Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

beloved teacher—who fought for civil rights, who got her daughter a full ride at a good northern prep school, the first person who made Ransom Hill believe that there was something in him worth an effort on another human being’s part—Delores could extend Ran her largesse, but accept him as her daughter’s lover, she could not.

In the end, you weren’t even good enough for them, were you, Ran? the voice proposed, not even good enough for your nigger girlfriend or her nigger mom.

“Shut up!” he shouted.

“We didn’t say anything, Daddy!” Hope and Charlie cried in protest.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Who were you talking to?”

“No one.” He avoided Hope’s query in the mirror. “Myself.”

Do you understand? the voice went on, growing ever bolder now. Do you begin to see why Harlan did it now?

There was a new voice coming from the speaker now—Mufasa’s. His deep-chested, manly baritone seemed familiar somehow. What was the actor’s name? Briefly, Ran tuned in. Mufasa was explaining the Pridelands’ extent to little Simba. Everything the eye could see would one day be his to rule. All except for a shadowy region in the farthest distance. That place, Mufasa said, Simba must avoid at all costs.

He’s wrong, though, isn’t he? the voice said. Don’t you have to go there, too?

Resistant, Ransom clenched his jaw, but what the voice said now seemed true.

They were crossing another, older bridge onto what appeared to be an island—for all Ran knew, it might have been Sullivan’s as easily as Kiawah. Expensive homes on immaculately groomed lots stood side by side by shacks with jungle yards. A hippie girl attired for a night out in Haight-Ashbury in 1968 was talking to a haggard homeless man with a fright wig of silver hair. Surfer dudes in wet suits filed off the beach, where a fabulous party roared beneath a pier. Unusually large numbers of dogs and cats wandered near the public road, like aboriginals on walkabout.

Beside a run-down shack that looked suspiciously like Ran’s old house on Bane and Ninth, an ancient lady in a rocking chair sat hunched beneath a crude hand-lettered sign: “Fried Popcorn Shrimp.”

Pulling into the dusty lot, Ran got out, leaving the children fixated in back.

“Popcorn shrimp,” he said, examining the gray specimens she was heading in her lap. “Bait, in other words…”

“You got it,” she conceded, cheerfully enough. “Don’t let that stop you, though. They’re good. Here, try one.” She offered him a greasy paper plate.

He picked one off the mound. “You’re right.”

“Even better hot. Can I fry you up a batch?”

“What I really need is ice cream for my kids.”

She wiped her hands and put the basket in the fryer. “There’s a shop in town. Or I got some Ben and Jerry’s in the house.”

“I guess it would be asking too much for you to have some cones…”

“Well, you are pushing it a bit,” she said. “But, guess what, it’s your lucky day.”

“I could argue the point,” he said. “But I won’t. Two double scoops to go. I’ll make it worth your while.”

The screen door slammed behind her, and he listened to the sizzling of the oil, the whisper of breaking surf.

In the van, Scar was telling Simba that the shadow region was only for the bravest lions.

Scar’s right, isn’t he? said the voice. However wise and good Mufasa is, he doesn’t really grasp the total picture. You have to go there, too, don’t you, Ran—to where the shadows are? Isn’t that trip, in fact, the one that really counts?

“That’s where we’re going now, isn’t it?” asked Ran.

And the voice said, Already there.

“Mind if I ask a question,” he asked the old woman as he paid.

“Shoot.”

“Where exactly am I?”

“Folly Beach.”

Ran expelled a shrimp, projectile-style, as he began to laugh. “And I suppose that once you get here, you can never leave.”

“I might not be the person you should ask,” she said. “Been here forty years myself.”

“Okay,” said Ran, “okay, the Folly part is evident, so where exactly is the Beach?”

She jerked her head. “’Bout a hundred yards that way.”

“Would you object if I let my children stretch their legs?”

“It’s a free country.”

“Who told you that one?”

The woman smiled at this, and Ransom, cheered by the exchange, took the cones back to the car to find a herd of wildebeests plunging down a sheer rock scarp with hyenas snapping at their heels. Ahead of the stampede, the little lion, Simba, ran, weaving and slipping.

Ransom, like the children, watched, entranced, as black-maned Scar informed his golden, nobler brother, Mufasa, of the peril in the gorge.

Scar and Mufasa traversing down a rocky mountainside…Mufasa plunging into the stampede…He runs against the herd and gets knocked down…He grunts and struggles up…little Simba’s clinging to a tree limb…Now it breaks, he’s flying through the air…Mufasa catches him in his mouth…He puts Simba, safe, on a high rock. The herd sweeps him away, and Simba screams.

Suddenly Mufasa reappears. He lunges, claws his way up the rock face. Above, Scar waits, looking down at him, strangely calm.

Mufasa whispers, asks for help. Scar lunges, digs his claws into Mufasa’s paws. His chartreuse eyes are lit up now; Mufasa’s golden ones go shocked and round with awful prescience. “Long live the king!” says Scar.

Mufasa, screaming, falls and falls.

The thunder of hooves abates.

Ashen, Ran reached up and turned the picture off.

“Daddy! It’s not over!”

“Yes, it is,” he said, unbuckling them brusquely.

“What about the movie?”

“Here’s your ice cream,” he said, handing them their cones. “Come on.”

He took their hands and hauled them to the beach.

“Look!” said Charlie, running toward the ocean as it came into view.

Hope, less easily diverted, frowned at Ransom.

“What?”

Warned off by his tone, she followed Charlie. “Wait for me!”

Alone, Ran fell to his seat and pressed his throbbing temples with both hands.

“Scar, help me, brother!”

In the final moment, just before Mufasa fell, Ran recognized the voice. The actor was James Earl Jones, but that wasn’t it. The connection was to Cell. Cell was Mufasa. Their voices possessed a similar timbre, similar depth. Hope had