The Devil's Alphabet

Chapter 17

PAXTON WAS MET at the front gate by a shotgun and a scowl. The chub—a middle-aged man whom Paxton recognized from the Tuesday-morning payday crowd—told him to drop the newspapers, turn around, and put his hands on the hood.

Pax didn’t argue. He leaned against his car, the sheet metal already hot from the morning sun, and tried not to think of the gun in the man’s hand. God, he was sick of guns.

The gate squealed open behind him. “Pull up your shirt.” Pax hitched up his T-shirt, and a rough hand quickly patted him down: armpits, waist, legs, and ankles. The chub was more fat than muscle, but still looked capable of pinching off Paxton’s head with one hand.

“You don’t have to worry about him,” another voice said.

Pax turned around. Barron, the Home’s regular security guard, stepped out and touched him on the shoulder. “How you doing, son?” he asked. The man’s uniform was slept-in. His round face sagged from fatigue. It looked like he hadn’t shaved since Clete had tied him up two days before.

“I’m just coming to check on my dad,” Pax said.

“Best thing,” Barron said. “Get back to normal as soon as you can.”

“Right,” Pax said. “Normal.” He picked up the newspapers and followed Barron to the front door. The chub with the shotgun stayed outside.

Barron shuffled toward his desk without saying another word. Two other chub men filled a couch in the lobby, looking somber. One of the men nodded at him, but Pax had never seen either of them around the Home; Rhonda had been calling in the reserves. They were older men, perhaps the same age as Harlan, both of them bald and huge, just sets of dark eyes and mouths embedded in massive round bodies like fleshy snowmen. One step from becoming producers themselves.

No one had brought Harlan out to the lobby, and it didn’t look like anyone was about to. Pax walked back through the sets of double doors.

His father’s door was open. Harlan lay on the bed, half sitting up, eyes on the TV. The size of him came as a shock, every time. The white sheet covering his body made him into a landscape, an arctic mountain range.

“He returns,” his father said without looking away from the television.

“I’m sorry it took so long to get here,” Pax said—an apology that covered both his late arrival this morning and his absence the day before. “It’s still a madhouse downtown.”

His father was uninterested in the papers and wanted nothing to do with the news channels—he’d seen enough of Ecuador, he said. He was watching mole rats instead. Green-tinged night-vision cameras somehow followed the whiskered, bucktoothed things through the tunnels. When the show ended, his father made no move to change the channel or look away from the screen. The next program was about the hunt for giant squids.

Pax glanced at the clock on the wall. Half past nine. Too soon to rush off—he’d just gotten here. He’d give his father another half hour, then get back to the house, where Andrew Weygand and the twins would be waiting for him.

He flipped through the newspapers. USA Today and both of the local papers were full of the Changes. The government of Ecuador had declared a state of emergency and sealed the borders to the Los Rios province, even as it refused to admit that the epidemic was indeed TDS. The pictures, though, made it clear that the argo strain was at work. If the disease followed the same course, the B strain would strike in a week or two, and then the C. The estimated death toll had already reached 5,000. By contrast, Switchcreek had lost only 378 the entire summer of the Changes, but that was almost a third of the population. Babahoyo contained 90,000 people. If the ratio held …

“Dad.” Harlan didn’t move his eyes from the TV. “Dad.”

Harlan’s great head turned. Pax said, “Thirty thousand people could be dead before the end of the month.”

“Tell me that isn’t His judgment,” his father said.

Pax thought, Judgment of what—being poor? Living on the equator? But then a voice said, “Dr. Fraelich says it’s all just chance.”

Aunt Rhonda stood in the doorway holding a paper mask to her face, somehow making the pose seem less like a woman warding off germs than a courtesan flirting at a masquerade. She wore a salmon-pink blouse, a tailored midnight-blue jacket, and a matching knee-length skirt. On her lapel were an American flag pin and a loop of green ribbon. “Haven’t you heard? We’re surrounded by bunches and bunches of other universes. She says it was inevitable that a virus eventually learned to jump over.”

Harlan grunted. “Maybe somebody should ask the doctor who created those universes.”

