Sunshaker's War (17 page)

The little boy (not so little now actually; he was seven and had finished first grade with straight A's, of which he was vastly proud)—pranced over to the bed and plopped down atop David's left leg.

“So what's up kid?” David asked him, twisting round to ruffle his hair.

“Pa sent me to get you up.”

David yawned. “Figured that much. What else is goin' on? What's the ruckus about?”

“Ma burned the toast and the coffee was too weak, 'cordin' to Pa. He throwed the butter dish on the floor.”

“
Threw
the dish,” David corrected. “God, I hope Liz didn't see that.”

Little Billy rolled his eyes. “She did, though. Me and her just about laughed at 'im!”

“
She
and
I
,” David corrected again.

His brother frowned, “Aw, Davy, how come you're always changin' me?
You
say stuff like that.”

“Yeah—when I'm bein' careless, and around here who cares? But
you
gotta know better. You'll grow up and be seriously brilliant someday, and we can't have you talkin' like a mountain hick.”

“
You
don't talk like a hick.”

“No, but I have to watch it when I'm away from here, or I'll backslide. But anyway, so what's Liz doin'?”

“Foolin' with breakfast, I reckon.”

“You're a big help.”

“Davy!”

David made a sudden dive for his brother and managed to catch an arm before Little Billy could escape. It took more effort than he expected to reel him in (the little booger was surprisingly strong), but eventually David got him in range of his other hand and began tickling him unmercifully. Little Billy giggled and twitched and wiggled and tried to retaliate (dangerous, since David was
himself far more susceptible than he liked to admit), and eventually their gyrations brought them closer to the edge than David could compensate for, and the whole kinetic mixture of boys and bedding flopped noisily to the floor. An on-the-fly check that neither was hurt and they were at it again—until heavy footsteps sounded downstairs and Big Billy's voice rumbled up the stairwell like distant thunder.

“You boys quit actin' crazy and get down here. I gotta headache!”

They froze instantly, faces locked in resigned glee, David with his right leg and a hunk of blanket wrapped around Little Billy's lower body, and his left arm prisoning both his brother's while he assailed an unprotected side; and Little Billy with his right hand snaked free and stuffed into David's especially vulnerable armpit.

A quick set of smirks followed an exchange of knowing looks from almost-matching sets of blue eyes, and David released his prisoner, flinging a substantial hunk of bedclothes over him as he scrambled back to the bed and dived for the gym shorts he'd left on the bedpost. His brother was ahead of him, though; and finally realizing David's atypical state of undress, snatched them from David's startled fingers and ran for the stairs, grabbing the bathrobe as an afterthought.

“Why you little—!” David shouted, then flopped back on the bed and shut his eyes against the violence that had suddenly erupted in him, that had made him, for the tiniest instant, want to chase down his brother and literally break his neck.

“David! Breakfast!” His ma's voice this time.

“Just a sec!” he hollered back, trying very hard to regain control. A glance down at his naked body and the humor of the situation finally dawned on him. He exhaled the breath he'd been holding as a giggle.

*

The upshot of Little Billy's thievery was that David was forced to make his entrance downstairs in much the same garb as a Roman senator, but with rather less dignified effect.

Liz, whom he could see from the foot of the stairs, was on the phone in the living room. She lifted a brow in amused surprise as he rolled his eyes in her direction and darted into his room to don a pair of cut-offs and a T-shirt. He looked very sheepish when he entered the kitchen.

Big Billy was nowhere in sight, though the Saturday
Atlanta Journal and Constitution
seemed to have been hastily abandoned; and his mother was sweeping up the detritus of a broken plate and muttering to herself. The smell of charcoaled bread permeated the room.

“I just don't know what's got into him,” JoAnne complained as David poured himself a cup of coffee. “He's crankier'n an old she-bear.”

“We
all
are, Ma,” David said, taking a sip of the controversial beverage, which really was pretty weak. “It's like I told you: all the hostility in Faerie's sloppin' over. We'll just have to be extra careful.”

She rose and eyed him wistfully. “That's easy for you to say; you can think things like that and keep 'em in your mind; me and your pa's a lot more set in our ways.”

“
You
gotta be the one to do it then, and just cut him some slack.”

“What do you think I
been
doin'?” she snapped, then caught herself. “And damned if I didn't just do it again. Don't know what's gonna happen if this keeps up.”

“Something's gotta give,” David said flatly. And with that remark, he fell silent.

—Which allowed him to key into Liz's conversation.

“…Yeah, right, Mom; but it's like I told you, I don't
have
to have clean clothes. I'm just stranded, not shipwrecked. I've got plenty of stuff back in Gainesville and I need to study more than I need to look good. We're talking chemistry here, not home economics.”

A voice chattered back rapidly, and Liz grimaced expressively then: “Yeah, I
know
I could come around
—if
I didn't mind going through Clayton or Hiawassee, but it'd take longer to do that than it would to get back to Gainesville. I mean this is the only road north for miles. I—”

She was cut off by more angry-sounding chatter, but finally managed to break in again.
“
No
,
Mom, the car's
fine
;
it's not stuck or anything, and I already called the patrol, and things are okay over the mountain—shoot, you can tell that by looking out the window!”

