The Knights of the Cornerstone (16 page)

“
Him?
You’re talking to a Knight now.”

He stared at her stupidly for a moment. “Really … you’re a
Knight?”

“What did you expect? A Dame?”

Witty responses flickered in his mind, but he needed a pen to sketch them out. “Another beer?” he said.

“No, thanks. I might get silly.”

“How am I going to pry anything out of you if you don’t get silly?”

“
Pry something out of me?
Is that some kind of romantic euphemism?”

“My favorite romantic euphemism is ‘pitching woo,’” he said evasively. “That was my mother’s term. You can’t use ‘making love’ in that sense anymore.” He realized he was blushing.

“Are you any good at it?” She smiled at him, putting him on the spot.

“At
what
?” he asked. It sounded a little bit like a brazen overture to him, which was another of his mother’s terms.

“At pitching woo,” she said. “You seem a little rusty at it, like the Tin Man. I sense a tragedy involving a Munch-kin maiden.” She smiled at him, but she seemed to be serious. “Are you waiting for someone to pick up an oilcan?”

He searched his mind for something to say, but came up absolutely empty. He couldn’t remember ever having run into a woman much more forthright. The waiter appeared, setting plates of apple pie and ice cream on the table, which they hadn’t ordered.

“On the house,” he said, and moved away.

“Heck of a nice place, New Cyprus,” Calvin said. “Everyone’s got your best interests in mind.”

“Remember that,” Donna said. “Now I’ve lost track of what I was saying.”

“You accused me of being rusted,” he said, throwing caution to the wind. “There’re things that can do that to you, I guess. This one’s name was Elaine.”

“Elaine—very romantic name. You still think about her?”

“Not too often these days.”

“There’s nothing wrong with thinking about her. What’s the value in having a disposable past?”

He shrugged, and they sat in silence for a moment. Then she asked, “What were you doing up there alone, anyway? At the quarry.”

“Nothing, really. Just taking a look around.”

“It probably wasn’t smart. What possessed you?”

“Just curious, really.”

“Curious about what? You said you wanted to talk to a Knight, and now you’re talking to one, and she’s been plied with drink. All of a sudden you’ve got nothing to ask?”

“All right,” he said. “Here’s one for you. The last couple of nights when I was falling asleep I thought I heard a pounding noise, like someone hammering on stone. Lamar Morris at the bookshop over in Bullhead City had told me about that—that it came from up in the quarry. Maybe the conversation put the idea in my head, and then I just dreamed it or something, although it didn’t seem like a dream.”

“It wasn’t,” she said.

“So what is it? Ghosts?”

“Why not? You don’t believe in ghosts? You’re okay with space aliens but you draw the line at ghosts?”

“Do
you
think it’s ghosts?” Calvin asked.

“Maybe.”

“Go ahead. Tell me. I’m not in the mood to ridicule anyone.”

“I’ll tell you about something that happened to me about a month ago. I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know what time it was—late, though. Past midnight. I was lying there in bed trying to figure out whether to get up and work for a while, or shut my eyes again, when I heard a kind of clanking outside, and voices talking, really low. New Cyprus is maybe the safest place on earth, but it creeped me out a little bit, which made me kind of mad.”

“It made you
mad?
“

“At myself. I just
hate
fear. I just want to poke it in the eye, you know what I mean?”

“Sure,” he said. “Me, too. Fear lives in fear of Calvin Bryson. You can ask anyone. So who was it outside the trailer?”

“I don’t know, really. I looked out the window, and there were half a dozen men walking across the park in the shadows, carrying tools. They were nobody I recognized, which wasn’t right, since I’ve seen pretty much everybody in New Cyprus about a thousand times. And they were dressed in antique clothes, too, like they were going to a costume party as miners or something.”

“Maybe they were,” Calvin said.

“Except they were transparent. They walked straight through a picnic table and a barbecue without slowing down. Then they walked into a patch of moonlight and disappeared entirely, and then I saw them again farther on, in the shadows again.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it. I asked my grandmother about it, and she wasn’t surprised at all. Her idea is that there are things about New Cyprus that … interfere with
time
. That’s how she put it.”

“So you think you were looking at something that
happened in the past—that you were seeing some kind of temporal discontinuity?”

