Selection Event (24 page)

They walked in silence a full minute. Then Catrin said, “I've decided. I'll trust you, for now.”

“Fair enough.”

From the corner of his eye he noticed she was smiling to herself. “What's funny?”

“The way you look at me. I haven't been looked at that way for a long time.”

“I was trying to be discreet.”

“You're not good at it, Martin.” She was still smiling.

Back inside the capitol building, she opened the door to a rosewood-paneled plushly-carpeted room that had once been some politician's office. Now there were two children playing with blocks in the middle of the floor — a boy about nine, with dark coppery-brown skin and brown eyes, and a blue-eyed girl, three or four, in a ruffly sun dress with a single blond braid down the back of her neck.

Winch was with Martin and Catrin now and couldn't hold himself back. He sat down with them and folded his legs and introduced himself. The boy said his name was Solomon and the little girl said, “Missa,” and offered him a block, which he accepted.

“They remind me—” He paused for a moment. “—of my grandkids.”

A few seconds later, they were taking turns carefully placing a block apiece on their indescribable construction.

“I found them eating garbage,” Catrin said quietly. “They took to me right away, as though I was their mother. My own children were teenagers.”

Martin heard the past tense and glanced at her. Again, her voice was even, matter-of-fact.

Martin left Winch and Catrin and within an hour he'd had found a second car and filled its tank from other cars. They jump-started it from his station wagon and by four in the afternoon had started down Highway 99, south to Santa Miranda. Winch drove the newlyweds and Martin drove Catrin, Solomon, and Missa.

He asked her where she was from.

“Wisconsin. I was visiting my daughter.”

“You were immune.”

She nodded. Then she changed the subject. “A year underground,” she said. “Not many people could do that.”

“It probably doesn't indicate warmth of character. I came up to the surface of the earth, ready to dive back into life. I was going to propose to a woman who probably would have refused me a second time, and I was going to appreciate my parents and friends every day I was alive. I wanted to walk in crowds and be jostled, smell them, be annoyed by them, and I was going to love it, every instant of it. But it was all gone. To tell you the truth, I can't deal with being alone anymore. I don't want to risk losing anyone. If Paul and Leona had said no thanks, I would've begged. If you'd turned us down, I probably would've moved in next door.”

She gave him a pat on top of his leg. “I would not have been suspicious of your motives.”

They rode in silence for awhile, the children playing in the backseat with their blocks, Missa making garbled word sounds and Solomon pointing to the letters on the blocks and naming them for her. Martin tried to watch the countryside, noting how it had changed without the hand of man to turn its natural purpose, but he kept finding himself glancing at Catrin's face, her profile.

He decided she was probably thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and, in profile, he saw now that she had an unusual face. With her high cheekbones, square jaw line and nose that formed only a slight outward angle from her forehead, she looked slightly Asian.

“If you are wondering,” she said, “why my nose doesn't stick out like other people's, it's because when I was fourteen, I was roller skating with my hands in my pockets. It's not a favorite memory.”

“I have a friend who's interested in roller skating, and there's something I've been wondering about for a couple of weeks. Do you think a person could skate a few hundred miles on an Interstate?”

“Roller skate on a highway?” She looked at him.

“I'm thinking Nevada or Kansas, say.” He explained about Diaz and the dazzling skates in his saddle bags.

“Well, my first reaction would be to think your friend is a little loosely wrapped. But if he's in good shape, it does make a certain kind of surrealistic sense. He might be able to go thirty or forty miles a day — or night.” She shuddered. “Even after this many years, just thinking about skating gives me the creeps. I can still remember lying on the table, looking into the lights and how my nose made a grinding noise when the doctor re-set it. That's why it's this shape. Aside from my name — former name — it's my least favorite memory.”

“I think it's attractive. And the rest of your face, too.”

“Martin,” she said, crooking one leg up on the seat, “are you flirting with me already?”

“I planned on waiting till later, to find out if you were crazy or not, and if you weren't, then I was going to flirt.”

“I tend to be a little serious,” she said, “but I'm not crazy. No skeletons in any closets, no secret habits performed in solitude — or in groups. Because of my nose, I've been told that I snore sometimes.”

“If you're not crazy, I guess I could start flirting now.”

“I'm ready.”

“Would you care to live with me, Ms. Catrin?”

“Flirting goes fast these days. But, yes, I think I wouldn't mind giving it a try. Separate rooms for a while.”

“It's not like I'm the last man on earth or anything.”

“You're third from the last by my count.” She put her arm across the back of the seat and rested her warm hand on his neck.

The green weed-filled world that they drove through became beautiful.

Chapter 41

Diaz lay knocked out, loaded past the gills with his own blend of psychoactive angst relievers. Two joints of Grade B smoke spread through the day, a gram of chlorpromazine for relief of self-destructive tendencies, and an even hundred milligrams of dexedrine to keep his heart online. Sometimes he didn't know what the hell he was doing, but improvisation was, after all, the whole point during these times. Was it not?

Today he thought he was in Salt Lake City, or was it Slat Luck Suzie? Or Slut Lick Salty? Or was that his last I Ching reading? At least the drugs were working enough that he hadn't tried to kill himself in the last few days.

Most of the time he hovered in that twilight of almost waking up — exactly where he wanted to be — and the rest of the time he was unconscious and it wasn't like anything at all, and that was The Best. No hunger, no thirst, no dreams, no dead people saying “Bring me back, Diaz — I didn't want to die!” None of that when his brain waves jiggled way way down in the bottom of the tank.

