I’m leaving the Doc a note on my pillow: ‘Gone dancing with the DJ. Don’t wait up.’
Daniel struggled to open his eyes but he was being lowered into a fresh, clay-streaked grave, his naked body glowing in the alkaline light of the moon. Standing in a circle around the pit, twelve old women were singing a wordless incantation of wails and parched moans, their upraised faces shining like oiled leather, their bodies swaying to the feathered tambourines they played. But the music Daniel heard wasn’t the thump and shimmer of tambourines, but the sound of shattering glass.
When his back touched the ground, the music stopped. Above him, framed by the grave, the moon slowly spiraled into itself till it disappeared, the stars following like flecks of foam. People whose faces he couldn’t see began to file past, each silently dropping a white rose into his grave, flowers to cushion the fall of covering earth, flowers to sweeten his decay. Daniel’s hands were crossed on his bare chest. He pressed his right palm against his ribcage, feeling for a heartbeat. Pressed harder when he felt nothing. Harder, beginning to panic, when a voice hollered, ‘Hey! Daniel!’ and he bolted from the bed, heart racing, riding the adrenaline rush as it cleared his senses.
Another holler: ‘Hey, you alive in there?’
It sounded like Wally Moon. Daniel tried to make his voice gruff with sleep. ‘Yeah, hey, who is it?’
‘Wally.’
‘Yeah, okay, just a minute.’ He picked up the bowling bag and slid it under the bed. He buttoned his shirt as he crossed the room, tucking it in before he opened the door.
He need not have been so formal. Wally Moon was standing on the porch naked, dripping wet. ‘The stones in the sweathouse are still hot if you want to get clean. Sorry if I woke you, but I don’t like to waste heat. Besides, it’s about your only chance for a hot bath till the next one.’
‘Thanks,’ Daniel said, ‘that was thoughtful. A sweat would be perfect. And no problem about waking me up; glad you did. I’ve got some work to do tonight anyway, and––’
Wally’s squint cut him off. ‘You work at night?’
‘I’m a writer,’ Daniel said quickly. ‘Religious stuff.’
‘Oh, a poet.’
‘Not quite, no, more like a scholar, sort of a religious anthropologist, I suppose – theological essays, research papers, that general vein.’
‘So you’re going to stay here and work tonight?’
‘If it doesn’t stretch your hospitality.’
‘No, I meant it when I said you could stay as long as you like. But I just wanted to make sure you planned to work, because I need to borrow your truck till the morning.’
‘Ummm, gee,’ Daniel began, ‘I’d really like to let––’
Wally, more as if continuing than interrupting, said, ‘I told you my wife was off in the mountains menstruating? Well, she went in our truck and it broke down – she called me on the CB just before I headed to the sweathouse.’
Daniel said, ‘The front differential on my truck is busted. No four-wheel drive.’
Wally wiped a trickle of water from his cheek. ‘Don’t need four-wheel. She broke down on the highway about thirty miles from here, not out in the hills. Just need to tow it in if I can’t fix it, but Annie said it sounded like the engine was eating metal, so it might not be simple to fix.’ Wally shook his head. ‘Menstruating women should not be around machines. They confuse machines. But don’t worry about your truck, because Annie says she is done menstruating. Annie is always very lustful when she returns from the mountains.’ Wally grinned, looking directly at Daniel.
It was a universal appeaclass="underline" Let me borrow your wheels so I can get laid. The appeal demanded a generosity beyond the merely convenient. Daniel, feeling vaguely conned, reached in his pocket for the keys.
Daniel was in the sweathouse when he heard his truck rumble past and fade toward the highway, the music pounding from its radio the last sound to dissolve. Faint from hunger and the heat, he bent forward from his squat, lowering his head to his knees. He inhaled strongly, stretching his lungs, but his attempt to keep the exhalation smooth collapsed into a sigh. He tried to imagine Volta’s face. The face flickered but wouldn’t hold.
Daniel mumbled anyway, ‘I know, it was stupid to let Wally take the truck. He and his wife could get nailed, they might turn me, or take the truck and money. Hundreds of shitty possibilities. But even if stupid, it was the right thing to do, or at least that’s how I felt it. I’m working on nerve alone now, out on the edges looking for the center, not a realm that rewards a rational approach. Thought isn’t fast enough. Don’t make me doubt myself, Volta, don’t make me hesitate. Hesitation could be fatal. Let me do it myself. Don’t stand between me and the Diamond. This one isn’t yours. It has a spiral flame through its center, like the one I saw. It wants me to see inside, wants me to know. Let me go.’ He realized he was no longer addressing Volta but the Diamond.
Daniel started laughing and immediately felt faint again. He dipped his hand in the bucket of cold water at his side and flung a cupped handful on the hot stones. The water sizzled into steam. The steam curled through the slender shaft of moonlight from the small, heat-fogged window behind him, coiled, braided, swirled through itself, dispersed. Daniel looked for a pattern, a rhythm. He threw another handful of water on the stones. A dragon’s tail lashed slowly through the light. The durable lines of a pig. A great blue heron ponderously lifted from its fishing roost and glided downriver. A lion’s paw. The bash and plunge of a whale. A twisted question mark. A rose billowing into bloom. A thousand possibilities, but nothing that cohered.
Twenty minutes later Daniel half staggered from the sweathouse and made his way to the shower. When the cold water hit him, jolting him back into his skin, he saw a slender twist of flame flash behind his eyes.
His body steaming in the cool night air, he walked naked back to his cabin, slipped the Diamond from the bowling bag, and vanished.
Calm, steady, focus locked, Daniel gazed into the Diamond all night, waiting for it to open. He reappeared with the Diamond an hour before dawn, so exhausted he didn’t think to put it away. He curled around its light and immediately fell asleep.
Smiling Jack Ebbetts punched the Play button and said to Volta, who was pouring them both a shot of cognac, ‘I don’t know if it’s something or nothing or a load of shit. You tell me.’ He sat down across the table from Volta in the basement of the Allied Furnace Repair building, swirled the cognac in his glass, tossed it back.
The tape began with a ringing telephone. Smiling Jack said quickly to Volta, ‘He gave me his direct line so it didn’t go through the secretary.’
The ringing stopped.
‘Keyes.’
‘Hello, Melvin,’ Smiling Jack’s voice boomed in a hearty Texas drawl, ‘this is Jacques-Jacques Lafayette, Dredneau’s good buddy and brain trust. You got your half of this deal for me?’
‘Yes. Or the best I could. I’m not really pleased with this deal, though. I’m––’
‘Well, shit-fire, Mel, it’s simple enough: You talk and I don’t; you don’t and I do.’
‘But suppose I talk and then you talk anyway? Or want me to keep talking so you don’t? Let’s talk about that.’