Gods and Pawns (Company) Read online

  Robert is smiling, lifting his arms as though in a gesture of surrender. Despite the heat, he is wearing a long overcoat. Its lining is torn, just under his arm, and where the sweat-stained rayon satin hangs down Porfirio glimpses fathomless black night, white stars.

  “Lalala la la. Woooowww,” says Robert Ross, just as Clete hits him. Clete shrieks and then is gone, sucked into the void of stars.

  Porfirio stands very still. Robert winks at him.

  “What a catch!” he says, in ten-year-old Bobby’s voice.

  It’s hot up there, on the old white road, under the blue summer sky. Porfirio feels sweat prickling between his shoulder blades.

  “Hey, Mr. Policeman,” says Robert, “I remember you. Did you tell the Company what you heard? Have they been thinking about what I’m going to do? Have they been scared, all these years?”

  “Sure they have, Mr. Ross,” says Porfirio, flexing his hands.

  Robert frowns. “Come on, Mr. Ross was my father. I’m Bobby.”

  “Oh, I get it. That would be the Mr. Ross who died right down there?” Porfirio points. “In the crash? Because his kid was so stupid he didn’t know better than to lean out the window of a moving car?”

  An expression of amazement crosses the wrinkled, dirty little face, to be replaced with white-hot rage.

  “Faggot! Don’t you call me stupid!” screams Robert. “I’m brilliant! I can make the whole world come to an end if I want to!”

  “You made it come to an end for your family, anyway,” says Porfirio.

  “No, I didn’t,” says Robert, clenching his fists. “Professor Bill explained about that. It just happened. Accidents happen all the time. I was innocent.”

  “Yeah, but Professor Bill lied to you, didn’t he?” says Porfirio. “Like, about how wonderful it would be to live forever?”

  His voice is calm, almost bored. Robert says nothing. He looks at Porfirio with tears in his eyes, but there is hate there, too.

  “Hey, Bobby,” says Porfirio, moving a step closer. “Did it ever once occur to you to come back here and prevent the accident? I mean, it’s impossible, sure, but didn’t you even think of giving it a try? Messing with causality? It might have been easy, for a superpowered genius kid like you. But you didn’t, did you? I can see it in your eyes.”

  Robert glances uncertainly down the hill, where in some dimension a 1946 Plymouth is still blackening, windows shattering, popping, and the dry summer grass is vanishing around it as the fire spreads outward like a black pool.

  “What do you think, Bobby? Maybe pushed the grandfather paradox, huh? Gone back to see if you couldn’t bend the rules, burn down this barn before the mural was painted? Or even broken Hank Bauer’s arm, so the Yankees didn’t win the World Series in 1951? I can think of a couple of dozen different things I’d have tried, Bobby, if I’d had superpowers like you.

  “But you never even tried. Why was that, Bobby?”

  “La la la,” murmurs Robert, opening his arms again and stepping toward Porfirio. Porfirio doesn’t move. He looks Robert in the face and says: “You’re stupid. Unfinished. You never grew up, Bobby.”

  “Professor Bill said never growing up was a good thing,” says Robert.

  “Professor Bill said that because he never grew up, either,” says Porfirio. “You weren’t real to him, Bobby. He never saw you when he looked at you.”

  “No, he never did,” says Robert, in a thick voice because he is crying. “He just saw what he wanted me to be. Freckle-faced kid!” He points bitterly at the brown discoloration that covers half his cheek. “Look at me now!”

  “Yeah, and you’ll never be a baseball player. And you’re still so mad about that, all you can think of to do is to pay the Company back,” says Porfirio, taking a step toward him.

  “That’s right!” sobs Robert.

  “With the whole eternal world to explore, and a million other ways to be happy—still, all you want is to pay them back,” says Porfirio, watching him carefully.

  “Yeah!” cries Robert, panting. He wipes his nose on his dirty sleeve. He looks up again, sharply. “I mean—I mean—”

  “See? Stupid. And you’re not a good boy, Bobby,” says Porfirio gently. “You’re a goddamn monster. You’re trying to blow up a whole world full of innocent people. You know what should happen, now? Your dad ought to come walking up that hill, madder than hell, and punish you.”

