Selection Event (28 page)

Paul said nothing as they walked back.

Martin wondered how seriously he intended the threat. He wondered who he was becoming.

Chapter 50

Jan-Louise showed up the day after the fire. She was a heavily-used-looking twenty-eight years old, blond and fair-skinned, with a tracery of fine wrinkles around her eyes. There was nothing delicate about her: she was strong-boned, on the stocky side.

“Good Polish farm stock,” she said, grinning and showing her white, perfectly aligned teeth. “Diaz gave me your address, but when I got here and saw that you guys had a fire too, I thought, 'Oh crap, missed out again,' but the house where I got your address was on the other side of town. Then I had to find a map to find you. You know it took me three cars and three pairs of shoes to get here from Winnemucca? The cars kept dying and the shoes kept falling apart.”

“Water in the gas,” Winch said. He watched Jan-Louise closely.

They were sitting in Martin's house, all of them together, to welcome their new member. Paul and Leona sat quietly, and Martin had noticed that Leona had a faint purplish darkening around her left eye. Paul must have been eloquent.

Solomon and Missa had already brought out the wine glasses and the apple juice, and just before they drank, Jan-Louise had said, “I drink this and I'm in with you guys, right?”

“Unless you're crazy or until you want to leave,” Martin said.

There was a subtle change in her voice — a slower lower tone. “I was wondering if you guys had a program going here or something.”

“Definitely no program,” Martin assured her. “No one's said it, but the golden rule around here seems to be 'If you can't help somebody, then mind your own business.'”

“And you're the leader,” she said to Martin.

“Me?” He sat there a moment, thunderstruck. Him? The leader? How had that happened? He had always been the loner, the guy who was willing to spend a year underground.

“Yes,” Catrin said. “He is. When we need one.”

“He doesn't know it yet,” Winch said.

Jan-Louise held up her glass. “Sounds good to me. To all of us,” she said. And the toast was made.

“So,” Catrin asked, “what did you do back in the old times?”

Jan-Louise looked at Solomon, who was giving her all his attention. She held her glass out to him. “Honey, I'm finished with this. Could you take it into the kitchen for me?”

Solomon looked a little puzzled but he took it from her and left the room.

“I was a hooker,” she said when he was out of sight, “to be brief. Sorry, guys, but if you're taking me in, I'm not going to lie to you. I don't have AIDS either. Soon as it started looking like I was immune to MIV, I got checked to see if I was going to die from anything else, and I'm not.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and looked Martin straight in the eyes. “Look, you gave me the option of joining up with you and I'm giving you the option of passing on your offer. I try never to be where I'm not wanted. I've been alone all my life, so if you don't want me here, I can deal with it. But you have to tell me. I don't read minds.”

Martin noticed that Leona had gone pale. Solomon came back and sat at his feet. “What's a hooker?” he asked, looking up at him.

“Men would pay her to go on dates,” Martin said.

“Oh.”

“It's not a high-skill occupation,” Jan-Louise said. “As for being useful, I can sew, cook a little, and that's about it. As for being twenty-eight, I'm dumb as a stump. But if you need me to learn something, I'll do what I can to learn it.”

Martin glanced at Catrin, who nodded. He saw Winch and Xeng also nodding for acceptance. Leona sat frozen, eyes wide, staring at Jan-Louise, and Paul watched his hands fidget in his lap.

“Please stay with us,” Martin said.

“You guys sure?” she asked. “For some people, it's a lot to overlook. I'm not your regular pedestrian.”

“We're sure,” Catrin said.

“You can stay with me and Xeng,” Winch said, “till you decide where you want to live. We have the house across the street. It's got about five extra rooms we don't use.”

“Fine with me. I walked twenty-some miles yesterday and I'm really shot. I'm kinda hungry too, if I'm not imposing too fast on your hospitality.”

Xeng and Winch got up. “I'll make sandwiches,” Xeng said. They left with Jan-Louise.

When they were gone, Martin said to Leona, “You all right?”

“Yes.” She barely moved her lips when she said this.

“You don't approve of us taking her in?”

Paul still studied his hands and Leona looked at Martin hard enough that he could almost feel the pressure of her stare. Suddenly, her icy expression broke into a tidal wave of weeping and sobbing and gasping for air. She fell sideways, away from Paul, hiding her face in her hands, and wept long and loudly.

Paul tentatively put his hand on her hip and gave her several little pats. “Leona?” he said.

Catrin went over and knelt beside Leona and stoked her hair and spoke softly to her.

Several minutes later, Leona was sitting up, Paul and Catrin sitting on either side of her. She was still taking short little gasps of breath, but it was clear she was readying herself to speak.

“I used to work at a restaurant—” She faced Paul. “—like I told you. I worked at a real nice restaurant. And that woman comes in here, a hooker forever, and it's okay with everybody.” She wept terribly.

Martin glanced at Catrin; they both wondered where this was going.

“One evening... one evening a customer paid his bill and said he'd give me two hundred dollars for an hour of my time.” She looked at Paul with an expression of dread and fear. “And I did it. I sinned in the worst way. I was thinking two hundred dollars for just an hour and what I could do with it and I'd be able to forget about it, and I did it just that once, and I got pregnant, and god punished me by taking my baby with the disease, and that woman, she's been a hooker forever and she's just fine with you and everybody else, so why isn't she punished?” To Paul, she said, “Why isn't she?”

“It's okay,” Paul said blandly.

“Nobody cares and all the time I lied to everybody about what happened just that one time.”

“It's okay,” Paul said again.

Martin was remembering the power of ceremonies when he went into the kitchen, brought back an opened bottle of wine, and poured half a glass into their four glasses. Then he took Leona's hand and the four of them stood up.

