“Sweetie, you’re thirteen. Didn’t you say thirteen?”
“Yeah, well, but now I’m the man of my family. Don’t tell me that sounds silly.” He was embarrassed to hear his voice break a little. “Don’t dare tell me that.”
After a silence, she said, “I won’t let you help me kill a man. I won’t put that memory in your head for the rest of your life.”
“I won’t just hide in the woods,” he insisted.
45
Long after Eden, when every shadow symbolizes the eventual death of the creature casting it, when chaos cascades through our fallen days, once-perfect Nature remains beautiful even in her imperfection, though she shares with humanity a taste for perversity that reflects the cruelty of the agent of her corruption. She mocks her victims with deformities, sometimes of the body, sometimes of the mind. With those she curses, her purpose seems to be to sow despair in a world desperately in need of hope.
Just the previous night, Joanna had seen Jimmy Two Eyes in a dream half formed by memories; but she was not prepared for the impact of his appearance here in the waking world. As an innocent child in the magical environment of Rustling Willows, she’d thought the world was her playground. Back then, she hadn’t yet developed an awareness of the existence of evil, therefore feared nothing, not even what was strange to the point of being profoundly alien. Also, if the boy in the dream was truly Jimmy as he looked in childhood, he’d been grotesque but not fearsome; however, twenty-four years had whittled away the sweetness of his broken face and carved it into a monstrous countenance.
He slumped in a large upholstered chair, his hunched back forcing his misshapen head forward. His prominent nose had grown hooked like that of a witch in a fairy tale. His eyes were more deeply hooded by his brow than they had been in childhood. Staring at his smallish hands, which lay upturned in his lap, he muttered wordlessly, continuously.
Joanna stopped a few steps inside the room, reluctant to approach Jimmy, but her hesitation shamed her, especially because Hector might sense her disquiet. The passage of so much time had been as unkind to Jimmy as had been Nature; but he was surely still the harmless soul that he’d always been. He had no capacity to commit evil, no reason to harm her.
In front of the armchair stood a padded footstool. Joanna sat on it and said, “Jimmy? It’s me. Joanna. Jojo. Do you remember?”
As if unaware of her, chin on his chest, he continued muttering to himself, like a troll reminiscing about deeds done in dark and dripping caverns.
She leaned forward and reached out hesitantly at first, but then boldly took one of his hands, which was warm and dry and limp.
“I had a dream about you, Jimmy. First a bear then two deer led me through fields and forest, straight to you in the apple orchard. In the dream, you asked me to come, to help you, and here I am.”
He stopped muttering, but he did not raise his head.
Pressing his hand between both of hers, she said, “All the animals . . . When I was a girl, it was so magical. You seemed magical.”
At last he lifted his chin off his chest. From deep under a brow of malformed bone, his eyes came into view, the left one blue and clear, the right one dark and bloodshot and set higher than the other. Although his stare had evidently never troubled her when they were children, she almost flinched from it now. Her heart beat harder, faster. If she allowed this unexpected fear to be apparent, she would offend Hector, if not Jimmy as well, so she repressed it and gave his hand a gentle squeeze to reassure her secret friend of her continued affection.
Without turning his head, he glanced surreptitiously at his father, at Wyatt Rider, and then fixed Joanna with his stare once more. His limp hand stiffened and squeezed one of hers.
She interpreted Jimmy’s actions to mean that he desired to visit without observers, just her and him.
“I’m all right here,” she told Wyatt. “Jimmy and I have a lot of catching up to do.” To Hector, she said, “When we arrived, Wyatt was raving about your Studebaker pickup. I know he’d love to have a look at it.”
“She’s a beauty,” Wyatt said.
Hector smiled broadly. “I saw her sitting in a driveway at a yard sale forty years ago. She needed help. Did all the mechanical work myself, then dismantled her and sent the pieces off to be painted, to get all the corners and cracks and the backs of things.”
As the men left the room and moved away through the house, Joanna returned her attention to Jimmy. The uneven set of his eyes made it difficult to match both barrels of his stare. For that and other reasons, she focused on the one that was as clear and blue and eerie as the glass eye of a doll.