When I joined Sparky and Bridget in front of the Explorer, she said, “Winston is going to be so excited. We smell like hams baking in an oven. What was that all about, the huggy thing?”
“He says he owes his happiness to me. Baby me, to be specific.”
Sparky frowned. “Happiness?”
“It’s contagious, isn’t it?” I said. “I went in there glum, and I came out so carefree I want to dance. Now we better go see Bailie Belshazzer. There’s still plenty of daylight left, but I want to be sure to be out of Peptoe before the curtain opens on the bugs-and-bats show.”
Looking past us toward the trailer, Sparky said, “What’s this?”
“This” was Hakeem, hurrying toward us, holding his smartphone high overhead, as if carrying the Olympic torch. He enjoyed phone service out here. His connectivity must have had something to do with one of the satellite dishes on his roof.
“John Ching just called. You can’t go to Bailie’s place,” Hakeem warned. “Not now. Not ever. That helicopter was carrying ISA agents. Eight or nine of the bastards. They’re already at Bailie’s house. They’ve commandeered his SUV and two of the sheriff’s patrol cars. No doubt they’ll be here as soon as they can get anyone to tell them how to find my place, which won’t be right away because the people of Peptoe don’t traffic with their kind. You’ve got to go straight to Panthea. Bailie would have sent you to her after you’d visited with him. Panthea has been expecting you for weeks.”
“Weeks?” Bridget said. “We didn’t know we were coming here until yesterday.”
“Yes, but Panthea sees.”
“Sees what?”
“What a seer sees when a seer dreams.”
“Well, of course. Silly of me not to understand.”
“You must go to Panthea. She’s waiting for you. You’ll be safe with her. No one will think to look for you there.”
I was sure that was true, because even I would never have thought to look for me there, wherever “there” might be. “Yeah, okay, but I don’t know anyone named Panthea. Panthea who?”
Hakeem regarded me with frustration and amazement, unable to comprehend how the miracle baby from the stars could be so clueless. “Panthea who? Panthea who? Panthea Ching, of course!”
|?22?|
Winston had arrived at an understanding of the purpose of a toy. During our trip from Hakeem’s outpost to Panthea’s home, to which the UFOlogist had directed us with extravagant gestures, the pooch lay on the back seat, beside Sparky, incessantly squeaking the white lamb, all the while happily slapping the seat with his tail.
“I knew a guy,” Sparky said, “wanted to protect his children, he had an attack dog that lived up to its name. If you’d tried to give it a toy, it would’ve taken off your hand and eaten it.”
“Seems dangerous, a dog like that around little kids,” I said.
“Not these kids. They were tough little bastards. The dog had profound respect for them.”
With afternoon light slanting across the still and colorless land, short shadows of low cacti and mesquite prickled the earth; but the usually reliable sameness of a desert day would not sustain until nightfall. A tide of dark-gray thunderheads stacked on squall clouds was surging in from the southwest, soon to drown the sun. In advance of the storm, the hot air began to cool, and its faint alkaline scent faded.
Panthea, the daughter of John Kennedy Ching, didn’t occupy one of the family’s five houses in the vicinity of Ching Station. She lived beyond the vaguely defined limits of Peptoe, in that otherwise unpopulated suburb that, I knew from my research, locals referred to as Dead Dan’s Wasteland, though Dan was so lost in the dust storms of history that no one remembered who he’d been, when he’d lived, or how he’d died. Panthea’s place was at the end of a gravel road, in a large, insulated Quonset hut that she’d converted into a residence. The structure dated to early World War II, when the government had conducted secret experiments here that no one dared speak about, resulting in thirteen deaths and the toxic contamination of the soil that took over half a century to resolve. Rumor had it that an unintended consequence of the experimentation had been the mutation of six-legged Jerusalem crickets into terrors as big as dachshunds, with teeth that would shred bone as easily as flesh, creatures that had to be exterminated with flamethrowers and submachine guns in a desperate three-day bug war. Eighty years had passed since then, and no one had seen such a fearsome beast. So whatever else had happened here, the cricket business must have been an apocryphal story with no more substance than the rumor that, in the same decade, an atomic bomb had been developed elsewhere in a program called the Manhattan Project.