“You mean aliens?” Harlan Moffit interrupted.
He could think of no euphemism that was any less absurd. “Yeah.
Aliens. They-”
“I’ll be a fucking sonofabitch!” Harlan Moffit said,
and smacked one meaty fist into the palm of his other hand. A torrent
of words burst from him: “I knew I’d get to see one sooner or later.
Read about them all the time in the Enquirer. And books. Some are
good aliens, some bad, and some you’ll never figure out in a month of
Sundays–just like people. These are real bad bastards, huh? Come
whirling down in their ships, did they? Holy shit on a holy shingle!
And me here for it!” He grabbed the last two cans of gasoline and
charged off the porch, uphill through the bright reflections of flame
that rippled like phantom flags across the snow. “Come on, come
on–let’s waste these fuckers!”
Jack would have laughed if his son’s sanity and life had not been
balanced on a thin line, a thread, a filament. Even so, he almost sat
down on the snow-packed porch steps, almost let the giggles and the
guffaws come. Humor and death were kin, all right.
Couldn’t face the latter without the former. Any cop knew as much.
And life was absurd, down to the deepest foundations of it, so there
was always something funny in the middle of whatever hell was blowing
up around you at the moment. Atlas wasn’t carrying the world on his
shoulders, no giant muscular hulk with a sense of responsibility, the
world was balanced on a pyramid of clowns, and they were always tooting
horns and wobbling and goosing each other. But even though it was
absurd, though life could be disastrous and funny at the same time,
people still died. Toby might still die. Heather. All of them.
Luther Bryson had been making jokes, laughing, seconds before he took a
swarm of bullets in the chest.
Jack hurried after Harlan Moffit. The wind was cold.
The hill was slippery.
The day was hard and gray.
o
Climbing the sloped backyard, Toby pictured himself in a green boat on
a cold black sea. Green because it was his favorite color. No land
anywhere in sight.
Just his little green boat and him in it. The sea was old, ancient,
older than ancient, so old that it had come alive in a way, could
think, could want things and need to have its way. The sea wanted to
rise on all sides of the little green boat, swamp it, drag it down a
thousand fathoms into the inky water, and Toby with it, ten thou
WINTER MOON 463
sand fathoms, twenty thousand, down and down to a place with no light
but strange music. In his boat, Toby had bags of Calming Dust, which
he’d gotten from someone important, maybe from Indiana Jones, maybe
from E.T maybe from Aladdin–probably from Aladdin, who got it from the
Genie. He kept scattering the Calming Dust on the sea as his little
green boat puttered along, and though the dust seemed light and silvery
in his hands, lighter than feathers, it became hugely heavy when it hit
the water, but heavy in a funny way, in a way that didn’t make it sink,
magical Calming Dust that crushed the water flat, made the sea as
smooth and ripple-free as a mirror. The ancient sea wanted to rise up,
swamp the boat, but the Calming Dust weighed it down, more than iron,
more than lead, weighed it down and kept it calm, defeated it. Deep in
the darkest and coldest canyons below its surface, the sea raged,
furious with Toby, wanting more than ever to kill him, drown him, bash
his body to pieces against shoreline rocks, wear him away with its
waters until he would be just sand. But it couldn’t rise, couldn’t
rise, all was calm on the surface, peaceful and calm, calm.
Perhaps because Toby was concentrating so intensely on keeping the
Giver under him, he lacked the strength to climb the entire hill,
though the snow was not piled dauntingly high on that windswept
ground.
Jack put down the fuel cans two-thirds of the way to the higher woods,