“Get out here, you goddamn little defector. Of course I’m inviting you. Of course I’m—” Anna stuck, exasperated or overcome. “Just get on out here, all right?”
It took two days to catch a MAC transport aircraft from Eglin to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, but only six hours to claim a seat on a giant, pelicanesque C-141 departing Lackland for McConnell. He rode in the belly of this prodigious bird with twenty other space-available bindlestiffs, a convoy of six haunted-looking blue buses, and several canvas-draped cylinders.
One young airman claimed that the cylinders were unarmed nuclear warheads, while a paunchy officer in wire-rim glasses pooh-poohed this notion, declaring them experimental plastic cisterns for catching and storing water in certain hypothetical combat situations. Their ultimate destination was Fort Carson in Colorado. Joshua did not wait to see who emerged victorious in the warhead/cistern controversy. He disembarked the C-141 as soon after it had set down as the pilot would permit. It was cold in Wichita, and he pulled his Air Force horse-blanket coat tight about his neck and chest.
Once off base, Joshua walked the right-hand side of the highway to Van Luna waiting for a ride. Finally a captain in a 1956 Nash Metropolitan picked him up and carried him the remainder of the way.
Van Luna, once a farming village as well as a modest bedroom community for people employed in Wichita, had spilled over the countryside like the markers in a vast Monopoly game. Tract houses, convenience stores, and motels were everywhere. The highway between McConnell and Van Luna afforded only an occasional glimpse into the pastureland or the cottonwood copses beyond the roadside clutter; and Joshua, despite a long-term familiarity with the mercantile sprawl of Florida’s Miracle Strip, felt betrayed. Even if he had lived here only five years, Van Luna was the Eden of his dreams of childhood. Its streets and fields had represented, at least in memory, the landscape of his choppy evolution toward self-knowledge, a process he still did not regard as complete. This ongoing complication of the simple geometries—the innocent geometries—of the original town was demoralizing.
“Damn.”
“You’re welcome,” said the captain, letting him out not far from the building that had once housed Rivenbark’s Grocery.
The old business district, the cobblestone heart of Van Luna, did not look greatly different from Joshua’s memory of it. Although under the proprietorship of a stranger, the grocery was still a grocery. Even better, the façade of the old Pix Theatre had been restored. Joshua walked through an older neighborhood to his mother’s mother’s house, aware of the townspeople’s tentative curiosity and the chilly tingle of the December air.
At the front door of an old-fashioned red-brick house with Tudor trim and ranks of gorgeous evergreen shrubs around the porch and walls, Joshua knocked. No one came. He pressed the buzzer and heard a thin, protracted raspberry deep inside the house. Whereupon the door swung open and there stood Anna, simultaneously smiling a welcome and trying to shush him to absolute silence. She was pregnant, quite far along, and their enthusiastic hug had to accommodate itself to the salience of her belly.
“Come in,” she whispered. “Don’t stand out there in the cold—come in, Johnny, come in.”
He did not budge. “What’s the deal, Anna? You married?”
There in the doorway she explained that, yes, she was married; her husband was a man named Dennis Whitcomb, but Anna had not taken his last name. An ensign in the Navy, Whitcomb was stationed aboard the nuclear carrier Eisenhower, which was presently at rest in the harbor of the new naval facility at Bravanumbi, Zarakal.
“Zarakal!” Joshua exclaimed in a high-pitched whisper.
“Mutesa Tharaka’s country, Johnny. You know, the place where all those people starved to death a few years ago. On special occasions he wears some sort of early human skull on his head.”
“Your husband?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Right, I do. It’s a habiline skull, Anna. President Tharaka wears it to celebrate the origin of humanity in his own backyard. It’s also a sign of his own preeminence in Zarakal.”
“Good for him. Do you mind if we go inside?”
“Lead the way.”
Anna, who had not yet spoken above a whisper, led him to a sofa upholstered in a satiny floral print.
She made him sit down, but did not herself take a seat. Instead, one hand in the small of her back, she paced a threadbare Oriental rug whose faded pattern reminded Joshua of a paisley shirt he had owned in Cheyenne. The room smelled of camphor, cedarwood, and, strangely, peppermint. It was shuttered, curtained, and wallpapered. The miasma of Peggy Rivenbark’s widowhood drifted from room to room like nerve gas, and Anna, suddenly, appeared to be suffering a convulsion of memory.
“Do you still have those dreams, Johnny?”
“Sometimes, yeah, I do. But I’m undergoing a treatment that’s supposed to help me control them.”
“I was afraid the damn things would kill you.”
“They might yet.”
“But if you’re learning to control them—”
“Scratch ‘They might yet,’ Sis. Melodramatic license. I’m fine.”
“You’ve joined the Air Force. Following in Dad’s footsteps?”
“Not too far, I hope.” Anna took his meaning, and he said, “The President ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to waive the height limitations for me. A blow for the civil rights of short people.”
“Now you have a reason to live.”
“Amen, Sister.”
“Are you being sent overseas, too?”
“Right after New Year’s.”
“Where?”
He decided, unilaterally, that this much, at least, he could divulge to his own sister. “Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base in—”
“Zarakal!”
“I thought we were supposed to be whispering.”
Halted in front of Joshua, Anna lowered her voice again: “Maybe you’ll be able to meet Dennis.—No, probably not. They’re set for a long cruise in the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. I don’t know exactly when. Soon, though. The Midway and the frigate T. C. Hart were strafed recently by American-made jets flown by—well, they think they may have been PLO sympathizers in the Saudi Arabian Air Force.
No one knows for sure. They’re keeping it out of the news, Dennis says. It’s weird. Weird and scary.”
“Yes.”
“I met Dennis in Athens.”
“Greece?”
“Georgia, you turkey. He was going to the Navy School there. Did you know that Roger Staubach went there in the sixties?”
“No, I never did.”
“Anyway, I’d gone over to Athens for one of the University of Georgia’s drama productions. Buried Child by Sam Shepard. During the second intermission I bumped into Dennis.”
“Which intermission resulted in that bump?” He nodded at her belly.
“You mean ‘intromission,’ don’t you? Well, we’ve never kept count. And I don’t remember you being such a wise guy.” Anna eased herself onto the sofa beside Joshua and kissed him daintily on the temple.
“Welcome home, short stuff.”
Under a gingham canopy in an antique four-poster in the master bedroom, Peggy Rivenbark lay. She had been sickly ever since Bill’s death thirteen years ago, but only over the Christmas holidays, in perverse commemoration of the betrayal that had made her a widow, did she surrender to the elegant purdah of her bed. Who would have thought that, taking advantage of Pete Grier’s absence, Bill would have crept upstairs from his daughter’s former apartment to the boudoir of frumpy, frozen-pie-faced Lily, there to commit a cardiac-arresting instance of extramarital hanky-panky?