The Masters of Atlantis (25 page)

The clouds were low and heavy. Ghostly white hogs rooted in the fields. The farmers of America, Babcock noticed, had stopped wearing straw hats, overalls and high-top shoes, and had gone over to the trucker's uniform of baseball cap, tight jeans and cowboy boots, this outfit having the raffish air of the pool hall. Ed said he had weighed 112 pounds in the third grade, and then in the fourth grade 130 pounds. “I was a little pink pig in grade school.” He said Danny had written more than three hundred songs in several three-ring notebooks that he kept under lock and key with his Undertaker books.

At Ed's insistence they stopped at motels with marquees boasting the dreaded Live Entertainment, with howling young demons up on the bandstand playing the amplified music of Hell. Ed showed his doctor's note to waitresses and bartenders. He slapped his fingers to the rhythm of the music on the plastic pad at the edge of the bar. He fondled the pad too but Babcock had already made him surrender his razor blades. Late on Saturday night in the room he watched the long string of football scores on television and cried out, “God almighty!” and “Did you see that!” and fell back on the bed in amazement over such unexceptional scores as 13 to 7 and 10 to 0, from games involving obscure college teams he could have known nothing about. Over breakfast, which had very likely been prepared in aluminum cookware, Babcock had to listen to Ed read aloud from the two features he always sought out in a newspaper, “TV Mailbag” and “On This Day in History.”

They passed through Texarkana at night. Babcock said, “Now we're in Texas.”

“Which lane do I get in, Skipper?”

“I'll let you know in plenty of time, Ed. We still have about six hundred miles to go.”

From the radio there came music and news. Ed talked steadily against this flow. He said he had been a Golden Gloves champion of Nebraska and that plain old Coca-Cola was the best thing to use in wiping bugs off a windshield. He said he had rather have a man coming at him with a gun than a knife. Vinyl repair had never really interested him but nursing school took too long, not to mention medical school, which went on for years. He wouldn't mind going to that school for circus clowns down in Florida or running the pony ride at a kiddieland zoo or working in a crime lab. He enjoyed his work as an investigator for Mr. Jimmerson, protecting him from creeps who would disturb his naps and waste his time, and from gangsters who wanted to kidnap him or rub him out, but what he really liked was the screech of the machine shop. What he really wanted to do was wear goggles and stand over a grinding wheel, grinding metal objects down to nearly nothing in a fountain of sparks. If he ever got his hands on any red rubies or won a big lump of money in a lottery he would use it to help poor people instead of throwing it away on women and Jeeps the way so many people did. The last time he had gone home his mother had chased him out of the yard with a Weed-Eater. Texas looked okay so far. It looked better than Chicago. He had never liked Chicago. “Downtown there at night,” he said, “I was afraid every minute that some headhunter with a sock over his head was going to jump out at me with a knife and say, ‘Boola magoola!'”

Babcock lay in a crouch against the door, limp, feigning sleep, numb under the pounding of Ed's conversation and the strain of looking for Skelly stations. It was another TKO for the golden gloves of Ed. But now at last the sun was out and the weather become mild. Now they could have the windows down. The skies of Texas opened up before them with glorious pink streamers that converged to a point over the horizon. Small birds were diving on a big soaring bird, harrying him.

The trip was tiring and a plunge into the unknown but Babcock found it pleasant to speculate on how future chroniclers of the Gnomon Society would deal with him and his role in this historic flight south. Then not so pleasant. What if they saw no reason to deal with him at all? It was Popper who was traveling with the Master and the
Codex Pappus
, while he, Maurice Babcock, Keeper of the Plumes, straggled along behind in the baggage cart with Ed, who at this moment was eating with hoggish noises a giant peanut log. Nandor dissembling again?

Babcock felt no lift. He felt no access of vigor or courage or understanding. If the Telluric Currents were now rising in Texas then they must be rising still farther south. He felt if anything a slight drain. His socks had collapsed too, in a lifeless heap around his ankles, and his clothes seemed to be falling apart.

