Summerland (44 page)

"How far is it, by foot, then?"

"Three days fer the likes of you, I reckon, more or less."

Jennifer T. heard the breath go hissing out of Ethan. In three days it might already be the Ninth Inning.

"We need to get there sooner!" Jennifer T. said. "Have you got anything we could use for fuel?"

The Man grinned, and reached into the hip pocket of his dungarees. He pulled out a silver flask.

"What is that stuff, cuz?" Grim said.

"Put it this way, little giant," the Man said. "Friend of mine makes this stuff. Takes the shining edge of my axe, the crash of timber ya just heard, and puts them in a bottle. Calls it prunejack."

"Prunejack!" Grim said. "You can't run a engine on prunejack!"

"With grammer, ya could," Cinquefoil said.

"Prunejack!" said Pettipaw, taking a deep appreciative whiff of the Man's flask. "You can't waste a fine flask of good jackass liquor on a
carl
"

IT TOOK THE BETTER PART OF THE DAY TO MAKE THEIR BURBLING
way down to Old Cat Landing. The character of the land changed, as they descended into the grassy foothills of the Lost Camps beyond the Raucous Mountains. There were fewer ferisher knolls, and the caves of Bowling Men were left far behind. The road widened out again to a kind of highway. It ran, mostly straight, occasionally dodging around a piney hill or barren knob of black oak, through a country of Indian camps and hunters' lodges, of miners' flats, of farms and ranches, of lean-tos and lonely cottages with a pale watching face from the kitchen window. To Ethan's surprise, the dwellers in these habitations were, for the most part, of women and men. There were gold-panners, wolf-trackers and bear-hunters, farmhands and cowboys, freed slaves and Buffalo soldiers, pig-tailed Chinese laborers whose bats and gloves were stamped with the words
PROPERTY OF BIG JIM HILL
. But though the form of these creatures was human, they were not reubens, not at all. They were solid, living creatures, and yet they were not human beings so much as the compounded memories, preserved in the Summerlands like mayflies in amber, of human beings. They were ghosts, shades and reflections. They were lies and legends made flesh. And the greatest of these ghost people were the Big Liars. At one time they had ranged all across this part of the Summerlands, striding a quarter mile in a single step. Now they hung around Old Cat Landing, haunting its bars and brothels. When the Shadowtails showed up on the main street, right by the Jersey Lily saloon, the Liars all came out to laugh.

The street was paved in a mixture of chalk, oystershells, and broken whiskey bottles. You had to watch where you walked.

"So, here they are, then. The saviors of the Summerlands."

It was a large man who said this, bearded, in a vast blue pea coat, with a stocking cap on his head and the stub of a pipe jammed into the corner of his mouth. He carried, slung over his shoulder, a long harpoon, tipped with a glinting barb. The Tall Man with the Harpoon threw back his head and laughed, very carefully, somehow, as if the laughter would not be as humiliating, nor the laugher himself quite so big and imposing, if he did not stop first to throw back his bearded head. They were all large, the men and women who crowded around Skid and the Shadowtails, and one of them was wearing a cowboy hat, with an enormous live rattlesnake twined around his throat like a living necktie. Together with the Man with the Axe, they numbered nine, the seven men as tall as Taffy, the two women nearly so, broad-shouldered and thick-legged and strong. Two of the men and both of the women were dark-skinned, with hands as big as the family Bible that Jennifer T.'s gran Billy Ann kept on the television. One of the black men carried an immense black iron hammer, and his smile though more kindly was no less mocking than that of the man with the pipe.

"Old Ringfinger done said you was a motiey crew," said the Tall Man with the Hammer, peering down at the Shadowtails, "but didn't nobody said you was
this
motley."

With that all nine of the giant people burst into laughter, slapping each other on the back, and spitting foul juices into the street, and exchanging high fives with the man holding the great big Hammer.

"You might be laughing now," Jennifer T. said, and Ethan loved her for it before she even got the rest of the sentence out of her mouth, "but you're going to be
crying
when we get through whupping your fat butts!"

