Page 14 of Going Home in the Dark

Now, as the dashboard clock glowed 4:10 p.m., Spencer turned off the interstate and motored down a ramp into Maple Grove. Tree-lined streets. White picket fences. Broad, green, perfectly tended lawns. Victorian architecture. It looked like the town where Barbie and Ken Doll would live together, not in sin, but after being married as certified by a document from the Mattel Corporation, the kind of tolerant and convivial town where Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy could cohabit in cross-species bliss without exciting any locals to commit a hate crime.

Sluiced along by a wave of nostalgia, Spencer wondered why he’d left such an idyllic community, why Rebecca and Bobbyhadn’t stayed here with Ernie. His doubt and confusion were short-lived. Heknew.He knew why his compadres had left after him, all right. He knew all too well. As lovely as it appeared to be, Maple Grove wasn’t what it seemed to be. Maple Grove was Stepford; it was ’Salem’s Lot; it was serene Santa Mira where giant seedpods from another world were full of weird gooey stuff that was being shaped into replicas of the human citizens.

In fourteen minutes, he arrived at County Memorial Hospital, where Ernie Hernishen lay in a coma, flirting with death.

7Baltimore No More

Having provided needed atmosphere and a sense of threat when the story required those things, the storm with its fierce display of lightning quickly passed, and the jet carrying Bobby the Sham flew into good weather once more. None of the tattooed passengers wearing T-shirts with satanic images tried to hijack the airliner. However, when they opened their snacks, those with teeth filed to points and with tongues surgically split proved to be noisy eaters.

When he deplaned in Indianapolis, obtained a rental car with the voice of an officious woman issuing insistent directions from the navigation system, and set out across state lines for distant Maple Grove, the deep sea of his imagination floated disastrous possibilities to him for consideration. He let them wash through him without effect and instead focused on the name Wayne Louis Hornfly, which had crackled into his mind with the lightning and thunder high above western Pennsylvania.

In the Indianapolis airport, waiting for his luggage to appear on the carousel, he had googled the name without success. If Wayne Louis Hornfly still walked the Earth—or had ever existed—the man lived far off the grid, utterly without contacts or accomplishments. He was less than a ghost; he was as immaterial as the ghost of a man who had never been born.

Nevertheless, during the drive to Maple Grove, the name haunted Robert Shamrock. He could imagine a shadowy form hulking in the mist of the past, formidable though without detail, and he could almost see a face. Almost ... almost ... But almost having money in your pocket doesn’t buy beans for dinner.

Even those portions of the Middle West that are largely flat, which is to say most of it, can provide beautiful vistas to enchant a driver. Broad, deep plains have a majesty about them, seem to roll on forever, reminding the soul of the eternity that is its destiny, stippled with trees standing in silhouette like symbols of broken hopes. Stark, discrete structures far out on the horizon—a barn with a big silo, an isolate church—when detached from other human purposes, project a minimalist beauty both elegant and intolerably sad. However, sadness can be an appropriate and satisfying emotion when you’re journeying to see a friend in a coma, when you’re going home but really can’t because it’s not home anymore.

If that sadness was inescapable—and it was—it did not crowd other emotions and considerations out of Bobby’s heart. Like fear and Wayne Louis Hornfly.

In addition to immense plains of wild grass, there were crops thriving across thousand-acre plots. In a lush cornfield, a tall, shadowy figure moved through the rows with an intensity and purpose that had nothing to do with corn. A few miles later, Bobby passed a breeze-riffled field of wheat where in the distance another tall, shadowy presence carried an enormous scythe as if he farmed by the methods of an earlier century, though the man paid no attention to the grain and seemed eager to get some place where he intended to harvest a more exciting crop. Bobby passed a lonely dirt road that led nowhere apparent, yet a dark figurewith a sack slung over one shoulder was walking toward the horizon with grim purpose.