  Robert looks down the hillside.

  “But he can’t, ever again,” he says. He sounds tired.

  Porfirio has already moved, and before the last weary syllable is out of his mouth Robert feels the scorpion-sting in his arm.

  He whirls around, but Porfirio has already retreated, withdrawn up the hillside. He stands before the mural, and the painted outfielder smiles over his shoulder. Robert clutches his arm, beginning to cry afresh.

  “No fair,” he protests. But he knows it’s more than fair. It is even a relief.

  He falls to his knees, whimpering at the heat of the old road’s surface. He crawls to the side and collapses in the yellow summer grass.

  “Will I have to go to the future now?” Robert asks piteously.

  “No, son. No future,” Porfirio replies.

  Robert nods and closes his eyes. He could sink through the rotating earth if he tried, escape once again into 1951; instead he floats away from time itself, into the back of his father’s hand.

  Porfirio walks down the hill toward him. As he does so, an all-terrain vehicle comes barreling up the old road, mowing down thistles in its path.

  It shudders to a halt and Clete leaps out, leaving the door open in his headlong rush up the hill. He is not wearing the same suit he wore when last seen by Porfirio.

  “You stinking son of a bitch defective,” he roars, and aims a kick at Robert’s head. Porfirio grabs his arm.

  “Take it easy,” he says.

  “He sent me back six hundred thousand years! Do you know how long I had to wait before the Company even opened a damn transport depot?” says Clete, and looking at his smooth ageless face Porfirio can see that ages have passed over it. Clete now has permanently furious eyes. Their glare bores into Porfirio like acid. No convenience stores in 598,000 BC, huh? Porfirio thinks to himself.

  “You knew he was going to do this to me, didn’t you?” demands Clete.

  “No,” says Porfirio. “All I was told was, there’d be complications to the arrest. And you should have known better than to rush the guy.”

  “You got that right,” says Clete, shrugging off his hand. “So why don’t you do the honors?”

  He goes stalking back to his transport, and hauls a body bag from the back seat. Porfirio sighs. He reaches into his coat and withdraws what looks like a screwdriver handle. When he thumbs a button on its side, however, a half-circle of blue light forms at one end. He tests it with a random slice through a thistle, which falls over at once. He leans down and scans Robert Ross carefully, because he wants to be certain he is unconscious.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmurs.

  Working with the swiftness of long practice, he does his job. Clete returns, body bag under his arm, watching with grim satisfaction. Hank Bauer is still smiling down from the mural.

  When the disassembly is finished, Porfirio loads the body bag into the car and climbs in beside it. Clete gets behind the wheel and backs carefully down the road. Bobby Ross may not be able to die, but he is finally on his way to eternal rest.

  The Volkswagen sits there rusting for a month before it is stolen.

  The blood remains on the old road for four months, before autumn rains wash it away, but they do wash it away. By the next summer the yellow grass is high, and the road is white as innocence once more.

  The Angel in the Darkness

  August 6, 1991.

  Maria Aguilar slammed the door of her apartment, dropped her keys and purse on the coffee table, threw her head back, and screamed in perfect silence. She had not had a good day at work.

  She sel
dom had good days at work, lately; she was an underpaid insurance underwriter in a firm that had just been sold to new owners, and the future was dubious. Today, with rumors of relocation and layoffs, it was especially dubious. The weather was stickily hot, the air acrid with smog. She was forty-six, single, overweight, and drove an eight-year-old Buick Century.

  And the red light on the answering machine was blinking at her.

  She stepped out of one of her high heels and threw it at the wall, not quite close enough to hit the phone table.

  “What the hell is it now, Tina?” she muttered, as she undressed. “Philip’s daddy didn’t show up to drive you to the clinic for his shots? Philip’s cutting another tooth and you can’t get him to stop crying? Philip ran out of Similac and you need somebody to drive you to the market? Or maybe you just can’t get the cork out of your goddam bottle of Pink Chablis?”

