“You are faster than I imagined,” said Callie, gathering composure. She pointed at the Bard's hand. “I see that you received my message.”
“Aye, that I did. Do you have the Inspiros? Let’s get this over with,” he said, holding up the lyre.
“Let me see the lyre first,” she said. “Put it on the seal box.”
“You don’t trust me?” He looked pained. “What a world we live in when our gods can’t trust their mortals.”
“You are not one of mine. Put it down, please.”
“Let’s see your end of the bargain.”
She put down the stick she was holding and looked at Brad. He picked up her bag and carried it over. She opened it and drew out the Inspiros.
It was a bronze statue. Brad looked at it and saw a Rodin’s Thinker, but as she lifted it and the angle changed, Brad swore it turned into an abstract shape, then into a little Mona Lisa. By the time she held it aloft, it was just a dimly glowing bronze mass, maybe an angel holding aloft a globe, but maybe a penguin with a yoyo. The Bard eyed it hungrily, a shipwrecked sailor seeing a boat on the horizon. The big man’s left hand reached out for it, out of the control of his dumbstruck brain.
“It’s beautiful,” he croaked through his thick black beard.
“Now tell me who you are working for, or I will destroy it.”
“What?” the Bard shouted.
For the first time since he’d picked her up, Brad felt that there were other people as clueless as he was about the whole affair.
Callie’s face blazed, eyes like comets. “Mortals cannot use the Inspiros! It would destroy your mind! Who sent you?!? Who gave you the lyre???”
“Can’t use… what are you talking about?” he spluttered.
“Why did you think that you were any different than Steyr Cassman? Or Martin Hollman? They ended up as vegetables. So will you. The Inspiros is too much for you.”
“No, he said-“
“Who?!?”
With a loud shout, the Bard ran towards the muse, right arm out like a football player stiffarming a defender. She jumped back, but he hit her in the upper shoulder. The Inpiros went flying from her fingers and she flew back. Brad raced for the statue but the Bard got to it first. He threw a foot out and caught Brad in the stomach. The will to breathe rushed out of Brad’s body, but the will to fight went on while the will to lie down and rest a while piped up that it had feelings too and deserved to be considered. This was not going the way the mental movies in the car had. He barely dodged the Bard’s next kick with a completely lucky stagger to the left. He tried to lift his leg and deliver a roundhouse to the big man’s upper face but the heavy weight of the Inspiros struck his leg and added new items to his body’s list of grievances.
He spun backwards, having forgotten his dad and old tae kwon do instructor’s many warnings never to turn his back in a fight. But the Bard was trying to readjust the lyre and Inspiros under his left arm and so the spin distracted him while Brad shoved an elbow into the rather large target that was the Bard’s stomach. He didn’t make much of a dent.
Meanwhile, Callie was fishing through her bag. She came out with a piece of notebook paper and tore it lengthwise. She ran to the two men and jumped onto the Bard’s back. The giant roared and tried to shake her off, while defending his crotch from Brad’s front kick. She slapped the strip over the man’s eyes and then backflipped off the wide platform of his shoulder blades. She landed at her bag, picked up the stick she’d found and began running to the edge of the clearing, bag also in hand. Then realizing she’d forgotten her traveling partner, she stopped and yelled, “Come on, Brad!” Brad was sizing up his opponent, now blind, but not flailing. In fact, he seemed to be moving quite surely, just in the wrong direction.
“Say nothing,” he heard in his head, not so much in words, but in images. A kid with a hand covering the lower half of his face as he looked at a Pictionary card. A whisper in the ear. A zipped mouth.
So he said nothing; just ran away, leaving the Bard punching at air with the statue, the most mystical pair of brass knuckles the world had ever seen.
They ran out of the clearing, Callie backtracking their steps quickly and surely, without even breaking any branches. Brad tried to minimize the damage his steps were doing while keeping his average speed up.
Back at the car. Back onto the highway.
