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As sundown approached, the encampment spread out on both sides of the
road. Meg stayed close to Goliath, and so ended up with a front-row
seat as the occupants of Farther set up stage. Five stage hands set
up palettes as a stage and a modest but up-to-date sound system. Meg
almost spit when their full banner was unfurled: HEDLEY KOW AND THE
KRAPPERS.
Meg found herself between Carlos and a willowy woman with flowing
blond hair streaked with red. The woman was practicing on an
instrument that looked like a fiddle with a crank and a keyboard.
“Hi,” she said. “I'm Lady Elayne, with a Y, and this is a
hurdygurdy.”
“Are
you in the band?” Meg asked.
“I
wouldn't say that, but I suppose it comes out the same,” Elayne
said. “I play with Hedley, sometimes, when I have the time. I'm a
liberal arts professor at Carlos's college... well, I was.”
Carlos laughed. “Try the liberal arts department. A while back,
they decided to get with the times and teach the tech boys the
humanities. They only ever hired two professors, and t'other quit.”
“So,”
Meg said, “what's with the name
“It's
from an English legend,” Elayne answered. “Hedley Kow was one of
the kelpies, a kind of fairy. Tales say that he could take any shape.
He could be a handsome man, or a fine horse. He could even turn
into a great monster of the lochs.”
Meg looked askance, but Carlos nodded. “George is into that sort
of thing- they call it cryptozoology,” he said. “Among those as
take Nessie and such seriously at all, the shape-shiftin' angle is a
serious 'ypothesis.”
“Okay,”
Meg said, “and what about... the rest of the name?”
“Well...
they spelled it wrong.”
Meg gave a perplexed frown. “What?”
Carlos pointed to two non-descript men setting up a synthesizer on
stage. “Those are John and Harold. They're brothers, from
England,” he said. He pointed to a blond woman who moved in
position to test the keyboard. “That's Jane, John's wife. And
John's great-to-the- greath grandfather was an inventor named
Thomas... Crapper.”
Laramie came and served them dinner paper plates, and stuck around
while Elayne flirted with him shamelessly between mouthfuls. Meg
inspected the meal, which consisted of a boiled egg, baked beans and
something that had been deep-fried beyond recognition. “What is
this?” Meg asked, poking the mysterious meat.
“Batter,” said Carlos. Meg
ventured a bite, and it turned out to be spam. “We got ourselves a
fryer, way back. The way it works, most of the work an' energy just
goes into firin' it up, so once it's goin', you might as well do
whatever you can. Sometimes things can get a bit outta hand.”
“Would that be the fried ice
cream sandwich or the fried armadillo?” Elayne queried with her
mouth full.
Carlos jabbed the air with his fork. “Those were gourmet
masterpieces!” he expostulated. “Now the fried catfish, that was
too far.”
“How is frying a catfish going
too far?” Meg asked.
“If the catfish is still moving,”
Laramie said deadpan.
“I think I've had enough,” Meg
said.
“Nay, you 'aven't,” Carlos
said. “You eat what we bring you. Doctor's orders. Hey Lar,
bring Grinner over here.” Laramie went to the Horsehauler and
brought back a large cage. Inside was something that looked like a
rat the size of a cat. Carlos dropped a few chunks of spam through
the chickenwire of the cage, and the creature gobbled them. When
Carlos waited to drop the final morsel, it hissed and bared a
mouthful of many tiny pointed teeth.
“Is that a possum?” Meg asked.
“Opossum, strictly speaking,”
Carlos said. “Didelphis
virginiana. They range
from the east coast all the way to Texas. We call 'em grinners,
'cause when one of 'em gets hit by a car, and sits in the sun a
while, the muscles in their lips stretch back, and it looks like a
big, happy grin...” Meg almost choked. “Aye, but this bloke,
when I found I found 'im in the road, I picked 'im up, an' he says
howdy.”
“Well, I think he's cute, and I'm
glad you made him the class mascot,” Elayne said.
“Mascot?” Carlos said, with a
grin as predatory as the possum's. “I'm saving him for a special
occasion. I bet he'll fry up real good.” The possum hissed.
Elayne finished her meal and made a
graceful departure. “When I first ran into her, she was a navy
brat, way back when,” Carlos muttered. “She and Hedley had an
act together before he joined up with the brothers. I think they had
a thing, too.” The tone of his voice, and the way his muscles had
rippled with tension while Elayne talked with Laramie, made Meg
suspect that he
had a “thing” of his own.
Then the man who could only be Hedley took the stage, playing a
simple squeeze box with no particular proficiency. He looked to be
in his early forties, with long dark hair that was starting to
recede. He wore a plaid shirt and knee-length khaki shorts with an
impressive selection of noise makers in various pockets. He pumped
harder and played faster as he took the stage, and the band went
wild, as if absolutely determined to drown him out. Elayne played
and ululated simultaneously, Jane bobbed and weaved in place as she
pummeled the keys, Dick used a foot pedal to pound the bass drum
while he frenetically worked over the rest of his instruments, and
John started to jump up and down like a child in a tantrum. Hedley
more than matched them, flailing his arms at the bellows like Icarus
trying to fly. Finally, an English terrier waddled out and started
to bark, and all fell suddenly silent.
