Читать книгу The Returned - Jason Mott, Jason Mott - Страница 16

Six

PASTOR PETERS GRUMBLED in concert with the keystrokes. Only God knew how bitterly he hated typing.

In spite of still being a young man, just forty-three—youngish, at least—he’d never been any good at typing. He had the bad luck of being born into that ill-timed generation of people for whom the epoch of computers was just far enough away that they were never given any reason to learn to type and, yet, the rise of the machines was just close enough that they would be forced to always suffer for their lack of understanding in regard to QWERTY and its arrangement of home keys. He could only wield two fingers at the keyboard, like some huge, computer-dependent mantis.

Peck. Peck-peck. Peck, peck, peck, peck-peck, peck.

He’d begun the letter four times now. And he had deleted it five times—he counted the time he’d deleted everything and turned off the entire computer out of frustration.

The problem with being a poor, mantis-fingered typist was that the words in Pastor Peters’s head always ran far, far in front of the words his index fingers took entire eras to construct. If he didn’t know any better, he would have sworn on any stack of consecrated tomes that the letters on the keyboard shifted position every few minutes or so, just enough to keep a person guessing. Yes, he could have simply written the letter longhand and then taken the time to type it through only once, but that wouldn’t make him any better a typist.

His wife had come into his office once or twice, offering to type the letter for him, as she oftentimes did, and he had politely declined, as he oftentimes did not.

“I’ll never improve if I keep letting you do it for me,” he told her.

“A wise man knows his limitations,” she replied, not meaning it as an insult, only hoping to start a dialogue, a powwow, as he himself had said to the Arcadia townspeople not long ago. He was distant in the past few weeks, more so in the past few days. And she did not know why.

“I prefer to think of it more as a ‘loose boundary’ than a limitation,” he replied. “If I can ever get the rest of my fingers to play along...well...just you wait and see. I’ll be a phenomenon! A miracle unto myself.”

When she began walking around the desk, politely asking to see what he was working on, he quickly deleted the few precious words that had taken him so long to assemble. “It’s just something I need to get out of my head,” he told her. “Nothing important.”

“So you don’t want to tell me what it is?”

“It’s nothing. Really.”

“Okay,” she said, holding up her hands in submission. She smiled to let him know that she was not angry just yet. “Keep your secrets. I trust you,” she said, and left the room.

The pastor’s typing was even worse now that his wife had said that she trusted him, thereby implying that there might be something in his writing of the letter that required not only her trust but, even worse, a reminder of that trust.

She was a very skilled spouse.

To Whom It May Concern,

That was how far back he’d gone. All the way to the beginning. He huffed and wiped his furrowed brow with the back of his hand and continued.

Peck. Peck. Peck. Peck-peck. Peck...

I am writing to inquire

Pastor Peters sat and thought, realizing now that he knew very little about exactly what he wanted to ask.

Peck-peck-peck...

I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch. I received your letter stating that Miss Pinch was trying to find me.

Delete, delete, delete. Then:

I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.

That was closer to the truth of it. He thought, then and there, about simply signing his name and dropping the envelope in the mail. He thought so hard about it that he even printed the page. Then he sat back in his chair and looked at the words.

I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.

He placed the paper on his desk and picked up a pen and marked a few things out.

I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.

Even if his mind was unsure, his hand knew what he was trying to say. It lifted the pen and launched it at the letter again. Scratching and drawing through until, finally, the truth of everything was there, staring back at the pastor.

I am writing about Elizabeth.

What else could he do then but crumple the paper and toss it into the trash?

The pastor logged on to the internet and pecked Elizabeth Pinch’s name into the search bar. All that came back were dozens of other people named Elizabeth Pinch; none of them were the fifteen-year-old girl from Mississippi who had, once upon a time, owned his heart.

He refined the search to display only images.

