That first visit, he and Maddy managed not to have a moment to themselves.
Three years later Journeyman visited the Farm in earnest. He was then at an early low ebb, the toaster show canceled and forgotten, his once-live pitches all gone dark, his manager not returning calls. Todbaum, on the other hand, was on the rise, through the ranks of the ordinary mortal assholes possessing a desk and a telephone, to assume what seemed his rightful place. He’d begun transforming himself into one of the town’s sacred monsters, a packager known for wrangling talent and intellectual property into fertile conjunctions, for spooking money out of dim corners of the Pacific Rim and Eastern Europe. He was becoming one of those who defied the usual precept that, despite all the power talk, nobody really could make anything happen except for the seven or twelve bankable stars. Todbaum made things happen.
Journeyman’s lack of work freed him to wander from L.A., though his money was growing thin.
If that second visit was a restorative one between Journeyman and his sister, it was a restoration to a cooled, firmer-edged place. She wasn’t his kid sister any longer. He had to stop and apprehend who it was she’d become instead. Spodosol Ridge Farm thrived, five or six homesteads built, though several times a week the whole community still dined together in the central lodge. The fields were now joined by an elaborate greenhouse in which the Spodosolians produced miraculous Zone Five tomatoes, ripe in May and June. They’d allocated a quadrant of land to a group of migrant Mexican berry pickers, three families, who’d years earlier begun a roadside tamale stand from the blueberry fields, a hit with those who’d come here from afar and been starved for any authentic cuisine besides pie and lobster.
The tamale stand they’d subsidized into a real concern, a takeout business, now nestled inside Spodosol’s weekly vegetable farm-drop enterprise, which had been embraced by the peninsula. Spodosol’s produce had supplied restaurants in Tinderwick and Esther’s Landing (East Tinderwick was too small for a restaurant, Granite Head too long in decline from its quarrying glory days), and also individual homes. If you weren’t home, you’d leave a couple of twenties pinned on a counter in a kitchen left unlocked in exchange for a reusable wooden crate of what Spodosol Ridge pumped out of its fields.
Maddy had fallen in love with a woman. The obvious turn? Not to Journeyman. Astur Guutaale was Somali, a member of what Journeyman learned, to his surprise, was a substantial community centered in Lewiston. The two had met at the Common Ground Country Fair, a yearly gathering of agrarian hippies. Astur worked as a beekeeper. She’d traveled to the fair with a demonstration hive, and samples of honey, beeswax salves, and candles. Journeyman would come to know Astur well, later, in the permanent vacation that was to become his post-Arrest life. But not yet.
The sole mention of Todbaum came while Journeyman and his sister were swimming.
Maddy had had to lure Journeyman out. The ocean, whether at Rehoboth or Fishers Island or the monolithic blue fist of the Pacific, had never been Journeyman’s thing. The cove here was sheltered, Maddy explained. The open surf broken by a dozen islands before it made its way to this inlet. The water warmed itself over the rocks, was nearly bathwater, or so she advertised. He went from the Farm with her that bright hot day and they immersed and floated out, two bobbing heads in salt froth. The cove wasn’t only tolerably warm, it was filthy with green fronds, with dead jellyfish, with unidentified global-warming gloop, perhaps red tide or coliform. There were times Journeyman felt, accompanying Maddy through the natural world, that she’d filled his head with too much bioknowledge, that he couldn’t quit being aware of everything teeming with rot and humidity, up to the food at the end of his fork.
Before Todbaum’s name came up they discussed Journeyman’s woes. His career drought, his romantic drought. They talked of their parents. Journeyman’s mother’s sense had begun to fail. At Christmas Eve dinner she’d cleared a half-full bowl of chowder from the table and drained it into an open silverware drawer. Their father’s denial was absolute: he’d shut the chowder-filled drawer, and scowled Journeyman and Maddy to silence. What were they to do about it all? The Arrest would soon enough solve the conundrum for them, stranding them from news of whether their parents were even alive anymore. In this they were hardly alone.
Journeyman recalled the light twinkling on the ripples extending from their floating heads. The fronds and filth, the cool beneath the sun-warmed layer, the chrome-green horseflies that caused the siblings to slap at their heads and submerge. Maddy had seen Journeyman living at the Farm for five or six days; perhaps she’d begun to trust that he saw her for who she’d become. Might Journeyman be forgiven, that day? He craved more even than he’d already gained of Maddy’s cool and acute compassion.
“I’m not working with Peter Todbaum anymore,” Journeyman said. He’d weighted the emphasis in how he spoke the line, so it could be heard as a statement of policy rather than abject fact. Todbaum’s ascent was fresh, and the two men were out of touch. Journeyman’s bitterness toward Todbaum freed him to imagine he’d behaved valiantly on behalf of his sister in ways he hadn’t.
“You really don’t need to ever mention him again,” said Maddy, not harshly, but with unmistakable firmness.
“Well, I figured—”
“Really not ever.” She plunged her head below the water and stayed there awhile. There was no horsefly.
“Okay,” he said when she surfaced.
So, it seemed to Journeyman later, Maddy had given him permission to leave unmentioned this fact: that he’d upon his return begun to work with Todbaum again. Indeed, Todbaum soon became the basis of Journeyman’s whole livelihood.
12.
The Blue Streak, Part 1
THE HORSES SNORTED. A CROW vamoosed. The supercar came around the corner and up the hill at once, gleaming in the sun and seeming to ripple off waves of heat-static around its perimeters, as though near and far at once. Eke waved Journeyman off the center of the road, onto the shoulder, to make way for it. The shiny abysmal engineered carcass. This was Journeyman’s first impression: that a jet engine or hydrogen bomb had been mounted on a fantastic chassis, then been mated with an animal or insect. And then been turned at least partly inside out. The supercar was a monstrosity, a rupture to Journeyman’s stabilizing premise, his self-situation. In its humming, seething, glistening actuality it made a blight in the very air. It seemed to destroy, or at least to collapse, time itself. This didn’t strike Journeyman as a positive sensation. Following the Arrest, it had seemed that assaults on time—time’s fragmentation, or insane velocity—had also been Arrested. Time had been allowed to recollect itself. To flow into bodies at an undistressed rate. The supercar wrenched a hole in those notions, which might now, it seemed to Journeyman, be exposed as sentimental. The supercar seemed to remember too well the pre-Arrest world, to drag fragments of smashed time in its wake.
Later, in the library, Journeyman found two pictures:
Journeyman X-Acto knifed these two images out of art books and added them to his file of recollections concerning the coming of Todbaum’s supercar.
13.