He closed his eyes.
“Eden in His Dreams.”
“I beg your pardon,” the clerk said.
“That’s the title—Eden in His Dreams.”
“No, sir. Not by this author. Here, why don’t you thumb through it? It’s not selling all that well yet, but we expect it to.”
Joshua blurted, “But this is a novel.”
“Yeah. Her first foray into fiction. Publishers Weekly liked it, for whatever that’s worth. Give it a gander.”
The clerk left Joshua alone with the book, which, as hefty as a Hebraic tablet, he clutched in trembling hands.
It was entitled The Outcast. The cover showed a tatterdemalion child crouching in the shadow thrown by an immense barred door. Yes indeed. A novel.
Joshua let the book fall open and began to read. His mother’s narrative style seemed to be a cross between perfervid Mary Shelley and early Joyce Carol Oates. He tried to pick up at least a strand of the story line from this perusal, but so intense was his relief that the book was not Eden in His Dreams, he could think of little else. Gratitude welled up, and another fetid hint of guilt.
Jeannette had spared him. In fact, she had spared him for nearly seven years. That, insofar as he understood the law, marked the statute of limitations for a great many criminal offenses. If old movies and numerous detective novels did not err, a person who had not been heard from in seven years could be declared legally dead…. Maybe it was time he began to forgive his mother, demonstrated to her by word and deed the fact of his continuing existence. In less than three weeks he would be descending the ramp of a commercial airliner at Marakoi International Airport in Zarakal. He would not return to the States until the end of the decade, assuming, of course, that he did not perish in the iffy ghost-past to which White Sphinx would eventually post him.
Joshua carried the book forward to the cashier’s island and placed it on the counter. A dark young woman in a red velour jumpsuit turned the book around, studied the jacket painting, and then keyed the book’s price into the cash computer: $21.95.
“You like Jeannette Monegal’s stuff, huh?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never read a novel by her before.” He put three ten-dollar bills on the counter and waited for his change.
“You’re some gambler, then. You wait long enough and you could probably pick this up on a discount table for less than the paperback. Four and a quarter or so.”
“With me it’s now or never. I’ve never been able to delay the gratification of my impulses.”
“I know a bunch o’ fellas like you.” The cashier raised her eyebrows, slid The Outcast into a brown paper sack, and counted out his change.
Joshua winked a conspiratorial goodbye and left.
On the shuttle bus back to Eglin—he had sold his Kawasaki to an airman in recreational services—he took the novel out of its grainy, biodegradable sack and opened it on his knees like a dictionary or a Bible. Then he thumbed forward from the end papers to the table of contents. While he was riffling these leaves, an inscription at the top of an otherwise virgin page caught his eye, and he turned back to see what he had missed.
It was the dedication:
In memory of
Encarnación Consuela Ocampo
and
Lucky James Bledsoe
——
for all that they gave me
That evening Joshua telephoned his mother’s Riverdale apartment from the day room in his barracks. No one answered. He dialed the number every half-hour. Shortly after eleven he reached a thin masculine voice that told him, peevishly, Jeannette Monegal had not had this particular telephone number for at least five years. Joshua called information and learned that although his mother no longer had a listing for Riverdale, the directory did show a few other Monegals whose first initials corresponded to his mother’s.
He tried three such numbers with no success and a sense of mounting frustration. At midnight he hauled himself upstairs and fell into bed.
In the morning his first thought was Ah ha, I’ll call Anna.
But Anna had left Agnes Scott in Atlanta at least five years ago, and when he finally reached a hired official in the school’s alumnae society and tried to talk her into divulging the present whereabouts of Miss Anna Rivenbark Monegal, class of 1980, he was met with a distant, scrupulously polite, “Sorry—not a chance,” the implication being that he sounded like a rapist, a salesman, or some other unsavory blight on the stately live oak of civilization.
Then, like being sideswiped by a Greyhound bus, it hit him: Van Luna, Kansas! Where but Van Luna, Kansas, would his mother and his sister retreat for the Christmas holidays? Nowhere else but!
Excitedly Joshua put through a long-distance call to the residence of Mrs. William C. Rivenbark of Van Luna, Kansas. In 1972, at precisely this time of year, Old Bill had died of a heart attack in Cheyenne. He and Peggy had come to Wyoming—their second such trip—to visit their daughter and grandchildren for Christmas while Hugo was supervising the loading of B-52 bomb bays at Anderson Air Force Base on Guam. Under decidedly peculiar circumstances, in the bedroom of Pete and Lily Grier, the Monegals’ former landlords, Bill Rivenbark had collapsed and nearly lost consciousness. Pete Grier had been out of state at the time, attending a bowl game in New Orleans with a cousin from Texas, and Lily, in an exemplary dither, had telephoned Jeannette to come and rescue her father before Peggy, asleep in the Monegals’ old apartment downstairs, discovered that her husband was upstairs with Lily rather than stretched out beside her in connubial repose.
Angry and distraught, Jeannette had answered Lily’s plea, taking ten-year-old John-John with her to the Griers’ house since Anna was spending the night at a friend’s. Upstairs his grandfather had lain supine on another man’s bed, his dentures clamped together like a strip of yellow whalebone. The old man’s eyes had been as elusive as welding sparks, seeming to go everywhere without settling on anything. Bill had suffered a second heart attack in the hospital’s emergency room, and that one had finished him off….
Joshua’s recollection of this incident took on embarrassing vividness as the widow’s telephone rang.
Maybe this was a mistake. He held the receiver away from his head and considered hanging up.
“Hello?” A cautious female voice, girlish rather than elderly.
“Anna?”
“Who is this, anyway?”
Joshua told her. There intervened a silence like the silence a bowler experiences after lofting a gutter ball.
You couldn’t hear a pin drop.
“Come on, Anna, talk to me.”
“What do you want?”
“Is Mom there? I saw Mom’s book, the novel.”
“She’s not here, Johnny. She may get here for Christmas, she may not. Everything’s up in the air. Where are you?”
He wanted to tell her about meeting Alistair Patrick Blair a year and a half ago, but realized that every aspect of the White Sphinx Project, especially the involvement of the Zarakali paleontologist, was classified. Besides, Anna and he were using an unprotected public line. Besides, she probably didn’t give a damn.
“Can’t talk long. I’ve been finger-feeding this squawk-box quarters for hours, just trying to run you folks down. ‘Bout out o’ change. Anna, I’ve got to know if Mom—”
“Are you coming?”
Joshua Kampa, alias John-John (Johnny) Monegal, studied the receiver as if it were the single bone of contention separating him from his family. Deliberately he asked, “You inviting me?”