None of those presences was Wayne Louis Hornfly. Bobby the Sham knew perfectly well that none was Hornfly. He also knew it was not likely such a person could exist yet escape detection by the all-knowing Google search engine. Nevertheless, with each sighting of a tall and shadowy figure, he flexed his novelistic imagination with greater effort, striving to imagine how they couldallbe Wayne Louis Hornfly. Often a ludicrous and impossible story premise that seemed as dead as a cluster of rotten tulip bulbs could suddenly put forth green shoots and then stems and then glorious flowers, becoming a shining novel of a hundred thousand or even two hundred thousand words.

Twenty miles from Maple Grove, as he passed a wind farm of two-hundred-foot-tall towers, a great flock of birds winged with foolish confidence where their kind had flown for millennia. The massive whirling blades introduced the concept of mortality to their small brains, reducing 90 percent of them to a shower of feathers, blood, chopped flesh, and bone bits.

That horrific sight crossed two wires in Bobby’s head. Light came into his darkness, andhe knew. He didn’t know who Wayne Louis Hornfly was or what the man looked like or where he could be found. The light was dim, just bright enough to assure him there had been such a person and that the purpose Hornfly embraced, the passion that motivated the man, was cruel and mindless slaughter.

The fine hairs stood up on the nape of Bobby’s neck, and an icy chill descended his spine with the swiftness of a centipede, and his heart skipped a beat before abruptly racing, and his breath caught in his throat, and his testicles tried to retract. Itwas a full-body fear reaction straight out of a 1930s pulp magazine, except community standards in those days would not have included crawling testicles in his list of symptoms.

His first impulse was to turn the car around, head back to the airport in Indianapolis, fly to California, take a flight from there to Tokyo, and then decide on a destination that was comfortably far away from Maple Grove. If he were to make a list of what he thought were his best qualities, heroism would not have been in the top ten.

No, no, no. He couldn’t run out on his amigos. They were the best friends he’d ever had. They had been through too much together to abandon one another, even if they couldn’t entirely remember what it was they had been through.

Anyway, by the time Bobby got to Maple Grove, maybe Ernie would have come out of his coma. Once reunited in their hometown, maybe the four of them would remember everything, fill the gaps in their memories. Maybe what had been erased from their minds would turn out to have been nothing of grave consequence. Maybe they would go to Adorno’s Pizzeria this evening just like they did so often when they were kids, if Adorno’s was still in business. This time they could have beer or wine instead of Cokes. They could have a lot of laughs, talk about old times, all of them successful now, none of them a nerd any longer. It could happen. You could write your life as you would a work of upbeat fiction, shape your future. It happened. It really did. Yeah, well, it could never happen as neatly as that, but he drove on to Maple Grove anyhow, arriving at the hospital at 4:22, hoping not to be cruelly slaughtered.

8Lassie, Come Home

Rebecca Crane did not own a private jet, nor did she want to own one, but she knew ninety-six people who did own one. Many were generous enough to lend the use of their aircraft to a famous actor or other person whom they might one day be able to use in a ruthless fashion to secure a lucrative business deal.

At any one time, fifty of those individuals had taken their aircraft to a far-away exotic location to attend a conference with the purpose of developing policies and influencing legislation that would prevent the common people from depleting the world’s precious resources. Of the remaining forty-six, some would be away on their third vacation of the year in Italy or Fiji. Others would be using their jets to get to and from more open-minded jurisdictions where certain practices illegal in the US weren’t merely tolerated but were encouraged and even formally recognized with fancy embossed commendations or engraved plaques presented by whatever tenderhearted king or wise cult leader or benevolent dictator maintained an iron grip on that nation.

Although these jet owners were engaged in far more demanding and important activities than most Earthlings, eight or ten of their magnificent flying machines stood unused at any one time. If you were a member of the right social strata or were at least “in the know,” there was a secret app that would tell you the locationand status of aircraft belonging to any person whose name you queried.

After receiving the bad news about Ernie Hernishen from Bobby the Sham, Rebecca needed forty-one minutes to learn that one of two jets owned by a tech entrepreneur and budding film financier of her acquaintance, Holden von Smack, was hangared at a private facility associated with Los Angeles International. One vessel, though fully serviced, wasn’t scheduled to be flown for a week. Holden von Smack took her call ten minutes later. In three minutes, he graciously offered her the use of one of his jets. There wasn’t a man on the planet who would have refused to grant a reasonable request from Rebecca Crane, and if you ever saw her, you’d know why. Even at two pounds five ounces above her ideal weight, she was a knockout.

