Stone Junction

One: AIR

Unam est vas.

—Maria Prophetissa

Daniel Pearse was born on the rainy dawn of March 15, 1966. He didn’t receive a middle name because his mother, Annalee Faro Pearse, was exhausted from coming up with a first and last – especially the last. As near as she could figure, Daniel’s father might have been any of seven men. Annalee decided on Daniel because it sounded strong, and she knew he’d need to be strong.

At Daniel’s birth, Annalee was a sixteen-year-old ward of the Greenfield Home for Girls, an Iowa custodial institution administered by the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin. She had been placed there by court order after attempting to steal an ounce bar of silver from a jewelry-shop display case. She told the arresting officer she was an orphan of the moon, and told the judge that she didn’t recognize the court’s authority to make decisions about her life. She refused to cooperate beyond giving her name as Annalee Faro Pearse. The judge sentenced her to Greenfield till she was eighteen.

Her second month at Greenfield, Annalee confided her suspected pregnancy to one of her roommates. The next day she was called before Sister Bernadette, a small, severe woman of fifty with an office as meticulously spare as her heart, though not nearly as dour.

‘Sit down,’ Sister Bernadette said. It was a command, not an offer.

Annalee sat down in the straight-back wooden chair in front of the desk.

Sister Bernadette stared at Annalee’s face for half a minute, then shifted the gaze to her belly. A muscle twitched in the Sister’s flaccid cheek. ‘I understand you are pregnant,’ she said evenly.

Annalee shifted her weight on the hard chair. ‘I think so.’

‘You were raped,’ Sister Bernadette almost whispered. ‘The child will be put up for adoption.’

Annalee shook her head. ‘I wasn’t raped. I was fucked by a man I loved. I liked it. I want the baby.’

‘And who is this loving father?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know.’ Sister Bernadette blinked slowly, folding her hands on the desk. ‘Is that because you never got his name, or because there’s too many names to remember?’

Annalee hesitated a moment, then said firmly, ‘Both.’

‘So,’ Sister Bernadette nodded curtly, ‘you’re a slut as well as a thief.’

Blue eyes flashing, Annalee stood up.

‘Sit down, slut,’ Sister Bernadette screamed, slamming the desk top with her open hands as she jumped to her feet. ‘I said sit down!’

Annalee, just under six feet tall and a little over 130 pounds, broke Sister Bernadette’s jaw with her first punch, a roundhouse right with every bit of herself behind it.

Annalee spent three months alone in what the girls called ‘the blocks’ – a row of tiny cinderblock sheds that had been used for smokehouses when Greenfield was a pig farm. Except for the series of ventilation slits high along the roofline. Annalee’s room was windowless. Nor, with just a saggy cot and a toilet prone to clogging, were her quarters particularly well appointed. She received two meals a day, invariably thin soup, stale bread, and a withered apple. Once a week she was allowed a shower, and once monthly a visit to Greenfield’s doctor, a retired physician deep in his dotage whose main diagnostic technique was having patients do jumping-jacks naked in his office.

For the first time in her life Annalee began a program of daily exercise, which did not include naked jumping-jacks for the doddering doctor. The exercise helped burn off the rancidity of confinement and answered some faint maternal intuition that she needed to be strong for this birth.

Annalee’s regimen occupied about two hours a day. The rest of her time she daydreamed, long spiraling reveries. A week later she felt the baby move inside her for the first time, and her entire attention began a slow pivot inward. Using the spoon that came with her meals, working in the few minutes available between eating and the retrieval of her tray, she scratched what she’d learned into the cinderblock wall: ‘Life goes on.’

When she returned to her dorm, she was welcomed as a heroine. Sister Bernadette was still eating through a straw, and it was rumored she was being transferred. Annalee didn’t particularly care about Sister Bernadette’s fate. She was worried about her own and her baby’s. The new Mother Superior – Sister Christine, who the girls said was ‘cool’ – told her that Sister Bernadette had decided not to press charges for assault.

‘Why not?’ Annalee demanded.

Surprised by Annalee’s aggressive tone, Sister Christine sat up straighter at her desk. ‘Perhaps Sister Bernadette found some compassion in her heart.’

‘Only if you could find some in a mustard seed. And if there is any, it’s not much.’

Sister Christine said softly, ‘It saddens me to hear you say that. I’ve given my life to Christ because I believe in His Divinity and His Wisdom. Central to both, in the heart’s quick, is the power of forgiveness.’

Annalee leaned forward, conscious of her swelling girth. Just as softly, she said, ‘Sister, I’ve devoted half my life to survival because I’ve found life mean. Forgiveness is a waste of spirit because there’s nothing to forgive. I believe in the wisdom of what is and the power of right now. I’m pregnant. I intend to keep the baby. It’s my life and the only real power I have is taking responsibility for it. If you deny me that power, we go to war, hopefully on front pages and the six o’clock news. “Pregnant Waif Sues Catholic Prison.” “Little girl orphaned by murder/suicide of parents prays every night in tears: Please God, don’t let them take my baby, she’s all I have left.” Forgive me, Sister, but that’s how it is.’

Sister Christine, eyes bright with tears, reached across the desk and gently squeezed Annalee’s shoulders. ‘Oh, I wish they were all like you. There are so many who must seek God; only a few whom God must find. I’ll do what I can, but beyond Greenfield my influence is minimal. And I do think you should consider adoption, because you have no way to support the baby once you leave here – assuming by some miracle you’re allowed to keep it here – no skills, no home, no family. If you think life is mean so far, try it with a kid. You’ll end up a thirty-year-old waitress with hemorrhoids and a third husband, so depressed that drugs don’t help, and a kid who hates your guts.’

‘How would you know?’ Annalee said sharply.

‘Because I’ve seen it so many times I can’t even feel the heartbreak any more – or not until I meet someone like you, so strong, so real.’

Annalee covered Sister Christine’s hands with her own. ‘I’ll make you a vow of my own: If you don’t break my ass, I won’t break your heart.’

At the beginning of her last trimester, Annalee radiated a powerful and vital tranquility. Her roommates held her in awe. Their attitudes and touches softened. They made sure she had extra pillows and any food she desired. They asked her excitedly what it felt like. Annalee told them it felt like she was becoming someone else, and that it was the most amazing thing she could imagine.

The birth was without complications. Nineteen hours later, after the nurse had brought Daniel for his third feeding, Annalee swung out of bed, dressed quickly, and left the hospital with Daniel bundled in her arms.

It was drizzling outside, cold but not quite freezing. Annalee turned left and started down the street, looking for keys in ignitions. The drizzle thickened. She pulled the blanket closer around the child. ‘Okay, kid,’ she said, ‘here we go.’

Letting the road rock the baby against her breast, Annalee sang along with Smiling Jack Ebbetts, the Singing Truck Driver, as they roared down I-80 West in the tuck-and-roll cab of his ’49 Kenworth. Annalee had stolen a car five blocks from the hospital, but, deciding it was too risky to stay with for long, had ditched it near the Interstate and put out her thumb. In less than a minute Smiling Jack pulled over, and they were fifty miles gone before the engine had cooled on the stolen Ford.

Smiling Jack Ebbetts didn’t haul freight. He made his living singing at truckstops and bars across the country, performing as it pleased him or finances required. He lived in the long-box trailer the Kenworth hauled. The trailer had a small kitchen, cozy living room, cramped shower and toilet, and two tiny bedrooms in the rear. The rig, Smiling Jack explained, represented a compromise between his homebody heart and his vagabond soul.

As good-humored as his name implied, Smiling Jack was in his late thirties. He had a faded IWW button on his Stetson’s band and a pair of rolling dice on his belt buckle. Annalee liked him immediately. When he asked what she was doing on the road with such a young baby – ‘looks like he’s barely dried off’ – Annalee told her story. He sounded two long blasts on the airhorn when she recounted breaking Sister Bernadette’s jaw.

‘Well all right!’ he crowed admiringly when she’d finished. ‘You got it straight as far as I’m concerned.’ He reached over and patted her shoulder. ‘You’ll do fine. You got heart, you got brains, and you got the spirit to keep ’em glued together.’ He turned his attention back to the road. ‘You got any idea where you and this newborn fellow here are going?’

‘California, I guess. I want to be warm.’

‘Got people there?’

‘No.’

‘Any money?’

‘No.’

‘I’m a mite depleted myself at the moment,’ Smiling Jack said, ‘but when we hit Lincoln I want to buy li’l Daniel here some duds for his birthday. Shirt and jeans and stuff. And some diapers.’

‘That’s kind,’ Annalee told him, ‘but please don’t spend what you can’t afford.’

Smiling Jack smiled. ‘If I don’t spend it, how do I know what I can afford?’

Smiling Jack taught her some of the songs in his bottomless repertoire, and they practiced them together as they crossed Wyoming, down through Evans and Salt Lake City. They worked out harmonies as the big diesel hauled them across the salt flats into Nevada, Daniel asleep between them on the seat, or nursing.

Annalee and Smiling Jack sang together three nights at a bar in Winnemucca, followed by a weekend gig at a small club in Reno. Smiling Jack gave Annalee forty percent of the take and paid all expenses. When they crossed Donner Pass and dropped into California, Annalee had a used bassinet, an old stroller with bad wheel bearings, and seventy-five dollars in the pocket of her Salvation Army jeans.

They stopped that afternoon east of Sacramento, Annalee washing diapers at the laundromat while Smiling Jack changed the oil in the truck. Back on the road, Smiling Jack said, ‘I was thinking back there, all scrunched up under the rig and watching oil drip in the pan, that I might have a proposition for you and the boy. You see, I got this half-ass ranch way the hell and gone out Spring Ridge, which is about a hundred and fifty crow-miles north of ’Frisco, couple of miles inland from the coast. My uncle won it in a card game back in the thirties – four deuces against aces full. Not the dead mortal nuts, but like Uncle Dave said, good enough to take it all. Uncle Dave willed it to me when he cashed out five years ago. It’s about two hundred acres, big ol’ redwood cabin, clean air, good spring water. Nearest neighbor is seven miles of dirt road, so it’s bound to cramp your social life, but it might be just the place to hunker down a spell till the wind drops, if you know what I mean. I can’t stand the ranch because it’s always in the same place and the taxes come right out my tank, so if you’re interested, I’m in the mood to deal. Rent would be taxes and caretaking; stay as long as you want. The taxes are $297 a year, and they’re already paid till next January. If you want to give it a shot, country life is great for kids. And if you’re still there next time I come through, I might have a job that’ll make you a little money. Till then, you’d be on your own. What do you say?’

‘Thank you.’

Smiling Jack laughed. ‘Hell’s bells, you deserve it, sweetheart. Don’t feel obliged.’

Smiling Jack’s Kenworth was too much for the narrow rutted road, so they walked the last mile to the ranch, taking turns carrying Daniel. Four spread deuces were nailed to the cabin door, the cards so sun-bleached they appeared blank. The cabin was festooned with spider webs and littered with woodrat droppings, but nothing a broom and scrub brush couldn’t fix. The woodshed roof sagged under the weight of a thick limb a storm had torn from a nearby apple tree, but the shed itself contained three cords of seasoned oak. Smiling Jack showed her where the kerosene was stored and how to fill and trim the lamps, instructed her on using the woodstove and propane refrigerator, produced bedding from an old seaman’s chest, and generally squared her away. Out on the back porch, in the warm sunlight, they shared a lunch of sourdough bread and cheese they’d purchased the previous evening in San Francisco. After lunch, Smiling Jack waved farewell and headed up the road toward his truck.

Daniel started to cry. Annalee unbuttoned her blouse and offered a breast. Daniel pushed it away and cried louder. Annalee was sixteen; Daniel, barely two weeks. It was April Fools’ Day. She was somewhere in California, in a drafty, shake-roof cabin built by some shepherd in 1911, with nothing to eat but some bread, cheese, and a few rusty cans of pork and beans in the cupboard. She had sixty-seven dollars in her pocket. ‘You’re right,’ she blurted to the bawling Daniel, and started crying, too. Then she got to work.

The cabin caulked and spotless, water hooked up, Annalee hitched to San Francisco with Daniel in her arms ten days later. It took them three rides and twelve hours. They spent the night in a Haight Street crash pad where a woman in her early twenties, who called herself Isis Parker, offered her a joint and the use of her father’s American Express Card.

The next morning Annalee checked the Chronicle Want Ads under baby-sitters, made a few calls, settled on a woman with a sweet voice, caught the bus and delivered Daniel, then headed downtown to abuse Isis’s father’s credit card. She bought Daniel a whole shopping bag full of clothes. For herself, she chose a stylish tweed suit, matching bag and shoes, three pairs of hose, and a gray silk blouse.

That afternoon a middle-aged broker coming out of Bullock & Jones was stopped by a tall, lovely young woman – a girl, really – wearing an impeccably tailored suit. The young woman was clearly distraught. ‘Ex-excuse me,’ she stammered, ‘but … but my purse was just stolen and …,’ she faltered, blushing, then continued bravely, ‘I have to buy some sanitary napkins.’

Bam. A hundred dollars an afternoon. She generally worked the financial district, taking care to choose well-dressed men in their fifties because they tended to cover their embarrassment with generosity. A few declined, usually just walking away without a word. One fainted. She never tried it on other women. They were too smart.

In all, it was the perfect nick, so good that even its clearest failure proved its greatest success. One crisp October afternoon she approached a tall, dapper man with graying hair as he left the Clift Hotel. He listened attentively to her plight, immediately reached for his wallet, and handed her a hundred-dollar bill. Annalee had never seen one before. She counted the zeros twice. ‘I’ll bring you the change,’ she managed to say, thinking somehow she would.

‘Nonsense.’ The man grinned. ‘You keep what’s left after the Kotex – which I imagine will be a hundred dollars. It’s an excellent hustle. Talent’s rare these days, and deserves encouragement. Besides, I just won eight grand in a poker game and I like to keep the money moving.’

‘Well, go get ’em, cowboy,’ Annalee laughed. She was still laughing when she picked up Daniel.

She usually worked the city once a month. At first she just worked an afternoon, but after Daniel was weaned she’d leave him with a sitter for two or three days while she hit Montgomery Street and spent the evenings and nights with the young artists and revolutionaries in the Haight, smoking weed and drinking wine. She was attracted to poets and saxophone players, but hardly confined herself to their company. She never took any of them home.

Annalee and Daniel spent the rest of each month at the ranch. She’d bought a single-shot .22 with her earnings, and she occasionally killed a deer or wild pig, freezing what she could cram in the refrigerator’s tiny box, drying or canning the rest. There was a large garden and a dozen chickens and ducks. The old orchard still produced, and nearby Cray Creek held small trout year-round, with salmon and steelhead arriving in the fall. She worked hard, but they lived well, buying the few things the land didn’t provide.

Annalee spent the evenings reading library books her poet friends had recommended or playing the old guitar she’d found under the bed, making up songs for Daniel’s amusement. Song, in fact, was his first word. But he was talking well enough to rush in excitedly and announce, ‘Mom, someone’s coming,’ when Smiling Jack, three years late, finally returned.

Annalee and Jack greeted each other with whoops and hugs on the front porch. Smiling Jack had hardly changed – a touch more gray in his hair, the smile-wrinkles around his eyes perhaps more pronounced. But Annalee had changed immeasurably: At nineteen she looked strong, solid, and wild. Her movements carried a sense of ease and grace, and her eyes looked right at you. Smiling Jack was impressed. He held her at arm’s length, declaring, ‘Sweet Lord o’ God, girl, but if you ain’t lookin’ about nine hundred forty-seven percent better than the last time I seen you. You must take to this country living.’

Annalee laughed, tossing her hair. She said to Daniel, who was standing in the doorway, ‘This is Smiling Jack Ebbetts, the man who let us stay here.’

‘Hi,’ Daniel said.

‘It’s a pleasure, Daniel.’ Smiling Jack offered his hand, which Daniel eyed hesitantly before shaking. ‘Doubt if you remember this crazy ol’ double-clutcher,’ cause you hadn’t made a month o’ life when I swept you and your momma off the cold shoulder of I-80 right outside Des Moines and hauled you on out here to look after the Four Deuces, but I sure remember you and our long, sweet ride to the coast.’

‘I don’t remember you,’ Daniel said.

‘Not many folks remember very much from when they were babies.’

‘Yeah,’ Annalee said, ‘but when most people say they’ll be back in a few months, they aren’t three years late.’

‘Had to see if you were serious about making a go of it here.’

Annalee folded her arms across her breasts. ‘We’re still here.’

‘Naw,’ Smiling Jack waved dismissively, ‘I was joshing on that – never had a doubt. What happened was I got involved in all sorts of family stuff back in Florida, and then on my way back out here, I found a monster three-card monte game in Waco. Lost my truck seven times.’

Annalee nodded. ‘And how many times did you win it back?’

‘Eight or nine,’ Jack smiled hugely, ‘plus enough money to burn a wet mule.’

‘Well come on in,’ Annalee said, gesturing toward the door. ‘I’ll help you count it.’

Smiling Jack broached another proposition to Annalee when they’d finished lunch. ‘Me and some friends have a notion to use this place as a safe house, and––’

‘What’s a safe house?’ Annalee interrupted.

‘Just a fancy term for a hideout, I guess. A safe place.’

‘Running from the law?’

‘Generally,’ Jack nodded. ‘Not always, though. Sometimes just resting.’

‘And the proposition?’

‘I want you to run it. Take care of the people.’

‘Do you have eight or nine trucks really?’ Daniel cut in, tugging at Smiling Jack’s sleeve.

‘No, pardner, just one. A ’49 Kenworth diesel.’

‘I’d like to ride in it,’ Daniel said.

‘You’re on, but you’re gonna have to wait a little bit. Right now your momma and me are doing some business negotiation.’

‘Okay,’ Daniel said. He went outside.

Smiling Jack turned back to Annalee. ‘You’d get a thousand dollars a month, plus free rent, whether the place is used or not – and most often it won’t be.’

‘What sort of people will I be dealing with?’

‘The very best.’ His voice promised it.

‘What happens if somebody finds these people they’re looking for? I don’t want Daniel at any risk.’

‘I can’t guarantee that. All I can tell you is that they won’t be coming here till they’re very cool. This will sort of be the next to last move, a staging stop while the final move is being set up.’

‘How much am I supposed to know about these people?’

Smiling Jack shrugged. ‘Whatever they tell you.’

‘And “take care of them.” What exactly does that mean?’

‘Shop, cook, keep ’em company if you feel like it.’

‘Mostly men?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What about children?’

‘Possibly. I really don’t know.’

‘I couldn’t do it for long. Daniel should start school in a few years.’

