What am I doing here? Pearson suddenly asked himself. This is totally insane . . . like an AA meeting in a psycho ward.
The members of the Church of the Fucked-Up Bat were taking ashtrays from a stack on one of the book cartons and lighting up with obvious relish as they took their seats. Pearson estimated that there were going to be few if any folding chairs left over when everyone had gotten settled.
‘Got just about everyone,’ Duke said, leading him to a pair of seats at the end of the back row, far from where Janet Brightwood was presiding over the coffeemaker. Pearson had no idea if this was coincidental or not. ‘That’s good . . . mind the window-pole, Brandon.’
The pole, with a hook on the end to open the high cellar windows, was leaning against one whitewashed brick wall. Pearson had inadvertently kicked it as he sat down. Duke grabbed it before it could fall and possibly gash someone, moved it to a marginally safer location, then slipped up the side aisle and snagged an ashtray.
‘You are a mind-reader,’ Pearson said gratefully, and lit up. It felt incredibly strange (but rather wonderful) to be doing this as a member of such a large group.
Duke lit his own cigarette, then pointed it at the skinny, freckle-splattered man now standing by the easel. Freckles was deep in conversation with Lester Olson, who had shot the batman, pop-pop-pop, in a Newburyport barn.
‘The redhead is Robbie Delray,’ Duke said, almost reverently. ‘You’d hardly pick him as The Savior of His Race if you were casting a miniseries, would you? But he might turn out to be just that.’
Delray nodded at Olson, clapped him on the back, and said something that made the white-haired man laugh. Then Olson returned to his seat — front row center — and Delray moved toward the covered easel.
By this time all the seats had been taken, and there were even a few people standing at the back of the room near the coffee-maker. Conversation, animated and jittery, zinged and caromed around Pearson’s head like pool-balls after a hard break. A mat of blue-gray cigarette smoke had already gathered just below the ceiling.
Jesus, they’re cranked, he thought. Really cranked. I bet the bomb-shelters in London felt this way back in 1940, during the Blitz.
He turned to Duke. ‘Who’d you talk to? Who told you something big was up tonight?’
‘Janet,’ Duke said without looking at him. His expressive brown eyes were fixed on Robbie Delray, who had once saved his sanity on a Red Line train. Pearson thought he saw adoration as well as admiration in Duke’s eyes.
‘Duke? This is a really big meeting, isn’t it?’
‘For us, yeah. Biggest I’ve ever seen.’
‘Does it make you nervous? Having so many of your people in the same place?’
‘No,’ Duke said simply. ‘Robbie can smell bats. He . . . shhhh, here we go.’
Robbie Delray, smiling, raised his hands, and the babble quieted almost at once. Pearson saw Duke’s look of adoration on many other faces. Nowhere did he see less than respect.
‘Thanks for coming,’ Delray said quietly. ‘I think we’ve finally got what some of us have been waiting four or five years for.’
This sparked spontaneous applause. Delray let it go on for a few moments, looking around the room, beaming. Finally he held his hands up for quiet. Pearson discovered a disconcerting thing as the applause (in which he had not participated) tapered off: he didn’t like Duke’s friend and mentor. He supposed he might be experiencing a touch of jealousy — now that Delray was doing his thing at the front of the room, Duke Rhinemann had clearly forgotten Pearson existed — but
he didn’t think that was all of it. There was something smug and self-congratulatory in that hands-up, be-quiet gesture; something that expressed a slick politician’s almost unconscious contempt for his audience.
Oh, get off it, Pearson told himself. You can’t know anything like that.
True, quite true, and Pearson tried to sweep the intuition out of his mind, to give Delray a chance, if only for Duke’s sake.
‘Before we begin,’ Delray went on, ‘I’d like to introduce you to a brand-new member of the group: Brandon Pearson, from deepest, darkest Medford. Stand up for a second or two, Brandon, and let your new friends see what you look like.’
Pearson gave Duke a startled look. Duke grinned, shrugged, then pushed Pearson’s shoulder with the heel of his hand. ‘Go on, they won’t bite.’
Pearson was not so sure of that. Nevertheless he got up, face hot, all too aware of the people craning around to check him out. He was most particularly aware of the smile on Lester Olson’s face — like his hair, it was somehow too dazzling not to be suspect.
His fellow Ten O’Clock People began to applaud again, only this time it was him they were applauding: Brandon Pearson, middle-echelon banker and stubborn smoker. He found himself wondering again if he hadn’t somehow found his way into an AA meeting that was strictly for (not to mention run by) psychos. When he dropped back into his seat, his cheeks were bright red.
‘I could have done without that very well, thanks,’ he muttered to Duke.
‘Relax,’ Duke said, still grinning. ‘It’s the same for everybody. And you gotta love it, man, don’t you? I mean, shit, it’s so nineties.’
‘It’s nineties, all right, but I don’t gotta love it,’ Pearson said. His heart was pounding too hard and the flush in his cheeks wasn’t going away. It felt, in fact, as if it was deepening. What is this?
he wondered. A hot-flash? Male menopause? What?
Robbie Delray bent over, spoke briefly to the bespectacled brunette woman sitting next to Olson, glanced at his watch, then stepped back to the covered easel and faced the group again.
His freckled, open face made him look like a Sunday choirboy apt to get up to all sorts of harmless dickens — frogs down the backs of girls’ blouses, short-sheeting baby brother’s bed, that sort of thing — during the other six days of the week.
‘Thanks, folks, and welcome to our place, Brandon,’ he said.
Pearson muttered that he was glad to be here, but it wasn’t true — what if his fellow Ten O’Clock People turned out to be a bunch of raving New Age assholes? Suppose he ended up feeling about them as he did about most of the guests he saw on Oprah, or the well-dressed religious nuts who used to pop up on The PTL Club at the drop of a hymn? What then?
Oh, quit it, he told himself. You like Duke, don’t you?
Yes, he did like Duke, and he thought he was probably going to like Moira Richardson, too . .
. once he got past the sexy outer layer and was able to appreciate the person inside, that was.
There would undoubtedly be others he’d end up liking as well; he wasn’t that hard to please. And he had forgotten, at least temporarily, the underlying reason they were all here in this basement: the batpeople. Given the threat, he could put up with a few nerds and New Agers, couldn’t he?
He supposed he could.
Good! Great! Now just sit back, relax, and watch the parade.
He sat back, but found he couldn’t relax, at least not completely. Part of it was being the new boy. Part of it was his strong dislike for this sort of forced social interaction — as a rule, he viewed people who used his first name on short notice and without invitation as hijackers of a sort. And part of it . . .
Oh, stop! Don’t you get it yet? You have no choice in the matter!
An unpleasant thought, but one it was hard to dispute. He had crossed a line that morning when he had casually turned his head and seen what was really living inside Douglas Keefer’s clothes these days. He supposed he had known at least that much, but it wasn’t until tonight that he had realized how final that line was, how small was the chance of his ever being able to cross back to the other side of it again. To the safe side.
No, he couldn’t relax. At least not yet.
‘Before we get down to business, I want to thank you all for coming on such short notice,’ Robbie Delray said. ‘I know it’s not always easy to break away without raising eyebrows, and sometimes it’s downright dangerous. I don’t think it’d be exaggerating to say that we’ve been through a lot of hell together . . . a lot of high water, too . . . ‘
A polite, murmured chuckle from the audience. Most of them seemed to be hanging on Delray’s every word.
‘ . . . and no one knows any better than I do how difficult it is to be one of the few people who actually know the truth. Since I saw my first bat, five years ago . . . ‘