The Mechanical Mind of John Coggin (13 page)

BLLLWWWHAATTTT!

John awoke to the sound of a constipated elephant in its death throes.

“What is that?” he moaned.

“Reveille,” Page said as she rolled out of her cot and landed with a bump on the ground. “Miss Doyle likes to play her trumpet in the morning.”

She
may like it, John thought as he crept out of the tent, but I don't think anyone else does.

And he was right—even the rattlesnakes hid in terror when Miss Doyle sounded her daily yawp. Still, apart from the initial cacophony, John couldn't really complain. Anything was better than copper mines and coffins.

It was a strange feeling to be getting dressed and eating breakfast and brushing one's teeth in the desert. John
had seen many landscapes on his travels with the Wayfarers, but none as alien as this. Walking with Page to the dig site was like walking across a lunar crater.

“Chip chop!” Miss Doyle called out. The sheen on her umbrella was shimmering like a mirage.

While Page clambered into the pit, John examined his new place of work. Though the sun was already scorching cracks into the ground, a sturdy canvas tarp had been strung up on poles to protect anyone working below. A very bored Boz was lounging under the edge, keeping an eye on the horizon.

“I want to get this outhouse cataloged before I go.” Miss Doyle pivoted and began climbing down a ladder. “Rich stuff to be found in people's old poo,” she noted.

“Like what?” John asked, following her into an earthen room.

“Seeds, bones, bits, and bobs. What they ate, what they drank, what was crawling around inside them and eating their intestines . . .”

John looked over at Page. She was happily labeling what appeared to be a piece of stone dung.

“What they threw up and what they threw out,” Miss Doyle finished, handing John a box covered with a screen. “See this? This shard tells me that the Medapandac enjoyed a glass of goat's blood with their evening meal.”

John examined the shard with care. No matter which
way he turned it, he couldn't understand what Miss Doyle was talking about. He chewed on his bottom lip. Making himself indispensable was going to be more complicated than he had imagined.

Then again, everything was complicated when you worked for Miss Doyle. His new employer, he decided, had more than one screw missing. She might spend hours removing the dirt from a femur, then suddenly seize a pickax and go at the ground with the fury of a hurricane. When she wasn't instructing John about the eighty-two varieties of grain in the area, she was using Boz to explain how the Medapandac disemboweled their cattle.

She certainly didn't sleep like any normal person. Every afternoon, bang on the dot of one, she'd curl up in the most convenient dig site—sometimes right next to a skeleton—and stay like that for an hour without moving. John almost fell on top of her one day. She simply flicked her long, reptilian tongue to the side of her mouth.

In spite of her idiosyncrasies, John did his best to be of service. Whatever the task might be, from counting stone flakes to sorting kneecaps, he was the first to volunteer. He asked intelligent questions and listened patiently to Miss Doyle's three-hour answers. He squished scorpions with the air of a man who cared nothing for death.

But that wasn't all. To sweeten the honey, he began to devise little improvements to Miss Doyle's excavation.
With a rope, his jackknife, and the heel of a bucket, he cobbled together a basic pulley system for shifting dirt. He fixed the axle on her wheelbarrow. He mended the ribs on her umbrella.

The goal was simple. He needed to persuade Miss Doyle that both Coggins were worth taking overseas. Like many in this world, John had finally reached the point where he no longer cared to imagine what
could
be. His only purpose was to survive what
was
.

There was one major stumbling block to his plan: Miss Doyle's pride and pleasure in working alone. Three weeks into his labors, as John was cleaning cattle ribs near the tomb, he judged the time was ripe to ask her why.

“Never took much to live humans,” Miss Doyle told him matter-of-factly. “And they never took much to me,” she continued, picking a beetle out of her hair and popping it into her mouth. “It's a hard cross to bear, being a woman of uncommon talents.”

She sniffed and resumed her analysis of the artifacts. As she had explained in great depth to John, her theory was that the cattle bones formed part of a ritual feast. Boz had labeled it the barbeque pit.

“
I
like living with you,” John hazarded. “And I
love
being an archeologist.”

Miss Doyle did not reply. John dug his knuckles into his thigh. Had he played his cards too early?

“In fact, I thought Page and I could come with you. To work. Overseas.” Where we can disappear forever, he added in his head.

Miss Doyle cackled. A very sere cackle.

“What's so funny?”

She squatted back on her haunches and tilted her umbrella off her eyes.

“Look, I'm not the kind to spread mustard on a rotten cabbage, so I'll be frank. You're a terrible liar.” The force of her gaze compelled John to look to the ground. “You don't want to be an archeologist. I've been observing you during your time here—you'd be much better off making things that people will dig up later.”

