Three Moments of an Explosion Page 5

  And as I’m thinking that, with my hands stock-still to anyone watching, my fingers are snatching my no-longer-helpful spare Three and sending it to Hell via my sleeve, and coaxing my stolen card out from under its band, toward my cuff and fingertips, a clean sleight, bringing it back up and slipping it into position, all in a fraction of a second, all unseen.

  Belinda’s in, and the captain’s in, of course, which I was banking on, and I don’t care what piece of shit he’s holding, he’s not going to beat my hand—my winning hand—now. I’m ready.

  The betting’s done and Sugarface deals the river, the fifth shared card. It skitters down. The lights flicker and everyone’s gasping and everything goes slow, because the last card out of the deck, the last card face up on the table, is a new color.

  It’s the Four of Chimneys.

  “Oh hell yes,” I hear Sugarface say, “Mon Dieu,” I hear, and “Oh my God.”

  That’s Belinda.

  I stare at the blue in the red and black. A shared hidden card. Everyone can have a hidden card in their hand.

  The boat pitches, and for a fraction of an instant I see the night beyond the windows and it’s as if I hear a drone, as if someone’s walking on the deck, someone tall and stiff and dignified in a deep coat, smoking, looking in at us with austere curiosity, with satisfaction.

  I can hear the captain saying, “What is this? What does this mean?” and Sugarface saying, “Just keep quiet and watch, and show some respect, this is your induction,” and Belinda is staring right at me, her mouth open, her eyes wide.

  My frantic little fingers are fumbling deeper in my sleeve than you’d think possible but I dropped that Three to nestle I don’t know where against my skin, there’s no retrieving it, and I can’t swap it back in or its replacement back out again, and everyone can see I have two hole cards in my hand, just as I should.

  And one of them’s my Four of Chimneys, like the one on the table, and there’s only ever one Four of Chimneys, if there’s ever a Four of Chimneys at all.

  Sugarface is looking at me and saying, “What’s the matter, Kid?” and he looks at Belinda and down at the table and at the back of my cards and up at me and his face falls and he says, “Oh no, Kid, oh no, no, oh Kid, oh no,” and there’s more sorrow and fear in his voice than I’ve ever heard.

  “What is this?” the captain blathers. “What is this card?”

  I go to fold but Sugarface takes hold of my wrist.

  “Kid, I don’t want to see what I think I’m going to see,” he says gently. “Judge,” he says. “Get the rule book.” He starts to pull my hand down. “I need you to look up ‘Hidden Suits,’ ” he says.

  Everyone is watching my descending cards but Belinda. She’s staring at her own hand.

  “I need you to look up ‘Cheating,’ ” Sugarface says. “I need you to look up ‘Sanctions.’ ”

  Belinda’s cards twitch with a tiny instant motion of her fingers as with her free hand she grabs my wrist too. She’s stronger than Sugarface. Pushes my cards back up.

  “I call,” she says.

  “We’re mid-play,” he says.

  She says, “Look up a ‘Link Evens,’ Judge.”

  Even the captain’s silent while the judge turns pages. “Two Four Six Eight Ten including a Chain,” she reads out. “She can preemptive call with that. Nothing can beat it. Wins … any single object in the room she chooses.” She looks up.

  “And everyone keep your paws off that prize,” Belinda says. She’s staring at the hand in my hand. “No looking, no touching, no turning. Just slide it to me face down.”

  The judge looks at the cards on the table. “If she has a Two and an Eight,” she says, “she wins. But there’s a winner’s forfeit …”

  “I have the Two of Hearts,” Belinda says. She sounds exhausted but she smiles at me. “And I’m holding the Eight of Chains.”

  Everyone sits up.

  “Wait,” I manage to whisper. “What’s the forfeit?”

  No one hears me. Belinda is lowering her cards to show them.

  “I win,” Belinda says.

  “What is it?” I try to say.

  “I win, and I choose a card as my pot,” Belinda announces.

  She looks at what I’m holding as her own cards go down. She meets my eye and smiles. She could always read me. I know she’ll choose the right one.

