The Croning (30 page)

Holly called as he was moping before the mirror, taking gloomy stock of his stretch marks and graying chest hair. He had to run for the phone in the hall. After the operator connected them and ascertained Don would accept the charges, Holly said, “Mom there?” It was a lousy connection. Music honked and bleated in the background. His precious Holly was seldom far from a pub and its gallery of dashing riff-raff, folk-rock singers and beret-wearing activists.

“Hi, honey. How’s France treating you?”

“Yeah, hi, Don. It’s Glasgow—didn’t you get my card? Mom there?” Her accent was decidedly cosmopolitan; she sounded exactly like a BBC broadcast woman who announced special foreign news bulletins.

“She’s at work, as I’m sure you’re aware, honey.”

“Huh. I called the university earlier.” Doubtless she had called multiple times—Holly interrupted her mother’s work at least thrice weekly to report on current events or petition for more cash. It was endemic of her pathology.

“Ah, I dunno then. Everything okay?”

“What?” Her voice elevated in competition with the riotous music. Highlands metal.

“Anything wrong?”

“No! Everything’s great! Tell Mom I’ll try again tonight!”

“Love ya.” The line had already died. Don threw the phone against the wall; it burst into several satisfyingly jagged pieces that might’ve been chunks of Big Wayne’s skull in a happier world. He pulled on a shirt. He scooped the remains of the phone into the wastebasket and idly pondered the best way to keep this
faux pas
from his hawkish wife. He immediately discarded the notion. She knew all.

Michelle rumbled in, equally pissed at the world. Something about a woman working in a man’s field and how academia in general and anthropology in particular could use a nice purgative. Her mood had been savage since they’d returned from the trip to Spokane. She went straight to the liquor cabinet and fixed a drink and sulked at the kitchen table. Don pecked her cheek on his way to making a sandwich and casually mentioned that he’d be flying out of town for the better part of a week. She shrugged and smoked a cigarette, flicking ashes into her empty glass. She only perked up when he mentioned Holly called and immediately wanted to know if he’d gotten a number. He’d failed to do so, as per usual, and her glower became truly and awesomely terrible to behold.

Don fled the kitchen. He retreated to the armchair across from Kurt, who eyed him with the suspicion of a magpie. Don gestured for the boy to kill the tunes which leaked from his earphones at what were likely brain-bleeding decibels and said, “What do you think of the neighbor boy—Bronson Ford? You like him?”

Kurt frowned, an expression that had the unfortunate effect of squeezing his features into those of an anthropomorphized albino rodent. “BF? I don’t hang with kids, Pop.”

“Really? He lives right next door—”

“Um, he’s like, what, twelve or something?” Kurt rolled his eyes.

“I thought maybe you saw him around.” Don chafed to ask whether the Rourke boy had access to illicit drugs (obviously he did) and if the little refugee might be moonlighting as a junior dope pusher.
Yo, sonny, you scoring grass from that Ethiopian kid down the road? Oh, and by chance have you seen a pair of goons lurking in the shrubbery? They look like a couple narcs.

What was it the thugs in the cheap suits at the reception had said? He couldn’t pin it down, the conversation was a static-laden mumble. The thought of them frightened him a little. But so did thinking of that Bronson Ford boy. As a matter of fact, thinking of the boy caused his hands to shake. He folded his arms to hide them from an oblivious Kurt and renewed his vow to cut back on the booze forthwith.

“Get real.” Kurt jammed in his earphones. After a thoughtful moment, he lifted one muff and said to Don, “Jeezus, Pop. You and Mom are acting weird.”

Speaking of weird, that night as Don and Michelle lay in bed after a brief, furious screw, she lighted a cigarette and regarded him as she lolled in her rumpled teddy, one leg still draped over the footboard where Don had flung it. “You’re going where?”

“Nowhere. Place in the Olympics.”

“Sounds like somewhere.”

“Slango Camp. Old site in the mountains. Astra C is running some tests. Wayne asked me to fly in and check on the team. You haven’t heard of it, huh?”

She studied him and her eyes were huge and dark as they became after sex, or when she was furious, drunk, or working voodoo on him. “I’ve heard of Slango.”

“Oh. Wayne says.”

“I’m tired of Wayne bossing you around.”

“Because it interferes with
your
bossing me around.”

