The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [19]
“You got that right, baby,” D. K. told his wife. “That’s where Jack’s gone now. ‘And don’t you come back no more.’”
They all had nachos and margaritas in the kitchen. From Annie’s bedroom, where she was packing her suitcase for France, she could hear them loudly laughing. It baffled her that “grown-ups” could find anything so funny about life.
Late that night Jack telephoned Sam from the road.
“Hold onto my leather jacket,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow, tell you where to send it.”
Sam told him to come back right now and turn himself in or leave them alone. “Jack, since you went away, I’ve gotten older. I can’t take much more of this send-things-and-save-things and you tearing out of the cornfield like North by Northwest.”
He laughed. “Love ya, Sam. Gotta go.”
But of course, as Annie predicted when Sam recounted this conversation, Jack didn’t call them the next day, although his sister waited near the phone. He didn’t call the day after that, or for month after month, or as far as Annie knew, ever.
Sam kept Jack’s old brown leather flight jacket that he’d flung off in the hot summer barn. It was unnecessary to instruct her to hold onto things. Her habit was not to throw even the useless away. While she never talked about the past, she did keep its relics, amassing memories in boxes. She was impervious to facetious warnings that the attic floor of Pilgrim’s Rest was going to collapse under the weight of what Clark called her great conscious collective. The past needed saving. Clark should understand that. All the biographies he read, all the time he spent cleaning the old pieces of blue glass bottles they’d dug up gardening. Without the past, she told him, our lives would be as thin and shallow as the news.
So, that day, Sam had gone to the attic and squeezed between stacked boxes (one of all her old girlfriend’s exercise videotapes) and found the baseball cap with the word ANNIE spelled in bright-colored glass beads, packed with some other childhood clothes of her niece’s, like the green velvet dress, the small cowgirl boots, the neon-blue sunglasses.
As she studied Annie’s cap, Sam noticed something written in pen on the inside band—a faded almost indecipherable sequence of numbers and letters. They made no sense to her but she put the cap back in the suitcase and added her brother’s flight jacket to it.
***
The morning after Jack’s escape in the Corvette, Sam scrubbed dirt from the red stone that he’d told her to give Annie as a birthday gift. The stone looked like a ruby. Sam asked Georgette’s mother, Kim Nickerson, who’d inherited the local jewelry store from her deceased husband George, to examine the stone. Kim (called that by Georgette since the seventh grade, with a familiarity that Annie found both alien and enviable) said that it was a ruby. It was a good ruby, worth at least a thousand dollars. Georgette’s mother, a mercenary enthusiast, was sure this ruby proved that Jack’s old story was true: There were precious gems buried at Pilgrim’s Rest, whose recovery might well be “finders keepers.”
The town of Emerald had long dined out on Peregrine fortune and misfortune, gossip of how Peregrines used their wealth to build a mansion on a hill and in general felt so superior that most of the town privately rejoiced when personal tragedy struck them and all their money was swept away in some crash or other, leaving them nothing but their name to feel smug about—and eventually not even that. The town assumed the Peregrines’ money came from financial savagery—tobacco trading, bank foreclosures, and the like. But occasionally there floated to the surface old tales of untold wealth in buried precious stones, rumors passed along for generations.
In their spare time, from grade school to high