The Big Dark Sky (62)
When at last he turned and headed back the way they had come, he was overtaken by an urgent intuitive sense that he should not have left Joanna alone with Jimmy Two Eyes for this long. He sought reassurance when he said to Hector, “She tells me that she and your boy were best friends back in the day.”
Hector’s sun-leathered and time-seamed face looked less old than wise, and his smile was that of a contemplative mystic. “I’m not surprised Jojo made a life in books like she did. Even as a little girl, she had the colorful mind of a story writer, shaping the world into a better place than ever it was. What friendship she had with my Jimmy was her imagination. Whatever goes on in his mind, it has little to do with other people or this world. Annalisa and I, we liked to think that even though Jimmy’s flesh and bones are in this sorry world, his soul is already in the next, so he sees and travels through that sweet and better place, waiting for his poor twisted body to catch up with him.”
That response didn’t soothe Wyatt’s concern. He said, “Has he really never spoken a word in all these years?”
“From time to time, he makes sounds that maybe mean something to him, but they make no sense to us. His mother and I . . . we sinned against the boy. So caring for him and loving him is my penance, loving him and not knowing if he can love me in return at all, not knowing in this world if he can forgive Annalisa and me, though I hope to hear him say so in the next.”
They had encountered a little traffic on the way out, but on the return trip, the county road was as deserted as if the world had passed through an eerily quiet apocalypse. The pavement curved to the north, past descending meadows off to the right, with serried ranks of conifers ascending on the left. Coming out of the curve, Wyatt braked to a stop when he saw a family of deer—an antlered buck, a doe, two spotted fawns—blocking the straightaway ahead.
The animals stood as still as sculpture, their heads turned toward the Studebaker, as if they had been waiting for it, aware that it was en route, though most likely they had paused in their crossing when they heard the approaching engine.
“Magnificent,” said Wyatt.
“Mule deer,” Hector said.
“Why mule? They look nothing like mules.”
“Their big ears. Other deer don’t have ears so big.”
The deer regarded them with what seemed to be solemn curiosity.
Wyatt said, “Seems like they don’t spook easily.”
“Toot the horn,” said Hector, “and they’ll scoot.”
Two short honks of the horn had little effect. The buck raised its head higher, and the two fawns ventured a few steps closer to the pickup, as if the sound appealed to them.
“Lay on it hard,” Hector advised.
A long, strident blast had even less effect than two short ones.
Opening the passenger door, Hector said, “I’ll shoo them off.”
“Wait a second. Is that wise?”
“They’re just deer. Isn’t any fight in them.”
Having lowered its head, the buck was pawing at the pavement with one hoof, as though warning or challenging them.
Under his sport coat, in a hip holster, Wyatt carried the Heckler & Koch .45. He would never shoot one of the deer, but a round fired in the air might cause them to bolt in case Hector couldn’t shoo them away.
He put the truck in park, engaged the hand brake, and got out to accompany the old man.
The fat sun hung far in the west, and the shadows of the nearby forest pooled toward the east, as if the substance of the pines were melting into tar. In the northwest, an armada of dark clouds moved southward in a slow but threatening procession.
As Wyatt and Hector approached the animals, the only sounds were the hollow, lonely voice of the freshening wind and the scrape of the male deer’s hoof on the blacktop.
The wicked points on the buck’s antlers gave Wyatt pause, and he put his right hand on the grip of the pistol.
50
The bandwidth of the interstate highway was inadequate to the volume of data moving on it, the data being traffic, but behind the wheel of the Pontiac GTO, Kenny Deetle slalomed through real space with the same bravado with which he raced through cyberspace. He never used the horn, though other drivers hammered theirs to express outrage at the panache with which he weaved sharply from lane to lane, treating their vehicles as a downhill racer would treat the poles that marked the course of a ski run. They thought his maneuvers were reckless, but Kenny knew them to be the consequence of exquisite calculation—or at least strongly believed that they were, which was nearly the same thing in a quantum universe where the Uncertainty Principle held, in part, that nothing was anywhere until it was observed, or something like that.
In the front passenger seat, Leigh Ann was braced as if she were aboard a plummeting airliner. At first she punctuated her speech with the S-word and the F-word to such an extent that her meaning was at times difficult to decipher. Soon, however, she exhausted her capacity for indelicate language, and Kenny was able to bring her up to speed regarding Ganesh Patel.
“He’s three kinds of genius in a single package,” Kenny said.
“There’s more than one kind?”
“Scientific genius, finished college at twelve, doctorate at seventeen, has beaucoup patents for bioprinting technology.”
“Which is what?”