Scott acknowledges the applause - and a few raucous rebel yells - with the Scott Landon grin that has appeared on millions of book-jackets, all the time resting one foot on the shoulder of the silly shovel while the blade sinks slowly into the imported earth. He lets the applause run for ten or fifteen seconds, guided by his intuition (and his intuition is rarely wrong), then waves it off. And it goes. At once. Foom. Pretty cool, in a slightly scary way.
When he speaks, his voice seems nowhere near as loud as Dashmiel's, but Lisey knows that even with no mike or battery-powered bullhorn (the lack of either here this afternoon is probably someone's oversight), it will carry all the way to the back of the crowd. And the crowd is straining to hear every word. A Famous Man has come among them. A Thinker and a Writer. He will now scatter pearls of wisdom.
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?