"He used to say heate time. He didn't like it, but he ate it anyhow, because an ability like that has a reason behind it, and if you have the ability, you have to find the reason. He said once he saw Omar and Sylvan Dunstan robbing dead soldiers on a battlefield, and he thought maybe that was the reason he had the ability."
"What's the reason you had it?"
"Maybe so Howard Dunstan could make me unhappy. Maybe so I could talk to you. I hope your reason is better than mine."
"Howard made your mother unhappy," I said.
"Yes." Joy nodded. “Ina great many ways."
"He had other women."
"Didn't he, though! Up and down, and hither and yon, and there's the car, I'll be going, don't wait up."
"Did he have children by any of his other women?"
She looked at me with a show of interest. "Would you care to hear a funny story?"
I nodded.
"One day, I finished my lesson with our French tutor, which I had alone because I was gifted in French, and Queenie and Nettie, who were not, came in for their lesson. May was sick in bed. She wouldn'teat, you see, my sister May hardly ate a speck all through her childhood. I was all alone with nothing to do. Well, I got up the courage to slip into my father's study, which was a room I loved but was not supposed to entersans permission. Can you guess what especially fascinated me in that room?"
"The fox," I said.
Joy clapped her hands. “I loved that fox! I thought if I looked at him long enough, old Reynard would forget I was there and finish that step he was taking. I wanted to see him moveune fois seulement. I was kneeling in front of the fireplace, and the telephone rang. Oh! I nearly fainted. Daddy came walking to the study door, boom, boom, boom. I ran around the back of his couch. In he marched, boom, boom. Slammed the door. I saw the bottom of his legs going toward his desk. He picked up the receiver and did not speak for quite a while. Then it was 'Ellie. Please calm down.' Iknew he was talking toune autre femme. He said, 'All will be well. He will think it's his.' When he hung up, he said, 'An excess of cannon smoke.' Then he walked out, not stamping at all."
"You never knew who Ellie was?"
"We never met any Ellies," Joy said. "We never met anybody."
She peered at the dark hallway. “I should be attending to my duties." Joy showed me out with more dispatch than I would have thought her capable.
•88
•A metal brick pushed into the small of my back when I got behind the wheel. I undipped the holster and put Toby's pistol on the passenger seat. It was about 9:30 on a Monday night in June. The lamps cast yellow circles like spotlights on the sidewalk. Cherry Street looked improbably beautiful, and the world seemed motionless. All I had to do was get to the Brazen Head and catch up on my sleep. This schedule felt almost sinfully luxurious. I decided to drive along the streets I had walked after my first visit with Joy, to erase the impressions made when I had seen them through a veil of grief and rage.
I turned left at the end of the block, and a pair of headlights sped toward me from down the street. The cab of a pickup flew past in a gray blur. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw the truck swerve into Cherry Street.
I took the next right and saw green light shining above the intersection of Pine Street and Cordwainer Avenue, three blocks ahead. I didn't care if I got there before it changed; I was enjoying the journey. Frame houses like Nettie's rolled past my windows. As I coasted down another block, the light stayed green, and I nudged the foot pedal. A white dazzle of light burst in my mirror. I looked up and saw, half a block away, the gray pickup speeding toward me with its beams on high.
My stomach jumped into my throat. Mountry had come again to Cherry Street. I flattened the accelerator. The pickup's lights doubled in size while my little car swam forward. With a clank that shook the chassis like a wet dog, it dropped into a lower gear and shot ahead.
The light changed to yellow when I was about thirty feet from the intersection. It was still on yellow as I blasted my horn and barreled out into Cordwainer Avenue. In my rearview mirror, the headlights of the pickup kept coming.
On the far side of the median, two cars jolted to a halt a moment before I flew past them. In the mirror, I saw the pickup run the red light. It slammed into an oncoming car and sent it skidding across the road. The dazzle in my mirror wobbled and swung back.
Ahead lay the chain-link fences and one-story brick buildings of Pine Street. I glanced into the mirror and saw the pickup fly out of the intersection.
Looking for a way out, I benttoward the windshield. A massive figure was standing under a street lamp. The warrior in the red and green dashiki whom I had encountered on the day my mother died turned his head to watch me flash by.
The dazzle filled the rearview mirror. I slammed the brake pedal. The Taurus's back end spun to the right, and I cranked the wheel the same way. The landscape revolved around me. The pistol sailed off the passenger seat. When the car stopped moving, I was looking into the lights of the pickup. I released the brake and stamped on the accelerator. The car jolted forward, shuddered, stalled. I smelled burning rubber and frying circuits. The dashboard lights went off.
The doors of the pickup opened on a burst of hoarse laughter. Joe Staggers jumped out of the cab. A heavyset man lumbered toward me from the other side of the truck. He was carrying a baseball bat. Staggers hitched up his belt. "Looks like Mr. Dunstan's car quit on him. Isn't that a damn shame?"
His friend laughed,yuk, yuk, yuk.
I turned the key, and the Taurus muttered. Joe Staggers slapped its hood. "Hey, don't you want to talk to us?"
Yuk, yuk, yuk.
I groped under the dash without touching anything but the floor mat.
Joe Staggers's face filled the window like a Halloween pumpkin. "Coming out to play?" He reached for the door handle.
I was going to have to fight two men. No matter how well I fought, they were going to kill me. I was minutes from a miserable, painful death. Suddenly, Aunt Joy's voice spoke to me with absolute clarity.He used to say he atetime.
You can use time, if you're able.
My stomach knotted. I closed my eyes and dropped into darkness.
When I opened my eyes again, I knew that I had eaten time. I was still in the car. Staggers had disappeared. The lights of his pickup were gone. Nothing around me resembled the Pine Street I had left. Tar-paper shacks grew from a muddy field ending at a wooden fence with ano trespassing sign. Far back from the road, flames from a trash barrel in front of a ramshackle wooden structure illuminated a dozen men in clothing like layers of dried mud. It could have been a photograph from the Depression. My head cleared enough for me to realize that it was the Depression. I had fallen through nearly sixty years.
At first cautiously, then with a kind of surly boldness, the men moved toward me. Suspicion and hostility came from them like an odor.
I turned the key. The ignition growled.
One of them shouted, "You spyin' on us, Fancy Dan? What's that you're drivin'?"
Uncertain, intimidated, they gathered at the side of the road. The man who had shouted drew a knife from his pocket and stepped forward. The others shuffled along behind him.
I tried to remember what I had done a moment before. Footsteps plodded toward me. I thought of Joe Staggers; I remembered walking over a grass carpet into the wreckage on New Providence Road. For the first time, I grasped the means I had used twice before. I wish I could describe it, but it would be like trying to explain a color. The bolt once more passed through my forehead. I ate time, although it felt as though I were the one being eaten.