Читать книгу Regina’s Song - David Eddings - Страница 9

As luck had it, the rain let up—briefly—on Thursday morning, so I made a quick trip to the nearest lumberyard. Working with wet boards is a real pain, so I took advantage of the break in the weather. A pickup truck would have made things a lot easier, but I didn’t have one, so I lashed the boards to the top of my car instead. It’s not the best way to transport lumber, but if you pad the top of the car, it’ll work—and it wasn’t as if the house was all that far from the lumberyard.

When I pulled up in front of the house, there was a scruffy-looking young fellow standing on the porch ringing the bell.

“They’re not home right now,” I called to him when I got out of my car.

“Any idea of when they’re likely to be back?” he called.

“It shouldn’t be too long. They were going to hit the grocery store this morning. The pantry’s running low.”

“You live here?” he asked me, coming down off the porch.

“Not yet, but I will be by next week. Are you looking for a room?”

“Yeah. It’d be a long commute from Enumclaw. What’s this ‘serious’ business?” He gestured at the sign in the front window.

“The landladies have opinions,” I told him, struggling with the knots that held the boards to the top of my car.

“Let me give you a hand,” he offered.

“Gladly. We’ll have to lug these boards around to the side. I’d like to get them into the basement before it starts raining again.”

“You said something about opinions,” he said, while we were untying all my knots.

I outlined the basic setup while he helped me off-load the lumber, ending with the no-no list: “No booze, no dope, no loud music, and no fooling around on the premises. The term they use is ‘hanky-panky.’ Their main objective is to keep the noise level down so that everybody can concentrate on study.”

“I could probably live with that,” he told me as we carried the boards around to the outside basement door.

“You’re a student, I take it?”

“It wasn’t entirely my idea,” he said glumly. “I work for Boeing, and they leaned on me to go to grad school. It was too good a deal to pass up, so I’m stuck with it. They cover the tuition and pay me my regular salary to hit the books. In theory, my major’s aeronautical engineering, but I’m not supposed to talk about what I’m really working on.”

“Top-secret stuff?”

“Sort of, yeah—Star Wars kind of crap.”

“I’m Mark Austin, by the way.”

“Charlie West,” he introduced himself, and we shook hands. “Are the Erdlund girls thinking about total prohibition?” he asked then. “I usually have a few beers after work, so I probably couldn’t always pass a breathalyzer test.”

“They don’t take it quite that far, Charlie,” I assured him. “They just don’t want us getting all lushed-up on the premises. Far as I know, we’re not talking about blue-nosed puritan morality here, just peace and quiet.”

“I can go along with that. Do they get worked up about cooking in the rooms?”

“It’s a room and board setup. The girls do the cooking and the laundry.”

“What do the guys do?”

“The heavier stuff—plumbing, carpentry, that kind of thing. That’s why we’re lugging all these boards inside: I’m building bookshelves. Right now they’re on the lookout for somebody who knows a little bit about fixing cars. They’ve been burned a few times by mechanics who specialize in making out the bills. Do you know anything about auto mechanics?”

“I could probably build a car from the ground up, if I really wanted to. That’s my pickup out front. It doesn’t look too sharp on the outside, since I haven’t gotten around to the paint job yet, but you should see the engine. You don’t hardly ever come across a Mach-3 pickup.”

“You’re kidding, of course.”

“I wouldn’t swear to it. I’ve never punched it all the way out. The speedometer only goes up to 120, and I can bend the needle in about two blocks.”

“That sort of makes you a serious candidate, Charlie. Would living in the same house with a black man give you any problems?”

“No. A green one might make me nervous—they tell you to watch out for them. They’ve got all kinds of bad habits—mating with spruce trees, eating public buildings, worshiping sewage treatment plants, all the weird crap. What’s your major, Mark?”

“English. Do you think Boeing might want to pay me to sit around reading Chaucer?”

“I wouldn’t bet on it, but with Boeing, you can never be sure. Who’s the black guy?”

“James—he’s in philosophy.”

“Heavy,” Charlie said admiringly.

“You wouldn’t want to mess with him,” I cautioned. “He’s got a George Foreman build, and he backs up the Erdlund girls by looking mean and flexing his muscles. When Trish says ‘jump,’ James tells you how high. He handled most of the evictions when the no-booze policy went into effect. You usually only have to throw a guy downstairs once to get your point across.”

“This sounds like a real fun place to live.”

“The girls should be back before long. I’m not sure exactly where Sylvia is—possibly over in the psych lab trying to drive all the white mice crazy.”

“Is she another one of the Erdlund girls?”

“No, they’re Swedes. Sylvia’s Italian—in abnormal psych.”