“If you wanted that bastard to have that thing, why’d we come all this way? Why didn’t we just leave it for him at the freakin’ truck stop with a ‘Happy Birthday’ banner?” Brad fumed.
“I mean, geez, we come all this way, see your stupid box, make some flashy business and then I get my ass kicked.” He was unable to keep his head of anger. “That is, um, if you, uh, didn’t have some plan or something. Which you do. So I’ll just shut up and wait for you to tell me why you did the right thing as usual.”
“I did the wrong thing,” she said.
That was more of a shock than the pain in his stomach.
“You? Head muse? Mistake?”
“Yes. I should have gotten his employer’s name out of him before I started.”
“Started what, running away? Hm, kinda hard when King Kong want smash.”
“But surely you do not think I would leave him with something that would destroy him?”
“The Inspiros?”
“Is right here.” She pulled a dull bronze out of her bag. It was a small man in a toga. His head was marked with uneven scratches in the shape of a crude asterisk and he held out a hand, not in triumph, but in supplication. “Not as good looking as that other thing, is it?”
“I thought all your magical crap glowed. And the lyre? Are we just going to let that go?”
“I do not think so,” she said, shaking the stick she held. In her hand was the golden instrument. “This piece of ‘magical crap’ does indeed glow. I apologize.”
“Hey, don’t sweat it. We got the damn thing! Wow. I’m happy.”
“I am as well.” She didn’t look happy. She looked more tired than when he picked her up as she huddled in her seat and took a large belt of ambrosia. She screwed the cap back on but then quickly loosened it and took another sip.
The Bard punched the Asian kid in the stomach a few times and he crumbled to the ground. Then he turned around. The muse was watching him, head forward. “I got what I came for, little girl. Don’t wanna have to hit you.”
“Save your breath,” she said and yowled towards him. He raised the Inspiros and brought it down on her head. She dropped like a sack or garbage tossed off the balcony by a lazy tenant.
The adrenaline started dissipating in his bloodstream. He breathed. Checked himself for damage. He was worried that girl was going to split his head open with a rock or something when she jumped on him.
While he was here, he thought he might as well tell the dealer the good news. He went over to the box and said, “Fearson.” The box opened and the Bard took out the wooden seal. His transmitter box was back in the car, but he could go might as well use this one. He pulled some paper out of the box and composed a short telegraph style message:
Callie’s face was paler than usual. She kept the thermos to her mouth. She was using too much, she knew. She wondered when would be the best time to stop projecting her illusions. The paper over the Bard’s eyes helped but, as they got farther and farther, it became harder to project to it. If she did not have this mortal body, she would have so much more power. As it was, she sucked ambrosia like a wino drinking through a fifty and worried that she would run out before the Bard would let slip his employer’s name. As soon as he said “Fearson,” she was tempted to drop it, but she was curious to see what the plan was.
Ah, she was meant to be captured, she saw. She held her breath as the big man eyed the Brad body. When he kept walking, she breathed a sigh of relief. Then she stopped working.
The paper strip fell from his eyes and the Bard knew immediately what had happened. The woods shook with his yell. In his left armpit, he held a stick, in his left hand was a lump of plastic. A motel alarm clock. He wanted the illusion back, just to stomp on the two bodies some more.
“So, where to?”
“There’s a man. A shop. You have done a lot for me. You do not have to come.”
“Read my mind. You think I’m going to drop out in the middle of this?”
“Better than dropping dead at the end. Fearson is powerful, whoever he is.”
“Yeah, but he’s evil, right? Evil never wins.”
“Not in my stories. But we are not in one of mine.”
“Anyway, where is this shop?”
“I do not know. We must consult. I should get this lyre back to my sister.”
“Well, let’s start there. Where does she live?”
“Miami.”
“Well, I was going to Ocala anyway. What’s another half a state?”
She smiled. “When you meet Erato, you will be glad you made the trip. You would probably trek across the Peloponnesians for her.”
“Why do you say that? Did that happen often?”
Callie sighed. “The best I could muster was a river or two.”