Sure, thought John, if they weren't all blown to smithereens.

“I tried that.”

“You mean the chicken poo debacle?”

John reared his head. He was going to have Boz's vocal chords for guitar strings. “Who told you about that?”

“Your sister. Now don't scowl,” she said sternly. “I asked, and she answered. It's an excellent and efficient way to get through the world.”

So Boz hadn't told Miss Doyle. Well, that made him a little less of a pathological liar.

“Yes, I tried to make an oven run on chicken poo,” John admitted.

“Well, why not give it another go?”

“It won't work. My inventions never work. It's no use.”

“Then you're just like your great-aunt wants you to be.”

“Really?” challenged John. “How?”

“Dead on the inside.”

“Am not!” John yelled, bouncing to his feet and hurling his brush to the ground.

“Are so!” Miss Doyle stood and barked back. “If you're not out there learning, you've given up. Great lives are built on risk, John. You must accept the perils of existence.”

John was so angry, his hands were shaking and tiny red spots were obscuring his vision. “I'm not dead!”

“Not yet,” Miss Doyle said, squinting at the crinkles in John's forehead. “But if you keep on reacting like that to an honest opinion, you might as well be. Breathe, boy, breathe.”

John took a deep breath, and the red spots began to fade.

“Are you okay?”

John nodded.

“Right,” Miss Doyle said, “then this conversation is closed. Back to work.”

“H
ELP ME
! S
OMEBODY
help me!” John screamed.

A huge serpent of fire was slinking through the desert, engulfing fleeing geckos and swallowing rocks whole. In the black of night, its crimson skin flickered and shivered. Through the camp it came, each razor-sharp scale tinged with flame. It was at the tarps, it was at the tomb, it was at the tent! It reared its head, opened its horrible fanged mouth wide, and—

“Johnny, wake up! Wake up!”

Page shook her brother so hard she pushed him off his cot. On the dry-packed ground he lay shivering in his own sweat.

“You had a dream,” she said, wrapping her blanket around him. “It's okay.”

John ducked his head. Dawn was seeping through the slit in the tent flap.

“It's okay,” Page repeated, patting the blanket.

“Anything wrong?” Miss Doyle shouted from outside the tent.

“I'm fine,” John finally managed to say.

But he wasn't fine.

A month had passed with them living on top of the buried city of the Medapandac, and his dreams were getting worse. If it wasn't fire and floods, it was Maria and his mother. Sometimes they were apart—Maria weeping tears of blood into the smoking rubble of her bakery, his mother tripping and falling into a pit full of bones—and sometimes they were together, both reaching out their hands to him from a fast-moving freight car. Regardless of how hard he ran, he could never catch up.

And then there was the one with his father. They'd be sitting on the stone bench in the sunshine, and a cloud would drift by. Then another. Then more and more, until the whole sky was a mass of roiling thunder. It always ended with a lightning bolt severing the bench in two.

John was smart enough to know that these dreams weren't appearing out of nowhere. In fourteen days, Miss Doyle would be moving on. And he had no idea what to do.

“Where are you going when you head overseas?” he asked her at the end of breakfast. His veins were still icy with leftover fear.

“Mandalina,” Miss Doyle replied, using her long
tongue to put a final lick on the rim of her plate. “For work on a contract dig. Have to raise enough funds to finance the next stage of operations.”

“We need to come.”

Miss Doyle peered at him over her nose.

“I thought we'd discussed this.”

John put down his spoon.

“Not for archeology,” he clarified. “Just on the ship. Page is awfully good with animals, and I can find work with the crew. Please, Miss Doyle, please. We have nothing left here.”

Miss Doyle placed her fingers together in a contemplative steeple.

“And what about Boz?”

Boz. John had forgotten Boz. Boz the magnificent, Boz the ridiculous, Boz the danger to any person standing within twenty feet. What was he going to do with Boz?

“I don't know,” John answered.

“Well, that's honest, at least.”

Miss Doyle stared at her bowl for a long moment. Then she nodded.

“Okay. I'll find you two passage on the ship. The captain has a wife with sticky kisses—maybe she can find someplace to stow you. But there'll be no sentimental twaddle from me, do you understand?” She handed her spoon to John for washing. “Think of it as payment for a job well done.”

John smiled. No one could accuse Miss Doyle of being sentimental.

But if John was hoping that the new plan would bury his nightmares, he was sorely mistaken. If anything, his visions became more convoluted.

