IGMS Issue 5 Read Online Free PDF Page B

their lunch."
    "Well, I wasn't planning to go into the god business myself," I told her. "Really wasn't looking to set up in competition with any Angel of Death. Piss-poor job, you ask me. No benefits, no paid vacations. And damn sure no union."
    Susie shook her head and laughed a little bit, but after that she got quiet again, and sort of broody. By and by, she said, "There's a union. There's always been others like you, Jake. The ones who mend the world."
    "The world's no torn shirt," I said. My insides felt like they'd been scooped out, dragged over gravel and put back. "I got a store to run." Susie looked at me, didn't say anything. I said, "There's others like him out there, I don't know how many. Can't stop them all." I put my hand on Susie's shoulder to steady myself.
    Willa came in behind us in her bathrobe, looked around at the dining room, and demanded, "What was all that tarryhooting around in here after we went to bed? Did you and Esau get to wrestling or something?"
    "Kind of," I mumbled. "Boys with beers. I'll clean up, I promise."
    Willa shrugged. "Your house. I was just afraid you'd wake up the kids. Esau already gone?" I nodded, and she peered at me in that older-sister way of hers. "You sure nothing happened between you two?" She wasn't expecting an answer, so I didn't have to fix one up. She studied Susie a lot more closely and carefully than she'd done during dinner, and there wasn't any question what she was thinking. But what Willa thinks and what Willa says never did spend a lot of time together. This time she just said, "Good of you to take the time with Ben, Susie. I was just frazzled out, dealing with those crazy TV people and Carol Ann."
    "It's been some time since I've been around children," Susie said. "I like yours."
    Willa said, "Stay the night, why don't you? It's late, and there's a spare bedroom downstairs." As she left, she said over her shoulder, "And I make great Mexican eggs. My husband loves them, and
he's
Mexican."
    Susie looked at me. I said, "If you aren't worried about compromising your reputation, that is, staying over in the house of a widower man. There's still folks in this town would raise their eyebrows."
    Susie laughed full-out then, for the first time. That was nice. She said, "I'm older than I look."
    Well.
    What else? The network never ran that show, of course, what with one thing another. Didn't get the chance. Seems like it all started turning bad for Esau, just about then, slow but steady. That stock-option business. Those people who sued the whole network about his fouled-up dirty-bomb story. The sexual harassment charges.
Those
got settled out of court, like a bunch of other stuff, but there was a mountain landing on his head and he couldn't duck it all. Still, he hung on like a bullrider. He's almost as stubborn as I am. Almost.
    Tell the truth, he might have ridden that bull all the way home, if he'd still been selling the same kind of stories. But the things that had made him who he was, the big disasters and the common-man nightmares, somehow there just weren't as many of them as there had been. The news got smaller, and so did he.
    Did I feel bad? Interesting, you asking me that. Yeah, I did feel bad for him, I couldn't help it. I still wonder how he felt when he woke up -- the morning
after
the night he told the country all about those Kansas cult-murders, with the ritual mutilating and all -- only it turned out they hadn't ever happened, even though he'd made them up just as pretty and scary as all the other lies he'd always made real. How's the Angel of Death supposed to do his job with clipped wings?
    I got a call in the store that day. Picked up on the second ring, but when I said hello there wasn't anybody on the line.
    The guns were the last straw. The automatics and the Uzis and whatever in his office, in the dressing-room, those were bad enough, the tabloids had a field day with those. But trying to go through Los Angeles airport security with a pistol