  IN THE SLOPES

  McCulloch brewed a glass of tea and took it into the front room of his shop, where he found a young woman and a young man browsing. The bell had not sounded when they entered. It was fritzy.

  They wore gray cargo pants with bulging pockets, rucksacks over their shoulders. McCulloch nodded at them and sat behind the counter on his high stool. He aimed the remote control at the TV on the wall and lowered the volume.

  The girl smiled. “Not on our account,” she said. She was taller than her companion, dark-skinned and muscular, with long blond hair up in an artful tangle. She gave McCulloch a look of friendly, frank assessment.

  “Where you from?” McCulloch said.

  “Swansea.” He could hear the accent in her loud voice. “You don’t sound local yourself.”

  “I am now.”

  McCulloch’s shop was the converted front room of his house. Shelves covered three walls, and there were display units in the middle of the floor. The whitewash was peeling. He could see the whole interior by a mounted, curved mirror that had been there when he bought the place.

  Like most of the shopkeepers, in summer he hung bright plastic balls and towels and buckets outside. He had packed them up and stacked them back in his storeroom a week before.

  The young man sifted with slow attention through baskets of trinkets, toys, and bars of soap in the shapes of collaborators. McCulloch could see that his black hair was already thinning at the crown. The woman skimmed through the books for sale.

  “How come you’re here?” McCulloch said.

  “A dig,” she said.

  “I think I heard,” McCulloch said. “In Free Bay.”

  The visitors glanced at each other. “No,” the woman said. “We’re in a place called Banto.”

  “I heard wrong. What’s in Banto?”

  “You tell us,” she said. “Mr. Local.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Not much. Farms. About an hour away. You not been yet?”

  “We only just got here,” the boy said, quietly enough that McCulloch strained to hear. “We got in late last night. We’re stocking up and heading there now.”

  He brought a key ring to the counter, a twisted figurine in shoddily molded plastic.

  “Four quid,” McCulloch said. The young man raised an eyebrow.

  “Nothing’s made here,” the woman said. “It’s imported. You’d get it cheaper at home.”

  “Yeah but that’s not the point,” he said. He counted out coins. “Jesus, Soph, you’re going to break the bank with that lot.”

  “I’m not going without crisps.” She set her basket down and McCulloch rang up the goods and stacked them in paper bags.

  “How long you here?” he said.

  “Three weeks, me,” she said. “A month, Will. Our prof till February. Nicola Gilroy?” She looked at him for any recognition, and indicated the books he sold. There were photographs of the collaborators, cheap and outdated guides to their sites. There were speculative and absurd New-Age ruminations.

  “I don’t keep up,” McCulloch said.

  When the young woman opened the door the buzzer stayed silent again. “Thanks,” she said. “Maybe see you.”

  “Elam’s the only town, so maybe. There’s a club, ChatUp, up on Tolton.” He pointed the direction. He knew they were wondering what an unkempt man in his fifties who ran a store like this could have to tell them about clubs. “The best bar’s Coney Island. Two minutes from here. I’ll get a round in. Make up for the groceries.”

  When they were gone he checked the books himself. Only two contained indices, and neither listed any Gilroy. />
  McCulloch stood at his entrance and looked south down the slope to the main square. The sky was still light but the dim neon of the old town was coming on. The municipality had just switched over to the winter schedule and, for a few weeks, the streetlights would start to glow pointlessly early. The streets of Elam were filling with fishermen coming up from the harbor, office workers ascending toward the parks to catch the late strong-smelling flowers.

  Beyond his shop’s friendly competitors, beyond the amusement arcade, which had started its early evening whoomping as it filled with kids taking off their school ties, beyond the edge of the town, was a fringe of dark vegetation where the ground grew steeper, on the slopes of the volcano.

  The signs in the bar that read CONEY ISLAND were in a different font from NUTS! BEER! VODKA!,” and those that pointed out toilets. McCulloch pushed his way between loud groups and found Cheevers just as Cheevers saw him and waved McCulloch over to the corner where he drank.

