Mastodonia (21 page)

“This will give us a fresh headline,” said Herb.

I told him what he could do with his fresh headline. I called him a ghoul. I rescued the bottle we hadn't used for Hiram and went into Ben's office, where I worked on the bottle morosely. The drinking didn't help. I didn't even get a buzz on.

I phoned Courtney and told him what had happened. For a long time after I had finished, there was a silence on his end of the line. Then he asked, “He's going to be all right, isn't he?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'm waiting to hear.”

“Hiram is the one who talks to Catface, isn't he?”

“That's right.”

“Look, Asa, in a few days, Safari will be there to go into the Cretaceous. Is there anything that can be done? The time roads, I suppose, aren't open yet.”

“I'll try to talk with Catface,” I said. “He can hear what I say, but I can't hear what he says. He can't answer back.”

“But you'll try?”

“I'll try,” I told him.

“I'll be seeing you in a few days. That senator I was telling you about—he wants to talk with you. Not with me, with you. I'll bring him out.”

I didn't ask him if he had any idea what the senator wanted. I didn't give a damn.

“If Hiram doesn't make it,” I said, “there's no use bringing anyone. If that happens, we're dead. You know that, don't you?”

“I understand,” he said.

He sounded sad about it.

Herb brought me some sandwiches and coffee. There had been no word from Rila or Ben. We talked for a while and then I went out the back door. Bowser was waiting for me and we walked across the lawn to the house. We sat on the back steps, Bowser close beside me. He knew there was something wrong and was trying to comfort me.

The barn still stood, the lopsided door hanging crookedly on its hinges. The chicken house was the same as ever and the hens were still there, clucking and scratching about the yard. The rosebush stood at the corner of the chicken house—the rosebush where I had seen Catface looking out at me when I had gone out to get the fox and, instead, had walked into the Pleistocene.

That much was familiar, but little else was. The strangeness of the rest of it seemed to make the barn, the chicken house, the rosebush unfamiliar, too. The fence stood high and spidery and inside the fence humped the strangeness of the floodlights. Guards walked along the fence and outside of it were clustered knots of people. They were still coming to stand and gawk at us. I wondered why they continued to come. Certainly, there was nothing to be seen.

I stroked Bowser's head, talking to him. “You remember what it was like, Bowser, don't you? How you'd go to dig out a woodchuck and I had to bring you home. How we'd go in the evening to shut the chicken house. How Hiram would come to visit you almost every day. That front lawn robin.”

I wondered if the robin was still there, but didn't go to look. I was afraid I wouldn't find him.

I got up from the steps and went into the house, holding the door so Bowser could go in with me. I sat down in a chair at the kitchen table. I had intended to walk through the rest of the house, but I didn't. The house was too quiet and empty. The kitchen was too, but I stayed. It had a bit of home still left in it. It had been my favorite room, a sort of living room, and I'd spent a lot of time there.

The sun went down and dusk crept in. Outside, the floodlights went on. Bowser and I went out and sat on the steps again. In daylight, the place had looked strange and foreign. With the coming of night and the flaring of floodlights, it was a bad dream.

Rila found us sitting on the steps. “Hiram will be all right,” she said, “but he'll have to stay in the hospital for quite a while.”

TWENTY-FIVE

The next morning, I went looking for Catface. I didn't find him. I walked through the crab-apple patch below the mobile home, crisscrossing it in several directions, calling him softly, looking everywhere for him. He did not appear. After several hours of this, I wandered to other groves of trees and looked.

Back at the house, Rila said to me, “I should have gone to help you, but I was afraid I might scare him off. He's known you for a long time. I'm a newcomer.”

We sat at the lawn table, despondent. “What if we don't find him?” Rila asked. “Maybe he knows what has happened to Hiram and is hiding, unwilling to show himself until Hiram's here.”

“If we don't find him, we don't find him,” I said.

“But Safari …”

“Safari will have to wait,” I said. “Even if we find him, I don't know if he will work with me.”

