The devil, disguised as a smiling female cheerfully smoking a cigarette, stepped out of the shadows. “Why don’t you guys let me drive you home? Joe or somebody can return to find the keys later.”
“I’d rather hitchhike.” But Heidi’s meek declaration totally lacked pizzazz.
Gratefully, Joe accepted her offer. “Thanks for hanging around, Nancy. Kids, climb out of the bus.…”
Packed like sardines on the drive to the Castle of Golden Fools, the adults tried to remain mute while the kids exchanged amenities.
“Get off my foot, Bradley. You’re squashing my foot.”
“No I’m not. I’m not even near your stinking foot.”
“Bradley, dear, don’t say ‘stinking.’ Be nice.”
“Daddy, Bradley’s standing on my foot and it hurts!”
“Shuttup, Heather, we’re almost home.”
“Well, he’s killing me! Ow, ow, ow!”
“Bradley, darling, move your foot, would you, please? if it’s on top of Heather’s.”
“It is not. And anyway, I can’t even budge. I’m getting squashed. I can’t breathe. Michael’s elbow is stuck in my guts.”
“Michael, move your elbow, okay?”
“Where cad I moob id to, Dad? I’b id a straid jagged. Bradley id crudhing my hib.”
“Bradley, are you crushing his hip?”
“I can’t help it, Mom. There’s too many people back here.”
Joe said, “Here, I’ll move. Heather, change your position on my lap. Ooff, Jesus! Michael, see if you can squunch your leg over a little, huh?”
Heidi said, “Maybe I can move my seat forward and give you some more room back there.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Nancy apologized. “The gizmo that loosens the passenger seat is rusted, it doesn’t work.”
“Well, we’re almost home anyway,” Joe said. “Come on, everybody, let’s see if we can hold out a few minutes longer.”
“Pee-yew,” Heather exclaimed. “Who just laid a grenade? Bradley, did you cut that fart? I bet you did.”
“Shuttup, Heather.”
Bradley screeched, “Mom, I didn’t cut a fart! Make her take it back.”
“You did so,” Heather accused. “It had to be you.” She started to make gagging sounds. “Help! I can’t breathe!”
Joe said, “Heather, when we get home I’m gonna kill you.”
“I’m not afraid.” She stuck out her tongue. “Blaaah!”
Bradley cried, “Mom, tell her I didn’t cut a fart!”
Nancy swung her head sideways. “She knows you didn’t cut a fart, Bradley. Nobody’s blaming you for anything.”
“Yes they are! Make her take it back!”
“I can’t make her take it back, dear. That’s silly.”
“Take it back, Heather,” Joe snarled wearily.
“Why should I take it back if he really did?”
“You don’t know if he really did or not. And I can’t stand this bickering So take it back, dammit, or I swear on a stack of Bibles I’ll tan your hide so thoroughly when we get home that they’ll be able to cut it up and make saddles with it.”
Michael said, “You probadly fahdded, Hedder. Id’s alwaids duh wud dat fahds dat accudded edrebody else ob fahdding.”
“I did not! Daddy, make Michael be quiet! He’s a liar.” Poking her face to within an inch of her brother’s bandaged visage, she chanted, “Liar! Liar! Pants on fire! Hanging from a telephone wire!”
Heidi added her two cents: “Joey probably farted. But he’s too chicken to tell anybody. That goes with his new role in life as a professional snake in the grass.”
“Heidi, I hate to be picayune, but that was gratuitous venom.”
“Still, it’s probably true.”
“I didn’t fart, dammit.” Her accusation was so absurd and unfair that he felt a heat rising. If he let it build unchecked for another thirty seconds, he would probably reach forward and strangle the bitch in her tracks, broken wrist or not.
“I farted,” Nancy said pleasantly. “Please excuse me.” She exhaled another rich billow of Lucky Strike exhaust and, abruptly, Joe couldn’t breathe.
“Heidi, open the window a little, would you please?”
“I can’t. I’m shivering. My teeth are chattering. I think I’m getting a fever.”
“But I can’t breathe. I left all my pills and the inhaler in the bus.”
“Oh screw your asthma, Joey. I’m sick of your emotional crutches. When are you ever going to grow up?”