Smiling Jack quit smiling. ‘You ain’t gonna send him to school? There’s nothing he’s gonna learn there but how to get along with other kids under completely weird conditions. Right out that door is the best education in the world. But hell, you do what you think’s best – don’t listen to me. I’m a tar-ass reactionary on the subject. Had my way, no kid would learn an abstract word till they was ten years old. Wouldn’t get their minds so gummed up.’

‘I’ll think about school, but I can’t promise we’ll be staying. I’ll do it for a thousand a month, two years for sure – but after that we’re free to go.’

Smiling Jack’s smile returned. ‘Or free to stay. We can work out the details later. Just needed to know if you were interested. Wasn’t presuming you would be, but I brought a load of lumber to build a little guest room down the hill. Three in here is a tad close.’

‘What would you have done if I’d said no?’

‘Leave you be and find another place.’

‘And what makes you think I wouldn’t betray these people in a cold second for two thousand bucks?’

‘If I thought you’d sell ’em out for two million, I wouldn’t be talking to you.’

‘Jack, if your criminal friends are half as sweet as you, I’ll give you back the grand a month and call it even.’

‘Outlaws,’ Smiling Jack said. ‘Not criminals: outlaws. My friend Volta says there’s an important difference. Outlaws only do wrong when they feel it’s right; criminals only feel right when they’re doing wrong.’

That night, after Jack had left to sleep in his truck, Daniel asked Annalee, ‘Can we still live here?’

‘Sure, and as long as we want. But we’ll be having some company occasionally, friends of Jack’s who’ll be stopping by.’

‘He said they would be hiding.’

‘Well, resting really, waiting to move on.’

‘Why are they hiding?’

‘Because they’re outlaws.’

‘Are we outlaws?’

Annalee thought about it for a moment. ‘I suppose I am. As for you, that’s something for you to decide when the time comes.’

‘When does the time come?’

Annalee slipped her tanned arm around Daniel’s slender shoulders and hugged him against her hip. ‘You’re a good kid, Daniel, but you’ve got to stop beating on me with all these questions that I can hardly answer for myself, much less you. There’s all kinds of things you just have to figure out for yourself. That’s half the fun of being alive.’

‘What’s the rest?’

‘Changing your mind.’

‘Is it as much fun as riding in Smiling Jack’s truck?’

‘Hey,’ Annalee said, tightening her grip, ‘fun’s fun.’

Four months after its completion, the guest cabin remained unused. Annalee, as promised, received a one-thousand-dollar check at the beginning of each month, drawn on the account of Orr Associates Trust Fund in Nashville. She cashed the checks in San Francisco and always stayed a few days to party. Such leaves from the post were permissible, Smiling Jack had assured her, providing she left a time and number where she could be reached. Smiling Jack gave her a ‘location line’ to call when she planned to be away and a confirmation code for their calls.

Annalee used the kitchen phone at an all-night coffee shop on Grant, paying the cooks twenty dollars a month for the service. She happened to be there dunking doughnuts and discussing Japanese tea ceremonies with Japhy Ryder, a young poet of considerable charm, when Louie stuck his head out of the kitchen and called her to the phone.

‘Hello,’ Annalee answered.

‘Mrs Ethelred?’

She recognized Smiling Jack’s voice. The married name was the beginning of the confirmation code. ‘Yes, this is Mrs Ethelred. And Daniel.’

‘Where did we buy the diapers?’

‘Lincoln.’

‘Was I late getting back to you?’

‘Thirty-two months.’

‘That’s actually pretty quick for me. But I hope you can make it home a helluva lot faster than that. There’s a duck on the pond. Sorry to do you like this the first time out, but things got screwy somewhere else and we had to make a hot switch. Your friend may be there waiting, or already gone.’

Annalee had a vehicle now, an oil-guzzling ’50 Ford flatbed, and she immediately picked up Daniel from the sitter’s and drove back to the Four Deuces, jolting the last two miles to the cabin. The house was dark when they entered.

‘Why don’t you just stop right there and relax.’ The woman’s voice was soft, but carried the unmistakable authority of a person holding a gun.

Annalee and Daniel stopped.

‘Who we got?’ the voice asked. Annalee could make out the woman’s shape against the far wall. She was indeed holding a gun, some kind of short rifle.

‘Annalee Pearse, and my son, Daniel.’ She felt Daniel pressing against the back of her leg.

‘Good enough, gal,’ the woman said, some boom in her voice. ‘Didn’t mean to throw ya a shit-scare, but I’ve had a mean day and a hard night and for all I knew you might have been looters or the law. Light a lamp so we can look each other over.’

Annalee lit the two lamps on the mantel. As the light flared, the woman lowered the sawed-off shotgun. ‘My name’s Dolly Varden.’ The woman looked bloodlessly pale in the lamplight, but her clear blue eyes, her voice, and her short, sturdy body erased any sense of frailty. She was wearing a gray cotton chemise and grimy tennis shoes.

‘I was told you might be here, Dolly,’ Annalee said, ‘but I was still startled.’

‘Hardly blame ya,’ Dolly grunted. She looked down at Daniel, still pressed against his mother’s leg. ‘And your name’s Daniel, right?’

Daniel nodded once, quickly.

‘Did I scare you, too?’

Daniel answered with another nod, this one even quicker.

Dolly Varden squatted down in front of him and smiled. ‘I got to admit that when you two came driving up, scared me so bad I almost jumped plumb outa my skin and shimmied up the flue.’

Daniel buried his head behind Annalee, who reached down and lifted him into her arms.

Dolly stood up. ‘Well, now that we all had a good scare, I want you to get ready for another one.’ She turned around. The bottom half of her shift was soaked with blood. ‘You any good at first aid, honey?’ she said over her shoulder.

‘Not really,’ Annalee said, shuddering faintly at the sight.

Daniel felt the shudder, and twisted around in her arms to look at her face. ‘That’s blood,’ he said, as if reassuring her.

‘Well, don’t stand there gawking, you two. Boil water and tear petticoats. I don’t think it’s much, but I haven’t got a good look yet, seeing as how the bastard got me in the ass. Damn but my ass has taken a ton of punishment. Men, motorcycles, general kicking, and now buckshot. Fucking guards don’t use rock salt like the farmers did when I was just a freckle-faced filly raiding the pumpkin patch.’

Annalee set Daniel down and went in to start the stove. Dolly turned her back to Daniel and pulled the chemise over her head. Daniel stared. Dolly’s back and thighs were covered with tattoos, her panties torn and blood-soaked.

‘My mommy has one,’ Daniel said.

‘One what?’

‘Tattoo picture. A little one.’

Annalee, following the conversation from the stove, said, ‘I did it myself. It’s not very good.’

‘You must have been in deep to do it yourself.’

‘I was,’ Annalee said.

‘What is it? A lover’s name, a flower, an animal?’

‘A cross.’

‘Would’ve never guessed,’ Dolly said. She sounded faintly disappointed.

‘No, no – it’s not religious. It’s a twisted cross. They tried to humiliate me.’

‘Me too, honey,’ Dolly said with sympathy. ‘And now they shot me in the ass. How’s that water doing?’

‘Pretty soon.’

‘Does it hurt?’ Daniel said.

Dolly turned to face him, her large breasts swaying as she moved. ‘Some, but not terrible. Kind of a steady ache.’

‘I hit my leg with the ax one time. Not the sharp end, the other end. That hurt a lot.’

‘I bet it did.’

‘I cried and cried.’

‘I would too.’

‘You’re not crying now.’

‘Well, I probably will be in a few minutes,’ Dolly said.

‘You’re supposed to,’ Daniel said solemnly. ‘It helps it go away.’

When the water was ready, Dolly slipped off her panties, wincing, and laid face down on the bed. There was a narrow, ragged furrow across her left buttock.

Examining the wound, Annalee said, ‘Doesn’t look bad at all. But you appear to have lost a tattoo.’

‘My cherry,’ Dolly groaned.

Annalee giggled. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘It was my first and my favorite. Made me feel young and salty, know what I mean?’

Dolly’s buttocks clenched when Annalee touched the wound with the clean, wet towel. Daniel watched, fascinated.

‘Where’d you get it?’ Annalee said, hoping to distract her.

‘Going over the wall,’ Dolly said, her voice tight. ‘Wasn’t a tower guard, though – it was one of those bull bitches off the yard.’

‘No, I mean the tattoo.’

‘Oh. Had it done when I was about your age. In Oklahoma.’

‘That where you grew up?’

‘Yup. Near Carver, down in the southeast corner. In the thirties, that was still outlaw country. Never forget my first day in school the teacher told us, “If you come runnin’ and tell me about somebody doing bad, I’ll give him a fair switchin’ ’cause he did wrong, but I’ll whup on you till I can’t lift my arm no more, because the one thing I can’t abide is a snitch.” It was the kind o’ place––’ she flinched and quit speaking as Annalee reapplied the towel.

‘Well, you still have the stem and two green leaves,’ Annalee said absently as she wiped away blood.

‘Had a gal friend in the joint, Doris Kincaid, who said it wasn’t so bad if they got your cherry as long as they didn’t get the pit.’

‘What did you do down there in Carver?’

‘Mostly robbed banks. I rode with the first motorcycle gang in the country, the Bandits of Vermilion. I mean, we had class. We were like family. It wasn’t like it is now. Bikers these days got no heart. Take drugs and beat on the weak, dress grubby and act stupid – most of ’em are defectives. Look how they treat their women! You don’t treat nobody like that if you got a drop o’class.’

‘What’s vermilion,’ Daniel asked.

‘Brilliant red,’ Annalee answered.

Dolly lifted her head and looked back at Daniel. ‘We wore these long vermilion scarves,’ she explained. ‘Looked good.’

‘Did you kill people?’

Annalee cut in on Daniel’s question, telling Dolly, ‘I’m going to pack this with antibiotic ointment – it’s all we have – and then just tape a gauze pad over it. How’s that sound?’

‘You’re the doc,’ Dolly said.

‘Did you kill people?’ Daniel repeated impatiently.

‘Dammit Daniel!’ Annalee snapped. ‘Don’t harass us during surgery.’

‘It’s a fair enough question,’ Dolly said, sounding more resigned than irritated. ‘We were bank robbers, Daniel, not killers. We had guns, but we never loaded them. We did have to hurt a few people, but we didn’t like to do that – it was a matter of honor among us never to cause anyone pain if we could help it. That was my boyfriend’s idea, never loading the guns.’

‘Where’s your friend now?’

‘He’s dead. Wrecked his motorcycle on a frosty road.’

Daniel didn’t say anything.

Annalee ripped off two strips of adhesive tape and secured the gauze pad. ‘There it is,’ she said to Dolly. ‘I don’t have an M.D., but I’d say you’ll pull through.’

‘I reckon,’ Dolly said, her voice muffled against the pillow.

‘Let me see if I can dig out some panties to help hold the bandage.’ Annalee gave Dolly’s unwounded buttock a light pat as she rose and headed for the bedroom.

Daniel stepped closer to the bed and put his small hand on Dolly’s back, gently rubbing.

Dolly lifted her head and turned to give him a smile, her eyes glistening with tears. ‘My, ain’t you something,’ she said, quietly beginning to cry.

As they sat down to breakfast the next morning, a small blue plane buzzed the house.

‘That’s for us,’ Dolly said. ‘He’ll drop something on the next pass.’

Annalee went outside, Daniel scampering in front of her. They watched, hands shading their eyes against the low sun, as the plane banked slowly to the left and came back over, dropping a small silver cannister that bounced along the road and finally rolled to a stop behind the flatbed.

‘That was a great shot!’ Daniel enthused.

Annalee picked up the cannister and handed it to him. ‘You can carry it in to Dolly.’

They read the message together at the kitchen table: ‘H1M1142400. Beach. Walk. NoV.’

‘I hope you know what it means,’ Annalee said, ‘’cause I don’t have a clue.’

‘Highway 1, Marker 114, at 2400 hours,’ Dolly translated. ‘That’s midnight. Meet on the beach. Walk over. “NoV” means no vehicles. How far is it from here?’

‘Two miles maybe – an hour at the most. There’s an old saddle trail. But that’s just to the highway. I don’t know the highway marker.’

‘I’ll bet 114 is close to the trail. I guess I should leave around ten o’clock. You have a spare flashlight?’

‘I’ll walk down with you,’ Annalee said. ‘We hike over all the time for fish and abalone.’

Dolly glanced at Daniel.

‘I carry him. One of those kiddie-carriers, sort of like a backpack.’

‘It’s fun,’ Daniel said.

‘There’s no point, really. And if somebody caught up with me at the last minute…’

Daniel said hotly, ‘I wouldn’t tell! Never, never, never.’

Chuckling, Dolly rumpled his hair. ‘I wasn’t worried about that. You got so much face you could never lose it all. But I don’t want them to take you hostage.’

‘What’s hostage?’

‘Where they trade you for me.’

‘I wouldn’t trade,’ Daniel said flatly.

‘I would,’ Dolly told him. ‘That’s why you and your mom are staying here.’

Dolly left a few minutes before 10.00. Annalee and Daniel walked with her down through the orchard to the saddle trail. Annalee gave her an old day pack that she’d stocked with a sandwich, the last of the large gauze pads, and extra batteries and bulb for the flashlight. Dolly lifted Daniel in her arms and gave him a huge hug, waltzing him around a moment before setting him down. She and Annalee embraced briefly.

‘Thanks for the help and hospitality,’ Dolly said. ‘You’re real people, both of you.’ She took a deep breath of the clear October night. ‘Damn,’ she sighed, ‘it’s so good to be loose.’

‘Stay that way,’ Annalee said.

Hand in hand, Daniel and Annalee watched as Dolly, limping slightly, set off alone toward the coast.

Shortly after Daniel’s fifth birthday, Annalee sat down with him and outlined the possible benefits and disadvantages of attending school as carefully as she could. She left the choice to Daniel. It only took him a moment. ‘Naw,’ he said, ‘school sounds shitty.’

However, while Daniel was unschooled, he wasn’t uneducated. Annalee – an excellent student herself before her parents’ deaths – had already taught him to read by the time he decided against institutional learning. On their supply runs to town, they spent half their time at the library as Daniel selected his reading material till the next trip – and he was always careful to determine from Annalee exactly when that would be. His reading choices were eclectic, but he had an abiding interest in animals and the stars. When he was nine years old, he ordered a color poster of the Horsehead Nebula. He rhapsodized over it for days, lecturing Annalee on the nature and mysteries of the seething whirl of gas and dust. Annalee had never seen him so entranced.

She said, ‘I bet I know why you like the Horsehead Nebula so much.’

‘What are we betting?’ Daniel said. She only made bets like that when she wanted to know what he was thinking. He liked the odds.

‘Dinner dishes.’

‘Okay,’ Daniel agreed. ‘Why do I like it?’

‘Because it’s beautiful.’

‘Nope.’

‘Well – why then?’

‘I like it,’ Daniel said, ‘because it’s as much as I can imagine.’

Annalee pounced. ‘That’s exactly what I meant by beautiful.’

‘Wrong,’ Daniel declared. ‘You have to do the breakfast dishes too, for trying to cheat.’

Like most teachers, Annalee learned with her student. Each New Year’s Eve they chose a subject to study together. One year it was rocks. One year, birds of prey. The year devoted to meteorology was the most fun. Each night they put their sealed forecasts for the next day’s weather into a jar, opening them after dinner on the following day as if they were fortune cookies. They plotted their relative accuracy and the day’s weather data on a wall chart that had become a mural by winter solstice. On New Year’s Eve, a few minutes before midnight, they ceremoniously rolled the mural up, tied it with a sky-blue ribbon, and stored it like a precious scroll in a fishing-rod case.

The toughest subject for them both had been plants. They’d worked hard, but the subject was simply too large. The living room worktable was usually covered with sprays of specimens and stacks of well-thumbed botanical keys. Wildflowers and trees weren’t too difficult, but the fungi were tough, and the grasses proved impossible.

Paradoxically, playing permanent hooky provided Daniel with a healthy diversity of teachers. Not all the safe-house guests took an interest in Daniel’s education, but most found his eagerness and aptitude irresistible.

He studied penmanship with Annie Crashaw, a forger of considerable renown. Sandra XY, a revolutionary witch, instructed him in the delicate arts of subversion and sabotage, stressing the importance of analyzing whole systems for points of vulnerability, seeing not only the parts but how they were connected. The delicacy of Sandra XY’s art stemmed from her commitment to nonviolent means, a conviction somewhat lost on Daniel. His only examples of violence had been supplied by nature and he was neither attracted nor repelled. Violence was a fact of life. When he pressed the point, Sandra XY said, ‘Fine. As long as you eat what you kill.’

He received detailed lessons in structural engineering from Bobby ‘Boom-Boom’ Funtman, who’d developed his knowledge on the subject as a necessary adjunct to his passion for precision and efficiency in explosions. Boom-Boom knew whereof he spoke, for it was widely claimed that he could do more damage with a single stick of dynamite than a squadron of B-52s. ‘It’s not the size of the charge,’ Boom-Boom constantly reiterated, ‘it’s the placement.’

A young poet named Andy Hawkins, a draft resister on the run, echoed Boom-Boom’s lesson when he introduced Daniel to Japanese poetry, particularly the ephemeral density of haiku. Daniel’s studies in Oriental verse were often frustrated by the absence of his teacher, who was in bed with his mother. She had seduced young Andy about three minutes after he walked in the door. She’d never slept with a guest before. When Annalee had said, ‘Good night sweetie, I’m going down to the guest house and sleep with Andy,’ Daniel was shocked, jealous, frightened, bereft, confused, and utterly delighted by his mother’s clear happiness.

Daniel’s favorite teacher among the forty or so who’d been guests was Johnny Seven Moons. Johnny Seven Moons was the closest Daniel had come to a father. Johnny Seven Moons was also the only guest who’d ever come back for a purely social call, though a few of the more incorrigible offenders had returned on business, the continuing thermal exchange of hot and cool.

Johnny Seven Moons was an old Pomo Indian who fervently believed that one of the highest spiritual pleasures available to human beings was blowing up dams. Early in March, just before Daniel had turned seven, he went out to feed the chickens and found Johnny Seven Moons sitting on the porch, comfortable, self-contained, as if he’d materialized with the sunrise. For both of them, it was love at first sight.