[This is an authorial aside. I must prevent you from reaching a mistaken and ungenerous conclusion about Rebecca. She is not a snob. She does not insist on always flying in private jets and in fact doesn’t indulge in any of the hoity-toity behaviors that many others of her wealth and fame seem unable to resist. She is a down-to-earth person, humble and kind and selfless. If you were to meet her in mundane circumstances where you spent an evening with her, and if for some reason you didn’t recognize her, you might imagine she was a dress-shop clerk or seamstress, though a remarkably good-looking one. I know a woman of unusually penetrating insight who thought Rebecca was the person in a bowling alley who rents shoes, which perhaps will help you understand how down-to-earth she is.]

[Bear with me for another paragraph. When Rebecca Crane does take commercial flights, she has no choice but to bring a security team. Said team consists of two large, muscular, highlytrained agents who, were you to meet them in a dark alley or even on a well-lighted street, would likely cause you to soil yourself if they just looked at you askance. They are not thugs; they are nice guys from wholesome backgrounds. It’s merely the look they know how to give you, the aura that they project, which results in your convulsive bowel issues. Rebecca needs to employ these gentlemen because there are more deranged stalkers in our sadly dysfunctional society than you might think, odd men and even a few unbalanced women, who operate under the delusion that they have a romantic relationship with Rebecca. They believe such things as that she not only wants them but also has promised them a souvenir of their time with her, and they expect her to fulfill the promise by allowing them to cut off one of her ears to keep under their pillow in a sachet filled with rose petals. In some cases, they expect a vital organ, which is especially out of the question. On this occasion, if Rebecca took the time to get her security team together and find a flight that had a block of at least three seats available, she would never get to Maple Grove while Ernie was still alive. What would be the point in that? There would be none.]

So it was that, as humble as a bowling-shoe-rental person, she drove alone in her potentially explosive EV through two hours of savage Los Angeles traffic, all the way from her house in Malibu to the private-plane terminal. As promised, Holden von Smack’s jet was crewed and ready to take her to the heartland where Ernie was lying at Death’s doorstep and perhaps even just inside the front door.

The aircraft that von Smack provided wasn’t the jumbo jet he’d refitted with an elegant interior, transforming it into a sky yacht with two bedrooms and baths among other amenities. Instead, heprovided his smaller Gulfstream V. Living up to her reputation as being the farthest thing from hoity-toity, Rebecca was grateful for the accommodations she’d been given. She didn’t require a crew of seven, which the larger jet would have provided. Three were enough—the essential pilot and copilot, plus a smartly uniformed steward who offered her a choice of three entrées for lunch.

Takeoff was delayed when six protestors raced onto a runway to threaten planes with spray paint. They intended to defile priceless art at the Getty Museum; however, security at the Getty outfoxed them. Lacking the flammable liquid needed to set something important on fire, and with the spray paint unused, they came to the airport under the mistaken belief that a mist of carnelian red or peacock blue could destroy a jet engine. Although airport security agents in slickers and face shields might have been cheered for putting such feebs out of their misery, they only rounded them up, escorted them off the property, and suggested they try the bus station.

Through all of this, Rebecca kept thinking ofLassie Come Home, the wonderful 1943 film based on Eric Knight’s timeless novel. All Lassie wanted was to get home to the boy who loved her, much like Rebecca—a lass—wanted to return to her hometown to be with Ernie, whom she loved like a brother. Lassie—and now Rebecca, too—kept being thwarted in her journey.

Life was often like a movie. That thought should have comforted her, considering the dog story had a happy ending. However, she knew that whatever movie she walked into in Maple Grove would be less likeLassie Come Homethan likeShriek. She had been the sole survivor of all three movies, but she wasn’t a cat with nine lives.

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