“What’s he have buried here?” she asked. “The whole skeleton of a T-Rex?”
“Last night,” I said, “I thought all the digging was just a grief reaction to Dad’s death, a way for Orson to work off negative energy.”
“Grief reaction?” she said, frowning.
She’d seen how smart Orson was, but she still didn’t have a full grasp on the complexity of his inner life or on its similarity to our own. Whatever techniques were used to enhance the intelligence of these animals, it had involved the insertion of some human genetic material into their DNA. When Sasha finally got a handle on that, she would have to sit down for a while; maybe for a week.
“Since then,” I said, “it’s occurred to me that he was searching for something that he knew I needed to have.”
I knelt on the grass beside Orson. “Now, bro, I know you were in a lot of distress last night, grieving over Dad. You were rattled, couldn’t quite remember where to dig. He’s been gone a day now, and it’s a little easier to accept, isn’t it?”
Orson whined thinly.
“So give it another try,” I said.
He didn’t hesitate, didn’t debate where to start, but went to one hole and worked to enlarge it. In five minutes, his claws clinked against something.
Sasha directed the flashlight on a dirt-caked Mason jar, and I worked it the rest of the way out of the ground.
Inside was a roll of yellow pages from a legal tablet, held together by a rubber band.
I unrolled them, held the first page to the light, and at once recognized my father’s handwriting. I read only the first paragraph:
If you’re reading this, Chris, I am dead and Orson has led you to the jar in the yard, because only he knows of its existence. And that’s where we should begin. Let me tell you about your dog….
“Bingo,” I said.
Rolling up the papers and returning them to the jar, I glanced at the sky. No moon. No stars. The scudding clouds were low and black, touched here and there by a sour-yellow glow from the rising lights of Moonlight Bay.
“We can read these later,” I said. “Let’s move. Bobby’s alone out there.”
33
As Sasha opened the tailgate of the Explorer, shrieking gulls wheeled low overhead, tumbling inland toward safer roosts, frightened by a wind that shattered the sea and flung the wet fragments across the point of the horn.
With the box from Thor’s Gun Shop in my arms, I watched the white wings dwindle across the turbulent black sky.
The fog was long gone. Under the lowering clouds, the night was crystalline.
Around us on the peninsula, the sparse shore grass thrashed. Tall sand devils whirled off the tops of the dunes, like pale spirits spun up from graves.
I wondered if more than the wind had harried the seagulls from their shelter.
“They’re not here yet,” Bobby assured me as he took the two pizza-shop boxes from the back of the Explorer. “It’s early for them.”
“Monkeys are usually eating at this hour,” I said. “Then a little dancing.”
“Maybe they won’t even come at all tonight,” Sasha hoped.
“They’ll come,” I said.
“Yeah. They’ll come,” Bobby agreed.
Bobby went inside with our dinner. Orson stayed close by his side, not out of fear that the murderous troop might be among the dunes even now but, in his role as food cop, to guard against the unfair distribution of the pizza.
Sasha removed two plastic shopping bags from the Explorer. They contained the fire extinguishers that she’d purchased at Crown Hardware.
She closed the tailgate and used the remote on her key chain to lock the doors. Since Bobby’s Jeep occupied his one-car garage, we were leaving the Explorer in front of the cottage.
When Sasha turned to me, the wind made a glorious banner of her lustrous mahogany hair, and her skin glowed softly, as if the moon had managed to press one exquisite beam through the clotted clouds to caress her face. She seemed larger than life, an elemental spirit.
“What?” she said, unable to interpret my stare.
“You’re so beautiful. Like a wind goddess drawing the storm to you.”
“You’re so full of shit,” she said, but she smiled.
“It’s one of my most charming qualities.”
A sand devil did a dervish dance around us, spitting grit in our faces, and we hurried into the house.
Bobby was waiting inside, where the lights were dialed down to a comfortable murk. He locked the front door behind us.
Looking around at the large panes of glass, Sasha said, “I sure wish we could nail some plywood over these.”
“This is my house,” Bobby said. “I’m not going to board up the windows, hunker down, and live like a prisoner just because of some damn monkeys.”
To Sasha, I said, “As long as I’ve known him, this amazing dude hasn’t been intimidated by monkeys.”
