She said, “I’ll just stand,” which stopped the hissing.
At the back of the rambling house, where visitors were rarely wanted, Pete Jones—who was also John White and perhaps numerous other people—worked with several antique presses, laser printers, laminating machines, and so much other, more exotic equipment that the place had a Frankenstein air. Instead of reanimating the dead, however, he produced impeccably forged documents of all kinds.
The vision in leopard sweats reappeared in the archway between the living room and dining room, carrying something like a dress box that contained Jane’s order. “I put on table. You look, darling.” She set the box on the table and removed the lid.
In the center of the dining-room table stood a crystal ball on a silver plinth. Beside it lay a deck of Tarot cards fanned out and ready for shuffling.
Jane examined everything in the box. “Very good. Very nice. My compliments to Pete.”
“Better than nice.”
“Yes, you’re right. It’s all excellent.”
The woman accepted the sandwich bag and took from it the two bricks of hundred-dollar bills held by rubber bands. She riffled the edges of the bills across her thumb, twice with each brick, cocking her head toward the sound.
“No need count, you always honest,” she said, though she had probably done an accurate count with her devilishly sensitive thumb and hearing.
“It’s so nice to be trusted,” Jane said.
“You want to know?”
“Know what?”
Judy Lois White Jones nodded her head at the crystal ball and the cards. Her smile was humorless, feline. Her eyes were as black and her stare as viscid as pools of tar.
Jane said, “I don’t believe in all that.”
“Don’t have to believe to be true. Will be rich, will be poor? Will be happy, will be sad? Will live, will die? Just have to ask.”
At the front door, as she stepped outside, Jane turned and met the woman’s eyes. “I make my own future. So do you.”
“But what is future? Crystal and cards could tell.”
“Have a nice day, Mrs. White-Jones. I know I will.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” the woman said, and closed the door.
43
THE JEEP WRANGLER AND THE RHINO GX are making good time until, north of Austin and south of Georgetown, they come upon an eighteen-wheeler that, minutes earlier, jackknifed on Interstate 35. The thin-skinned cargo trailer has split open, spilling a load of colorful athletic shoes designed by the nation’s current number one rap star. Maybe a hundred large cartons have tumbled onto the roadway, and most of these have burst open, casting forth uncountable shoeboxes emblazoned with the rapper’s face, and in turn the lids have flown off these smaller containers. A Day-Glo rainbow of expensive footwear is drifted across what little of the roadway the overturned vehicle itself does not block, and in fact the sudden avalanche of high-priced gotta-have sneakers seems to have overwhelmed a less-than-substantial Mini Cooper, smashing it into the guardrail. Two Texas Highway Patrol officers have recently arrived on scene, and beyond the barricade of truck and shoes, a southbound ambulance is flashing its way along the shoulder of the road.
Traffic backs up so quickly in Egon Gottfrey’s wake that before he quite knows what has happened, he’s locked in, bumper to bumper, with the vehicles behind and in front of him.
He sits for a minute, wondering what the Unknown Playwright expects of him. Then he gets out of the Rhino to assess whether he might be able to maneuver out of his lane, onto the shoulder of the highway, and then reverse southward to the nearest exit.
Just then a third highway patrol officer comes along, putting down flares along the outer edge of the lane, to keep the shoulder open for emergency vehicles inbound from the south.
Gottfrey halts the trooper, presents his Bureau ID, and says, “You’ll have to help us here. I—and my men in that Jeep Wrangler—urgently need to get past this mess.”
The trooper is maybe six feet four, built like a pro wrestler. He stares down at Gottfrey in silence for a moment, frowning as though he has been addressed in a language known only by people on another planet. Then he says, “Sir, in these circumstances, your D.C. badge means about as much to me as your library card. We got people hurt and a road to open.”
As the officer turns away, Gottfrey says, “I want your full name and badge number. There will be grave consequences if we don’t get to Killeen within an hour.”
The trooper seems to swell two inches taller as he turns on Gottfrey. “Sir, with all due respect, if you’ve just got to be in Killeen inside an hour, may I suggest you best stick a propeller in your ass and fart your way there.”
Gottfrey does not know what to say to that, and perhaps wisely he chooses to say nothing.
After going forward three vehicles to the Jeep Wrangler and conferring with Rupert, he walks back to the Rhino and gets behind the wheel. He turns on the engine and powers down the windows and switches off the engine and tells himself that this delay doesn’t matter.
None of this has any meaning, anyway. The overturned truck is not real. The shoes are not real. The rude highway patrol officer is not real. Killeen is not real.
Gottfrey is only along for the ride. The delay means nothing to him. So … it’s curious, then, that he has the urge to get out of the Rhino and draw his pistol and shoot the trooper in the back.
He is reasonably sure, however, that if he did such a thing, he would be going off script to such an extent that he would inevitably be punished for misinterpreting the playwright’s work.
As Egon Gottfrey strives to be only a disembodied mind with no stake in these events, other drivers and their passengers in some of the surrounding vehicles realize the nature of the treasure that has spilled out of the overturned Peterbilt. Doors are flung open and people spring out. They dash forward into the heaps of ruptured cardboard containers, snatching up three-, four-, and five-hundred-dollar Day-Glo sneakers, some still in their boxes, others loose and surely mismatched as to size. In a kind of ecstasy, they hurry back to their cars and SUVs with armfuls of celebrity footwear, only to return to the melee for more, while those people who remain in their vehicles look on with shocked and fearful expressions, as if they find themselves trapped in a traffic jam during a zombie apocalypse.
The shoe shoppers are not real. The sneakers are not real. It all has no meaning.
Egon Gottfrey is only along for the ride. But when he thinks of Killeen, where perhaps Ancel and Clare can yet be found, he looks at the collapsible baton lying on the passenger seat, and he remembers the drunken cowboy outside Nashville West, and he is overcome with the urge to use that effective weapon on a few of these greedy shoe collectors, an urge that must be resisted.
44
PALM SPRINGS. The Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains stark and mostly barren, plunging dramatically to the idyllic valley floor, palm trees stirring gently in the warm currents of the day, glittering shops and restaurants lining Palm Canyon Drive, all sun-splashed and palm-shaded, with an air of unhurried living …
Places like this—built with tradition as much as with wood, stone, nails, and mortar—had once made Jane feel safe, places where the storied past flowed through the present, where a way of life was largely preserved, evolving but slowly and with grace.