“I’m sure she’d have an answer,” Rhonda said.

“Ask her this, then,” Harlan said. “In an infinite number of universes, wouldn’t one of them have to give rise to an all-knowing, all-powerful God? Once he exists anywhere, he exists everywhere—the alpha and the omega.”

Rhonda laughed. “Reverend, you could save the devil if you could get him to visit.”

“Getting him to stop by is never the problem, Rhonda—it’s getting him to leave. But you know that.”

Pax sat back, listening to them bat words back and forth. They’d known each other for how long, thirty-five years? Forty? Even enemies had to derive pleasure from such a long relationship.

“And how are you doing, Paxton?” Rhonda asked a few minutes later. Before he could answer she said, “What did you think of the council meeting last night?”

“I’m just glad they’re not going to put us in quarantine.”

A penciled eyebrow arched above the paper mask. “I’m not so sure about us, but you don’t have to worry,” Rhonda said. “I’m sure they’ll declare all you nice normal people clean and free. You can leave any time you like.”

Harlan grunted.

Pax didn’t look at him. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

“Oh, I know, hon,” she said, and conspicuously checked a diamond-studded watch. “Well, I’ve got to run. I hope you’ll be watching the news—I’ve got a major press conference this afternoon. Oh, I almost forgot …” She gestured to someone in the hall, then moved aside to let in one of the chubs from the lobby. “You know Lawrence Teestall, don’t you?”

“Oh, sure,” Pax said, trying to mask his shock. Mr. Teestall had been his junior-high shop teacher. Back then he’d been a short, skinny man with a Brillo pad of bright orange hair. Pax hadn’t recognized him at all in the lobby; all resemblance to his old teacher had been buried under an avalanche of fat.

Rhonda said, “Could you just take a few minutes to teach him how to do an extraction? He’s good with his hands, I’m sure he’ll pick it up in a snap.”

“But I don’t—”

“Come now, how many times have you watched? Lawrence, just don’t let Paxton get sloppy and work bare-handed—the vintage hits him harder than most folks. And don’t forget to turn on the news at two. I’d pick channel ten—they’ve got that nice Asian girl.”

Pax needn’t have rushed home—the twins hadn’t arrived yet. Weygand was pacing around the room with his shirt off and his cargo shorts hanging low on his hips, talking to himself. No, not to himself—he turned, and Pax saw that he wore a tiny earpiece and microphone.

Pax went into the bathroom and closed the door. He pulled the latex gloves from the pocket where he’d stuffed them after the extraction, then turned them in his hands until he found a discoloration in one of them, and touched his tongue to that spot. Just a taste, nothing to incapacitate him. He needed to stay awake today. Then he carefully folded the gloves and tucked them back into his pocket.

When Pax returned to the living room Weygand had stopped talking and sat bent over his laptop. He had the gaunt face and the thin arms of a runner, so that he looked skinnier the more clothes he wore; with his shirt off the muscles of his chest and back were more apparent, as clearly delineated as a Renaissance Jesus stretched on a cross.

Weygand looked up from the screen. “You okay?”

“Was that the twins on the phone?” Pax asked.

“No, that was a guy I know who blogs about DHS. Homeland Security. Besides, the girls don’t have my number, do they?”

“Oh, right.”

Last night after the town meeting Paxton had tried to get time alone with Rainy and Sandra, but Tommy had hovered a few feet from them the entire time. His smooth face betrayed nothing to Paxton, but his body language spoke volumes. The blank man was still jealous of Paxton, still nervous that his place as stepfather would be usurped. No wonder the girls kept their visits to Paxton’s house secret from him. Fortunately Rainy understood that Pax wanted to tell them something; she engaged Tommy in a conversation and in the break Pax managed to tell Sandra to come to his house at 10:00 a.m. with the laptop.

It was already 10:30. Weygand paced, fiddled with his laptop, paced some more. He didn’t want to miss Rhonda’s press conference, which he somehow knew all about even though Pax hadn’t mentioned it. Something about a charity, Weygand said.

