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

Ran actually reached out and touched them, before he stopped himself. Suddenly something opened in his head; awareness rushed back like air into a pierced vacuum. Like a sleepwalker who comes to on the edge of a precipice, Ran found himself in the upstairs hallway, glomming the dirty-clothes hamper, drawn to a pair of Claire’s new underpants, fixated like the Millennium Falcon in the Death Star’s tractor-beam.

“What am I doing?” he said aloud, and fled.

Taking refuge in the library, he sat down at the partners desk and took his head between his hands. “This is Claire,” he said. “Claire.” Whatever image she projected, had she ever been casual about sex? No, never. (Oh, many—including him, early on—had made that sad and bad mistake!) Nor, so far as Ransom knew, had she ever been unfaithful to him. And to say, to imply, “so far as he knew” wasn’t fully honest either. In his heart, Ran was certain, one hundred percent sure, that whatever their troubles, Claire had kept faith with him there. The only way he could imagine Claire cheating on him was if it was for keeps, if the marriage, for her, was truly over. And if it was for keeps, wouldn’t she tell him? Wouldn’t Claire—Claire!—have the decency, the respect, to look him in the face and honor their years together with the truth? Of course she would! And Cell was a straight shooter, too. He always had been. The notion of the two of them humping in a motel room somewhere, getting their jollies over Ransom’s credulousness, his pathetic hope that the marriage might yet work—preposterous! It was like a dream, some horrible dream from which he’d suddenly awakened, and once more the strange thing was, it wasn’t like his dream. It was as if, for an hour, two, he’d fallen into someone else’s nightmare like a swimmer in a riptide, and it had almost carried him away to sea. Sitting there, Ran had the sense he’d made the thinnest and narrowest of narrow, thin escapes. But whose dream was it, if it wasn’t his? What was all this strangeness?

Disturbed, he took a reading-glasses case that had no reading glasses in it from the top drawer of the partners desk. Secreted there, in a cloudy Baggie the yellow of old Scotch tape, a few brittle tops and flowers shifted amid a plenitude of seeds. As Ran rolled the joint, an elephant trumpeted, lumbering across the black ground of the computer screen. Firing up, he held the toke and threw the window up and exhaled into the night.

When he turned back to the room, he noticed the blue bottle on the corner of the desk. Giving it a swirl, he heard the liquid whoosh and the illiquid tink. Holding it to the light, he promptly fumbled it and watched it burst into a hundred fragments at his feet.

“Shit,” he said as the puddle spread.

In the center was a small gray lump that looked like nothing more than mud. When he picked it up, he felt hardness at the center. It was nickel-sized and round, with a hasp or fitting on one side. Something was embossed on the surface, and when Ran wiped away the sediment, he saw writing. He read and blinked, and blinked and read again.

OshKosh, it said, in burnished letters that seemed newly pressed into the tin.

“OshKosh,” he said aloud. When he looked up, Addie was waiting for him in the portrait, her blue eyes heavy with some information she seemed anxious to impart.

TWENTY-SIX

When it began, nobody can remember

No doubt at the beginning: one fine day

The surface world collapsed around his longing

The deep world yawned and took his love away

And he dove after it with righteous passion indignation passion…

And after nineteen twenty years he knew….

Ran woke up, heavy-headed, at the partners desk and found these lines. They seemed alien at first, but slowly, as he read, the details of his late-night session returned. The first verse had come in its entirety in fifteen seconds. He’d struggled with the second for an hour and a half. Was Nemo’s mission undertaken out of love or anger? Should Ran use nineteen years, like his marriage, or the thin disguise of twenty? And whether nineteen or twenty, what, after all that time beneath the sea, had Nemo learned? Here, the process finally broke down. Ransom put his head down on the desk, and woke up hours later with a stiff neck and the imprint of tooled leather on his cheek.

It was almost seven. The windows had been left open and the room was cold. Under the high ceilings, everything was shadowed, gray. On the buckram spine of a nearby book, he noticed mildew, and then he looked at all the books there were—so many of the titles obscure, forgotten. He thought of all that effort, all the self-important striving, moldering away, and it came home that the odds of his success on this song, or a future one, were very long. A twinge of fear seized in, and it struck Ransom that his dereliction with his meds might not be so easily forgivable as he’d assumed; camels’ backs were broken, after all, with straws, not bricks. His project to become a different, better man—was it fully realistic at his age? To change, at any time, is hard, but forty-five? To become someone other than you’ve been? Come on…And then he heard a thud above him on the ceiling, the tattoo of little footsteps running down the hall.

Into his dark mood ran Charlie, shouting, “Doddy! Doddy! Wake up! Bi’truck!”

Charlie ran to the window and looked back with his fresh, excited face. “Dere! Come see!” Ransom joined him as the excavator’s dump truck pulled into the frame, hauling a trailer with a yellow Caterpillar loader chained on top.

“Bi’truck?”

Ransom shook his head. “Excavator.”

“Escavator?”

“Yep.”

“No bi’truck?”

“No fire truck.”

“Wha’s exsavator do?”

“He’s going to dig a hole.”

“A hole?”

“Let’s go talk