Mike Nelson's Death Rat! (19 page)

“Ooh, ouch, Mr. Earl,” said King Leo, looking down at Ponty.

“Son of a . . . sorry. So sorry. They were supposed to have fixed this thing!”

“Ponty, get out of the man's lap,” Jack said.

“I'm trying, okay? King Leo, could I ask you to just reach behind the seat and give me a push?”

“It would be my pleasure,” said King Leo, and he did.

Ponty played around gingerly with the seat adjustments until he was satisfied that he would not be flying backward anymore. Just to be safe, King Leo moved to the spot behind Jack.

Once they'd started driving and the remaining awkwardness of the seat incident had dissipated, no one spoke for a moment, so Ponty attempted to get something going.

“So . . . King Leo. You do much fishing?” he asked, looking in the rearview mirror.

Jack, who had spent more time with King Leo, knew that Ponty had just opened himself up to a conversation-killing response, like “I am fisher of love” or “I fish the body electric” or some such thing, so he was surprised when King Leo responded simply.

“No,” he said. “No, I'm afraid not.”

“Well,” said Ponty, “we could get after the walleye while you're up here. How long you planning to stay?”

“Until we are all saved by the Universal-Spirit-Being.”

Ponty was rocked somewhat by this reply, but he pressed on. “Well,” he said, “if that's not gonna take long, you can always get a temporary license. They're a lot cheaper.”

“Perhaps I'll do that,” King Leo said, and there followed a long pause before he spoke again. “Mr. Earl, I could not help but notice that you have an unopened hot-dog steamer in the backseat of your car. Can you tell me about that?”

“Oh, yeah. It's kind of funny. I got it as a gift, and I have to say, I have almost no occasion to steam a hot dog of any kind, but I just never got around to returning it.”

“May I have it?” King Leo asked respectfully.

“You want my hot-dog steamer?”

“I'll pay you.”

“No. You can just have it.”

“Thank you.”

“You like hot dogs, huh?” Ponty asked pleasantly.

“Not particularly, no.”

After another moment of silence, Ponty spoke. “King Leo, can I ask why you want my hot-dog steamer?”

“I'd rather not say,” he replied. “Can I still have it?”

“I guess so,” said Ponty tentatively.

They drove through town till they came to County Highway P, traveled on that for just under a mile, pulled off into a dirt driveway, traveled down it a quarter mile, and stopped the car in front of a large chain-saw sculpture of Linus Pauling.

“Mr. Earl, I have to ask you—what is that?” asked King Leo after they'd gotten out to get a closer look at Pauling's likeness, carved from the stump of a large oak. Before Ponty could answer, Jack guessed, with a fair amount of what turned out to be unwarranted confidence, that it was a sculpture of Robert Loggia. Ponty corrected him, explaining that the owner of the land they (and the mine) were on, Gerry Iverson, was a fan of Pauling. King Leo and Jack nodded knowingly, tipping Ponty off to the fact that neither one had the vaguest notion of who Linus Pauling was. Ponty was just giving them a brief biography when from around the backside of a large grass mound a savagely barking black dog took the vanguard position ahead of a far less fierce-looking man in a flannel shirt and white painter's pants.

“Firesign, man, knock it off,” said the man to the dog. The dog obeyed but then ran excitedly toward them, choosing King
Leo to jump up on, smudging thick mud all over the front of his sweater. “Firesign!” the man cried sharply, and Firesign the dog shrank away and lay down on the ground, his tail wagging in apparent eagerness to leap on King Leo again.

“Hey, I'm really sorry, man,” the man said. He was a thinlegged fellow of about fifty, with a small potbelly, a shiny bald pate, and long, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail and secured by a small band of beaded leather. His voice was a rough tenor, and he spoke with a vague accent or affectation, though his face was open and gave the impression of guilelessness. His eyes were surrounded by wrinkles and crow's-feet, and they were slightly rimmed with red. He touched the dog with the toe of his heavy sandal. “Firesign isn't used to guests, man.”

King Leo was obviously in some sort of sartorial state of shock and could not speak. The man looked at Ponty. “Hey, Ponty,” he said, and then he squinted and leaned in to get a better look at Ponty's mustache.

“It's Earl, actually . . . um, Gerry,” said Ponty, not at all smoothly.

“Earl? You told me your name was Ponty.”

Indeed, there was every reason in the world for Gerry to hold the belief that the newly mustachioed person now identifying himself as Earl was really named Ponty. For when Sandi had taken Ponty there several days before, he'd been nothing but Ponty.

“No. No, my name's Earl.”