  As he did most days, Cheevers wore a dark suit more expensive than most on the island. He was only a little older than McCulloch, and similarly graying and heavy. They enjoyed their disparity—the shrewd, well-dressed lawyer and the shabby storekeeper, alcohol buddies alike and unalike enough to bring to mind two versions of the same man from alternative timelines.

  Cheevers sat with a trim, pale man. He was forty-something, and his lumberjack shirt was too young for him. “So?” he was saying to Cheevers as he blinked over a whiskey. “Is the landlord some displaced New Yorker or what?” He moved to let McCulloch sit.

  “I’ll let this old lag explain,” Cheevers said. “John McCulloch, Daniel Paddick. John knows this place pretty well. For an outsider.” An old riff. Island-born, some of us. Not like Johnny-McCulloch-come-lately.

  “Used to be a strip joint,” McCulloch said. “Signs used to say Cunny Island.” He looked to see if Paddick understood. “When Jay took over and cleaned it up he only changed the letters he had to.”

  “That’s classy,” said Paddick. “How often are people disappointed? Here for cunny?”

  “You’d have to have a pretty old guidebook,” said McCulloch. “Why? Were you . . ?”

  Paddick smiled, took the tease and bought a round.

  “You’re from London?” he said to McCulloch.

  “That obvious?”

  “Your mate busted you. Although yes. You’ve hung on to the accent impressively.”

  “I swear it’s got stronger,” Cheevers said.

  “Stepney,” McCulloch said. “Long time ago. Wanted out but I’m too thick to learn a new language and too lazy to change money.” The island was technically independent, an imperial throwback.

  “When was this?”

  “Since way before the new digs. Wondering if that’s what brought me?” McCulloch shook his head. “That your business?”

  Paddick nodded. “I’m an archaeologist. You must get sick of us all.”

  McCulloch shrugged. “Pays my rent. I met your students. Banto, is it?”

  “No,” Paddick said. He glanced away. “That’s another lot. I’m in Free Bay.”

  “Right. I heard about that. I didn’t know about them others.”

  “Totally different. Different institution. Different dig, methods, aims. Everything. Last minute. I don’t think either of us was expecting to overlap.”

  There were always teams at work, mostly around Free Bay and the temple at Miller, where a permanent encampment of excited scholars dug out pillars in a field surrounded by ill-tempered commuters on a ring road. That hadn’t been the case when McCulloch moved to the island almost three decades before. Few Britons—or anyone—had heard of it then, which of course had been much of the draw for him. When the second wave of investigations began, the new attention had troubled him.

  Of course the island had filled with visitors. Its permanent population had increased. The capital had spread out.

  But as it turned out, not by much. For a tiny not-rich place, its local authorities had always been restrained about monetizing the remains, and the new times had not substantially altered that caution. Digs, development and tourism were all controlled: the chamber of commerce constantly complained. Elam was only a little larger than it had been when McCulloch immigrated.

  Paddick was gazing into his drink. “Who was it told you about Banto?”

  McCulloch and Cheevers glanced at each other. “Tall girl. Short quiet lad. Came into my shop. I suppose you all know each other—-”

  “Well,” Paddick said. He finished his drink. “It’s a big enough island.”

  When he went to piss, Cheevers clicked Paddick’s glass in his absence, then McCulloch’s. He raised an eyebrow.

  “What was that about?” he said. “A nerve has been touched.”

  “Academics,” McCulloch said. “Hate each other worse than lawyers.”

  “How dare you, sir? I’m curious. Oh, for a sprinkling of the old sodium pentothol.” Cheevers mimed opening a compartment on his signet ring and pouring something into Paddick’s glass.

  “Curtain-twitcher,” McCulloch said. Cheevers raised an eyebrow.

  “Leave it out,” Cheevers said in a dreadful London accent. “You’re the nosiest chap I know.”

  “Objection,” said McCulloch. They sometimes played each other’s caricature like this, barrow-boy and silk.

  A petrol-station-cum-store marked the center of Banto. There was no town, only a scattered stretch of squalid little farms over acres of dry land and dusty growth.

