The Big Dark Sky (53)
Indeed, he has been in a fugue state. But as he stares at the pages filled with those words, the obsession represented by the sameness of those many lines doesn’t seem to be something of which he is capable. For one thing, although the cursive is recognizable as his neat writing, it’s subtly different, the strokes sharper than usual, the curves less fulsome than they should be, suggesting that the words struck fear in the writer’s heart or at least distressed him. But Asher delights in the dark sky, is exhilarated by the void between the stars and the end of all things that it portends. It’s almost as if, during that period of blackout, a power other than his own mind controlled his pen, some fearful entity horrified by the eventual heat death of the universe and the following eternal cold that would make meaningless all of human history.
From a distance in the waning afternoon, a coyote issues a shrill, ululant cry.
PART 3
JIMMY TWO EYES
Amazing coincidences are in fact unconsciously engineered synchronicities, and we are the engineers.
—Ganesh Patel
43
The unpaved four-mile-long secondary loop connected with a more major blacktop county route at each end, a back road from nowhere to nowhere. The Range Rover’s navigation system knew nothing of this territory and offered no guidance, but Wyatt Rider took direction from Joanna, who thought she could find the place that Vance Potter had described. The land offered only a few proofs of human presence, each at a considerable distance from the next: two house trailers on a weedy property; a burnt-out church with glassless windows, its blackened steeple canting toward collapse; a few humble residences, one with an American flag flying bright above its weathered walls.
The Alvarez house was a single-story clapboard rectangle with a roof of asphalt shingles, on a raised foundation of concrete blocks. Behind it towered a windmill, perhaps forty feet tall, no doubt pumping water from a well that served the property; its bladed rotor turned fast enough to indicate that the soft breeze had stiffened with the waning of the afternoon.
The house appeared freshly painted. The green lawn had recently been mown. A row of red begonias had been planted along the front wall, to the left and right of the door.
Wyatt parked beside a 1955 Studebaker E7 pickup with a two-tone paint job—red and white. Joanna knew it well. The truck had been Hector Alvarez’s pride and joy when she’d last seen him, twenty-four years earlier. It was so pristine that it looked as if it had come off the showroom floor that morning and then been driven nearly seven decades through time to this new and uglier century.
During the short trip from Rustling Willows, Joanna had been in the grip of an expectation that alternated between anticipation and apprehension. When Wyatt had phoned Hector to request a visit, the old man seemed pleased by the prospect of seeing Joanna after nearly a quarter of a century. However, because he and Annalisa had been an honorary uncle and aunt to her, she felt guilty that she’d failed to stay in touch, especially because Annalisa had passed away without her knowledge. Considering that her memory of these people seemed to have been repressed by some strange power, her guilt was irrational. Nevertheless, worried about what she ought to say to Hector and how he might receive her, Joanna was trembling slightly when she got out of the Range Rover.
The windmill rotor ticked like a great clock, and in the vanes of that high, turning wheel, the breeze found an eerie voice, like the cry of a lost and frightened creature.
As she and Wyatt approached the house, the front door opened, and Hector stepped onto the small concrete stoop. He was shorter than she remembered him being. His hair had gone white, but he still had all of it. Although his face was seamed by time and weather-beaten, she would have recognized him anywhere, for his smile was as broad and sweet as ever.
He held out his arms, and it was the most natural thing to hug him and kiss his cheek. “Tío Hector, I’m so happy to see you.”
“Little Jojo, the years have blessed you. You’re as lovely as your mother.”
“I was so sorry to hear about tía Annalisa. I didn’t know until today.”
He took her hand in both of his. “She is with the angels now. She has no cares.” Looking past her, he said, “You’re Mr. Rider, Liam O’Hara’s detective and Jojo’s friend, from on the phone?”
“Yes, sir.”
Shaking Wyatt’s hand, Hector said to Jojo, “On the phone, your friend said you need to speak with my Jimmy. But, Jojo, he’s the same. The boy will never be . . . will never change.”
“Yes, I know. But I want to see him, tío Hector. I need to see him. You know that he and I were close.”
Ushering them into the house, Hector said, “When you were a child, you were kind to him and imagined him to be more than he is.”
The kitchen was here at the front of the house, to the right: painted cabinets; low-end appliances; a wooden table; four rustic dining chairs with tie-on cushions, their back rails decorated with stenciled flowers in pastel colors. To the left, part of the same space, lay the living room: two armchairs draped with colorful Pendleton blankets, one side chair, the necessary tables and lamps. It was a minimalist environment and scrupulously clean.
A large, battered trastero, its doors open, housed a compact music system, perhaps a hundred CDs, and a few dozen paperbacks. Atop this cupboard stood a collection of bultos of various saints.