Meg glanced sidelong at Carlos. “Well, look at it this way,” he
said, “if any of them are around, you can bet you're going to know
it.” Sure enough, Daniel fired several bursts, and then all was
quiet. The band continued to go through their motions in the
silence, as if the music were still going in their minds. Then
Hedley swapped the squeezebox for a banjo slung over his shoulder,
and strummed along with lyrics he delivered with the sing-song
quality of a nursery rhyme.
“Well one day old Lucifer
called Heaven, said, `There
ain't no more room in hell,'
An' St. Pete says, `We
need a curve to get more bodies in here.'
So the dead returned to Earth, and it sure was a sight, the
night they all woke up.”
He
blew a slide whistle.
“So the unknown soldiers came
out of the tomb sayin' `Peace
out, man!' Lincoln
got up and said `Segregation
forever!' While
Jefferson sat down and said `Brown
sugar's better!!' The
night they all woke up.
“Lenin
climbed out of the box and said, `Capitalism
rocks!' Gandhi
said `No
more Mister Passive Resistance!'
And John called Ringo an' said `Tell
Paul
Wings
sucks!' The
night they all woke up!”
“Then
all the stiffs in the churchyard came in and said to the priest, `You
told us when we die we'd live up in the sky in the sweet by and by.
Instead we wake up in the same old muck, so Padre
whatthe-!”
A
riff from the band and a blast of the squeeze box covered the
obviously intended profanity. “The
night they all woke up.”
The band went through one last extended riff that cut off abruptly
at the dog's bark.
The song was obviously their signature number. Meg clapped, and was
moderately disturbed to see Janie doing the same. After that, they
went into mostly covers, mostly mild sixties numbers that by their
very benignity took on a disturbing quality. The weirdest was a
muzak-like instrumental from the band that Carlos identified as “the
Gonk”. “Theme from a British kids' movie,” he said. “Bloody
crazy Brits...” A close second was John joining Jane at the
keyboard for “Heart and Soul”. He proved to have a eerily soft
pitch, while his wife sang with a jarringly deep contralto. That was
followed by a spaced-out version of “Georgie Girl” with the
redhead singing the vocals. The performance wrapped up with everyone
singing along with “Good Morning, Starshine,” at which point
Dianna carried Janie off to Moby Ralph.
As the stage came down, Carlos called to John: “Hey, I gotta talk
to Hedley.”
While Carlos waited, Meg talked briefly to Jane: “So, Carlos told
me about the name...”
“What
about it?” she said. “A name's a name.”
“Yeah,
but... Well, did you take his name?”
“Why
wouldn't I?” Meg tried not to look perplexed. “What, are the
hip girls against a woman taking her husband's name now?”
“No,
of course not, but... you shouldn't have to.”
“I
didn't.” Meg stopped trying to hide her bafflement. “Look, I
thought about it, and I figured, most important inventions in human
history: fire, the wheel, the flush toilet. Nobody knows who made
the first two, and I didn't want to be the reason people forget who
made the other one. So I took his name, and when we have a son, the
world will have another John Crapper.” By then, Jane was smiling
herself, and Meg finally allowed herself to laugh.
Hedley arrived with a set of bongos under one arm and a didgeridoo
over the other shoulder. John took his wife's hand, and they
hustled for the bus. “Put those down,” Carlos said sternly.
Hedley complied. “We've got some new vehicles, and we need to do
some recon. First light tomorrow, if not before, I'm leading a
scouting party west, and I'm taking some of our new acquisitions with
us to make it a shakedown. I want your bus with them as backup.”
Hedley shrugged in resignation. Carlos looked to Meg. “I want you
to go with them, show us where you been.”
“I
can do that,” she said hesitantly, “but I don't know if I can be
much help. There really isn't much to see. Just... a lot of them.”
She saw that her hands were trembling.
“Then
show us where you saw them,” Carlos said. “Tell us how many.
You might see things that jog or memory, even notice things you
didn't the first time. You can help us, and it's going to help you
too.”
Meg squeezed her hand into a fist, and the trembling stopped. “I'll
do it,” she said. “We can take my Audi.”
“We
have enough vehicles already, and I want you in the old Jeep with
Joe,” Carlos said. “But it's appreciated. Now, I need you to
prepare... by getting in that van now and getting a good night's
sleep.” Meg found she was more than happy to comply, and found she
was especially comfortable in the upper bunk.
Not long after, Carlos looked in, with Laramie looking over his
shoulder. “You haven't told her,” his student said casually.
“What
good would it do if we did?” Carlos responded rhetorically. “If
there's anything we know, it's that whatever happens is mostly in the
head. Telling them it could
happen is the surest way to make
it happen.”
The fiberglass boat had a plexiglass window on the bottom, with one
edge just over the bunk. Meg slept, not so much peacefully as simply
without conscious thought. Thus, when she awoke, she had no notion
of the passage of time, except that it was darker than when she went
to bed.
She was on her side, and tried to shift, which was when she
discovered she could not move. She could not even raise her head.
She found she could move her eyes, though. She looked down, and saw
Laramie stretched out on the couch. Then she looked up, at the
skylight, and saw a face peering down. She saw only a face, as
clearly as if it was illuminated by full moonlight.
It was Greg.
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