The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (7 page)

I stopped at a gas station and used the book in their phone booth to find her address. “B. Rushforth—Plum Hill 67a.” I assumed the small
a
meant the difference between her gatehouse and the main. The sky had started the morning blue, but had slipped down grey-white to almost brown by the time I entered the Plum Hill gates and started looking for numbers. A large black labrador retriever ran out of a driveway and followed the car, barking awhile until he lost interest a few houses down and wagged his tail back home. Sixty-three, 65, 67. The name on the mailbox was none other than Samuel Morgan, sole owner of the Morgan Computer Company. You know the one I’m talking about—each machine costs millions and is the darling of the US Defense Department? I think the man is still in his thirties, but is reputed to be astronomically wealthy. Beenie rented her house from
this
guy?

The driveway wound up and around a long way before you actually saw anything. The “gatehouse” came first, although it guarded no gate. No car was parked near her house, and, from what I could see, none was at the big house either. I felt like a thief casing the joint. I am not a thief or a snoop, but I decided to snoop. I would do it in plain sight, however, so if anyone happened to come up, they’d see me at it. But I did have every intention of looking in whatever windows were there and finding whatever clues were available.

Snow had begun to fall, but it was light and playful. The whole feeling of what I was about to do lightened my mood. It was so out of character for me—so nosy and so none of my business to peek in a stranger’s windows. I couldn’t help smiling, although I was still pretty riled.

Flakes began to stick and melt on my glasses. I had to take them off for a wipe before spying in earnest. Specs in hand, I looked around and realized what an utterly beautiful scene it was. Acres of lawn, dark trees on the edges, the green-brown stillness of the lake behind the fat floating snowflakes ...

Beenie’s house was nothing special. A small Cape Cod saltbox the colour of silvery tree bark—from the outside, it appeared cosy and a good place for one person to live, two at most. Pink gauzy curtains framed the windows. From afar, I looked through and saw a couch covered in a large flower print. Eyeglasses back in place, I went to the window that looked into her living room. Typical stuff: appropriate furniture, a few throw rugs, dull pictures on the walls. For no reason, I looked at my watch and then chuckled. I’d seen too much TV. Without realizing it, I was spying the way they did it on television—check your watch a lot; check over your shoulder constantly; don’t spend too much time looking in a window before moving on to the next. Check that watch again—you have only so much time. I had no idea how much I would have before someone noticed me peeking in windows, and came over or called the cops, and I would get myself into big trouble.

Moving slowly around the house, I passed a kitchen with the remnants of breakfast left out—a knife on a plate filled with breadcrumbs, a coffee cup tipped over on its saucer. Something touched my mind, but didn’t come into focus until a few minutes later. A small window into a bathroom. Standing on tiptoe, I could make out a yellow shower curtain and a rumpled towel tossed across the sink.

I was a step towards the next window when it registered.

“It’s messy!”

Her whole house was messy. Beenie Rushford, Queen Terminator of the dust speck, Grand Wielder of Mop and Broom/Look-Out-Dirt-Here-I-Come, lived in a house with wet towels and strawberry-jam smudges on her tablecloth? It was not only hard to believe, it was nigh on impossible. I know—people are a giant admixture of contradictions, and nothing should be surprising in life, but if you had seen the results of this woman’s work, you would fully understand why it was inconceivable for her to live like this.

Still dumbfounded, I walked to the last window and saw dead Annette Taugwalder sitting on Beenie Rushforth’s bed, reading a magazine.

It was a trick, a joke; I was drunk; I was insane. She was
dead.
She could not be
there.
But oh, she most certainly was. Twenty-years’-dead Annette flipping the pages of a magazine. Without realizing it, I put my head on the glass, because the world was suddenly a new place for me.

“Annette?” I put a hand on the glass, too. It was cold. I felt that. She looked up and smiled. I was fifty-five years old and thought ... Forget what I thought. I was wrong.

She stood up and walked out of the room. I kept my forehead on the glass, and kept looking at the tangled bedspread where she’d sat. I had never in my life been so close to the answer, but I was petrified. Everything inside me howled and screeched and shook the bars of their cages. Let us out. Let us run away. The fire’s close and will kill us.

“Professor Silver?”

I turned, and there was Annette. “I’m scared of you.”