The man looked understandably confused. “But I called you Ponty the other day, didn't I, and you didn't correct me?”

“Well, they sound a lot alike. Sorry about the mix-up,” said Ponty.

“Well . . . okay, man. Earl it is.”

Ponty introduced Gerry to the other men, and Gerry took the opportunity to again apologize to King Leo for his dog's having soiled his “sweater set,” as Gerry called the sleeveless turtleneck. King Leo had recovered enough to accept the apology gracefully, telling Gerry that it was okay, as he had dozens more sleeveless turtlenecks (which was quite true), but he did not offer his standard list of alternate names, for which Jack and Ponty were grateful. The introductions complete, Ponty asked if they could speak with Gerry for a moment, and he invited them into his house.

“Gerry has an earth home,” Ponty informed the others.

“Yeah, me and Bilbo,” Gerry laughed.

“Now, Gerry, is Bilbo your wife?” King Leo asked good-naturedly.

Gerry checked to see if he was kidding and, discovering he wasn't, said, “No. No, Bilbo's a hobbit, from the Tolkien books.” They walked around the other side of the large earth mound toward the entrance with Firesign the dog tagging along behind. They had to walk past a large array of flat panels mounted about four feet off the ground. “My solar collectors,” Gerry explained, though no one had asked. And he continued, “I got off the grid back in '84. Just couldn't take it. Saw an episode of something called
Night Court
, and that was it for me. I was done. Now, here, see, the aluminium”—he used the British pronunciation—“plates heat up in the sun and warm the water in the coiled pipes, and I pump that into reservoirs under the foundation.” Not reading his audience very well, he kept the solar-collector information coming as they entered his earth home. “Works well until it gets really cold, and then I'm forced to use our dead ancestors as heat. But I suppose that's better
than burning our friends the trees,” he said, sounding a little sad. “I use photovoltaic panels for my lighting, but they're way pricey, man, so I can't use 'em for heat.”

They stepped into his rustic kitchen, and he offered each of them a chair (and though all the chairs he offered were unique in style and color, the two similarities they shared were their chipping paint and an immediate need to be shimmed and glued in order to be considered structurally sound), and they pulled them up around his fiberboard kitchen table, a remarkably stained piece of wood set atop two sawhorses. “Can I get you some stinging-nettle tea?” he asked them.

“I—I don't think so,” Jack said. “Or is it good?”

“Oh, it's great. I throw a little comfrey leaf in there, too,” he said, hoping to close the deal.

“It won't sting when I drink it, will it?” Ponty asked.

“No, it shouldn't.”

They all reluctantly accepted, so he drew water into a battered old aluminum teapot, lit a small can of denatured alcohol, and set the pot on a grid above it. “It'll take a while,” he said. “But every good thing does.” He took a large plastic pail from a spot next to the sink, overturned it, and sat down near his guests. “What can I help you guys with?” he asked.

“Well, King Leo here—Are you familiar with him, by the way?” Ponty asked.

“Just what I know of him from when we met a minute ago to now,” Gerry said honestly.

“Well, he's a . . . a singer-songwriter from the Twin Cities, and he'd like to take a look at the mine. Is that right, King Leo?”

“Gerry, I want to see the mine in preparation for a funkadelic
cosmic event such as history has never known,” King Leo clarified.

“What'll that involve?” Gerry asked.

“The coming together of many into one. An up-and-down, whacked-out, joyous, dizzy funk being laid down in praise of the Source, the . . . the, Spirit-Being, the Funky One, the Rat of Dee-vine Power.”

Gerry whistled. “How many people we talking about?”

“Gerry, if I'm right, and I am right often, the Source, the Funky One does not require a certain number of people in attendance to show his Dee-vine will and pour out the funk on those involved in the revival.”

“I see . . . So . . . ?”

“I couldn't imagine more than forty to sixty-five participants.”

“Would that be okay?” Ponty asked.

Gerry passed a hand over his balding head. “Well,” he said, “as long as you leave it in the condition you found it in, I don't have a problem with that.”

“That is excellent,” said King Leo. “Gonna be a revival. Thank you, Gerry Iverson.”

Gerry waved off King Leo's praise. “Bah,” he said.

“No, really, thanks,” added Ponty.

“Ahh,” Gerry croaked, with another demure movement of his arm. He paused while looking King Leo over. “So you're a musician, huh?” he said. “You know, I used to do a little fingerpicking and whatnot myself. Hang on a second.” He left the table with surprising alacrity, disappeared around a half wall behind which the sounds of enthusiastic rooting around could be heard, and returned a moment later with a battered Ovation
six-string and a banjo. Jack looked at Ponty with concern, but Ponty was looking at King Leo, who in turn was watching Gerry with a mildly amused expression.

