Chapter 15 #2
that the current is strong here and your wrists are cuffed together. If you run into the ocean I’m not sure anyone will be
able to pull you out before you drown.”
“Be honest, I’d rather not try,” Salem said to her. “The water is cold as fuck.”
Donna waited for Van to say something witty and rude, but he didn’t make a sound. He kept his head down, his coppery hair
in his eyes.
No one gave them permission to start walking. No one said a word to them. After a moment Donna bumped Van with her shoulder
and started down to the wide strip of dingy sand. She was out of the dunes before she noticed her brother hadn’t moved. She
had to call to him before he turned and came after her, swaying, head down, hands cuffed before him.
Van scuffed through the sand in his old Sperrys and shivered. Gulls screamed and wheeled down the beach. When Donna looked
back, Little Rock and Salem were there, maybe twenty feet away, strolling side by side in matching insulated hunting vests.
For the first time in their lives, Donna and Van didn’t know how to talk to each other. She wasn’t sure how to begin, and
he didn’t look like he wanted to talk at all.
“How they hanging?” she asked at last. She was unused to tenderness, didn’t know how to do it. Allie was good at caring for
people. Gwen was even better, in her own brisk, efficient, good-natured way.
“Same as always. Down to my knees,” he said, and there was the ghost of a smile on his face.
He glanced at the ocean. “Funny Valentine felt it was necessary to tell us not to try and swim for it. I’ll never go in the water again.
I screamed for them to stop. I was screaming underwater. I know they heard me.”
Donna felt something hardening behind her breastbone, like a petrified organ. She had heard cancers could be as hard as slate,
as hard as bone. The rage in her chest was harder.
“They’re going to die,” Donna said. “All of them. King Sorrow has their names. And they know it.”
He nodded, then said, “But we won’t live to see it. They’re going to drown one of us and make the other watch. Then they’ll
shoot whoever is left. They’re close to panic now. Pretty soon they’ll lose their last shreds of restraint. Right now they’re
following some rules, laid down by someone with power over them. They have a protocol to follow. Mr. Francis is enforcing
it. But eventually even that will go out the window. They’ll do anything to us to save themselves. And if they can’t save
themselves, there’s always revenge.”
“How much have you told them?”
“That we brought King Sorrow out of the Long Dark to kill Jayne Nighswander and Ronnie Volpe. Because of the money I owed
them. That we didn’t really think it would work. That we didn’t know the deal was for life and we’d have to pick someone for
King Sorrow to destroy every year. Some of it they already knew—they knew at least half of the people we chose to die before
I started giving them names. Did they tell you they recovered a scale from Greenland, big as a dinner plate, black as a meteorite?
Has a melting point higher than tungsten steel. When they hit King Sorrow with a Sidewinder missile over Greenland, it must’ve
been like taking a lukewarm bath for him. They know so much.”
“They’re going to learn more. They’re going to get themselves some close-up firsthand experience.”
Combers creaming with foam raced at the beach. The sky was a pale, cold blue and unbearably lovely.
Donna said, “What are those birds? Are those wrens?”
Van looked out over the dunes at a rising whirl of small black birds. “I wouldn’t know a wren if it laid an egg in my hair.”
So. He hadn’t told them about Colin. That was maybe the only thing that mattered.
It was true that when they pretended to have their own secret twin language, it was only a bit of half-remembered Creole they had learned from Leticia Delva, their old nanny.
But it was also true they could share information obliquely, saying things without saying them.
Van could communicate more to her in one veiled, sidelong glance than most men could manage with a half hour to chew her ear off.
Van said, “Well, I’ve walked far enough.” He sank down into a squat, then rocked back onto his bottom and sat on the beach,
with his legs spread, facing the ocean.
Donna turned to face the water and the wind snatched at her hair and blew it back from her face. She didn’t want to sit down,
didn’t want to get her bottom sandy and damp. It was like Van not to care.
“Sooner or later I’ll tell them everything there is to tell,” Van said. “Everything they want to know about you and me and
Allie.”
Which was his way of adding that Gwen and Arthur were safe too.
“Fuck that. Why tell them anything when you know they’ll kill us anyway?”
“I’ll do it for a few minutes of mercy. I’m not tough like you. I’ve never been tough like you.” He paused, then glanced up
at her. “You know they asked me to choose? They said they would drown one of us and make the other watch. I said I’d go. And
if they ask again, I’ll go again. I can do that. It’s the only thing I’m proud of.”
She grinned. “Thank you, Van. For what it’s worth, I’m also willing to let you die for me.”
They looked at the water. Salem and Little Rock stood watching from twenty feet away.