“Fun group.”

“Are you interested?”

“You sound like a recruiting sergeant.”

“We’ve just got one empty room left, and I’d like to get somebody in there before classes start. If it stays empty, Trish might send the rest of us out trolling for prospects. I’m a little busy for that, what with putting up all these bookshelves. Trish likes the idea so much that I’ll probably be building bookshelves in bathrooms and closets before the end of the school year. I just hope that wood screws are going to be beefy enough to hold the weight.”

“Use lock screws,” he suggested. “They expand when you tighten them, so they’re locked in place. If you put your shelves up with those babies, they’ll outlast the house itself.”

“I’ll give it a try.”

We were coming back around the house when the Erdlund girls pulled up out front. Trish was driving, and her car was stuttering and popping as she drove up.

“Little problem with the timing,” Charlie noted.

“Can you fix it?” I asked him.

“Piece of cake.”

The girls got out of the car and started hauling out bags of groceries.

“Hey, babe,” I called to Trish, “this is Mr. Goodwrench, and he’s thinking about signing on.”

“Why does everybody think he’s a comedian?” she said, rolling her eyes upward.

“Sorry,” I apologized. “This is Charlie West. Boeing’s paying him to go to graduate school, and he tinkers with cars in his spare time.”

“Really?”

Charlie was looking at the tall Erdlund girls with an awed expression. “Swedish girls come by the yard, don’t they?” he muttered to me. “I bet those two could play a wicked game of basketball.”

We went over to the car, and I introduced the girls to Charlie.

“How did you get Boeing to pay your way?” Erika asked him.

“It was their idea, not mine,” Charlie replied. “Boeing’s always interested in guys who might come up with ideas they can steal and patent. I’m involved in a program I’m not supposed to talk about, and if I happen to stumble across some whiz-bang new technology, Boeing’s going to own it, and they won’t even have to pay me any royalties for it.”

“I thought the cold war was over.”

“The old one is,” Charlie replied. “The new one’s just getting under way. The aerospace industry absolutely bates peacetime, because it cuts down the money-tree. Of course, if Boeing goes belly-up, Seattle turns into a ghost town. So everybody talks about peace, but they’re not particularly serious about it. Peace is bad for the economy. Did you want to talk of graves, of worms, of epitaphs?”

“I didn’t quite follow that,” Erika admitted.

“Shakespeare,” I supplied. “Richard II. Charlie here seems to be a Renaissance man.”

“But I don’t do ceilings,” Charlie added.

I think his reference to the Sistine Chapel missed the girls.

“Did Mark fill you in on the house rules?” Trish asked him.

“I can live with them,” Charlie replied with an indifferent sort of shrug. “I take a beer once in a while, but it’s not my life work. Mark tells me you’ve got an empty room. Could I take a look at it?”

“Of course,” Trish told him. “Let’s get the groceries inside first, though, Erika.”

“I’ll give Mark a hand with the rest of his lumber,” Charlie said. “Then you can show me where to flop.”

“Don’t let him get away, Mark,” Erika told me with a peculiar fierceness.

“Those are a couple of spooky ladies,” Charlie said, while we carried the rest of my boards around to the side.

“Swedish girls lean toward intensity,” I agreed.

After we’d finished, Trish gave Charlie the tour. He only glanced briefly into the room across the hall from mine. “It’ll do,” he said almost indifferently. “I’ll go back to Enumclaw and pick up my junk. Would it be OK if I put my tools in that basement room where Mark’s got his lumber? I don’t want to leave them in my truck. Good tools fetch fancy prices in pawnshops, so I don’t want to take chances on having somebody swipe them. If it’s OK, I’ll move in on Monday.”

“That’s fine with me, Charlie,” Trish told him.

“Would you mind if I painted the room?” he asked then. “Pink walls aren’t my scene.”

“It’s your room,” Trish told him. “Pick any color you like.”

I spent the morning in the basement staining the boards, then I went to a hardware store and bought those lock screws Charlie had mentioned, came back, and started installing the shelves. It went quite a bit faster than I’d thought it would, and I was better than halfway through the job when I knocked off for the day.

I called Miss Mary’s house when I got back to the motel, and Twink answered the phone. “Where have been, Markie?” she demanded. “I tried to call you four times today.”

“I was building bookshelves. Are you all right?”

“I was just lonesome, that’s all. I thought that maybe we could go to a movie or something.”

“Is there anything showing that you’d like to see?”

“Not really. I’d just like to get out for a while.”

“Have you eaten yet?”

“I was going to pop a TV dinner into the microwave.”

“Why don’t I take you out to dinner instead?”

