Joey had gotten ahead of her. He moved in the shadows of the trees, uphill to the three stone mausoleums where Buchanan’s best families had once interred their dead. Too good for burial, the bodies had been enclosed in these stone boxes. To Beth it seemed doubly macabre. She had stood once on a hot spring afternoon and peered through the small barred opening into the darkness inside one of these tombs, a garage-sized building inscribed with the name of the JORGENSON family. The mausoleum had been frigid with undisturbed winter air. She felt it on her face like a breath. It must be winter in there always, she thought. And backed away with a shuddery, instinctive reverence.
It was a reverence Joey obviously didn’t share. He raised the can of cherry-red spray paint to the wall of the building and began to work the nozzle.
He worked fast. Beth stood back and watched. He covered the east exterior wall of the mausoleum with a motley collection of words and symbols like a machine printing some indecipherable code. The symbols were commonplace but Joey made them his own: swastikas, skulls, Stars of David, crosses, ankhs, peace symbols. She couldn’t guess what they meant to him. Maybe nothing. It was an act of pure defilement, empty of meaning. The hiss of the spray can sounded like leaves tossing in the night wind.
He turned to the gravestones then, moving along the hillside so fast that Beth had to run to keep up. He made red Xs across the engraved names and dates. Now and then he would pause long enough to make a skull or a question mark. In the light of the Artifact, the red paint looked darker—brown or black on these chill white slabs.
It must be like sex for him, Beth thought. This frantic motion. This ejaculation of paint.
It was a funny thought but truer than she realized. When the can was empty Joey threw it at the sky—at the Artifact, maybe. The can looped high up and came down noiselessly among the graves. Beth approached him, and as he turned she saw the outline of his erection pressing against his jeans. She felt a shiver that was both attraction and revulsion.
He pushed her down—she let herself tumble—into the high grass at the edge of the woods. It was late, they were alone, and the air was full of scary electricity. A cool wind came in from the ocean with the battery odor of midnight and salt. She let him pull up her skirt. He was like a shape above her, something out of the sky. She lifted up for him as he tugged her underpants away. He breathed in curt, hard gasps. His penis was as hard and as chilly as the night. It hurt for a minute. And then didn’t.
Was this what she wanted from him? Was this why she had adopted Joey Commoner the way an alcoholic adopts the bottle?
No, not just this. Not just this push and shove and brief oblivion and sticky aftermath.
Joey was dangerous.
She wanted him—not in spite of that—but because of it.
This was a bad and troubling thought, allowable only in the neutral calm that came after fucking.
He pulled his pants up and sat beside her. Suddenly embarrassed by her own nakedness, Beth smoothed her skirt. Fucking in a graveyard, she thought. Christ.
She followed Joey’s gaze out across the night. From this hill she could see the lights of downtown Buchanan and the night shimmer of the sea. “Someday we’ll do something big,” Joey said.
Joey often made this ponderous statement. Beth knew what he meant by it. Something really dangerous. Something really bad.
He put his arm around her. “You and me,” he said.
He’s like some kind of wild animal, Beth thought. A wild horse maybe. A wild horse you befriended and who lets you ride him. Ride him at night. To some wild place. To the edge of a cliff. She closed her eyes and saw it. Saw herself riding Joey the wild horse to the brink of a limestone butte. Long drop to the desert floor. Some starry night like this. Just Beth and her wild horse and that soaring emptiness.
And she spurs him with her heels.
And he jumps.
Later they saw the lights of the little golf cart the security guard rode through Brookside every night, and they ran down the hill and across the graves to the duckweeds and into the dark ravine where the river flowed. Beth imagined she could hear the guard’s hoots of surprise as he discovered the vandalism, but that was probably her imagination. Still, the idea was funny; she laughed.
Joey sped away past these houses full of sleeping people, wending a crooked path down Buchanan’s side streets… past the house of Miriam Flett, who turned in her bed at the sound of a motor and Beth Porter’s wild laugh, and thought in her sleep of how strange the town had lately become.
Chapter 3
Machines
Jim Bix was ugly the way President Lincoln was said to have been ugly: profoundly, distinctively.
His face was long and pockmarked. His eyes, when he focused the full beam of his considerable powers of attention, resembled poached eggs cradled in cups of bone and skin. He wore a brush cut that emphasized his ears, which stood out not merely like jug handles—the image that sprang to mind—but like the handles on a kindergartener’s clay jug, or the discarded work of a tremulous potter.
It was also a face transparent to emotion. When Jim Bix smiled, you wanted to smile along with him. When he grinned, you wanted to laugh. He was conscious of his own guilelessness, Matt knew, and oddly ashamed of it. He avoided poker games. He told lies seldom and never successfully. Matt had once witnessed Jim Bix attempting a lie: He told Lillian he had broken one of her Hummel figurines, protecting the guilty party, the family dog, whom Lillian despised. The lie had been so incoherent, so patently manufactured, and so blindingly obvious that everyone present had laughed—including Lillian but excepting Jim himself, who blushed and clenched his teeth.
Jim Bix, in other words, was a nearly unimpeachable witness. Matt kept that in mind as he listened to what his friend had to say. From anyone else, it would have been unbelievable. Absurd. From Jim…
Belief, that cautious juror, withheld a verdict.
Matt opened the door a quarter of an hour before midnight that August evening and welcomed in this ugly and obvious man, his friend, who was also one of the best and most scrupulous pathologists Matt had encountered. Jim accepted Mart’s offer of coffee and settled leadenly into the living room sofa. He was 6’3” from toe to crewcut, and he dominated any room he inhabited, but tonight, Matt thought, he looked smaller—a sag had crept into his shoulders, and his frown hung on his face like a weight. He took the coffee wordlessly and cradled the cup in his hands.
Matt interpreted all this as fatigue. Early in the year, Buchanan General had been certified as a regional trauma center. This was good news for the administration; it meant prestige and more reliable funding. Among staff, the reaction was mixed. They were handed a wish-list of technological goodies—respirators, bronchoscopes, a new pediatric ICU. But they also inherited a number of difficult cases that would ordinarily have been transferred to Portland. For Pathology, it had meant a huge new work load without the prospect of additional staff. Jim had been working evenings for most of two months now. Of course he was tired.
Rachel had gone to bed, and the house, with its curtains drawn against the dark, seemed uneasy in its own silence. Jim cleared his throat. Matt said, “How is Lillian?”—disguising the fact that he’d seen her this afternoon.