Joe said, “Stop this car, Nancy. I’m getting out.”
“But we’re almost there.”
“I didn’t ask you where we were, I asked you to stop this car.”
She pulled over to the shoulder and braked. Using her left hand, Heidi opened the door and leaned forward. Joe pried himself out, lost his balance, and crashed into the ditch, enormously relieved to be free of those claustrophobic quarters. Fresh air embraced him with a delirious rush.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Heidi snorted, slamming the door.
“I’ll see you around the universe, asshole!” Yet as the car chugged off, Joe suddenly remembered again, and hollered in panic: “What did you mean about a rubber suit and a snorkel?”
“What the hell do you think?”
Then they were gone, and Joe sat there, incredulous, astonished by their infantile interactions.
A dozen cows mooed appreciatively. Filtered through spring mists, the moon was balanced atop a Midnight foothill, trailing wisps of soft yellow fog like angel hair. And Joe Miniver, child of scorn, reeled to his feet like a punch-drunk fighter wondering in what direction salvation lay. Overhead, a billion stars twinkled imperviously. To them, the human condition didn’t mean squat.
But then he thought: “She’s lying. She’ll market the stuff herself, after we’re divorced, and live high on the hog forever after.”
A skunk trotting across the road peered at Joe inquisitively. But then, deciding this human had probably had enough for one night, it merely flicked its tail in a neighborly fashion and waddled on, disappearing into the ebullient shadows.
* * *
WITH A PEBBLE he was too pooped to excavate in his shoe, Joe limped halfway up the driveway, cursing softly. Geronimo answered his muffled exclamations with a soft whinny. The horse stood in the center of Eloy’s front field, nosing around the Hanuman U-Haul. Incredibly, despite a million-dollar price tag on the monkey god, nobody was guarding it.
Joe glanced around once, uneasily, just to make sure nobody like Angel Guts or Ray Verboten or Cobey Dallas crouched in the branches of a nearby tree, fingering an infrared sniper gun. Then, slipping between barbed-wire strands, he approached the U-Haul. Geronimo whinnied again and backed off, suspiciously awaiting further developments.
Head cocked, Joe listened for a sound: for a clock ticking, an electrical humming, for anything from inside that prosaic trailer indicating life, security precautions. Maybe somebody slept inside, arms wrapped around a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun full of double-ought buck loads. Or perhaps a pair of Indian king cobras came wrapped around the idol to protect it from infidels. Then again, Nikita Smatterling and his underlings might simply have wrapped the whole kit and caboodle in a pink cloud for safekeeping. In fact, most probably, they figured the Hanuman’s safety was ensured by its own positive vibes.
Circling the battered red-and-orange trailer, Joe inspected the padlocked doors. He reached out to touch the mammoth steel contraption doing the job … but stayed his hand, paranoid—abruptly—about fingerprints. Suppose Tribby and Ralph slunk over here tonight and absconded with the goods? It’d be typical of his luck that the one clue cops could extract from the empty, shattered vehicle at the bottom of a ravine would be a single Miniver fingerprint on the lock!
A steel cable, probably a relic from the Clarion, Ohio, caper, still packaged the trailer. A large metal ring, such as a gymnast might use, poked up from intersecting cable strands at the center of the U-Haul
roof. No doubt they had used an immense grappling hook to make the connection when they whisked the statue away from the previously airlifted hoosegow in that soybean field. And Tribby wanted to swoop down like James Bond on this field in a Floresta bubblecopter.…
HELICOPTER HEAVIES HEIST HANUMAN! MINIVER MANGLED BY MONSTER HOOK DURING MANEUVERS!
In the grass beneath the U-Haul, some fruit was cooking … or anyway, absorbing the kind of vibes it needed to become prasad—celestial radiation. Joe wondered: did Hanuman freaks with pacemakers have to steer clear of potent statues?
Stooping, he spitefully selected a heavy peach, bouncing it a few times in his palm, liking the heft of it. As his teeth sank in, would lightning bolts erupt from the sky directly overhead? Or would a bestial voice, with tantalizingly human undertones, issue forth in a growl from the U-Haul’s interior? Tempting the fates, Joe took a healthy bite. Sweet juice dribbled over his chin … and a thousand owls hooted, frogs croaked, crickets uncorked a symphony of dazed screeks, the moon slid behind a cloud. Sudden thunderheads coagulated and clotted over the sacred mountain: nature prepared to go bananas.
