I STOOD ON THE PORCH, leaning against the railing, inhaling the clean, clear air with its taste of the mountains and summer. A few members of the comet cult had heard the commotion and come out onto the porch, Elder Bent among them, his stepdaughters flanking him. The girls were pretty brunettes in their early twenties, and each of them wore matching ceremonial hubcaps on their heads. It was only the best for Elder Bent’s pretties: golden ’59 Lancer hubcaps that looked like UFOs from a black-and-white movie.
Martina emerged in a pair of jeans so tight I’m surprised she could get into them without lubricant. She stood beside me, pushed her crazed hair back from her face.
“You do me favor?” she asked.
“I think I just did.”
“Don’t call police man for a while,” she said. She gave me a haunted, harried look. “I haff my own legal problem.”
“Yeah. All right,” I said, but I found I couldn’t look at her, and my voice curdled with distaste.
I was sorry for her and glad she was safe, but it didn’t mean I had to like her. She’d had her fun, teasing Andropov about how she was going to jump into bed with the dykes upstairs, using us as a cudgel to batter his masculinity. She’d been doing it the day the hard rain fell. That was why Andropov had come home in such a hurry—not to beat the storm but to beat his girlfriend. In her own way, she wasn’t much better than Gumby, who loathed Yolanda for being a queer. We had never been people to Martina. We were just a blot on the local environment, something she could rub her ignorant boyfriend’s face in when she needed a cheap thrill.
Maybe she registered some of the contempt in my tone. She softened, took a step toward me on her delicate feet. “I am sorry for Yo-lin-dah. She was very special. I see her die from the window.” Her cornflower-blue eyes took on a guilty, shamed aspect, and she added, “I am sorry about things I say to Rudy. About how you both make me lesbeen. I am shit, you know?” She shrugged, then smiled and blinked at tears in her long lashes. “You a real badass beetch, you know? You safe my worthless ass today. You are like if Miss Maple haff baby with Rambo Balboa.”
She turned and put her hands in the pockets of a tight leather coat she’d found somewhere and went down the steps, crystal nails crunching under her heels.
“Where are you going?”
The air was heavy, so heavy it required an act of will to draw a full breath. In the ten minutes I’d been inside, that ghostly impression of a distant thunderhead had darkened and filled in to become a looming mass, pretty as a facial tumor.
Martina turned back, answered with a shrug. “Maybe down to university. I haff friends there.” She laughed bitterly. “No. This is lie. I haff people I can sell drugs to there.”
“So they’ll think of you fondly then. Go on. Just don’t take any detours. The weather is about to turn ugly.”
She looked up from under her carefully tweezed eyebrows, then nodded and turned away. I sat on the top step and watched her go, walking at first—then breaking into a half jog.
Martina had only just disappeared around the corner when the door crashed open behind me and Andropov stumbled out. Blood and snot had dried over his upper lip, and his eyes were bloodshot as if he’d been up for twenty-four hours with only a bottle of vodka for company.
“Martina!” he screamed. “Martina, come back! Come back, I am sorry!”
“Forget it, brother,” I said. “That plane flew already.”
He staggered to the edge of the porch and dropped down to sit beside me, clutching his head and crying helplessly.
“Now I haff no one! Everything fuck me in the ass! Everyone is dying, and I haff no friend and no woman.” He opened his mouth so wide I could see his back teeth, and he sobbed in a great, booming voice. “I haff no place to go where I am not alone!”
“There’s a place with us,” Elder Bent said softly. “There’s work for you to do and secrets to learn—a bed to sleep in and dreams to dream. Your voice belongs with ours, Rudolf Andropov. Singing the curtain down on the world.”
While I was lost in my thoughts and Andropov was lost in his sorrows, Bent had come to the bottom of the porch steps. He stood there with his hands folded at his waist, smiling placidly. In the weird gathering stormlight of the afternoon, the planets on his skull seemed alight with a sickly glow.
His daughters and a small delegation of worshippers were behind him in their gowns. The girls began to hum softly, a melody I recognized but couldn’t place, something sickly sweet and almost sad.
Andropov stared at them with wide, straining eyes and a dazed wonder on his face.
I kind of wished I’d held on to the wrench. I stood and backed off a few steps, putting the railing between me and the crazies.
“All that harmonizing together is going to be good practice for singing on a chain gang,” I said. “If you haven’t heard from the state police yet, count yourselves lucky. They’ve got the three who jumped me on the interstate, and they’ll be coming for you next.”
“The police have come and gone,” Elder Bent said, and he smiled apologetically. “Randy, Pat, and Sean acted without my knowledge. They were the ones who first saw Andropov’s note slipped under the door, and they decided to spring upon you without ever discussing their plan with me. I think they believed they were protecting me—as if I have any reason to fear the law! Yes, I knew that the storms were coming, but prophecy is not culpability. When I saw the note myself and my daughters told me what Sean and his friends were off to do, I immediately contacted local authorities to warn them what was afoot. I am so, so terribly sorry the police weren’t able to prevent them from attacking you, but of course law enforcement is badly stretched thin right now. You weren’t hurt, were you?”
Andropov and I spoke at almost the same time. The Russian said, “What note?”
I said, “Wait, Andropov left a note? Sean said they got a message from him, but I thought they meant a voice mail or something. How do you know this note was from Andropov? Did he sign it?”
One corner of Elder Bent’s mouth turned up in a wry smile. “He has a rather interesting phonetic spelling of your name. ’Onysuck! It’s quite unmistakable.”
“I leave note?” Andropov said, sounding genuinely baffled. “I must haff been so high! I don’t remember thees note.”
“Good,” Elder Bent said. “Let it all go. The note. Martina. Your sadness. The whole life you had until this moment. A new life begins right now, today, if you want it. You’re looking for community, for a place where you don’t need to be alone. And we’ve been looking for you, Rudy! If you’re ready to do work that means something and to be among people who will love you and ask you only to love them, then we’re here for you. We’re ready to say hello.”
And on cue the girls behind him broke into Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” asking Andropov if it was them he’d been looking for. If I hadn’t been so confused and stunned, I would’ve gagged.
Andropov, though, stared at them like one inspired, his tears drying on his cheeks. Elder Bent held out one hand, and Andropov took it. The bald, gangly monk of madness pulled the Russian to his feet and led him down the steps. One of the comet cultists zoomed in and hung an astrolabe around his neck and kissed his cheek. Andropov stared down at it in wonder, fingered it in fascination.