‘That’s very fancy. Now you’re talking like you
earned
that degree.”

“But that
is
what you’re talking about?” Calvin said.

“I guess it is. Turns out my grandmother was right. Everyone in New Cyprus has stories to tell. If you want to call these things ghosts, then there’re more dead people walking around New Cyprus than live people. We’re thinking of giving them a day-old breakfast discount at the Cozy Diner. Yesterday’s food for yesterday’s people.”

She smiled at him, but he knew she was serious. All of this was serious. But what did that mean to Aim? How serious was
he?

The waiter passed by just then, carrying a load of plates. “Coffee?” he asked.

“Not me,” Donna said. “I’m done.”

“Me, too,” Calvin told him. “I guess we’ll want the check.” The waiter nodded and moved off.

“We should get back,” she said. “In order to show your uncle the photo.” She had printed out the results of Calvin’s spy work on the equipment in her mobile home—half a dozen enlarged photos of the truck and the littered work site.

When the check arrived, Calvin pulled out his uncle’s eighty dollars and handed it to the waiter. It covered the tip and all. He didn’t have to add a dime. Donna, however, fished her wallet out of her bag and tried to hand him forty dollars.

“The Lymons’ treat,” he said. “My uncle gave me the eighty bucks.”

“All right,” she said, putting the money away. “Let’s go thank him.”

They went out into the warm night and walked back toward the trailer park, both of them looking up into the starry sky. With a little more tilt, the Little Dipper would spill out an ocean of starlight, or whatever it was full of.

“I read that the cavemen used to think the stars were little lanterns burning in the sky,” Donna said.

“The cavemen had lanterns?”

“Made out of pumpkins.”

“I like that,” Calvin said. “A sky full of jack-o’-lanterns. Do you think they were right?”

“Even a caveman can’t be wrong all the time,” she told him.

The park was settling down for the night, but there were still people out and about, and even in the lamp-lit evening Calvin noticed the winks and smiles. Did Donna notice the winks and smiles? He glanced at her, but she looked away to say hello to an old woman who was sprinkling her flowerbed. The woman said hello back, and Calvin could see that she was checking him out, maybe wondering if he was good enough for their girl Donna. Was he? Did it matter? Was all of this just water under the bridge? They walked along in silence, and he could see the lights of Chez Lymon coming up on the port bow. Suddenly he wanted the moment to last, to be able to walk around forever under the stars on this warm desert evening. “Oilcan,” he said in a squeaky voice. Donna laughed.

He had never been as happy as he was now, and he was on the verge of saying so when Donna pointed and said, “What happened to your
car
?” It sat in the drive, looking strangely mottled. At first he thought that the cottonwoods were painting it with weird moon shadows, but then he realized that he was looking at dents. Someone had hammered the crap out of it—with boulders, apparently. When
they got closer he saw that the rear windows were pulverized, and the backseat was covered with glass.

“Wow,” Donna said, gaping at it.

“Wow, indeed,” Calvin said. There wasn’t a door panel left that wasn’t dented in three or four places. The trunk had been cratered, and the hood, too. The rear bumper was smashed inward, which would have taken some work. They had run into it! Of course. The front windows were intact, and so were the tires, which wasn’t surprising. The car had to be roadworthy day after tomorrow so that Calvin could keep his appointment at the Gas’n’Go in order to sell the veil to Postum for a bag full of kapok. “What’s my insurance man going to make of this?”

“Tell him you were driving through the desert and the car was caught in a meteor shower.”

He stared at her for the moment it took for his sense of humor to switch back in. “Looks like one of the meteors is still inside,” he said, pointing through the shattered rear window at a head-size rock on the seat.

“We found it like that,” his uncle said, having come out onto the porch. “Your men were nowhere around. No sign of them, although there was broken glass and pieces of metal on the shoulder a few miles up the road, like they ran into something when they went out of control. We found your keys with the metal detector and drove her back down. It’s a mess, but it runs like a top.”

“Thanks,” Calvin said. “That’s good news.” He kept any irony out of his voice. There was no use complaining. What had happened to his car had happened to his car, and it could be that they had taken the time to pound it to pieces because he had taken the time to roll
their
car down the hill. Too bad it hadn’t gone off a cliff. …

“You two have a good meal?” Lymon asked. “Nice chat?”

