People came tumbling out of the rear door of the office building when Rila pulled up and leaned on the horn. I lifted Hiram from the car. Herb was the first to reach us. “Snake bite,” I told him. “Rattler.
Get an ambulance.”
“Here, let me have him,” said Ben. “There’s a bottle of whiskey in my lower left desk drawer. I don’t suppose you gave him any.”
“I’m not sure …”
“Damn it, I am. If it doesn’t help, it won’t hurt. I’ve always been told it helps.”
I went for the whiskey and brought it back to the front office, where Hiram was stretched out on a sofa.
Herb turned from the phone. “The ambulance is on its way,” he said. “There’ll be a paramedic with it. He’ll take over. I talked with a doctor. He said no whiskey.”
I put the bottle on a desk. “How are you, Hiram?”
I asked.
“It hurts,” said Hiram. “I hurt all over. I hurt terrible.”
“We’ll get you to a hospital,” I said. “They’ll take care of you there. I’ll go with you.”
Herb grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to one side. “I don’t want you to go,” he said.
”But I have to. Hiram is my friend. He’ll want me.”
“Not with those newsmen out there. They’ll follow the ambulance, in the hospital, you’ll be fair game to them.”
“The hell with them. Hiram is my friend.”
“Be reasonable, Asa,” Herb pleaded. “I’ve built you and Rila up as mysteries. Recluses. Publicity shy.
Exclusive people. We need that image. For a while longer, at least.”
“We don’t need an image. Hiram needs help.”
“How can you help him? Hold his hand? Wait while the doctors work on him?”
“That’s part of it,” I said. “Just being there.”
Ben joined us. “Herb’s right,” he said. “I’ll go along with Hiram.”
“There has to be one of us. Myself or Rila. It should be me.”
“Rila,” said Herb. “She’ll be upset, hysterical.”
“Rila hysterical?”
“The newsmen won’t press her as hard as they would you,” said Ben. “If she says she won’t talk, she’ll have to say it fewer times than you would. She could build up her exclusiveness, while you …”
“You’re bastards!” I shouted. “Both of you are bastards!”
It did me no good. In the end, Ben and Rila rode the ambulance and I stayed. I felt horrible. I felt I’d lost control, that I was no longer my own man, and I felt a terrible rage and fear. But I stayed behind. On this end of the operation, Ben and Herb were, calling the shots.
“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.