Curious about that last remark, David stood and wandered to the eastward back door, pausing in transit to retrieve a sliver of plate his ma had missed. The sun was still shining fitfully, illuminating the porch's gray boards and the long slope of side yard above the scrap of cornfield that separated the Manor environs from the main highway and the larger field on the other side—the one where he had first seen the lights of the Sidhe two summers before. But what caught his attention now was the road: an almost-stationary line of cars that snaked down off the mountain to the right, and an only slightly faster moving one that appeared from beyond a hump of mountain to the left. David guessed the road was still out and the G.S.P. was re-routing traffic—turning it back, really, as there was no effective way to detour them. As he watched, a mammoth earth-moving machine hove into view from the southern side.

Shrugging, David turned back into the room and took a slice of toast. Just as he sat down he caught the last snatch of Liz's conversation. “…Sure, Mom, I'll be careful. I'm gonna stay here a little longer and see if traffic clears a little, and then head out. I'll call you soon as finals are over.”

She hung up the receiver and returned to the kitchen, where she plopped down beside him and helped herself to the remains of a cold cup of coffee. “Lord, Davy, mothers are such a
pill
,
” she announced, for the moment apparently forgetting the puttering Jo Anne.

“Yeah,” Little Billy agreed, transiting through with the funnies in tow on his way to a rendezvous with the morning's cartoons. “Big, ugly,
nasty
pills!”

“William Thomas!” JoAnne snapped.

“Watch it, kid,” David chuckled. “You've gotta live here a while longer yet.” He looked back at Liz. “So what's up?”

“Well, I called the patrol and they said things were fine over the mountain, just the culvert out here which has blocked the whole highway, so there'd be some traffic but no problem. No rock slides, or anything. Unfortunately, they won't have the road fixed until this afternoon sometime, and probably only one lane then, and I've gotta get back as soon as I can so I can study. So I'm gonna hang around here till after lunch and then go straight to Gainesville. That's what I was calling Mom about. I left some laundry over there last time I was up, and she was making a big deal about it, and I just about went wild trying to convince her that everything was okay, that I could get to school fine, and that your mom washed my muddy clothes and loaned me some clean ones.”

David started at that. He'd never considered that Liz and his ma were close enough to a size to swap clothes, though now he looked, he realized those were his ma's jeans Liz was wearing, along with one of her blouses. Come to it, though, his ma
was
in pretty good shape for a woman in her early forties, and she'd worried off a bit of weight in the last year as well. Even without makeup she was still pretty good-looking, though the crow's feet at the corners of her eyes were getting more prominent by the month, and her hair a little duller. She was also beginning to acquire a trace of looseness in her cheeks and neck.

A lingering glance at Liz confirmed it: they really were almost the same. For the first time in his life it occurred to him that Liz was really not a girl, but a woman. He wondered, though, if she—or anyone—would ever really think of him as a man. At five-foot-seven, with white-blonde hair and still only once-a-week stubble, he really did wonder.

Liz appropriated the last of the bacon. “You still going over to Alec's?”

“Do bears perform necessary bodily functions in the woods?”

“You know more bears than I do. Do they?”

David grinned back, catching the reference to the bears he had met in Galunlati. “Yeah, well… But seriously, I don't see any way around it. Knowin' bad news is better than not knowin' anything sometimes. So I guess I'll head on over as soon as I can. I don't think I really dare call.”

“May be a while, then,” Liz said. “But hey, the sun's back out anyway.”

David looked up. “It
is,
isn't it?”

Liz swallowed her last mouthful of toast and polished off her coffee. “Think I better go move my car, too. I didn't look real closely at where I parked last night, just tried to get it out of the main drag.”

“Mind if I come along?”

“'Fraid I'll get lost?”

Something about the flip tone of her reply rubbed David the wrong way. He started to tell her to can the sarcasm, then frowned.
Was
she being sarcastic? Or just conversational? He frowned further and bit his tongue. Jesus, it was getting to him, making him irritable and fractious and jumpy. None too soon for her to leave. Maybe he ought to go with her.

“Sorry,” he began, “for what I
nearly
said just then.”

She studied him seriously. “Yeah…I think I know what you mean. Lord, I hope the whole summer's not like this.”

“Me too,” David said, and opened the back door. By the time they reached the bottom of the hill she had almost caught him.

*

As he and Liz neared the turn-off that led from the Sullivan Cove road to the Sullivan Cove Church of God roughly an eighth-mile from his house, he caught sight of an image so absurd it made him laugh out loud.

The little white church was set back a fair bit from the road, perched on a low hill that had been partially denuded of trees except for a smattering of oaks and walnuts. There was a small graveyard before it and to their right, by the gate of which Liz's car sat. But what caught David's eye was further up by the church proper. It was mid-morning of the first day of their annual all day revival, and though the main highway was blocked, that didn't mean that the congregation meant to be cut off from the sweet love of Jesus. Apparently no members lived on the Sullivan Cove side of the main highway, either, because there wasn't a single car in the parking lot. But there was a steady file of suited men and well-dressed women picking their way down the low mountain behind the church. The sight of them—tottering old folks, loud teens, taciturn adults, and fractious children—all parading through the woods, occasionally slipping and sliding as they made the last slope above the churchyard, was more than he could stand. His laughter rang loud through the valley.

Liz looked sternly at him. “Don't do that Davy. It's not nice! One of those old folks could fall and get hurt!”

“But I can't
help
it!” David chuckled, eyes wet. “They must have parked across the mountain up in Coker Hollow and be comin' across that way. It's not but a quarter mile or so as the crow flies.”