My son killed the engine of the dented pickup and leaned out the window the way a train engineer might. This threw me. In my soul of souls, Nigel was still an adolescent, younger even.
But even wrinkles in time get sorted out. And once free of the truck, Nigel swaggered toward me and Araminta. My, he really was tall. Even taller than I realized in our quick exchange earlier. His long stride cleared the distance between us in a few steps. His green eyes—Penny’s eyes—were unchanged, thankfully. Unfortunately, there was the issue of his skin, which was fair-angel-fallen-into-the-mud-pit brown.
This Nigel was much darker than the boy I’d raised. He vaguely reminded me of some of my lighter-skinned cousins on Sir’s side of the family. These cousins had been older than me when I was a child, and I hadn’t seen most of them since adulthood. But I had been jealous of their worldliness, their masculine beauty, the hint of final assimilation into whiteness they heralded. Still, it wasn’t my cousins, whose names I could hardly remember, that I thought of when my son came to me just then. In fact, it wasn’t really a thought that I experienced so much as a feeling that caught me by the collar from behind.
Where is my gun?
The weapon had been tucked into my belt holster when I made it to the commune entrance. But I must have lost it before my delousing. I glanced around. Which one of these kleptos took it? One of the cotton pickers? Doc? Dopey?
During my woodland journey and before my flight to the underwater tunnel, I had raised the gun to eye level and pointed the muzzle at a grand old evergreen. I had choked the trigger—pop—and relished the sight of mottled bark exploding away from pearlescent flesh. I still smelled gunpowder in my nostrils.
I worried that Nigel and Araminta saw my thoughts in a bubble over my head. But now that I was paying attention to them, it was obvious they weren’t paying attention to me. They were shouting at each other. She kicked the wheel of the truck. He pounded the hood with his fist. What was the fuss?
He wanted to take me somewhere right away, and she wanted to come along. I pleaded for calm, and they told me to shut up, simultaneously. I recognized the pattern of their argument as one I once knew well. This was the exchange of two people who had been grievously in love for years. Two souls who had been divided prior to their disposition on Earth and now were angry at the effort of trying to fuse the jagged halves back together. They wore wooden bands on their ring fingers. I wished Penny could see them now.
These two new adults—so greatly changed from their larval stages when they fed on the leaves of the garden Penny and I planted—frankly astonished me. They were a family of two, soon to be three. And inside the big swell of Araminta’s belly was a precious baby—my grandchild. A person who would hopefully not take after me in any significant way, who would favor my Penny, inside and out, if there were any justice in the multiverse. But then again Araminta was still black as a meteorite—
“Look, Minty,” Nigel said. “I”—he shot a look my way—“have to do this.”
“This ain’t what we talked about,” Araminta said.
Nigel placed his hands on her shoulders.
“Fine,” she said. He kissed her forehead. With that, Araminta tugged his beard.
When I got into the truck, my door wouldn’t close. Nigel instructed me to pull the handle when I shut it. We were already in motion before I fully latched the thing. Crumpled notepaper and fallen leaves cluttered the floorboard. The truck was a beater for sure. The tailpipe banged against the bumper, adding to the noise that made the truck sound like a bundle of pots and pans tumbling downhill. A jagged crack ran down the center of the windshield. The passenger rearview mirror was missing so that the bracket seemed like an empty eye socket, silently appraising my worth.
We hung a right and curled up the mountain road. Dark valleys and wooded slopes all around us. Jackrabbits leaped along gravel, their eyes glowing like diamonds.
“This is certainly in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?” I asked.
“It sure is.”
I turned to Nigel. “You like this?”
He gave a small nod. “It’s quiet, and the air is clean.”
“I sold the house,” I said.
He nodded again. “Oh.”
“It was too big for just me.”
And again. “That makes sense.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t come home, son.” Up to this point, Nigel had been focusing on the shadowy road. His voice was flat, and his eyes betrayed nothing more than vacant concentration. Whatever ideas they had fed my son seemed to have turned him into a drone. But at my last comment, something flickered across his face.
“Home?” He glanced at me.
“Yes. The condo is small, but I have a rollout, and wait till you see—”
Nigel opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He took a half breath and placed a hand on my forearm without looking away from the path.
“We’ll talk when we get up the mountain,” he said.
“But I really think we can—”
“Dad.” He smiled. I had been shushed by my own son, who now seemed to be laughing at something foolish about me. I stared at my hands, confused. We didn’t say a word for the rest of the ride. The rattletrap cacophony of the truck was abrasive. The silence? That was worse.