  Stalking back through the living room in her bathrobe, Maria glared at the answering machine. “You can damn well wait,” she told it, and leaned sideways into her tiny kitchen. Rummaging in the freezer, she withdrew a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. She pulled a spoon from the drainer, shoved a pile of unfolded laundry to one end of the couch, and settled down to work her way through some consolation.

  Halfway through the pint, however, she sighed, set it aside, and pressed the PLAY MESSAGES button. She braced herself for Tina’s voice weepy and alcoholic, or, worse, with the abnormally bright and chirpy tone that meant something had gone really wrong. Instead, she heard a total stranger.

  “Uh…Ms. Aguilera, this is Marcy Jackson of Senior Outreach. Mrs. Avila at the Evergreen Care Home gave me your number and suggested we might discuss the best possible outlook for your father, uh, what we can do to make him more, uh, to improve the quality of his care. There are some other facilities I can recommend—”

  Maria said a four-letter-word. Five minutes later, having pulled on sweats and sneakers, she was back in the Buick Century fighting traffic, on her way to the Evergreen Care Home.

  Mrs. Avila was younger than Maria, but she always spoke as though she were a kindergarten teacher gently rebuking a five-year-old.

  “It’s specifically stated in the terms of admission,” she said. “No open flames in any room at any time. He’s had two warnings now. Today was his third infraction.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me he had a lighted candle in his room?” Maria cried.

  Mrs. Avila pursed her lips. “We had assumed you’d noticed. When you visited your father.”

  “But—” Maria fell silent, realizing she had seen the candle after all. As long as she could remember, there had been a votive candle flickering in its little ruby-glass cup in front of the wooden figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe, familiar to the point of invisibility. For most of Maria’s life, the Virgin had stood on the mantelpiece of the house on Fountain Avenue. Recently, she had relocated to a shelf above Hector’s television set in the Evergreen Care Home.

  She was still there, smiling through five generations of candle-soot, when Maria stepped into her father’s room; but there was no light in the glass cup now.

  Hector, seated on the edge of his narrow bed, blinked at her and smiled wide.

  “Hey, shweetie,” he exclaimed, rising painfully to his feet. “It’s sho good to see you!”

  He struggled forward and she came quickly to take his hands, seat him again. His hands were soft now, felt fragile as chicken feathers. “Papi, we have to talk. Do you understand they want you to move out of here?” said Maria.

  He smiled, nodding, looking into her eyes; then the meaning of her words got through and he scowled, looked away.

  “I’m moving back to my daughter’s plashe,” he said.

  “No, no, Papi, listen—why are you talking like that? Did you break your upper plate again?”

  “No, no. I—wait! Yesh I did.” He fished in his mouth, produced it for her inspection. Maria stared at it bleakly. She dug in her purse and found the Papi kit: disposable plastic gloves, antibacterial ointment, Band-Aids, denture adhesive, tube of Superglue. She pulled on a pair of gloves.

  “Christ Jesus, Papi. Give it here.”

  He looked on mildly as she dried the pieces with a paper napkin and fitted them together.

  “Did you know, my wife used to be in the movies?” he said.

  “I know, Papi. Three Republic Studios serials, one monster flick, and a TV commercial for bananas. I’m your daughter Maria, remember?”

  “Oh. When’s Tina bringing the little man?” he asked, smiling again.

  “Pretty soon, Papi. He’s teething right now, and he’s a handful. Here we go; you have to make this last, Papi, please, okay? I still haven’t got your paperwork straightened out at the dental clinic. The only time I can do it is during the day when I’m at work, and there’s only so long I can wait on hold on a personal call. You see?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Have they said what your white blood cell count was, from last Tuesday?”

  “No. Nobody tells me anything.”

  “Damn. And where have you been getting votive candles for Our Lady?”

  “Corner store.”

  “You mean somebody went down there and got them for you?” Maria looked up sharply.

  “No. I take my walk.”

  “Oh, my God.” Maria closed her eyes, imagining her father toddling through traffic like Mr. Magoo. “Nobody told me they were letting you out for walks. Papi, you can’t do that! You get lost. Remember?”

  He just shrugged, smiling in a vague kind of way.