Now he dreamed of standing with Page on the deck of an ocean liner while Maria and their mother called to them from the pier at Pludgett. They'd be laughing and waving handkerchiefs and happy as birds—right up to the point when a hideous vulture swooped down and pinioned them with its claws.

Great-Aunt Beauregard was still out there, John knew. Still waiting to entrap them in the family business. Until the Coggins were on the other side of the world, he couldn't sleep easy.

Miss Doyle appeared to be thinking along similar lines. Soon after the vulture dream, she summoned him from the pit.

“John, come here.”

“What's wrong?” he said, scrambling up the ladder. “Did you see someone?”

Miss Doyle was standing in a sandy patch near the tents. In lieu of her umbrella, there was a cowboy's hat. In place of her pursed lips, a frown.

“I was examining the knife marks on the scapula of a thirteen-year-old this morning when it occurred to me that every boy should know how to knee someone in the
groin. Especially boys that are blessed with great-aunts off their rockers. So, let's have it—come at me.”

Miss Doyle tossed her hat to the side, squatted in the dust, and lowered her brow menacingly. John sniggered.

“What?” she barked.

“You look really, really stu—”

He never finished his sentence. Before he knew what was happening, he found himself somersaulting through the air and landing on his back in a gigantic puff of sand. He tried to stand up, but his eyes met only the buffed tip of Miss Doyle's boot.

“First rule of self-defense. Never underestimate your enemy. Especially if she's a woman.”

She reached down and lent John her hand. As soon as he had a good grasp on it, she let go. The sand had traveled halfway up John's nostrils before he had the sense to breathe out again.

“Second rule of self-defense,” she said. “Never trust your enemy. Unless, of course,” Miss Doyle added, “she happens to be a woman of uncommon talents.”

John coughed and spluttered and attempted to get to his feet. She pinned him down with her boot.

“Do you understand what I've been telling you? You've got to be on your guard at all times.”

John nodded.

“Good, then on your feet.” She lifted her boot, and John brought his left foot around in a long sweeping
motion. It caught Miss Doyle on the ankle and sent her tumbling to the ground beside him. She lay motionless and facedown in the dirt.

Then, with a gush of sand, she flipped over onto her back and laughed. It was a thundering, sonorous laugh that rolled across the dig site. It sounded remarkably like her trumpet.

“Excellent work, John. Excellent. We'll make a thinker out of you yet.”

It was the first, and most important, of Miss Doyle's lessons in the art of self-defense. For the next week, one hour a day was devoted to the finer points of disarmament. Of course, Miss Doyle also insisted that Page be instructed.

“If I'm going to teach you the ways of the world, your sister learns too. You look out for each other. You're the only family you've got.”

As for Boz, he appointed himself honorary referee. Every afternoon, he would sit in a folding chair on the side of the patch, a straw hat firmly planted on his scarlet hair, and award points and penalties.

“This is the life, is it not, my lovelies?” he would say, typically at the precise moment when John's arm was being twisted into a figure eight by his little sister. Apparently, Page still hadn't quite forgiven him for the bakery.

“The primal pull of the animal instincts, the blood and guts and glory of the testosteronal urge!”

“Ugggh,” replied John.

A few days into the tutorial, Boz made the mistake of chipping in a suggestion.

“Ahem. Forgive me for being forward, Mademoiselle Doyle, but I have noticed that you are neglecting a certain cruciate element in your instruction.”

“Which is?” demanded Miss Doyle, drawing herself up to her full six feet.

“You aren't teaching your dilatory pupils the art of combat. You aren't teaching them how to fight with their fists.”

“Correct,” Miss Doyle said.

“But why not?” Boz jumped to his feet and began to shadowbox around her riding pants. “If you should need some pugilistic assistance, I'd be willing to lend a glove. In my time, I was known to my fellow featherweights as the Prancing Pony of Principessa.”

He danced the first few steps of the cancan and threw a series of wild punches at a cactus.

“If you value your reproductive organs, you will stop that immediately,” Miss Doyle growled.

Boz stopped.

Miss Doyle pointed to the seat, and Boz shuffled back to his position. Page was trying hard not to laugh.

Miss Doyle turned to address John. “Above all, remember that you are small insects in a world of clumsy mammals. If you attempt to do what Boz did, you will
either be sat on or squashed.” She planted her hands on her hips. “The reason I am not teaching you how to fight with your fists is because I fully expect you and your sister to fight with your brains.”