Just before noon Pax offered to make Weygand a sandwich. When he brought it out to him Weygand took it one-handed and started to eat, still tapping at the laptop.

Pax said, “So what did your Homeland Security guy say?”

“Not much.” Weygand wiped a dot of mayonnaise from his mouth with the back of his hand. “The big question is, what if—hey, is this baloney? I haven’t eaten baloney in … ever.”

“It’s better fried,” Paxton said.

“Wow. That’s so authentic. Next you’ll be feeding me possum.”

“Nobody eats possum anymore,” Pax said. “It’s all possum substitute now. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Possum.”

Weygand gave him a weird smile. “You know, you’re kinda funny when you’re high.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “What did you do back there?”

“Aw, just a little white lightnin’,” Pax said with a drawl. When he was out of sight of the living room he’d taken out the gloves again, but the vintage had dried out. He threw them in the garbage, then went to the freezer, where he kept three partly filled vials. He uncapped one of them, scraped a fingernail along the inside, and touched the icy residue to his tongue. The hit had been less than satisfying. Pax said, “You were talking about the big question.”

Weygand smiled, took another bite of his sandwich. After a moment he said, “The thing they’re all wondering about is, what if it’s not a natural virus? What if it’s been genetically engineered?”

“Ah. The massive government conspiracy I’ve heard so much about.” It was by far the most popular explanation for the Changes, at least in the early days of the quarantine. Several people in his church had been certain that secular humanist scientists had experimented on them without their knowledge. Second most popular was the cover-up-of-high-tech-accident theory—Switchcreek as a genetic down-winder story.

“Not our government, man,” Weygand said. “They can’t even keep their top-secret torture prisons out of the news. I’m talking about those other universes. What if the Changes are a deliberate incursion?”

“The other universe is attacking us? Sure, that makes sense. Every fifteen years they take out some town in the boondocks. In 2030 they’ll finally get the Eskimos.”

“‘Attack’ is the wrong word. Think immigration. Colonization. They’re trying to cross over.”

Pax laughed. “My dad may be a bull elephant, but he’s still my dad. I find it hard to believe that he’s a colonist from Planet Fat Boy.”

“Bull elephant?”

“I meant chub. Charlie. My dad is—” Pax inflated his cheeks, exhaled. “—big.”

“Oh, shit. I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Pax said. “There’s a lot of it going around in this town.” Weygand didn’t seem to know what to say to that. He seemed genuinely sorry. After a moment Pax said, “I think I know what you’re getting at. It’s not my dad, per se.” Per se. This may have been the first time he’d said that aloud. “You mean his DNA.”

“Exactly,” Weygand said. “Any species that could learn to send its genes across the universes would go a long way to ensuring its own survival. The invaders would soon run into competition, though, because whatever species it colonized would have to figure out how to replicate too, because now it’s competing not only with all the other species on its planet, but with all its alternate selves across the universes.”

“Arms race,” Pax said, suddenly getting it. Or maybe he wasn’t understanding it on his own, he was … syncing up. Andrew’s thoughts seemed to be spilling into his own. “Argos versus chubs versus blanks.”

“Yes!” Andrew said. “And them versus us.” He hopped up, excited now. “Think about how weird it is that three distinct species came out of the Changes. It’s almost as if … Okay, say that the argos discovered the trick first. Maybe they even did it by accident. But anyway, they replicate into the universe of the betas. Then the betas figure it out—they engineer the virus to work for them. Now argos and betas are together in one universe, and together they invade the universe of the charlies. And so on and so on, across the universes, until they get to us. We’re at the front wave of a three-part war.”

“Wow,” Pax said.

“Yeah, wow.”

“So this is what your Homeland Security guy thinks? We’re at war?”

“He’s not in Homeland Security,” Weygand said. “He’s only nineteen. He writes about them.”

“Oh. Sure.”

For some reason they both laughed. Weygand sat down next to him. “This is the crappiest couch in the world,” he said.

“I should throw it out,” Pax said. Weygand’s arm was a few inches from his own, radiating heat.

A minute passed, maybe two.

Weygand said, “So, Paxton. What are you thinking right now?”

