Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle (31 page)

Mercedes lifted her head enough to take a shallow breath. Jack could feel her heart beat all the way through him. In pretty much any other circumstance—but the strange rage that possessed her at the street had fled, and she was beginning to lean into him more and more in nervous exhaustion. Jack could tell she was scared, and wished fervently there was something he could do in the way of reassurance. Not that he was feeling all that confident himself!

Slowly, he lowered his free hand to her shoulder. Watching Kyle carefully, Jack then began brushing his fingertips through the fine hairs on the back of Mercedes’ neck, gently stroking the tension out of her fear-tangled tendons. Her skin was velvet-soft.

It seemed a strange thing to do, but it worked. Her body slowly relaxed. Mercedes sighed, a sound he felt more than heard, and rested her forehead against the crook of Jack’s arm.

By the time Mercedes’ heart had begun to slow, Kyle and his companion had reached the McDade’s front yard. They continued onward to the next corner and split up, one taking the new street in front of the house and the other jogging up the increasingly inclined blacktop to the next block. As soon as he was able, Jack eased himself and Mercedes around the base of the walnut tree.

They crossed the street on quiet feet, eyes riveted on the back of the retreating Goatee. Mercedes’ feet scuffed once on the bottom of a dry mud puddle that heralded the entrance to an unpaved alleyway, and then they were out of sight.

But not out of danger
. Loud enough and they can still get you, Jack,
a dry voice whispered in the forefront of his mind. He and Mercedes raced as quickly as they could up a paved path that ran between two cement walls. Their footsteps echoed loudly around them, thunderously loud to Jack’s ears. He stole a look at Mercedes, and she grinned back, tired but fierce. It must have been the adrenaline, but he had to admit he was having
fun!

They entered a driveway cluttered by the skeleton and approximations of a disassembled Army Jeep, and stopped in front of another cedar fence. “Friend of mine lives here,” Jack said. “Kind of eccentric.” As he spoke he pushed hard against the upper end of the fence, and a three-foot section swung up from the bottom, pivoting soundlessly on hinges that gleamed in the diffused light.

Mercedes put her hand out. “Wait. Does your friend have a dog or anything?”

“No, well; yes. Sort of. It’s a Yorkie.”

He led the way into the darkness beyond, then let the fence down slowly. On the other side of the small yard, they climbed up the stones of a rough rock wall, pushed over the knots of ivy at the top, and stood on the hillside. They could see over and between the nearby roofs all the way to the main street, where the white Ford still sat at an angle in the intersection.

The foliage was thicker along the base of the hill than Jack remembered, but he had never run the footpath in the dark. A lighter line of dirt against the grassy slope marked the trail, and he beckoned Mercedes into the trees. More light from the town actually reached them over the roofs of the houses, but they still had to pick their way with care upward through the thickening pines. Mercedes was soon breathing deeply. Somewhere between when Jack stepped sideways on a pinecone and when Mercedes tripped on a protruding rock, they started holding hands. Funny. Jack couldn’t remember the trail being wide enough to accommodate two.

A pleasant breeze bent the heads of the long grass and carried with it all the fragrance of the midsummer night. Even in their haste, Jack took a moment to point out a bed of wild evening primrose to Mercedes, and smiled as she squealed and bent over the butter-yellow blossoms with delight. Their sweet scent mingled with those of clover and Indian paintbrush that grew in the shelter of the pines on the south-facing slope. Jack took a deep breath. The air was so sweet and clean. Everything in that night was sharper.

The trail leveled out at a flat area several hundred feet wide where the trees were sparse. In the center of the meadow stood two great bull pines, thrusting up royally into the star-bedecked sky. A third pine lay in the curve of earth where it had fallen, its prodigious bole held in a cluster of boulders. Wordlessly they clambered over the rocks to the tree. Wind and a season on the ground had managed to strip away much of the beautifully fissured bark, but the iron-colored trunk was still sound.

“Think they’ll look for us up here?” asked Mercedes as they sat.