They made one more overnight stop, at a small motel with a children's wading pool, which Ed soon cleared with his rubber snake and his violent splashing. He called out repeatedly for Babcock to watch this antic or that one. By midafternoon of the following day they were passing through the onion farms of the Rio Grande Valley, this place of winter crops, although to Babcock's eye it was less a valley, in the sense of a riverine depression, than a broad coastal plain. Here, Popper claimed, the Society would bloom anew. It would take hold in this warm soil and swell in the sun like a melon.

The expressway came to an end in downtown Brownsville, near the river, which was the border. Ed was preoccupied. He was comparing a government hospital he had just seen with the ones he had known up North.

Babcock said, “Don't get on that bridge, Ed.”

Ed drove onto the international bridge and went past the toll booth into Mexico. Learning of his mistake, he made a U-turn in Matamoros and was back in the United States within a minute or so. Still, technically, they had been in Mexico with their truck, and a customs agent ordered them to unload everything for contraband inspection. Every article must be turned out, down to the last wad of newspaper in the last teacup. The job fell to Babcock, Ed being unable to help. Night came. It was under the floodlights that Babcock finally got everything back in the truck, minus the Master's badger-hair shaving brush, this having been seized as a suspected source of some foreign hair disease. Twice in a matter of hours Babcock had moved more than a ton of
Hoosier Wizards
.

He had never known such fatigue. He was concerned too about the late arrival. It was almost midnight before they found La Coma and the Moaler estate, long past the bedtime of elderly Gnomons. There it was at last, the Moaler mailbox, next to the golf course. On that point, at least, Popper had told the truth. But Babcock need not have worried about the late hour. Lights were still burning in the Great Moaler Hall of Gnomons.

“BUT
ROBBED
?” said Popper. “No, I don't think so. A bank is robbed, Babcock. A temple is plundered or looted. Just as a resignation is tendered, a complaint lodged, charges preferred. Verbs are our action words. You, a secretary of all people, should see to it that your verb always matches up nicely with your—the other thing. You should also try to learn a new word every day and then use it in conversation to fix it in your head.”

“Looted then. Or pillaged or sacked, if you like.”

Babcock could not understand why his arrival and his dramatic account of the last hours of the Temple should meet with such indifference. Indiana, it seemed, had been shaken off and the new life in Texas begun in earnest. They listened hardly at all—Popper, Mr. Jimmerson and Mr. Moaler, he a little man with brick-red face and a full head of fluffy white hair that looked highly flammable. He sat in a wheelchair. He was not yet wearing his Poma. On his dangling feet he wore what appeared to be Buster Brown scout shoes, size five, with bits of string molded into the rubber soles. The Master himself was even less attentive than usual. He had received the silver bowl and the yellow sash, recovered from the Inner Hall at such risk, with no sign of recognition. From time to time he sneaked a look at Babcock, as though having trouble placing him.

Popper said, “But what happened to your clothes, Babcock? You come here in your rags to make your report. It doesn't show much respect for the Master or Mr. Moaler. Have you and Ed been drinking on the road?”

“No. I don't know what happened.”

Popper raised a hand. “Later, please. We can't take up any more time with that now. A political problem has come up and we can't sit around here all night discussing the failure of your buttons and zippers.”

They sat in a long, low room of plastic couches and Mexican blankets and dull hues, a room less grand than the Red Room but cleaner and more fragrant, and more comfortable too in its snug way. The Great Moaler Hall was in fact a mobile home. It was a big one, some seventy feet long, with three bedrooms, but it was still a trailer with a flimsy aircraft door and not at all the great manor house that Babcock had been led to expect.

The place was cluttered with Mexican curios made of shells, stones, bones, feathers and corn shucks. There was an inflated plastic globe of the earth, which Mr. Moaler sometimes held in his lap. Atop a bookcase there was a stuffed bobcat. On the floor by Mr. Moaler's wheelchair there sat what Babcock took at first to be a stuffed dog, a small white terrier sitting in the sphinx position, head erect, paws forward, not blinking or moving. A beloved pet preserved? Texas humor? What? Then the dog turned his head. He was alive, a little dog grown unnaturally fat from some sex operation, which had also softened his nature. His name was Sweet Boy.