Pictures of women populated the screen, one after the other. Some smiling, facing the camera. Others not even aware that the camera was there. Some of the images weren’t pictures of people at all. Some of them were images from movies or television. (Apparently there was an Elizabeth Pinch in Hollywood who wrote for a very highly rated television crime drama. Images of the crime drama appeared on page after page of the search results.)

Pastor Peters searched on the computer well past when the sun went from gold to auburn, then back to gold just before it slipped beneath the horizon. Though he had not asked for it, his wife brought him a cup of coffee. He thanked her and kissed her and shooed her gently from the room before she could study the computer screen and see the name in the search bar. But, even if she had seen it, what would she have done with it? What good would it have done her? At the very least, seeing the name would have made her suspicious, but she was already suspicious. The name itself would have given her nothing more.

He had never told her about Elizabeth.

Just before bedtime he found it: a newspaper clipping uploaded from the Water Main, the small newspaper back in the small Mississippi town that Pastor Peters grew up in not so long ago. He hadn’t imagined that technology had made it that far, reached out all the way to a Podunk town in a humid corner of Mississippi where the greatest industry in all the county was poverty. The heading, grainy but legible, read Local Girl Killed in Car Accident.

Pastor Peters’s face tightened. A taste of anger rose up in his throat, an anger aimed at ignorance and the incapability of words.

Reading the article he wished for more detail—exactly how Elizabeth Pinch had died in a tangle of metal and sudden inertia. But the media was the last place one should look for truth. A person was lucky to find the facts, let alone the truth.

In spite of what the article lacked, the pastor read the small newspaper clipping over and over again. After all, he had the truth inside him. The facts only served to bring it all back to him in sharp relief.

For the first time all day, the words came easily.

I am writing about Elizabeth. I loved her. She died. Now she is not dead. How do I behave?

* * *

Harold and Lucille sat watching the news and very silently fidgeting in their own way. Jacob was upstairs, sleeping, or not sleeping. Harold sat in his favorite comfortable chair and licked his lips and rubbed his mouth and thought of cigarettes. Sometimes he inhaled, held the breath, then pushed it out firmly through lips perfectly shaped to the circumference of a cigarette.

Lucille sat with her hands in the lap of her housecoat. The news was being irrational.

A silver-haired news anchor with perfect and handsome features sat in a dark suit and had only tragic and unfortunate things to say. “In France, there are reports of three dead,” he said, a little more unemotionally than Lucille would have liked. “That number is expected to rise as police are still unable to contain the pro-Returned protesters, who seem to have lost the thread of their own protest.”

“Sensationalism,” Harold spat.

“Lost the thread?” Lucille said. “Why would he say it such a way? He sounds like he’s trying to be English.”

“I suppose he thinks it sounds better,” Harold said.

“So because it’s in France he’s gotta say something so bad in such a way?”

Then the man with the silver hair disappeared from the television and there were men in uniforms with riot shields and batons taking wide, arcing swings at people beneath the cloudless, sun-filled sky. The crowd responded like water. The mass of people—hundreds of them—rippled back as the men in uniforms surged forward. When the soldiers felt they’d overextended themselves and pulled back, the crowd immediately filled the space left behind. Some of the people ran away, some were hit in the back of the head and fell heavily, like puppets. The people in the mob surged like pack animals, lashing out in groups and slamming against the policemen. Now and again a small flame would suddenly appear at the end of someone’s arm. It would reel back, then rise into the air and fall and then there would be a great, shaggy plume of fire.

The newscaster came back. “Frightening,” he said, his voice a mixture of excitement and gravitas.

“Just think of it!” Lucille said, shooing the television screen as if it were an ill-behaved house cat. “People should be ashamed of themselves, getting all riled up like that, forgetting about basic, common decency. And what makes it worse is that they’re French. I wouldn’t expect this kind of behavior from the French! They’re supposed to be more refined than that.”

“Your great-grandmother wasn’t French, Lucille,” Harold interjected, if only to distract himself from thinking about the television reports.