“While we're waiting for the water to heat up, what say we jam?” Gerry said, thrusting the guitar at King Leo. “We can start with a few Weavers tunes and see if we get anything clicking.”

It was during the fourth stanza of the Irish Rovers' setting of “The Unicorn,” King Leo strumming along with Gerry, that Jack felt a hollow sense of revenge for King Leo's poetry assault. Then Gerry swung immediately into “The Gandy Dancer's Ball,” and Jack's feeling of revenge was swamped by one of intense personal misery.

I
t was 8:45
A.M.
, and Bart Herzog, the governor of Minnesota, was rappelling out the third-floor window of the governor's mansion to greet his guest.

“Bromstad, you son of a tinker's son, how the Hec Ramsey are you?” he asked, unclipping from his carabiners to shake Bromstad's hand.

Bromstad had expected a more conventional approach, something along the lines of Herzog's opening his door in response to Bromstad's knocking upon it. He answered Herzog with a question of his own. “Governor, are your stairs out?”

Herzog began the process of laughing, extracted an El Rey
del Mundo Churchill maduro from the breast pocket of his military-issue M-65 field jacket, paused his laughing to bite the end off, resumed laughing, pulled a pack of Ohio Blue Tip matches from the thigh pocket of his BDU tiger-stripe trousers, took one out and struck it on the side of his lifted boot, interrupted his laughing again to light his cigar, and, after some strenuous puffing, threw the match over his shoulder, took a long drag, and resumed his laughing on the exhale.

“No, no. That little toadstool press secretary of mine,” he said, pointing a thumb back toward his mansion, “‘advised' me not to talk to you, and I didn't want to have to fight with him, so I just came out the window. Didn't even wake the wife.”

“Why do you think he advised you thusly?” Bromstad asked, accidentally producing a rather archaic sentence while trying to be nonchalant.

“He says you're as dead as a stuffed mule deer. ‘Wouldn't be good for my approval ratings to be seen with you,' he says,” Herzog stated matter-of-factly before taking a puff of his Churchill. “Hey! I'm sorry—you want one of these?” he asked, gesturing with the already very wet end of his stogie.

Bromstad just shook his head sadly.

“What?” Herzog asked upon noticing Bromstad's hurt look. “Oh, hey. Don't worry about it. He doesn't know what he's talking about. You're not as dead as a stuffed mule deer. Sure, you been shot by this Ryback fellow. But there ain't no reason in the world you can't drag yourself through the woods, find some heavy brush, and lay down to lick your wounds.” A passing car honked its horn. “Hey,” said Herzog, “they've spotted us. Let's break up this little powwow and reconvene in my study.”

Once inside—they entered through the front door—Bromstad peered at Herzog through a thick fog of cigar smoke and attempted small talk. “How's the governor game going?” he asked.

“Beats pickin' cotton,” Herzog said, “Though not by much. I suppose you heard about my recent trouble?”

“No. I've been busy.”

“Are you kiddin'? Busy doin' what—spelunking? It's all over the media.”

“I've been . . . out of town.”

“Well, a protester got personal on me the other day, so I had to bust a move on him. Dropped him like a hot buttered anvil right there on the capitol steps. Unfortunately, a picture of me standing over him taunting Ali style made the front page of the paper.” He took a long pull off a can of vanilla-flavored sports shake. “Big uproar. Lots of negative press. I suppose they would have liked it better if I'd held him in my arms and rocked him to sleep singing ‘All the Pretty Little Ponies.' No. I did the right thing. I stand by it.”

“Well, good for you,” Bromstad encouraged, though he was really just waiting for Herzog to be done speaking.

“And what's happening with you? The latest Dogwood book just went in the toilet after the second week, huh?”

Bromstad pulled up the arms of his sweater. “No. No. It's still posting strong sales, and we expect to tie up some more foreign-rights deals within—”

“You can't fool an old soldier. This Ryback fellow's taking a big boardinghouse bite out of your sales. There's only so many book-buying dollars per household, and right now that rat-adventure book is eating your lunch. It happened to me when
Stamp Your Ass MINE!
came out. Bunt Casey's was released right after it, and sales took a little hit. They recovered, though.” Herzog's personal memoir had turned out to be a giant success, and it was at the Dwee Awards, where Bromstad and Herzog had met and formed their friendship after discovering a common love of drinking too much table wine, throwing wadded-up bits of dinner rolls at other attendees, and heckling the presenters.

