Lisey's Story(12)
Pearls before swine, Lisey thinks. Sweaty swine, at that. But didn't her father tell her once that pigs don't sweat?
Across from her, Blondie carefully pushes his tumbled hair back from his fine white brow. His hands are as white as his forehead and Lisey thinks, There's one piggy who keeps to the house a lot. A stay-at-home swine, and why not? He's got all sorts of strange ideas to catch up on.
She shifts from one foot to the other, and the silk of her underwear all but squeaks in the crack of her ass. Oh, maddening! She forgets Blondie again in trying to calculate if she might not . . . while Scott's making his remarks . . . very surreptitiously, mind you . . .
Good Ma speaks up. Dour. Three words. Brooking no argument. No, Lisey. Wait.
"Ain't gonna sermonize, me," Scott says, and she recognizes the patois of Gully Foyle, the main character of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. His favorite novel. "Too hot for sermons."
"Beam us up, Scotty!" someone in the fifth or sixth row on the parking-lot side of the crowd yells exuberantly. The crowd laughs and cheers.
"Can't do it, brother," Scott says. "Transporters are broken and we're all out of lithium crystals." The crowd, being new to the riposte as well as the sally (Lisey has heard both at least fifty times), roars its approval and applauds. Across the way Blondie smiles thinly, sweatlessly, and grips his delicate left wrist with his long-fingered right hand. Scott takes his foot off the spade, not as if he's grown impatient with it but as if he has - for the moment, at least - found another use for it. And it seems he has. She watches, not without fascination, for this is Scott at his best, just winging it.
"It's nineteen-eighty-eight and the world has grown dark," he says. He slips the ceremonial spade's short wooden handle easily through his loosely curled fist. The scoop winks sun in Lisey's eyes once, then is mostly hidden by the sleeve of Scott's lightweight jacket. With the scoop and blade hidden, he uses the slim wooden handle as a pointer, ticking off trouble and tragedy in the air in front of him.
"In March, Oliver North and Vice-Admiral John Poindexter are indicted on conspiracy charges - it's the wonderful world of Iran- Contra, where guns rule politics and money rules the world.
"On Gibraltar, members of Britain's Special Air Service kill three unarmed IRA members. Maybe they should change the - SAS motto from 'Who dares, wins' to 'Shoot first, ask questions later'."
There's a ripple of laughter from the crowd. Roger Dashmiel looks hot and put out with this unexpected current events lesson, but Tony Eddington is finally taking notes.
"Or make it ours. In July we goof and shoot down an Iranian airliner with two-hundred and ninety civilians on board. Sixty-six of them are children.
"The AIDS epidemic kills thousands, sickens . . . well, we don't know, do we? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?
"The world grows dark. Mr Yeats's blood-tide is at the flood. It rises. It rises."
He looks down at nil but graying earth, and Lisey is suddenly terrified that he's seeing it, the thing with the endless patchy piebald side, that he is going to go off, perhaps even come to the break she knows he is afraid of (in truth she's as afraid of it as he is). Before her heart can do more than begin to speed up, he raises his head, grins like a kid at a county fair, and shoots the handle of the spade through his fist to the halfway point. It's a showy poolshark move, and the folks at the front of the crowd go oooh. But Scott's not done. Holding the spade out before him, he rotates the handle nimbly between his fingers, accelerating it into an unlikely spin. It's as dazzling as a batontwirler's manoeuvre - because of the silver scoop swinging in the sun - and sweetly unexpected. She's been married to him since 1979 and had no idea he had such a sublimely cool move in his repertoire. (How many years does it take, she will wonder two nights later, lying in bed alone in her substandard motel room and listening to dogs bark beneath a hot orange moon, before the simple stupid weight of accumulating days finally sucks all the wow out of a marriage? How lucky do you have to be for your love to outrace your time?) The silver bowl of the rapidly swinging spade sends a Wake up! Wake up! sunflash across the heat-dazed, sweatsticky surface of the crowd. Lisey's husband is suddenly Scott the Pitchman, and she has never been so relieved to see that totally untrustworthy honey, I'm hip huckster's grin on his face. He has bummed them out; now he will try to sell them a throatful of dubious get-well medicine, the stuff with which he hopes to send them home. And she thinks they will buy, hot August afternoon or not. When he's like this, Scott could sell Frigidaires to Inuits, as the saying is . . . and God bless the language pool where we all go down to drink, as Scott himself would no doubt add (and has).
"But if every book is a little light in that darkness - and so I believe, so I must believe, corny or not, for I write the damned things, don't I? - then every library is a grand old ever-burning bonfire around which ten thousand people come to stand and warm themselves every day and night. Fahrenheit four-fifty-one ain't in it. Try Fahrenheit four thousand, folks, because we're not talking kitchen ovens here, we're talking big old blast-furnaces of the brain, red-hot smelters of the intellect. We celebrate the laying of such a grand fire this afternoon, and I'm honoured to be a part of it. Here is where we spit in the eye of forgetfulness and kick ignorance in his wrinkled old cojones. Hey photographer!"