“Son of a bitch of a stone slammed me in the balls, man.”
Again we heard the sounds, this time from inside the cabin. My brain was reeling, with gutter rags and dirty socks, and broken teeth, and fingers, and brooms.
“He’s in the basement,” I said.
“I heard the bastard.”
I tried to take his hatchet. “Maybe you should give me that.”
“The hell you will.”
My buddies at the window couldn’t see us or anything else. They couldn’t hear a thing, either — nothing but wind and rain. All they could do was wait, afraid for the sound of a shot, the screams of some twit getting killed. I squinted hard at the trees as their skin crept round their Etch A Sketch limbs, searching endlessly it seemed for the lamest of signs, until just as I was ready to quit a shape emerged from the wall at my right, about twenty feet off, and like a phantom set our way.
“There he is!” I said.
Basil leapt growling to his feet and drove toward the shape, its movements clipped, as if by a wound. The shape came on, a man now, I knew, who might not’ve seen us even, lurching as he was to some alien poise. But just as Basil fell on him, the man feinted one way and dodged the next. The hatchet made an arc of whaleback-blue, then dropped wide of the man, and the man leapt forward and spun and with a boot sent Basil down. Then both fell from sight but as quickly emerged, then fell back again. I heard a crack, and then a grunt, and then, as though by bitter poets, a cry of hurt and rage. To know what was what or who who was hard, but soon the man rose in deep silhouette, the hatchet aimed at Basil’s neck, his face the print of terror.
I rushed in now, my little knife lost, and took the man by his wrist. Straddling Basil, still pinned, he swiveled round to meet me. Those pale eyes — that silver beard and earwig mouth — the hand with the hatchet bony and wet — the tattoos on the fingers—
“You,” I said.
“No, no,” Super said. “Not me.” He still had my friend by the throat. Basil tried to speak, but couldn’t so much as squeal. “You ain’t no bard,” Super told him. “Rest a while, now.”
“It was you in the basement,” I said.
“We weren’t nowhere near the basement.”
“You would’ve killed him.”
The old man snorted. “This little squirrel? Heh. We were just scratching his mortality some. Catch our drift?”
I looked at the hatchet. I looked at Basil. I looked at the hatchet, and then again at this spooky man. And then once more I saw the rain, veiling with its ceaselessness stage and play alike, and knew I was just a groundling.
“I don’t suppose you have any more of that stuff,” I said, hoping Super would know my intent.
With two fingers he picked a blob of mud from his face and studied it like he might a gem. Then he balled up the blob and squashed it. Next to him, as if he’d been there always, sat Fortinbras the dog.
“Laddie,” the old man said, “your telephone has gone kapooey.”
“What?” I said.
“But fear not, fear not. The man we used to be just did a bit of surgery. The wires are fine, we think.”
“Who is this guy?” Basil said, and I just about laughed. With his blackface of mud he looked a wretched minstrel.
“The one we told you about.”
“This crusty boob?”
Super stood quietly by, a quasi-grin working beneath his beard. He’d just topped Basil at his own game, mano a mano. But worse than that, he’d shamed him. Looks made Super the grizzled old man half Basil’s size. And yet here he was carrying on like the matter had been less than a drill in humor. He could’ve been the high school jock laying a yo-yo on a freshman nerd.
“Naw,” Super said. “Don’t say it’s so.”
“You want to cut my throat, dickwad, get on with it. Otherwise, blow me.”
“Tell us, Laertes. Just how is it you expect to get our cousin down the mountain?”
“You have any idea what he’s talking about?” Basil asked.
I shook my head.
“Stuyvesant Wainwright the Fourth, of course. We come to see that old black clown doesn’t carry him off.”
“Let’s get out of this rain,” I said.
“Not till you officiate some manners-making, you won’t.” I looked at the old man. “Your cohort,” he said. “We don’t know him from Hill.”
Goddamn. Crazy as it was, the geeze wanted introductions. “Super,” I said, “meet Basil. Basil, Super.”
Super extended a hand. “Pleased to rub truth with you, son.”
“Basil. My name is Basil.”
The old man scratched his beard. “If we can recollect better than piss in a pot, memory says the name ain’t never the thing. Fools of nature’s all we are, to the last of us.”
Basil turned to me, defeated. “I’m really cold,” he said, almost whispering. “And this guy makes me feel like a mollusk. You mind if I kind of just, you know, go inside?”
I ASKED SUPER IN, BUT HE LEANED AGAINST A boulder and pulled off a boot.
“Something,” he said, “is itching at us.”
Where a foot and five toes should’ve been was a chunk of salmon-colored plastic. He peered into the boot, tapped its sole, turned it down, and shook it.
“Ha!” he shouted. “Someone needs to ring them bells!”
It was hard to believe, but before my eyes, on the old man’s palm, lay a little stone. He examined it, grinning, then looked up like I were a man imprisoned.
“Take this,” he said, hand held out, “and we will set you free.”
“Don’t you ever get cold?”
“We wanted to make sure you got help for Stuyvey. Some investigation after we dropped off you and him revealed that a sore impossibility, hence our return. We are good with wires.”
Again I made away but the old man wouldn’t budge. A pallor had crept over him now, a rich air of sadness.
“Not that we’d recommend such activity beyond the pure necessities,” he said, and turned toward the light someone in the cabin had just switched on, “given our mission’s success and your telephone does now work.”
Dinky and Hickory were gazing down from one window, Lucille from another.
“So how’d you know about that thing anyhow?” I said, indicating the little stone.
“Ever hear that old saw,” he said, “‘All the world’s in a grain of sand?’”
“If I did, I don’t remember.”
Super tossed the stone and donned his boot. The last thing he wanted, it seemed, was to go inside. I recalled his truck’s open windows, his refusal of Dinky’s invite. Finally he stood and called his dog Fortinbras, then cleared his throat for speech.
“After the doctors pitched them boys in the Cong the better half of our two legs,” he said, “—hold on now, let us ponder… that was back in March of ’68, we believe, Tet offensive is when the foul deed done been done — well, like we said, after they snatched it off the way they did and throwed it to the dogs what with only a scratch, we didn’t have any more sense where it had been than a germ has brains. But later we got to feeling these itches down there, and other pains and whatnots. Our ghost foot, they called it. We can feel, all right.”
After that, what I really had to say couldn’t be said. I was just too tired.
“You’re welcome to come inside,” I said. “But whatever you do, I’ve got to go.”
“Well you go on and go, then, though again we must decline. We only hope you and yours got enough of that blister-your-sister up there to last the night or more. In case nobody told you, there’s a bastard of a flood in progress as we speak. The spirits are truly calling.”