The Big Dark Sky (73)

“Don’t you feel it, Wyatt? It feels inarguable, inevitable.”

“Tell me.”

“Whatever the hell we’re up against,” she said, “this puppeteer of animals, this master of Jimmy—it isn’t one of us. The damn thing isn’t human.”

“Not human? Then you mean . . . something from another planet?”

“Maybe. But I suspect it’s not as simple as that.”





62


After Jojo and the detective departed, Hector Alvarez stood in the yard, watching the Range Rover until it was out of sight. Then he turned his attention to the sky, which gathered its elements for violence, as the light retreated into the west and the night seemed to rise out of the meadows and forests rather than descend on them.

For over fifty years, he’d worked with animals and been as one with this land that he loved. Living close to nature, he developed a perhaps sharper intuition than that of men who lived in cities and worked in offices. Now he sensed that Jojo’s return to Rustling Willows had nothing to do with the billionaire, Liam O’Hara, that she had come for some purpose of her own, and that her visit with Jimmy had been central to that purpose.

Neither he nor his late wife, Annalisa, had understood Jojo’s connection with the boy when they were children. The girl had been swept away by fantasy stories—Cinderella, A City in Winter—and perhaps she saw Jimmy as a character who might have been at home in one of those fanciful tales, even imagined that he was magical in some way. However, the enthusiasms of young children never lasted long, and to this day, Hector remained puzzled as to why Jojo had been Jimmy’s steadfast companion, why she behaved like a doting sister when the boy couldn’t reciprocate.

He looked once more toward that place where the Range Rover had vanished. “Why did you come here, Jojo? What was that really about?”

With the dying of the light, the wind grew cooler. Shivering, though not because the twilight was truly cold, which it was not, Hector returned to the house. He went to his son’s room.

Jimmy stood at the window, gazing out at the rising tide of night. He often spent hours staring intently at the same thing—a flower, a picture in a book, a bulto of a saint, a scene beyond a window—as if he saw deeper into all things than other people did, as if in the fine details of a rose or a colorful stone he perceived meaning of the most profound and complex kind. In truth, Jimmy’s tragically low intelligence suggested that he saw nothing in the rose and the stone except shape and color, or that what he appeared to be fixated on was in fact of no interest to him because he was lost in an interior world, in some impoverished dreamland beyond the comprehension of anyone not cursed with his limitations.

From the doorway, Hector said, “Do you remember Jojo? She lived at Rustling Willows a long time ago. We lived there, too, in those days, and later when the Kornbluths bought the place.”

Jimmy didn’t turn from the window. He stood slump shouldered, his right hand on the sill.

“There were horses on the ranch,” Hector said. “Many horses. Beautiful horses.”

Except for Annalisa and Jimmy, Hector had lived for horses. They were his life, his passion. In truth, he loved horses as he never could love Jimmy, for horses returned his affection.

“Jojo was born a rider,” Hector said. “She started on ponies but soon she was riding larger than her age. It scared me at first, to see that little girl astride a big mare. But she could handle them—and soon even stallions. The horses loved Jojo. They would do anything for her. None of us who’d worked with horses had ever seen anything like it.”

Jimmy said nothing; as always he said nothing.

“God, how I miss the horses,” Hector confessed. “I wish the Kornbluths had never sold the ranch. They’d have kept it a horse operation, and we’d still be there.”

When Liam O’Hara had sold off the horses, he provided Hector with not merely a severance package but also with a pension, which neither Sam Chase nor Roy Kornbluth provided. Yet Hector harbored some resentment toward the billionaire for having taken away the horses that were his great passion. He knew this feeling wasn’t worthy of him, that Liam O’Hara never earned it, but the ill will remained, like a precancerous lesion, and when Hector had too much to drink, the resentment became malignant.

If Jimmy had died and Annalisa had lived at least there would now be the comfort of a wife, and there would be enough money for a horse or two. Jimmy had health problems that kept Hector’s wallet thinner than he would have liked. This resentment, too, was unworthy of him. Jimmy was a burden, yes, but a burden earned and one that, Annalisa believed, they must carry or else endanger their immortal souls.

“Do you have a soul?” Hector wondered. “Do I? Your mother was so certain.”

Beyond the window, the dusk dimmed and the land darkened.

“I wonder what Jojo came here for, what she said to you.”

Silence but for the wind and the windmill.

“As she grew up, she must have wondered, doubted . . . must have wanted to be sure that it happened how they said.”

Jimmy moved his hand from the windowsill to the pane, as if to touch the storm wind and the dark, or maybe he yearned for something else beyond the glass.

“All these years,” Hector said, “I’ve been expecting her to come back with questions for me.”