One day he drifted into consciousness in a K-Mart, slumped over the checkout counter, with two coyotes sniffing his legs, probably trying to figure out if this one was dead enough to eat. His eyes came open and he watched them sniff his shoes, poke their noses up his pants cuff and sniff his skin and then look at each other.

“This one's not dead enough,” one coyote said to the other.

“We could kill him and call the others in. He looks helpless enough.”

The first coyote stood up on its back legs and rested its front paws on the checkout counter. He sniffed Diaz's nose and then snuffled around his face. “No,” it reported back to the other one, “I don't think we want to eat this one. He smells crazy.”

Diaz giggled.

“We'd get sick if we ate him,” said the coyote who looked into Diaz's eyes.

The other coyote made a disgusted cough and they both trotted into the back of the store.

Diaz got his hands positioned and pushed himself up. He had a box of crackers and a large can of grapefruit juice there on the counter with him. Gripped in one fist, he had a couple of dollar bills, a few quarters and some pennies. Evidently he had been wanting to pay someone.

The coyotes came back from the aisles, each with a large dead rat in its mouth. They glanced up at him as they trotted past, and one of them muttered to him through the rat fur, “Shape up, man.” And then they hopped through the broken front window and disappeared in the midday glare.

Diaz stared into the glare for a minute, looked back down at the can of grapefruit juice, noticed a lot of new cuts and scabs on his hands, and thought, “When rat-eaters give Diaz advice, Diaz is attentive.”

After a while he staggered back into the store collected some cans of fruit cocktail, some canned meat, a bottle of vitamin C tablets, and followed his trail of blood drops back down the street to the motel where his motorcycle still lay on its side in the parking lot.

His mood was rising. It was time to dry out.

Chapter 42

They arrived in Santa Miranda at 6:00 PM, and when Martin looked at his watch, he saw that it was June 21, probably the first day of summer — but this was no normal June 21st. A cool north breeze had turned into a cold wind, and it looked like there might be still more rain.

Isha pranced and yelped excitedly behind the gate-bars, and beside her, a yellow-eyed blob of black, Mona watched the people with measured suspicion.  

“Lassie! Lassie!” Solomon said, pointing, and going over to her. “It's Lassie!”

“You like dogs and cats?” Martin asked Catrin.

“Of course. She's beautiful. A female?”

“Her name is Isha. The cat, Mona, is technically her pet. She found her and brought her home.”

Catrin gazed at him with an amused smile. “A lovely place for a garden,” she said.

“Your cat's missing a tail,” Leona said. “Why didn't you get a normal cat?”

Winch saved Martin a dismal explanation when he came up behind Paul and Leona, and pointed at the houses across the street. “Any of those you want, you can have. That one's got a good fence around the backyard and a pool where you could keep fish.”

“I never thought I'd have a pool,” Leona said. She glowed at the prospect, but Paul seemed a bit bewildered.

Martin was thinking of the power the wedding ceremony had in breaking the barrier of unfamiliarity between all of them. They needed more of that. “I think,” he said, “we need a wedding dinner.”

“Ohh!” Leona clasped her hands in front of her breast. “I never thought....”

Even Paul grinned sheepishly.

“Show us the way to the kitchen,” Catrin said.

....

Martin put in the two table leaves, got out all the candles, and Catrin put them in a row down the middle of the table. Paul and Leona sat together on one side, their faces glowing with wine and candlelight. Catrin made their cake from frozen bread dough into which she kneaded sugar and cinnamon. Leona had brought the Mendelssohn music which played as the newlyweds held the bread knife in their clasped hands and cut the first piece.

Martin never thought he would see this kind of happiness again.

Winch whispered to him, “Gets to you, don't it.”

Martin thought, Yes it does, and wiped his eyes discreetly with the back of his hand.

 They sat and talked for a while, finishing another bottle of wine, and Martin got a clearer picture of who Paul was. Shy, above all, he was the son of a bus driver and a housewife, and his only job, the three summers between his high school years, was grilling and selling hamburgers at a fast food restaurant. This whole situation — being a survivor, being married to Leona scared the hell out of him. But, Martin thought, at eighteen, he himself would also have been a little on the tense side.

Leona, he thought, was easily excitable, didn't listen well and was a bit scatterbrained. Except, he noticed, every time questions came up about her past, she consistently managed to get completely off the subject and talk about the bird she used to have or people she knew at high school or if it might be possible to have a car of her own. Whatever out of her past she was hiding, however, it was now utterly irrelevant.

When the candles burned near their bases, Catrin said, “Martin, I'm getting awfully tired. Where can I go to bed?”

Winch nonchalantly chewed a bite of wedding cake, a faint smile on his lips, waiting to hear the answer.

“We have three bedrooms. The newlyweds can have the one on the far end of the house, out through the kitchen.” He pointed the way.

Leona nodded and said, “Okay,” while Paul studiously examined his plate.

“The kids and I can camp out in the bedroom here at the end of the hall,” Winch said. “I'll get their sleeping bags.”

“Thanks, Winch.” To Catrin he said, “You can have the room down the hall on the left.”

“Thank you,” Catrin said, a faint smile on her lips as she turned her wine glass in her hands.

....

Later, holding her against him, his hands on the silky skin of her back, Martin listened to a mockingbird outside the window trilling and whistling.

“I've known you less than a day,” she whispered.

“Life is brief.”

She snuggled closer and he felt her breath on his chest. Her skin was smooth, like soft glass, she felt like his second self. She smelled of sandalwood and skin.

Outside the mockingbird sang on and on, endless variations of its song.

Martin wanted to say something to her as pure as that, something untainted by old usage or the corruption of the past world. But he didn't yet have any words that would sing for her.