That brought out an even greater explosion of laughter. One of the big white men, a little smaller and fatter than the others, with close-cropped red hair, laughed so hard that he dropped his long pole, fell over, and had to be righted by one of his fellows, a huge ox of a man with a snub nose, beady red eyes, and skin that glinted like polished bronze who carried a huge hammerlike tool, spiked on one side, that they afterward learned was a steelworker's maul.

"Chiron Brown?" Ethan said. "Is he here? Has he been around?"

The Tall Man with the Axe pointed—his index finger as thick and long as one of Cinquefoil's legs—and they turned back to see the old white Cadillac coming down the main street. It was Ringfinger Brown behind the wheel. He was dressed in a green-and-gold suit—green overlaid with a kind of diagonal yellow grid. He eased his old body out of the car and walked right up to Ethan and Jennifer T.

"Well, now," he said. "Well, well, well. Look like old Ringfinger wasn't
entirely
wrong about you two." He chuckled, clearly delighted with himself, as though his failure in scouting Ethan and Jennifer T. had been rankling for a long time. "You done come
far
, come a
long
way. Been playin' halfway good baseball, too, what I hear."

"Been playin all-the-way
losin
' baseball, what we hears," said another of the Tall Men. He was a very dark, very handsome man dressed in a gray-and-white pinstripe suit, with a purple brocade vest, that made Ringfinger's look dull and conservative. From the top of his tooled-leather, Cuban-heeled boot, protruded the horn handle of a very big knife. "Come a
long
way to get they hineys tanned."

"We aren't here to play any stupid baseball," said Spider-Rose.

"We're on our way to Applelawn, so that we can get through to find the Coyote"—she thrust forward the scrunched little ragdoll husk of Nubakaduba—"and get him to turn my brother back into a
baby
!"

The Shadowtails all turned to her, mouths open, eyebrows knit. It sounded like a preposterous idea to Ethan, who had seen Nubakaduba only as a gross little hank of chamois and yarn, and never as a cute, plump, burbling little ferishet whose face lit up every time his sister walked into the room. But more surprising still was the wildly powerful blast of hopefulness that seemed to be behind this strange idea. Spider-Rose had long since won for herself the Shadowtails tide of Most Negative Player.

"And stuff," she finished, blushing a deep peach-flesh gold.

Jennifer T. put her arm around Spider-Rose's shoulder. "You bet we will," she said.

"I'm acutely sorry to disappoint you travelers," said one of the Tall Women, "because you done come so powerful far." She was a wide-built lady with beautiful green eyes and freckled skin, dressed in a pair of vast denim overalls, with a long-barreled rifle slung over her shoulder. "But we are not here to engage in no diamond antics with you, neither. We are here, in fact, to see that you
never get across that there river
"

"And who, I'd like to know," Grim the Giant said, "is fixing to stop us?"

"Annie Christmas," said the woman in the overalls. "And her friends."

They all stepped forward now, the Tall Man with the Axe, the Tall Man with the Hammer, the Tall Man with the Big Maul, the Tall Man with the Harpoon, the Tall Man with the Rattlesnake Necktie, the Tall Man with the Knife in His Boot, The Tall Man with the Pole, and the other Tall Woman, who wore a tight red dress so shiny that it put to shame the slick gray suit of the Man with the Knife in His Boot, and a pair of red shoes whose heels were nearly as high as Spider-Rose herself. Around her neck hung a straight razor on a silver chain.

"These here are my friends," Annie Christmas said. "The Big Liars of Old Cat Landing."

"Yeah? Well, if you're so big and all, why are you so
short
?" said Jennifer T. She went right up to the Tall Man with the Axe and looked him up and down as critically as she examined opposing pitchers before the start of a game. "I've been wanting to ask you that all day. I thought you were supposed to be, like, a
giant lumberjack? Supposed
to, I don't know, supposed to use a whole redwood tree for a toothpick? And Lake Superior for an ice rink? And stuff like that. So, where's the
blue ox
?"