“Is it possible he went back to Willow Bend?” she asked. “To the orchard on the farm. That was his favorite hangout, wasn't it? Maybe if he knows about Hiram, he'd feel closer to him there.”

In the Willow Bend orchard, I found him almost immediately. He was in one of the trees close to the house. He looked out of it at me with those great cat eyes. He even grinned at me.

“Catface,” I said, “Hiram has been hurt, but he'll be all right. He'll be back in a few more days. Catface, can you blink? Can you shut your eyes?”

He shut his eyes and opened them again, then closed them and opened them again.

“All right,” I said, “I want to talk with you. You can hear me, but I can't hear you. Maybe we can work out a way. I'll ask you questions. If your answer is yes, close your eyes once. If your answer is no, close them twice. Do you understand?”

He closed his eyes once, then opened them.

“That is fine,” I said. “You understand what I told you about Hiram?”

He closed his eyes once.

“You understand that he'll be back in a few days?”

Catface signaled yes.

“And you're willing to talk with me this way? Work with me this way, by closing your eyes?”

Yes, indicated Catface.

“It's not a very satisfactory way to talk, is it?”

Catface blinked twice.

“All right, then, in Mastodonia—you know where Mastodonia is, don't you?”

Yes, indicated Catface.

“Back in Mastodonia, we need four time roads laid out. I have set out four lines of stakes, painted red, with a red flag at the end of each line, the red flag marking the point where we want to go into time. Do you understand?”

Catface signaled that he did.

“You have seen the stakes and flags?”

Catface said he had.

“Then, Catface, listen closely now. The first time road should go back seventy million years. And the next one ten thousand years less than that—ten thousand years less than seventy million years.”

Catface didn't wait for me to ask him if he understood; he signaled yes.

“The third one,” I said, “ten thousand years less than the second and the fourth one, ten thousand years less than the third.”

Yes, said Catface.

We went through it all again to be sure he understood.

“Will you do it now?” I asked.

He said he would and then he disappeared. I stood there, staring stupidly at where he'd been. I suspected that he had taken me at my word, that he was now back in Mastodonia setting up the roads. At least, I hoped he was.

I found Ben in his office with his feet cocked up on the desk.

“You know, Asa,” he said, “this is the best job I ever had. I like it.”

“But you also have a bank to run.”

“I'll tell you something I shouldn't tell anyone; the bank runs itself. Of course, I'm still in charge, but now I do barely any work. Only some of the tough decisions and a few papers that I have to sign.”

“In that case, how about getting off your big fat butt and going into the Cretaceous with me?”

“The Cretaceous? You mean you did it, Asa?”

“I think so. I'm not sure. We ought to check it out. I'd like company. I'm too chicken to do it alone.”

“You still have the elephant guns at your place?”

I nodded. “No hunting, though. Not this time. We just check out the roads.”

Rila went along with us. We debated taking a car, but decided to go on foot. I was quite prepared, as we walked down the first line of stakes, to have nothing happen. But it did. We walked straight into the Cretaceous. It was raining there, a steady downpour. We set the stakes we carried and walked out a ways, far enough to pick up a clue as to where we were—a bunch of silly ostrich dinosaurs that went skittering away at our approach.

The other three roads were there as well. It was not raining at the ends of any of them. So far as I could see, all the places looked fairly much alike. There'd not be much change in forty thousand years—not at first glance, that is. If we'd spent some time, I suppose we could have detected a number of changes. But we spent almost no time at all. We pounded in the stakes and left. In the fourth time road, however, Ben knocked over a small ankylosaur, six or seven feet long, probably a yearling. The big bullet from his gun almost took its head off.

“Dinosaur steaks tonight,” said Ben.

It took the three of us to haul it back to Mastodonia. There we used an axe to cut through the armor. Once we had a cut down the length of the body, it was possible to peel off the armor, but it wasn't easy. Ben cut off the clublike tail as a trophy. I hauled the broiler out from under the mobile home and got a fire going.

While Ben was broiling thick slabs of meat, I went down the hill to the crab-apple grove and found Catface. “I just want to say thank you,” I told him. “The roads are magnificent.” He blinked his eyes at me, four or five times, grinning all the while.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked.