The old claim that great teachers have no subject was certainly the case with Johnny Seven Moons. Another pedagogical assertion – ‘The great teachers don’t teach’ – also applied. Seven Moons just did things with Daniel – make a bow and arrows, build fish traps, paint the guest house, gather mushrooms, cook and clean – taking what the day offered and Daniel’s thriving curiosity suggested. Like Annalee, Johnny Seven Moons treated Daniel more as a companion than a charge. Seven Moons, to Daniel’s initial disappointment, didn’t pass on much Indian lore. As he explained to Daniel, he didn’t know a whole lot, having attended missionary schools. His hitch in the army had given him advanced training in demolition. After his discharge, he’d spent time in prison for applying his military training to man-made impediments of natural flows, such as dams, irrigation canals, and aqueducts. ‘But don’t worry,’ he told Daniel, ‘I know some Indian stuff. You see, I have the Indian mind, but not all the little details.’

If it was sunny Daniel and Seven Moons did something outside. Rainy days were devoted to marathon games of chess, played with a small set Seven Moons had carved from elk horn. The white pieces were done in the likeness of cowboys, the reddish-brown pieces as Indians. However, according to Seven Moons, when you played Indian chess, the dark pieces always move first, and only Indians can play the dark pieces – though in Daniel’s case he made a magnanimous exception. Seven Moons played shrewdly and without mercy, exploiting every blunder Daniel made, and crowing with glee as he did.

The most memorable lesson for both Daniel and Annalee occurred on a warm May afternoon. All three of them were cleaning the pantry, item number nine on Annalee’s list of spring chores, when the sky suddenly darkened with a mass of clouds. Within minutes rain began falling. Johnny Seven Moons went to the open door, inhaled deeply, and started stripping off his clothes. Daniel and Annalee exchanged anxious glances. ‘You going swimming?’ Daniel joked.

‘No,’ Seven Moons said, hopping out of his pants and tossing them aside, ‘I’m going for a walk in the warm spring rain. Join me if you like. Walking naked in warm spring rain is one of the highest spiritual pleasures available to human creatures.’

Annalee was already wiggling out of her jeans, but Daniel had a question: ‘Is it a higher pleasure than blowing up dams?’

Seven Moons shut his eyes and almost immediately opened them. ‘That’s a tough one, but I think they’d have to be the same. You see, if I didn’t blow up dams and keep rivers where they’re supposed to be, in not very long there would be no warm spring rain to walk naked in.’

It was splendid. Hands joined, Daniel in the middle, they walked naked across the flat and up the oak-studded knoll where, deliriously drenched, they sang ‘Old Man River’ to the clearing sky. The sun burned through minutes later. By the time they walked back to the house through the wraiths of mist lifting from the soaked grass, everything but their feet and hair had dried.

Annalee and Daniel recalled that walk with Seven Moons often, but they never talked about what had really moved them. Annalee had been so overwhelmed by the rain on her flesh that she was afraid she was going to come, to collapse in the wet grass. She felt constrained. It was difficult to shift her attention away from her body and back to them, even though they brought their own sweet joy.

Daniel remembered a moment as they’d started up the knoll, when he looked at his mother, so beautiful, her skin shining with rain, and then he’d looked at Seven Moons, strong and wise and brave, feeling their large hands in his and the rain splattering on his shoulders, feeling for just a moment that the world was perfect.

They both remembered yet never mentioned what Johnny Seven Moons had said when they reached the top of the knoll. He’d tilted his head back and groaned out, ‘Oh, blowing up dams is a tremendous responsibility, an important responsibility, a grave responsibility …’ And then he’d laughed like a loon, the sound echoing distantly across the flat and then lost in the hush of rain. He squeezed Daniel’s hand and grinned at Annalee. ‘It’s only at moments like this that I’m glad we’re all going to die.’

Seven Moons stayed seven months that first time, and visited for a week or two about four times a year after that. When eight months had passed since his last visit, Daniel began to worry.

When Smiling Jack showed up a month late for Christmas, Daniel asked if Seven Moons was back in prison. Smiling Jack didn’t know, but promised he’d check on Seven Moons’ whereabouts as soon as he had the chance. He cautioned Daniel it might take a while since Seven Moons wandered as he pleased – no phone, no address. Since Smiling Jack’s colossal tardiness was the result of a similar temperament, Daniel didn’t expect a speedy reply. A week after Jack’s departure, there was a letter in the P. O. box when they went into town for supplies. Smiling Jack said Seven Moons was staying near Gaulala taking care of his mother, who’d been very sick but was getting better, yet he probably wouldn’t get away until the fall. Without reason, Daniel was convinced he would never see Seven Moons again. When Annalee, concerned by his sudden and uncharacteristic moping, finally coaxed out his secret conviction, she suggested that he go visit Seven Moons in the spring.

Annalee was glad to help Daniel arrange the visit, which she hoped would last through the summer. If it could be worked out, then she’d ask Smiling Jack for a three-month vacation. She needed some unclaimed time. Running the safe house, while never unpleasant, had become increasingly boring. Daniel, with his sweet hunger for information and action, was inspiring, but he was also exhausting, and the random appearance of guests made it even more difficult for her to find and sustain a psychic rhythm of her own, an undistracted sense of herself. Annalee was particularly troubled by the recent onset of sexual desire for her son. She wasn’t sure if the desire was simply a convenient focus for the heightened eroticism that had begun with the walk in the rain or whether it was something specific between them, or between all mothers and sons at Daniel’s age, whirling in that prepubescent blur between boy and man. It didn’t help that he was tall, lanky, blue-eyed and fine-spirited. Lately, the sight of him naked unsettled and confused her. Not that she would ever act on the desire. So it wasn’t the fear of succumbing to temptation that bothered her so much as the distraction of dealing with it, and that’s why she was so eager to send Daniel off to Seven Moons’ summer camp that she used the location phone to leave Smiling Jack a message to get in touch as soon as possible.

She shouldn’t have bothered. When she and Daniel returned from San Francisco that night, Smiling Jack smiled at them from the kitchen table when they walked in. With him was a new guest, the first Jack had ever delivered, a striking man in his mid-thirties named Shamus Malloy. And everything changed.

Shamus Malloy was a professional smuggler, an alchemical metallurgist, a revolutionary thief, and – my goodness – a poet of more than modest accomplishment. At a trim six feet two he was slightly taller than Annalee, and, at thirty-six, ten years older. He had unruly hair the color of sandstone, intense blue eyes that hid nothing, and a resonant baritone voice that caressed long vowels and lightly rolled the r. What made his handsome presence unusual was the black glove he wore on his left hand.

Annalee was smitten.

Daniel was impressed and somewhat intimidated by Shamus’s magnetic quality, but not enough to squelch his curiosity about the black glove. Annalee had always told him that if you want to know something, don’t be afraid to ask, but Daniel knew by the way she was behaving – which was goofy – that she would get upset if he pressed Shamus about the glove. He had to be clever. He waited till Smiling Jack had departed and Annalee, who was sure tossing her hair out of her eyes a lot, was in the kitchen making tea, which she never drank. Then he casually inquired of Shamus, ‘How many falcons do you hunt?’

He was immediately sorry. Shamus fixed him with those direct, uncompromising blue eyes. The teakettle began a low banshee whistle in the kitchen, mounting toward a shriek before Annalee lifted it off the stove.

In the sudden silence Shamus said, ‘Daniel, what are we talking about?’ His tone was pleasant, but tinged with both irritation and challenge.

Daniel could feel his mother listening. ‘Falcons,’ he said. ‘Mom and I spent a whole year studying birds of prey. Raptors is what that class of birds is called. Raptors. Isn’t that an amazing word? Like rapture.’

It didn’t work. ‘Indeed – a lovely word. Directly from the Latin raptor, meaning snatcher, derived from the root rapere, to seize, which is also the source of both rapt and rape, seizures of two different kinds, since in one the recipient is transported into joy and in the other is violated and demeaned. But tell me, Daniel, how is this etymological exploration germane to your question about the number of falcons I hunt?’

Annalee came in from the kitchen then with the tea. The cups were on saucers. He was sunk. ‘Well,’ he began, trying for a tone of bewildered innocence, ‘that’s a falconer’s glove, isn’t it?’

‘No, Daniel, it isn’t,’ Shamus said, his voice as cold and level as a frozen lake. ‘I wear it because my hand is disfigured, scarred from a burn.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘I accidently spilled a vessel of molten silver.’

‘Do you always wear a glove?’

‘Yes. Otherwise it attracts morbid attention, or revulsion, and a pity I find far more hideous than my hand.’

‘Do you take it off when––’

‘Daniel!’ Annalee lashed. ‘That’s enough. You’ve gone from a tactless question to being plain rude.’

He used bewildered innocence again, appealing to Shamus with dismay and a hint of contrition. ‘Was I being rude?’

‘You were,’ Shamus said, then, added, ‘but I ascribed it more to cunning curiosity than thoughtlessness.’

‘Daniel wants to know everything,’ Annalee explained, her tone, Daniel noted with relief, fond and forgiving.

‘I’m sorry,’ Daniel said to Shamus. ‘Seven Moons told me it’s hard to know when to put yourself first.’

Shamus smiled, blue eyes glittering in the lamplight. ‘Your gracious and elegant apology is warmly accepted.’ He leaned forward, opening his glove hand palm up in front of Daniel. ‘I want you to understand this, Daniel. My hand is horribly disfigured. The black glove is mysterious. I would rather inspire mystery than horror in the beholder’s eye, and heart, and soul. That is my choice. If you don’t respect it, you are not a friend.’

‘But maybe it would be better to just see it instead of imagining what it looks like.’

‘Maybe so. I clearly don’t agree, given my choice.’

‘All right,’ Daniel said, leaving no doubt he meant it.

They stayed up late that first night, listening raptly as Shamus talked about precious metals, how and where they were mined, the processes of refinement, their colors, textures, properties, malleability and melting point, their importance in the parallel refinements and applications of human consciousness, their irreducible and essential purity – literally elemental. Both Daniel and Annalee were taken by his passion and eloquence, both excited and vaguely disturbed by the power of his appreciation, which seemed to vibrate between reverence and obsession.

After Shamus had gone down to the guest house, Daniel said to Annalee as she brushed her teeth, ‘You like him, don’t you?’

Annalee rinsed and spit. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Extremely attracted.’

‘I thought so.’

‘And what made you think that?’

‘The black glove.’

Annalee laughed. ‘More likely the blue eyes.’

‘Yeah, but the black glove too.’

‘Good-looking, spirited, intelligent, emotionally alive, surrounded by an aura of mystery and danger – yes, I’m attracted.’

Daniel thought for a moment. ‘Well, don’t get too strange or he’ll quit liking you.’

‘It shows, huh?’

‘To me,’ Daniel said, ‘but I know how you really are.’

Suddenly serious, Annalee said, ‘I wish I knew how I really was. That’s something I really need to know, that I’ve gotten hungry to know this last year. I need some mystery and danger and dark, handsome strangers. Do you understand what I’m messing up saying?’

‘I’m not sure. But it doesn’t matter; it’s your choice.’

Annalee hugged him. ‘Daniel,’ she solemnly swore, ‘you are a joy to my soul.’

The next evening, after explaining to Daniel that Shamus had invited her down to the guest house to discuss the alchemical properties of silver and gold, and that she hoped to be out quite late, Annalee waltzed out the door. Daniel was cooking some oatmeal when she floated back in the next morning.

‘Oh no!’ she declaimed, throwing a wrist to her forehead, ‘what a derelict mother, her lonely child starving as she frolics the night away.’

‘Boy,’ Daniel said, ‘you look happy. You must have really frolicked.’

‘We did. We built a castle and then we burned it down.’

‘Does that mean you made love?’

‘For real and for sure. Tenderly and wildly. Sweet and scalding. Eye to eye and breath to breath.’

Daniel nodded, not exactly sure what she meant but knowing she was pleased. When she paused, he said quickly, ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Sure,’ Annalee said, but it was a nervous permission.

‘Did he take off his glove?’

‘Nope.’

Daniel nodded thoughtfully. ‘I didn’t think so. Can I ask another question that may be rude?’

‘Shoot,’ Annalee said, less nervous now than resigned.

‘Did you ask him to take off his glove?’

‘No.’

‘You like him a lot, don’t you?’

‘More every day,’ Annalee grinned.

More every night, too. She and Shamus began leaving as soon as the dinner dishes were done and not returning to the cabin till mid-morning. Daniel didn’t mind the shift in her attention – he was honestly pleased to see her so happy. Though he still felt slightly overwhelmed by Shamus and his black glove, and wasn’t sure if his respect was based on admiration or fear, he did like Shamus, and more so when Annalee elicited a playfulness that Daniel hadn’t suspected. Annalee, however, worried that Daniel was feeling neglected, and after the fifth night of sexual rampage suggested to Shamus that they should spend an evening with Daniel.

‘We’d better,’ Shamus had replied, nuzzling her shoulder, ‘or I will not survive what was supposed to be a time of contemplative rest.’

The next evening after dinner Shamus joined their study of their temporarily abandoned subject for the year, which was, loosely, American history and culture – or ‘how it was in the old days,’ as Daniel put it. The current text, barely begun, was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. They took turns reading aloud, stopping at the end of each scene to ask questions or offer comments. Shamus even took notes in a red notebook he kept in his briefcase. His briefcase, like his black glove, was always there.

When Shamus finished his stint as reader, he wondered aloud if school ever recessed so that he might catch up on his notes.

‘Good idea,’ Annalee said. ‘I’m hungry. You guys want some popcorn?’

‘Two batches,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ll melt the butter.’

‘Let’s do it,’ Annalee said, squeezing Shamus’s thigh as she got up from the couch.

‘I have to pee first,’ Daniel said.

‘Go,’ Annalee said. ‘Never resist the call of nature. It strains the organs.’

‘She’s a wise woman, your mother,’ Shamus said to Daniel, looking at Annalee.

Daniel came back in almost immediately. ‘Hey, I hear a helicopter coming.’

‘Fuck!’ Shamus hissed. He shoved his notebook into the briefcase, extracting, as if by some magical exchange, a Colt 9 mm. automatic. ‘Let’s go,’ he said calmly. ‘Right now or we’re dead.’

Daniel grabbed his coat from the rack. As he hustled to put it on, a sleeve whipped the kerosene lamp off the end table. The lamp shattered, instantly bursting into flame.

‘Now!’ Shamus commanded, flinging him toward the door. Annalee grabbed Daniel and they sprinted toward the flat, Shamus right behind them, the helicopter suddenly louder as it came over the ridge. They plunged downhill at the flat’s edge, following a runoff ravine, the water shallow but numbingly cold. They could hear the helicopter swing over, the pulsing mechanical chop like the heartbeat of a frenzied locust. Annalee in the lead, Daniel between her and Shamus, they headed downhill toward the South Fork, battling a passage through the ferns and gooseberries and redwood suckers.

They rested a moment at the creek. Shamus panted ‘Coast?’ Annalee nodded, and they each took one of Daniel’s hands and forded the creek, the water shallow but swift, the rocks slippery. In moments they were gasping up the steep eastern slope of Seaview Ridge. Daniel felt like he was burning and freezing at the same time. Mindless, breathless, falling down and getting back up, he scrambled for the top.

They collapsed at the crest, huddling against the trunk of an ancient bay laurel, heaving for breath. Across the canyon, flames from their cabin paled the stars. At the edge of the flames they could make out six or seven vehicles, red lights blinking. With a strangled sob, Annalee began weeping. Shamus put his arm around her and pulled her close. ‘Just as well. Leave them ashes. You could have never gone back anyway.’

Annalee tried to slug him, all her fear and rage and grief gathered into the blow. She was in too close and Shamus, feeling her weight shift as she drew back her fist, caught it with his forearm. He grabbed her wrist and held it for a second before pulling it toward his chest, bringing Annalee’s face to his. ‘I’m sorry, Annalee. Even though it’s the truth, it was a crass and thoughtless remark. I forgot it was your life. I’ll try never to let it happen again. Your life – and Daniel’s – matter to me.’

Annalee sighed raggedly, then wiped her face. ‘Do I have time to cry?’

‘Survival says no; love says forever.’

‘Mom,’ Daniel said, ‘do you think you can still love someone when you’re dead?’

Annalee wasn’t sure if it was an innocent question or not. ‘I don’t know.’

‘We want the nearest bar or café or motel from here,’ Shamus said. ‘Without being seen.’

‘Three miles south,’ Annalee said. ‘Tough ones.’

Shamus asked Daniel, ‘You got three miles left?’

‘I think I do.’

‘Let’s vanish then,’ Shamus said.

They followed the ridge line for almost a mile, then angled downhill until they saw the occasional flash of headlights on the highway. They traveled parallel to the road for another half mile, keeping to the trees, then descended abruptly into the Shell Cove Inn parking lot. Shamus hotwired a ’59 Impala and they took off for San Francisco, heater on full blast.

Shamus stopped at a gas station in Santa Rosa and made a call from a pay phone, then drove them south to a wrecking yard on the outskirts of San Rafael. There he introduced them to José and Maria Concepción. Maria loaded them into an old Chevy panel truck while José wheeled the Impala into the wrecking yard for some fast midnight dismantling. Maria whipped them across the Golden Gate and into her warm Mission District apartment, replaced their wet clothes with luxurious terrycloth robes from the hotel where she worked part-time as a maid, and filled their bellies with a spicy menudo.

When they woke the next morning, José was there with a suitcase full of clothes for each of them. When they had dressed, he drove them to an airstrip near Sacramento and turned them over to a pilot who flew them to Salt Lake City in his battered old Beechcraft while regaling Daniel with tales of World War II dogfights in the clouds over France.

A thin, hawk-faced man was waiting for them at the landing strip near the Great Salt Lake with new driver’s licenses for Shamus and Annalee (now James and Maybelline Wyatt), credit cards in the same name, four thousand dollars in cash, and a ’71 Buick registered to Mrs Wyatt. He told them to drive to Dubuque, Iowa, and make a phone call to the number he provided. It wasn’t until the three of them were alone in the Buick and moving east that they finally caught up with themselves. Shamus tried to explain what he thought was going on.

Three weeks earlier, after eighteen months of meticulous planning, Shamus had attempted to steal some uranium-235 from a Tennessee refinery. When Shamus slithered through the hole he’d cut in the cyclone fence, a guard who wasn’t supposed to be there called halt, but Shamus clubbed him with his flashlight just as the guard pulled his gun. It went off harmlessly, but the shot brought security at full alarm. A searchlight pinned him to the ground. He kicked the guard’s gun away, pulling his own when they started shooting. He took a wild shot at the searchlight, missed, instantly understood he didn’t have a chance in a gunfight, rolled to his left as a burst of automatic rifle fire geysered dust behind him, rolled again, and came up running. Using the dust cloud for cover, he sprinted for the nearest building.

