Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

“Come in,” she whispered. “Don’t stand out there in the cold—come in, Johnny, come in.”

He did not budge. “What’s the deal, Anna? You married?”

There in the doorway she explained that, yes, she was married; her husband was a man named Dennis Whitcomb, but Anna had not taken his last name. An ensign in the Navy, Whitcomb was stationed aboard the nuclear carrier Eisenhower , which was presently at rest in the harbor of the new naval facility at Bravanumbi, Zarakal.

“Zarakal!” Joshua exclaimed in a high-pitched whisper.

“Mutesa Tharaka’s country, Johnny. You know, the place where all those people starved to death a few years ago. On special occasions he wears some sort of early human skull on his head.”

“Your husband?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Right, I do. It’s a habiline skull, Anna. President Tharaka wears it to celebrate the origin of humanity in his own backyard. It’s also a sign of his own preeminence in Zarakal.”

“Good for him. Do you mind if we go inside?”

“Lead the way.”

Anna, who had not yet spoken above a whisper, led him to a sofa upholstered in a satiny floral print.

She made him sit down, but did not herself take a seat. Instead, one hand in the small of her back, she paced a threadbare Oriental rug whose faded pattern reminded Joshua of a paisley shirt he had owned in Cheyenne. The room smelled of camphor, cedarwood, and, strangely, peppermint. It was shuttered, curtained, and wallpapered. The miasma of Peggy Rivenbark’s widowhood drifted from room to room like nerve gas, and Anna, suddenly, appeared to be suffering a convulsion of memory.

“Do you still have those dreams, Johnny?”

“Sometimes, yeah, I do. But I’m undergoing a treatment that’s supposed to help me control them.”

“I was afraid the damn things would kill you.”

“They might yet.”

“But if you’re learning to control them—”

“Scratch ‘They might yet,’ Sis. Melodramatic license. I’m fine.”

“You’ve joined the Air Force. Following in Dad’s footsteps?”

“Not too far, I hope.” Anna took his meaning, and he said, “The President ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to waive the height limitations for me. A blow for the civil rights of short people.”

“Now you have a reason to live.”

“Amen, Sister.”

“Are you being sent overseas, too?”

“Right after New Year’s.”

“Where?”

He decided, unilaterally, that this much, at least, he could divulge to his own sister. “Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base in—”

“ Zarakal!”

“I thought we were supposed to be whispering.”

Halted in front of Joshua, Anna lowered her voice again: “Maybe you’ll be able to meet Dennis.—No, probably not. They’re set for a long cruise in the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. I don’t know exactly when. Soon, though. The Midway and the frigate T. C. Hart were strafed recently by American-made jets flown by—well, they think they may have been PLO sympathizers in the Saudi Arabian Air Force.

No one knows for sure. They’re keeping it out of the news, Dennis says. It’s weird. Weird and scary.”

“Yes.”

“I met Dennis in Athens.”

“Greece?”

“Georgia, you turkey. He was going to the Navy School there. Did you know that Roger Staubach went there in the sixties?”

“No, I never did.”

“Anyway, I’d gone over to Athens for one of the University of Georgia’s drama productions. Buried Child by Sam Shepard. During the second intermission I bumped into Dennis.”

“Which intermission resulted in that bump?” He nodded at her belly.

“You mean ‘intromission,’ don’t you? Well, we’ve never kept count. And I don’t remember you being such a wise guy.” Anna eased herself onto the sofa beside Joshua and kissed him daintily on the temple.

“Welcome home, short stuff.”

Under a gingham canopy in an antique four-poster in the master bedroom, Peggy Rivenbark lay. She had been sickly ever since Bill’s death thirteen years ago, but only over the Christmas holidays, in perverse commemoration of the betrayal that had made her a widow, did she surrender to the elegant purdah of her bed. Who would have thought that, taking advantage of Pete Grier’s absence, Bill would have crept upstairs from his daughter’s former apartment to the boudoir of frumpy, frozen-pie-faced Lily, there to commit a cardiac-arresting instance of extramarital hanky-panky?

“Should I go in to see her?” Joshua asked.

“I don’t think we even need to let her know you’re here.”

“She still associates me with that night, doesn’t she? I let it slip where Mom and I had found Bill, and I’m still the evil messenger of the Rivenbark household.”

“It’s been a damn long time, honey. Peggy’s convinced herself that you’re dead. This probably isn’t the best time to show her you’re still kicking.”

“Okay, I’ll play. No ghosts for Grandma.”

“Good.”

Before he could ask Anna about their mother, she rose by pushing off against his shoulder and beckoned him into the sunny kitchen on the house’s southwest side.

Green glass canisters for sugar, flour, and tea. Knotty-pine cabinets. A bay window overlooking a margin of neat, winter-brown lawn, the kind of lawn that cries out for touch-football players and blithely romping dogs. Van Luna’s suburban sprawl was nowhere in evidence here.

Joshua sat at a wrought-iron table with a Formica top while Anna served him coffee and leftover biscuits. When the heater kicked on, she spoke without whispering for the first time since he had entered the house.

“You just about killed Mom, you little twerp. For two years she was strung out like an elastic clothesline, almost ready to snap. She tore up Eden in His Dreams and couldn’t get anything else going. The third year, well, she spent that right here in Van Luna, as if this house were a sanatorium for terminally bereaved females.”

“Where is she now, Anna?”

“Maybe I’m not ready to tell you.”

Alarmed, Joshua ate crumbs off his fingertips. More than likely he deserved to be taunted in this tender, hair-trigger fashion. If Anna really squeezed, though, he would go off like his grandfather’s heart, in either apoplectic anger or tearful remorse. The latter if they were lucky. He remembered how Hugo had used to ascend from a grumbling snit into one of his infrequent but terrifying Panamanian eruptions….

“You got any Fritos, Anna?”

She turned and faced him, her arms folded on the ledge of her pregnancy. “Jesus, you’ve got the recall of an elephant.”

“Dumbo the Dinothere at your service.”

“I remember almost everything about that little expedition—but, of course, I was twelve. I ought to remember.”

“What about Mom? Where is she?”

Anna crossed the little kitchen, walking on her heels, and patted him on the head. “Neat diversion, John-John. I got a cable from her yesterday. You won’t be seeing her this year.”

“Why not, for Christ’s sake?”

“She’s got a contract from Vireo to do a book on the Spanish monarchy—the impact of its restoration on the people and on European politics in general. She’s in Madrid. She plans to be in Spain for at least six months. She wanted to beat a possible moratorium on air travel—that’s why she took off so suddenly.

It was my year to babysit Peggy, anyway.”

“Shit.”

“I’ll write and tell her you’re in Zarakal.”

“You can’t. I shouldn’t have told you. You can tell her when you see her in person. Then swear her to secrecy. Cross your heart and hope to die.”