In Joe’s mind, that is. Outwardly, his chomp provoked nothing more delirious than another inquisitive and slightly demanding whinny from Geronimo, who conquered his temerity and clomped forward, seriously interested in a piece of the action.
Well, why not?
Three delicious apples later, the horse burped appreciatively, whisked some misbegotten moon-struck fly off his haunch, and retreated, allowing digestive juices to have at it unmolested.
His palm placed against the scratched metal of the U-Haul, Joe waited in vain for a vibration. While he waited, he tried to assess where he was at. A few crickets chirped: he missed the katydids from his youth. And where oh where were all the whippoorwills of yesteryear? And the fireflies? If God was so god-awful good, how come She couldn’t invent fireflies above six thousand feet? Would his children never know the ecstasy of gamboling through thick dewy grass in their bare kiddy feet chasing the blinking little buggers through sweet muffling currents of nocturnal air?
As if in answer to his prayers, a teeny-weeny star plummeted out of the sky, halted its descent right above Geronimo, and languidly floated toward Joe, blinking lazily. The horse tossed his head, emitting a puzzled, guttural harrumph. Joe was so surprised his jaw fell open, and he gaped, thoroughly astounded. In fact, for a few seconds it was as if his limbs had been frozen by some sort of extraterrestrial stun-gun: he couldn’t move, his heart stopped, his body experienced a sensation that seemed akin to what he might have felt had somebody punched an air needle into his belly button and commenced pumping him full of helium. A hit of euphoria, mixed with terror, clobbered his brain … then, casual as you please, the minuscule neon insect floated into his open mouth and lodged in his throat.
Joe doubled over, coughing, gagging, trying to expectorate. Spooked, Geronimo galloped away. Joe shook his head, flailed at his mouth with his tongue, dropped to one knee, and thrust an index finger between his choppers, frantically digging for the obstreperous bug. For a second or two, he thought he might die. “Holy shit!” he croaked. “I don’t believe it!”
Then he managed to cough the thing free. With thumb and forefinger, he plucked it off his tongue. And knelt in the grass, frowning at the slimy, black, mangled lump on his finger, trying to make out its surviving features in the silvery moonlight.
“This just didn’t happen,” he whispered in dismay.
But it would certainly teach him to swagger around cavalierly devouring somebody else’s prasad!
* * *
“PSST … Miniver!”
Joe jumped, spun around, and, had he been packing a rod, would for sure have slapped leather and drilled the surrounding obscurity like a wildcat oilman in the east Texas petroleum fields, circa 1930.
Instead, however, he found himself face to face in the gloom with the diminutive, braceleted accountant known as Roger Petrie. Against his black turtlenecked chest, a silver cross glowed phosphorescently.
“Jesus, Roger—you scared me!”
“Why are you feeding their fruit to a horse?”
“Why are you creeping around here like some kind of lugubrious Dracula? Planning to filch the monkey and hold it for ransom to raise bread to hire a West Coast mouthpiece to keep you out of leg-irons when the legal apparatus of this godforsaken state starts snuffling in the garbage of your embezzlement and water-rights affairs?”
Oh, that silvery dancing tongue! When he was hot he was hot!
Taken aback, Roger said, “Where did you hear that?”
“Oh, hey, please.” Now that his initial terror had passed, Joe practically gloated. For this was one buzzard at his own level he knew he could keelhaul. “You know this town. Scott Harrison floats a double sawbuck into escrow lining up that H2O Cobey promised you for doctoring Skipper’s books, and the great pinball machine in the sky over Hija Negrita Mountain flashes a giant TILT that even astronomers at Mount Palomar come in their pants over.”
“Very funny. Who’s writing your gags?”
“Would you believe Cobey Dallas? Skipper Nuzum? The Tarantula of Chamisaville?”
“Seriously, Joe. I didn’t come here for you to mock me.”
“I’m tired, Roger. All the convolutions surrounding these monkey maneuvers have got me down.”
“Me too—I can honestly sympathize. It’s getting out of hand. Nobody knows whose side anyone is on anymore. All the traditional loyalties have gone down the drain.”