“Paul, do you love Leona?”

“Yes,” he said, but his voice was tired and dull.

“Do you still want to be her husband?”

“Yes.”

“Leona, do you love Paul?”

She nodded. “Un-huh.”

“And you still want to be his wife?”

“Yes I do,” she whimpered.

“Paul, you should treat this as something you've always known about, because Leona is the same person today as the day you married her.”

“I am! I am!”

Paul nodded a little bit.

“Now we all know about it. Leona, look at how much we don't care.”

Martin held his glass forward and the others did likewise, solemnly, and then they drank. “Now it's over.” He hoped.

....

The next day, Martin and Xeng and Solomon were on their way to see if anything was salvageable from the library. When they passed by Paul and Leona's house, Leona was out front pulling some bermuda grass out of her hedge.

“So sorry to hear you lost baby,” Xeng said.

“Thank you,” Leona said. “Her name was Ramsey.”

“My condolence,” Xeng said.

Solomon stepped forward and hugged Leona around her legs. “My condolence too,” he said with great seriousness, looking up into her face.

“Thank you, Solomon.”

....

At the library, they found nothing but great heaps of smoldering books. The smoke stung their eyes, but when they started back, Martin realized that it was not the smoke that caused Xeng to weep.

Chapter 51

Through the Fall and into Winter, the group functioned smoothly. Leona was quiet and withdrawn for several weeks, but that passed and she became more like her old self. Several times, though, when Leona suggested some slight “modernization” of their house, Martin heard Paul say to her, in his quiet, no longer so bashful way, “No, I don't think I want to do that,” and apparently that ended the discussion.

Jan-Louise never moved out of Winch and Xeng's house, and when there were gatherings, dinners, or when the group went somewhere together, such as the walks they sometimes took in the evenings, Martin noticed that Jan-Louise always walked between the two men and that both of them were quite solicitous of her, opening doors for her, clearing a place for her to sit, or helping her in a hundred ways.

Once he asked Winch, “Not meaning to pry or anything, but I was curious how the three of you got along together.”

Winch chuckled. “We get along very well. Back in the old times, they'd've dusted off their stake and burned all three of us for having too good a time. But we really get along very well. Xeng is a fine person — so how could I be jealous of him? — and I guess he feels the same way about me. And Jan-Louise, well, we both love that woman enough we don't need to own her.”

“Winch, you're a gentleman.”

“It's no sweat being a gentleman, here at the end of the world.”

....

Xeng took over Missa and Solomon's reading lessons from Martin and Winch, although there wasn't much to take over. Missa imitated Solomon and he was so intent on learning to read, spending three or four hours a day reading and writing in his notebook, that Martin suspected that the kid was a genius, although where any special aptitudes lay neither he nor Winch nor Xeng were sure.

Xeng had the first field-test of his medical skills when Winch was trying to move the refrigerator out of his kitchen, slipped, broke his arm and put a five-inch gash in it.

Solomon ran across the street and told Martin, but when Martin got there, Xeng already had Winch sitting at the kitchen table and had his briefcase of equipment opened and ready. Xeng squinted at the injuries. “Hurt much?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Winch said. “It's numb.”

“Very good,” Xeng said, taking the arm in his hands, feeling it first one way and then another, and then quickly giving a little push on it.

“Whoa!” Winch gasped, his body stiffening. “I thought you were my friend.”

“No x-ray,” Xeng said, “so I made my best amateur guess.”

“Okay, okay,” Winch said, breathing heavily and staring at the blood that was pooling on the table around his elbow.

Martin was not sure how competent Xeng was, but Xeng at least acted as though he knew what he was doing and that was worth a lot.

“Now to sew up the cut. I think only four stitches.”

“Jesus, Xeng, don't you have any anesthetic?”

“Not yet,” he said under his breath. Solomon handed him a needle with transparent thread already through its eye. “Look away. It's best.”

Winch looked away.

“Xeng,” Martin said, “can you wait two minutes?”

“It will hurt more if I wait.”

“I have something for the pain.” Martin ran across the street to his house, got his grocery bag of drugs, and hurried back to Xeng. “I guess you should have all this anyway," he said, “since you're our doctor.”

Martin dug through the bag and found the chloral hydrate, picked out two of the green gelatin capsules, and gave them to Winch with a glass of water. Within five minutes, his eyes were rolling back in his head. “Thanks, Martin,” he slurred. “Stitch away, Xeng. Use the sewing machine if you want.”  

Xeng started and finished the stitching within a minute and a half. He quietly explained to Solomon what he was doing as he worked, how far back into the unbroken skin to pierce the skin and how far apart to place the stitches. Since Winch was unconscious, he put in eight.

“Xeng,” Martin said, after they had got Winch on the sofa and were letting him sleep off the sedative, “what did you mean you didn't have any anesthetic 'yet?'”

“Ah.” He was washing his hands in the kitchen sink and wiping off the table. “Martin, I am not sure, you see, how happy you may be with my anesthetic.”

“If someone needed it, I'd be very happy with it.”

“But pills go bad, go weak, after time."

“That's true. Tell it to me in my mother tongue, Xeng.”

“I have been planning for the time when our pills are gone or no good, planning for making anesthetic, for tooth problems, childbirth, you know. I can not be a good doctor if my patient has much pain.”

He was avoiding looking at Martin and a film of sweat had broken out on his forehead.

“Yes, Xeng, yes. Bottom line.”

“Opium poppies for anesthetic,” he said, looking down at his hands as he dried them. “A modest amount will be ready in two weeks.”

“Xeng, you've been thinking further ahead than I have. Thank you. The next time all of us are together, I'll bring it up. They should know, but it isn't going to be a problem.”