The Tall Man with the Axe rubbed at his gray-blond beard, peering down at Jennifer T. Ethan was astonished to see tears in his eyes. The other Big Liars gathered around him, and the Tall Man with the Hammer put an arm across the Man with the Axe's shoulders. And then the Man with the Axe buried his face in his hands, and sobbed.

"I'm sorry," he said, after a moment, wiping his nose on his sleeve. He tried to gain control of himself, but every time the tears abated somewhat he would let out a heartrending cry of "Babe!" and then start crying all over again. Finally the Man with the Hammer had to lead him away, into the Jersey Lily saloon, with a backward look of reproach over his shoulder at Jennifer T.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to—I didn't know. Did something happen to the ox?"

"What happen to Babe is what happen to all of us," said the Man with the Big Maul. He had a little bit of an accent, it seemed to Ethan, Russian or Polish or something like that. "Look at me. One time, I am big as slagheap. Legs like rolling mills. Heart like Bessemer converter. Now look. Tiny guy. Only six foot six, and shrinking. Use to take bath in blast furnace, melt myself down and pour myself a fresh new body from the ladle. Not no more. Steel mills gone. Everything gone."

"Whaling ships."

"Railroad crews."

"Keel boats."

"Sternwheelers jes' bursting out with pigeons for the pluckin'," said the Man with the Knife in His Boot.

"Not to mention the good old Indian fights," said the Man with the Rattlesnake Tie.

"Yeah, well, we're better off without
that
crap," Jennifer T. said. "Whaling ships, too. Whales are sentient beings, or didn't you know that? They are, like, smarter than people, and they have language, and myths, and histories." She turned on the Tall Man with the Pole, and for all his six-plus feet and considerable bulk, Ethan saw him take a little step backward. "And I don't know what a keel boat is exactly, but I'll bet we're better off without keelboat
men
too. I mean, jeez, it looks like somebody bit your ear off."

The Man with the Pole rubbed at the nub of his left ear tenderly. "Yeah," he said, with a dreamy expression. "Gouged out mah eyeball, too, but Ah stuck hit back in ag'in."

"Er, be all that as it may, Miss Rideout," said Pettipaw, stepping forward now to stand between Jennifer T. and the Man with the Pole, and tugging delicately on one of his whiskers. "While I never had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of the late ox, I do not believe that there is anyone now living in the Summerlands who has not, at one time or another, lamented the passing of the Old Days."

"Yer right, there, Pettipaw," Cinquefoil said. "These is shrunken times, indeed."

"But I confess," the wererat continued, "I do not understand why it is that you fine people believe that allowing Coyote to carry out his intentions will
improve
the lot of us Summerlanders."

There was a silence, and the Big Liars shuffled a little, and shifted back and forth, as if the answer were so obvious that they were embarrassed, for Pettipaw's sake, to have to answer it. Finally the Tall Man with the Harpoon struck a match, and got his pipe lit, and then looked up.

"We don't hope to improve our situation, sir," he said. "We hope to
end
it. We
want
that old Kye-oat to bring the Lodgepole down."

A gull cried, and the air went crackling through the clay pipe, and the cooling engine of Ringfinger Brown's Cadillac ticked like a clock in the sun.

"These-here folks," Ringfinger said. "They been feelin' for a while now like there wasn't much point to it all."

"But they don't get to decide," Jennifer T. said.

"They have no
right
to stop us from crossing that river," Thor said.

"We don't need no right, changeling boy," Annie Christmas said. She pushed back her sleeves, revealing a set of powerfully muscled brown arms. "Not to stop the likes a you."

"There
is
a point," Ethan said, surprising himself a little. The others all turned to look at him. "I mean, okay, I want to find my father. My dad. I need my father, and he needs me." He looked at his watch. It still read Top of the Seventh; then, as he glanced at it, the little triangular arrow flipped over and pointed down. Two innings left before the end. "So, ha, that's a point."