He got lucky twice in a row. The first piece of good fortune was a bullet that grazed his lower lip, so close it raised a blister but didn’t break the skin. The second break was a rumpled old man walking toward the parking lot, oblivious to the probing searchlight and bursts of gunfire, so lost to the moment that when Shamus pressed the gun barrel to the back of the old man’s head and told him, ‘Get in the car and go,’ he’d turned around and said, puzzled, ‘Escargot?’

Finding a hostage, however obtuse, wasn’t the end of Shamus’s luck, for the old man who drove him through the front gate with a gun at his head was Gerhard von Trakl, Father of Fission and the ranking nuclear scientist in America. Shamus intended to keep von Trakl only until they reached the getaway car, the first of three switches he’d already set up.

But to Shamus’s wild surprise, von Trakl begged to go along. He told Shamus that he was a virtual prisoner of the U.S. government and was no longer interested in the work they wanted done. He wanted to explore the other side of the equation, the conversion of energy into mass, and ultimately, he supposed, the obliteration of the distinction. He confided to Shamus that he’d made a fundamental scientific error in his career – he’d viewed the universe as a machine instead of a thought.

While Shamus was delighted to discover that the most brilliant physicist in the country was a fellow alchemist at heart, he knew that von Trakl’s employers would never stop looking for him till the old man was returned. But von Trakl refused to be freed, and for reasons Shamus honored.

Shamus compromised. He kept von Trakl through the first car switch, but a mile from the second switch Shamus pulled over and forced von Trakl out on the empty country road. He promised von Trakl he’d leave the car a mile up the road, wished him luck with his new research, and thanked him for his company, then fried rubber as von Trakl started to reply.

A mile down the road he exchanged the car for the dirt bike he’d stashed the day before. He gunned the dirt bike up the hill. He cut the engine at the crest and coasted down the long, gradual slope into Coon Creek Valley. He abandoned the bike in a dense stand of hickory, covering it with the camo netting he’d pulled off the battered Gimmy pickup he’d hidden there earlier in the week. But when he reached to open the truck’s door, a laconic voice behind him said, ‘Ain’t none of my business, friend, but less’n my scanner done fucked all up, they’ll have a roadblock at the end of the valley ’fore you can fart the first bar o’ “Dixie.” Be my suggestion to ride with ol’ Silas Goldean here, seeing as how me and most of the local law grew up together and get on fine, and they know I got a fondness for going over to the res’vor this time of night and soaking a doughball for them catfish. Got a good place for ya to ride, too.’

And so Shamus went through the roadblock curled up in a cramped compartment under the backseat of Silas’s dusty Packard sedan while Silas jawed with a sheriff ’s deputy about a turkey shoot early next month to raise money for the local Grange. Silas’s second cousin was waiting at the reservoir in a funky johnboat to ferry him over to another cousin who locked him in a camper and drove all night to an airstrip south of Nashville. A cross-country flight punctuated with what seemed like twenty refueling stops eventually ended on Cummins Flat, two miles down the ridge from the Four Deuces, where Smiling Jack had picked him up.

Though Shamus found it difficult to believe, Gerhard von Trakl had evidently made his own escape, a fact that pleased Shamus immensely even though it meant personal grief. The Feds unfortunately assumed the daffy old bastard was still his captive and had poured on the heat – or as much as they could without causing undue media attention. They didn’t seem to want any, in fact, since there hadn’t been a hint in the press or on screen that the country’s foremost nuclear physicist had been kidnapped inside the nation’s largest facility for the production of fissionable materials – an understandable silence, as such information would not inspire the citizens’ confidence or advance any political careers.

‘But,’ Shamus said, bringing his story up to date, ‘somebody wasn’t silent. Somebody had to tell them where to find me, because they did. When they turn up the heat, somebody burns, and then it all starts burning, collapsing as it’s consumed. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about your losses – your possessions, your home, the labor and heart you put into it.’

‘It’s not the first time,’ Annalee assured him. ‘That’s how we got to the Four Deuces, even though Daniel might not remember.’ She was driving, so had to prompt him with a quick glance over her shoulder, ‘Not that you should.’

But Daniel, who’d listened intently from the backseat, didn’t want to talk about what he didn’t remember. ‘How many people knew you were staying with us?’

Shamus responded without hesitation, obviously having given it some thought himself. ‘You, your mother, Smiling Jack, and the pilot, a young black guy named Everly Cleveland, Bro for short. Those are the ones I know for certain; there were probably others.’

‘The pilot betrayed you,’ Daniel said.

‘Said with great certainty,’ Shamus noted. ‘Your evidence?’

‘Mom and me wouldn’t do it and neither would Smiling Jack. And besides, the pilot flew over two thousand miles with a bunch of stops, so the plane almost had to be noticed. See, that would be smart – to check the little airstrips.’

‘Yeah,’ Shamus sighed, ‘that’s the most likely case, but who knows? If it was the pilot, though, I hope he turned me cold. Went straight to a pay phone and snitched me off.’

‘Why?’ Daniel said, puzzled.

Shamus, who had turned around to face Daniel, shifted his gaze past Daniel and out the rear window, following the white line back to the horizon. Daniel didn’t think Shamus was going to answer but Shamus suddenly snapped back to attention, his eyes boring into Daniel’s as he said, ‘Because if he didn’t turn me cold, they beat it out of him, and that puts his blood on my hands.’

On a hand and a glove, Daniel thought. He didn’t say it because something in Shamus’s voice and eyes frightened him, something feverish and weak, something that fed on its own corruption, drew nourishment from its self-loathing and suffering, and Daniel wanted to leap away from Shamus’s intimate guilt. He prefaced his question with a vague reassurance. ‘But you’ve got friends, too. Besides Mom and me, I mean. Somebody is helping you. Helping us, really. Who is it?’

Shamus glanced at Annalee, then back to Daniel. ‘You’re sharp, Daniel. What one of my teachers called “a good sense of what’s going on inside what’s going on.”’

Daniel shrugged off the praise. ‘It’s pretty obvious that somebody is flying us around and giving us cars and money. And instructions.’

‘AMO,’ Shamus said.

Daniel didn’t understand. ‘You mean like ammo for guns? Ammunition?’

‘No, though the pun is suggestive. Amo as in the Latin I love.’ Shamus reached backhanded along the front seat and lightly touched Annalee’s neck with his right hand.

Annalee wanted to pull over and hold him in her arms and let him touch her just like that anywhere he wanted, the warmth of his bare fingertips at the base of her neck, the brush of soft leather on thigh, belly, nipples, throat.

She listened distractedly as he continued. ‘AMO is the acronym for Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws – or, as some members claim, Alchemists, Magicians, and Outlaws, which they contend was the original name. Another faction, small but vocal, insists AMO has always stood for Artists, Myth-singers, and Outriders. As you might sense, there is constant and long-standing contention about AMO’s origins and development, a situation encouraged by the fact that the Alliance does not keep a private account of itself – all records must be public. Since AMO forbids nearly all direct reference to its principles and practices, the public accounts – books and music being the most available – are extremely oblique, hidden in images and the arc of metaphor.

‘But whatever the true derivation of its name, AMO is a secret society – though more on the order of an open secret, in fact. Basically, AMO is a historical alliance of the mildly felonious, misfits, anarchists, shamans, earth mystics, gypsies, magicians, mad scientists, dreamers, and other socially marginal souls. I’m told it was originally organized to resist the pernicious influences of monotheism, especially Christianity, which attacked alchemy as pagan and drove it underground. From what I gather (I’m not a scholar on the subject), AMO has survived as an extremely loose international alliance of self-described moral outlaws and wild spirits. And though the alliance is so loose it’s nebulous, the center is tight.’

‘What do you mean?’ Daniel said.

‘In each country or region, there’s a seven-member council called the Star. Council members can serve up to forty years or resign at any point. Star members nominate potential successors, who must be approved by the other council members. I’ve never been sure exactly what the Star’s job is beyond administration and special projects. Each Star member has a small field staff to assist her – and I use her because four of the seven Star members, by tradition, must be women.’

‘That’s wise,’ Annalee nodded, glancing at Shamus long enough to flash a smile.

‘Can more than four be women?’ Daniel said.

‘Yes – but not any fewer. That make sense?’

‘I suppose,’ Daniel said, not so much lacking conviction as withholding judgment.

Without taking her eyes off the road, Annalee said, ‘I have a feeling that we were keeping house for AMO, right? That’s who we’ve been working for?’

‘Smiling Jack is a field assistant for Volta, one of the Star members, so I think that’s a safe assumption. But they dislike the phrase working for. They prefer thinking of it as a natural alignment of mutual interests, and therefore an extension of the alliance.’

‘Well shit,’ Annalee said, ‘why not tell us? Or ask us to join?’

Shamus raised his hands in mock defense. ‘Don’t ask me why they do what they do. The only policy I know about recruitment is that you’re not supposed to approach people till they’re ready, and then to tell them the truth. I would suspect in your case that there’s some legal concern about Daniel, since you might be nailed for conspiracy if membership could be proven, and that’s a harder fall. Also, members are supposed to donate five percent of their net income to the cause, so maybe they didn’t want to lean on a single woman’s purse. Besides, you spent enough time on the street to understand the wisdom of knowing no more than you need to.’

Before Annalee could reply, Daniel leaned forward intently and said, ‘You keep saying they. Aren’t you a member?’

‘I was,’ Shamus said. ‘I quit.’

‘But they’re still helping you.’

Shamus sighed. ‘It’s complicated. I started out as a smuggler. Cigarettes and watches at first, then drugs, then gold. Gold was the first thing I’d ever moved that moved me. The first bar I ever saw, it was like the sun rose in my blood. I was working out of Florida at the time, very young, ambitious, imaginative, with a talent for safely transporting contraband from point A to point B. I was reliable, I was discreet, and I was making lots of money. And unlike most smugglers, I didn’t fling it away on drugs, racing boats, and high-flying women. I had fun, but at a level less extravagant than my income, because no matter how good you are, you can get unlucky.

‘I’d got to the point where I had plenty of money and lots of doubt that my luck could hold, so I was thinking about getting out of the business when Red Lubbuck paid me a visit. Red was the main mover on the Gulf side, so naturally I assumed he wanted to talk business; I was surprised when he told me about AMO instead. It was, like Red himself, very straightforward: I could enjoy the benefits of alliance in return for the annual dues, five percent of my net, paid on my honor – no collectors, no audits, no questions asked. The benefits of alliance, according to Red – he went into detail, but I’ll just mention them – were technical and legal assistance; a network of skilled and reliable people; the use of various facilities, from safe houses to machine shops; access to intelligence services, which Red claimed, correctly, were exceptional; and the possibility of using communal knowledge and educational opportunities to expand one’s own talents.

‘Red was persuasive without applying pressure, but I’d always worked independently and was thinking about retiring anyway, so there was no sense in joining an organization of strangers on vague promises of unusual opportunities and collective strength. I told Red I was flattered, but my answer was a friendly no thanks.

‘My Boston Irish can’t accommodate Red’s Cracker twang, but I can quote his reply from memory: ‘Hell son, we ain’t interested in your smuggling. That’s just an occupation, prone to go belly-up any time. What we’d like you to do is go study precious metals with Jacob Hind, who you probably never heard of, being young and unawares, but we think he’s one helluva teacher, a flat-out master – forgotten more shit about precious metals than you’ll ever learn. But Jacob Hind is pushing ninety. You’d be his last student.’

‘That snared me. As mentioned, I was becoming increasingly taken with precious metals and nervous about smuggling. Smuggling, after all, is a job, and no matter the danger or reward, a job gets boring. So I joined AMO, and three months later I was on an island in Puget Sound, the lone and bewildered pupil of Jacob Hind.’

‘Was this like regular school?’ Daniel wanted to know.

‘Not like today’s, no. If anything, it was plain old-fashioned master-apprentice.’

Daniel poked Annalee’s shoulder. ‘We just were reading about that a month ago, huh Mom?’

‘We sure were,’ Annalee said. ‘But let Shamus finish his story.’

‘Was Jacob Hind a good teacher?’ Daniel said to Shamus. Annalee wasn’t sure if the question was meant to defy her or encourage Shamus to continue.

‘A good teacher?’ Shamus repeated thoughtfully. ‘It’s a good question, even if I can’t answer it. At first I thought he was completely loony, this daft old Dutch-English fool who lost control of his bladder when he was excited, which was often. Half the time he babbled in Latin and when he did speak English it was almost entirely in metaphor. ‘The most precious stone is the river in flames.’ ‘One who has a man’s wings and a woman’s also is the womb of matter.’ The Latin may have been all metaphor, too. Anyway, I had difficulty grasping his lessons.

‘However, he had a great metallurgical laboratory and a better library – even though, again, half of it was in Latin or Greek. I was just beginning to understand his methods, and with them a sense of his substance, when he died suddenly of a heart attack.’

Shamus paused, taking a deep breath. ‘That’s how I burned my hand. When Jacob’s heart gave out, he staggered against the lab table. We were in the middle of an exercise involving the transformation of silver, and when he flailed his hand out to catch himself he hit the crucible of molten silver, spilling it on my hand. In that instant of shock before the pain consumed me, Jacob grabbed me by the shoulders and, with such power it seemed effortless, pulled me to him in a fierce embrace, shuddering as he gathered breath to whisper in my ear: “Make them return to ninety-two.”’

Annalee said, ‘What did he mean, “return to ninety-two”?’ Daniel was glad she asked.

‘I’m not sure what he meant,’ Shamus said. ‘In the Periodic Chart of Elements, ninety-two is uranium, a precious metal, the last natural element – last by being the heaviest in terms of atomic weight – before the fifteen created by man. If I’d understood him correctly in our brief time together, he despised man-made elements because they were dangerous, corrupting, confusing, and unnecessary.’

‘But how could you make them return to ninety-two?’ Annalee said.

‘I wish I knew. I wonder about it every day.’

Daniel said, ‘Now I understand.’

‘What?’

‘Why you quit, and why they keep helping you: They owe it to you for hurting your hand.’

‘But I didn’t quit then. In fact, when I recovered I took over Jacob’s lab and continued my studies. AMO not only approved, they provided me with a Latin teacher. In six months of demon study I could read most of the old texts. Out of the emerging connections, I became fascinated by the radioactive elements, and, not surprisingly, uranium in particular. Old ninety-two itself, Jacob’s point of return, the end of the natural line before the man-made mutants of linear accelerators and nuclear reactors. I had uranium samples, of course, but it was uranium-235, the fissionable isotope, that interested me. But since 235 is used in nuclear bombs, the government has it all. And if nothing else in my studies was clear, it was overwhelmingly obvious that we cannot comprehend elemental powers and processes without direct communion.

‘At any rate, I decided to steal some U-235, and I asked AMO for help. They sent a member of the Star to see me, a man named Volta, and he not only turned down my request, he tried to persuade me not to attempt it on my own. He said he sympathized, but – I’m quoting – “Personal fascinations aren’t sufficient reason to commit AMO to a course of action where success would be more dangerous than failure.” Which was Volta’s elegant way of saying that the theft of nuclear material would bring down the heat so hard and hot that other projects and many people would be jeopardized.

‘I was pissed, so I said something like “Since I am going to steal the uranium for my own selfish reasons, the only honorable thing I can do is quit AMO.” And Volta said, “As you choose. Not that it’ll make much difference – the scrutiny will still be severe and disruptive. And not that your honorable gesture is pointless; honor never is. By all means, do as you will.”

‘And I did,’ Shamus smiled ruefully. ‘And it fucked up. And the heat came down. And here we are.’ The smile had disappeared.

Annalee reached over with her right hand and squeezed his thigh. ‘I can think of worse places to be.’

‘Now what will happen?’ Daniel said. Annalee could have strangled him. The future would come fast enough.

‘Who knows?’ Shamus answered Daniel. ‘They’ll probably split us up in Dubuque and get me out of the country.’

‘Suppose we don’t want to split up?’ Annalee said.

Shamus turned to her and said softly, ‘But we do. So far I’ve got you burned to the ground, uprooted, and on the run. I’d love to stick with you, but that’d be an indulgence I don’t deserve and a risk I won’t take right now.’

Annalee started to say something, then changed her mind. She reached over and snapped on the radio, looking for some rock ’n’ roll she could crank up loud. Her brain told her splitting up was the most sensible move, but her heart reminded her she didn’t have to like it.

Transcription:

Denis Joyner, AMO Mobile Radio

Oooooowwweeee! You got me when you weren’t looking, the ol’ DJ hisself, the Duke of Juice, coming at you live as I can handle on KOOOOL mow-beel radio, where you find it is where you get it, but don’t look on the dial, baby,’ cause we’re not there. We’re OTD, OD, and O Sweet Leaping Jesus could this possibly be real! It is – heh-heh – it is indeed: The Blue Man in the Silver Van come to seed your dreams and feed your lonely little monkey.

What we’re talking here is HIGH Kulture. Towering! The Immensely Outasight! Magnificent Spirit-Shots into the Void! Direct Brain-Bang Transmission Leaps! Solid-State Astral Sex-Launch! That’s right, you got it! Welcome to the Cloud-Walker Kulture Klub.

Now just between you, me, and the cave walls, kids, tonight we’ve got a bodacious show. If it don’t get you off, you must be chained down.

Think I jive? Well, brothers and sisters, check it out. We’re gonna hear Karl Marxxx doing his Number One single, ‘Undistributed Surplus Income and What It Means for Working Stiffs Like You and Me,’ featuring Peter Kropotkin on dobro and Leon Trotsky on violin. We got Jean-Paul Sartre from that new Essays-on-Tape series, in this case his neglected disquisition on postindustrial anxiety called ‘Incipient Arousal and Feelings of Doom.’ You digging it so far? Want more? Well, write this one down: out-takes from a rare Walt Disney interview where he holds forth at length between pipes of opium on Electromythology and the Tinkerbell Fetish (and hey you guys, ’fess up – don’t you remember wishing little ol’ Tinkerbell was about five feet taller?).

And why stop there? Hell, why stop at all? We’re also gonna have live, in the here and right now, the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir doing the dirty version of ‘Staggerlee.’ Fuck me if we ain’t! Plus – mercy, mama! – the recently discovered Bach violin partitas as performed by the Tap City Strutters, Demerol Jones conducting. And if that don’t leave you squealing, heap on our regular features – like Carl Jung on astrology, Consumer Hot-Line with Attila the Hun, Corliss Lime’s ultrabitchy book reviews, and me, the Duke of Juice, on drums.

So hang in there and I’ll hang it in your ear.

When they reached Dubuque later that day they stopped at a Conoco station. Shamus called a number from the pay phone. It was a short conversation, and he came back to the car looking thoughtful.

