The Big Dark Sky (60)
Once when she was eight, on the carnival midway at a county fair, Joanna badgered her mother to take her into the funhouse. The exit was by way of a giant padded barrel that both rolled and slowly pitched; she hadn’t maintained her balance, but had tumbled through it, laughing, and down a rubber ramp. A similar disorientation and dislocation overcame her now, but this time the sensation wasn’t an occasion for laughter. This loss of balance wasn’t physical but emotional, wasn’t for a minute or two but perhaps for a lifetime.
She was only an arm’s length from this new and hostile Jimmy, too close. She wanted to back away, but she feared that her retreat might inflame him further. She stood her ground as she said, “What do you mean you ‘reached out’ for my father? Are you saying . . . you read his mind? You can read minds?”
“Didn’t you hear me when I said you’ve lost your innocence? Didn’t you hear me when I said you’re filled with confusion, strange convictions, fears, and calculation? Didn’t you listen when I said I knew his heart, his mind, as I knew yours back in the day, as I know yours even now?”
She should have foreseen that this was a logical extension of his ability to control animals, but if she had suspected as much on a subconscious level, she had, in fear, always retreated from the conscious consideration of it.
Now a grievous thought occurred to her. She was loath to press him about it, but she could not restrain herself. “If it’s true that my father killed her and if you knew he’d done it, why didn’t you compel him to confess to the police?”
“Compel?” His laugh was without humor and as terrible as a snarl. “Yes, wouldn’t that be a neat solution to human crime and deceit, if I could simply compel every miscreant to tell the truth and do the right thing. Had I such power, I would use it ruthlessly, Jojo.” He spoke her name without affection, in fact with a note of mockery. “If I want to know a person’s mind and if I focus on him to the exclusion of all else, no secret can be kept from me, but I have no control of him.”
“The animals . . .”
“They’re simple entities. Human beings are orders of magnitude more intelligent than the smartest animals. Elk I may control, rats and rabbits, whole herds at a time, but I may not control a man, woman, or child.”
“May not . . . but you can?”
“I can. But I am forbidden.”
“By whom?”
“By my very nature.”
“So you used the bear to murder him.”
“To execute a murderer.”
“And were you . . . ?” She didn’t complete the question, but left it unspoken, as a test of the power that he claimed to possess.
“No,” he said, answering what she hadn’t asked. “I wasn’t in control of the bear when it attacked him, when it devoured him alive.”
If long ago she had thought him magical, she now found him mysterious, unfathomable, alien.
Beyond these walls, the windmill rotor clicked-clicked-clicked, and through its spinning vanes, the rising wind sang a threnody for the slowly dying light of late afternoon.
She hoped to hear the Studebaker pickup returning, but she couldn’t will the sound into existence.
Jimmy Two Eyes pointed a finger at her, and his ragged voice became a lash of censure. “Because you’ve changed, you’ve changed tragically, because you’ve lost your innocence, you fear me now, as much as you once loved me. In the past, I was like a gnome to you—all Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Now you look at me and see a monster, you think I’m capable of monstrous things, like inhabiting the bear while it ate your father, relishing the blood and violence.”
Although Jimmy’s eyes had been strange when Joanna had been a child, she didn’t believe they had been bright with derangement, but there was madness in those eyes now.
His finger curled back into his hand, and he shook his fist at her. “I brought the bear out of the forest, down from the foothills, guided it to your wretched father where he was riding his favorite horse. I triggered its memory of the smell and flavor of rich blood, then turned it loose to do the work for which nature had shaped it. I did this for your mother, for your mother!”
“My mother was a gentle soul. She believed in justice but not vengeance.”
Infuriated by the implied accusation, he shrieked his response, spittle flying. “It wasn’t vengeance! It was fair retribution, the impersonal visitation of the doom of righteous law! I’m forbidden vengeance. I am forbidden!”
He leaped off the footstool and hurried to the nightstand. He yanked open the drawer and fumbled through whatever it contained.
For an instant she thought he would turn toward her with a knife and deadly purpose. As she was about to pivot toward the door, he found what he wanted and brandished it at her: a simply framed photograph of Joanna when she’d been seven or eight years old.
Jimmy brought it to her and threw it on the floor at her feet. “The pitiful monkey wanted it for whatever stupid monkey reason, but he doesn’t want it now. He can’t have it now. He can’t ever have it, because you aren’t you anymore. You’ve changed! You’re so changed! You’re just another one, just like all the rest of them, another plague virus, pestilence.”
This extraordinary individual, whether merely malformed and maladjusted or in fact a monster, compelled her attention and was the fulcrum on which her future would be leveraged. There could be no forgetting him again, and there absolutely must be an ultimate understanding of him, of all that he could do and all that he had done, for she could not have a normal life or write anything worth writing if she fled Montana and left the mystery of him unsolved. What she had forgotten—been made to forget—of her childhood had shaped her more than she yet understood, and it no doubt explained why, at thirty-three, she remained without a partner in life, and why her six novels were filled with such yearning for transcendence of one kind or another.