“I doubt it,” Jack replied. “But even if they do, by the time they climb up this far they’ll be too tired to do anything about it.”

The wide canyon spread the city out below, and Jack and Mercedes had come far enough to be able also to see several miles up the Clearwater River. The enclosing mountains were quilted in fields and forests, tan and blue under the starlight.

Jack looked over at Mercedes. The faint town lights cast her features in a pale glow. She reached back and removed the tie holding her ponytail in place, and her hair slid back in an unbroken, argentine wave past her shoulders. She flexed her fingers inside the elastic tie, still gazing down, absorbing the vast panorama. “Isn’t this view incredible?”

“Yes,” he blurted without turning away, and grinned. She started at the speed of his answer, then returned his grin shyly. Jack wished he could tell if she was blushing. He ran his tongue over his lower lip. Now would be the time to say something romantic, if he could just decide what that might be.

Mercedes snapped the hair tie around her wrist, and said, “Did I hear you right at the library when you said you used to be fat?”

He blinked. This was an interesting turn in the conversation. “Yup. You wouldn’t believe it–and we’re not just talking chunky, Mercedes. I had dreams I was the round kid from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I’ve been wearing the same size jeans since I was ten.”

She laughed. “That’s nothing. Just be glad you didn’t grow up with my grandmother feeding you. Everybody used to call me the Pillsbury Doughgirl.”

“You? No way!” Jack tried to imagine a younger, mega-chinned Mercedes and failed. “What did you eat?”

“What
didn’t
I eat? My cousins were the worst. They got this weird kick off of seeing how much I could hold. Ack!” She held her side, remembering. “They even made me put peanut butter on pizza.”

Jack thumbed his chest. “
Slathered
butter on saltine crackers.” This was fun. “Sometimes I would sneak slices of bread to bed by hiding them in my pajamas.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Hah! Poptarts instead of bread. In my underwear.”

“Yuck! All those empty nutrients? How about this: three big bowls of cereal as an afternoon snack? Can you top that?”

“Sure. Butterscotch-flavored toothpaste.”

“So?”

“I used to eat it.”

Jack started to laugh, then caught himself. “But can’t that kill you?”

She leaned toward him. “Depends on how much chocolate milk you need to wash it down.” Mercedes started to laugh.

“Drank maple syrup straight from the bottle,” he shot back.

“No!” She squirmed with laughter, and Jack chuckled at her hysterics. She nearly fell off the log. Heh. Mercedes one, Jack one.

“You have an odd way of saying things,” she said at last.

“I watch a lot of old movies.” He looked pointedly at her grin. “When you smile, you look a little bit like Stanley Laurel.”

“Stan Laurel? Black-and-white movie Stan? Thin guy, crazy hair, wiggly ears?”

“Can you wiggle your ears?” he asked.

“That would make you Oliver Hardy.”

“The fat man’s fat man,” he agreed.

They sat on the log for a while then without speaking, and found the lull in the conversation had become a companionable hush. Slowly the sounds of night stirred up from the trees and long grass around them. Crickets began to sing. A bat breathed by above, flapping twice around the two bull pines before heading off to hunt field mice. Jack rarely came here at night; he was struck by how vivid and crisp the stars were, despite the upwash of Forge’s streetlights and candy-neon signs.

A shooting star sliced by overhead, and Mercedes pointed to it before it vanished over the horizon. Jack rubbed his eyes. She sure was quick. They grinned at each other with childlike excitement, then turned skyward again.

Jack took a deep breath, hesitant to break the cricket’s music. “So, how come you learned to speak Italian so well?” he whispered.

Mercedes smiled faintly. “My mom’s family, back in San Francisco, is pretty much all Italian. Do you know much about the Bay Area?”

He shook his head.

“Well, if you go into North Beach, be careful. You can hardly turn around without falling over one of my cousins. North Beach is full of my relatives from Florence; they’ve been coming over a few at a time since, well, since the city got started. Have you ever heard of A.P. Giannini?”

