Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, page 21
"About."
"Because that's when I found it. I was out on a hike, and I looked down and there it was."
"Where?" said Ludi. As she said it, a funny trembly sensation came to her, as though she did not really want to hear the answer.
"Not too far from here," said Gene. "West of Dublin. In Applemont, actually. It was just lying there beside a big rock."
He did not seem to notice that Ludi was drifting away on him, that she was only haif listening.
But she noticed, eventually, when the words stopped. She felt the silence filling the Volkswagen up. a little too full to be comfortable. She looked up at Gene and found that he was looking back at her, holding the pendant between his fingers. Like, waiting for something. He gave her again that uncertain smile of his. With his shirt unbuttoned, he looked young and vulnerable.
He said, "Would you, um, like to go see?"
"See what?" she asked. And she thought, Dumb question.
"Where I found the skull," he said, turning to face the road, innocently. "And, you know—where I live. It's this interesting old bungalow. Very well preserved, architecturally."
There were implications here. Ludi knew what they were. And she knew what it meant when she put the Volkswagen back in gear and said: "Sure. Which way?"
THE RIGHT TO BEAR
Molly could have warned them.
The shortcut that seemed like such a totally great idea—a perfect diagonal slicing through the empty north end of Applemont and popping out just above Gene's rented bungalow, that looked so solid and reliable on the map—turned into a rutted mud-capped nightmare after only a show tune or two. The Volkswagen plowed onward, making slow headway, and by the time "Tangerine" ended and "Fascination" began, Ludi voted to turn back, but oh, no: Gene, gripping the Atlas, seemed to perceive this as a challenge directed at the adequacy of his testosterone supply, just like they all do, or would have, under the circumstances. So they kept driving until Ludi lost patience and stopped the car halfway to the bottom of the Gully at the End of the World. There she clambered out onto the wet shoulder and said: "Fine. Then you drive."
So Gene slid across the bony gearshift knob and nestled hesitantly in the unfamiliar driver's seat. Ludi didn't feel like getting back in at all, but of course, she did, when it became clear that Gene intended to go ahead with this. She settled into the warm hollow left by his body and breathed the funny smell he had left there: expensive macho toiletries that Guillermo would have disdained. Guillermo liked to smell like sweat—"an honest human animal scent," which incidentally made it seem as though he performed some kind of manly toil for a living. (Sail-making was actually a computerized operation that involved a lot of stitching and reinforcing of artificial fabrics.) Gene smelled like glossy-magazine products. Ludi wondered how many trees you had to cut down to print one issue of GQ. Say what you might about the American psyche, it seemed to Ludi that there was a certain amount of room for national self-improvement.
The Volkswagen started moving. It crept downward, then lurched to a halt, then crept downward again.
"The brakes are a little touchy," she said.
"Yeah, no kidding."
He got the hang of it by the time they reached the bottom of the gully. The uphill slope ahead of them looked immensely high and steep. In fact, it looked impossible.
"If we got stuck here," said Ludi, "I mean, just supposing—do you think we'd get eaten by bears?"
"We're not going to get stuck," Gene said through clenched jaws. Then he sort of got it, that she might be teasing a little, and he forced a smile for public consumption. "Anyway, I don't think there are too many bears around here. Are there?"
"Tex says there are."
Gene let the clutch out and the Volkswagen slurped upward.
"Ha!" said Gene, laying a little extra gas on. His death-grip on the wheel relaxed somewhat. "Who's Tex?"
"Tex is my friend that owned that skull you've got on," said Ludi. When the words were out she noticed that she had mixed up her tenses, past and present. Which was it?
The Volkswagen slid sideways from one rut to another, like a water-skier passing over the swells of a wake. The road looked like a location shot for some natural-disaster movie.
"Hang in there," said Gene—more to the car than to Ludi, she thought.
The car took heart. The little wheels found a solid piece of something to grab on to, and the Volkswagen shot up the remaining stretch of hillside.
