The Knights of the Cornerstone (20 page)

“So you didn’t read the book? You only watched the movie?”

“I
might
read the books now that I know they’ve got a ship in them called
Hoptoad
. I remember she was always going on about her father coming home to take her away to some tropical island. …”

“Yeah,” she said. “I remember that, too.” She looked away.

It came to him after a moment that the statement had apparently killed the conversation. “Sorry,” he said. “I think I said something I shouldn’t have.”

“I didn’t know my father or mother anyway. Just my grandparents. When I was little, though, I used to dream, you know, that my father was out there somewhere, and that he’d come home one day. Then—I don’t know, maybe when I was nine or ten—I figured out that dreams are for babies. I quit reading
The Velveteen Rabbit
, too. I got over it, though.”

“I guess I know what you mean,” he said. “Sooner or later you get over it.”

“You mean losing the love of your life?”

“The love of my life? I’m not dead yet,” he said. “But, yeah, something like that. What do you say we paint ‘Hoptoad’ on the side of the Boston Whaler?”

“We don’t have paint.”

“I’ve got a felt marker,” he said. “Indelible ink.” He stuck the base of his champagne glass under the river sand and picked up his book bag. “I brought some cartoons,”
he said. “I thought maybe I’d show you a couple. I mean, they’re maybe not all that funny, but …”

“What if they
are
funny? What if you’re wrong about it? What if you’re wrong about all kinds of things? Like what if you’re actually Mr. Wonderful but this Elaine woman couldn’t see it? She made you miserable, and then you let yourself get into the habit of being miserable and turned yourself into a mope. You know why I brought you out here today?”

“Tell me,” he said.

“That’s what I’m doing. What I’m telling you is that we’re done with Elaine. She just got written out of the script. Is that all right with you?”

“Absolutely,” he said.

“Then show me one of your cartoons, and
I’ll
tell you whether it’s funny or not, and if I say it’s funny, then it’s funny. And quit looking like you’re going to faint.”

“I’m not going to
faint
,” he said, staring at her. She actually looked angry. If he had a chance to draw the cartoon, it would be a picture of both of them wearing leopard-skin garments. She’d be wearing the Pippi braids and carrying a club, dragging him off toward a cave, and he’d have a lump on his head. Over the cave door it would read “Vena Vena Cava.” It would be a heart-shaped door. He started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Nothing. I can’t tell you.” He laughed again.

“I’ll hurt you,” she said.

“Later,” he said. “I’ll tell you later, and then you can hurt me. Here …” He took his sketchbook out of his book bag and opened it at random, handing it to her. It was the cartoon of the lunatic doctors in the doorway.

“That’s the one,’” she read, apparently baffled. “I don’t get it.” She looked at him blankly.

His heart sank. “Well, I guess I wanted to imply that …”

“You’re
so
easy,” she said. “Okay, it’s funny. It really is. What do you do with these, mail them out to magazines?”

“Sometimes, I guess.”

“Sometimes? Like you did it once?”

“Maybe two or three times. Take a look at this.” He flipped back a couple of pages to a drawing of a sheep floating through space. The caption read “To boldly go where no sheep has gone before.” “What do you think?” he asked.

“Okay, this time I really don’t get it. Is this one of your Martian things? The brothers upstairs, or whatever it was? The sheep upstairs?”

“No! Are you kidding? It’s a line from
Star Trek!”

“Sheep?”

“In
Star Trek
it was people—mankind. Look at this one.” He turned the page. This time the sheep was climbing a pyramid. On the adjacent page the same sheep was swimming under the ocean. There was a jellyfish going past and a starfish on a rock.

“I’m not sure ‘to boldly go’ sounds right. I’d write, ‘to go boldly.’”

“Right. Me, too. It’s a split infinitive. But you
must
have seen
Star Trek
at least once or twice. …”

“I don’t think so. But I’m absolutely certain that if I
had
seen it I’d be laughing like crazy. I swear it.”

