind yuccas and into arroyos, setting skeletal chollas into glaring relief. The light slipped through the mesquite above them without stopping. It crossed the place they had sat to have their supper, slipping through the ashes of Mike's document, scattered gray on a soil almost as gray. It slipped across Lolly's huddled form in its olive-drab bedroll, and went on south without stopping, a dark dragonfly shape against the stars, supported on its narrow beam of light. When it had gone some distance, it turned west.

Worldlessly, Ophy put her sleeping bag along the wall of the arroyo in the shadow, then lay down once more. Without comment the others followed suit.

“Sophy said she had an enemy,” said Carolyn into the silence. “She spent her life trying to save women, and she said she had an enemy. She must have known about the Alliance.”

No one offered comment. The helicopter noise diminished, the night filled with cricket noises once more, and eventually, uneasily, they slept.

In Calcutta, Paris, Durban, Adelaide; in Beijing, Osaka, St. Petersburg, Stockholm; in Buenos Aires, Lima, Mexico City, Rangoon; in cities all around the world, as evening came, old women assembled under cover of the dusk. Up out of the clamorous hollows of subways, down from the attics of abandoned warehouses, out of doorways, out of alleys, out of the back doors of neat houses in the suburbs, out of all-night do-it-yourself laundries, out of shelters and slum warrens, from behind Dumpsters, and out of shacks they came, drifting together like tattered leaves blown by an autumn wind, swirling, casually turning, joining in larger drifts that went spiraling down streets and alleys to join others already there
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“Did you hear the beast baying?” they asked one another. “Just as the sun went down, did you hear it?”

In the same cities, as dark fell, men came out of bars onto the sidewalks, muttering among themselves, small clots of them swaggering
off in one direction or another to meet another little clot, also swaggering along. Trucks with rifle racks and NRA bumper stickers pulled over to the sides of the streets and men got out. Police cars ghosted to a stop under overpasses, in dark alleys, and officers got out to join other men on the street corners. When the marchers with their robes and whips and drums came along, men were already there, lined up along the sidewalks, watching, ready to join the procession
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“The summons,” they told one another eagerly. “It's the summons …

When dark came, there were no young women on the street. Not one, Not a twentyish waitress just getting off. Not a thirtyish clerk who'd worked late taking inventory. Not a female officer, all of whom had called in sick or decided to catch up on paperwork or gotten tied up somewhere on a case. There were not even any rebellious teens, with their ratty hair and short skirts. The men had been summoned (so they thought, assumed, had been told) to go hunting, but there was no one on the streets for them to hunt. They were there to strike a counterblow for … for something or other. To let them know they couldn't get away with it anymore
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But there was no them on the streets at all
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A far-off mutter, a whisper, like wind in the grass. A lifted nostril, a raised upper lip, a stag scenting the wind, a bull nosing the air
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“Women down there,” said one to another, pointing with his chin, jutting his jaw in the direction of downtown. “I can smell 'em.”

“Women down there,” said another. “He can tell.”

So the lines turned as men began to walk, without rhythm at first, then gradually to march in time with the pom, pom, pom of the drums
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Somewhere in the direction of their march, the old women waited
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The DFC did not sleep long. Carolyn woke suddenly to the sound of a cat purring, a kettle boiling, a purling noise off somewhere in the darkness. She rolled out of the sleeping bag and stood for a moment in the chill air, naked-legged, turning to find a direction. The sound was coming from the west, she thought. Perhaps a little south of west.

She shook Faye awake, then Ophy, then the others, telling them to get dressed, gather their stuff together, just in case they had to take off in a hurry. The noise came nearer, and
then sound became visible, a glow, a halo, a ball of pale-yellow light rolling toward them in the night. When it came nearer, they saw it was a bus, a vehicle faded to the pale organic yellow of late-fall aspen leaves, a fleeting gold aging to gray. When it stopped beside them, they could make out the words “Lizard Rock Public Schools” in peeling letters below the windows.