"Oh my god," said Ludi, louder this time.
"What?" demanded Gene, turning to frown at her. "We made it, didn't we? I told you—
"No," said Ludi. "I mean that."
He looked. They both looked.
A platoon of armed and dangerous-looking dudes wearing camo fatigues and black greasepaint and packing heavy firepower spread out across the road, half a dozen paces in front of them. A couple of the guys dropped into a crouch, leveling AK-47's at the windshield of the Volkswagen. Others began edging up the sides of the road, performing some flanking maneuver. There were seven or eight in all. More than enough.
"What the hell is this?" said Gene, more angry than frightened. "Is there a guerrilla war going on around here that I haven't heard about?"
Ludi put a hand on his leg, a quieting gesture. "Don't get excited," she said. "You don't want to alarm them."
"Alarm who!"
By this time, a couple of road warriors drew up even with the Volkswagen's headlights. One of them made a funny downward motion with his hand—as though signaling them to lay down their weapons. Ludi quickly dropped the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer. Gene stuck his head out the window.
"May I ask who the fuck you think you are?" he said.
"Whoa, friend," said the nearest gun-toter. "You got a few questions to answer yourself, so I'd suggest you not go popping your mouth off."
"I've got a few questions to answer?"
In Ludi's mind, a strange and perhaps implausible scenario spun itself out like a videotape on fast forward:
Gene gets mad.
Gene jumps out of the car.
Gene and the guy in combat fatigues yell and curse at each other.
The guy gets tired of this and blows Gene away.
Gene's guts splatter across the VW, through the window, and onto Ludi's lap.
Ludi spends years in expensive therapy recovering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
She ends up doing talk shows and marrying an asshole who sells commercials for cable television.
All their children are named Robert.
"Tell me something," said the guy outside Gene's window, whose assault rifle had an ammo clip 15 inches long. "Didn't you see the warning sign posted back up the road?"
"No," said Ludi, smiling nicely. "I'm sorry. We were a little confused. Are we on your property?"
The man smiled back, but there was something still not exactly polite about it. "Where you are," he said, "is not exactly anybody's property. Where you are is, you've entered a freedom Zone. You've entered a part of America that's been reclaimed by free Americans, in the name of constitutional sovereignty. You'd know that if you had read the sign."
"We didn't read the goddamn sign," said Gene. "And if we had read the goddamn sign, it wouldn't have meant shit."
Ludi pressed his leg a little harder.
The man stuck his head closer to the window. His greasepaint had been unevenly applied, heavier on one side than the other. Heterosexual men have no business fooling with makeup.
"You've got quite a mouth on you, son," the man said, though he did not look old enough to be using the word son in this way. "Why don't you step on out of the car and we'll talk this over without getting the lady involved."
"I'm no lady," Ludi told him. "I write articles for local newspapers, sometimes. You don't want a lot of really bad publicity, do you?"
"There's no such thing," said another guy, slinking up along Ludi's side of the car. "We want publicity. We need to open people's eyes to what's really going down here. That's how we get our recruits."
"Recruits?" said Gene. He was having, Ludi thought, a really hard time getting the picture here. "What do you think you're doing, forming your own banana-republic army out here? Do you guys have any functional brain cells, or what?"
"I've had about enough of this bullshit," said the guy with asymmetric paint. He reached for Gene's door handle.
"Hold it!" a different voice yelled. "Back the fuck off."
All the guys in their fighting gear were clustered around the front of the car now. One of them, dressed like the others except with a captain's twin silver bars on his ball cap, pointed at the man who was ready to go hand to hand with Gene. The man grumbled but obediently stepped away.
The officer type came forward. He wore twin 9-millimeter pistols in leather holsters that drooped gunslinger style low down on his hips. His face, behind aviator glasses, was thin and gray. "This fellow's not dangerous," he told the others. "He's just a boy from away who's gotten himself lost. Isn't that right, Dr. Deere?"
