“We need to palaver, you and me.”
It wasn’t what he’d said the first time she met him; close, but no cigar. Back then he’d said they ought to palaver. Needing to, she thought, takes it to a whole new level.
Gwendy shut the door, sat down in the porch swing with the canvas bag between her feet, and asked what she would have asked in the kitchen, had he not reminded her that she had a husband upstairs.
“What’s wrong with you? And why are you here?”
He managed a smile. “Same Gwendy, right to the point. What’s wrong with me hardly matters. I’m here because there’s been what that little green fellow Yoda would call ‘a disturbance in the Force.’ I’m afraid I must ask you—”
He began to cough before he could finish. It racked his thin body and she thought again how like a scarecrow he was, now one blown about on its pole by a strong autumn wind.
She started to get up. “I’ll get you a glass of wa—”
“No. You won’t.” He brought the spasm under control. Coughing that hard should have raised a flush in his cheeks, but his face remained dead pale. His eyes were set in dark circles of sick.
Farris fumbled in his suitcoat and brought out a bottle of pills. He started to cough again before he could get the cap off and the bottle dropped from his unsteady fingers. It came to rest against the drawstring bag. Gwendy picked it up. It was a brown pharmacy bottle, but there was no information on the label, just a series of runes that made her strangely dizzy. She closed her eyes, opened them again, and saw the word DINUTIA, which meant nothing to her. The next time she blinked, the dizzying runes were back.
“How many?”
He was coughing too hard to reply but held up two fingers. She pushed the cap off and brought out two small pills that looked like the Ranexa her father took for his angina. She put them in Farris’s outstretched hand (there were no lines on it; the palm was perfectly smooth), and when he popped them in his mouth, she was alarmed to see tiny beads of blood on his lips. He swallowed, took a breath, then another, deeper one. Some color bloomed in his cheeks, and when it did she could see a little of the man she’d first met on Castle View, near the top of the Suicide Stairs, all those years ago.
His coughing eased, then stopped. He held out his hand for the bottle. Gwendy looked inside before putting the cap on. There were only half a dozen pills left. Maybe eight. He returned the bottle to his inner coat pocket, sat back, and looked out at the darkened backyard. “That’s better.”
“Is it heart medicine?”
“No.”
“A cancer drug?” Her mother had taken both Oncovin and Abraxane, although neither of them looked like the little white pills Farris had taken.
“If you really must know, Gwendy—you were always curious—there are many things wrong with me and they’re all crowding in at once. The years I was forgiven—there have been many—are rushing back like hungry diners into a restaurant.” He offered his charming little smile. “I’m their buffet.”
“How old are you?”
Farris shook his head. “We have more important things to talk about, and my time is short. There’s trouble, and the thing inside that canvas bag is responsible. Do you remember the last time we spoke?”
Gwendy does, vividly. She was at Portland South Airpark, sitting on a bench while Ryan went to park the car. Her luggage, including the button box in her carry-on bag, was piled around her. Richard Farris sat down and said they should palaver a spell before they were interrupted. And so they did. When the palaver was done, the button box was gone from her bag. Presto change-o, now you see it, now you don’t. And the same was true of Farris himself. She had turned her head for a moment, and when she looked back, he was gone. She’d thought then she would never see him again.
“I remember.”
“Twenty years ago that was.” He kept his voice low, but the rasp was gone, his fingers were no longer trembling, and his color was good. All just for the time being, Gwendy thought—she had nursed her mother through her last illness, and her father was now in slow but steady decline. Pills could only do so much, and for so long. “You were a lowly House of Representatives back-bencher then, one among hundreds. Now you’re gunning for a seat of genuine power.”
Gwendy gave a quiet laugh. She was sure Richard Farris knew a great deal, but if he thought she was going to beat Paul Magowan and ascend to the United States Senate, he understood jack shit about Maine politics.
Farris smiled as if he knew exactly what she was thinking (an uncomfortable idea, which didn’t make it wrong). Then the smile faded. “The first time you had the box, your proprietorship lasted six years. Remarkable. It’s passed through seven sets of hands just since that day at the airport.”
“The second time I had it was barely the blink of an eye,” Gwendy said. “Long enough to save my mother’s life—I still believe that—but not much longer.”
“That was an emergency. This is another.” Farris toed the canvas bag between her slippered feet with an expression of distaste. “This thing. This goddamned thing. How I hate it. How I loathe it.”
Gwendy had no idea how to reply to that, but she knew how she felt: scared. Her mother’s old saying came to mind: this is NG.
“Every year it gains power. Every year its ability to do good grows weaker and its ability to do evil grows stronger. Do you remember the black button, Gwendy?”
“Of course I do.” Speaking through numb lips. “I used to call it the Cancer Button.”
He nodded. “A good name for it. That’s the one with the power to end everything. Not just life on Earth but Earth itself. And each year the proprietors of the box feel a stronger compulsion to push it.”
“Don’t say that.” She sounded watery, on the verge of tears. “Oh please, Mr. Farris, don’t say that.”
“Do you think I want to?” he asked. “Do you think I even want to be here, tasking you with this—excuse the language—this fucking thing for a third time? But I have to, Gwendy. There is simply no one else I trust to do what needs to be done, and no one else who may—I say may—be able to do it.”
“What is it you want me to do?” She would find out that much, at least, and then decide. If she could, that was; if he left the button box with her, she’d be stuck with it.
No, she thought, I won’t. I’ll weight the bag with rocks and throw it into Castle Lake.
“Seven proprietors since the year 2000. Each held it a shorter time. Five committed suicide. One took his whole family with him. Wife and three kiddos. Shotgun. He kept telling the police negotiator ‘the box made me do it, it was the button box.’ Of course they had no idea what he was talking about because by then it was gone. I had it back.”
“Dear God,” Gwendy whispered.
“One is in a mental asylum in Baltimore. He threw the button box into a crematorium furnace. Which did no good, of course. I committed him myself. The seventh, the last, only a month ago … I killed her. I didn’t want to, I was responsible for what she became, but I had no choice.” He paused. “Do you remember the colors, Gwendy? Not the red and the black, I know you remember those.”
Of course she remembered. The red button did whatever you wanted, for good or ill. The black one meant mass destruction. She remembered the other six just as well.
“They stand for the continents of the earth,” she said. “Light green, Asia. Dark green, Africa. Orange, Europe. Yellow, Australia. Blue is for North America and violet is for South America.”