The room was lighted by a black candle she’d taken from the dresser drawer. Her face reminded him in its wildness of the expression she’d worn that one night at the Wolverton mansion, except less vulnerable. Her snarled hair and cruelly glistening lips, the marble tautness of her neck and bare shoulders, were those of a pagan goddess etched into one of the woodcuts she so diligently collected. A drinker of blood, killer of men, harvester of skulls, and fecund as the dark soil of the ancient forest. She was a savage druid contemplating whether to fuck him or slice his heart out with the wavy obsidian knife she stashed under her pillow. This spooked him, but it also made him hard again.

She said, “I wonder if he knew I was flying to Russia this week.”

“He doesn’t. And if he did, he wouldn’t care. Wayne suffers from an increasingly common malady among management—rectal cranial inversion.”

Michelle stubbed her cigarette into a bone ashtray she’d balanced on a cushion. She slithered on hands and knees across the bed and mounted him so he was pressed against the pile of pillows. As his cock went in, her eyes rolled back and she gripped with her knees and leaned down to kiss him softly. She said into his mouth, “Quit.”

He grabbed her waist and she slapped his hands away, snatched his wrists and pinned them to the mattress. “Quit? I can’t.” He spoke with some difficulty.

She bit his lip and moved her hips. “There’s a village way out in the taiga, in the mountains. These aren’t Inuit folk. Boris Kalamov made contact with them nine months ago, although I have a hunch he’s lying on that score. He’s a cagey bastard; might’ve found them years ago. He claims the people have seen outsiders three times in the last decade… trappers who didn’t have a blessed clue they’d stumbled across a bloody miracle of modern anthropology. Kalamov is the only scientist on the planet who is aware of their existence. He told me, that’s it. Lou was his confidante and now that Lou is gone… I’m going to participate in a ritual with the natives. Maybe. Depends on whether Kalamov can pull the matriarchs over to his side.”

“Kalamov…I thought he was ruined. The debacle…”

“The man is tough as a cockroach. Can’t kill him. Keeps coming back for more. He got tortured by natives once. Lived to tell.”

“Baby, you’re killing the mood.” Don thrashed a bit; he couldn’t break her bruising hold. Age was draining the life from him while she just got stronger.

“My mood is fine.” She licked his ear and ground against him. The ceiling over her shoulder blurred into soft focus. “Don, your hair is going white. A whole shock right down the middle. When did that happen? It’s sooo sexy.”

He was sure he didn’t know. Not even a flash of Bronson Ford looming taller than a basketball player, his face that of a shark, could derail the moment.

When they were done, Don’s manhood felt as if it had been used for football practice. Wheezing, he said, “What kind of ritual? Better not be a fertility ritual or I’m going to be jealous.”

“I don’t have their word for it,” she said. “It’s a croning. After a fashion.”

“What’s a croning?”

“Don’t go to Slango.”

He cleared his throat and hummed “Baby Please Don’t Go.”

After she’d drifted away into dreamland he arose and went to the toilet to urinate. A light flickered on the drive leading to their yard. He squinted, trying to discern a real shape in the black-on-black landscape. The light flared again—the eye of a penlight inside the cab of a car parked down the driveway. Don froze, not certain of what to do next. Moments later the car drifted away without engaging its headlights, reversing down the road and vanishing into the night.

The next morning Michelle headed for Siberia. Everything was different after that.

2.

Don arrived at the Olympia Airfield as night receded into its cave. He experienced several seconds of disorientation when attempting to penetrate the snowy gap between slapping off the alarm on the dresser and climbing metal stairs into the cabin of a company jet.

Standing atop the platform, he glanced over his shoulder at the gravel parking lot which arced before the radio shack and the row of beige hangars gone blue-gray in the filtered light of dawn. He tried to pick his car from the silhouetted lumps of vehicles and failed—wait! Ronnie had driven him; Don abruptly recalled the morning talk show beamed live from Seattle, the dingy and desiccated air freshener bobbing from the rearview mirror, a thermos of coffee and Schnapps in the console between them; a mudslide and flashing red lights and his confusion boiled over again. White-gloved hands floated from the darkness of the cabin and politely ushered him inside the plane, sent his disjointed and inchoate misgivings away in a cloud of smoking dust.

The jet was a four-engine model, manufactured in the ’50s judging by its appearance, equipped with a bar and a young attendant named Lisa whose presumably lovely features were squashed under layers of makeup and mascara. Three fellow passengers shared the accommodations.

