“What do you mean? How could that be? I mean why hasn’t anybody else heard it before?” An instant hysteria bloomed in Kai’s chest.
“Maybe they did,” Ptolemy said in a matter-of-fact tone. He had turned back to his screens. He wasn’t really thinking about his nurse. “Maybe they did and then when they talked to him they lefted.”
“Left where?”
“To God, I guess. Maybe not, though. Maybe they went to heaben.”
“Isn’t that where God is?”
“No,” Ptolemy said, turning again to the squat, mask-faced woman. “Heaben is somewhere else.”
“But, Popo,” she said. “Why hasn’t anybody else heard these messages?”
“ ’Cause they don’t play with the radio like I do. They all wanna make things but they don’t listen too much, you know?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“When I listen to the radio waves I can hear little pieces of him talkin’. And then, when I turn the knob I hear a little more. His words comin’ through in pieces all over. They think it’s static. They made the digit-thingy to block it out. Nobody wanna hear it in they music, so they miss it.”
“What does God say?” As Kai heard the words coming from her mouth she realized that she meant them.
“Hi,” answered Ptolemy. “How are you and can you hear me.”
“Could it be some alien race and not God at all?”
“I guess. But I don’t think so.”
“We should tell somebody about this,” Kai said. Behind her Misty Bent had fallen asleep.
“I did.”
“Who? Who did you tell?”
“Chilly.”
4
“I have to talk wit’ you, Kai,” Chill Bent said three weeks after the social worker/nurse was forced to reconsider the existence of God.
It was a cool autumn day. The Tickle River was swollen with waters from recent rains, and fish could be seen darting around in schools numbering in the hundreds.
“Yes, Mr. Bent?”
“I’m gonna have to go away for a few weeks.”
“Where?”
“Outta the country.”
“Oh.” The nurse frowned.
“I gotta get some money or they gonna take Popo away. My cousin Hazel been talkin’ to child welfare and the EEG. They wanna take Popo to Houston but I won’t let ’em.”
“But maybe it would be better,” Kai suggested hesitantly. “M-maybe if he was in Houston you could visit and he’d have all the best guidance and education.”
“Boy needs a family and a home,” Chill said. “I been in the state institution before. It ain’t no good.”
“But that was a detention center,” the short nurse argued.
“No different. He gonna be detained in the school too. He cain’t come home when he want to. You know his grandma-ma’ll die a week after he’s gone.”
Kai Lin didn’t argue that point. She watched the large man’s dark face. He had aged in the two years since Kai had met him. Deep furrows had appeared in his cheeks, and something was wrong with his knees. He was still very handsome, though Kai would have never said so out loud.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I can’t say. But I want you to take care’a Popo. I want you to make sure that Hazel or M Russell don’t get him.”
“They won’t.”
“ ’Cause I know you love that chile,” Chill said. “I seen how you are wit ’im. How come you over on your days off. And you know I’m right too. He learnin’ all he can right here, right here in this house.”
Tears sprouted from the ex-con’s eyes. They rolled down his face.
“I love that boy more than I love anything,” he said. “I will not let them take him. I will not let them white people and them people wanna be white turn him into some cash cow or bomb builder or prison maker. He will find his own way an’ make up his own mind, god dammit.”
Kai reached out to touch Chill’s arm. He pulled her close, holding her forearms in a powerful grip. Kai winced but didn’t fight him.
“Maybe that’s what they’re afraid of,” she said. “Maybe they don’t want these children to make up their own minds. Maybe if they did that, the world would change.”
“I know you know,” Chill said. “They afraid Ptolemy would be their king if they didn’t brainwash ’im.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Kai said. “Sometimes I’m afraid when he talks. Sometimes I’m afraid of what he can see.”
“When I come back you an’ me gotta talk,” Chill said.
Kai did not ask about what.
Chill was gone for six weeks. The first ten days he called every evening. Ptolemy traced the call on his illegal Internet connection and told Kai and Misty that he was in Panama City. After the third week, they received only one faxgram.
Dear Mama, Ptolemy, and Kai,
I’m out in the backcountry down here and so I can’t call. I’m fine and I will be home as soon as I can. Just a little more work and I’ll have enough money to pay for Ptolemy’s home education and we don’t have to worry about what anybody else wants to say. Take care of your grandmother and Kai, Ptolemy. I’ll be home soon.
“Thill din’t write nuthin’ like that,” Misty Bent said after Kai had read it out loud to both her and Ptolemy.
“Sure didn’t,” Popo agreed. “Chilly never say no Ptolemy when he talkin’ t’ me.”
“He must have had somebody write it for him. Maybe he dictated it over some kind of radio system,” Kai said to allay the family’s fears. She wasn’t worried whether the faxgram came from Chill. What bothered her was how the ex-convict intended to make so much money in Panama.
The Vietnamese nurse had found a home in southern Mississippi. She loved the land and the people more than her native Hanoi, and more than Princeton, where she’d spent so many years going to school. The people reminded her of the stories that her grandmother told. The great jungles and the wild forests. By 2010 Vietnam was divided into twelve highly developed corporate micro-states that produced technical and biological hardware for various Euro-corps. Gone were the farms and rice paddies. The back roads were paved with Duraplas, and the giant cobra was extinct. Kai reveled in the Mississippi heavy air and the meandering back roads, the thick drawl on the English words and the life that sprang from every tree and rock and stream.
And then there was the child who listened to God. Kai had only lived in Hazel’s house since Chill had been gone, sleeping on the Bents’ couch, but she had felt that that house was her home since the day she’d crossed the threshold.
Six weeks after Chill had gone a private ambulance drove up the Bents’ dirt driveway. The attendants were from New Orleans, as was the van. The two white men rolled Chill into the house on the wheeled stretcher.
Chill was there under a thin sheet. His head was shaven and his eyes were covered with bandaged gauze. The form his legs made under the sheet was straight and motionless.
“Where should we bring ’im, ma’am?” one of the attendants asked Kai Lin.
“What’s happened to him?”
“Uncle Chilly!” Ptolemy screamed in dismay.
“Don’t know nuthin’ ’bout that, ma’am,” the second paramedic said. “We just picked him up from the airport with instructions to brang ’im here.”
“Am I in the livin’ room?” Chill asked.
“Yeah,” the paramedic replied.
“Chilly!” Ptolemy yelled again. He hid behind Kai Lin’s red silk dress, afraid of the white men, the chrome stretcher, and Chill’s decimated form.
“Then leave me here. Kai?”
“Yes?”
“Give these men fifty dollars each. I’ll pay you back later on.”