Toby stood slowly, rising up to nearly seven feet. An expanse of milk-white skin. Huge thighs. A keg torso pregnant with a Buddha belly: glossy and tight and almost translucent, like something extruded by a glass blower. He gave off a powerful, yeasty odor. Lew had to look up at the man, a rare experience for Lew. And Toby looked down. Broad nose, tiny ears that seemed almostvestigial, rubbery pink lips. He blinked. His eyes seemed tiny compared to the black goggles perched on his smooth, Beluga forehead. Toby lifted one arm, a slablike thing with none of the comic book definition of a body builder’s. A weightlifter arm, a blacksmith arm. I gave Lew an admonishing look. Lew came to his senses and took the man’s giant paw in his own.
“Pleased to meet you,” Lew said. Without looking away from him, he said to me, “I couldn’t find you. I looked in your cabin . . .”
“I was out here and Toby swam right by me, scared the shit out of me! Do you know this man can hold his breath for nearly eight minutes?”
Toby shrugged: a ripple of meat.
“So,” Lew said. “You’re the Shug.”
“For thirty-five years,” Toby said. His voice was surprisingly soft.
“Shug number five,” I said.
I gave Lew the abbreviated version of the story Toby had told me over the past hour. Back in the twenties, Harmonia Lake had been a popular stop on the road between New York City and Montreal. Hotels, gas stations, resorts. Oliver Hardy had fished there. When the first Shu’garath was sighted in 1925, the indistinct photographs and breathless newspaper accounts only made the place more popular. Somebody got the idea of swimming around as the Shug, and for a while there was even an annual Shug festivaclass="underline" fireworks and eating contests and a boat parade. But in the fifties the interstate went through to the west, and then the only people who stopped into town were the Shug watchers. They still got a few tourists—the museum’s listed on the web, he said proudly—but most business came from fishing.
“So what does being the Shug involve, exactly?” Lew said, deadpan. “I mean, you swim around in fifty-degree water—”
“No, no,” Toby said. “It’s about forty-eight right now. But I’ve been in there colder than that. I can take the cold. I’ve got the insulation.”
“Sure, sure. But still . . . swimming around and scaring the shit out of people. That’s not exactly a full-time job.”
Toby stared at him. I lifted a hand, started to say something. Toby said, “I also do children’s parties.”
I barked a laugh. Lew nodded, keeping a straight face. The big man pulled the goggles down over his eyes. “Besides, somebody’s got to do it. As long as there’s a Harmonia Lake, there’s gotta be a Shug.”
He padded to the end of the dock, stopped, looked over his shoulder. His head like a planetoid embedded on rolls of neck fat. “Oh, try Louise’s walnut hotcakes.”
He dove in, vanishing beneath the water. When he didn’t come up, Lew and I walked to the end of the dock. The fog had burned down to wisps. Harmonia Lake was much larger than we had suspected last night. The opposite shore was dimly visible across the water, on the other end of a road of sunlight. I couldn’t guess at the lake’s shape; left and right the shoreline disappeared and reappeared as it traced scallops of land, the gaps hiding anything from shallow coves to vast expanses of water.
Lew and I watched for a few minutes, then started walking back up the dock, but both of us kept looking over our shoulders to see if the water had broken. At the shore we stood and waited: eight minutes, ten. We never saw him surface.
“Are you sure it was him?” Lew said. He was trying to pace, but the short metal leash of the pay phone kept yanking him back. Lew’s cell phone still hadn’t managed to find a signal, and it was cramping his style.
I stabbed another triple-stacked wedge of pancake, smeared it through the syrup. I’d stopped being even faintly hungry fifteen minutes ago. Now I was stuffed, engorged, infused . . . and I couldn’t stop putting the food in my mouth. The coffee was terrible and the bacon was ordinary, but the pancakes were avatars of some perfect Ur-cake whose existence until now could only be deduced from the statistical variations in other, lesser pancakes.
“Have you called the police?” Lew said into the phone. He glanced up at me, glared, then pivoted away. “I think you should call the police.”
I stabbed, I smeared, I swallowed. The Baby Condor woman, Louise, poured me more coffee and pointedly ignored Lew, who was obviously making too much noise.
Lew carefully put the phone back on the hook. He didn’t immediately come back to the table. He walked toward the gift shop, stopped, and then walked back. He leaned into the table, arms straight, and addressed the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table. “He’s sitting in a van outside our goddamn house.”
I didn’t have to ask who he was talking about.
“This van’s been parked on our street,” Lew said. “Amra passed it on the way to work, saw him sitting there. He’s fucking stalking her now.”
“Is he still there?”
“She called the cops, but the van was gone by the time they got there.” Lew stared at the checked vinyl.
I started to say: Bertram’s harmless, afraid of his own shadow.
“This is unacceptable, Del.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?!”
“Okay!”
8
I got up awkwardly, levering my feet over the bench. A pound of weapons-grade carbohydrates sank lower in my gut. I sifted through my wallet until I’d found the ATM receipt where I’d written Bertram’s number after he’d called Mom’s house. My calling card was right there, but I didn’t know how many minutes were left, and why should I pay for it? I called collect. It rang only once—then there was a silence as whoever picked up negotiated with the computer to accept the call.
“Oh my God, is it really you, Del?” The connection had the clipped metallic sound of a cheap cell phone. His voice sounded strange—Bertram and I had never talked on the phone before—but I recognized him. “Where are you?” he asked.
There was no way I was telling him—the next day he’d be outside my cabin door. “What are you doing, Bertram? How the hell did you get to Chicago?”
In the hospital he’d always been hunched over the phone by the nurses’ station: a little white guy, bald with a fringe of sandy hair, pudgy except for skinny legs. Every phone call he received was critical, every discussion freighted with meaning. To Bertram, casual conversation was a contradiction in terms. But Bertram wasn’t in the hospital in Fort Morgan; he was in a van in Chicago.
“It’s imperative that you and I talk,” Bertram said. “In person.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen. I can call you in a couple weeks, but right now I need you to—”
“You don’t understand, this is important,” Bertram said. “I told my commander about your, uh, situation. This someone—I can’t say his name over the phone—very much wants to meet you. He has a solution, a kind of procedure that would allow you to be free of your, your . . .”
“Situation.”
“Exactly! I can hear in your voice that we understand each other.”
Understand each other? All I could think was, Bertram has a commander. Commander of the Human League.
“This is bigger than just you,” Bertram continued. “With your help, we can change the world.”
Jesus, Lew was right. Bertram, and all his fellow Human Leaguers, thought I was the Anti-Slan Firewall.
In the background of the call I heard a male voice say something I couldn’t pick up, and then Bertram said, “Del, if you would just tell us where you are, we could meet you.”