“Don’t swear it if you don’t mean it,” he said, giving her a hard look.

She nodded her head seriously. “I
do
mean it,” she said. “Under those other circumstances I’d be laughing. Hey,
here’s one for you. You could draw a cartoon for it. What happened when the boardinghouse exploded?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Roomers were flying! That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You should be the cartoonist.”

“Except I didn’t make it up. It’s about a hundred years old. I heard it from Miles.”

“Okay, I’m going to show you my most recent.”

“Not another drawing of a sheep?”

“No. This is an Attila the Hun gag. Check this out.” He flipped to the back of the book, grinning despite himself. She looked at the sketch—a picture of a perfectly round, perfectly flat man with a tiny little helmet on, holding a bottle that said “Mead” on it. Next to him stood a woman who looked like a cinnamon roll. The caption read ‘Tortilla the Hun and his Honey Bun.” He nodded at Donna. “Eh?” he said. “Is that funny, or what?”

For a moment she stared at him poker-faced, but she apparently couldn’t keep it up, and she started laughing. Then she leaned forward and kissed him. He was silenced for a moment, and then realized that he was smiling stupidly at her, and that she knew she had struck him dumb. “We haven’t had enough champagne yet to …”

“No. So it’s not the liquor talking.”

“Speaking of the liquor talking, did you know that Attila the Hun drank himself to death on his wedding night?”

“What a guy,” she said. “I bet it made his bride happy, though. Hey! I bet he drank mead! That explains the bottle.”

“And the ‘honey bun’ in a way. Sort of.”

“I get it—mead, honey wine. That’s
so
obscure. …” she said doubtfully.

“Yeah, but that’s all right. People don’t have to get the whole thing.”

“God knows that’s true. Lots of people
never
get the whole thing. Why don’t you put your sketchbook back into the bag? Your cartoons are really funny, by the way.”

“Sure,” he said. “Thanks.” He got up and put the bag back into the Whaler. When he turned around he saw that her chair was empty and that she had spread a big beach towel down on the sand and was sitting on it.

“Either you pitch some woo at me or I’m going to pitch you into the river and steal your cartoons,” she said. “It’s your choice.”

“Give me a moment to decide,” he said.

T
hey ran the Whaler up to the dam, past the casinos and ferry docks, and then turned around and headed back downriver toward New Cyprus, catching up with and passing the New Cyprus ferry not far from home. His aunt was on board the ferry, with her back to them, and he saw Betty Jessup turn to say something to her. Nettie swung around and shaded her eyes, spotted the Whaler, and waved. He waved back. It was a solidly good thing, seeing Nettie out on the river.

There was a wind coming up, but it seemed to cool things, like a trade wind, and he realized that for ten cents he’d be happy simply staying on the river, stopping here and there to launch the lawn chairs, watching the stars come out over the hills, maybe, and returning to their cove in the shelter of the Dead Mountains to sleep under the stars. Right now it sounded like the plan of a lifetime to him—a long lifetime. He looked at Donna, whose hair caught the
sunshine and seemed to flare up.
Ideally a
really
long lifetime
, he thought.

A crowd of people in a speedboat blasted past them heading upriver toward the dam, towing two children on big, flashy, canvas-covered inner tubes. He waved at the people in the boat, and they waved back cheerfully, and he wished at that moment that he could wave at the whole wide world, but instead he waved at the children on the tubes, one of whom, a little boy of maybe five or six, let go with one hand to return the wave, but immediately flew off the tube and went cartwheeling away across the water. Calvin turned to watch, feeling like a criminal as the speedboat slowed down to rescue the victim.
Heck
, he thought,
every silver cloud …

He watched New Cyprus approaching on the right. Donna swung the Whaler into the bay, cutting the engine way back, the boat sort of ghosting along over the smooth water. The fisherman was still out there, fifty yards downstream from where he’d been earlier, his line still slack. He apparently had all the patience in the world. He tilted his head back to take a drink of something, and just at that moment there was the gurgling roar of an approaching boat, which angled out away from the shore where it had apparently been hidden by cottonwoods—very near his uncle and aunt’s house.

