Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [115]
Up ahead, a dump truck turning off toward the landfill slowed almost to a stop. Red stayed in second. Then, accelerating, he heard a new sound in the truck’s engine, the sound water makes. Maybe it was just gas sloshing around in the tank, though it seemed to be coming from up front. Hoping to isolate and identify the noise, he slowed and opened his door, trying to hear better. Hearing nothing, he slammed the door shut, and an air bag seemed to detonate between his chest and the truck’s steering wheel. Had he hit the dump truck? No, there was no dump truck, only the wheel clasped by his freckly pink hands, and the white buttons on his blue chambray shirt. No air bag, no object of any kind ballooning between them. He still felt it, though: a tough sac blown up to the bursting point, pressing into him.
And now his father was in the car—or was it Frank? They were going to the water gardens. He could see the trees in the distance: the leaves, the branches, the fruit, all the crystal, silvery arcs of water.
It was not a water garden, he saw now, but a hall of people, all lined up, leaning toward him. Nobody he recognized. Their clothes were from the thirties and forties, gabardine and crepe in autumnal colors: tailored jackets in rich browns and wines on the women, the men in full-cut suits of cinnamon, chocolate, charcoal gray. An AA meeting, it seemed, or the first AA meeting, before it broke into fifty thousand splinter groups. Red searched for Bill Wilson, the founder, and his wife, Lois—he would so like to meet them. He raised his hand to shake theirs, and all the people vanished. In their place stood a row of eucalyptus trees, upright, rooted, stubborn with life. His mind clear as rain, Red thought, I lost it, damn it, and tried to swerve, but the truck hit the dirt berm and, for the next long moment, flew.
LEWIS was in the kitchen waiting for bread dough to rise. The phone had been ringing constantly—Red called a couple times from Ventura, David called from the office and asked Lewis to look in his room for a client’s discharge papers. Ramón, the breakfast cook, called to say he’d like to work more meals. When the phone rang again, Lewis considered not answering it, then picked up. “Round Rock, Lewis here,” he said.
“It’s me, David.” His voice came from a noisy, echoing place.
“Where are you?”
“Buchanan General,” he said. “Look, I have some very bad news.”
Lewis knew as much from his intonation. David had recently told him about taking a rare folk poison, and Lewis’s first thought was that the toxin had somehow, belatedly, kicked in. He drew a breath, let it out. He was standing in the Blue House kitchen, at the desk in the back. Through the window he could see the black silhouette of an oak tree backlit by the sun. If the news was bad enough, he knew, this could become a place he’d never seen before. He sat on the desk. “Okay,” he said.
David said, “We lost our good friend Red Ray today.”
“Red?” Surely David meant someone else—Frank Jamieson, perhaps. “Red?”
“He had a heart attack driving back from Ventura. Drove his truck into a tree. The ambulance crew started resuscitation, but they couldn’t bring him back.”
“Oh my God,” Lewis said, not because he truly felt any emotion or pain yet—he was numb as ice—but because the immensity of the fact was right around the corner. “And Libby? Was she with him?”
“No, he was alone. She’s in there with him now—with his body.”
Red’s body?
Lewis heard squeaky rhythmic noises on David’s end and thought, Someone must be wheeling a gurney past. Then he