The gray-faced man looked at Gene, who for the duration of several heartbeats did not recognize him. Then Gene said: "Eckhart?"
The man nodded.
"Eckhart, in charge of security?"
"None other." The man nodded. He repeated the nod for Ludi.
She thought it was probably safe to scowl at him.
"Eckhart," said Gene, "what the hell is going on here? Are you guys crazy! Is this part of your job?''
Eckhart seemed to chew on something. "Not directly part of the job, I guess you'd say. But I guess you could call it related. It's a security matter, only it goes beyond just Gulf Atlantic."
"Evidently," said Gene. His hands kneaded the steering wheel, spreading dampness around.
Eckhart gestured up the road. "Maybe it's time for you folks to get moving along."
"I've got no problem with that," said Gene.
"Want me to drive?" Ludi offered, as gently as she could.
Before he could answer, there was a shout from somewhere ahead on the roadway.
"Who's that?" said Eckhart. "Who's on rear guard?"
"The new fellow," somebody told him.
The shout came again—far enough away that you couldn't make the words out, just a general sense of agitation.
Suddenly a pop struck Ludi's ear like a quick pressing-inward of air. It was a rifle going off. In the next few seconds it fired again. And again.
Eckhart spat in the dirt. "Damn flatlander," he said. "Go see what the hell—"
His eyes opened wide.
Ludi followed them, peering through the jumble of battle fatigues and firearms. She saw, perhaps 20 strides away, a huge brown animal lumbering up the road.
"It's a fucking bear," one of the men said.
The word seemed to jar them into motion. They spread out. A few took cover in the trees, and one climbed on top of the Volkswagen.
The bear, a good 800-pounder, was trudging heavily up the road, as though this were not something it had really wanted to get involved in. It paused to check the banks on either side: slippery and steep. Then it took a few steps closer to Ludi's car. Briefly it looked back in the direction the rifle shots had come from.
That was when Eckhart opened fire. He shot first with the pistol in his right hand, then with the pistol in his left hand. The bullets struck somewhere in the dense fur around the bear's neck.
The animal roared and slapped itself beside the head, where the bullets had gone in.
As though released from a spell, the other men started shooting too. They fired their assault rifles in single shots and in bursts of fan-fire. One of them threw a hunting knife. Not many of the several dozen rounds discharged actually came close to striking the target. But enough.
The bear bellowed. It went down on its knees and then rolled onto its side. It breathed and cried and bled for a little while, but basically it died without making too much fuss about it.
Ludi felt absolutely sick. She was nearly overpowered with disgust. She closed her eyes and swallowed a couple of times—swallowed nothing, her mouth was empty—then she felt Gene lift her hand from his leg, which she seemed to have been squeezing the blood out of.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"For what?" he murmured. Neither of them knew what he was talking about.
"Killed that damned bear," one of the guys in greasepaint said.
"I guess," said another.
Eckhart walked over to where the dead animal lay. After a few seconds he said, "Motherfuck."
Gene opened the driver's door and got out. Ludi tried to stop him, but failing that she got out also. They walked over to the bear and looked down where Eckhart was staring.
"It was a damn mama bear," he said. "It was about to have a baby."
Ludi gave a cry. Eckhart was pointing at something bloody sticking out of the bear's groin. The head of its unborn cub? Part of the placenta?
Gene bent over, getting in close to it. He tapped Eckhart on the arm. "Look," he said. "See that?"
"Motherfuck," said Eckhart. "The sucker's still kicking."
Ludi looked. She could not not look, though she didn't want to. The thing sticking out of the dead mama bear squirmed inside an oozing membrane.
Gene said, "You ever seen anything like this?"
Eckhart shook his head. "Nope," he said, "but." He reached into a sheath on his belt and pulled out a knife with a long blade, serrated on one edge. "I'd say we ought to take a shot at getting that little sucker out of there."
The two men stared into the mess below them. Gene said, "How about if I spread the legs apart? Then maybe you could—"
Eckhart looked back. Neither of them knew what maybe he could do. He twiddled the knife.