Calvin watched it swerve tightly around the end of the ferry dock and shoot downriver past the fisherman, passing so close that from Calvin’s perspective it looked like they had run him right down. But then he saw that they hadn’t. The fisherman stood up and shook his fist, and then grabbed on to the edge of the boat for balance as it rocked back and forth in the wake.

Drunks
, Calvin thought,
out having a little fun
, but suddenly Donna gunned it, and they were shooting in toward Taber’s dock at warp speed. She throttled down again at the last moment, backing water, and bumped softly against the dock, cutting the engine. “Tie it up!” she shouted, and headed up the dock at a run toward the house. The ferry came in behind them, moving strangely fast toward the dock on the island, and he had no sooner finished putting a couple of loops of line over the bollard than his cell phone rang, surprising him. He dug it out of his book bag and flipped it open, glancing at the long-distance number, which he didn’t recognize. A man was already talking, although about what Calvin had no idea. Then he realized it was Warren Hosmer, calling out of the blue like God in the Old Testament. “Sorry?” Calvin asked. “I didn’t hear that.”

“I said they
got him.”

“They got
who
?” Calvin thought about the man in the rowboat, but why would Hosmer … ?

“Lymon
,” Hosmer said.
“They got Lymon
. Are you listening now, or should I get out the bullhorn? Betty Jessup rang through to me twenty seconds ago. Nettie went into town and left Al resting out on the river, in one of those chairs they have. When the ferry was coming back down just now, Betty caught sight of a boat down there along the shore—must have been a jet boat, because it came right out of shallow water, moving fast. They snatched him from right out behind the house. It was a bold damn stroke. They headed back downriver toward Needles, and
I mean just now
. Betty saw the whole thing.”

“Good God,” Calvin said. “I saw it, too. What should
I
do? Donna went up to tell Miles.”

“I don’t know any Donna,” Hosmer said. “So what you’re saying conveys no meaning to my mind. Pipe down for a moment and listen to me. There’s only one thing
to
do—
get him back
. They’ll want the veil—maybe they already have it—but don’t be fooled. That’ll just be the start of it. What they really want is the whole nine yards, the whole ball of wax, the enchilada, and they mean to get it this time. They’ll ask for a ransom, but they won’t play ball once you throw it to them. They’ll knock it right back at you and ask you to buy another round, right up to last call, because they’re lying sacks of crap, every man jack of them. You hear what I’m saying? This is
match point
we’re talking about. Do what you’ve got to do, Cal. You’re on the payroll. Your time has come.”

W
hat do you think, Calvin?” his aunt asked him after Taber said he was stumped. “What would you have us do?” They were sitting in the Temple Bar, the swamp cooler sounding loud in the silence.

“I’ve got no experience with this kind of thing,” Calvin said. “I didn’t even know it went on in the world.”

“Well, it does,” Taber told him. “All kinds of things go on in this part of the world. What did the boat look like?”

“It was blue or purple. Metal-flake, from the way the sun was shining off it.”

“Yes, that’s right,” his aunt said. “Betty saw a name on the back. Looked like ‘paint’ or something.”

“Painted Lady
,” Calvin said. “I got the second word when they buzzed that fisherman. Maybe we can find the name of the boat owner by tracking the name of the boat.”

“A boat doesn’t have to have a name,” Taber said, “so there’s no reason its name would be registered. We’d want the license number on the side, which we don’t have. We can ask around easy enough. It’s
got
to be a local, probably out of Needles. We have to find out why they took him—what they want.”

“Obviously it’s the veil,” Calvin said. “That’s what Hosmer told me, anyway. I don’t know why they had to snatch Uncle Lymon, though, after Bob Postum offered me a bribe to deliver it out at the Gas’n’Go tomorrow. Why couldn’t he wait a day?”