“Anyone with a wristband stopped again will go to jail,” the officer in charge told them. “The bands will come off in a couple days. Now go home and sober up.”
Oscar and Kevin and Doris started toward Tallhawk’s house. “That was stupid,” Doris told Kevin.
“I know.”
She glanced around. “Those guys are following us.”
“Let’s lose them now,” Oscar suggested, and took off running.
Their belligerents followed in noisy but fairly efficient pursuit. It took them several blocks of twisting, turning, and flat-out running to shake them.
When they were free of pursuit they stood on a street corner, gasping. “This sure is fun,” Doris said acidly.
Oscar nodded. “I know. But now I’m lost.” He shrugged. “Oh well.”
It took them another hour to find Tallhawk’s house, and by that time Oscar was dragging. “This is far more exercise than I like,” he said as he opened the door of the darkened house. He entered a study with a long couch, collapsed on it. “It always happens like this when I visit Sally. She’s a maniac, essentially. The guest room is down the hall.”
Kevin went to the bathroom. When he returned to the guest room, he found that it had only one bed, and a rather narrow one at that.
Doris was undressing beside it. “It’s okay,” she said unsteadily. “We can both fit.”
Kevin swayed for a moment. “Um,” he said. “I don’t know—there’s another couch out there, I think—”
Then she pressed against him, hugging him. “Come on,” she said in a muffled voice. “We’ve done this before.”
Which was true. He had looked down onto that head of black hair, in embraces just like this. Although…. And besides, he…. Drunkenly he kissed the part, and the familiar scent of her hair filled him. He hugged back, too drunk to think past the moment. He gave in to it. They fell onto the bed.
The trip back was long, and hung over. Kevin was tired, bored with the endless Mojave Desert, awkward and tongue-tied with his old friend Doris. Oscar slumped in his seat, a portrait of the sleeping Buddha. Doris sat looking out her window, thinking unreadable thoughts.
Images of Sally Tallhawk jumped Kevin as if out of ambush: striding around their campsite with the evening sun flush on her broad face, arms spread out as she talked in a low chant of water sluicing into the underworld, pooling, drawn inward, making its secret way to the sea. The ragged ridge of Thunderbolt Peak against a sky the color of the ocean, stripes of white rock like marble crisscrossing the dark basalt, hypnagogic visions of her dancing by the lakeshore with its black wavelets, throwing Oscar out onto it where he skated as if on ice—
Jerking back awake. Trying to nod off again. The car’s monotonous hum. Off to their right, the weird illuminated black surface of one of the microwave catchments, receivers like immense stereo speakers flat on their backs, soaking rays, the photon space music, the lased power sent down from the solar panels soaring in their orbits. They were almost done setting out that array of orbiting panels, his parents’ work would be finished. What would they do then? Space junkies, would they ever come down? Visit El Modena? He missed them, needed to talk to them. Couldn’t they give him advice, tell him what to do, make it all as simple as it once had been?
No. But he should give them a call anyway. And his sister Jill as well.
Then, home at the house—having said a very awkward “good night” to Doris, pretending that there was no reason he should not go to his own room just as he always did—the TV was blinking.
It was a message from Jill.
“All right!” he said as he saw her face. That sort of coincidence was always cropping up between them. He would think of her, she would call.
She looked like him, but only in a way; all his hayseed homeliness had been transformed into broad, wild good looks, in that peculiar way that happens in family resemblances, where minute shifts in feature can make all the difference between plainness and beauty: big mobile mouth, upturned nose, freckles, wide blue eyes with light eyelashes and eyebrows, and auburn hair turning burnt gold under the Asian sun.
Now her little image said in the familiar hoarse voice, “Well, I’ve been trying to get you for the last couple of days because I’m moving out of Dakka to learn some tropical disease technique at a hospital in Atgaon, up in the northeast near the Indian border—in fact I’ve already moved out there, I’m just back to pick up the last of my things and slog through the bureaucracy. You wouldn’t believe what a mess that is, it makes California seem like a really regulation-free place. I hate doing these recordings, I wish I could get hold of you. Anyway, Atgaon’s about as far away from Dakka as you can get and still be in Bangladesh, it takes all day to get there, on a new train built on a big causeway to keep it above the floodplain. It must go over a hundred bridges, it’s a really wet country.
“Atgaon is a market town on the Tista River, which comes down from Sikkim. The hospital is the most important thing in town, it’s associated with the Institute for the Study of Tropical Diseases, and getting to be one of the leaders in the area—like, this is the place they developed the once-a-year malaria pill. The whole thing was started by the Rajhasan Landless Cooperative Society, one of the land reform groups, which is pretty neat. They do tons of clinical work, and they have a bunch of good research projects. I’m going to work on one concerning hepatitis-B-two. Meanwhile I’m helping out in the emergency room and in clinic visits, so it’s mostly busy, but I like it—the people are nice and I’m learning a lot.
“I’m living in a little bungalow of my own on the hospital grounds. It’s pretty nice, but there are some surprises. Like my first day there I turned on the light and tossed my bag on the bed, and a gigantic centipede came clattering out at me! I took a broom and smacked the thing with the handle and cut it in half, and both sides started to crawl away in different directions. Can you believe it? I was freaked and put a bed post on one half of the thing in place, while I pulverized the other half with the broom handle. Then I did the same to the half under the post. What a mess. Later they told me to check out bedsheets and clothes before using them—I told them hey, I know!”
She grinned her sister grin, and Kevin laughed. “Oh, Jill—” he said. He wanted to talk, he needed to talk!
He stopped the tape, tried to put a call through to Bangladesh. It wouldn’t go; she wasn’t there in Dakka to answer.
Feeling odd, he started the tape again.
“… Happy to know that there’s a woman’s softball league out here, can you believe it? Apparently there was an exchange program, nurses here went to Guam, and some from Guam came here, and the ones here started softball games, and when the nurses visiting Guam came back they were hooked on it too, so they kept it going. Now it’s grown, they’ve got some fields and a five-village league and everything. I haven’t seen Atgaon’s field yet, but they say it’s a good one. They’re proud of having a woman’s league, women in the rural areas are just getting out from under Islamic law, and now they’re doing all kinds of work, and involved in the land reform, and infiltrating the bureaucracy too, which means in a few years they’ll have taken over! And playing sports like this together, it’s new for them and they love it. Team spirit and all that. The big sport around here is cricket, of course, and women are doing that too, but there’s also this little softball league.