She nodded, said she understood.

“I don’t know what to do. Can one talk to Death?”

“Yes, Professor. We
have
to talk.”

“Is it because of Beenie?”

She nodded again, then gestured for me to follow. We walked a long way across the lawn and down to a boathouse beside the lake. There was a pinewood bench in front of it, and we sat down.

“She thought it was best if I came first, because you and I have the most to talk about. The other things aren’t as serious.”

“Sometimes I dream of talking to the dead. Sometimes the dreams are very vivid.”

She frowned. “This isn’t a dream. I’m really here, and we have to talk, so please don’t pinch yourself or jump up and down trying to wake up. It’s real; I’m real. I am dead, but I’m here now.”

“Why?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Because I hate you, and you must know that. It
was
your fault back then. Or a lot of it was. You were the straw that broke my back. You said my book was bad, and bingo, that did it.”

“Oh Annette, I didn’t—”

“
Yes, you did!
I wasn’t
dumb,
you know. I knew what you were saying.”

“Should I have lied? You said you wanted the truth.”

“I did, but not one that would kill me.
Your
truth was like stabbing a knife into my fucking brain!

“I was so sure it was good. So sure you’d say, ‘Annette, it’s
stunning
! It’s like nothing else.’ ” She slid closer down the bench, pointing furiously at me. “Do you remember what you
did
say? Huh? I do. You said, ‘I think in certain places you’ve sat a little too close to the fires of your favourite writers. Sometimes you use their heat to keep your prose warm.’ You pompous, smug asshole! It was my fire! I lit all the fires in that book—”

“Annette, that’s enough.”

Beenie’s firm voice came from behind me, but before I turned, I saw the girl’s fury sink back into her face like a fist she had to hide. She still hated me, but was more afraid of what would happen if she didn’t do what she’d been told.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Hiya, Scott. I wasn’t expecting you so soon. Go in the house, Annette. You can talk more to him later.”

Like the hyperbolic young woman she was, or had been, she got up without deigning to look at me,
tsk’d
loudly, and stomped off. I looked at her shoes, and realized they were the same high riding boots she’d worn and had been so in fashion when I had known her. “I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack, Beenie.”

“Don’t worry—your heart’s as strong as a horse’s. What you should watch out for is that uric acid. Stay away from tomatoes, is my advice.”

I took a deep breath and looked at her. “Who are you?”

“God.”

“Oh.”

She smiled and took my hand. “Uh-Oh City!”

Had it grown colder, or had my soul’s temperature dropped ten degrees since sitting on the bench? Beenie had got a large stick in her hand and was snapping off little bits. That was the only sound around us except for the occasional faraway car driving into the Plum Hill turn-off.

“Don’t you want to ask any questions?”

I was trying to get calm. My eyes were closed. She nudged me and handed over a piece of stick. I looked. A perfectly carved head of me about three inches high. Perfect colouring, too—my grey hair, blue eyes. I dropped it and unconsciously wiped my hands on my trousers.

“Come on, boy; lighten up! It’s funny. Ask me some questions, and let’s get going on this.”

It was my turn for narrowed eyes. “How can you be God and have cancer?”

“Good shot, Professor. Now we’re cooking! I guess I should begin from the beginning, huh?” She was about to go on, when she saw something behind me and stopped. Standing up, she cupped both hands around her mouth and shouted, “You go back to the house, Annette! I’m not fooling, and I’m not telling you again!”

I didn’t turn, because I had no desire whatsoever to see A. Taugwalder again any time soon.

“That damned girl. I told her, you know? I told her she could have her say, but then she had to back off so I could explain things to you. But she’s headstrong and
so
used to getting her way. Are you all right, Scott?”

“No.”

“Too bad. Where was I? At the beginning. OK. I was born in McPherson, Kansas. My father owned a hardware store, and our whole family worked there. One day, when I was behind the counter, a man I’d never seen before came in and asked for a pair of pliers. We got to talking, and he told me his name was Gilbert, Nolan Gilbert. I was fifteen years old. Do you know anything about the mystic Jewish?”

“You mean Jewish mystics?”

“Right, that’s them.”

“Well, something. I’ve read—”

“They came closest. Ever heard of the Lamed Wufniks!”

“Beenie, what are you
talking
about?”