  “I heard there was a dig somewhere,” McCulloch said to the cashier and she showed him on a map. He drove another five miles toward the volcano. It was a bright day and the long-cold cone was languid, framed by clouds and scattered with late blooms. Rooks went back and forth above the slope, intrigued by something. Under a red plastic arrow a sign read DIG.

  There was a track between trees, and where it ended there were three big tents pitched by two cars. Some distance away was the kind of flat-bottomed pit with which McCulloch, an islander even if not by birth, was familiar.

  A security guard with the broken nose of a fighter approached.

  “I was looking for Sophie,” McCulloch said.

  “Sophia.” She emerged from a tent and corrected him. She frowned to see him and for the first time McCulloch considered how it might seem to her, for him to have overheard her name, and to have come looking. He was embarrassed.

  The young man Will came into view behind her. McCulloch was relieved. “Good,” he said as the guard wandered away. “I was hoping I’d find you two.”

  Behind them a second young woman came out. Her clothes were muddy and her hair was tied up in a head scarf. It looked like Rosie the Riveter’s.

  “Why’re you here?” Sophia said.

  “Just curious,” McCulloch said. “I couldn’t find anything out about this place. And I was up this way and I saw the sign and I thought I’d give it a punt.” He saw Sophia hesitate. “I can go. It’s just I’m here now, and I know you have to do education outreach and that. I could be like a check box for you. And I’ll knock something off on future groceries.”

  Sophia smiled. It’s a small place, he imagined her thinking. We need to get on with the locals. “Give me a minute,” she said. She headed for the pit.

  “You working here too?” McCulloch asked the other woman.

  “I’m Charlotte. I’m with the opposition.”

  “Paddick?”

  She nodded. “But I’ve known Soph since we were at York, so I drove over to say hi. Easier than her coming to me.” She grinned, all freckles and dust.

  Sophia came jogging back. “Prof’s up to her elbows,” she said. “But I can show you something.” She led him toward the tents. “You know about the preservation process?”

  As if he could live here and not.

  Brickwork, pillars, channels had always protruded from the island’s undergrowth and dirt, but it was only in the nineteenth century that the amateur excavations of a local platoon
’s commander uncovered a mosaic floor that intrigued specialists and scholars. They came, elbowing aside the disgruntled descendants of British soldiers, shipwreck survivors, and convicts who eked out a living on the slopes.

  The only known antique reference to the catastrophe was an aside by Tacitus—“The island caught fire. The gods neither loved nor despised those farmers.” Volcanologists said the mountain had been silent for many lifetimes before the eruption, and for the almost two millennia since. There were no eyewitness accounts, no survivors’ testimonies—what escape had there been, from this tiny remote place? It was from the Younger Pliny’s descriptions of Vesuvius that writers borrowed images of burning darkness, a tree of smoke, of locals in their agoras choking in gases from under ground, of the pyroclastic flow.

  A slurry of burning ash and rock had gushed through the townships and temples and boiled the sea. It had left buildings standing, random artifacts carbonized and whole.

  When they dug, the archaeologists found holes. Burrows without entrances. For years they simply cracked them open and picked out bones and bits within until, in 1863, they got word that Giuseppe Fiorelli had poured gesso into a similar air pocket of Pompeii, and let it set.

  There was a first time that the earth was scooped away from plaster, when the ground gave birth to someone dead.

  Bodies had rotted leaving charnel foundations, spaces in the shapes of anguish. Hunkering deaths, the pugilist poses where cooking sinews had clenched. Anti-corpses made by plaster into figures like bones. Even the shapes of their cries were preserved.

  After Pompeii, the island.

  The hollows left by the preserved dead underfoot were filled, their plaster forms uncovered. Women, men, children, dogs and cats, domesticated bears in the ruins of dwellings. Now they lay in the island’s museums, in the visitors’ center at the largest dig.

  Sometimes casts were lifted gently onto planes for overseas exhibitions with titles like “The Other Pompeii.” The most famous figures were named for their dead poses: the Lovers; Defiant Boy; the Runner.