The Wave Read online

  “At the hospital. Temple. They admitted her through the emergency room.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  By the time I got to the admissions desk of the emergency room, it was almost three-thirty. Lon was nodding in a chair between a nauseated-looking woman and a man with a bloody gauze bandage wrapped around his forearm.

  “She got these terrible pains and started bleeding,” Lon said. “I brought her here, and they took her right in. The doctors haven’t said a thing.”

  “What are they doing for her?” I asked.

  “I think they’re operating. That’s what the nurse said.”

  “When did she start bleeding?”

  “It started about nine. I brought her in because we thought it might be some kind of rough labor or something, but they said that the bleeding was bad.”

  Lon was tall and prematurely gray. He had a young face, though, and an athletic physique. We never liked each other much. It didn’t have anything to do with race or even with my sister. We were just very different people. But he was my brother-in-law, so I treated him as well as I could.

  “Who’s in charge of the operation?” I asked.

  “I don’t know anything else, Errol,” Lon said. “They just put me off whenever I go up to the desk.”

  I went up. They put me off, too.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Porter,” a young Latina in a white uniform told me. “Your sister is very sick, and Dr. Valeria is operating on her now. We won’t know anything until she comes out of surgery. We might not know anything certain for a few days.”

  “What about the baby?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You’ll have to excuse me.”

  Lon and I waited until six-thirty. After the doctor had a brief conference with us, I called Nella.

  I told her what happened and then asked, “Could you go by my house and pick up a few of my boxes? I’m stuck at the hospital, waiting to see what’s happening. The key is in the iron lamp up over the left side of the door.”

  “Is she going to be all right?” Nella asked.

  “They say she has a pretty good chance, but they’re not sure about the baby. They removed her from Angie’s womb. She’s only two and a quarter pounds. They put her in an incubator.”

  “I’ll pick up your boxes, Errol. But after this, I t’ink you better t’ink about goin’ to church.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  I really meant it, too. My life up to the age of twenty-seven had gone off without a hitch, except for the death of my father. I’d gotten good grades at school and college. I’d married my high school sweetheart, fallen into a great job . . . Then all of a sudden things started going wrong.

  Maybe it was time to get into a fold.

  At 8:05, Dr. Valeria came out to meet with us for the second time.

  “She’s very sick,” the olive-skinned European said. “But she’s stable now. The bleeding has stopped, and the baby is breathing on life support. All we can do now is to give their bodies the chance to work their magic.”

  “Isn’t there some medicine?” Lon asked. “Something you can do?”

  The doctor shook his head. His wiry copper-colored hair shimmered as he moved.

  “No,” he said. “They are both very weak. We will keep them warm, keep them quiet and clean. Wait twenty-four hours and then we will see how to proceed.”

  Valeria told us that we wouldn’t be able to see Angie or the baby for at least forty-eight hours, so Lon went back to the waiting room, and I left for the street fair.

  I had shared the cost of the booth with Nella. It was a big one, costing four hundred and fifty dollars for the two days. Nella had all the materials. It looked pretty cool. Like a big tent with shelves and freestanding displays.

  Nella’s work was large. Handmade mythical animals designed with complex pastel patterns. She also made oversize stoneware platters that had been thrown and then reworked into large ovals and other, more complex shapes like whales and undulating rivers.

  Nella’s work took up most of the space, so she paid for most of it. My mugs were on a few shelves along the side.

  “How is your sister?” she asked me when I arrived.

  “Alive,” I said. “The doctors don’t know what will happen. They have her in the ICU for the next forty-eight hours, at least.”

  “And her baby?”

  “On life support, too.”

  Nella put her arms around me. I think she expected me to cry, but I couldn’t. I was just taking steps one after another. I couldn’t imagine anything happening to Angie. That just wasn’t a possibility.

  “She’s going to be fine,” I said. “Don’t you worry.”

  The words were dead on my tongue, but I don’t think Nella realized that.

  “Let’s get to work,” she said, putting away the pain she felt for me. “I already sold four of your ugly mugs.”

  “Really? Damn.”

  The day went along quite well. By two I’d sold over 130 mugs, and Nella had moved five platters. We’d made about the same amount of money, because Nella’s plates cost three hundred dollars each.

  Every hour I called the hospital, but Angelique’s condition had remained the same.

  Nella had just gone out to walk around the fair “to scope out the competition,” when the three men in suits came into the tent. I realized later that they must have been watching, waiting for Nella or me to walk away.

  Two of them seemed to be cast from the same mold. Dark suits. Tall and white with every hair and crease in place. The last man was tall also, but his light-colored suit was ill-fitting—loose in the chest and tight at the waist.

  The twins wandered around a bit and then settled near the entrance. There they pulled the canvas flap across the front, closing off the space to the public. I was about to ask them to move the fabric door back, when the man in the bad suit came up to me. He had one of my mugs in his hand.

  “Mr. Porter?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Werner.”