“These mystics believed in Lamed Wufniks. Thirty-six righteous men whose job is to justify the world to God. Or, looking at it another way, they’re supposed to explain to God why man has a right to be here. Now, if one of these thirty-six ever discovered who he was, he immediately died, and somebody else, in another part of the world, took his place. Because, you see, even though they don’t know it, they’re the secret pillars of the universe. Saviours. Without them doing this justifying, God would get rid of the whole bunch of mankind.”

“Wup—”

“
Wuf.
Lamed Wufniks. Which is not so far from wrong. The big difference is, we don’t do any justifying, because we
are
God.”

“
You’re
a ‘Wufnik’?”

“No, I’m God. Or one thirty-sixth of Him. They got the number right.”

A bird flew in over the water and out again. I looked at Beenie, the ground, Beenie, the ground. What was I supposed to say?

“You don’t believe me. And what about Annette? You need more miracles? I can give them if it’ll help, but I thought she’d be enough. You’re a tough audience, Professor Silver. Here.” With her left hand, she pulled a silver dollar from behind my neck. With her right, she held something up. In her palm was one of those plastic, dome-shaped doodads you shake up, and fake snow flutters and falls over a scene like Paris or the North Pole. Only, in this one, real-life tiny people were sitting on a bench, moving—and after staring, I realized it was us in there, doing what we out here were doing, move for move.

“For God’s sake, stop it!”

“OK.” She closed her hand around the snowy dome, and it disappeared.

I half stood. “What do you want from me? Why are you doing this?”

She pulled me down again. “Just sit back and listen to the rest of my story. I was fifteen when I met Nolan Gilbert. He was about seventy. First he told me, then showed me, who he was, like I’m doing with you. Then he said he was dying, and I was supposed to replace him.

“That’s how it works, see. You live your life normally, even after you know. But like everybody else—and you
are
like everybody else, Scott; you got to know that. Sooner or later, our time to die comes, too. A normal lifetime—sixty or seventy years, usually. But the difference is,
when
our time comes, we have to find a replacement. Some are luckier than others—they know who it is that they want years before they die. Like me with you.”

“You knew me before?”

“Sure. I’ve been cleaning your room at the university for years, but you never really saw me, because I worked the night-shift. Sometimes we’d pass each other in the hall if you worked late.”

“You’re telling me God is man?”

“No, no, no! I am
not
saying that at all. Man has God in him, but he’s not God! No, the absolute simplest way to put it is this: man is man, but there are thirty-six chosen men who,
together,
are God. That’s why normal people feel close to Him—because He’s them in many ways. Nolan told me about the Greeks. You know about that. They believed there were lots of gods, which is kind of right, and that they all had human feelings. They were interested in sex, got angry, and did unfair things, stuff like that. So the Greeks were close, too, in guessing right, but they also thought gods lived up on special mountains away from the rest of the world. Wrong. We’re here—just all over the place, and not looking like people’d expect, you know? I’m one, and I’m sure not impressive, huh? But I’m only a thirty-sixth of the big puzzle. Fit me together with the other parts, and you’ve got
ONE IMPRESSIVE GOD
, all right!

“I’ll tell you something else, too—the world is full of puzzle pieces. Know how you feel lonely and apart sometimes? That’s because you’re not connected up the right way. People who find out that secret spend the rest of their lives trying to find their matching other parts. But I’m not here to talk about that with you. We don’t have time for it. There’s so much else I gotta tell you.”

As I mentioned earlier, before that wondrous afternoon with Beenie Rushforth, I was beginning to believe more and more in God, but one along the lines of Emily Dickinson’s “God is a distant, stately lover.” One who is fully aware of us and what we are up to every minute of our lives, but one who has the love and respect to allow us our own fates. When we die and reach whatever other side there is, He will go over our lives with us page by page, like an essay written for school, an essay having on it many mistakes that must be identified and corrected before the essay is put away. Once the mistakes have been brought to our attention, we will recognize most of them, and He will point out others. By the time we get up from His desk, we’ll fully understand what we did wrong. Did I believe in reincarnation? No. Why would we repeat third grade if we fully perceived all of the mistakes we’d made there? I believed in an afterlife, but not on earth. I hadn’t a clue as to where we went, and I did not want to guess.