The Necromancer's House(8)

13



The Jehovah’s Witnesses come soon after the storm is over. The air is damp and the receding dark clouds in the east make their white shirts pop as they walk up the drive between the young maple trees. Andrew stands on his front porch with his leather coat on, knowing he looks and smells every inch the career sinner, combing out waist-length hair redolent of tobacco and myrrh. He frowns at a new white hair, plucks it, winds it around a finger.

It will take them a moment to make it up the steep walk.

He realizes he is about to sigh, recognizes impatience as a sign of entitlement, thinks he really should read another book about Buddhism and try to meditate. He has a date with being Buddhist, but he isn’t there yet.

And here come two of God’s warriors, both of them African American, one in his sixties, one about twenty.

At least they mean it, I’ll give them that. They wear out a lot of shoe leather doing what Jesus said to do. No Christmas. No Halloween. But this is a little like trick-or-treating. Do they eat candy? Do I even have any candy?

The older one is slowing them down.

That guy doesn’t need any candy.

That wasn’t very Buddhist, and he’s not fat, just a little soft around the middle, and probably a grandfather, so give him a break.

Maybe that kid’s grandfather?

The elder raises a hand, smiles a winning smile.

“Quite a driveway you have here,” he says. “You must be in good shape!”

“I might be if I ever left. I’m a hermit. All I do up here is talk to God and wait for strangers to come so I can tell them God’s plan for them. Didn’t they warn you about me at the Kingdom Hall?”

“Well, they did say . . .”

“Where’s Barbara?”

“She moved to Syracuse.”

“More action in the big city. A rich crop of the godless there, I tell you.”

“Something like that.”

He stands with his hands on his hips, bent forward just a little, his elbows fanning out his open coat, Sears, granddad gray. Tie the color of an excited brick. He’s smiling and panting, catching his breath.

“You okay?” Andrew says.

He nods, still panting.

The younger Witness senses he should say something, but he’s a shy one. He’s also more than a little distracted by the garden of rocks and rusted-out cars piled in Andrew’s front yard. The ’65 Mustang he wrecked, an old Chevy truck, a Dodge Dart. All of them wound through with young trees and big, handsome boulders. Its aesthetic leans just more toward art installation than junkyard fodder.

The boy is fascinated with it, especially the bleached longhorn steer skull crowning it all, its dry teeth yellowing in their sockets, its horns leather-wrapped at the base, slightly tilted.

The lad knows there’s something more to it than meets the eye.

He knows he’s the one who’s supposed to break the silence, though, so he speaks.

“Quite a . . . quite a storm, wasn’t it?”

“Sure was,” Andrew says.

They exchange a look.

The boy glances at the steer skull again, then tilts his head a little bit at the magus, like a dog trying to process a strange sound.

Holy shit, is this kid luminous?

A natural?

Andrew smiles more broadly.

Damn if he isn’t. Marching around with armfuls of The Watchtower when he’s just humming with receptivity for magic. Anneke’s got a little, but this kid’s like I was.

Ready to explode.

One spell book away from a lifetime of . . .

What?

Now the older man stands.

“Arthur. Arthur Madden,” he says, holding out a hand. “And this handsome fellow is Marcus Madden, Jr. No relation. Just kidding.”

“Andrew Blankenship.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Blankenship.”

This is a genuinely nice guy. I’ll keep it dialed down.

It’s hard to keep the mischief out of his voice.

“Would you like to come in?”

• • •

They leave twenty minutes later.

It isn’t the conversation about the reliability of the gospels, nor is it Andrew’s Socratic minefield of questions; it isn’t even Andrew’s assertion that a God who intended sex for procreation alone would not have built a clitoris, nor made it so compatible with the tongue. (“Must be nice to be so close to the lake,” Arthur says to change the subject, although Andrew enjoys the unintended symbolism, as he enjoys that this is how faultlessly polite Arthur chooses to comment about the fishy smell permeating the house.)

It’s Marcus.

Marcus sees too much.

First he’s distracted, looking out at the lake through the back windows.

“Is there something more interesting than us out there, young man?”

“I . . . thought I saw a . . . dolphin.”