“That’d be nice.”

“I’ll take a shower and change clothes. I’ll be there in about forty-five minutes, OK?”

“Anything you say, Markie.”

I realized that I’d been neglecting Twink for the past few days. I’d been busy, of course, but that was no real excuse.

I took her to a Chinese restaurant, and we pigged out on sweet-and-sour pork. Then we sat over tea and talked until the restaurant closed. Twinkie seemed relaxed and even quite confident. She was coming right along.

I was certain that I’d finish up the shelves and the painting on Friday, so I’d only have one more night in the motel before I’d be able to settle into my own room.

I got up fairly early and started painting as soon as I got to the Erd-lund house. I wanted the paint to be good and dry before I moved in my furniture.

James stuck his head in through the doorway about noon. “Baby blue,” he noted.

“I’m just a growing boy,” I replied.

“Sure, kid. Who’s this Charlie guy the girls are all up in the air about?”

“He’s an aerospace engineer who works for Boeing. His hobby is cars, and that made the Erdlund girls wiggle like puppies.”

“Is Boeing really paying him to go to school? Or is he just blowing smoke in everybody’s ears?”

“I think he’s giving us the straight scoop. He’s a sort of slob who quotes obscure passages from Shakespeare and knows more about the Italian Renaissance than you’d expect from an engineer. He’s a sharp one, that’s for sure. He’ll be moving in on Monday, and then you can judge for yourself.”

“Nobody ever offered to buy me an education.”

“We’re in the wrong fields, James.”

“It looks like you’re almost finished,” he observed.

“Three more shelves on top, then it’s all done.”

“Do you really have that many books?”

“Not quite, but I’m giving myself room for expansion. When you major in English, your library grows like a well-watered weed. I’ll get those last few shelves installed as soon as I finish painting. I want to polish it all off before the local U-Haul place closes. I’ll rent a truck this afternoon and bag on up to Everett first thing tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll go along,” he rumbled. “Loading furniture into a truck is a two-man job.”

“I was sort of hoping you might make that offer,” I said, grinning at him.

“Have you got everything up there all packed?”

“It’s ready to roll.” Then I went back to painting.

I finished up by midafternoon, and then I went to the U-Haul place and rented a truck.

James and I got an early start the next morning. It was Saturday, and of course it was raining. It always rains on weekends, or had you noticed? Monday through Friday can be sunny and bright, but come Saturday, you get rain. James and I talked a bit on the way north, and James told me that he’d started at the university after his wife had died of cancer. “I needed something to distract me,” he said rather shortly. He clearly didn’t want to go into any greater detail.

There was an awkward silence for a while as we drove past Lynnwood through the steady drizzle.

“What got you into English, Mark?” he asked finally.

“Dumb luck, probably.” I launched into a description of my years at the community college and my early major in “everything.”

“You sound like a throwback to the Renaissance—Mark da Vinci, maybe, or possibly Mark Borgia.”

“It was an interesting time, that’s for sure. Isn’t that an old Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting times’?”

“I seem to have heard that.”

“I was just dabbling, James,” I explained. “I wasn’t even working toward a degree—I took courses in anything that sounded interesting. What got you into philosophy?”

He shrugged. “The usual stuff—’The meaning of life,’ or the lack thereof.” He seemed to hesitate a moment. “It’s none of my business, but how is it that a young fellow who works for a living came to own a house? That usually doesn’t come along until quite a bit later.”

“It’s an inheritance,” I told him. “My folks were killed in a car accident, and there was some mortgage insurance involved in the estate.”

“Ah,” he said and let the matter drop.

We reached my house in north Everett, and I backed the truck up to the front porch. Then we hauled out my furniture and box after box of my books. Books aren’t quite as heavy as salt, but they come close. James and I were both sweating heavily by the time we finished up. “Now I see why you needed so much shelf space,” he observed.

“Tools of the trade,” I said. “I guess I’m one of the last precomputer scholars, so my books take up lots of room—which is fine with me. When I read something, it’s on a real page, not a monitor. No hysteria about rolling blackouts.”

I had to shift my emotions into neutral as I made a quick survey of the now-empty house—I didn’t want to start blubbering.

“Tough, isn’t it?” James said sympathetically.

“More than a little. I grew up here, so there are all sorts of memories lurking in the corners. There’s a big cherry tree in the backyard, and the Twinkie Twins used to spend hours up in that tree eating cherries and squirting the pits at me.”

“Squirting?”

“You put a fresh cherry pit between your thumb and forefinger and squeeze. If you do it right, the pit zips right out. The twins thought that was lots of fun. It was a summer version of throwing snowballs.”