The guest house was compatible with the Great Hall in both form and scale. It was another, older, smaller trailer, with its own rectangular charm, set back in a thicket of thorny shrubs. Ed was there now having a late supper in the company of Maceo, Esteban and Lázaro. Lázaro was Mr. Moaler's cook and driver. Babcock did not know it yet but he too was to eat there and bunk there with the domestic staff. Farther back in that same thicket there was a third trailer, older and smaller still, where Teresita lived. She was Mr. Moaler's housekeeper, now largely retired.

There were formal expressions of regret all around about the death of the Temple, as though for some distant historical calamity, but nothing in the way of heartfelt sorrow. Popper dismissed the subject. “Well, we can't take up any more time with that tonight.” He held up the registered letter. “This is the thing we must deal with now.”

There was some confusion over the letter. The Master had taken it into his head that it was an invitation for him to address a session of the Texas legislature. He wished to honor that invitation. But this was a gross misreading of the letter, Popper explained to him again, watching his face all the while for some flicker of understanding, and in any case it would be demeaning for the Master of Gnomons to jump, as it were, whenever these politicos snapped their fingers.

The letter was not quite a subpoena but it was a very firm request, all but commanding “Lamar or James Lee ‘Jimbo' Jimmerson and Austin Popper alias Wally Wilson of the Gnolon Society” to appear at a hearing of the Churton Committee on the following Friday in Austin. Senator Churton sought their help as he and his committee members looked into the recent infestation of the state by various cults, sects, communes, cells, covens, nature tribes and secret societies, their aim being to identify the more pernicious ones, those disruptive of public order, those who fleeced the elderly and those who made extravagant claims to truth and authority, preying on the senile, the college students and other credulous and weak-headed elements of society.

Mr. Moaler urged defiance. “Big Boy is behind this,” he said. “This is his way of getting back at me for taking you in. He wants those two parking lots of mine downtown. He thinks I don't have enough sense to run my own business. If it was me I would just wad that letter up and throw it in a trash can.”

Popper said, “Does Big Boy know anything that might embarrass us?”

“He knows nothing. He doesn't even know that the new cycle has begun. Big Boy knows no more about Gnomonism than”—Mr. Moaler looked around for a good example of Hermetic ignorance—“than Sweet Boy here does.”

Mr. Jimmerson said, “But I don't mind answering their questions. I don't see why you and Morehead are making such a fuss, Austin. You know I have nothing in my personal life to hide. I think they are showing great consideration in allowing me to air my views there in the capital.”

“They don't want to hear your views, sir, they want your hide. These people are not friendly, they're hostile. I'm thinking about your dignity. I just don't think there's any place for the Master of Gnomons in a vulgar political scrap.”

Mr. Moaler said, “If it was me, Lamar, I would tell Churton and Big Boy and that whole gang up there to mind their own beeswax.”

Popper thought he saw a third way. They could comply with the summons and at the same time spare the Master from an ugly political confrontation. Following the example of Ed, with his light-duty medical certificate, they could get a note from some medico excusing Mr. Jimmerson on the grounds of ill health. He, Popper, could go alone to the hearing and testify. To capture their hearts? No, that would be asking too much. But he might fend them off. He knew enough to string the senators along, and if they began to probe in delicate areas, then he, as a mere spokesman, could plead ignorance of details. It seemed much the best way to go.

IT WAS late on Friday night when Popper was called to come forward and be sworn. The big hearing room with its dark wood and high windows had a desolate air. This was the tattered end of the Churton investigation. The television people had left with their blazing lights, but still the room was too warm. Only a handful of spectators remained. The panel of a dozen senators had dwindled down to just three—Churton, Rey and Gammage—all in shirt sleeves. From their raised platform they looked down on Popper with fatigue and dull disapproval.

Senator Churton, the chairman, was a thin, haggard man who smoked cigarettes and made impatient gestures with his gavel. Behind him on a stool sat Senator Junior Moaler, a big man, whose face, like his father's, was congested with blood. There was little further resemblance. Junior was a much bigger man. Here the pygmoid strain in the Moaler blood had skipped a generation. It was Junior, untroubled heir to the Moaler property until this Gnolon band had come along and settled in on his father, who had persuaded the committee to pencil in Jimmerson and Popper as last-minute additions to the witness list, to summon them and show them up for sponges and charlatans. Junior sat anxious on his campstool with a box of papers on his knees, ready to prompt the examiners with questions and feed them damaging material.