“Because you’re mad at me.”
“It was Rick’s decision, not mine. Take it up with him if you’re not happy.”
“The only reason I came was to be with you on the mesa. Well, not the only reason. But I am very, very annoyed.”
In her face was the disappointment of a spoiled child, a slighted VIP. Maybe she was thinking of the Acapulco trip that she’d forgone.
“Who took my place?” she said. “Who’s going with you?”
“Ted Jernigan, Judy Pinella. Craig Dilkes, Biff Allard. Carolyn Polley.”
“Oh great.” She rolled her eyes. Russ wondered if his jealousy-provoking gambit might actually have worked. As he watched her stalk away, the arduousness of the long path behind him felt like nothing. She wanted to be with him, and he’d managed to conceal his delight.
Echoes of Biff Allard’s bongo drums were bouncing off the bank across the street, cigarette smoke and Frisbees in the air, a black dog in a bandanna hurdling guitar cases and hand luggage, kids dashing in and out of the church on missions of adolescent urgency, mothers lingering to embarrass long-haired sons with loving injunctions, the three bus drivers and the swing driver conferring over a road atlas, Rick Ambrose standing in his army jacket beside Dwight Haefle, who’d come outside to behold the glory of it all. As Frances walked up to the two men, Russ averted his eyes （Thy will be done） and went looking for the Kitsillie kids whose names were still unchecked. They were due to leave in ten minutes, at five o’clock, and the buses were still empty. There were last-minute runs to the drugstore, tragic partings of friends on different buses, the suitcase in need of late excavation from a luggage bay, the forgotten sack dinner, and, as always, in Russ’s experience, the one or two kids who were late.
“David Goya?” he shouted. “Kim Perkins? Anybody seen them?”
“I think they’re upstairs,” someone said.
Inside the church, as he climbed the upper stairs, he heard voices go silent at his approach. Sitting in the Crossroads meeting room, on a pair of legless couches, were David Goya, Kim Perkins, Keith Stratton, and Bobby Jett. Cool kids all; friends of Becky and Perry. Russ sensed that he’d caught them doing something wrong, but he didn’t see or smell anything forbidden.
“Guys, come on,” he said from the doorway. “We need you downstairs.”
Glances were exchanged. Kim, in stiffly new blue overalls, jumped up and gestured to the others. “We’re going, okay? Let’s just go.”
Keith and Bobby looked to David as if the decision was his.
“You guys go,” he said.
“What’s going on?” Russ said. “Do you have something to tell me?”
“No, no, no,” Kim said.
She pushed past him, out the door. Keith and Bobby followed, and Russ waited for David to explain. The agedness of David’s face and hair was so peculiar, it might have been endocrine.
“Seen Perry?” he said.
“Yes. Why?”
“Let me put it differently. Does Perry seem okay to you?”
Before the question was even out of David’s mouth, Russ intuited its pertinence. The scenario that came to him was complete and convincing: Perry would contrive to mess things up at the last minute, and all would be lost with Frances.
“Let’s go downstairs,” he said to David. “You and I can talk on the bus.”
“You haven’t noticed anything. He hasn’t seemed at all strange to you.”
It was true that Perry had been notably scarce in recent weeks, more like his former furtive self, no longer rising so early, but Russ said nothing. He needed to keep the bad scenario at bay.
“I saw him last night,” David said, “and he wasn’t making any sense. He can be that way sometimes—his brain works too fast to keep up with. But this seemed different. More like a problem with the entire circuit board. The reason I mention it is I’m concerned he might be violating the rules.”
Time was passing. Things of interest to Russ were happening in the parking lot. He forced himself to focus on the matter at hand. “So, you think—has he been smoking pot again?”
“Not to my knowledge. Laudably or regrettably, that appears to be a thing of the past—I gather he made some kind of promise to you. My concern here is that I violate the rules myself if I fail to report a rules violation. My concern is that even now, as we speak, he isn’t unimpaired.”
God damn Perry. The scenario now included a call to Marion, explaining that she couldn’t go to Los Angeles because her son was messing up again, to which she might object that she’d already bought her plane tickets, to which Russ would reply that his job obliged him to lead a group in Arizona, whereas she and Judson were going to Los Angeles purely for pleasure, and that, moreover, she was the one who’d insisted that Perry was doing better.