“Yes, she was! She was Creole.”

“Ain’t nobody in your family been able to prove that. I think y’all just want to be French because you’re so damned in love with them. Hell if I know why.”

The news turned away from Paris and settled comfortably on a broad, flat field in Montana. The field was studded with large, square buildings that looked like barns but were not barns. “Shifting focus closer to home...” the silver-haired man began. “An anti-Returned movement seems to have sprung up right here on American soil,” he said. Then there were people on television who looked like soldiers, but were not soldiers.

But they were definitely Americans.

“The French are a sensitive and civilized people,” Lucille said, half watching the television and half watching Harold. “And stop cussing. Jacob will hear you.”

“When did I cuss?”

“You said ‘damn.’”

Harold threw his hands up in mock frustration.

On the television there were pictures of the men in Montana—but there weren’t just men; there were women, too—running in their uniforms and jumping over things and crawling under things, all of them carrying military rifles and looking very stern and serious, though failing, painfully sometimes, to look like soldiers.

“And what do you suppose this is about?” Lucille asked.

“Nut jobs.”

Lucille huffed. “Now how do you know that? Neither of us heard a word anybody’s said about all this.”

“Because I know a nut job when I see one. I don’t need a newscaster to tell me otherwise.”

“Some people are calling them ‘nut jobs,’” the silver-haired man on television said.

Harold grunted.

“But officials are saying they aren’t to be taken lightly.”

Lucille grunted back.

On television, one of the makeshift soldiers squinted down the barrel of a rifle and fired at a paper cutout of a person. A small plume of dust rose up from the ground behind the cutout.

“Some kind of militant fanatics,” Harold said.

“How do you know that?”

“What else would they be? Look at ’em.” He pointed. “Look at the gut on that one. They’re just plain old people who’ve gone off the deep end. Maybe you should go quote them some scripture.”

Then the newscaster was there to say, “It’s happening like this all over.”

“Jacob!” Lucille called. She didn’t want to scare the boy, but she was suddenly very scared for him.

Jacob answered her from his bedroom in a low, soft voice.

“You okay, honey? Just checking on you.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m okay.”

There was the light clatter of toys falling down, then the sound of Jacob’s laughter.

They called themselves the Montana True Living Movement. Self-made militants formerly preoccupied with overthrowing the U.S. government and preparing for the race wars that would eventually rock America’s melting pot to its core. But now there was a greater threat, the man from M.T.L.M. said. “There are those of us out here who aren’t afraid to do what needs to be done,” he declared.

The television program turned away from the men in Montana and back to the studio where the silver-haired man looked into the camera, then looked down at a sheet of paper, while across the bottom of the screen were the words Are the Returned a Threat?

He seemed to find the words he had been waiting for. “After Rochester, it’s a question we all have to ask ourselves.”

“If there’s one thing America will always lead the world in,” Harold said, “it’s assholes with guns.”

In spite of herself, Lucille laughed. It was a short-lived laughter, however, because the television had something very important to say and it was not the patient type. The newscaster’s eyes looked uneasy, as though his teleprompter had broken.

“We now go to the president of the United States,” he said suddenly.

“Here it is,” Harold said.

“Shush! You’re just a pessimist.”

“I’m a realist.”

“You’re a misanthrope!”

“You’re a Baptist!”

“You’re bald!”

They went back and forth this way until they caught what the president was saying. “...stay confined to their homes until further notice.” Then the bickering stopped.

“What was that?” Lucille asked.

Then the words were on the bottom of the television screen, just like most information in the modern world. President Orders Returned Confined to Their Homes.

“Dear Lord,” Lucille said, going pale.

* * *

Outside, far away on the highway, the trucks were coming. Lucille and Harold could not see them, but that did nothing to make them any less real. They carried change and irrevocability, consequence and permanency.

They rumbled like thunder over the asphalt, bringing all these things, rumbling toward Arcadia.