“Yes, we did,” Donna told him. “We talked about astronomy. Thanks for dinner, by the way. Calvin told me that it was your treat.”

“My pleasure,” he said.

“Here you go,” she said, handing Calvin the photos. “I’m going to call it a night. I’ve got some work to catch up on.”

“I’ll just step inside,” Lymon told them, taking the photos out of Calvin’s hand and heading in. “You two want a moment alone.”

That’s awkward
, Calvin thought, watching the door whisper shut. “That was easily the most enjoyable dinner I’ve had in years,” he said woodenly. “The food was good, but it’s the company I’m talking about.”

“Me, too,” she said. “Tomorrow morning, then?”

“Tomorrow morning?”

“You said you were coming in for the Million-Dollar Plate.”

“That’s right, I did. It’s a date.”

“I’ll see you then,” she said, casting him a big smile.

“You need a walk home?”

“This is New Cyprus. Nobody needs an escort in New Cyprus.” She leaned forward and kissed him, and he nearly lost his balance. “Maybe we can look for that oilcan sometime. See you in the morning.” And then she was gone, fading into the darkness down the driveway. He stood watching for a moment, took another long look at the stars, and went inside.

He found Miles Taber standing in the living room with Uncle Lymon, Taber squinting at a photo through Lymon’s big magnifying glass. Lymon was sitting on the couch, looking as if gravity were asleep on his shoulders. “Blasting, core drilling, wells, and excavation,” he read. “Beamon Construction Services, Needles.”

“Ned stinking Beamon
,” Lymon said. “He’s a hoser of the first water. If there was any justice in the world he’d have blown himself up by now. Hoisted himself on his own petard.”

“Well, there isn’t any justice in the world,” Taber told him. “That’s why they call it ‘the world.’ It’s what men sell their souls for. There’ll be justice enough for all of us in the hereafter, and don’t we hope there’re no surprises in store for us there.”

“Amen to that,” Lymon said, sounding oddly serious. “It’s obvious that they’re getting set to blast.”

Taber set down the magnifying glass and looked hard at Lymon. “You don’t look too good,” he said. “Worse than this morning. You aren’t keeping any secrets, are you? You sneaking over to the medical center when you make those runs into Bullhead City?”

“No,” Lymon said. “I haven’t seen anyone except Doc Hoyle in the past ten years. He says I’m as fit as a draft horse. I’ve got a touch of the bug, that’s all.” He started to get up, then sat back down, then made a bigger effort, moving into the kitchen in a sort of headlong way. Taber looked at Calvin and shook his head doubtfully. After a moment Lymon came back in with three grape sodas and handed them out. “Cal knows all about the veil,” he said to Taber. “It’s no secret to anyone by now. Lamar Morris knew about it, too.”

“Good for Cal. I don’t know whether it’ll be good for Lamar.”

“What are they going to blow up?” Calvin asked.

“Probably that heap of rock where they’ve been messing around,” Taber told him.

“Just for the heck of it? They’re into explosions?” After a period of silence, Calvin asked, “None of my business?”

“Well,” Taber said, “not strictly speaking. Sorry to put it that way, especially after they worked your car over, but …”

“I’m okay with that,” Calvin said. “No need to explain. I think I know anyway. Morris tried to talk me into taking some pictures of anything that might be construed to be a passage or a tunnel—some secret way that they used to get the stones down into New Cyprus without hauling them down the road.”

“Why don’t we just invite Lamar Morris into the club?” Taber asked. “Satisfy his damned curiosity.”

“He’d turn us down,” Lymon told him. “He’s like his old man. He’d rather stay on the outside so that he can write about it.” Then to Calvin he said, “Postum and his crowd are maneuvering to open up New Cyprus—jockeying for position. You and I talked a little about their activities back in the early fifties. They pretty much fell apart for a time after that, but they’ve
regrouped
, you might say. We’re not sure what they intend—how serious they are.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Calvin told him. “Open up New Cyprus?”

“We think they’re fixing to sack the town,” Taber said. “And just in case it’s true, we’re fixing not to let it happen. Greed has a lot to do with it, like it always does.”