  “Look, Papi—Papi, are you listening to me? You aren’t supposed to have candles in your room. They’re this close to throwing you out of here, Papi, you hear me? I got them to give you one more chance. But you have to promise me you’re not going to break the rules again. No more candles, okay? You could burn the place down.”

  When that sank in on Hector he looked askance, elaborately scornful.

  “Why, they’re crazy. I never burned our house down,” he stated. “Fifty years Our Lady has her candle, on Fountain. S’not dangerous.”

  “It’s the law nowadays, Papi,” Maria said. She had a flash of inspiration. “Listen, you know what they’re doing now, in churches? They’ve got little electric votive lights in front of the statues. You drop in a dime, you push the button, a light comes on in the cup.” Gingerly she set his upper plate on the top of the bureau, wedging it between Hector’s Bible and water glass, and peeled off the disposable gloves. Grabbing up her purse, she searched through it.

  “Here! I’ll show you what we’re going to do.” She pulled out her keys and unclipped the mini Maglite flashlight she kept there for emergency occasions. “See this teeny flashlight? Cute, huh? Red, just like a rose. Look, Papi, we’re going to dedicate this flashlight to the Blessed Mother, okay? Here!” Maria turned on the mini Mag and stuck it in the candle cup, then hastily tilted it outward so the Blessed Mother didn’t look quite so much as though she were telling a scary story at a slumber party.

  “Ta-da! And, uh, look, see the little spot of light it throws up in the corner? Think of that as, like, a little window into Heaven. That’s where your guardian angel is watching over you, all right?”

  Hector eyed it doubtfully.

  “You’re wasting the battery.”

  “It’s not wasting!” Maria threw her hands up in the air. “It’s burning in honor of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, okay? Papi, I’ll go to Bargain Mart and buy you a whole case of triple-A batteries, I swear. It’ll be just like candles, only safer. And then you can go on living here.”

  Hector’s mouth trembled.

  “I want to go home,” he said.

  “Oh, Papi, don’t start that again,” Maria begged. “These are nice people. They drive you to your doctor appointments. They make sure you take all your medications, don’t they? And you know I can’t do that unless I quit my job. And I can’t afford to quit my job. I used up my personal leave when you had pneumon
ia as it is. Please. This is how it has to be.”

  But his attention had wandered away, and he gazed up at the light on the ceiling now.

  “My guardian angel,” he mused. “Your Uncle Porfirio came to see me, you know?”

  She nearly screamed out Uncle Porfirio has been dead for thirty-five goddamned years, Papi! Containing her fury, she merely said: “Gosh. Did you have a nice visit?”

  Hector just nodded, smiling now, tranquil and enigmatic as Buddha.

  She got him to promise he’d be good, to promise he’d leave his upper plate out until tomorrow morning when the glue would be set, promised in turn she’d be back the next evening with more batteries, and kissed him good-bye. His kiss was wet and soft. Maria fled from his room down the pastel hallway, hating herself for her anger.

  At the elevator, a man waited. He merely turned and smiled at Maria, as she drew near; but something about his smile chilled her.

  She smiled back, though, and studied him out of the corner of one eye. What was it? She knew, if she looked long enough, she’d figure out what was setting off subliminal alarm bells in her mind.

  Maria had been sensitive, all her life, to physical differences in others. Her acuteness of observation had often embarrassed her parents, when she had been too little to know better than to blurt out Mama, that lady has a wig on her head! or Papi, why is that man dressed up like a lady? It had enraged her sister, when Maria had been able to spot dilated pupils or smell the chemical sweat that betrayed drug use in Isabel’s boyfriends. Isabel had remarked often, acidly, that Maria would make a great vampire hunter.

  What was it about this man, now? Glass eye? Prosthetic limb? A trace of ketones on the breath? He wore a white coat, though somehow he didn’t look like a doctor. He was young, too, perhaps in his mid-twenties. And the smile was still on his face even though he was no longer meeting her eyes, a self-assured smirk that reminded her of, of, of…the Cat in the Hat.

  The elevator arrived, the doors slid open. Maria stepped in and turned, but the man remained where he stood. He lifted his eyes to her look of inquiry.