Again Jack shook his head. “Nope.” He remembered the name from one high school textbook or another on American history, but he didn’t want to interrupt. Jack didn’t think he could stand it if Mercedes got the impression he was a bookworm. Besides, he didn’t want to say or do anything that might stop her from talking; if her face was beautiful in repose, it was
alive
with expression when she spoke.

This time she smiled at him. “You’re so cute, Jack. So this guy owned a bank--he just loaned money out to Italians and other poor people, even the Irish immigrants, and everybody made fun of him and his ‘little dago bank in North Beach.’ So when the big ‘quake of 1906 hit and flattened almost everything, nobody had any money. Giannini stole all the gold and cash out of his own bank and hid it underneath his fireplace. Then, when his customers needed money, he loaned it out to ‘em, but never had anybody sign any paperwork, because he knew them all personally. Cool guy. My grandfather says North Beach was rebuilt because of A.P. Giannini, his godfather.”

Jack shifted slightly. The log seemed to be getting harder under him. “So what happened to your godfather’s grandfather? Did he go broke after he gave all his money away?” It sounded a bit like something out of a Frank Capra movie.

“It’s the other way around. Grandfather’s godfather.” She laughed. “He did all right in the end. Everybody who borrowed money gave it back, with interest. Ever heard of the Bank of America? Biggest bank in the world?” When he nodded, she continued. “That’s what happened to the ‘little dago bank in North Beach.’

“Anyway, our family’s really close back home. My parents worked at the same place since I was a baby, and they’d have to leave me for a couple of months at a time when they had a special project. So my mom’s family took care of me. They didn’t mind at all–heck, they’re still convinced my dad’s going to win the Nobel Prize and prove himself worthy at last to marry my mother. They spoke nothing but Italian at home all the time I was growing up. Boy, do they know how to talk!”

“Not like you at all, though, right?”

She smiled, suddenly shy again. “Right!” She ran her hand along the steam-colored surface of the old tree. “Actually, I don’t usually talk this much.”

Jack patted her arm. “Sorry if I’m sarcastic. I like hearing about stuff like this. How come your parents left you for so long when you were little? What do they do?” Jack didn’t want to pry, but he had an idea where the conversation was beginning to go, and he wanted to let her do the talking.

“They’re–they were high-energy physicists. Most of the stuff they did was for the government, really hush-hush; they could never talk about it. They’d been doing it since before I was born. I think they were at some base in Nevada for a while, because they took me to Vegas for vacation and showed me some cool stuff, you know, out-of-the-way kinds of things. And they would teach a little at Stanford. Dad’s a good teacher. They made a great team.” She looked out over the town. “That’s what everybody says. My dad always says how Mom is the smart one–you know, the old joke about how the girl’s got great legs but she’s no rocket scientist? In this case, she was.” Jack barely caught the catch in her throat, but by the time she turned back to him, Mercedes was expressionless, ice-smooth, distant as the moon. Her tone was dead even as she spoke. “My mother died a little over a year ago.”

Jack’s mind went suddenly numb and fiery, as if he’d brushed up against an electric current. The back of his neck iced over, and he winced, scorched by the coldness of the sweat between the middle of his shoulders. She must have heard him gasp or something, because the next thing he knew, she’d slid across the log and placed her hand along his arm.

Before she could say anything, he gulped quietly and asked, “Did you get to know them? With your mom and dad being gone a lot? Did you get to know them very well?”

Concern for him etched her face, and she answered hesitatingly at first. “They were . . . great. Never spoke to me like I was a dumb kid, or too little to understand. They hated it when people spoke to me in baby-talk. I was a part of their lives. Parties, birthdays, promotions, whatever, I always got to come along.”

He smiled so she would know he was fine, a-okay, nothing amiss, just some bad escargot.

Mercedes continued. “They went out of their way to show me neat things and places, and they’d play with me. All the special occasions you’d think they would have celebrated on their own, even their wedding anniversary, they included me.” She paused. “What about your mom and dad? What are they like?”