“Forgive me for interrupting,” Boz chimed in. His every muscle was straining from the effort of staying in his seat. “But I don't see how a surplus of cerebra is going to aid our young heroes in the pursuit of happiness.”

Miss Doyle picked up her hat and brushed the dust from the brim. “Then come with me.” She strode off in the direction of a distant cluster of rocks, leaving John and Page and Boz to catch up.

By the time they reached the outcrop, John's lungs were on fire. Miss Doyle was waiting for them beside a heap of whitish stone.

“Tell me what you see,” she said.

John looked. It appeared to be precisely what it was.

“A heap of stone,” he answered.

“Wrong! Assemble your facts before theorizing. Look again—look closely,” she instructed.

John crouched down next to the rocks. He saw only a mass of crumbling limestone. He sat there for a minute, waiting for a brilliant idea to come to his brain. Page stood behind him, her hand resting on his shoulder.

“Remember where you are, remember what you have learned, and use your imagination. Think, boy, think!” Miss Doyle urged.

John stared again. Then he saw it. A knob sticking out of a stone—a knob that was like nothing he had seen before in nature.

“This stone has been shaped,” he said, pointing to his discovery.

Miss Doyle smiled.

“Excellent. Why?”

John chewed on his lower lip.

“To hold something?” Page offered tentatively.

“In a way,” Miss Doyle answered. “I will give you both a clue. All of these stones, at one time, were shaped.”

There was a cry like a throttled sheep from behind them.

“By gosh, oh golly, oh Jehoshaphat, it's a pyramid!” Boz yelled.

Much as it pained her, Miss Doyle had to concede the point. “Quite right. This is the Temple of Froom.”

“How marvelous!” Boz clapped his hands together.

“Do you know anything about the Temple of Froom?” Miss Doyle challenged.

“No. But how marvelous that I should not.” Boz grinned.

“The Temple of Froom,” Miss Doyle said, directing her remarks at John and Page, “was the largest temple of the Medapandac. They built it at the height of their power, when this place was a lush and fertile valley. That knob that you saw sticking out was a way to transport
the stone. They would tie a rope around each block and have their cattle pull it on rolling logs. This was one they forgot to chisel off afterward.”

“Why did they build it?” asked Page.

“To honor Hom, their god of creation. According to the myth, Hom breathed his magic into every living thing at the time of birth. The Medapandac people believed that this was what helped them grow and prosper. They called it the divine gift of Hom. We might call it imagination.”

“I like that,” John said. “The gift of Hom.”

“But what happened to the temple?” insisted Page.

“Marauders!” Boz exclaimed. “Cutthroats, brigands, the attack of enemy tribes. Mighty are the men who wield the swords.”

“Wrong. They destroyed it themselves.”

“Come again?” Boz asked.

Miss Doyle crushed the dust between her fingers. “In the process of building the temple, the Medapandac discovered that this kind of limestone makes for a particularly effective plaster. So they began to use it to reinforce their housing. But they didn't know that this kind of limestone plaster also reacts badly to water. Almost as soon as they had applied the first coat, it started to crumble.”

“But why did they tear the temple down?” Page insisted.

“Because they didn't fight with their brains!” Miss
Doyle yelled. John had never seen her look so angry. “Any smart person would have said, ‘Maybe we should be doing something different. Maybe we need to try another material.' But not the Medapandac. They kept on cutting down more and more trees to heat the lime plaster. Without the trees, there was no shade for their cattle, their farms began to erode into the rivers, and the mud made the water undrinkable. In time, all that was left was a ruined landscape.”

“And they blamed Hom for giving them the idea,” John concluded.

“They did. They thought he was cruel and malicious. So right before they started their great migration, they tore down his temple in a fit of spite.” Miss Doyle was patting the stone in the same way Page might pat a frightened dog. “Leaving only this to tell us the tale.”

“O loathsome ignorance!” Boz bawled, wiping his eyes with the edge of his sock. “How sad the sagas of ancestors can be.”

“Twaddle,” Miss Doyle said, giving the temple one last pat. “If they'd done a little experimentation, they would have discovered that they only needed to add some of the sand they were standing on to stabilize the limestone.” She brushed her hands off vigorously, spraying Boz with a fine layer of sediment. “Gods, my foot.”

By now the sun was sinking and the cracks in the earth were snapping with the drop in temperature. Miss Doyle
rubbed her stomach.

“Gravy, that's what I need.” She pointed at John. “You and your sister can get the meal ready.”

“They shouldn't have blamed Hom,” John said, picturing a whirling flurry of stones and statues crashing down. “He probably would have showed them the solution, if they had asked.”