Stone Junction (36 page)

‘Another difference.’

‘Yes. You’re innocent, and I’m experienced.’

‘This morning we were equals.’

‘And so we are. And so are innocence and experience. As are space and time. But as much as I enjoy our little metaphysical chats, I must go explore possibilities for practical application in circumstances we do not control.’

‘And I stay here, working to improve our control and the possibilities for imaginative application. Any instructions?’

Volta said, ‘Walk down to the river and back every morning.’

Daniel waited for a moment before asking, ‘That’s it?’

‘Yes. Beyond that, proceed as you deem wise or as you damn well please or any combination thereof. You take responsibility now. It’s yours to do or fail. Just don’t mistake your abilities for the truth. Don’t worry about the transmissions coming in; they’ll be shuttled. I’ll be back within a week. Don’t run amok. Don’t delude yourself. We need you.’

Volta drove slowly down the mountain. Red Freddie, flying in from Big Sur, wouldn’t arrive at the airstrip till dark. Volta had left early to get away from Daniel and radios and his own weariness. He planned to wait down by the river at the airstrip. Just sit in the sunlight and watch it flow. The summons to New Mexico meant everything was going to start moving fast. He didn’t think Daniel was ready and he wasn’t sure he was either. He hoped the daily trek to the North Fork and back would slow Daniel down. Daniel was too enthralled with the power of vanishing. Certainly Daniel seemed to have the gift for it, if not always the necessary understanding. That was the trouble with youth: power without point. And Daniel still didn’t trust him. Volta smiled behind the wheel. Daniel would trust him even less if he knew that nerve-gas canister was actually one of Mott’s polyresin sculptures from his True Cubism period, a birthday present from ten years ago. But that was the good thing about youth: it was gullible.

It was a steep two-hour scramble down to the North Fork and a tough four-hour pull back up. Daniel had expected to see the river gliding smooth and bright along a wide plain; instead, high with the late winter runoff, it was brawling through a narrow, boulder-strewn gorge. The roar of the coffee-colored water was so loud he didn’t hear the bear crashing through the thin screen of stunted willows toward him. Fortunately, he saw it. He threw a piece of handy driftwood at the bear, and in the same moment vanished. He moved behind the willows, reappeared, and watched. The bear was standing motionless, peering at the stick Daniel had thrown, occasionally wriggling his nose along its length. He touched it with a paw. When it didn’t leap at him, he picked it up in his jaws. Daniel was astonished when the bear shambled down to the river’s edge and almost delicately released the stick into the swift current.

Going to the river each morning was Daniel’s favorite part of the program he developed for himself. Food was a close second. The fresh air and exercise, coupled with a full recovery from Charmaine’s flu, unleashed a tremendous hunger. He ate a huge pre-dawn breakfast before he left for the river. When he returned at noon, it took at least two hours to prepare and demolish lunch. From two to five he read from Volta’s small but excellent library, followed by three hours of dinner. That left eight to nine for vanishing practice. He wasn’t sure if it was perversity or respect, but he followed Volta’s program, vanishing once a day for an additional minute each time. He did this with an ease that quickly became boring. Though Volta hadn’t seemed overly impressed, Daniel felt he’d found the secret – imagining himself invisible by recreating his state of mind, bypassing the mirror, the fall, the fear, leaping the wall instead of drilling through it. If he didn’t have to fight his way through, the energy saved could be used to sustain his stay in invisibility. Daniel was confident he could vanish for an hour easily. The twenty minutes he’d done to impress Volta hadn’t even strained him.

Jump out.

Jump back.

Simple.

Returning from his seventh trip to the river, wondering how much longer Volta would be gone, Daniel spotted a huge deer browsing in a clearing across the draw. It was the biggest deer he’d ever seen. His intuition told him it was a buck, but he couldn’t see any horns. It moved like a buck. Chagrined, he remembered it was late March and the antlers shed in mid-winter would have barely started growing back. He decided to take a closer look. The draw between them was choked with brush, but was no obstacle to those with powers. Daniel vanished, and instead of walking through it, walked it through him.

Daniel’s odor evidently vanished with him since the deer continued feeding, apparently oblivious, as he approached. Daniel noted the swollen, velvety knobs where the new antlers were forming and congratulated his intuition. He thought,
If nothing else, this invisibility
gets you in close, lets you see the world without the influence of your presence
. Yet the closeness was wrong somehow – a voyeur’s intimacy, hollow because it wasn’t reciprocated, sterile because it lacked permission.