“Never,” Bobby agreed. “And I’m not starting now.”
“Let’s at least draw the blinds,” Sasha said.
I shook my head. “Bad idea. That’ll just make them suspicious. If they can watch us, and if we don’t appear to be lying in wait for them, they’ll be less cautious.”
Sasha took the two fire extinguishers from their boxes and clipped the plastic presale guards from the triggers. They were ten-pound, marine-type models, easy to handle. She put one in a corner of the kitchen where it couldn’t be seen from the windows, and tucked the second beside one of the sofas in the living room.
While Sasha dealt with the extinguishers, Bobby and I sat in the candlelit kitchen, boxes of ammunition in our laps, working below table level in case the monkey mafia showed up while we were at work. Sasha had purchased three extra magazines for the Glock and three speedloaders for her revolver, and we snapped cartridges into them.
“After I left here last night,” I said, “I visited Roosevelt Frost.”
Bobby looked at me from under his eyebrows. “He and Orson have a broly chat?”
“Roosevelt tried. Orson wasn’t having any of it. But there was this cat named Mungojerrie.”
“Of course,” he said drily.
“The cat said the people at Wyvern wanted me to walk away from this, just move on.”
“You talk to the cat personally?”
“No. Roosevelt passed the message to me.”
“Of course.”
“According to the cat, I was going to get a warning. If I didn’t stop Nancying this, they’d kill my friends one by one until I did.”
“They’ll blow me away to warn you off?”
“Their idea, not mine.”
“They can’t just kill you? They think they need kryptonite?”
“They revere me, Roosevelt says.”
“Well, who doesn’t?” Even after the monkeys, he remained dubious about this issue of anthropomorphizing animal behavior. But he sure had cranked down the volume of his sarcasm.
“Right after I left the Nostromo,” I said, “I was warned, just like the cat said I would be.”
I told Bobby about Lewis Stevenson, and he said, “He was going to kill Orson?”
From his guard post where he stared up at the pizza boxes on the counter, Orson whined as if to confirm my account.
“So,” Bobby said, “you shot the sheriff.”
“He was the chief of police.”
“You shot the sheriff,” Bobby insisted.
A lot of years ago, he had been a radical Eric Clapton junkie, so I knew why he liked it better this way. “All right. I shot the sheriff—but I did not shoot the deputy.”
“I can’t let you out of my sight.”
He finished with the speedloaders and tucked them into the dump pouch that Sasha had also purchased.
“Bitchin’ shirt,” I said.
Bobby was wearing a rare long-sleeve Hawaiian shirt featuring a spectacular, colorful mural of a tropical festival: oranges, reds, and greens.
He said, “Kamehameha Garment Company, from about 1950.”
Having dealt with the fire extinguishers, Sasha came into the kitchen and switched on one of the two ovens to warm up the pizza.
To Bobby, I said, “Then I set the patrol car on fire to destroy the evidence.”
“What’s on the pizza?” he asked Sasha.
“Pepperoni on one, sausage and onions on the other.”
“Bobby’s wearing a used shirt,” I told her.
“Antique,” Bobby amended.
“Anyway, after I blew up the patrol car, I went over to St. Bernadette’s and let myself in.”
“Breaking and entering?”
“Unlocked window.”
“So it’s just criminal trespass,” he said.
As I finished loading the spare magazines for the Glock, I said, “Used shirt, antique shirt—seems like the same thing to me.”
“One’s cheap,” Sasha explained, “and the other isn’t.”
“One’s art,” Bobby said. He held out the leather holder with the speedloaders. “Here’s your dump pouch.”
Sasha took it from him and snapped it onto her belt.
I said, “Father Tom’s sister was an associate of my mother’s.”
Bobby said, “Mad-scientist-blow-up-the-world type?”
“No explosives are involved. But, yeah, and now she’s infected.”
“Infected.” He grimaced. “Do we really have to get into this?”
“Yeah. But it’s way complex. Genetics.”
“Big-brain stuff. Boring.”
“Not this time.”
Far out to sea, bright arteries of lightning pulsed in the sky and a low throb of thunder followed.
Sasha had also purchased a cartridge belt designed for duck hunters and skeet shooters, and Bobby began to stuff shotgun shells into the leather loops.