Annalee studied his face. ‘So, where to?’

‘The City of Baton Rouge.’

‘Louisiana?’ Daniel said from the backseat. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

Shamus smiled. ‘The City of Baton Rouge is a boat, an honest-to-god old Mississippi stern-wheeler docked just out of town.’

‘Of course,’ Annalee nodded absently, ‘the Mississippi River. And down the mighty Mississippi to the Gulf at New Orleans. From there, I suppose, to Cuba by submarine.’

Shamus tousled her hair. ‘That’s the spirit. From Cuba to Brazil by glider. At night. No moon.’

‘Just starlight on the water and the rush of wings.’

‘You got it,’ Shamus said.

Annalee started the car. ‘First let’s find this riverboat.’

‘They’d never find us in the jungle,’ Daniel said with excited conviction.

Annalee said to Shamus, ‘Truth time – do you know where we’re going or are you just jacking us up?’

‘Take the last exit before the bridge, then north along the river. Elmo Cutter, one of Volta’s field men, is going to meet us there. Beyond our immediate destination of the City of Baton Rouge, I have no idea where we’re going. But I’m sure Elmo will have some suggestions.’

Elmo Cutter was short, swarthy, and squat. A thick, black cigar – which he never lit – wagged under the grimy bill of a Chicago Cubs cap. He greeted them on the dock with an assortment of gruff monosyllables, then led them aboard.

The City of Baton Rouge was the last of its class, a steam-driven stern-wheeler riverboat of sleek and majestic line. Before the turn of the century it had carried an elegant trade of businessmen, gamblers, and high-stepping women; and even now, though stripped and abandoned in 1950, it still had an aura of green felt, soft conversation, a waltz drifting from the ballroom. You could smell the fragrant mix of sourmash whiskey, country ham, and fresh magnolias in the serving girls’ hair; almost hear the soft clicking of chips as a pot was raked in the gaming room. But not even a fulgent imagination could blur its present state of weathered, empty decay.

Elmo led them to the dining room. Once two hundred had sat down at long tables sagging with fried chicken, ham, mashed potatoes, slaw, hot biscuits, butter-slathered corn, baked quail, greens, gravy, and thick slices of pumpkin pie. Now there was only a beat-up card table and four folding chairs.

Elmo went straight to the point: ‘You split up here.’

Annalee flinched.

‘Shamus, you’re gone tonight. It’s not all set, but it’s pretty solid.’ He turned to Annalee. ‘You and the boy have a choice. You probably already know it, but you were keeping house for AMO – affiliates, so to speak. Some of the folks that stayed with you weren’t even AMO members – Dolly, for instance, we sprung just because we like her on the loose. Now she’s joined. And we’re inviting you to join if you want.’

Annalee, as blunt as Elmo, said, ‘Why weren’t we asked before? Or at least informed?’

Elmo shrugged. ‘Got me, Miss Pearse. I wasn’t there. But I’d guess there probably wasn’t much reason, seeing as how you were already sort of allied, just not official. We don’t stand on formality.’

‘What happens if we don’t want to join? Maybe we know too much.’

Elmo made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a chuckle. ‘No ma’am, you don’t know too much. Cause some inconvenience maybe, but nothing major. AMO is like mercury. That’s how we’ve survived for centuries. So if you don’t want to join forces, you get the car, the four grand, and our fond farewell. And we’d probably try to help you out if you took a hard tumble – but that ain’t a promise, just our likely inclination.’

‘And if we join?’

‘Interesting work if it’s available, fair pay, good people, expanded opportunities, and the shared benefits of alliance.’

‘Do you have school?’ Daniel said with an intensity that made both Annalee and Shamus glance at him. He didn’t notice; his attention was locked on Elmo.

‘No schools,’ Elmo told him. ‘We got teachers, though, that’ll take you on if you’re serious about learning. And we have sort of a loose network of doctors, too – some of them fairly primitive by AMO standards, but that don’t mean the medicine don’t work. So I guess you could say there’s some educational and medical benefits. Legal as well, come to think of it – some real sack-ripping lawyers. And that’s it for my sales pitch. Don’t mean to lean on ya, but we best move it along.’

‘What do you think, Shamus,’ Annalee asked. Feeling she might have slighted Daniel, she added ‘Daniel and I would appreciate your advice because we’re the two who have to decide.’

‘I told you my story,’ Shamus said. ‘They’re good friends and fair adversaries.’

‘We should join,’ Daniel said. ‘It’s practical. And some day I’ll need a teacher.’

Annalee shut her eyes and opened them almost immediately. ‘Sign us up,’ she told Elmo.

‘Done,’ he nodded. ‘And now if you’d like to check out the boat, I’ve got a few things to discuss with Mr Malloy. I’m sure you understand that ignorance is often the best protection.’

‘But that’s really knowledge, isn’t it?’ Daniel said.

‘Same difference,’ Elmo grunted, then added as an afterthought, ‘Our teachers will love you.’

Flustered by Elmo’s comment, Daniel turned and followed his mother out on the main deck.

When they’d gone, Elmo told Shamus, ‘Detroit by train tonight, then a tour bus across the border and cold storage in Montreal. We got us a boiling case of bad heat. That wacky scientist you latched still hasn’t turned up. Car you left him never moved. He could be stone dead in a runoff ditch or wandering around talking to rocks for all we know, and we pride ourselves on knowing those kinds of things.’

‘That you do,’ Shamus said.

‘If they find him, dead or alive, things would cool considerably.’

‘I understand. I left him off exactly as I said.’

Elmo chewed on his cigar. ‘No idea which way he might have drifted?’

‘Up. Lost in thought.’

‘Yeah.’ Elmo spit a piece of tobacco. ‘All right, we got a fucking UFO on our hands. Figures he’d be a space cadet.’

Shamus folded his hands on the card table, bare hand over the gloved. ‘So where are we?’

‘Volta would like some consideration for the time and money it’s gonna take to keep helping you.’

‘I have money. I’ll gladly pay you back, with interest, when I can get to it.’

‘That’d be the right thing to do, but there’s no press. What Volta would like is your cooperation. He said to think of it as a couple of years of honorable protective custody. What that means to me is he wants your word you won’t run amok for a while. Otherwise, we cut you loose right here – a car and two grand, same as we offered the girl.’

‘You offered her four,’ Shamus corrected him.

‘She’s got a kid.’

‘Good point,’ Shamus said. ‘Guess friends don’t come cheap.’

‘Nope – especially when you screw the heat to ’em.’

‘If I didn’t feel for sure that that guard off smoking a joint was an accident, a random twist, I’d have to believe Volta would have found a way to make sure I didn’t pull it off.’

‘I couldn’t say. Seems you did fine fucking it up by yourself. That’s what we got to deal with.’

‘Put me on the train, then, and somewhere down the line I’ll try to make it right.’

‘Another thing,’ Elmo said, pointing with his cigar stub. ‘The glove’s got to go.’

‘It doesn’t come off. How about a cast?’

‘Whatever.’

Shamus held up his gloved hand. ‘We could cut the arm off at the elbow.’

‘Whatever,’ Elmo repeated.

‘Speaking of fuck-ups,’ Shamus said, ‘any idea how they turned the ranch?’

‘Yeah.’

‘The pilot?’

‘You got it. They just missed your ass at the Nashville airport. Got the plane’s ID and somebody saw the switch in Denver. Took ’em a few days, but they finally run the pilot down in Portland. Pounded it out of him.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Shamus said.

‘Not as much as he is. He loved to fly, but he was fond of walking too.’

Shamus slammed his gloved hand down on the card table. ‘Goddammit, whipping on me isn’t going to change it. If you didn’t like my judgment, why did you people recruit me? Why did you send me to Jacob Hind? Why did you encourage me to study radioactivity?’

‘Hey,’ Elmo spread his arms, ‘why the fuck are we helping you? Huh? I’ll tell you why: because we all make mistakes.’

‘Trying to steal that uranium wasn’t a mistake. It just went wrong.’

‘Shamus, you’re talking to the wrong man – do I look like a debate team? My job’s to get you clear. You get to Montreal, you’ll have tons of time to sort the fly shit from the pepper. Right now, we’re moving on the quick.’

‘Fine,’ Shamus said. ‘Let’s move.’

They found Annalee and Daniel admiring the wooden drive wheel.

‘Ready?’ Annalee said. Shamus didn’t look happy.

‘Yep, ready,’ Elmo said.

‘Where to?’

‘You and Daniel, right here.’

‘Dubuque?’

‘Here,’ Elmo said, pointing at the deck. ‘We want you to restore the Baton Rouge to her previous glory. The drydock stuff ’s all done; she just needs the finish work. Use the four grand to get started. When you run out, call Dave Jaspars and mention the Historical Restoration account – he’s in the book. He’s your contact here. Any emergency, let him know.’

‘Whoa,’ Annalee said, head cocked. ‘How do you want it done? Shit, how do we do it? We’ve pounded nails and cut boards, but that was ranch-style construction – we’re hardly skilled. And what about colors and stuff? I mean––’

Elmo cut her off. ‘Listen, you figure it out. We don’t let dummies in AMO.’

‘Can we live on the boat?’ Daniel was enthralled by the prospect.

‘Sort of assumed you would, but you don’t have to. Us, we have to make some tracks.’

Annalee and Shamus kissed farewell with feeling. ‘Gold doesn’t rust,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘I’ll see you again.’

‘Promises, promises,’ Annalee murmured, then held him fiercely as she fought tears.

Shamus shook hands with Daniel, and accompanied Elmo down the boarding ramp and up the dock. Annalee watched till they disappeared across the landing. When she finally turned to look for Daniel, he was leaning against the railing behind her, watching the gray Mississippi slide by. She went over beside him at the rail and put her arm around him. ‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘what do you think?’

Still gazing at the river, Daniel said, ‘It’s just like Mark Twain described it. Beautiful and ugly at the same time.’

It took Annalee and Daniel nearly two years and $52,000 to refinish the City of Baton Rouge. For Daniel, the time passed quickly. When he wasn’t sanding the walnut stairs or painting one of the forty staterooms, his nose was buried in any book he could find on the subject of riverboats – especially their construction, appointments, and history. The old, grainy photos of the Natchez, the Grand Republic, the Robert E. Lee, and the Mary Powell moved him with their power and grace. He read about the great races, disastrous wrecks, and other river legends; the courageous captains and slick gamblers and the wily, drunken roustabouts. In the late evening, checking his set-line at the end of the dock for catfish, he imagined the whistles and bells of ghost riverboats passing in the mist. Each bit of knowledge, each feeling, brought a deeper and more passionate respect to his daily work on the City of Baton Rouge.

For Annalee, though, time moved as slowly and sluggishly as the Mississippi itself. The sense of accomplishment that animated Daniel didn’t move her as solidly. The work was interesting, challenging, and rewarding, but it didn’t thrill her – not the way the run from the Four Deuces had, not like the touch of Shamus’s glove at the base of her spine.

She phoned Dave Jaspars whenever they needed money for material or tools. The first time she’d called, he’d told her there was an account at the local First National Bank under her paper name of Maybelline Wyatt. She was now the widowed daughter of J. C. Allsop, a Louisiana sugarcane tycoon and original owner of the City of Baton Rouge, its landing facilities, and forty acres of adjoining riverfront property – all of which she’d recently inherited upon his untimely death in a New Orleans brothel. In a rather feminine voice, Dave Jaspars explained that the boat would be used as a communications center and occasionally for large meetings. To Daniel’s sharp disappointment, however, the steam engine would not be replaced, nor would any other means of locomotion be installed. The City of Baton Rouge would remain moored.

As the work progressed, there was never a quibble over expenses or style. Every call requesting money was answered with a prompt deposit in her account, and no issue of taste or method was raised. They never met Dave Jaspars. No one from AMO came to inspect their work. The only visitors were occasional riverboat nuts (whom Daniel always invited to dinner and pillaged for lore) and the workmen they hired for special tasks. Daniel, who favored wood heat and the original oil-lamp chandeliers, was disgusted by the power lines and the backup generators in the engine room.

Annalee had hoped they would finish by Daniel’s twelfth birthday, but they’d just started painting the dining room when March arrived. Annalee had given him his major birthday present – an excellent telescope – that morning, so when they’d finished his birthday dinner, they took the telescope up to the top deck and looked at the winter constellations. The chilly, wind-whipped evening soon sent them inside to the captain’s dining room, which they’d made their own. Daniel waited at the head of the table while Annalee ducked into the galley and immediately reappeared with his birthday cake, twelve candles blazing, and set it in front of him as she sang happy birthday. Daniel’s eyes glistened in the candlelight.

‘Don’t forget to make a wish before you blow them out,’ she reminded him.

Daniel thought for a moment, took a deep breath and blew out all the candles except the one in the center. Annalee quickly reached over and pinched it out.

‘I guess I don’t get my wish,’ Daniel said. Annalee seldom heard self-pity in his voice. She didn’t know how to respond to his sudden shift in mood. ‘You know what I wished?’ Daniel said, then continued before she could answer. ‘I wished I knew who my father was.’

She grasped the connection with his birthday, but she was still stunned. She sat down across from him, feeling suddenly old and helpless. ‘I’ve told you before, Daniel – I don’t know. I was young and crazy and lost. I was sleeping with anyone who’d hold me warm all night. It could have been a number of men. I wish I could tell you.’

‘Tell me,’ Daniel cried. ‘Tell me! You have to know!’

‘I can’t, Daniel. I honestly don’t know.’

‘Liar!’ He exploded from his seat. ‘Tell me!’ He raised his right arm and smashed his fist down on the cake.

Annalee slapped him so hard it numbed her hand. Daniel staggered, barely catching himself against his chair. He brought his frosting-smeared hand to his cheek, blinking rapidly at the tears.

‘Goddammit, you little shit,’ Annalee yelled, ‘it hurts. Do you think it doesn’t hurt me too?’

Crying, Daniel nodded mechanically.

‘Where is this coming from? Why are you doing this?’

Daniel kept nodding.

‘Talk to me, Daniel. You can’t do that to me and go hide. What is it?’

Daniel sobbed. ‘I just want to have something. Something I can imagine.’

Annalee understood now what he wanted. She sat down, suddenly calm. ‘I first saw your father,’ she began, ‘when I was hiding out at a resort in Anchor Bay, about fifty miles down the coast from the Four Deuces. There’d been a bad drought for almost two years; nearly everyone was out of water. I woke up one summer dawn and looked out the window. Thin fog was swirling outside, milky in the first light. I saw a man out in the pasture, a tall, bearded man wearing a top hat and a flowing black cape. He was witching for water with a forked stick, holding it in front of him. I could feel his attention as he worked the field. I walked out in the pasture and stood in front of him. He spread his cape on the ground. Without a word, we made love. When we were done, he covered my shoulders with the cape. Before he left, he pointed out into the field and said, “There’s a deep spring near the center, but there’s no need to dig. It’s going to rain soon.” And the next morning I woke to a soft, soaking rain.’

Daniel nodded solemnly.

‘Your father,’ Annalee said, ‘was a riverboat captain. His boat was the Delta Queen. I was a serving girl, a young Cajun from the bayou. I remember how strong his arms were from handling the wheel. You were conceived on the pilot house floor while the wheel twirled slowly and the boat ran free. The next night there was an earthquake. I couldn’t feel it on the water at first, but you could hear people screaming on shore and see the treetops lashing in the moonlight. The river just seemed to roll over everything and you could hear the boat’s timbers snap loud as gunshots and glass shattering in the salon. I was on my way up to the wheelhouse with a bottle of brandy and was knocked back down the stairs. People were screaming and jumping overboard. Suddenly your father was there, lifting me in his arms and carrying me down to the main deck. There was a small dinghy lashed to the bow. He cut it loose with his knife, then lifted me inside. He kissed me, said he loved me, then lowered it. He went back to help the others. As I drifted away, still holding the bottle of brandy in my hands, I saw him run into the salon just before it burst into flames.’

Daniel shut his eyes, absently touching his cheek where Annalee had slapped him.

‘Your father was a bandit,’ she continued. ‘I was working as a cocktail waitress in this horrible Chicago bar. We’d closed up and the bartender and I were washing the last few glasses when he stepped out of the bathroom with a pistol in his hand. He tied up the bartender and locked him in the store-room, then emptied the till. He skidded a roll of dimes down the bar toward me, where he’d told me to sit and not move. ‘Put some music on the jukebox,’ he said. I asked him what he wanted to hear. ‘Whatever puts you in the mood,’ he laughed. It was the sweetest, loosest laugh I ever heard. I ended up driving the getaway car to his apartment. No. Wait. I’m lying to you.’

Daniel glanced at her sharply.

‘We didn’t go to his place. We made love right there, on the long mahogany bar.’

‘Mom!’ Daniel blushed. ‘Geez.’

‘You want to know your father and I don’t know who he is. So I’m going to tell you everything that moved me in the men I’ve known, what I’ve admired and enjoyed and dreamed and desired. And when I’m done, you still won’t have a father, still won’t know who your father is, but you’re going to have a much better idea who I am, and that you’re my son, and that I love you.

‘Your father was a mountain climber who disappeared on the peak. I met him in a Katmandu café just before he started the ascent. I remember …’

The smashed cake between them untouched, Annalee went on for nearly two hours, every man of flesh or dream she could remember or invent, heroes, poets, outlaws, fools. Daniel listened intently, and when she finished he did something that brought tears to her eyes: He broke a piece of the mangled cake and offered it to her.

To their mutual amusement, they finished the boat on April Fools’ Day. Their work, they agreed, was excellent. The forlorn queen had been restored to magnificence – from the Belgian carpet to the chandeliers, she possessed a muted elegance and luxurious dignity.

Annalee phoned Dave Jaspars that evening and told him the work was complete.

‘Fantastic!’ He sounded genuinely pleased. ‘Take a vacation for a few weeks or just hang out and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Elmo’s supposed to pass through toward the end of the month and he’ll tell you what’s next.’

‘I don’t suppose you’d have any idea what that might be,’ Annalee prodded. Dave Jaspars loved to gossip, and was always dropping hints he knew far more than he could tell.

‘Well …’ he began, letting it trail off. ‘You know I shouldn’t tell you this – but you’re going to Indianapolis to join the Sisters of Blessed Mercy convent and Daniel is going to Paraguay to study hallucinogenic medicine with a Yatati shaman.’

Annalee was stunned. She could hear herself producing a strange nasal whining sound, but until she actually blurted ‘No!’ she had no idea she was trying to speak.

‘April Fool!’ Dave Jaspars yelped with glee. ‘Got you!’

‘You miserable fucker,’ Annalee said coldly, ‘it’s a good thing I don’t know what you look like or I’d hunt you down and show you some serious foolishness.’