“I … I don’t know.”

Weygand laughed kindly. “Fair enough.” He leaned forward, knees on elbows. Pax regarded the architectural curve of his back, the frets of his spine. “I’ve been down this road before. Listen, why don’t you sober up and we’ll talk some more.”

Pax lifted his hand, then set it down between Weygand’s shoulder blades. Pax felt both his hand against his skin and the heat against his back; touched and toucher at the same time.

After a moment Weygand shook his head, laughing to himself. Or maybe laughing at himself. Then he started to get up, and as he rose Paxton’s palm slid down his back, each knuckle of his spine delivering a gentle tap. And then the contact was broken.

“I’ve got to get downtown,” Weygand said. “Maybe by the time I get back the twins will have shown up.”

Pax nodded.

“And get something to eat, okay, Pax?”

The twins didn’t come all that day, or the next.

They’d stayed away before, sometimes for days at a time, but this was the first time Paxton had waited for them, worried for them. The atmosphere in town had grown tense over the weekend. Friday afternoon a dozen beta women had driven to the Lambert Super Wal-Mart for their weekly Co-op shopping trip and walked into a line of pro-quarantine protesters. No one was hurt, but there’d been pushing and shoving; the betas had been forced to leave without their groceries. The store manager said that he’d arranged for the food to be delivered to the Co-op, but he’d made it clear to the reporters that he preferred that the Switchcreek people stayed at home until the protests died down.

Aunt Rhonda kept appearing on his TV screen, pushing for support of her new relief fund: Helping Hands to Babahoyo. She’d announced an 800 number; a software company in Memphis had already put up a supporting website. Three times Pax had seen her give what Weygand started calling the Azzamurkin speech: “As Americans, we’ve always been the first to reach out to those struck down by tragedy. As Americans, we must share the hard-won knowledge we’ve gained about TDS. As Americans …” The flag pin on her lapel and the green ribbon—for the victims in Ecuador, she said—had become permanent accessories.

Weygand said, “You see what she’s doing?” Pax thought, Running for office? But Weygand didn’t wait for an answer. “At the same time that she says she’s supporting the Ecuadorians, she’s saying, They aren’t us. We are Americans, we are Christians. They’re just brown people who live far away and happen to have the same disease. She might as well be raising money for earthquake victims.”

“I bet they’d rather have had an earthquake,” Pax said. The death toll had stalled at 6,500, but only because the Ecuadorian government had clamped down on reporters. Babahoyo had been quarantined “for their protection and ours.” Rhonda announced that one of the first tasks of her charity would be to send volunteers to the city—and some of those volunteers would be Switchcreek citizens, led by the mayor herself.

“I’ll say this,” Weygand said. “She moves fast.”

Nothing sexual had happened with Weygand; they never even touched each other after that moment Thursday afternoon. By the time Weygand came home from Rhonda’s press conference Paxton was asleep on the couch, and when he awoke Weygand was in the kitchen burning soy burgers and the attraction Pax had felt had vanished. For perhaps an hour he’d been someone Pax desired, someone he understood—and then he wasn’t.

The next day Weygand helped Pax work on the yard. Pax kept trying to apologize and Weygand repeatedly told him not to worry about it. Pax wanted to explain that he wasn’t like one of those gay-for-a-day frat-party lesbians—he’d slept with a couple of men. A few women too. And it wasn’t the vintage that made him suddenly want Weygand—or not just the vintage. He’d been this way since leaving Switchcreek. Most of the time he wasn’t attracted to anyone at all, and then he was—for a few hours. His desire for whatever body ended up next to him never seemed to last longer than it took him to put on his pants.

Women thought he was gay. Men thought he was straight but playing tourist. And Pax thought he was … waiting. The last time he’d felt anything real—the last time he felt real—was with Jo and Deke. The three of them had been perfect together, a completed circuit. Everything since had been pantomime.

On Sunday afternoon Weygand told him that he was driving back home in the morning—friends in Amnesty International were organizing a group to drive into Ecuador from Colombia and record what was happening inside the city. Pax thought he was crazy; he could end up in a South American jail. Weygand shrugged it off. “What about this laptop thing? Are we going to do this or not?”