Van scrabbled in the sand between his legs with his mittens, digging with a sudden intentness. After an instant he held up
his mittened hands with a sand dollar cupped between them. He pursed his lips and blew the sand off it. It was a disc of bone
with an impression stamped in the center like a five petaled flower. A child could not have looked any happier than Van did
at his discovery.
“Isn’t that something,” Van said. “Funny you can be in a place like this and still see something so beautiful it knocks you off your feet.”
“You aren’t on your feet.” Then she said, “What are you going to do with that, anyway? With those bags on your hands, you
can’t even put it in your pocket.”
“I don’t need to keep it to see it’s lovely. Besides. It’s better if I don’t keep it.” He laughed, without humor then. “Boy,
I learned that one too late, didn’t I?”
She said, “I don’t give a fuck about seashells.”
He nodded. “Well, you weren’t the one almost drowned the other day. But then you couldn’t afford to love things, even before
we came here. If you loved something, someone might throw it in a van and take it away from you. It’s easier to be outraged
all the time. It’s easier to be a dragon than it is to be in love.”
“I wish I wasn’t wearing these mittens,” she said. “Then I could write down some of these pearls of wisdom.”
“Writing down my pearls of wisdom is what got us into this mess. I can’t believe you haven’t used this opportunity to tell
me I shouldn’t have written that stupid book.”
“I told you already. I said it fifty fucking times while you were writing it.”
Donna knew that Gregg Pinet and his father had argued about whether the thing out the window was a UFO or a dragon. In the
book, Donovan had slyly gone with Gregg’s interpretation, that the plane had been harried by visitors from another world.
Or at least he thought he was being sly.
In the book, he turned the dragon into a biological spacecraft, an alien vessel made out of scaly green tissue.
It had battled the scrambled fighter jets with a death ray.
Van interviewed several passengers (although very few were willing to go on record), and Donna knew he had carefully primed them to say what he needed them to.
Even so, some had tried to tell him they saw a dragon.
He simply left those quotes out of the book.
In Van’s version of events Horation Matthews was a religious wacko who lost it at the sight of the UFO, which he believed was “Satan’s Chariot,” come to drag them all to hell.
He decided if he could kill Robin Fellows, a transgender woman and obvious sinner, he could save them all.
Robin published the book, knowing not a word of it was true.
The whole thing was written in Van’s very best Hunter Thompson, full of GONZO CAPITALIZATIONS AND ITALICS, breathless run-on sentences, and lurid caricatures.
The subtitle of the book was, after all: Spaceships and White Supremacy at 30,000 Feet—The Impossible but True Story of BA 238 as Told by the Admittedly Drug-Addled
Journalist Who Was There. With a subtitle like that, no wonder it hit the bestseller list and Johnny Depp was attached to the movie.
Now, watching the tide bash the shore, her brother said, “I’m a Van too. Cady was taken away to a horrible fate by one van—Allison
Shiner was taken away by another. It wasn’t my job to marry her. It wasn’t my job to try and keep her. She needed me to tell
her she was perfect and beautiful as she was, not as I wanted her to be.”
“You didn’t murder and rape her.”
“I hoped I could murder something in her. She had to get drunk to fuck me, and she never once really enjoyed it. I guess I
don’t think it was rape—but it wasn’t right neither.”
“Stop it. You aren’t the bad guy in this story. They are. Those two standing over there, and the people paying them.”
He rolled onto his knees and then, with a pant of exertion, climbed to his feet. He stared at the water a moment longer, then
twisted at the waist and flicked the sand dollar into the sea.
“That sand dollar will have to go on being beautiful without me,” Van said. He stood blinking, the wintry sun in his face.
“If I never walk out of this place, it might not be the worst thing that ever happened to Allie Shiner.”
“I said stop it and I meant it. She loves you. So do I.” Her chest felt very full and tight, and it was hard to breathe.
“If I didn’t have you, I would’ve been in jail or an institution by the time I was eighteen.
I wouldn’t have gone to college if you hadn’t gone to college with me.
I was too scared to go anywhere you weren’t.
I’ve spent my whole life saying terrible things to people and you’ve spent your whole life apologizing for me.
You’re a good man, Donovan. Your politics suck, you’re married to a girl way too good for you, you’re the laziest person I ever met in my life, and you’ve smoked half of Mexico and snorted half of Colombia .
. . but you care about people who aren’t worth a shit.
People like me. And you try to do the right thing.
Some days I wish you ate me in the womb.
But you didn’t. So I’m here to tell you: you don’t get to quit.
We’re going to walk out of here together. Believe it. All hail the King.”
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. He was pale and hunched and cold looking, but the sky and the sea brought out
the blue in his eyes, and when he smiled it was real.
“All hail the King,” he said.