Part 32 (1/2)

B.T. pointed at a sign that said ”Phones,” and she left.

She was back instantly. ”There's a line,” she said, and sat down. The waitress came by again with coffee and menus, and they ordered pie, and then Ca.s.sie went to check the phones again.

”There's still a line,” she said, coming back. ”My sister will have a fit when she hears about this. She already thinks I'm crazy. And out there in that fog today I thought so, too. I wish my grandmother had never looked up verses in the Bible.”

”The Bible?” Mel said.

She waved her hand dismissively. ”It's a long story.”

”We seem to have plenty of time,” B.T. said.

”Well,” she said, settling herself. ”I'm an English teacher- was an English teacher-and the school board offered this early-retirement bonus that was too good to turn down, so I retired in June, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. I'd always wanted to travel, but I hate traveling alone, and I didn't know where I wanted to go. So I got on the sub list-our district has a terrible time getting subs, and there's been all this flu.”

It is going to be a long story, Mel thought. He picked up the finger trap and idly stuck his finger into one end. B.T. leaned back in his chair.

”Well, anyway, I was subbing for Carla Sewell, who teaches soph.o.m.ore lit, Julius Caesar, and I couldn't remember the speech about our fate being in the stars, dear Brutus.”

Mel stuck a forefinger into the other side of the finger trap.

”So I was looking it up, but I read the page number wrong, so when I looked it up, it wasn't Julius Caesar, it was Twelfth Night.”

Mel stretched the finger trap experimentally. It tightened on his fingers.

” 'Westward, ho!' it said,” Ca.s.sie said, ”and sitting there, reading it, I had this epiphany.”

”Epiphany?” Mel said, yanking his fingers apart.

”Epiphany?” B.T. said.

”I'm sorry,” Ca.s.sie said. ”I keep thinking I'm still an English teacher. Epiphany is a literary term for a revelation, a sudden understanding, like in James Joyce's The Dubliners. The word comes from-”

”The story of the wise men,” Mel said.

”Yes,” she said delightedly, and Mel half-expected her to announce that he had gotten an A. ”Epiphany is the word for their arrival at the manger.”

And there it was again. The feeling that he knew where Christ was. The wise men's arrival at the manger.

James Joyce.

”When I read the words 'Westward, ho!'” Ca.s.sie was saying, ”I thought, that means me. I have to go west.

Something important is going to happen.” She looked from one to the other. ”You probably think I'm crazy, doing something because of a line in Bartlett's Quotations. But whenever my grandmother had an important decision to make, she used to close her eyes and open her Bible and point at a Scripture, and when she opened her eyes, whatever the Scripture said to do, she'd do it. And, after all, Bartlett's is the Bible of English teachers. So I tried it. I closed the book and my eyes and picked a quotation at random, and it said, 'Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world.'”

”Tennyson,” Mel said.

She nodded. ”So here I am.”

”And has something important happened?” B.T. asked.

”Not yet,” she said, sounding completely unconcerned. ”But it's going to happen soon-I'm sure of it. And in the meantime, I'm seeing all these wonderful sights. I went to Gene Stratton Porter's cabin in Geneva, and the house where Mark Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, and Sherwood Anderson's museum.”

She looked at Mel. ”Struggling against it doesn't work,” she said, pus.h.i.+ng her index fingers together, and Mel realized he was struggling vainly to free his fingers from the finger trap. ”You have to push them together.”

There was a blast of icy air and a patrolman wearing three pink plastic leis around his neck and carrying aspotted plush leopard came in.

”Road's open,” he said, and there was a general scramble for coats. ”It's still real foggy out there,” he said, raising his voice, ”so don't get carried away.”

Mel freed himself from the finger trap and helped Ca.s.sie into her coat while B.T. paid the bill. ”Do you want to follow us?” he asked.

”No,” she said, ”I'm going to try to call my sister again, and if she's heard about this accident, it'll take forever. You go on.”

B.T. came back from paying, and they went out to the car, which had acquired a thin, rock-hard coating of ice. Mel, chipping at the winds.h.i.+eld with the sc.r.a.per, started a new offshoot in the rapidly spreading crack.

They got back on the interstate. The fog was thicker than ever. Mel peered through it, looking at objects dimly visible at the sides of the road. The debris from the accident-baseb.a.l.l.s and plastic leis and c.o.ke bottles. Stuffed animals and kewpie dolls littered the median, looking in the fog like the casualties of some great battle.

”I suppose you consider this the sign you were looking for,” B.T. said.

”What?” Mel said.

”Ca.s.sie's so-called epiphany. You can read anything you want into random quotations,” B.T. said. ”You realize that, don't you? It's like reading your horoscope. Or a fortune cookie.”

”The Devil can quote scripture to his own ends,” Mel murmured.

”Exactly,” B.T. said, opening the Gideon Bible and closing his eyes. ”Look,” he said ”Psalm 115, verse 5.

'Eyes have they, but they see not.' Obviously a reference to the fog.'”

He flipped to another page and stabbed his finger at it.” 'Thou shall not eat any abominable thing.' Oh, dear, we shouldn't have ordered that pie. You can make them mean anything. And you heard her, she'd retired, she liked to travel, she was obviously looking for an excuse to go somewhere. And her epiphany only said something important was going to happen. It didn't say a word about the Second Coming.”

”It told her to go west,” Mel said, trying to remember exactly what she had said. She had been looking for a speech from Julius Caesar and had stumbled on Twelfth Night instead. Twelfth night. Epiphany.

”How many times is the word 'west' mentioned in Bartlett's Quotations'?” B.T. said. ”A hundred? 'Oh, young Lochinvar is come out of the west'? 'Go west, young man'? 'One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest'?” He shut the Bible. ”I'm sorry,” he said. ”It's just-” He turned and looked out his window at nothing. ”It looks like it might be breaking up.”

It wasn't. The fog thinned a little, swirling away from the car in little eddies, and then descended again, more smothering than ever.

”Suppose you do find Him? What do you do then?” B.T. said. ”Bow down and wors.h.i.+p Him? Give Him frankincense and myrrh?”

”Help Him,” Mel said.

”Help Him what? Separate the sheep from the goats? Fight the battle of Armageddon?”

”I don't know,” Mel said. ”Maybe.”

”You really think there's going to be a battle between good and evil?”

”There's always a battle between good and evil,” Mel said. ”Look at the first time He came. He hadn't been on earth a week before Herod's men were out looking for Him. They murdered every baby and two-year-old in Bethlehem, trying to kill Him.”

And thirty-three years later they succeeded, Mel thought. Only killing couldn't stop Him. Nothing could stop Him.

Who had said that? The kid from the carnival, talking about the winds.h.i.+eld. ”Nothing can stop it. There's stuff you could do to keep it from spreading for a while, but it's still going to spread. There ain't nothing that can stop it.”