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DR. Pigeon is in session… ah… Just a moment. Hold please."
A
The voice returned. "May I say who's calling?" Molly had had the same receptionist for eleven years, an efficient woman who steadfastly refused to recognize A
"Her sister," A
"One moment please." There was a click, then strains of Handel's Water Music filled the earpiece. Molly soothing the savage beasts.
"Hallelujah!" Molly came on the line.
A
"Silly bugger wouldn't stop crying. I couldn't get a profound sentence in edgewise. And I was feeling particularly insightful today. What's up? You don't usually call this early in the week."
The sucking sound: toxic, killing smoke going deep into her sister's lungs. A
"Jesus!" Molly laughed with the career New Yorker's reliance on black humor. "Lions and tigers and snakes, oh my! You're on hold… can I pour you a drink?"
"Got one," A
"It figures," Molly said. Handel flooded in. A
"Cheers." A glass containing one careful shot of scotch clinked down the two thousand miles of wire from Manhattan.
"To old friends and better days," A
"When? When are you coming?" Molly didn't sound as pleased as A
"I don't know…" A
"Ha!" Molly exploded. "IF. What in the hell are you up to, A
"What makes-"
"Hmph!" Molly cut her off. As children they'd both practiced doing hmph like it was spelled in books. Molly had become very good at it. "Psychiatrists aren't omniscient for nothing," she said. "The snake and lion business, A
A
"And?" Molly demanded.
There were times A
"And I've got some final checking to do," A
"Everything? Like who is going to win the World Series? Whether God can make a stone so big He ca
"Do you know what Scotsmen wear under their kilts?" A
"I'm a psychiatrist," Molly returned. "Not a sociologist. I know what they want to wear under their kilts."
A
"It'll never sell on Park Avenue," Molly told her. "We're like physicians of old but instead of bleeding the patient, we bleed the bank account. Take the Root of Evil onto our own broad shoulders."
"A modern-day sin-eater," A
"You got it. Now what the bloody hell are you up to? Back to the snakes and lions, A
A
"It's Tuesday. Four days of checking?"
"No. Thursday and maybe Friday of checking."
"You're going to creep about like the Lone Ranger stalking the forces of evil clad in Virtue and Right, is that the deal? A miniature, middle-aged John Wayne."
"They're dead," A
A long silence paralyzed the phone lines. Not even the sighing of cigarette smoke broke the darkness.
"You there?" A
"I'm here," Molly said. Then, very deliberately: "If you get yourself killed, I will kill you. Is that clear? I will donate all of your things to the Pentecostal Church. I will have you embalmed and put on display in the Smithsonian as the World's Biggest Horse's Ass. Call me Saturday."
"I will," A
"Before noon. At noon, Eastern time, I call out the National Guard."
"Molly, I-"
"Gotta go. I'm reviewing Suicide as a Solution for the Washington Post."
The click. The dead line.
What the hell, A
Thursday night the moon rose full and round at 9:12 p.m. A
Sand sparkled as if lit from beneath, the white salt flats glowed with reflected glory. Shadows became fathomless. The moon, as if held to a regal creep by a suddenly broken string, popped clear of the Guadalupe Mountains. Its light bathed the Patterson Hills. Desert hills: rugged and stony and cut deep with washes. No roads, no trails intruded on this outlying stretch of land. No people hiked or camped there. Not in July when daytime temperatures rose above a hundred and ten degrees and there was no water for miles in any direction.
It was there A
A boulder, flaked into miniscule staircases by heat and cold, threw its inky cloak of shadow over her. Sand was strewn over her tent and pack. To creatures dependent on sight and sound for their prey, she was invisible. She sipped at one of the jugs of water she had carried in. In the Pattersons, in July, she would sweat all night, losing water to the desert even in darkness. Since six p.m., when she'd begun the hike in, she had consumed almost a gallon. Two more gallons were cached close by.
Once above the escarpment the moon dwindled rapidly in size but its light flowed unabated through the dry clean air, caught the iridescent shells in the ancient reef-become-mountains and the salt crystals of the long dead sea. A