The door opened. A very old man came down the steps. He smoked a pipe redolent of woods and mosses and resins, aromatic, exotic, an odor evocative of forests, perhaps even of jungles. The assemblage of bus, man, and smoke was so unexpected that Carolyn felt herself deactivated, able only to stand staring at the vehicle and its driver while her mind sought for the difference between dream and reality and her hand furtively scratched her leg where something had bitten her during her brief sleep. None of the others was more capable than she. All of them stared as she did, as silently and as astonished.

It was Lolly who walked barefooted across the chill sand to stand spraddled before the old man, rubbing her belly with unselfconscious vigor. “Hi!” she said.

“Hi,” he replied.

“Did you know my grandma? Her name was Immaculata Corazon.”

“I knew her when she was a little girl.”

“Her sisters lived down here. Their names are Okeah, and Setwon, and Toulenae.”

“That is true.”

“They do live here! They really do!”

He nodded. Lolly turned and came toward Carolyn. “Did you hear him? He says my grandma's sisters still live here!”

“I heard him,” said Carolyn.

The old man raised his voice a little. “Was a helicopter looking for you, a little after sundown?”

No one commented on that. Faye zipped up her trousers and stepped into her boots before approaching the old man. “Where is she?”

“She?”

“Sovawanea aTesuawane. You wouldn't be here unless you knew we were here. You wouldn't know we were here unless somebody was expecting us. She's the only one who would be.”

“Ah.” He tapped his head reflectively. “You are clever.”

“No,” she said. “I just lack time for politeness or preliminary. She isn't dead, is she?”

He shrugged. “What is death, after all?” His English was unaccented, pure, without hint of origin.

Jessamine said, “ ‘There'll be more to birth than being born, and less to death than dying.' Sophy wrote that to me, after my child and grandchild were killed. ‘So long as earth bears golden corn, and hears the wild wings flying.' ”

“Yes,” the old man said again. “While there are yet growing things and the flights of birds wrapping the world, there is continuance. Are you ready to go?”

“The person, people, in the helicopter,” said Carolyn. “Do you know who they were?”

“They are only servants. A man named Keepe. A man named Martin. One man called Jagger.”

“Servants?”

“Of a creature who was not born, ever.”

“That's a riddle.”

“Perhaps, but he smells to me like an unborn one. A crawler out of time.”

“That sounds just lovely,” snarled Faye. “And you've come for us?”

“Surely. When you're ready to go. Put your things in the bus. I will bring you back to your car later.”

Carolyn locked the Land Rover and followed the others onto the straw-yellow vehicle, which was rather better inside than out. It had half a dozen worn but comfortable seats toward the front, a cargo area behind them, and then a partitioned space that looked lived in. Several sacks of scratch grain and pig chow were piled by the side door.

The bus belied its outward appearance by starting smoothly, almost soundlessly, and moving effortlessly south-westward across the desert, its headlights disclosing little rutty roads that ran north and south and southwest, the wheels sometimes traveling along them for a short distance, never for more than a few hundred yards, then swerving off onto desert once more, turning to miss clumps of twisted gray mesquite, disturbing no leaf. Carolyn, who was nearest the back, leaned out the open window to feel the spin of tiny dust devils. In the dim light of the taillights, she could see no wheel tracks left upon the sand.

Faye was riding with her head tipped onto the seat back, eyes shut, face very lean and drawn. Skull-like, thought Carolyn,
putting the image away from her in revulsion. Maybe Ophy had found out what was wrong. Agnes had not said a word since rising and seemed disinclined to do so now. She had her rosary in her hands and two hectic patches of color stained her cheeks. Ophy and Jessamine sat together, talking about something technical, as though they were on a tour. Bettiann was nearest Carolyn, her face quiet and empty, hands folded in her lap. Lolly had curled up on a seat, head pillowed on her arms, and was asleep again, like some small animal. She seemed able to sleep at any time, in any place. All she needed was a bushy tail to cover her eyes.