Sometimes Steve acted like he was tuned in to another world, somewhere out in space where all you heard was the far — off metallic voices on a lost radio beam.
'Aaah,' Steve uttered, a single private moan of pleasure or insight, and his feet went by the door again — it was as if someone had just finished explaining something to him.
Then Ridpath, his face glued to the newel posts of the half-railing on the second floor, remembered a terrible dream, what must have been a dream, from the winter before — a huge bird fighting against Steve's window, breaking the glass, whapping its big wings against the side of the house and tearing with its talons. . . . 'Oh, my God,' he whispered.
Steve was going aaah now, but Ridpath could not see the black bottoms of the loafers as he went past the door.
Beating, beating, thundering at the house, whipping that awful beak from side to side . . . Ridpath had a sudden irrational notion that now that nightmare bird was upstairs in Steve's room . . .
bang, went one foot on the left side of the room, where the window was, and then bang, bang, both feet on the right-hand side of the bedroom.
Bang. Just as if he had touched down back on the window side of the room — just as if that nightmare bird was ferrying him back and forth, the joy of flight causing aaah aah to bubble out of his throat couldn't be, he wasn't hearing right, there was some reason why he could no longer see Steve's loafers move past the door . . . some reason . . . those damn kids and their endless talk about bad dreams. I was up in the air and no one could get me down. Ridpath felt his whole body go cold. Whisper, went Steve's loafer on the right side of the room, and — an instant later — whisper, on the left.
'Come talk when you're ready,' Ridpath said, but only to himself.
That was on a Friday night. Chester Ridpath fled into the basement and uncorked a bottle of Four Roses he kept hidden under his workbench.
15
Two Saturdays after that, Tom Flanagan left his mother's side for the first time since the funeral. From the morning of Hartley Flanagan's death, his son and wife had been as if welded together: they had gone together to the funeral director and made the burial arrangements, had eaten every meal together, lingered together in the living room at night, talking. Mr. Bowdoin, the insurance man, had explained to both of them that Hartley Flanagan had left enough to pay all the bills for years to come. Together they had conferred with the Reverend Dawson Tyme, planned the funeral — Tom sat beside Rachel while she made all the telephone calls. He sat beside her while she cried, sat beside her and said nothing when she said, 'It's better he's gone, he was in so much pain.' Sat across the room in an uncomfortable Victorian chair when the fat Reverend Mr. Tyme returned and crowded beside his mother on the couch and blew out little minty breaths and said, 'Every tragedy has its place in his plan.' Saw that she, like himself, doubted the plan and mistrusted any man who would invoke it. Shopped with her; with her opened the front door to their visitors; stood beside her in the crowded funeral parlor during what the director called 'the visitation'; stood beside her finally at the grave on a wanning Sunday and realized that it was April first — April Fool's Day. And watched the crowd of Hartley's fellow lawyers and their wives and Hartley's friends and cousins and saw grief on some faces, restlessness on others, even embarrassment on others; there was no time to talk to any of the mourners, not even Del. They had to get back to the house and serve the food keeping warm in the oven. Chin yourself up out of that grave, he said to his father, just get out of there and be like yourself again, but the dry sun came down on them, the Reverend Mr. Tyme talked too much and pretended that he had been a friend of his father's, an April wind blew sand onto the graves and stirred the flowers. The grass looked sharp enough to inflict wounds. When it was over, he too cried and did not want to leave the grave. He looked at fat, minty Dawson Tyme and the lawyers — all of them were sleek, well — fed beasts, carnivores. A wall had crumbled, an anchor had snapped; he was without protection. The vulture had won and now it was Tom's turn to begin the walk into that long valley.
'You don't have to go to school for a while, do you?' asked his mother once they were back in the spiritless house. No. He did not.
After the fourth day his mother said, 'Don't you want to get out of the house, Tom?' and he said no. After the fifth day she repeated her question and said that they had to think about his going back to school and making up his lost work: again he said no. Resuming his normal life seemed a betrayal of his loss. When Rachel Flanagan repeated, her question after the sixth day, he recognized that he was now no longer a temporary adult. 'You haven't seen your handsome little friend Del since the funeral,' she said. 'Don't you want to practice for your show? And anyhow, it'll do you good to get away for a while.' 'He lives in Quantum Hills now,' he said. 'The Hillmans finally bought a house. It has a pool and a tennis court.'
'Quantum Hills.' Her voice was faintly ironic. 'Isn't that nice? And the suburban bus line goes right to the shopping center.'
'Yeah,' he said. 'Maybe I'll go out there.'
She embraced him.
Once out of the shopping center, he walked for half an hour along a street so black it shone. Enormous houses, some on landscaped hills and others in landscaped valleys, hovered like dream palaces far back on endless lawns. Whipping sprinklers whirred and sprayed, making rainbows which kept the grass green. Striped awnings shaded the vast windows. It was a suburb where no one ever walked. What was Del doing here, in the city's most artificial and dream-struck setting, this place of pools and tennis dresses? It suited the Hillmans, but it could not possibly be what Del wanted for himself. But — this came to him as he turned into the curving banked street — it was what Carson wanted for them: already many of their classmates lived here. Howie Stern and Marcus Reilly, Tom Pinfold and Pete Bayliss, six sophomores, took the bus the school sent out to Quantum Hills. All the stringency of life at Carson was meant to lead them to a place like this. If he had not met Del, if his father had not died, he would never have seen its absolute remoteness from him. He would have (he imagined) slid toward Quantum Hills as if on greased rails. He could not, now. He could only invent his future as Del was doing; he had been shaken from his frame.
Then just for an instant it seemed to Tom as if the shining blackness of the street was lapping at the cuffs of his trousers, the pale sky dark with witches. From a thin branch a starling screeched and fixed him with its black eyes. The world tilted.
This passed as quickly as it had come. The street subsided, the air cleared, the houses righted themselves. None of it could give a warning, because it represented a way of life in which warnings were obsolete. Tom realized that he was directly before the house Del's godparents had bought.
It was the classic Quantum Hills house, and the largest on the street, set far back on a rising treeless lawn. A wide asphalt drive curved up before it, marked by carriage lamps on tall dark poles. Where the drive met the two wide steps up to the entrance, the iron figure of a small black jockey held out a bright metal ring toward the rear bumper of a Jaguar. Modern, vaguely Moorish in design, the house sprawled behind these signs of a new Arizona prosperity.
Tom began to trudge up the drive, walked past the Hillmans' car and the sightless boy holding out his shining ring, mounted the steps. Something in his chest seemed to be trembling. He pushed the bell and jerked back his hand as if he had expected a shock.