“So you’re here to make me an offer I can’t refuse?”
“Sarcasm, Joe, is the cheapest form of humor. You don’t need to put me down just because I’m a small fry.”
“Okay, what’s the deal? Cobey sent you? Or Skipper? Joe B. threatened castration unless you figured out how to stop me before I cut off my nose to spite my face by blowing the lid off everybody’s illegal finaglings to do Eloy out of this choice piece of real estate?”
“You insult me, man, but I’ll ignore it for the moment. More important considerations are afoot.”
“Don’t tell me, lemme guess. Cobey knows you’re a double agent, but he can’t alienate you because once Skipper hauls him into court, his survival, vis-à-vis your testimony, depends on influencing you to perjure yourself—probably by threatening to squeal on your deal with Scott Harrison re the water rights. Plus what Skipper doesn’t know, but Cobey probably does (thanks to a careful review of your handiwork), is that you’ve been skimming off the embezzlement into your own account, hoping to zoom unsuspectingly out of nowhere to grab this land for yourself before anybody understands how it happened. Only problem is, word recently leaked out that Scott got cold feet once he heard Skipper had plans to spear Cobey and you into the bargain in order to cover his own tracks. So you need a new alliance, and here I am: Mr. Patsy on the half shell.”
“That’s a farfetched synopsis. What kind of drugs are you taking?”
“Fair enough: make me a liar. You wandered by simply to wish me good luck in the upcoming holocaust.”
“Are you quite finished, Joe? Because if you’ve gotten all this snide bile off your chest, I’d like to say something.”
“Speak, memory.”
“It’s very simple. I think Skipper’s prepared to let both Cobey and me take a rap. He even met with Scott Harrison today, probably because Scott realized Skipper’s jig was up unless he forgot his own selfish interests and joined the big boys.”
“Does Cobey realize you were reporting his embezzlements to Skipper and getting paid for it?”
“That’s a lie and a gross fabrication.”
“So proceed.”
“There’s not much more to tell. The Hanumans are stymied because Eloy’s in love with you at this juncture, and the last hope for this land to survive intact is before it’s out of his hands. Scott Harrison is blocked because Skipper’s threatening to tell the bar about his deal with me. Cobey can’t make a move, really, because the second he doe
s, Skipper will initiate proceedings to have him thrown in jail. I’m in trouble because I worked with all three of them, performing illegal gambits. You can’t get to first base because the dope scam is preposterous, and lethal into the bargain. And anyway, even if you could manage it, you’d have to unload the land to pay off your ex-wife. But I think I have a solution of sorts.”
“Mainly…?”
“We form a partnership.”
“Roger, save your breath.”
“No, wait. You give me the coke—I can step on it heavy and fence what looks like the entire package to Natalie Gandolf for twelve Gs, while retaining at least half the stuff to make a killing elsewhere—maybe in Boulder … I know some people there. With the twelve Gs, I can cover myself in Skipper’s books, so that when he lowers the boom on me and Cobey, I’ll be clean as a whistle. Meanwhile, we step on the other half of your cocaine and market it for the full price, split fifty-fifty between us. The proceeds should be enough to buy out Eloy Suchandsuch, and we split the land down the middle. How does that grab you?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“You’re crazier than all the rest of them. We could get killed.”
“I don’t think you understand, Joe. Plans like this work. You have to be bold. It’s how the world goes round.”
“Sure, but I have a better idea. Lemme run this up a flagpole, see if you salute it. There’s a million dollars worth of insurance on this monkey god—we’ll pinch the thing and hold it for ransom. I know a guy who pilots helicopters. What we’ll do is swoop down, snatch it with a grappling hook, fly it off to the Midnight Mountains, and drop it into one of the Little Baldy Bear lakes.”
Roger blurted, “Aw, shit man—now you’re crazy.”
* * *
BY FLASHLIGHT, Diana was reading a copy of I, Claudius. Joe mumbled “Hello,” and collapsed among her tattered blankets, old ski jackets, and dirty bluejeans.
“What happened to you?”
“What didn’t happen to me is more like it. Man, am I bushed.”
“I heard all hell broke loose in the Prince of Whales.”