“Isn’t Christmas enough?”
“When you came down to see me in La Jolla you told me that you thought something special was up, that it was important for me to come. Urgent, even, you said.”
“Right. But I don’t have a clue.”
“Could it be that he’s sick? Something really serious?”
Anse shook his head. “I don’t think so. He looks pretty healthy to me. A little run-down, that’s all. Working too hard. He’s supposed to be retired, but in fact he’s become involved in some way in the government, you know. What passes for a government now. They pulled him out of retirement after the Conquest, or he pulled himself out. He keeps a lid on the details, but he told me he recently led a delegation to the Entities in an attempt to open negotiations with them.”
Ronnie’s eyes widened. “Are you kidding? Tell me more.”
“That’s all I know.”
“Fascinating. Fascinating.” Ronnie tossed his towel aside, slipped on a pair of undershorts, set about the process of selecting the perfect slacks for the evening. He rejected one pair, two, three, and was studying a fourth quizzically, tugging at one tip and then the.other of his drooping blond mustache, when Anse, beginning now to lose the very small quantity of patience that he had for his brother, said, “Do you think you can move it along a little, Ron? It’s practically seven. The before-dinner drinks are called for seven sharp and he’s expecting us in the rec room right now. You remember how he is about punctuality, I hope.”
Ronnie laughed softly. “I really bug you, don’t I, Anse?”
“Anybody who needs to spend fifteen minutes picking out a shirt and a pair of pants for an informal family dinner would bug me.”
“It’s been five years since he and I last saw each other. I want to look good for him.”
“Right. Right.”
“Tell me something else,” Ronnie said, choosing trousers at last and stepping into them. “Who’s the woman who showed me to my room? Peggy, she said her name was.”
There was something in his brother’s eyes suddenly, a glint, that Anse didn’t like.
“His secretary. Woman from Los Angeles, but he met her in Washington when he went back there for a meeting at the Pentagon right after the Invasion. She was actually taken captive by the Entities the first day, in the shopping-mall thing, the way Cindy was, and she was in Washington to tell the chiefs of staff what she had seen. She ran into Cindy while she was aboard the alien ship, incidentally.”
“Small world.”
“Very small. Peggy says she thought Cindy was pretty nutty.”
“No argument there. And Peggy and the Colonel—?”
“Colonel needed someone to help him with the ranch, and he liked her and she didn’t seem to have any entanglements in L.A., so he asked her to come up here. That’s about all I know about her.”
“Quite an attractive woman, wouldn’t you say?”
Anse let his eyes glide shut for a moment, and breathed slowly in and out.
“Don’t mess with her, Ron.”
“For Christ’s sake, Anse! I simply made an innocent comment!”
“The last innocent comment you made was ‘Goo goo goo,’ and you were seven months old.”
“Anse—”
“You know what I’m telling you. Leave her alone.”
An incredulous look came into Ronnie’s eyes. “Are you saying that she and the Colonel—that he—that they—”
“I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but I doubt it very much.”
“If there’s nothing between them, then, and I happen to be here by myself this weekend and she happens to be an unattached single woman—”
“She’s important to the Colonel. She keeps this place running and I suspect that she keeps him running. I know what you do to women’s heads, and I don’t want you doing anything to hers.”
“Fuck you, Anse.” Very calmly, almost amiably.
“And you, bro. Will you be kind enough to put your shoes on, now, so that we can go up front and have drinks with our one and only father?”
For the past hour the locus of the tension had gone sliding downward in the Colonel’s body from his head to his chest to his midsection, and now it was all gathered around his lower abdomen like a band of white-hot iron. In all his years in Vietnam he had never felt such profound uneasiness, verging on fear, as he did while waiting now for his reunion with his last-born child.
But in a war, he thought, you really only need to worry about whether your enemy will kill you or not, and with enough intelligence and enough luck you can manage to keep that from happening. Here, though, the enemy was himself, and the problem was self-control. He had to hold himself in check no matter what, refrain from lashing out at the son who had been such a grievous disappointment to him. This was the family Christmas. He dared not ruin it, and ruining it was what he feared. The Colonel had never particularly been afraid of dying, or of anything else, very much, but he was afraid now that at his first glimpse of Ronnie he would unload all the stored-up anger that was in his heart, and everything would be spoiled.
Nothing like that occurred. Anse came into the room with Ronnie half a step behind him; and the Colonel, who was standing at the sideboard with Rosalie on one side of him and Peggy on the other, felt his heart melting in an instant at the sight at long last, here in his own house, of his big, blocky, blond-haired, rosy-cheeked second son. The problem became not one of holding his anger in check but of holding back his tears.
It would be all right, the Colonel thought in giddy relief. Blood was still thicker than water, even now.
“Ronnie—Ronnie, boy—”
“Hey, Dad, you’re looking good! After all this time.”
“And you. Put on a little weight, haven’t you? But you were always the chunky one of the family. Plus you’re not a boy any more, after all.”
“Thirty-nine next month. One year away from miserable antiquity. Oh, Dad—Dad—it’s been such a goddamn long time—” Suddenly they were in each other’s arms, a big messy embrace, Ronnie slapping his hands lustily against the Colonel’s back and the Colonel heartily squeezing Ronnie’s ribs, and then they were apart again and the Colonel was fixing drinks, the stiff double Scotch that he knew Ronnie preferred and sherry for Anse, who never drank anything stronger nowadays; and Ronnie was going around the room hugging people, his sister Rosalie first, then Carole, then his moody cousin Helena and her even-tempered brother Paul, and then a big hello for Rosalie’s clunky husband Doug Gannett and their overweight blotchy-faced kid Steve, and a whoop and a holler for Anse’s kids, sweeping them up into the air all three together, the twins and Jill—
Oh, he was slick, Ronnie was, thought the Colonel. A real charmer. And cut the thought off before it ramified, because he knew it would lead him nowhere good.
Ronnie was introducing himself to Peggy Gabrielson, now. Peggy looked a little flustered, perhaps because of the way magnetic Ronnie was laying on the beguiling introductory charisma, or maybe because she knew that Ronnie was the family pariah, a shady unscrupulous character with whom the Colonel had had nothing to do for many years, but who now for some reason was being taken back into the tribe.
Loudly the Colonel said, when the highballs had been handed around, “You may be wondering why I’ve called you all here tonight. And in fact I have a very full agenda for the next few days, which calls for a great quantity of eating and drinking, and also some discussion of Highly Serious Matters.” He made sure they heard the capital letters. “The drinking is scheduled to occur—” He paused dramatically and shot back his cuff to reveal his wrist-watch. “—at precisely 1900 hours. Which is in fact, right now.