‘My goodness, Mrs Wyatt,’ he said, ‘I had no idea you thought of me like that. Didn’t you know that April Fools’ is the only religious holiday we celebrate?’

‘No,’ Annalee said, smiling, ‘but it figures.’

When Elmo Cutter entered the main salon, he took the cigar out of his mouth and whistled softly. ‘Holy shit.’

Daniel thought it was a good moment to press his case for complete restoration. ‘It would be really beautiful on the river, but that’d mean getting the engine rebuilt, or maybe putting in a new one.’

‘Nope, Daniel, it ain’t gonna happen. It’s gonna serve as a stationary communication center. She’d attract way too much attention on the water.’

Exasperated, Daniel flung his arms out to indicate the salon. ‘Then why bother doing this? Any of this? Why not just make it cheap, practical, functional?’

‘Because it wouldn’t be doing it right,’ Elmo said. You could have broken a fist on his voice.

‘Is doing it halfway doing it right?’

‘In this case, yes. Shit, son, we couldn’t really afford to do this much right, and a power plant would double up the budget and make it worthless for what we have in mind.’

Daniel muttered, ‘It just makes our work seem pointless.’

Elmo dropped a meaty hand on Daniel’s shoulder. ‘Now that’s up to you, whether it’s pointless or not. Far as I’m concerned, you two did one helluva job, and before you go on bulldogging my ass about this engine and get me feeling mean, let me say thanks, okay? Now you can keep chomping if you want, or we can sit down at this fine table here and talk.’ He lifted his hand from Daniel’s shoulder and touched the polished tabletop. ‘What kinda wood is this anyhow?’

‘Walnut,’ Daniel said.

Elmo caressed it with his thick fingers. ‘That’s just plain fine.’

Annalee said, ‘A long way from that scabby old card table, isn’t it?’

‘A million miles.’ He glanced at Daniel. ‘You done chewing?’

‘If it makes any difference,’ Annalee said, ‘I agree with Daniel.’

‘It makes a difference, but it doesn’t change nothing.’

Annalee sat down. ‘Then let’s talk about something else, like the million miles between here and there and where we’re going next.’

‘That’s up to you,’ Elmo said, sitting down across from her. ‘Next month the boat here’ll be fitted out with radio equipment. There’ll be a permanent crew of about a dozen, and occasionally a full house. You’re welcome to stay on and learn some communication engineering, which is a good skill to have these days, or there’s an opening in our Waco language school if you want to learn Spanish while making sure our borders stay open to certain goods and people. There’s a communal salmon boat in Washington that could always use some extra hands; it’s got an engine, too, at least most of the time, and a crew that would have been pirates a hundred years ago. Or, if you want to learn the fine arts of printing and photography, there’s a paper house about to start production––’

‘Paper house?’ Daniel interrupted.

‘Documents. Licenses. Stuff like that.’

‘Forgeries.’ Daniel nodded.

Elmo shrugged. ‘Well, we have a lot of official seals; we just don’t have a lot of official authorization to use them.’

‘Where is this paper house,’ Annalee asked.

‘Berkeley. In California.’

‘Berkeley, California,’ Annalee repeated with a dreamy joy. ‘Credentials of identity, certificates of accomplishment. Perfect. We’ll take it.’ She looked at Daniel. ‘Assuming it’s acceptable to you.’

‘I’d like to live in a city,’ Daniel said.

‘For how long?’ she said to Elmo.

‘Till you get tired of it or it burns up – paper houses tend to do that. But the better the papers, the lower the heat.’

Annalee nodded. ‘When?’

‘Now, if you want. It’ll be another month before all the tools and materials are delivered, but the house is ready.’

‘It doesn’t need an engine, does it?’ Daniel said, but he was smiling.

Elmo grinned in return. ‘You know what they call a bulldog that knows when to let go?’

Daniel shook his head.

‘Smart.’

‘Do you know what they call a boat without an engine?’ Daniel said.

Elmo sighed. ‘Let me guess. Dumb?’

‘No. They call it a communications center.’

‘You know, I’m gonna start packing a spoon with me.’

Daniel didn’t bite.

Elmo explained anyway. ‘All the shit I have to eat on this job, I could use one.’

Annalee said, ‘As long as we’re asking questions, and since you trust us enough to run a print shop, there’s something I want to know. Where’s Shamus Malloy these days?’

‘Out at sea with a small crew of treasure hunters. That batty scientist still hasn’t showed.’

‘What sort of treasure,’ Daniel asked.

‘Silver and gold.’

Annalee smiled. ‘I bet he’s happy.’

‘Jesus,’ Elmo said, ‘let’s hope so.’

The house in Berkeley was on McKinley Street, not far from the high school. When the Helmsbro Movers (‘If we can’t truck it, fuck it,’ their typically Berkeleyan card proclaimed) delivered some ostensible furniture a month later, Annalee and Daniel found reams of blank birth certificates, drivers’ licenses from every state, draft cards, passports, and various official seals of sundry state governments and federal agencies. The small darkroom in the second-floor bathroom had been completed before their arrival, and the Multilith and platen press, flanked by a battery of typewriters, were set up in an adjoining room. After the friendly tutelage of Jason Wisk, their nominal real estate agent, they could document a new identity in half a day. Since Annalee enjoyed the camera work and embossing while Daniel was particularly fond of the printing, the labor divided itself along lines of natural interest. Jason coordinated the job orders, which were steady enough to keep them busy but not enough to be a burden. No customers came to the house; if photos were required, Annalee either worked from negatives shot elsewhere or shot them herself at Jason’s real estate office.

Because Daniel was often hassled for not being in school, he seldom left the house before 3.00 on weekdays. He usually printed till noon and read after lunch for at least a couple of hours before going out to explore Berkeley’s street life.

By mutual agreement, the nights belonged to Annalee. She was particularly taken with Dr Jamm’s Get-Down Club out on Shattuck. She quickly made friends with the musicians and artists who hung out there. Soon she was a singer and lead kazoo in a perpetually ripped aggregation known as the Random Canyon Raiders, whose repertoire included traditional, if obscure, favorites, as well as spontaneous and raucously pornographic sociopolitical polemics. The Random Canyon Raiders were devoted to high times and low art, and Annalee rediscovered a social life. She began to cut loose.

But some trajectories are immune to change: A year later, early in May, looking for a book of poems recommended by one of her Random Canyon friends, she saw Shamus Malloy standing by the chemistry section in the Berkeley Public Library. His hair was black, he was clean-shaven, and, to judge by the pinned sleeve on his jacket, he’d lost his left arm. But she was so sure it was Shamus that she browsed over beside him and tugged his empty sleeve.

Shamus closed the book he was examining and slipped it back on the shelf without acknowledging her. ‘I’ve loved you and missed you every minute for the last two years,’ he whispered, staring at the stacks, ‘and I’m afraid to look at you, afraid it won’t be you, that’ll it be some desperate hallucination, some hungry dream.’

‘Is it cool to hug you in here?’ Annalee said, her open hand pressing against the small of his back.

‘Probably not,’ Shamus grinned, ‘but please, please do it anyway.’ When he turned to look at her there were tears in his eyes.

She felt his arm under his jacket when they embraced.

‘What are we doing inside on a lovely spring day?’ Annalee murmured. ‘Let’s stroll, if that’s permitted.’

‘Everything’s permitted,’ Shamus said, ‘as long as we’re careful.’ He looked in her eyes when he said it, then glanced over her shoulder. ‘After you, milady.’

They walked two blocks to Swensen’s Burger Palace, ordered coffee, and took a table near the back.

‘All right,’ Annalee said, ‘what’s going on. The only news I heard was that you were off treasure-hunting.’

‘True. I holed up by sailing away. We were diving wrecks off Colombia. It was work, but it certainly had its moments. It has to be one of the most astonishing sensations in the universe to stand on deck with a bar of gold, still dripping sea water, raised in your hand. It’s not as wonderful as holding you, of course, but one takes what’s available.’

‘Talk that talk,’ Annalee said. ‘Daniel was asking me the other day why I liked you poets so much; I told him because they talked good.’

‘And how is Daniel?’

‘Thirteen going on thirty, and working hard to cut the apron strings.’

‘That shouldn’t prove difficult – you’re not the somthering type.’

‘You never gave me a chance.’

‘If there’s no other men in your life right now, maybe I will.’

‘Just Daniel, and it’s not clear whether he’s a young man or an old boy. But how about you? Can you come out and play?’ She idly ran a finger around the rim of her coffee mug.

‘My deal with Volta was that I’d be a good boy for two years. Cooperative was the term. I guess you didn’t hear that Gerhard von Trakl wandered back to work last week mumbling about sequential centers and the inextricable dance of particle and wave. He claimed he’d been out in the desert thinking things over. Probably true, according to AMO’s information – dressed in tatters with wild long hair and beard. No info on the debriefing, but evidently he told it like it happened, that I let him off and drove away in the night. It’s hard to believe they could cover his absence so long, but the old geezer doesn’t have any family, and the official word was that he was on special assignment.’

‘So now you’re cool?’

‘Well, not completely. They’re still looking, but the urgency has faded.’

With a thin smile and a definite weariness, Annalee said, ‘So you’re ready to try for the uranium again?’

‘No,’ Shamus said. ‘Plutonium – the dark, decadent queen herself. And this time for ransom: the dismantling of all nuclear facilities in the country. Not to mention the political embarrassment of having it stolen, the admission of vulnerability.’ He leaned forward across the table. ‘Nuclear weapons are madness. It has to be stopped. The knowledge and the technologies are always there before our ability to understand the consequences. Linear accelerators, breeder reactors – what do they do except speed everything up beyond comprehension while accumulating deadly materials in kinds and quantities nature never intended? It’s a sickness of greed and power, like amassing gold, and that much power in the hands of so few rots the heart. We’ve got to stop, stop and think hard about the consequences of possessing so much energy and what unleashing it might mean. I said the ransom would be the dismantling of all nuclear facilities, but that really isn’t it. The ransom is time. Time to consider, evaluate, judge. Time is the heart of tragedy. I reread Sophocles on the boat: ‘All understood too late.’ It takes time to come to understanding, and pride and ignorance and fear just grease the chute. We’re running out of time. It’s almost too late. That’s what my guts tell me: We have to buy time. And the only currency I can think of is plutonium.’

‘Gold doesn’t rust,’ Annalee reminded him, ‘but plutonium decays.’

‘Exactly. And it’s a deadly decay. Plutonium is man-made, the first transuranium creation. She is the real bride of Frankenstein: magical, entrancing, powerful – but without a soul. We don’t need her. I think that’s what Jacob Hind meant with his last breath: “Return to ninety-two.” If you steal fire, you’ll be burned.’

‘But isn’t that what you want to do?’

‘Yes, but with a crucial difference. I’m going to steal it from man and give it back to the gods. Or at least demand we give up our literal firepower until we’re wise enough not to use it.’

Annalee smiled sweetly. ‘I’d love to discuss the philosophical implications of firepower with you when we’re done fucking.’

For a moment she thought she had made a mistake, that she’d committed the female sacrilege of not taking men and their power seriously, of questioning their heroic passions, but the flash of anger in his eyes faded immediately and she felt his gloved hand on her thigh under the table.

‘I missed you, too,’ he said. ‘I have a place in Richmond, and I assume your print shop is busy.’

‘I wondered why I had the feeling our meeting in the library wasn’t mere coincidence. How did you know where to find me?’

‘I’m not without resources. And AMO, fittingly, is full of romantic souls who like to see young people get together even if it’s bad for security.’

‘I bet it wasn’t Elmo.’

‘Elmo wouldn’t tell me if I had an arrow in my back.’

As they stood to leave, Annalee said, ‘Do you think AMO will try to stop you?’

‘I think they’ll do what they think is right, just like I will. But first they have to find out what I’m going to do, which is unlikely, but not impossible. AMO has a genius for procuring high-quality information; it’s their real strength.’

‘Mine, too,’ Annalee said, slipping her arm around his waist, hooking a thumb in a belt loop. ‘Face to face, skin to skin, breath to breath.’

Annalee didn’t return to McKinley Street until late that evening. Daniel and Jason Wisk were at the kitchen table playing chess.

‘Hi Mom,’ Daniel greeted her, but his attention stayed on the board.

‘I used to be pretty good at this game,’ Jason said, ‘but Daniel is introducing me to reality.’

Daniel moved a rook behind his queen.

Jason dourly regarded the move. ‘Three more moves and only an act of God could save me. I concede.’ With elaborate formality, he toppled his king, nodding to Daniel. ‘You play well.’

Annalee, standing behind Daniel, ran her hand through his long brown hair as she said to Jason, ‘When I play him, he has to spot me a rook, two pawns, and three oversies. And he still beats me like a dumb dog.’

‘“Oversies,”’ Daniel repeated with disgust. ‘She says that’s girls’ rules. Do girls really have different rules?’

‘So they claim,’ Jason sighed.

‘Are they written down?’

Annalee gently pushed Daniel’s head down toward the board, answering, ‘Never. That’s the first rule.’

Jason laughed. He was bright, sweet, considerate, good-looking, and self-effacing without being wimpy. He treated Daniel like a real person instead of a kid. She liked him, had initially been attracted to him, but the fact that he had a solid marriage and three children at home had kept things comfortably uncomplicated. But it was unusual for him to be out so late, so she said, ‘Did Millie finally throw you out or do we have a rush order on the board?’

Jason cleared his throat. ‘None of the above. Millie and the kids are visiting her folks in Santa Monica so I’m allowed on the streets after dark, and other than the traveling papers for Mr Elwood the board is clean, and there’s no hurry on those. I only stopped by to learn some humility at Daniel’s hand and to relay some information that may or may not interest you – since it makes no particular sense to me, I wouldn’t presume to know. The message is that the wandering scientist has returned and you might expect a visit from an old friend named Malloy. I have a number for you to call if you want more information. Or have any.’ He handed her a folded slip of paper from his jacket pocket. ‘“Gone Fishing” is the access code.’

Daniel rolled his eyes. ‘That’s pretty corny.’

‘But discreet,’ Annalee said. She put the number in her purse without looking at it.

As soon as the door closed behind Jason, Daniel turned to Annalee and said, ‘I’ll bet you a hundred nights of doing dishes against that old piece of celery in the fridge that you were with Shamus today.’

‘You shouldn’t try to take advantage of your mother when she’s in a weakened condition. No bet, kiddo. But I must say you’re either very perceptive or I’m really transparent.’

‘Well, it was easy for me to tell because you got a look just like you had that morning after the first time you spent the night with him.’

‘What sort of look? Glowing? Transported? Stupid?’

‘Yeah. Except I would say it was more like shining and happy and a little bit worried. No, not worried – sad.’

‘That about covers it,’ Annalee said. Shamus had specifically asked her not to tell Daniel about the plutonium theft he was plotting, but he didn’t know Daniel like she did. She’d agreed not to tell him. But she trusted Daniel more than she could ever trust Shamus. The powerful combination of girls’ rules and mothers’ rules provided an exception. She told Daniel everything except the target. When she finished, he had his usual barrage of questions. The first one twisted her heart.

‘Do you think he can pull it off?’

‘Arrggh,’ Annalee groaned. ‘The only trouble with you men is that you’re males! What difference does it make if he pulls it off? If he doesn’t he’s dead or in prison for a billion years, and if he does he’s hunted into the ground. There’s no fucking difference, don’t you see? When I’m with Shamus, there’s something between us that I need. It’s not Shamus and it’s not me; it’s what we are together. A connection. A circuit. And if we’re not together there’s no connection and the circuit’s broken and the juice doesn’t flow. And whether he steals the plutonium or not we won’t be together.’

‘You’re in love?’

‘I’d like the chance to find out.’

Daniel thought for a moment. ‘Maybe you better call that number Jason gave you and get more information.’

‘I can’t. It would be a betrayal. They’d try to stop him.’

‘No, I meant get some information on love. You wouldn’t have to mention the plutonium.’

‘Daniel, I would have to. Besides, I’ve got more information on love than I need.’

‘Well, maybe you could talk Shamus out of it.’

‘Maybe I could talk a bird out of the sky.’

Daniel started putting away the chess pieces. ‘I don’t see any good endings.’

‘Me either.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Enjoy it while I can and cry when it’s over.’

Daniel gave her a puzzled look but said nothing. He folded the chessboard and put it back in its box. ‘I thought of a good ending.’

‘Tell me.’

‘If Shamus steals the plutonium and gets them to close all the nuclear plants, maybe he’ll be a hero. Maybe they’ll give him a medal instead of putting him in prison, and you could get married.’

‘You want to bet a hundred nights of dishes on it?’

‘No.’

‘How about one night for you against a thousand for me?’

‘Sure. I’ll always bet that anything can happen. I love longshots.’

‘Oh yeah? Well I love you.’ She put an arm around his shoulder and squeezed him to her side. ‘Thanks for the moral support.’ She giggled. ‘Moral support. Can you give moral support to an unwed mother forger who has her head up her heart over some crazy poet planning a plutonium heist? Jesus, Daniel, I have no idea what I’m doing.’

Daniel gave her a little hug, but he didn’t say anything.

Annalee saw Shamus once a week for the first month, running checks on each other to be sure they weren’t followed. When things seemed secure, they began meeting more often, but always at his apartment on the edge of Richmond. Daniel went with her sometimes, but on those occasions they’d meet Shamus at a prearranged location and go to a movie or an A’s game or drive up the coast in Annalee’s old Toyota. Daniel didn’t accompany them often. He felt that he disturbed some current between them. Shamus also seemed to be trying too hard to impress him. And it bothered him that Shamus never mentioned that he was planning to steal some plutonium.

When Shamus and Annalee had been lovers again for almost half a year, he asked if she would help him with the theft.

Annalee sat up in bed, an unseasonably warm October breeze from the open window billowing her hair. ‘Doing what?’

‘I’d rather not tell you until it’s all set up. That’s for your protection, you understand. In fact, I’ll be the only one to know you’re involved. But the task itself is safe and simple, and it requires someone I absolutely trust.’

Annalee said softly, ‘I don’t want you to do it, you know. Which doesn’t mean I won’t help you with everything I’ve got.’

‘Sweetie, I’m going to try whether you help me or not. And I’ll love you whether I succeed or not. But I can’t love you if we’re nuked into oblivion. There are things more important than us.’

‘Well, go make love to them.’ Annalee tossed her hair. ‘Go make love to the world.’

Shamus touched her bare shoulder with his black-gloved hand, then ran it gently down her spine. ‘I am,’ he said.