He blinked his eyes twice, saying no.

The ostrich dinosaur that we had eaten on our exploratory trip into the Cretaceous had been tasty, but I figured the anky steak might be a disappointment. Ankylosaurs are such crazy-looking beasts. There was no disappointment, however. I wolfed down the steaks, faintly ashamed of how much I ate.

Later on, we cut up the rest of the carcass, putting a few cuts in our refrigerator and wrapping up the rest of it for Ben to take back home.

“We'll have a dinosaur cookout tomorrow night,” he said. “Maybe I'll invite those news jockeys in to have a taste of it. It'll give them something to write about.”

We hauled the rest of the carcass down the hill and buried it. Left where it was, it would have stunk up the place in a few days. Two days later, walking down that way, I found that something, probably wolves or foxes, had dug out the remains and performed a remarkable scavenging job. There were only a few pieces of armor plate scattered about.

With Ben gone, Rila and I took it easy, sleeping late, doing a lot of sitting at the lawn table, looking out over our domain. I took a shotgun and set out with Bowser to hunt for rattlesnakes. We found none. Stiffy came up the hill to visit us. He kept shuffling in closer, putting out his trunk to sniff in our direction, flapping his ears at us. I knew something had to be done; otherwise, he'd be right in our laps. While Rila held a rifle covering me, I walked up to him, going slowly, shaking in my boots. He smelled me over and I scratched his trunk. He rumbled and groaned in ecstasy. I moved in closer, reached up to scratch his lower lip. He liked that; he did his best to tell me that he liked me. I led him down into the valley and told him to stay there, to keep the hell away from us. He grunted companionably. I was afraid he'd try to follow me back home, but he didn't.

That evening as we sat watching dusk come across the land, Rila said to me, “Something is bothering you, Asa.”

“Hiram upset me,” I said.

“But he's going to be all right. Just a few more days and he'll be back here with us.”

“It made me realize how shaky we are,” I said. “The time business is based on Hiram and Catface. Let something happen to either one of them …”

“But you did all right with Catface. You got the time roads open. Even if everything went sour right now, we'd have them, and it is this deal with Safari that will be the backbone of our business. There'll be other things, of course, as time goes on, but it's the big-game hunting …”

“Rila, would you be satisfied with that?”

“Well, no, I suppose not satisfied, but it would be more than we had before.”

“I wonder,” I said.

“You wonder what?”

“Please try to understand,” I said. “Bear with me a moment. The other day, the day you took Hiram to the hospital, I was at the farm. Me and Bowser. We walked around a bit and sat on the back steps the way we used to. We even went into the house, but I didn't go farther than the kitchen. I sat at the kitchen table and thought how it once had been. I felt lost. No matter what I did, no matter where I went, I was lost. Things had changed so much.”

“You didn't like the changes?”

“I'm not sure. I should, I know. There's money now and there never was before. We can travel in time now and no one ever did that. I suppose it was Hiram and the realization of how thin we run.…”

She took one of my hands in hers. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

“You mean you, too?”

She shook her head. “No, Asa. No, not me. I'm the pushy bitch, remember. But you, I know how you might feel. I feel just slightly guilty. I pushed you into it.”

“I was easy to push,” I said. “Don't blame yourself. There is nothing against which to assess any blame. The thing is, I loved that farm. When I saw it the other day, I knew I'd lost it.”

“Let's go for a walk,” she said.

We walked hand in hand down the ridge and all around us was the peace of Mastodonia. Off in the hills, a whippoorwill struck up his chugging cry and we stopped, enchanted. It was the first time here that we'd heard a whippoorwill. Never for a moment had I expected to hear one; I had illogically assumed there'd be no whippoorwills. But hearing the cry, I knew it as the sound of home, bringing back to me memories of years plunged deep in summer with the scent of freshly mown hay blowing from a new-cut field and the tinkling of cow bells as the herd filed out to pasture once the milking had been done. As I listened, I felt a strange contentment flooding over me.