“You have twin sisters?”

“Not exactly. They were the daughters of my dad’s best buddy.”

“Were?”

I hesitated for a moment. The story was almost certain to come out eventually anyway, so there wasn’t much point in trying to hide it. “One of them was murdered a few years ago. The other one went a little crazy after that and spent some time in a private sanitarium. Now she’s starting to come out of it—sort of. She’s staying with her aunt down in Wallingford—about five blocks from our place. Her headshrinker thinks that going to college might help her.”

“I’m not sure that U.W.’s the best place to go looking for mental stability,” James noted, as I locked the front door.

“Her aunt and I will be keeping a fairly tight grip on her,” I told him. Then we closed and latched the back door of the U-Haul van and climbed into the cab.

“You seem to be quite involved with this surviving twin,” James said rather carefully.

“There’s none of that kind of thing going on, James,” I told him, starting the engine. “The Twinkie twins were like baby sisters to me, and once you’ve seen a girl in messy diapers, you’re not likely to have romantic thoughts about her. I’ve just always looked out for them.”

“Twinkie Twins?”

“In-house joke.” I admitted. “Nobody could tell them apart, so I got everybody started indiscriminately calling them both ‘Twink.’ They pretty much stopped being Regina and Renata and started being Twink and Twink.”

“I’ll bet you could send Sylvia straight up the wall with that one,” James said, chuckling. “The concept of group awareness might damage her soul just a bit.”

“Bees do it, and so do ants. In a different sort of way, so do horses and wolves—and lions and elephants, if you get right down to it. If animals do it, why not people?” I carefully drove the truck off the front lawn and pulled out into the street.

“Did the cops ever catch the murderer?”

“No, and even if they do, I’m not sure they could convict him.”

“I don’t quite follow you.”

“Nobody can be positive which twin was murdered.”

“What?” He sounded incredulous.

“Well, nobody could ever tell them apart, and the hospital lost the footprints they took as newborns.”

“Why not just ask the surviving twin?”

“She doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t remember anything.”

“Amnesia?”

“Almost total.”

“What about DNA?”

“Identical twins have the same DNA. So if they ever catch the guy, they might be able to prove that he killed somebody, but I don’t think they’ll ever be able to prove who. A good lawyer might get him off scot-free—which’d be OK with me.”

“What? You lost me again.”

“Hunting season opens up along about then. If Twink’s aunt doesn’t bag the sumbitch, I might take a crack at him myself. I’m sure I could come up with something interesting to do to send him on his way. If I happen to get caught, I’ll hire Trish to defend me.”

“I still think the courts would send him away, Mark. Murder is murder, and if Jane Doe is the best the cops can come up with, he’ll go down for the murder of Jane Doe.”

“You live in a world of philosophical perfection, James. The real world’s a lot more ‘catch as catch can.’ That’s why we have lawyers.” Then I remembered something and laughed.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Chaucer got arrested once—back in the fourteenth century.”

“Oh?”

“He beat up on a lawyer.”

“Some things never change, do they?” he said, as we pulled out onto the freeway heading south.

When we got to the boardinghouse, James and I carried all my stuff upstairs and stacked it in my room. All in all it’d taken longer than I’d thought it would, so I decided to motel it for one more night. I’d already put in a full day, and I was feeling too worn down to start setting things up. I took the truck back to U-Haul, paid them, and retrieved my Dodge. Then I went by Mary’s place to check on Twinkie—I still felt guilty about the way I’d ignored her for the past week.

Mary was nice enough to invite me to dinner, and the three of us sort of lingered over coffee afterward.

“That sanitarium is pretty fancy, isn’t it?” Mary said.

“I didn’t quite catch that,” I said.

“My weekly visit to Dockie-poo,” Twink explained. “You forgot about that, didn’t you, Markie?”

“I guess I spaced it out,” I admitted. “How did it go?”

“Nothing new or unusual,” Twink replied. “Fallon asked all those tedious questions and scribbled down my answers in that stupid notebook of his. I told him enough lies to make him happy, and then Mary and I dropped by the house and had supper with Les and Inga.”

“Doesn’t all that scampering around crowd you?” I asked Mary.

She shrugged. “Not really,” she said. “Ren and I took off from here about three, so we missed the five o’clock rush.”

“If it gets to be too much, I could run Twink on up there on Fridays. That’s a light day for me most of the time.”

“We can pass it back and forth, if we have to. I don’t think it’ll give me any problems, though.”

“Did Fallon make any suggestions?” I asked Twink.

“Nothing I haven’t heard from him before,” she replied. “I’m supposed to avoid stress. Isn’t that an astonishing suggestion? I mean, wow!”