Paxton had no phone number for the twins, and he didn’t even know where they lived inside the sprawl of trailers at the Co-op. Nothing to do for it but go over there and ask. “How about you drive?” Pax said.

The gates to the Co-op—the Whitmer farm’s old iron cattle gates—were closed. Two teenage girls in white scarves, perhaps a few years older than Rainy and Sandra, sat on the other side in lawn chairs.

“Everybody’s getting paranoid in this town,” Pax said to Weygand, and got out of the car.

The girls looked at him but didn’t get up. A small black music player rested on one of their laps, and they were sharing a single red headphone cord, one earbud apiece.

“Hi, girls,” he said. “I’m looking for Sandra and Lorraine—the Whitehall twins?” Stupid: of course they had to know who Sandra and Rainy were.

“Nobody told us you were coming,” one of them said.

“I didn’t know I needed reservations.” He smiled. They watched him with small tight mouths. “So. Can I come in?”

The girls looked at each other. One of them pulled the bud from her ear and walked off toward the center of the compound. She could at least run, Pax thought. The remaining girl inserted the other earpiece and immediately lost interest in him.

Pax looked at Weygand through the windshield, shrugged.

He rested his forearms on the top of a gate and looked up at Mount Clyburn. It was the first week of October, but the afternoon sunlight was still summer-strong. It wouldn’t be long until the leaves began to turn, crowning the mountain, then seeping down in a months-long wave until the valley was drenched in color. He’d forgotten how long spring and fall were in Tennessee—in Chicago those seasons went by in a blink, just a couple weeks to toggle the thermometer between Too Damn Cold and Too Damn Hot. Why in the world had he stayed up there? When he turned eighteen he could have moved south, could have moved anywhere. For some reason he’d made the choice binary—Chicago or Switchcreek.

The girl who’d walked off was returning with another beta, a man wearing a baseball cap. Tommy. Sandra and Rainy were nowhere in sight.

Pax ran a hand across the back of his neck. He and Weygand could leave now, but that would look like they were doing something wrong. Pax waved hello and waited.

Tommy stopped a few feet from the gate. “What can we do for you, Paxton?”

“I was worried about Sandra and Rainy,” Pax said.

Tommy tilted his head. “Why would you be worried?”

Pax couldn’t read Tommy’s tone. Did he know that the twins had been visiting him?

“I heard about the stuff in Lambert Friday, at the Wal-Mart. I thought maybe they’d be upset by what was happening.” It sounded lame even to himself. “I can see you guys are taking precautions.”

“There are hooligans on the road. Knocking down mailboxes, vandalizing. We thought it better to keep an eye out.” Then: “The girls are fine.”

“That’s great,” Pax said. “Do you think I could see them?”

“Who’s your friend?”

Pax looked back at the Prius. “His name’s Andrew. He was a friend of Jo’s.”

“No he wasn’t,” Tommy said.

“You didn’t know all her friends, Tommy.” He wasn’t about to tell Tommy anything about Andrew, or about Brother Bewlay and Jo’s online life. “So how about I talk to Rainy and Sandra for a while, and then leave you alone.”

Tommy stepped forward and put his hands on the gate. The man was trembling—from rage? Something else?

“The girls are staying home, Paxton. You may be too distracted to notice, but there’s a crisis going on. We’re not going to have them—I’m not going to have them—running around unsupervised, not until it’s safe. But even then, even when this blows over?” He glanced at the two girls sitting a few feet away and lowered his voice. “I can’t believe you have to be told this. They’re twelve-year-old girls, Paxton. You’re a grown man. If you come around looking for them again, or if you ever bring them into your house, I’ll call the police.”

“What? I’m not—”

“I don’t know how this works up in Chicago, but here in Tennessee the cops do not tolerate pedophiles.”

Paxton stepped back, his face hot.

“Good-bye, Paxton.” Tommy stood with his hands at his sides, unmoving. After a long moment, Paxton turned, got back into the car.

Tommy was still standing there when the car pulled away.