"Here," said Ludi. "Give me that."
Eckhart stepped aside, though not altogether out of the way.
"Sorry to have to do this, Bear," said Ludi. "But it's the only chance."
She nodded to the two men. They each grabbed a leg and pulled on it.
The little male cub, which was born alive about 45 seconds later, Ludi named Tex.
Gene smiled at her weakly. His face was the same color as his business card. Eckhart lay down on the ground, smiling stupidly, like a drunk who's just thrown up. The cub pawed blindly at Ludi's chest, which was covered with blood by now. She hummed softly, to calm it, a cheerful ditty from Brigadoon, fresh in her mind from public radio.
"What do you figure we ought to do?" said one of the guys in greasepaint. "Think we ought to call an animal shelter or something?"
"Keep away from him," Ludi said sternly. She remembered all too well the Fish and Game Department Visitor Center down in Norway, where they kept orphaned animals locked in cells as large and comfortable as gas-station restrooms.
All the men looked at her, waiting for further instructions—as though they expected her to be plugged into some eternal feminine mystery channel.
"Okay," she said, after a period of deliberation. "We've got to get some milk in him, or some baby formula or something. At least some water. And we've got to clean him up. So here, help me—let's get him in the car."
It took Gene a couple of minutes to understand that she meant him.
"I'll ride in the back," she said, "and keep him calm. Just drive nice and steady. But don't take all day."
He nodded. He helped her into place and started the Volkswagen. The Sovereign Citizens Militia gathered around to wave them off, like heavily armed Munchkins.
"Where did you say we were going?" Gene asked, nodding good-bye to them.
"Don't ask me," said Ludi. "It's your bungalow. Put the pedal to it."
He had nothing to say: nothing to Ludi. Easing the clutch out, he muttered to himself,
"If I drove a classic baby like this,
I'd take better care
of it."
Tex thought, What am I this time?
* * *
Not a bear.
Yes a bear. Bouncing baby bear in the backseat of a car. Cuddled in the lap of a nice-smelling human girl. Or was it a woman? How was a bear to know?
The girl was humming. Music soothes the savage beast, maybe. But show tunes made Tex restless. He remembered the melody from an otherwise forgettable made-for-TV flop starring Robert Goulet.
Go home, the lyrics went, go home.
Go home with Bonnie Jean.
He imagined a guy in kilts leaping up in the air, a cleaned-up version of the old wild sword dance. Kilts, clans, chieftains, mists and moors. All lost. Driven out by a bunch of sheep farmers. The Highlands cleared. Forests chopped down, turned into ships and stockades and steeples. And history reseeds itself.
The savage beast was getting riled up.
"Shh," said the voice of a beautiful maiden—a princess, needing only to be rescued from a fire-breathing drag. "We're almost home. We'll get you some nice milk to drink."
"Um," said somebody else—not the drag; maybe a knight in shining Armani. "Actually I don't think I've got any milk."
"You haven't got any milk?" The princess wasn't digging it.
"It's not natural," said the knight, speaking hurriedly, "for adult humans to drink the milk of another species."
"Not natural!" said the princess. (Tex knew this voice, but the bear did not. They were going to have to work oat some better means of communicating, the two of them.) "You go around spraying poisons with airplanes and you're worried about milk not being natural!"
"I don't, um—"
The knight sounded cowed and the car squeaked around a corner. The new road was bad and the whole backseat, princess, bear & all, bumped up and down, up and down. It made the bear feel sleepy. So the bear slept.
And Tex, awake inside but constrained by an infant animal's senses, could only faintly discern that the car was slowing and a voice said: "Well, here we are. Home sweet home."
While the other voice, sweet and light as spring air, said That's their car! but the bear was twitching and fussing in his sleep and Tex got distracted and thought no more about that.
HOME WITH BONNIE GENE
"I just want to know what it's doing there," said Ludi. "I mean, they wouldn't have just left it. Would they?"
