“Yeah, right. You fucked one of your bonobo refugee clients because Mom and Dad are old. Makes a lot of sense.”
“Tom, you got no fucking idea what you’re talking about. You’re thirty-seven years old, you’ve never been married, you don’t have a family. I mean—” Jeff seemed to be straining to reach something inside himself. “Look, do you really think Megan would care that much if she knew? I mean, sure, she’d go through the motions, the emotions, she’d make me move out for a while, there’d be a lot of crying. But in the end, Tom, she’d do what’s best for the kids. They’re her world now, not me. I couldn’t break her heart anymore, even if I wanted to, even if I tried. It’s genetics, Tom, fucking genetics. I’m secondary to the kids for Megan because that’s just the way she’s wired.”
“And you fucked Nuying because that’s just the way you’re wired, right?”
Jeff puffed out a breath, looked down, spread his hands up from his sides. “Pretty much, yeah. My wiring and hers, Nu I’m talking about. I’m the big alpha male around the foundation, the patriarch and the most expensive suit in sight. For a bonobo, that’s a bull’s-eye bigger than Larry Lastman’s dick.”
“So you just obligingly stepped into range, right? Just couldn’t bear to disappoint the girl.”
Another sigh. This time, Norton heard in it how the fight had gone out of his brother. Jeff dropped back into his seat. Looked up.
“Okay, Tom,” he said quietly “Have it your own way. I guess you’ve probably never fucked a bonobo in your life, either, so you don’t know how that feels, all that submission, all that broken-flower femininity in your hands like…”
He shook his head.
“Forget it. I’ll call you a cab.”
“No.” Norton felt an odd, sliding sensation in his chest. “I’ll stay, Jeff. I’m sorry, I’m just…it’s been a long day.”
“You sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure. Look, I don’t want to judge you, Jeff. You’re right, none of us is a saint. We’ve all done things”—Megan, astride him in the motel, feeds him her breasts with eyes focused somewhere else, as if he’s some accustomed household task. Toward the end, she closes her eyes altogether, thrusts herself up and down on his erection and into her climax, grunting you motherfucker, oh you fucking motherfucker through gritted teeth. It will make him rock-hard just thinking about it for weeks afterward, though he’s close to certain it isn’t him she’s talking to and when, in the aftermath, he asks her, she claims not to remember saying anything at all—“things we regret, things we’d take back if we could. You think I’m any different?”
Jeff gave him a searching look.
“You’re missing a pretty major point here, Tom.” He raised his hands, palms open. There was something almost pleading in his face. “I don’t regret Nuying. Or the others, because God knows Nu hasn’t been the only one. I just never told you about the others after the way you reacted. Yeah, each time it’s emotional complication, Tom, stress I could do without. But I can’t make myself feel bad about it, and I can’t make myself wish it hadn’t happened. Can you understand that? Can you stand knowing that about your brother?”
I can’t make myself wish it hadn’t happened.
Norton put himself carefully back in the other armchair, gingerly, on the edge of the seat. Jeff’s words were like staples taken out of his heart, a sudden easing of a pain he hadn’t fully known he was carrying. The bright truth about his feelings for Megan welled up in the new spaces. He sat there trying to balance it all out for a moment, then nodded.
“Sure,” he said. “I guess I can stand it. I guess I’ve got to.” He shrugged, smiled faintly. “Brothers, right?”
Jeff matched the nod, vigorously. “Right.”
“So pour me another drink, big brother. Make up the spare room. What time’s Megan getting back?”
CHAPTER 9
They slept in well-worn nanoweave survival bags—as used by real Mars settlers!, the fraying label on Scott’s insisted—but always inside. Too many eyes up there, Ren said somberly as they stood at the hangar door on the evening of the second day and watched the stars begin to glimmer through in the east. It’s better if we don’t give them anything unusual to notice. The abandoned airfield buildings offered shelter from both satellite scan and desert sun; the heat built up inside during the day but long-ago-shattered windows and doorways mostly without doors ensured a cooling through-flow of air. The walls in the rooms they used were peeled of all but fragmentary patches of paint, stripped back to a pale beige plaster beneath, and none of the lights worked. The toilet facilities and showers, oddly enough, did seem to work, though again without the privacy of doors and only cold water. There was no power for the elevator up to the control tower, but the stairs seemed safe enough, and once up there you had long views over the surrounding tangle of ancient concrete runways and the flat open spaces beyond.
Ren spent a lot of her time up there in the tower, watching, he supposed, for signs of unwelcome visitors, and talking in low tones with the stranger, with Him. And that last part worried Scott, for reasons he could not entirely pin down.
He supposed, finally, it was lack of faith. Pastor William had always said it attacked the so-called freethinkers first and worst, and God knew Scott had been away long enough to get contaminated, rubbing up against all the smut and doubt of West Coast life. He felt a vague, uncontrolled spurt of anger at the thought of it, the bright LCLS nights, the nonstop corrosive stimulus-ridden whirl of so-called modern living and no escape anywhere, not even in church, because God knew he’d gone there and tried. All that lukewarm, anything-cuddly-goes sermonizing, all the meetinghouse handholding circles and the flaky moist-eyed psychobabble that never went anywhere except to justify whatever weakling failures of moral vision the speakers had allowed themselves to fall into, three fucking years and more of it, clogging the certainty of his own vision, confusing the simple algebra of good and evil he damn fucking well knew was right, because that was the way it damn fucking well felt.
His head ached.
Had been aching, on and off, since he’d woken in the back of the swaying truck and touched the field dressing wrapped just above his eyes. The doctor Ren took him to that night outside Fresno told him it was a normal symptom for the head injuries he’d sustained; with luck it should fade in a few days.
Head injuries the stranger had given Scott. And how could that be right? At first, he couldn’t make sense of it.
He will return—Pastor William’s soft tones rolling out over the pulpit like thunder a long way off, thunder you knew was riding in on the wings of a storm coming right your way. They said he’d trained at one of the South Carolina megachurches before he got his ministry, and in the teeth of the gale he blew you could well believe it. He will return, and how’s that going be, you ask yourselves. Well, I’ll tell you, friends, I’ll tell you, building now to a roar, it ain’t going be no cluster-hugging happy clapping day like them niggers always singing on about. No, sir, the day of His return ain’t gonna be no party, ain’t gonna be no picnic and skipping road right up to paradise for you all. When Jesus comes again, He will come in judgment, and that judgment going to be hard, hard on man and woman and child, hard on us all, because we are all sinners and that sin, that dreadful black sin gotta be paid out once and for all. Look in your hearts, my friends, look in your hearts and find that black sin there and pray you can cut it out of you before judgment because if you don’t then the Lord will, and the Lord don’t use no anesthetic when He operates on your soul.