Don recognized each of them from the list of names Wayne’s secretary had printed for his reference, and in turn they’d been briefed regarding his role as the liaison dispatched by HQ to crack the whip and right the ship: A droll elderly lawyer named Geoffrey Pike; Dr. Justin Rush, an urbane gentleman with glistening hair and a Clark Kent smile; and the hotshot Oklahoma archeologist Robert Ring, a rangy, athletic man who claimed one of his ancestors was a famous Chinese noble exiled from the motherland. Perhaps five years younger than Don, Robert Ring dressed like a model in a
Field & Stream
catalogue—plaids and corduroy; his deep dark tan didn’t appear to have come from a shake n’ bake spa; undoubtedly the byproduct of skiing or bicycling or royal heritage, and his grip was intimidating.

Lisa dispersed coffees and Danishes and the quartet chatted as the crew ran down the last-minute flight check. Each was headed to Slango Camp with particular business on their agendas. Pike was to run interference against BLM officials. Rush had been sent to attend minor ailments afflicting various members of the team. Two surveyors had sickened from bacterial infections and another sprained an ankle navigating a sinkhole; all quite routine, perhaps better than routine—these remote operations were prime for frequent and grievous accidents. Ring was charged with examining several structures for hazards known and otherwise.

Structures? Don perked up. Historical monuments hadn’t been mentioned in any of the previous briefings, although such wasn’t his particular area. He asked Ring if these buildings were remnants of the logging camp that, though less infamous than the lost colony of Roanoke, was just as vanished in the mists of history.

Frick and Frack had made a cryptic reference to the camp’s status as an official mystery and Don did a little digging of his own—two hundred men, women and assorted animals disappeared from the face of the earth in the late fall of 1923. Even the equipment, including boxcars from a train, and the shacks vanished. Unlike mass disappearances such as Roanoke or various wartime events, the Slango situation defied easy explanations such as attacks by angry natives or enemy forces, or high seas. It defied complicated explanations too. Don hadn’t given the matter much attention prior to the previous weekend and the unsettling comments of the alleged NSA agents. There wasn’t much a man could do with such lore except nod sagely and quote Hamlet. Right then, listening to the big engines rev for takeoff, a mere hour or two from visiting the legendary site, his already vivid imagination began to stir, eager to flex its muscles.

Ring wasn’t forthcoming with details. He smiled enigmatically and changed the subject in a manner that achieved obliviousness and insolence in equal measure. He boasted about the red clay tennis court at his summer abode in the South of Italy, an ex-supermodel girlfriend and a brown belt in Jujitsu, his disdain of engineers’ and geologists’ underwhelming social competence, present company excluded, naturally. Don decided to hate him just a little bit.

Once they lifted off, it was a puddle jump flight to an airport outside of Portland to grab some equipment, then a forty-minute swing back into Washington and the Olympic Peninsula. Don had one bad moment after he buckled in and they gradually rose to cruising elevation. He’d closed his eyes for a few seconds as gravity pulled him into the plush recliner and when he opened them, the cabin windows were going dark. The stain advanced like fast-flowing syrup, a gush of blood spilling through a sluice. As his own window blackened, he detected the crinkle of dry ice, a knifepoint scraping bone, stones cracking under tremendous heat. Motion reflected in the onyx glass: the baggage compartment across the aisle silently swung open; inside, a membrane glistened, a colloidal plexus, the bulk of which nestled in deeper shadow.

The overhead lights flickered rapidly. Bands of utter darkness cycled through the cabin followed by flashes of red emergency light. All the lights shorted as one, snapping with the violence of a string of firecrackers, dry bones under tank treads. Wind shrieked against the fuselage and the plane shuddered, knocked slightly sideways by heavy turbulence. Someone cursed and metal clashed in the galley, pans clattered to the deck. Don dug his fingers into the armrests as the seat threatened to vibrate from its moorings.

Mr. Dart whispered from the adjoining seat,
Nanking, Don. A train loaded with fifteen hundred souls—soldiers, tradesmen and peasants, mothers and kids, chickens and goats—lost. Not wrecked or ransomed. Just lost, like a soap bubble pops and it’s gone. Do you suppose they fell into a crack in the earth? You think Martians took them
?