He noticed now a strange look — almost distasteful — had taken over her face.
“Yes,” she said, “immune system…your partner was talking about the same thing. But that sounds like science. I mean…‘genetics.’ I’m an academic, so I don’t know much about that. We don’t have time to go outside our disciplines. So I don’t like to discuss it.”
“Well,” Eric said, “there was one time when almost all gay fellers knew somethin’ about the immune system, because there were these diseases like AIDS and things that affected it so much. When I first got to the Dump, you had to have an AIDS test every few months and be ready to show it, too. But not no more.”
“Please,” she said. “Sit down — ”
And he saw she was not looking at him.
Eric sat and frowned. “Don’t you really think all this ‘embarrassment of science’ stuff is just more ‘I don’t wanna be related to no apes or no chimpanzees’? I mean — ”
She looked up. “Mr. Jeffers — come on, now. No one is related to an ape. No one is related to a…chimpanzee! That’s absurd. We’re human beings, who can think and feel.”
“But all life is related to each other…” He saw she was smiling.
So he smiled back.
And she said, “I’d like to ask you some of my own questions now. Reading Spinoza, though — now, how could something like that be wasted?”
Leaning back, Eric chuckled. “That’s what Spinoza would have said — that it wouldn’t have been wasted. Or even knowin’ some little stuff about science. He had a great trust in knowledge for its own sake.”
Again, she smiled — and sat behind the desk, under the shelf of books. “Let’s not talk about things like science, all right? That’s…just a little crude, even for an enlightened group of artists, out here. Like talking about your income. I want to discuss some…well, things I think are actually important. Would you mind that?”
“Thanks to the Kyle Foundation, I don’t have to worry about — or talk too much — about my income. But a lotta people do — and did.”
“Your partner — Mr. Haskell — was telling me that both of you, separately and together, used to spend time at the Kyle Mansion, even before it became the Settlement Library. They told me it was abandoned back then — back before the thirties.”
“Naw, we used to go there when Hugh Kyle lived there — sometimes Mr. Kyle himself would come.”
“Really…?” She looked seriously surprised. “Do you think you could tell me a little about that — ?”
“Oh, yes. We — ”
From the door, Shit leaned in. “I gotcha two nice glasses of water here — okay? With ice.”
When Eric sipped his, he realized his had bubbles — soda water, like he’d have had at home. He gave Shit a quick smile. Shit smiled back toothlessly — Eric saw the shape of his teeth under the cloth of Shit’s plaid shirt pocket beneath his loose white jacket — with the beet spots — and walked with his listing swagger that, Eric knew, was actually a kind of limp, back out among winter guests.
“One of the things I wanted to talk about — ” Ann turned over a piece of paper, took up a pen (though it didn’t seem to have an ordinary point. Some sort of stylus…?) and made a note — “is some stories that have come to us from the mainland, about how some folks used to practice Satanic magic around this area.”
Eric raised an eyebrow.
“Did you know anything about that?”
“Satanic magic? Naw, I never heard nothin’ about that.”
She wrote something down, moved the stylus to an upper corner — and the writing disappeared, probably to be stored in some chip or bubble whose location he did not know.
She saw him peering and smiled. “I like these old fashioned devices,” she explained. “In the thirties, they made these things to last. And I really don’t like being bothered with new technologies, even when they’re supposed to be simple. What do they say? ‘If it was good enough for my dad…’” She leaned forward and wrote some more. Below where she was writing, a whole paragraph suddenly appeared on the page, which, somehow, she’d recalled — or what she had written had called up. “One of our informants tell me that when he was a child, his father took him and a bunch of other people to the island here, and they did some bizarre Satanic rites, probably sexual, which he wasn’t allowed to see, of course, somewhere in the Kyle mansion and outside it. That was before any of the current residents of the Settlement had come out to — ”
Eric began to laugh. “What — you been talkin’ to Ed Miller? That’s crazy. There wasn’t no Satanic rites goin’ on at the Kyle place when Mex and Jay lived there.”
Ann sat back. “Now, I’m not supposed to reveal my informants names to each other, but out here, sometimes it’s hard to keep them private. Still, yes, Captain Ed Miller said he knew MacAmon and his mute partner very well — and for a number of years. He said in many ways, after his own father died, Mr. MacAmon and Mr. Jalisco practically raised him. He said he always had the feeling that they were keeping something from him.”
“Ed knew they was gay — life partners — like me and Shit…”
“Yes, of course. That’s why we’re interested in what he had to say. But he said, very explicitly, he meant something else.”
“Well…” Eric had begun to frown again. “Well, I suppose they was keepin’ some things to themselves. Ed was a straight little puppy. They wasn’t out to convert him or make ’im do stuff that would turn his mind all around — though they probably wanted him to grow up comfortable with all kinds of people. And he did. But they wasn’t out to rub his nose in the sex they was havin’ with their friends and — hell — each other. That’s all.” Eric’s frowned reached its strongest. “What’d you say Mex’s last name was?”
“Jalisco. At least that’s the name he paid his taxes under and that was on his credit union account.”
“Mex Jalisco — I guess Mex had to be a nickname, too. You know, I never really thought too much about that before?” Eric eyebrows, somewhat bushy and overlong, bunched. “You know his first name?”
“Carlos.” Looking down, Ann wrote some more. “A lot of people who had connections with the Dump have gone on at some length about how much respect Mr. MacAmon had for his partner. But not a one of them knew Mr. Jalisco’s name, first or last. I confess, that seems a little odd for a respected man — ”
“I think I know why that was,” Eric said.
Questioningly, Ann looked up.
“Mex was here quite a while. But when he first come there was people lookin’ for him from Mexico. At least, he’d run away from them, when he ended up here, with MacAmon. I think Jay was protectin’ him — from the people back in Mexico what tried to cut his tongue out and made it so he couldn’t talk. ‘Mex’ is a pretty convenient nickname for a Mexican man who don’t wanna be found in a whole country full of legal and illegal immigrants. And that’s what we had back then.”
“Well, he was legalized, eventually — as far as we can tell, in ’96 of the last century, through the efforts of Robert Kyle, the same man who started the Dump.”
“So there you go.” Eric sat back. “’96 was ten, eleven years before I come down here. But I bet that has somethin’ to do with why they didn’t throw around his real name. At least, whenever I thought on it, that’s what I always come up with — though I confess, I did a lot of that thinkin’ after they was both dead.”