  He had robin’s-egg-blue eyes and a craggy face that if it had been on a marble facade, you might have said got only the first treatment of sandblasting. The skin was pocked and mottled.

  “We have a problem,” Werner said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re looking for your father. Do you know where he is?”

  “In the grave,” I said. The cold in my gut almost doubled me over.

  The ugly stone face smiled.

  “This is no time for artifice, young man.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, mister. My father died nine years ago.”

  “Then why, may I ask, were his fingerprints found on a water glass in your house just recently?”

  17

  They identified themselves as government agents but demurred when I asked what agency they worked for. They used a plastic tie to secure my wrists behind my back, then hurried me out of the street fair and into a black Lincoln Town Car. The dark-suited twins got in the front seat, while the lumpy agent sat next to me in back.

  “Can I see your identification again, Agent Werner?” I asked him.

  “You don’t need to see my identification,” he said. “You need to get your story straight.”

  “But—”

  “Wait until we get there,” he said.

  It was a very long drive. Because the men refused to answer my questions, I leaned my temple against the cold door-glass and closed my eyes. I imagined a vast blue sky with two great clouds. One was in the shape of a white rhinoceros, and the other was a feral snow hare. The winds blew the clouds together at an excruciatingly sluggish rate. Slowly, as they came together, the animals became a great blue-on-blue dragon.

  I couldn’t shake the vision. It wasn’t a dream or a mental construction. I thought at the time that it was a symptom of the great stress I was under, a way to escape my helplessness.

  At last we arrived at a house near the ou
tskirts of Ventura, in a rural town called Fillmore. It had once been a working orange farm. There were still hundreds of citrus trees surrounding the house. The property was immense for a single dwelling, almost the size of a plantation. There were certainly no next-door neighbors to peek over the fence and ask what was going on.

  I was dragged into the adobe-style mansion and deposited on a large, shaggy sofa. It was white and smelled of cured wool.

  Werner sat on a hassock in front of me. I was leaning on my side because it was hard to sit upright with my hands restricted.

  “This is no joke,” he said.

  “What’s your first name?” I asked him.

  “Jim.”

  “Well, Agent Jim, I have no jokes to tell.”

  “Then let’s drop this shit about your father being dead, shall we?” he suggested.

  “There was a man at my house,” I said as calmly as I could. “He claimed to be my father. But he was no more than twenty.”

  “Where’d you meet this guy?” James Werner asked me.

  “He called me,” I said. “Crazy, hopeless kinds of calls. I went out and found him in the graveyard.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “I don’t know. Sleeping on my father’s grave.”

  “You say that he looked like he was a young man?”

  “Absolutely. Almost a boy. But strong.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I related the experience of GT throwing me at the beach.

  “Why was he eating sand?” Agent Jim asked.

  “He was crazy,” I said. “Like I told you.”

  The rock-faced government agent stared hard at me. He seemed to come to some kind of conclusion and nodded. He stood up, snipped the tie holding my wrists, and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  The room he left me in had five doors, all of which were closed, and a big window looking out on a pair of weeping willows. The doors were locked. The windows were all barred by ornate cast-iron gratings that were painted pink. I wandered over to the shelf above the fireplace. There was a line of about twenty books between bookends made from bronze replicas of Remington cowboys atop bucking steeds.

  Most of the books were male-oriented adventures. Books about submarines at war, World War II battles, and Civil War strategies. There was one book that was different. It was a slender tome on astrophysics entitled The Effect of Celestial Events on the Biosphere. The subject was the impact of meteorites that have struck the earth and altered the environment and life.

  I remembered GT’s claim about an explosion, probably a meteorite, and felt a sudden chill. Despite all the evidence that had been presented to me up until that moment, it was seeing that book that made me wonder if what GT had been saying might really be true.

  I didn’t understand most of what I read of the introduction, but I got enough to glean a postulation about a meteorite that had struck Earth one and a half billion years ago. This rock was four times the size of the one they thought wiped out the dinosaurs. There were no large animals at that time, only single-celled, bacteria-like creatures. Dr. Zellman, the author, speculated that such life would both survive and be deeply altered by such a dramatic change in environment—

  “Good evening, Mr. Porter,” a man’s voice said.

  When I looked up, I realized that the sun had gone down. I had been on the sheepskin couch reading for some time.

  The man standing before me was tall and slender with a rather elevated forehead. He was over forty but not yet fifty. His eyes were dark, maybe green, and intense.

  “Who are you?”

  “David Wheeler,” he said with no hint of humor. “I will be your host for the next few days.”

  “I can’t stay here,” I said. “My sister’s sick, and I’m running a pottery sale with a friend.”

  “The sale has been going quite well,” Wheeler said. “And your sister is still in the ICU with her child. As soon as we know anything about their condition, you will be informed.”

  “You can’t just hold me here,” I said.