Daniel spread his arms out wide and reappeared, announcing cheerfully, ‘
Good
morning, fellow creature!’

The deer replied by leaping twenty feet straight up, executing a ninety-degree turn in the air. It was already running before it landed. A rear hoof nailed Daniel squarely in the center of his forehead, dropping him to his knees. Hands covering his face, fingertips pressed to the wound as if to hold back the pain, he listened to the buck crash loudly downhill through the brush.

Daniel was examining his forehead in the living room mirror when Volta walked in. Daniel jumped as high as the deer.

‘Pardon me,’ Volta said, ‘I didn’t know you were back.’

‘Me either,’ Daniel yammered. ‘That you were.’

Volta narrowed his gaze. ‘What happened?’

‘I hit my head.’

Volta stepped closer, took Daniel’s head firmly in his hands, and tilted it toward the light. ‘It looks like you were hit with a cloven hoof.’

Daniel twisted his head free and stepped back out of reach.

Volta shot his right arm out, pointing a trembling finger inches from the wound. He bellowed, ‘You bear the mark of Satan! I leave you for
one week
and you’re claimed among his hellish clan, flesh for his flames, fuel for his sick desires!’

‘All right, goddammit,’ Daniel snapped, ‘a deer kicked me in the head.’ He waited, expecting Volta’s laughter.

Instead, Volta said wearily, ‘Well, are you all right?’

‘Yeah, fine,’ Daniel grunted. He looked at Volta more closely. His eyes were raw and glazed with exhaustion, his face haggard. ‘I’m fine,’ Daniel repeated, ‘but you don’t look so good.’

‘I shouldn’t. It’s been seven long days of nervous waiting for bad news. I’ll give you the grim details after dinner, and we’ll consider possible approaches.’

‘Is it really that grim?’

‘Look at it this way, Daniel:
you
are the only break we’re getting.’

Daniel wasn’t sure what that was supposed to reveal. He was still considering when Volta said, ‘How’s the deer’s hoof?’

‘It bounded away nicely, thank you.’

‘That deer must have been truly startled – as if you appeared right in front of him, out of nowhere.’

Daniel wanted to discuss more successful applications of invisibility. ‘Vanishing saved me from a bear.’

‘I wasn’t being critical, Daniel. I’m glad to see it wasn’t all work and no play in my absence.’

‘Other than the bear – which was necessity – and the deer – which was convenience and curiosity – I stuck exactly to your program.’

‘Thank you. Was that out of perversity or respect?’

‘I’m not sure. Probably some of each.’

‘I appreciate your candor. I would also appreciate it if you would cook dinner this evening and not disturb me till it’s ready. I’ve been up thirty hours and have spent the last three on the radio making thousands of tiny, interlinked decisions, some of which may prove crucial to our success. It has lately been forced on my reluctant attention that I’m getting old. No complaints – I am ready to be old – but I can no longer go two days without sleep. I’m tired, Daniel. I’m going to bed.’

‘Dinner around six?’ Daniel said.

Volta nodded in gratitude. ‘Bless you.’

While he was mashing potatoes, Daniel thought of a foolproof way to steal the Diamond. He could hardly wait to cheer up Volta. But when Daniel announced at dinner that he’d thought of a way to steal the Diamond, Volta brusquely said, ‘It can wait. Let’s devote our dinner conversation to a subject appropriate to the season, the erotic unfurling of Spring. Let’s talk about blow jobs.’

Daniel nearly dropped his fork. ‘What?’

‘Blow jobs. Cock-sucking. Fellatio. Let’s talk in particular about two blow jobs: the one you received the night before your mother died and one I was forced to witness while in jail.’

Daniel said, stunned, ‘You sent that girl, didn’t you?’

‘Daniel, think. I absolutely lack the imagination or style to garner information through sexual duplicity, sweet though it might have been. I’m convinced you didn’t tell this Miss Bardo anything that might have compromised the plutonium theft or jeopardized your mother, otherwise you wouldn’t have told me that you thought your mother’s death wasn’t accidental. But that doesn’t mean Miss Bardo couldn’t have found something – a note, a diary – or, acting as an agent for others, placed a bug in the house, or planted an electronic locator in a pocket of your lowered pants.’

Daniel was shaking his head. ‘How do you know she was there if you didn’t send her?’