“Father Tom’s infected, too,” I said, putting one of the spare 9-millimeter magazines in my shirt pocket.
“Are you infected?” Bobby asked.
“Maybe. My mom had to be. And Dad was.”
“How’s it passed?”
“Bodily fluids,” I said, standing the other two magazines behind a fat red candle on the table, where they could not be seen from the windows. “And maybe other ways.”
Bobby looked at Sasha, who was transferring the pizzas to baking sheets.
She shrugged and said, “If Chris is, then I am.”
“We’ve been holding hands for over a year,” I told Bobby.
“You want to heat your own pizza?” Sasha asked him.
“Nah. Too much trouble. Go ahead and infect me.”
I closed the box of ammo and put it on the floor. My pistol was still in my jacket, which hung on the back of my chair.
As Sasha continued preparing the pizzas, I said, “Orson might not be infected, exactly. I mean, he might be more like a carrier or something.”
Passing a shotgun shell between his fingers and across his knuckles, like a magician rolling a coin, Bobby said, “So when does the pus and puking start?”
“It’s not a disease in that sense. It’s more a process.”
Lightning flared again. Beautiful. And too brief to do any damage to me.
“Process,” Bobby mused.
“You’re not actually sick. Just…changed.”
Sliding the pizzas into the oven to reheat them, Sasha said, “So who owned the shirt before you did?”
Bobby said, “Back in the fifties? Who knows?”
“Were dinosaurs alive then?” I wondered.
“Not many,” Bobby said.
Sasha said, “What’s it made of?”
“Rayon.”
“Looks in perfect condition.”
“You don’t abuse a shirt like this,” Bobby said solemnly, “you treasure it.”
At the refrigerator, I plucked out bottles of Corona for everyone but Orson. Because of his body weight, the mutt can usually handle one beer without getting sloppy, but this night he needed to keep a totally clear head. The rest of us actually needed the brew; calming our nerves a little would increase our effectiveness.
As I stood beside the sink, popping the caps off the beers, lightning tore at the sky again, unsuccessfully trying to rip rain out of the clouds, and in the flash I saw three hunched figures racing from one dune to another.
“They’re here,” I said, bringing the beers to the table.
“They always need a while to get up their nerve,” Bobby said.
“I hope they give us time for dinner.”
“I’m starved,” Sasha agreed.
“Okay, so what’re the basic symptoms of this not-disease, this process?” Bobby asked. “Do we end up looking like we have gnarly oak fungus?”
“Some may degenerate psychologically like Stevenson,” I said. “Some may change physically, too, in minor ways. Maybe in major ways, for all I know. But it sounds as if each case is different. Maybe some people aren’t affected, or not so you’d notice, and then others really change.”
As Sasha fingered the sleeve of Bobby’s shirt, admiring it, he said, “The pattern’s a Eugene Savage mural called Island Feast.”
“The buttons are fully stylin’,” she said, in the mood now.
“Totally stylin’,” Bobby agreed, rubbing his thumb over one of the yellow-brown, striated buttons, smiling with the pride of a passionate collector and with pleasure at the sensuous texture. “Polished coconut shell.”
Sasha got a stack of paper napkins from a drawer and brought them to the table.
The air was thick and damp. You could feel the skin of the storm swelling like a balloon. It would burst soon.
After taking a swallow of the icy Corona, I said to Bobby, “Okay, bro, before I tell you the rest of it, Orson has a little demonstration for you.”
“I’ve got all the Tupperware I need.”
I called Orson to my side. “There are some throw pillows on the living-room sofas. One was a gift from me to Bobby. Would you go get it for him, please?”
Orson padded out of the room.
“What’s going on?” Bobby wondered.
Sitting down with her beer, Sasha grinned and said, “Just wait.” Her .38 Chiefs Special was on the table. She unfolded a paper napkin and covered the weapon with it. “Just wait.”
Every year, Bobby and I exchange gifts at Christmas. One gift each. Because we both have everything we need, value and usefulness are not criteria when we shop. The idea is to give the tackiest items that can be found for sale. This has been a hallowed tradition since we were twelve. In Bobby’s bedroom are shelves on which he keeps the collection of tasteless gifts that I’ve given to him; the only one he finds insufficiently tacky to warrant space on those shelves is the pillow.