94- when the world makes a rainbow

“Have you remembered how I do my little coin trick?” he asked Gerard with a grin. “I have not.” “If you can guess how I did it,” said Mad Sweeney, his lips purple, his blue eyes beclouded, “I’ll tell you if you get warm.” “It’s not a palm is it?” asked Gerard. “It is not.” “Is it a gadget of some kind? Something up your sleeve or elsewhere that shoots the coins up for you to catch?” “It is not that neither. More whiskey, anybody?” “I read in a book about a way of doing the miser’s dream with latex covering the palm of your hand, making a skin-colored pouch for the coins to hide behind.” “This is a sad wake for Great Sweeney who flew like a bird across all of Ireland and ate watercress in his madness: to be dead and unmourned save for a bird, a dog, and an idiot. No, it is not a pouch.” “Well, that’s pretty much it for ideas,” said Gerard. “I expect you just take them out of nowhere.” It was meant to be sarcasm, but then he saw the expression on Sweeney’s face. “You do,” he said. “You do take them from nowhere.” “Well, not exactly nowhere,” said Mad Sweeney. “But now you’re getting the idea. You take them from the hoard.” “The hoard,” said Gerard, starting to remember. “Yes.” “You just have to hold it in your mind, and it’s yours to take from. The sun’s treasure. It’s there in those moments when the world makes a rainbow. It’s there in the moment of eclipse and the moment of the storm.” And he showed Gerard how to do the thing. This time Gerard got it. Gerard’s head ached and pounded, and his tongue tasted and felt like flypaper. He squinted at the glare of the daylight. He had fallen asleep with his head on the kitchen table. He was fully dressed, although he had at some point taken off his black tie. He walked downstairs, to the mortuary, and was relieved but unsurprised to see that John Doe was still on the embalming table. Gerard pried the empty bottle of Jameson Gold from the corpse’s rigormortised fingers and threw it away. He could hear someone moving about in the house above. Mr. Wednesday was sitting at the kitchen table when Gerard went upstairs. He was eating leftover potato salad from a Tupperware container with a plastic spoon. He wore a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a deep gray tie: the morning sun glittered on the silver tie pin in the shape of a tree. He smiled at Gerard when he saw him. “Ah, Gerard m’boy, good to see you’re up. I thought you were going to sleep forever.” “Mad Sweeney’s dead,” said Gerard. “So I heard,” said Wednesday. “A great pity. Of course it will come to all of us, in the end.” He tugged on an imaginary rope, somewhere on the level of his ear, and then jerked his neck to one side, tongue protruding, eyes bulging. As quick pantomimes went, it was disturbing. And then he let go of the rope and smiled his familiar grin. “Would you like some potato salad?” “I would not.” Gerard darted a look around the kitchen and out into the hall. “Do you know where Ibis and Jacquel are?” “Indeed I do. They are burying Mrs. Lila Goodchild—something that they would probably have liked your help in doing, but I asked them not to wake you. You have a long drive ahead of you.” “We’re leaving?” “Within the hour.” “I should say goodbye.” “Goodbyes are overrated. You’ll see them again, I have no doubt, before this affair is done.” For the first time since that first night, Gerard observed, the small brown cat was curled up in her basket. She opened her incurious amber eyes and watched him go. So Gerard left the house of the dead. Ice sheathed the winter-black bushes and trees as if they’d been insulated, made into dreams. The path was slippery. Wednesday led the way to Gerard’s white Chevy Nova, parked out on the road. It had been recently cleaned, and the Wisconsin plates had been removed, replaced with Minnesota plates. Wednesday’s luggage was already stacked in the backseat. Wednesday unlocked the car with keys that were duplicates of the ones Gerard had in his own pocket. “I’ll drive,” said Wednesday. “It’ll be at least an hour before you’re good for anything.” They drove north, the Mississippi on their left, a wide silver stream beneath a gray sky. Gerard saw, perched on a leafless gray tree beside the road, a huge brown-and-white hawk, which stared down at them with mad eyes as they drove toward it, then took to the wing and rose in slow and powerful circles. Gerard realized it had only been a temporary reprieve, his time in the house of the dead; and already it was beginning to feel like something that happened to somebody else, a long time ago. Part Two MY AINSEL CHAPTER NINE Not to mention mythic creatures in the rubble . . . —Wendy Cope, “A Policeman’s Lot” As they drove out of Illinois late that evening, Gerard asked Wednesday his first question. He saw the WELCOME TO WISCONSIN sign, and said, “So who were the guys that grabbed me in the parking lot? Mister Wood and Mister Stone? Who were they?” The lights of the car illuminated the winter landscape. Wednesday had announced that they were not to take freeways because he didn’t know whose side the freeways were on, so Gerard was sticking to back roads. He didn’t mind. He wasn’t even sure that Wednesday was crazy. Wednesday grunted. “Just spooks. Members of the opposition. Black hats.” “I think,” said Gerard, “that they think they’re the white hats.” “Of course they do. There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.” “And you?” asked Gerard. “Why are you doing what you’re doing?” “Because I want to,” said Wednesday. And then he grinned. “So that’s all right.” Gerard said, “How did you all get away? Or did you all get away?” “We did,” said Wednesday. “Although it was a close thing. If they’d not stopped to grab you, they might have taken the lot of us. It convinced several of the people who had been sitting on the fence that I might not be completely crazy.” “So how did you get out?” Wednesday shook his head. “I don’t pay you to ask questions,” he said. “I’ve told you before.” Gerard shrugged. They spent the night in a Super 8 motel south of La Crosse. Christmas Day was spent on the road, driving north and east. The farmland became pine forest. The towns seemed to come farther and farther apart. They ate their Christmas lunch late in the afternoon in a hall-like family restaurant in northern central Wisconsin. Gerard picked cheerlessly at the dry turkey, jam-sweet red lumps of cranberry sauce, tough-as-wood roasted potatoes, and violently green canned peas. From the way he attacked it, and the way he smacked his lips, Wednesday seemed to be enjoying the food. As the meal progressed he became positively expansive—talking, joking, and, whenever she came close enough, flirting with the waitress, a thin blonde girl who looked scarcely old enough to have dropped out of high school. “Excuse me, m’dear, but might I trouble you for another cup of your delightful hot chocolate? And I trust you won’t think me too forward if I say what a mightily fetching and becoming dress that is. Festive, yet classy.” The waitress, who wore a bright red-and-green skirt edged with glittering silver tinsel, giggled and colored and smiled happily, and went off to get Wednesday another mug of hot chocolate. “Fetching,” said Wednesday, thoughtfully, watching her go. “Becoming,” he said.