‘I didn’t until you just confirmed it. Shamus talked to a McKinley Street neighbor of yours who had hosted the party from which your young ladyfriend wandered. The same young lady who announced, upon returning, that she’d just “come back from the Horsehead Nebula down the street” where she’d “sucked a young boy’s dick till his brain tore loose,” or words to that effect.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘Dolly Varden. Shamus called to use her as a go-between again.’

‘Between who?’

‘I’m not sure. I think he just wants you to know he knows, see how you respond.’

‘So he thinks I told Brigit, or that she was an agent. An agent for who?’

‘I have no idea how he’s thinking, Daniel. Dolly says he’s gone insane – not obviously, but she has an unerring sense for madness. He’s evidently been drinking hard for the past year, and the whiskey, grief, and guilt have dragged him over the edge. It wouldn’t surprise me if he thinks
I’m
somehow implicated, having brought you into AMO and favored you as a student, or for any number of demented reasons.’

‘I have no response,’ Daniel said, ‘except to say I didn’t tell her anything. We hardly talked. She was stoned. Really stoned. And if she was an agent, she wouldn’t have gone back to the party and announced it.’

‘I think that’s a fair and measured reply for the circumstances. You can talk to Dolly directly if you want, or I can just radio your answer.’

‘Go ahead. I have other things to concentrate on.’

‘Indeed. The second blow job, for instance.’ And Volta proceeded to recount the sergeant’s savage humiliation of the young boy, and how he’d been tempted to vanish and intervene, and why he hadn’t, and then seeing the Diamond in the mirror.

Daniel listened, sickened, slowly coming to understand the Diamond’s importance to Volta. ‘I think I get it,’ he said when Volta concluded. ‘If the Diamond is like the one you saw in the mirror, then it in some way confirms your decision not to vanish and try to stop it?’

‘Or rewards it. But something like that, yes.’

‘I think I would have tried to stop it. I’m not judging you, though, or no more than I’m judging myself.’

‘Of course you are. Not that you can. I was at a point with vanishing – a point you haven’t reached, and perhaps won’t – where I felt certain that if I disappeared even once more, I would not come back. Which meant I could have only borne invisible witness to that boy’s degradation, just as helpless as I was locked in my cell. If and when you come to that point yourself, see how you judge me then.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Daniel said. ‘You sound defensive.’

‘Perhaps you’ve mistaken it for my annoyance at your glib judgments.’

‘Nope, I know
that
tone well. And really, I wasn’t criticizing your decision so much as …’ Daniel let the thought trail off, having realized Volta’s defensive tone had nothing to do with the decision he’d made in the cell.

Volta cocked his head. ‘Yes?’

‘The sergeant. Whatever happened to him?’

Volta nodded slightly and gave Daniel a weary smile. ‘I’m not sure if I should commend your insight or lament my transparency.’

Daniel waited for an answer.

Volta pushed his plate back. ‘The sergeant crawled under his bed, put his service revolver in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. This was four years later.’

‘Why?’ Daniel said.

‘Because I poured terror on his guilt.’

Daniel remembered Wild Bill’s mention of Ravens. ‘How did you do it?’

‘Slowly,’ Volta said. ‘It was almost a hundred days before he snapped, a hundred days believing that the kid’s ghost had sent me to exact revenge, a hundred days of raw fear to convince him justice would not be denied.’

‘I wouldn’t argue about the justice,’ Daniel said, ‘but it’s still murder.’

‘I won’t dispute your judgment – except to say AMO has been debating the fine moral points of the issue for centuries, and to no conclusion.’

Daniel was shaking his head. ‘No, not the fine points, just the fact: You drove him to do it. I can understand that. But why torment him? That’s different. That’s cruel. Why not just walk up and shoot him? A hundred days… that’s what I don’t understand. I just can’t believe you could do that.’

‘Could
you
, Daniel? Suppose your mother was set up, with cold premeditation, to be killed in that alley. What would
you
do?’

‘Try to find out who did it.’

‘Assumed. And when you were certain who’d done it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Daniel sighed. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘I didn’t either,’ Volta said, ‘till I found out. Let me tell you what I learned. I didn’t enjoy it. I’m not proud of it. I’m not ashamed. I never did it again. And I want you to know you’re the only person I’ve ever told. It wasn’t sanctioned by the Alliance; it was personal business. I obviously trust you’ll honor it as a strict confidence.’