“Well, I'll admit it. I'm disappointed by recent events. I don't like or trust this guy. I want him taken out as a viable threat to our way of life.”

“What can the governor's office do to help you?” Herzog asked while exhaling the largest cigar cloud yet.

“Well, here's the thing. I've got Stig and the boys from Den Institut Dansk working surveillance for me.”

“Be careful. They're Danish. I hope you know what you're doing.”

“Well, in fact, we ran into difficulty when an unfortunate incident caused the Volvo to roll, many times. We barely got out alive.”

“Swede cars aren't worth the paper they're printed on. They would roll just as soon as look at you. Buy American.” Bromstad was puzzling over this nonsensical automotive jingoism when Herzog continued, “How's their intelligence? What have you got so far?”

“Well, so far only this. He used to work at Medieval Burger. And he's got large feet.”

“That's not a lot to go on.”

“No, it's pretty thin—but we'll get more. He's up in Holey with King Leo right now, and—”

“King Leo! Jumping Jerry Rice in a flatboat, man! What's that panty-wearing freak of nature up to?”

“That's what I'm—”

“Eroding our hard-earned Minnesota dignity, no doubt,” Herzog said, slamming a fist down onto his table, overturning his empty sports-shake can.

“No doubt. That's—”

“What do you need? Troops?”

Bromstad did a double take. “Can I have some?”

“No. I got carried away there. Sorry. Now's not a good time anyway. The heat on me is too intense. Diverting the National Guard for personal use is not going to endear me to anyone.” The governor looked around the room as though he smelled something. “What about a steak?” he asked suddenly.

Bromstad looked as puzzled as a man to whom the offer of steak has been unexpectedly made. “I . . . I don't see how that will help.”

“You want one? I'm gonna have a steak.”

“No thanks. It's a bit early for steak.”

“Okay, I guess I'll wait, too,” said Herzog, his voice betraying his disappointment over having to forgo the breakfast meat. “King Leo,” he said, shaking his head. “His last album was nothing but a filthy rant over a bass line and fuzz guitars. It was an aggressive criminal act. My wife loves the guy, though. Figure that out.”

“There's no sense to be made of it. But if this Ryback person has aligned with him, they can't possibly be up to anything good. That's where I need your help.”

“I'm listening,” said Herzog, though it was clear to Bromstad that he was still busy being disgusted over King Leo while
relighting his cigar and therefore not listening at all. Bromstad coughed loudly, and Herzog disengaged from his own thoughts. “Okay. What do we do?” he asked.

“Well, I'll tell you. Number one, I don't believe that this Holey Rat story is true in the first place.”

“What? That's a pretty serious accusation. What proof have you got?”

“It's the story of a man being attacked by a six-foot rat, Governor.”

“Yeah, that's what I've heard. Sounds like an amazing story.”

“Governor! A six-foot rat! When's the last time you heard of a rat that grew to be six feet long?”

“I haven't. But just to play devil's advocate, I know that sturgeon can get to be a thousand pounds or more if left to their own devices. Maybe rats are the same way.”

“What does . . . ?”

“And I certainly wouldn't want to tangle with a rabid capybara in a dark alley, would you?”

“I don't know. But—”

“I saw him interviewed. He said he researched it pretty thoroughly. And his publisher, you don't think they checked this out? Look, you know I'm behind you.

You're good for Minnesota, just like I am, and Minnesota in turn is good to us. This guy with the big feet, I've got no more love for him than you do, but it seems like you're the only one who has a problem with his story being true.”

“What if I could prove it wasn't?” said Bromstad, narrowing his eyes and angling his head down significantly, unfortunately undermining the effect of the look by hiding it from Herzog under the brim of his hat.

Herzog lowered himself to see under it. “Then I'd be behind you one thousand and ten percent.”

“And you'd see to it that he was brought to justice?”

“Swiftly and surely.”

“Lying to his trusting fellow Minnesotans like that, it's inhuman.”

“It's in-Minnesotan, too, to coin a phrase. I don't like that kind of thing.”

“What could you do to a fellow like that?” asked Bromstad, pretending to mull.

“Well . . .”

“Yes?”

“Say, you're not suggesting . . . ?”

“I could be.”

“The Minnesota Cultural Sedition Act?”

“I am.”

“The Minnesota Cultural Sedition Act,” Herzog repeated ominously. “Do I have the power to invoke it?”

“You're the governor.”

“I am, aren't I?” said Herzog. “Yes, if he's guilty, we could invoke the Minnesota Cultural Sedition Act. It might be fun. Liven this state up a little. Steak?”