David looked down at his long, bony hands. “I’m not just covering my ass, by the way. Something is definitely not right with him.”
“I appreciate your honesty.”
“Although, having taken the step of mentioning it, I’d be grateful if Kim and Keith and Bobby could be included under the umbrella of immunity.”
“I’ll speak to him,” Russ said. “You get yourself on the bus.”
His fear, as he went downstairs, was both new and familiar. His primary feeling about Perry had always been fear. At first it was fear of his operatic tantrums, later fear of his intellectual acuity, its application to mockeries too subtle to be called out and punished, its implicit piercing of Russ’s every fault and weakness. Now the fear was more existentially parental. He and Marion had brought into the world a being of uncontrollable volition, for whom he was nonetheless responsible.
In the parking lot, kids were mobbing the buses, rushing to claim seats. Looking around for Perry, Russ saw the most wonderful thing. The woman he wanted was standing by the Kitsillie bus. The driver was stowing her suitcase below. With a more delicious kind of fear, Russ hurried over to her.
“Here I am,” she said aggressively. “Like it or not.”
“What happened?”
She shrugged. “Dwight saved the day. I asked Rick why I wasn’t going to the mesa, and you know what he said? That you could use another man up there. I told him that was incredibly demeaning to me. I told him Larry’s at an age where the last thing he wants is his mother in his hair. I said maybe Rick should tell Larry he’d ruined his whole trip. And you know Dwight, always the diplomat. He asks Rick if there’s anyone I can trade places with. Which it turns out Judy Pinella is perfectly happy to do. I don’t know what Rick was thinking, but if he thinks I don’t care if I get the full experience, up on the mesa, he doesn’t know me.”
She was full of self-regard, full of entitlement, and Russ was smitten with every bit of it.
“Plus,” he suggested, “you and I get to be together.”
She made a coy face. “Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?”
“It’s a good thing.”
“Maybe you don’t hate me so much after all?”
This time, there was no suppressing a smile, but it didn’t matter—she obviously knew very well how he felt. It was inconceivable to her that anyone could resist her. And this, more than anything else, had set the hook in him. He couldn’t get enough of her self-love.
Flush with the likelihood of possessing it, of carnally penetrating it, commingling with it, he went to look for Perry. As he passed the Rough Rock bus, he saw Ambrose staring at him. His lip was curled with impotent disgust. There was no more pretending that the two of them weren’t enemies. It was frightening but also thrilling, because this time Russ had won.
Inside the Many Farms bus, kids were piling onto seats already taken, clambering over backrests. At the door stood Kevin Anderson, a second-year seminarian with a deep-pile mustache and the soft brown eyes of a seal pup. Before Russ could ask him if he’d seen Perry, Kevin asked him the same question. Apparently Perry had not been seen since he checked in.
Russ’s intuition of warning signs ignored, of necessary actions not taken, returned in force. The sun had sunk behind the church’s roofline but was still shining on the bank clock, which showed eight minutes past five. Except for Perry, the buses appeared to be fully loaded. Car engines were starting up, a few determined parents lingering to wave good-bye. It occurred to Russ that they could simply leave without Perry—let Marion deal with the fallout. But Kevin, whose heart was as soft as his eyes, insisted that they look inside the church.
Spring-smelling air followed them in through doors still propped open. Kevin ran upstairs, calling Perry’s name, while Russ checked the ground floor. Not just the air but the emptiness of the hallway, which minutes ago had teemed with activity, had a flavor of Easter. In the middle chapters of the Gospels, crowds of people followed Jesus everywhere, gathering around him on the Mount, receiving fishes and loaves by the five thousand and the four thousand, welcoming him with palm fronds on the road into Jerusalem, but in the late chapters the focus narrowed to scenes of individual departure, private pain. The Last Supper: clandestine and death-haunted. Peter alone with his betrayals. Judas going away to hang himself. Jesus feeling forsaken on the cross. Mary Magdalene weeping at the sepulcher. The crowds had dispersed and everything was over. The worst thing in human history had happened sickeningly fast, and now it was another Sunday morning in Judea, the first day of the Jewish week, a particular spring morning with a particular spring smell to the air. Even the truth revealed that morning—the truth of Christ’s divinity and resurrection—was austere in its transcendence of human particularity, in its own way no less melancholy. Spring to Russ was a season more of loss than of joy.