“Be nice,” I told her.

She made an indelicate sound and changed the subject.

About nine o’clock, I went back to the motel and fell into bed. Moving really takes a lot out of you.

By noon on Sunday, I had my bed and desk set up and most of my clothes hung in the closet. Then I started putting books on the shelves. After an hour or so of unloading boxes and randomly shelving, I stopped and stood in the center of the room, glowering at my bookshelves. They were an absolute masterpiece of confusion. Hemingway and Faulkner were jammed in cheek by jowl with Chaucer and Spenser, and Shakespeare was surrounded by Mark Twain, Longfellow, and Walt Whitman. “Bummer,” I muttered. I knew that if I didn’t organize the silly thing right from the start, it’d probably stay confused in perpetuity. Owning a book is very nice, but you have to be able to put your hands on it.

I sighed and started stacking books on the floor, separating English literature from American and throwing the miscellaneous stuff on the bed. I came across books I’d forgotten I owned.

By evening, I’d finally put things into some kind of coherent order, and that gave me a sense of accomplishment. Fortress Austin was now complete and ready to hold off the forces of ignorance, absurd clothing, and bad music. With my help, God could defend the right—or the left, depending on His current political position.

After dinner that evening—my first Erdlund Epicurean Delight—I called Twink to make sure she was still on the upside. She was all bubbly, so things seemed to be pretty much OK.

“You might want to start thinking about going to class, Twink,” I told her. “The quarter starts two weeks from tomorrow. The class I’ll be teaching starts at one-thirty in the afternoon, so you won’t have to do that cracky-dawn stuff. I can stop by and pick you up, if you’d like.”

“That’s why they invented buses, Markie. I’m a big girl now, remember?”

“We’ve still got a while to kick it around, Twink. I’ll be a little busy for the next two weeks, though. I’ve got a lot of things to take care of on campus.”

“Quit worrying so much, Markie. It’ll give you wrinkles. Sleep good.”

The next morning, I drove to the campus to check in with Dr. Conrad.

“And how did you spend your summer vacation, Mr. Austin?” he asked me with a faint smile.

“Did you want that in five hundred words, Doc?”

“I think a summary should be enough—I probably won’t be grading you on it.”

“Actually, I spent quite a bit of time conferring with a headshrinker.”

“Has our load been shifting?”

“I don’t think so, but I’d probably be the last to know. Actually, the daughter of a family friend just graduated from a private mental hospital, and she’ll be taking some classes here. First, I had to get her moved in with her aunt up in Wallingford, and then I had to relocate myself as well: I got a place not far from her aunt’s. It’s a boardinghouse with a few grad students from departments scattered all across campus—but don’t worry, I’ll try to hold up our reputation.”

“I’m sure that if I’m patient, you will start to make some sense here.”

“I wouldn’t count on it, Doc. It’s been a pretty scrambled summer. I think I’ll go hide in the library for a couple of weeks to get my head on straight again.”

“That sounds like a plan,” he said sarcastically.

I spent the rest of the day in the library, and I didn’t get home until about eight that evening. Trish got on my case for missing supper, but after some extensive apologies, she relented and fed me anyway. The mother instinct seemed to run strong and deep in our Trish.

After I’d eaten, I went into the living room to use the community telephone. I dialed Mary’s number, but it was Twink who answered. I heard some weird noises in the background, and at first I thought we might have a bad connection.

“No, Markie,” Renata said. “It’s not the telephone. I’m listening to some music, that’s all.”

“It doesn’t sound all that musical to me, Twink. What’s it called?”

“I haven’t got a clue. Somebody—maybe even me—taped something and forgot to label it.”

“It sounds like a bunch of hound dogs that just treed a possum,” I told her.

“I think they’re wolves, Markie—at least on this part of the tape. Later on, the wolf howls gradually change over and become a woman’s voice.”

“You’ve got a strange taste in music, Twink.”

“Would you prefer some golden oldies by the Bee-doles? Or maybe ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a Clown-dawg’ by Olvis Ghastly?”

“Try the Brandenburg Concertos, Twink,” I suggested. “Avoid teenie-bopper music whenever you can. It’s hazardous to your hearing, if not your health. Did your aunt go to work already?”

“She’s taking a bath. I’ve got an awful headache for some reason.”

“Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”

“Fun-nee, Markie. Funny, funny, funny. Go away now. My wolves want to sing to me.” Her voice sounded sort of vague, but there was a peculiar throaty vibrance to it that I’d never heard before.

Then she abruptly hung up on me, and I sat there staring at the phone and wondering just what was going on.