“I would like to be,” I said. “Is he still living in the same place?”
“That’s enough,” came a voice from behind me. Barry Phoneblum was standing in the foyer.
“Barry,” said Pansy, her voice warm and real for the first time since I’d rung the bell. “You must remember Dr. Stanhunt. Dr. Stanhunt, this is my son Barry.”
“We’ve met,” said Barry sarcastically. He was dressed pretty simply, in a neat little shirt and a pair of striped pants, and he wasn’t wearing a wig this time. He wasn’t any taller, but his face now was that of a teenager, and his vast forehead was six years more wrinkled. Veins stood out like worms under the skin at his temples.
“I want you to go upstairs, Pansy,” he said firmly. “Dr. Stanhunt and I need to talk” He was talking to her, but he kept his eyes on me the whole time. It reminded me of Celeste coming home and sending the kitten away. I was always getting caught questioning people who didn’t know better than to feed me the answers.
“Oh,” said Pansy. She scooped the memory off the table and slipped it into the pocket of her skirt. She left the razor and the straw, but I suspected she had another set upstairs. She had new stuff to forget now.
“Okay,” she said. “Good day, Doctor. Give my regards to Celeste.”
I promised I would.
She tiptoed upstairs, leaving Barry and me alone in the living room. He vaulted up into the seat across from me in one neat movement, tucking his feet under his knees so they wouldn’t dangle. I guess by now he’d had a lot of experience being three feet tall in a six-foot world. When he put his hand inside his coat pocket, I was expecting him to produce a memory. Instead he produced a gun. It performed a couple of bars of ominous, pulsing violin when it came out of his pocket, like the occasional music titled GUN for an old radio show.
“Metcalf,” he said. “The kangaroo said you were coming back. I didn’t believe him.”
“It didn’t take you long to come into the fold,” I said. “So much for evolution therapy.”
“Fuck you,” he said. “My motives are beyond your comprehension.” Fuck you was his motto now, or at least he delivered it like one.
“Try me.”
He just sneered. The phone was on the table between us, and he leaned forward and plucked up the receiver without the muzzle of the gun ever veering out of line with my heart I watched him push buttons. Whatever the number was, his little fingers had it memorized. He pinned the phone against his big ear with his shoulder and waited for an answer.
“It’s Barry,” he said after what must have been a couple of rings. “Get me the kangaroo.”
The party at the other end kept him hanging a minute or so. I made amusing faces while we waited but he didn’t laugh.
“Shit,” he said, when the answer came. “Well, tell him I’ve got Metcalf here at the end of my gun. He’ll know what it means.”
They talked a little more, and then he put the receiver back and looked at me sourly, his vast forehead wrinkled all the way up over his skull.
“You must really be a glutton for punishment,” he said.
“A gourmet, actually,” I said. “If it isn’t perfect, I send it back.”
He didn’t laugh. “What did Pansy tell you?” he asked.
“Nothing I couldn’t have learned from a brick wall. We tried to play tic-tac-toe, but she kept forgetting if she was X’s or O’s.”
Barry didn’t like that. I guess he still had some kind of proprietary interest in Pansy. His jaw tightened and his face got red where the skin wasn’t stretched white with tension. “Fuck you, Metcalf.” His voice shook. “I could blow you away right now if I didn’t mind cleaning up the mess. You wouldn’t be missed.”
“Fuck you, Phoneblum. You pull that trigger now, and the recoil’s gonna break your nose.”
He moved the gun from in front of his face. “Don’t call me Phoneblum,” he said.
“Maybe you don’t buy him ties on Father’s Day,” I said. “And maybe he never took you to see the World Series. But that doesn’t change it.”
“I’d forgotten your interest in genealogy,” he said, recovering somewhat. But there was a conflict in him between the tough-guy lingo and the babyhead talk, a conflict he couldn’t resolve. “It represents a pathetic inability to see beyond superficial relationships.”
“I know what you mean. I’m having a real problem seeing beyond the relationship between the kangaroo’s hand and the strings attached to your arms and legs.” While I talked, I inched my feet forward on the carpet and slid my knees under the edge of the big glass coffee table. “I expected more of you, Barry. You were a pain in the ass, but at least you had style.”
“You’re making stupid guesses,” he said. “I take the kangaroo’s dough so I can care for my mother. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”
“Your mother’s dead,” I said. “I walked in her blood.”
It was meant to make him flinch, and it worked. I jerked the coffee table up with my knees and toppled it over on him. The telephone and the razor blade slid to the floor in a cloud of make, and the table fell without breaking to create a glass wall which trapped Barry huddling in his chair. The gun was still in his hand, but he couldn’t point it at me against the weight of the tabletop.
I put my shoe against the glass where his face was. “Throw me the gun, Barry. This’ll make a big mess if it breaks.”
He started squirming in his cage, but he didn’t let go of the gun. I pushed with my foot on the glass until the chair tipped over and Barry tumbled out onto the carpet. The gun fell into a corner. The glass slid back down to rest, propped between the chair and the carpet, intact.
I went over and took Barry by the collar and shook him a little, until my anger subsided and his shirt started ripping, then I put him down. I would have hated for him to get the impression I didn’t like the way he was dressed.
When I looked up, I saw Pansy watching us from halfway down the stairs, her hands folded neatly on the railing. She didn’t look overly concerned. I had no idea what she thought was happening, or whether she still possessed the equipment necessary to speculate. I didn’t particularly want to think about that. I was ready to go. The possible imminence of the kangaroo was not the only reason.
Barry was all balled up on the carpet, looking like nothing so much as an aborted fetus. I stepped over him and picked up the gun. It played me the music again. The violins didn’t know the action was over. I put it in my pocket, smoothed down my jacket, and stepped out into the foyer. Pansy didn’t say anything.
“You ought to buy your little boy a coloring book or a stamp album or something,” I said. “He’s got way too much time on his hands. He’s liable to take up masturbation.”
As I went out the door, I heard Pansy utter “masturbation” into her little microphone, but I was gone before I could hear the answer.
CHAPTER 4
I RAN INTO A CHECKPOINT IN THE HILLS ON MY WAY TO Testafer’s place. They were idling in a narrow spot on the road, and I didn’t see them until it was too late. An inquisitor waved me over, walked up, and leaned into my window.
“Card,” he said.
I gave it to him.
“This looks pretty clean,” he said.
“It’s new,” I said. I looked him in the eye and hoped he didn’t see my hands shaking on the wheel. They were shaking for a few reasons. The gun in my pocket was one of them. The make not in my bloodstream was another;
He motioned another guy to come over to my car. “Take a look,” he said. “Rip Van Winkle.” He flipped him my card. It was funny: I hadn’t felt much attachment to it before, but I experienced a sudden fondness for it seeing it in the hands of two boys from the Office.