Chapter 19
Remo wondered if the fates were aligning against him. Here he was trying to do something good, trying to prove himself, for crying out loud, and he was getting nothing but misery for all his trouble. Chiun throwing a hissy fit, Smitty giving him the third degree and then Ranger Rick driving his car off the hill so Remo had to stop and yank his ass to safety. Only to get a lecture in the strict codes of National Park ranger machismo for his effort.
But the big hill was finally starting to cooperate, and he spotted the tour bus below him on the twisting, curving Blue Ridge Parkway.
"Time for a shortcut," Remo announced to no one and vaulted off the road into the underbrush, slipping soundlessly as a shadow through the bushes and wildflowers that clung to the steep grade. A hundred feet lower the ground leveled out enough to afford purchase to a few deep-rooted trees, and Remo scampered up the trunks into the upper limbs, then vaulted from tree to tree. His hand-sewn Italian loafers, already ruined from the downhill run, landed perfectly every time, supporting him for a second before he was flying on to the next tree. Moments later he landed on the road just a few hundred paces behind the Union Island Freedom Tour Bus, and he caught up at the next curve.
He climbed on the roof and glared at Chiun, who was arranging the fluttering silk of his kimono as if he had not moved from his seat in hours.
"That didn't take long," Remo grumbled.
"It certainly did," Chiun retorted. "The bus has been on the road for nearly twenty minutes."
"I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about you."
"I, however, am talking about you. Then, lo! what do I see but the Reigning Master of Sinanju flinging himself through the trees like some ungainly combination of Strong Man Jack and Lord Greystoke."
Remo pondered. "Lord Greystoke is Tarzan, right?"
Chiun rolled his eyes and sighed to the crisp blue sky. Remo shrugged. "I give up. Who's Strong Man Jack?"
"Another character from twentieth-century American fiction or folklore or whatever passes for literature in this part of the world." Chiun waved his hand at the sky above, implying that "this part of the world" included the mountains and all the rest of the planet that was west of Pyongyang.
"So you're saying I'm sort of like Jethro Clampett meets George of the Jungle."
"I wouldn't have brought it up at all had I known I would be forced to explain it during the entirety of our downhill journey."
"Just trying to get a handle on the insults that keep getting hurled my way," Remo said.
"Maybe if you had an inkling about the written word, even the florid clutter that passes for literature in the Western world, you would understand what I say and why I say it."
Remo grinned without humor. "Hey, I'm getting smarter already-you just told me my culture is stupid and I'm stupider."
Chiun sniffed. "If the oversize novelty T-shirt fits..."
"Now that we understand each other on that point, let's move on to the next bit of trivia. How'd you get back here so fast? I just got off the phone with Smitty and next thing I know you're back in the saddle. So, what, are you carrying a mobile phone these days that you're not telling me about."
"I would not carry such a device. The waves emanating from them cook the tiny cells of the brain and addle the thoughts." Chiun looked suspicious. "Have you been using one behind my back all these years? It would explain much."
"So what are you doing here? Last I saw you transferred to the eastbound train, bound for Hoboken." Chiun nodded, as if the question was a perfectly reasonable one, and one that he had no intention of answering.
"Well?"
"I am here. Is that not enough?"
"You've got something up your sleeve you don't want to talk about."
"You are mistaken."
"You lie like a rug. Spit it out, Chiun-you realized I was on to something."
"What do you mean? On drugs?"
"The truth. My lead was panning out and you knew it and you came back because you had to be in on it when I solved this mystery."
Chiun, for a moment, looked genuinely surprised. Then he shook his head pityingly. "My son, that is not why I came back."
"Bulldookey. Then why?"
With a reluctant, graceful sweep of his arm the ancient Korean Master waved one hand at the billboard awaiting them on the very boundary of the national park. "There is your answer."
It was a magnificent, tawdry sign that put a blemish on the natural beauty of the mountain scenery the way a slash with garden shears would have blemished the Mona Lisa.
The billboard letters were multicolored, metallic and sparkling, and they spelled out: Mollywood U.S.A.! Just 15 Miles to the Entertainment Hub of the Smokies! Ms. Molly Pardon's Smoky Mountain Theme Park.
Remo groaned. "Molly Pardon as in country music singer Molly Pardon?"
"The same," Chiun enthused.
"Mountainous mammaries, big blond bogus bouffant, that Molly Pardon?"
"I have it on good authority that her hair is not bogus. Her silky tresses are naturally pale and golden."
"As natural as the boobs, anyway." Remo shrugged. "I've heard her sing."
"She has an angel's voice," Chiun enthused.
"Wolverines defending a carrion stash sound more angelic."
"She's no Wylander Jugg," Chiun admitted, "but she sings with the same sincerity and passion. It is the music of real people, music that flows from the heart and soars from the lips, Remo."
"You say soars, I say hurls."
Chiun beamed. "You are an admirer of the beauteous Molly Pardon? I never knew this, my son."
"I wouldn't call it admiration so much as fascination," Remo said when the second billboard followed just minutes after the first. Molly Pardon herself was pictured, a fifty-year-old bleached-blond giantess rendered in thermoset plastic. Her ruby-red lips, open in a wide Southern-girl smile, could have swallowed a minivan. Her famous mass of hair had been constructed with the not-found-in-nature fluorescent yellow of plastic lemons. Her face had been re-created with a photorealistic transfer technique so accurate that a layer of fleshy-colored enamel was added to blot out the crow's-feet around the eyes and surgical scars around the scalp, lips, temple and chin. Not that anyone even saw her face. Remo found it impossible to focus his attention beyond the swell of her re-created cleavage, which reflected the daylight like patent leather.
"That is one immense Molly," Remo said.
Chiun was mildly stunned at the spectacle. "It is large."
"Large? I'll bet they recycled five or six thousand soda bottles into each one of those knockers."
"Pah! You see only her womanly charms," Chiun said.
"How could I see anything else? Those things should have telescopes sticking out of them."
"She is well endowed, granted, and yet her attraction is in her voice, not her bosom."
"On anybody else you'd have called them 'udders.'"
"They would be so if she flaunted them in the same way the women you cavort with parade their milk-producing organs."
Remo laughed. "Come on! You're not seriously trying to tell me that Molly Pardon doesn't trade on her boobs."
"She does not!"
"You're wrong and you know it, but far be it from the Wise and All-Knowing Master Chiun to own up to a mistake."
"Someday I might make a mistake. Then I would indeed be the first to acknowledge it."
"And someday monkeys will fly out of my butt."
Chiun nodded seriously. "Such a feat would certainly be unique among all the Masters who have come before you. Is this the type of outrageous anecdote you plan as your legacy in the scrolls of the Masters?" Remo was about to respond when he caught it again. The whiff in the air, so faint, so fleeting, he was almost not sure of it. Then he saw Chiun lift his head and draw air into his nostrils. Chiun smelled it, too. It was here. Whatever it was that was making people go violently bonkers, it was right here in this bus.