Trembling, Annalee slid down beside him and put her hand on his chest. ‘I’ll help you.’

As Christmas approached, Shamus became increasingly moody and intensely preoccupied. He explained to Annalee that he’d hoped to steal the plutonium on Christmas Eve but that the plan wasn’t coming together. Some of the people he needed wouldn’t be available till late January. It was the first she’d heard that others would be involved. She knew better than to ask who they were or how many were included, but she was worried to learn of accomplices – the more who knew, the greater the risk. Shamus assured her they didn’t know each other and, with two exceptions, would never meet – and the two who would meet would be together less than ten minutes, and that would be after the job. He still wouldn’t tell Annalee her role in the heist. When she argued that she’d like to be prepared, he promised he’d tell her in plenty of time.

For Christmas Shamus gave Daniel a beautifully framed copy of the Periodic Table of the Elements from which he’d carefully excised what he called ‘the transuranium abominations.’ He gave Annalee a lovely gold chain necklace, each delicate link intricately connected to the next in a different way. As she examined it again later in her bedroom mirror, she was taken with the terrifying understanding that she was all he had left of reality. She felt a wild impulse to rip the necklace off and tear it apart, but instead she flung herself on the bed and wept. She wished it would happen, be over, end – even though she still didn’t see a good ending. But her and Daniel’s present to Shamus at least kept the faith of a happy conclusion. When he opened their package, he found seventeen separate identities to choose from. He laughed at the Harvard diploma certifying his doctorate in chemistry. It was the only time he laughed all day.

January was worse. He talked obsessively about plutonium, citing its connection in myth with the underworld, that in fact it took its name from Pluto, god of the dead, and that its namesake planet was absent from the ancient astrological charts – because, he speculated, it was meant to remain unknown, forbidden knowledge, the perilous edge. Nor did it escape his notice that the American political system, despite its democratic façade, was clearly a plutocracy, a government by wealth, whether rich individuals or corporate monopolies. The signs, he repeated incessantly, made it overwhelmingly plain that human consciousness was hurtling toward a plutonic apocalypse, a reign of shadow. The only hope of stopping it was a leap of wisdom, and wisdom took time. He would kidnap death and ransom it for time.

Annalee was wondering how much more she could stand when she knocked on his apartment door the night of February 3. She’d decided that if he mentioned plutonium or Greek mythology or any other associative notion she would turn around and leave. Instead she found a bottle of Mumm’s on ice, glasses ready on the candlelit table, and a happy, relaxed Shamus. ‘It’s set for the evening of the fifteenth,’ he greeted her. ‘The Livermore Lab. I want you to place a diversionary device – a small bomb – in an alley in the industrial area. It runs between two warehouses and no one should be around – there’s not even a watchman. When you’ve placed it, I want you to call me from a pay phone. I’ll give you the number and the exact locations that morning. Until then, let’s not talk about it, think about it, worry about it. Just you and me in the here and now, every night till then.’

‘Pour the champagne,’ Annalee said.

Annalee didn’t get home until noon the next day. She knew by the way Daniel looked at her that he knew something was up. She consulted each of her mixed emotions as she worked in the darkroom, debating whether she should tell him or not, and reached no decision. After dinner he said, without preamble, ‘You weren’t supposed to tell me about the plutonium theft to start with. Since you did, you might as well tell me the rest.’

So she did and was immediately sorry.

‘I want to go with you,’ he said. ‘I want to help.’

‘No. Absolutely, finally, unalterably no. No you can’t go, and no discussion. You’re not riding around with a bomb in a car.’

‘You are. And you told me Shamus said it’s safe.’

‘I’m not going to risk you. No. End of discussion.’

‘I won’t risk you, either. Suppose somebody happens along and sees you between the time you leave the car and go in the alley and come back? You need someone in the car, a lookout, to warn you if a cop or somebody shows up – that’s the point of greatest vulnerability. Besides, I’m great cover – if you get stopped, who’d suspect a bomb with a kid in the car?’

‘Exactly. Not a mother on this planet would be that stupid. Including me.’

‘Algerian mothers took their kids along when they planted bombs.’

‘Oh yeah, how do you know that?’

‘I read books.’

‘No. No. Forget it.’

‘I want to ask Shamus.’

‘Goddammit, Daniel, you can’t ask Shamus: You’re not supposed to know, remember?’

‘But I do.’

‘What does that mean?’ Annalee said, ice in her tone. ‘That you’d betray me out of childish spite?’

‘No. It means I’m implicated, but that I can’t share in the responsibility. That’s a betrayal, too. Mom, we share a lot between us – not everything, but a lot. I’m willing to share the risk of delivering the bomb because I share the risk of knowing about it. You have to quit feeling responsible for me. I’m almost fourteen. I need to be responsible for myself.’

‘I don’t like it,’ Annalee shook her head. ‘It doesn’t feel right.’

‘Besides, you need a lookout and moral support. And cover. And I need to do it. Let me go.’

Annalee put her head down on the table. When she lifted it, she said with weary resignation, ‘All right. You can go. Not because you’re my son – that defies my maternal instincts – but because you’re you.’

The next night with Shamus she told him that she was sure Daniel knew something was going on.

‘Shit!’ Shamus exploded, jumping from the bed and pacing the room naked.

Stung by his vehemence, Annalee said nothing.

‘Okay,’ Shamus said, more in control, ‘what does he know, or think he knows? And how?’

‘How? Jesus, Shamus, he’s a piece of my heart! He can feel it from me, that’s how. And that’s probably what he knows – nothing specific, just something in the air, a tension, an edge.’

‘Has he said anything specific?’

‘A couple of times he asked me if I was okay. Yesterday he asked me if there was anything going on that he should know about.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I told him we were going through a tense time in our relationship.’

‘Do you think he’s talked to anyone else?’

‘Never happen.’

Shamus paced for a moment, then came over and sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Daniel’s bright, he’s got heart, he’s loyal, but he’s a kid. I don’t know about kids. You do, and you know him in particular. Any suggestions how to handle this? Or is that why you brought it up?’

‘If you’re absolutely sure about the bomb being safe to transport, I think he should go with me.’

Shamus stared at her. ‘Annalee, if that bomb wasn’t safe, you wouldn’t be carrying it. Do you understand that?’

‘Yes. And I know I can trust Daniel as much as I trust you.’

‘Fine. You work it out with him. But absolutely don’t tell him when it’s going to happen or where until you’re on your way in the car. And don’t tell him what’s involved. Just that we’re going to need his help.’

‘Shamus, he’s been an outlaw his whole life. He forges papers every day. He understands how it is. When the theft hits the news, you think he won’t know who did it, what went down? And be hurt and pissed off he wasn’t trusted enough to be included – especially when he might have to suffer the consequences? You don’t think there’s going to be a shit-rain of heat?’

‘Obviously. But don’t forget, the plutonium is our umbrella. That’s why I have to pull it off. Because without the plutonium, there’s no leverage. They’re gutless, Annalee, not stupid. They won’t fire if they know we can fire back. And they’ll have the whole world watching, because I’m going to make sure it’s on every front page and television set in the world, and the first demand will be amnesty for everyone involved.’

‘And if they call the bluff? Won’t negotiate?’

‘I lose. I’ll surrender myself and the plutonium on the condition that everyone else involved, who I’d duped or forced into doing their tiny, innocent, unconnected parts, be granted amnesty. But even if it comes to that, it will be a success, because I’ll have held up a mirror to their madness, ripped off their masks.’

‘And they’ll lock you up forever as an example, maybe even execute you, and I’ll never see you again.’

‘Annalee,’ Shamus pleaded, ‘it’s beyond us. It cries to be done.’

‘I’ll cry, too,’ Annalee said.

Shamus took her in his arms and embraced her, rocking her as he said, ‘Do you think I won’t?’

When Annalee left for Shamus’s apartment the evening of the fourteenth, she hugged Daniel and said, ‘I’ll bring you a bomb for breakfast.’

‘Are you nervous?’ Daniel asked her.

‘About to fall to pieces. Are you?’

‘Yes. But excited, too.’

‘Right. Which is why you should go to bed early and get plenty of sleep so you’ll be rested and sharp, because tomorrow’s going to take the very best we’ve got. And remember to lock the doors.’

‘I will.’

He didn’t.

Daniel was undressed and in bed when he remembered the back door. He’d locked it earlier, but then, deciding to gather all the equipment together and have it ready for tomorrow, he’d gone out to the garage for the tent and couldn’t recall if he’d relocked it. He was reaching for his nightstand light when a woman’s voice said from the doorway, ‘I’ll look for you in the shadows.’

Carefully, Daniel reached for his pants beside the bed and took out his pocket knife, opened it, and slipped it under the covers. When he set his pants back down on the floor some change in the pockets jingled.

‘I seek you in the dark by the jingle of silver and the sound of your breath.’ He could hear her hand patting along the wall and then the overhead light switched on. The woman standing in the doorway was young, pretty, and, as Daniel quickly judged from her eyes, very stoned.

She peered at him intently. ‘Ha. I found you.’ She smiled at him. ‘But who have I found?’

‘My name’s Daniel,’ he said, too surprised not to answer.

She giggled, ‘Then this must be the lion’s den.’ She walked into the room.

‘Not really. It’s my bedroom. Who are you?’

But she was staring at the poster of the Horsehead Nebula on the wall over the bed. ‘What’s this?’

‘The Horsehead Nebula. It’s what’s called a dark nebula, because it doesn’t contain any bright stars. The dark nebulae block the light of the stars beyond them, so from here they look like dark patches in the sky. They’re like huge interstellar dust clouds. Some astronomers think they’ll eventually collapse into themselves and form new stars.’

She stared at it intently for half a minute. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, and began to cry.

‘I feel the same way sometimes,’ Daniel said.

Sniffling, she sat down on the edge of the bed and, head cocked quizzically, looked at him. Though it was a cold night, she wore only a thin blouse, blue jeans, and sandals. ‘Nebula, nebulae; nebula, nebulae,’ she intoned. ‘You’re too young to be a scientist, aren’t you?’

‘Are you too young to be a burglar?’

‘Hey,’ she said sharply. ‘I’m not a burglar.’

‘Then why are you here in our house, late at night, without knocking?’

‘I lost the party,’ she said. ‘When you lose the party, you have to find something else. You have to look for an open door.’

‘Did you take something at the party?’

She sniffled, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Tonight it’s Brigit Bardo. Like that old French actress.’

‘Are you an actress?’

She peered at him closely. ‘I’m not anything.’

‘Do you need some help?’

‘No,’ she laughed suddenly, ‘it’s easy.’

Daniel started to say something but she reached out and put a finger to his lips. ‘No more questions for awhile.’ She pressed harder with her finger. ‘All right?’

Daniel barely nodded.

She trailed her finger over his chin and throat and down his chest to the edge of the blanket that covered him.

‘What are you doing,’ Daniel asked uneasily.

‘Something you’ll never forget.’ She pushed the blankets down slowly. When she saw the knife, she reached over and folded the blade closed. Leaning down, she bit him lightly just below the ribs, then lifted back the blankets. When she took his cock in her mouth, Daniel shuddered and shut his eyes.

Her mouth was unbearably warm, infinitely slow. As Daniel passed through the Horsehead Nebula he learned there are things beyond imagining that exist anyway.

She left an hour later, locking the door behind her.

When Annalee returned home in the late afternoon, Daniel was waiting to open the door. They looked at each other and asked, ‘Are you all right?’ and then laughed.

‘You look like you didn’t get much sleep,’ Annalee told him.

‘And you look jumpy and exhausted,’ Daniel said.

‘You’d be jumpy, too, driving around with a bomb.’ Noticing the camping equipment piled on the living room floor, she pointed. ‘What’s this? We taking to the hills?’

‘That’s our cover. We’re going camping in Yosemite.’

‘There’s a small flaw, isn’t there? Like the fact that it’s February?’

Daniel reached into the pile and produced two pairs of snowshoes. ‘We’re going snow camping. I rented these at REI this morning. Out in the parking lot, a short, bearded man asked me where I was headed …’

Annalee listened distractedly to the elaborate cover story Daniel had concocted in case they were pulled over with the bomb in the car. How the bearded man had given him a package to deliver to his sister in Livermore, some sort of illegal cancer treatment from Mexico. The story was well conceived, but wouldn’t make any difference if they were busted on the way, which she was sure Daniel understood. When she finally saw the point, she shook her head.

‘Daniel, bless you, but there’s no way you can protect me if we get popped.’

‘I’m a juvenile. I wouldn’t go to jail.’

‘You’re a sweetheart. And I’d go to jail for contributing to your delinquency on top of possession of an explosive device.’

‘We could try it.’

Annalee didn’t want to argue. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘but let’s hope we don’t have to.’

Daniel pointed at the ceiling. ‘Something else. The paper upstairs. I put the blanks and seals in the safe, but if anything happens and they search here, they’ll find them.’

‘Yeah, well, AMO will just have to eat it.’

‘I was thinking we could drop the incriminating stuff off at Jason’s. Tell him we decided to go camping and didn’t want to leave it around.’

‘But we’ve taken off before and just stashed it. He’ll know something’s weird. And we don’t have time.’

Daniel considered this a moment, then shrugged. ‘Do you know where we’re going?’

‘Las Postas Avenue in Livermore. An alley between a machine shop that just went out of business and an empty warehouse.’

‘I can’t cover both ends of an alley.’

‘You don’t have to – it’s a blind alley, T-shaped. Just for deliveries and garbage pickup.’

‘What’s the bomb look like?’

‘A sealed black metal cube about a foot on each side. It’s in a paper shopping bag.’

‘What sort of bomb?’

‘I didn’t ask.’

‘I mean does it have a timer? Fuse? Remote control?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t care, either. What difference does it make?’

‘I just wondered if it was armed.’

‘No. I have to do that in the alley. There’s a button I push. A red light should come on. Whether it lights up or not, we leave immediately and call a number from a pay phone a half mile away.’

‘Probably a timer,’ Daniel said to himself.

‘Right, I guess it is. Shamus said it had a Mickey Mouse clock inside. He said the guy that put it together was in the avant garde of demolition.’

‘How is Shamus?’

‘Gone. Not there. Electric with purpose. The damn bomb was under the bed all night, if you can believe that.’

‘Yeah,’ Daniel said noncommitally. ‘How’s our time?’

‘Too much, not enough, and running out.’ She felt tears welling in her eyes and turned for the bathroom.

Daniel caught her by the hand as she passed him and held her at arms’ length. ‘You sure you’re okay? We have to concentrate.’

‘If I concentrate any harder I’ll disappear.’ She took a deep breath to gather herself, slumping as she let it out. ‘This whole thing is stupid and impossible and pointless.’

‘We’ve got outs,’ Daniel said gently. ‘Call the number Shamus gave you and tell him the car broke down. I can dump some sugar in the tank.’

Annalee hugged him fiercely. ‘I know, I know.’ She buried her face on his shoulder and squeezed him again. After a moment, she pushed herself away and gave him a weak smile. ‘I’m all right. I got shaky there for a minute, but I’ll make it.’

‘Then let’s go.’ Daniel smiled back. ‘You’ll be fine. You always are.’

* * *

A light rain was falling when they left Berkeley. As Shamus had planned, Daniel and Annalee were just in front of the heavy rush hour traffic on 580 through Castro Valley. It was almost dark as they left Dublin Canyon. Annalee glanced at her watch when they saw the Las Postas exit.

‘We doing good?’ Daniel asked. They’d hardly spoken since they’d left, but the silence was solid and comfortable.

‘We’re doing fine,’ Annalee said.

When they passed a Texaco station she pointed out the rain-blurred window and told him, ‘That’s the pay phone we want, so we’re close now. Look for 4800.’

When Daniel spotted it moments later, she turned right and circled the block. There were few cars on the wet streets, fewer pedestrians.

‘The rain’s a blessing,’ Daniel said. ‘It’s hard to see out the side windows, makes people concentrate on the road.’

Annalee said absently, ‘Small blessings.’

She stopped at the mouth of the alley. As she reached to switch off the ignition her hand stopped. She giggled, ‘Help! Do I turn it off or leave it running?’

‘Off,’ Daniel said. ‘Along with the headlights. And pull up the hood on your coat.’

‘Thanks.’ She smiled at him as she killed the engine. She glanced in the rearview mirror and then up the street.

‘Looks fine,’ Daniel said.

‘Well,’ she said, reaching over into the backseat for the shopping bag, ‘here we are.’

‘I’ll give two short honks if anything looks like trouble.’

Annalee opened the door and slid out, pausing to tell him, ‘You’re special, Daniel.’ She shut the door with her knee, adjusted the bag in her arms, and walked briskly down the alley.

Daniel could barely see her through the rain-smeared glass so he cranked the window down halfway. He caught a flash of headlights in the rearview mirror and turned to watch as a car hissed passed. The rain came down harder. He turned back to the alley just as Annalee disappeared around the left corner. He checked the streets quickly for pedestrians. Not a soul. He was just turning to check the alley when he heard Annalee scream, ‘Daniel! Run!’ and the bomb exploded, blowing the car fifteen feet sideways and hurling a shard of metal through his right temple. He staggered from the car, swayed, collapsed on the wet pavement. Shaking his head, he pushed himself up on his hands and knees, crawled toward the alley, and collapsed again. He lay still, blood and rain in his eyes. When he tried to blink them clear, they stayed closed.

Far below, he saw a tiny point of light. He began sliding toward it, helplessly gathering momentum. As he plunged, the light slowly enlarged, gleaming so brilliantly he was blinded. Daniel was falling into the sun. Just as he was about to be consumed, he realized the light was being reflected from a mirror. He tried to raise his hands to protect his eyes but his hands wouldn’t move.

They were lifting him into the ambulance when his heart stopped. The two attendants clamped a defibrillator to his chest, each jolt shooting a thin stream of blood from Daniel’s temple, flecking their white uniforms. Daniel’s heart fluttered briefly, faded, then weakly started beating again.

Daniel was in a coma when Annalee was buried five days later. Only a few stunned friends from the Random Canyon Raiders attended the brief service. They were photographed from an unmarked car as they left the cemetery.

That night, weeping, Shamus dug far down in the still-loose earth of the grave. He left his black glove, a large gold nugget nestled in its palm gleaming in the moonlight before he covered it over.

Jessal Voltrano was a prodigy of the air. At fourteen, critics were hailing him as a master of the aerial arts, and perhaps the best trapezist who ever lived. For the next five years, he dazzled crowds from Paris to Budapest. He refused to perform or practice with a net. As he explained to one reporter, ‘Nets discourage concentration.’