  “The man you say claimed to be your father stayed with you for a couple of days?” Wheeler asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Was he ever wounded during that time period?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was he cut, bruised, lacerated?”

  “Why would something like that happen to him?”

  “I’m not blaming you for anything, Mr. Porter,” my interlocutor assured me. “I was just wondering if he healed quickly.”

  I thought about my finger. I had healed at an incredible rate.

  “No,” I said. “No, uh-uh. I mean, I can’t say if he healed quickly, because nothing ever happened to him. Why do you ask?”

  “Did your father—”

  “GT,” I said. “I called him GT.”

  “Why did you call him that?”

  “When I met him, he kept saying that good times were coming.”

  Wheeler frowned.

  “Did this GT tell you where he came from?”

  “He said that he was my father,” I said. “That he’d risen from the grave. He called me from the graveyard.”

  “How did he have your number?”

  “I’m listed. He probably called information. But let me ask you something, Mr. Wheeler—”

  “Dr. Wheeler,” he corrected.

  “Let me ask you something, Doctor.”

  “What is that?”

  “Agent Werner said that the fingerprints on the glass on my sink belonged to my father. Is that true?”

  “Did this GT resemble your father?” he asked instead of answering me.

  “A little bit. I figured that he was the illegitimate son of my old man.”

  “Do you honestly believe that your father would have maintained a separate family outside of your own?”

  “Ask me if I believe that my father would have murdered my mother’s lover and then buried him in the garage.”

  Wheeler had been standing all this time. He wore soft, dark maroon trousers and a square-cut yellow shirt meant to hang out of the pants. His shoes were alligator, and there was a thick and cloudy crystal ring on his left pinky.

  “May I sit, Mr. Porter?”

  “It’s your house, man.”

  He sat on a stuffed chair across from me.

  “You don’t believe that men can rise up out of the grave?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “But didn’t this GT tell you things that only your father could have known?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But my father could have told GT or GT’s mother those stories.”

  “You think that he would have admitted committing a murder to a woman who may very well have wanted him for her own?”

  He was fondling the opaque crystal ring with the fingers of his right hand.

  “People do all kinds of crazy things,” I said.

  Wheeler shook his extra-long head. “You’re too bright to believe that,” he said. “Top of your class in computer science at UCLA. An excellent chess player.”

  “Then why don’t you believe me?” I asked.

  Wheeler sat up straight and put his hands on his knees. He fixed me with his maybe-green eyes and said, “Those were your father’s fingerprints on that glass. We’ve exhumed his grave, and all that’s left in the coffin is fine white sand.”

  Images of my father, the old man, flooded my mind. Along with these images were flashes of GT with all of his boyish exuberance. There were those phone calls from the graveyard and the insults I had piled upon him.

  Wheeler was handing me a handkerchief.

  I hadn’t even known that tears were streaming down my face.

  “Come with me, Errol,” Dr. Wheeler said. “I want to show you some things that will surprise you.”

  18

  We exited through the back of the residence. There was a good-looking forty-something woman working in a large garden. Her tan was heavily laden with freckles, and her bi
ceps and calves were dense from physical labor. She looked at us and waved. Neither Dr. Wheeler nor I responded, but she smiled anyway.

  There were two men in army fatigues waiting next to a bright lemon-yellow convertible Hummer parked outside the gate to the garden.

  “We’re going to take a little drive,” Wheeler informed me.

  He and I climbed into the backseat while the brawny white soldiers got in front.

  We traveled over wide plains and dirt paths carved into forest landscapes. For a mile or two, we drove along the beach. We may not have gone any more than ten or twelve miles from the defunct orange grove, but it took us over an hour.

  I didn’t mind. It was a clear day, and the breeze was exhilarating. The sun’s rays shone like crystals in the air. I could see sections of the sky that were different from each other. Some were orange, others violet.

  The mild hallucination didn’t bother me at the time.

  “Here we are,” Wheeler said.

  We had pulled up in front of a large concrete bunker. Gray and rough around the edges, it was somewhat reminiscent of the face of the agent who had arrested me—James Werner.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  The soldiers had jumped out. One of them helped me down. I got the feeling that his supportive hand would have turned into a vise in an instant if I resisted.

  There was a steel door to the bunker. It was painted drab green with PROPERTY OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT printed across it in red.

  The door opened as we approached, but there were no obvious sentries.

  We walked down a close concrete hallway and then entered an elevator that was built like a cage. The car descended a hundred or more feet, depositing us in a dark chamber that had only one blue light for illumination. The luminescence allowed me to see the men I had come with, but it was too weak to light up the room.

  “Is this the man, sir?” a voice boomed from somewhere.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Then shall we execute the process?”

  “I believe we shall,” Wheeler said ominously.

  I didn’t like the word execute, especially when the soldiers grabbed me by both arms. A bank of bright lights came on with a bang and a flash. The soldiers dragged me along without saying a word, heedless of my frightened complaints.