But two weeks before his twentieth birthday, during a solo performance in Prague, the empty concentration essential to exquisite timing failed him for an instant. He would never forget that disembodied moment when he saw himself open from the plummeting whirl of somersaults, never forget how softly the bar brushed his fingertips as he continued to fall.

One of the clowns reached him first. Jessal was still conscious. ‘I can feel my skeleton,’ he whispered in amazement. ‘I can feel it.’

No doubt. Except for his hands, he’d broken nearly every bone in his body. During his grueling convalescence, Chester Kane, an American intern, introduced him to sleight-of-hand magic. Jessal practiced the tricks with the same diligence he’d brought to the trapeze, absorbing the nuances of each grip, shuffle, slide, and turn. His therapy became his passion, and when he left the hospital nine months later, he was teaching Dr Kane.

Jessal returned to the trapeze, but it wasn’t the same. His brilliant grace was lost forever to damaged nerves, knotted bone. He left the circus and never looked back.

Changing his name to The Great Volta, he wandered through Europe, Africa, and Indonesia, walking by day, sleeping where night found him, performing his magic wherever people would gather to watch, surviving on the coins they tossed in his hat. As opportunity offered, he watched other magicians work, consulted with them, taught and learned; in every town, he scoured the library for useful texts. At the end of four devoted years, he was an accomplished practitioner of sleight-of-hand magic. However, he began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction, as if his craft and knowledge had become a trap.

One afternoon in Athens, as he performed for a crowd of pensioners and street urchins, Volta muffed a simple card trick, turning the queen of hearts instead of the ace. As the audience hooted at his blunder, Volta realized his magic was hollow, a magic of distraction and mechanical deceit, a manipulation of appearances that could never produce the substance he sought. Volta tossed the deck high in the air, laughing with the crowd as the cards fluttered down. He would remember that moment as his first great escape.

His second occurred a month later, summer solstice 1955. He was sailing to America on a Greek freighter, watching the moon rise from the top deck, when a leaky fuel tank exploded, hurling him into the sea. Watching the moon rise saved his life, for another tank detonated a minute later, engulfing the ship in flames and screams. Volta saw a life raft hit the water and swam for it.

Volta found only one other survivor, and he was badly burned. After attending to him as best he could from the meager first-aid kit, Volta propped him in the bow. He checked the raft’s provisions: a week of canned rations, five gallons of water, compass, flare gun, and a steel signal mirror. He set a westerly course and began to row.

When the burned man died five days later, calling deliriously for his mother as Volta held him in his arms, Volta barely had the strength to slip him overboard. A day later he was too exhausted to row. Caught between the punishing sun and the icy moon, he let the raft drift.

The food ran out first. The next night, his throat still aching with the last swallow of water, Volta fired the three flares in quick succession, blooding the sea. He dropped the compass over the side, the first-aid kit, then the flare gun. But when he picked up the signal mirror, he caught an image in the mirror. It wasn’t him. The face was swollen and peeled. In his exhausted delirium, he thought that to see his real face he would have to put his mind within the image in the mirror, look at himself through its burned eyes. With his last speck of concentration, he sent himself into the mirror, surrendered himself. When he opened his eyes, there was no one in the raft. He looked into the mirror. It was empty. As he started to fall, he could hear, distantly, a terrified scream wrenched from his lungs. Just as he returned to his body, Volta dropped the mirror into the sea. He was still following its sliver of light when he heard a woman singing. He listened, then opened his eyes.

Her name was Ravana Dremier, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of a French smuggler and Jamaican shamaness. By general consensus, Ravana was the most gifted healer in AMO. She explained to Volta that they’d found him unconscious in the raft four days earlier. They were on the Pinga del Ray, one of the few boats in AMO’s Caribbean fleet. When he asked her if she’d been singing, she said, ‘Only if it was your song.’

In their four years of travel as allies and lovers, Ravana led him deeper into the magical arts. Ravana’s mother had, like Volta, ‘entered the mirror,’ a practice, according to Ravana, she’d abandoned almost immediately, warning it was solitary magic, a sensational power not worth the risk. She’d told Ravana, ‘Entering the mirror requires a unique combination of gift and circumstance. But entering the mirror is simple compared to escaping it. To escape, you must swim the river of stone or fly into the sun.’

‘Yes,’ Volta said. Near death on the ocean, he’d found his magic – the art of escape.

Having affiliated himself with AMO before the Pinga del Ray reached Haiti – Ravana possessed an eye for talent and persuasive ways – Volta availed himself of Alliance resources, particularly the LUC, its Library of Uncollected Collections, a wildly decentralized network of personal libraries. With a phone call and an access code, a book was mailed the next day. Even better, Volta discovered, was picking the book up in person, because the librarians were scholars of their keep, repositories of distilled information. When they didn’t know the answer, they knew the best place to look. They saved Volta time by keeping his focus precise. Volta supplied the passion and discipline. Less than two years later, he performed his first magical escape.

While each of Volta’s seventeen escapes are renowned, and each culminated in that moment of dramatic astonishment at the heart of magic, his final escape is a legend of the art. It was performed in St Louis, on a barge towed to the center of the Mississippi River. Dressed only in tights, Volta was bound in a straightjacket and then shackled in twenty-gauge chain. Assistants helped place him in a cramped steel cube, each side drilled with a series of one-inch holes. When the cover plate was bolted down, a gas-driven crane swung the shining cube over the side and dropped it into the river. People thronged to the rails. Fifteen minutes later, as their anxious babble faded into a numbed silence, Volta, attired in a tuxedo, his hair dry, stepped from his makeshift dressing room. ‘Forgive my tardiness,’ he said, adjusting the rose in his lapel, ‘but I wanted to change into something more comfortable.’

The crowd went crazy.

So did Volta.

When all explanations but the impossible were eliminated, the secret to all of Volta’s escapes was simple: He dematerialized his body; disintegrated; vanished into air. The steel cube was empty before it touched the river. But as Ravana’s mother had warned, with each disappearance, returning became more difficult. He almost hadn’t returned the last time, had barely escaped the escape. With a cellular certainty that both terrified and compelled, Volta knew if he ever entered the mirror again, he would not return. The next day he announced his retirement.

But though he’d returned to his flesh, his spirit had snagged on the threshold – he was physically intact, but not quite coherent; dull to sensation; emotionally hollow. He couldn’t find a material essence powerful enough to silence the siren-song beyond the mirror, its promise of ecstatic oblivion, final surcease. He couldn’t find that binding essence in Ravana’s flashing eyes, couldn’t feel it in the wind or sense it in the shimmer of salmon moving upstream in the moonlight, couldn’t touch it in petals or flesh. Ravana brought her powers to bear but she couldn’t reach him. As his desperation drained into depression, Volta realized he could no longer love her as she needed and deserved; to honor Ravana, he forced himself to leave.

AMO provided him with a new identity, a small apartment in New York, and a job as a sensori, the Alliance designation for freelance investigators who identified and assessed useful information. The only information Volta wanted was a way to wrest his spirit from the mirror. He found it in a New York museum displaying the Treyton collection of precious stones. Saw it in the brilliant center and irreducibly dense reality of the Faith Diamond, fourth largest on Earth. Needed to touch it, hold it, feel its clarity. He smashed the display case glass with his forearm and was gently lifting the diamond in his cupped hands when a guard clubbed him from behind.

Released from the hospital three days later, Volta was taken directly to jail and booked on grand theft. A squat, pug-faced sergeant with a child’s pink skin uncuffed Volta in front of an open cell, punched him in the kidneys, and shoved him inside. Volta grabbed the rust-stained wash basin to keep from falling. When he looked up, he saw himself in the steel mirror bolted above the basin and instantly spun away from the glittering hunger in the mirror’s eyes. He used a washcloth to cover the mirror.

Volta was dreaming of sensuously interlocked loops of diamonds when he was slammed awake by a long shuddering wail: ‘Nooooooo!’ As two guards wrestled the new prisoner past Volta’s cell, he glimpsed a skinny, pimpled kid, not more than eighteen, throw his head back like a coyote and howl again – ‘Nooooooooo,’ a cry at once a denial and a plea.

For an hour after he was locked up and the guards had left, the kid continued wailing, at ten-second intervals, that single, anguished ‘Nooooooo!’ oblivious to the other prisoners’ curses to shut up.

The double metal doors at the end of the cellblock banged open and the pug-faced sergeant, his pink skin florid with rage, shambled down the corridor, lightly slapping a blackjack against his pudgy thigh. The cellblock fell instantly silent; then the kid, as if understanding what that silence meant, screamed ‘Nooooooooo!’

As he unlocked the kid’s cell, the sergeant said thickly, ‘You know what your problem is, son? You need something to plug that little pussy mouth of yours. Now you get down on your knees here for me.’

‘Nooo,’ the kid moaned, but his cry had lost its haunting denial. He was begging.

Volta screamed, ‘Noooooooo!’ He heard the two quick blows from the blackjack and the kid’s sharp cry slurring into a whimper.

The sergeant panted, ‘I said, on your knees, fuck-face.’

When Volta heard the kid gag, he tore the face cloth off the mirror. If he vanished and reappeared quickly in the kid’s cell, he might be able to stop it – but only if he could reappear. The eyes looking into his own – wild, inviting – urged him to try. Volta looked through them into the mirror. ‘No,’ he said. And he stood there watching himself weep until the kid’s choked sobs and the sergeant’s thin, rapid wheezing finally ceased.

Stood facing himself as the sergeant, humming, swaggered out, leaving the kid lying on his cell floor, vomiting.

Stood looking at his own haggard, mortal face, his tears, the spittle on his chin. Stood listening through the long desolate silence suddenly broken by three quick sounds: the tiny shriek of springs as the kid leaped from the top bunk; a strangled gasp as the noosed belt cinched; the soft, moist pop of the neck bone breaking.

Volta closed his eyes, leaned back, and, drawing every shred of power from nerve, meat, and bone, howled, ‘Nooooooooooooo!’ And when he looked in the mirror again he saw a large spherical diamond – perfect, radiant, real. He was looking for the light in the diamond’s center when the sergeant bellowed, ‘Which motherfucker was it?’

Volta turned from the mirror and walked slowly to the barred cell door. He could hear the faint rhythmic tap of the blackjack against the sergeant’s leg.

The sergeant, his voice dropped to a cold murmur, warned, ‘Last time, scum-buckets: Who screamed?’

‘Me,’ Volta said.

‘Well pucker up, fuck-face,’ cause you’re next.’

‘No. You’re next,’ Volta promised. ‘That boy just hung himself.’

‘Good,’ the sergeant said. ‘S’posed to cull the weak.’ He yelled over his shoulder to the other guards, ‘Bring a mop’ then turned back to Volta. ‘One, fucking, peep … and you’re going to die trying to escape.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Volta said, starting to laugh, ‘I’ve already escaped.’

‘Yeah, sure looks like it t’ me, you loony fuck.’

Volta gathered enough breath to explain, ‘Appearances are deceiving,’ and then surrendered to the comic beauty of his last escape, finding freedom in jail. He wanted to share his delight with the diamond in the mirror, but the diamond had vanished.

Hours later, Volta was released on bail supplied by AMO. The Alliance also provided lawyers from their in-house ‘firm’ – warmly referred to as Sachs, Pilledge, and Berne – and the charge was quietly dismissed on the court-directed stipulation that Volta receive mental health care. His psychiatrist was Dr Isaac Langmann, a member of AMO’s Star, who agreed with his patient that the best course of treatment was advanced training in the Raven’s arts.

Shortly after Volta completed his training, Dr Langmann offered Volta a job as his field representative on the Pacific coast.

Volta loved the work. Since a field representative functions as a nerve to the Star – mediator, messenger, field general, fixer, and roving trouble-shooter – each day brought new people, places, and problems. The people he worked with were impressed with the clarity of his understanding and the fairness of his judgments. When Isaac Langmann retired from the Star in 1963, he nominated Volta to replace him. Fulfilling its most important function, the appropriate integration of talent and task, the Star unanimously approved Volta on the first poll. At the time of the Livermore explosion, Volta had served with distinction for seventeen years.

Volta was standing at the foot of the bed when Daniel, after nine weeks in a coma, opened his eyes. Daniel looked dully around the hospital room and then, squinting, focused on Volta.

Volta nodded slightly. ‘Welcome back, Daniel.’

Daniel trembled as he tried to speak. Volta waited. When Daniel failed again, Volta said softly, ‘Your mother is dead.’

Daniel lifted his hands as if he were going to cover his face but they collapsed weakly across his chest. He shut his eyes tightly, but couldn’t stop the tears.

‘I share your sorrow,’ Volta said. ‘I appreciate the poverty of condolence at such a loss, but I offer it nonetheless.’

Daniel moaned, arching against the bed as if trying to sit up.

Volta said, ‘I know I’m presuming on the intimacy of your grief and have clearly violated your privacy, but I’m afraid I must.’

Nodding distractedly, Daniel brought his hands to his face, fingertips pressed hard against his closed eyes.

‘My name is Volta. You’ve met two of my most trusted friends, Smiling Jack and Elmo Cutter. I serve AMO as a member of the Star, the Alliance’s facilitating council. I’m here to offer our heartfelt regrets and, if you want it, our wholehearted help.

‘Your situation is complicated, Daniel. You were injured in the explosion; a sliver of metal from the clock’s hand pierced your temple, traveled upward at approximately a forty-degree angle through the edge of the right hemisphere of your brain, and lodged against the skull. Although the EEG and other tests indicate ‘normal’ brain function – whatever that might be – you have been in a coma for nine weeks. There may be damage the tests haven’t revealed, but other than the coma, all indications are excellent.

‘You are nominally under police guard, no visitors allowed, but since the posted guards were withdrawn a month ago, the restrictions are merely formal. When they find you’ve regained consciousness, you’ll likely be arrested. If so, you can expect to be interrogated by people who know how. My advice is to say you don’t remember anything from at least a month before the blast; conditional amnesia is medically consistent with trauma. So is selective recall. It would probably be best if you had no idea that your mother was planting a bomb. All she told you was that she was delivering something for a friend – better yet, a stranger.’

Daniel uncovered his eyes, looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then back at Volta. He wet his lips. ‘How did you know? The bomb? That it wasn’t already there?’

Patiently, Volta explained, ‘I know because Shamus called and told me everything. He was extremely distraught. He blames himself.’

‘They were in love!’ Daniel sobbed. He shook his head helplessly. ‘Oh Mom, Mom, Mom.’

‘Yes,’ Volta said, ‘I know they were in love. I know it hurts.’

Daniel lashed, ‘Tell me who killed her!’

‘Nobody,’ Volta said calmly. ‘By all evidence, it was a faulty bomb.’

‘Nobody? Then why were her last words “Daniel! Run!”’

Volta looked at him sharply. ‘She called to you?’

‘She screamed!’ Daniel sobbed.

‘And then?’

Daniel struggled for composure. ‘The bomb exploded before I could even turn to look. Like her scream set it off. That fast.’

Volta considered the information.

‘She was warning me,’ Daniel said.

‘Clearly. But about what? Did you notice any people or activity immediately prior to her shout?’

‘No. And I was looking.’

As much to himself as Daniel, Volta murmured, ‘She may have sensed something go wrong with the bomb.’

Daniel didn’t respond.

Volta asked, ‘Did she arm the bomb before entering the alley?’

‘No.’

‘Did she have time to do it before it detonated?’

‘She must have. It blew up.’

‘The pavement was wet. Maybe she slipped and dropped it. Heard a connection sputtering.’

‘I don’t know,’ Daniel said weakly. ‘I don’t know. She screamed and it exploded.’

‘If you want, we’ll look into it. It will take time, no doubt, but perhaps less if you know who built the bomb.’

‘I don’t,’ Daniel said. ‘Shamus should, though – ask him.’

‘I’d like to. However, I’ve been trying to locate him for over a month now to discuss your situation, but he seems to have vanished. Any ideas where he might be?’

‘No. But I want to know anything you find about my mother. I want to know what went wrong.’

‘Naturally. You will be kept completely informed – on that you have my word. Which leads to other matters we have to discuss. For instance, your future, and how we might help you.’

‘Help me do what?’

‘First, to escape the thirteen or so charges that will be filed against you. They only have inklings that the bomb was connected to a plutonium theft, so be very careful about what you say.’

‘They haven’t linked her with Shamus?’

Volta lowered his eyes, then looked back up, straight at Daniel. ‘Your mother didn’t leave any fingerprints, Daniel. Everything they know is from paper. They think she was Mrs Wyatt. We’ve cleaned the Baton Rouge connections, the bank account and land titles, and would be grateful if you forgot Dubuque completely.’ Volta kept talking to distract Daniel’s imagination from what the blast must have done to his mother. ‘However, from the snowshoe rental receipt in your pocket – the homemade driver’s license in your wallet had a phony name but the right address – the McKinley Street house was raided before we could cover it, so you also face some forgery and illegal possession charges. You’d be well advised to have an exceptional attorney, and we’d be glad to provide one free if you so choose.’

‘I’d appreciate that,’ Daniel said.

‘You’re fourteen, so you’ll be tried as a juvenile – actually, if things go well it’ll probably end up as a hearing, not a trial. It would help things go well if your amnesia proves intractable. Follow your lawyer’s instructions. We’ll try to get all charges dismissed and have you placed in your aunt’s custody.’

‘I don’t have an aunt.’

Volta cocked his head. ‘Aunt Matilda and Uncle Owen? The Wyatt Ranch up in Mendocino County?’

‘All right,’ Daniel said.

Volta crossed his arms. ‘Now, your future. Many people have spoken highly of you, people whose judgment I esteem – Smiling Jack, for one; Dolly Varden, Johnny Seven Moons, Elmo, and others. They think you have special qualities which should be developed and refined. AMO has some uniquely talented teachers who might help you transform potential into ability.’

‘Can I accept the legal help and not the teachers?’

‘Negotiation isn’t necessary. These are unconditional offers of assistance. Avail yourself as you please.’

‘I want the lawyer. The rest I need to think about.’

Volta said, ‘I’ll contact an attorney the moment I leave, which must be soon. But first I want you to know that I facilitated your return to consciousness by using simple, but suppressed, techniques that were taught to me by a woman named Ravana Dremier. Basically I joined your mind through the powers of empathy, and then I reminded you of life. I assure you I implanted no ideas or suggestions; I merely summoned your attention. I’m telling you this because you may remember my voice calling you – if you don’t at present, you may in the future, particularly in states of dream or reverie. It was your decision to return. I’m sorry about Annalee, Daniel. Heal quickly.’

Volta was at the door when Daniel called, ‘Thank you.’

Volta turned and said, ‘Yes. You’re welcome,’ and closed the door behind him.