“I crossed several states for you,” Brad said. Banter made him forget the pain in his side.
“You drive a car. It means less.”
He drove on, the expression on his face someplace between a grin and a grimace. She looked down and checked the thermos with a small motion. She started to raise it to her lips, but her better judgment stopped her wayward arm. She was OK. She could wait for it. Brad didn’t notice with his mind on his ribs.
Mr. Gong sank another drive deep into the fairway. He was starting strong, but did not want to let himself get distracted halfway through. That’s when you made careless mistakes. That’s when you lost the cup. He was leading Bancroft by two strokes, but a bad hole would tie them.
Today was odd. When he putted, he wasn’t really thinking of the ball and hole in angles and elevations like he used to. Instead he was remembering the last time he took Brad minigolfing. Mr. Gong had tried to spread his love of the game for Brad in all its forms. First was minigolf. Then golf lessons. When Brad expressed more interest for the videogames at the golf range than the actual lessons, Mr. Gong gave up reluctantly. Then, they’d gone minigolfing a year or two ago and had had a really good time together. Back to the basics. Basics with windmills and bridges and moats.
So instead of hole 3’s kidney shaped green, Mr. Gong saw hole 3 at Storm’s, with it’s up and down drawbridge. And if Bancroft noticed him counting rhythms under his breath as he drew the putter back, he didn’t care. In fact, Bancroft thought Gong was timing his swing, and the other man started mumbling numbers to himself as well. It seemed to be working for them both.
The plane finally took off. Louie breathed deeply. He liked lots of things about flying. You got to go someplace new. You got to sit in a chair for a while and be served. The terror tales he heard from others made him want to be curt, to say, “Stop whining. Take a frickin’ Greyhound if you can’t handle the rigors of air travel.” But they never stopped complaining. And, against his will, he would find himself going along with them. “Oh yeah, aren’t layovers the worst? And the food…” Why did he say that shit, instead of just telling them to shove it?
The funniest thing was that what they really hated most were the other passengers. “Hell is… other people,” he heard Brad quote in his head. So why did they talk to him? He was another passenger. Perhaps it was their way of vetting their seatmates. Talk about the crazies and see what sort of commiseration you get back. And that, he guessed, was why he bitched too. To be part of the club.
Deep thoughts thought, Louie turned his attention to the ground rushing by. Lift came, slowly at first. It could be the collective will of everyone in the plane that really provides the power of flight. Belief that fuels itself. It only they could disconnect all the physical trapping of flight. Then hour refueling delays like the one they’d just had would go away.
But now he had something to talk about with the lady next to him.
Rand was slightly scared by the twitching. Masterson sat in the passenger seat, not moving a muscle except for his right hand, which was in his pocket. And it was twitching. Rand didn’t especially like looking at another man’s lap, but the twitch drew his attention away from the road. He kept an eye on it like a kid watching a firework fuse burning.
As for Masterson, he was in his own world, a world where touch reigned paramount over the other senses. He tried to hold the marble loosely, but his hand couldn’t stop grabbing it and letting it go. It felt alive under his fingertips. He kept it under wraps to keep it from jumping onto the floor. The marble’s weight shifted in his hand and he barked directions to his partner, mostly to go faster, but also telling which path to take at forks in the road.
They were getting closer. Masterson said so. Rand nodded nervously. Masterson said so again, not really talking to his partner anymore.
Esmerelda stopped walking and turned back. She’d left the book her sister had left her in the car. She backtracked and got it from the backseat. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. “I’d be better off with Seven Ways to Not Be a Waitress Anymore,” she thought to herself. But Markie was just trying to help. She was a Highly Effective Person. She had good Habits. She had a child.
Esmerelda cringed when she thought of the books that Markie would make her borrow if Esmerelda ever got married and had children. She rang the doorbell and heard the commotion begin inside. The two dogs running to the door for food (all new people had to be checked for sources of protein). Her nephew Sam running behind the dogs (all new people had to be checked for toys). Markie trailing the pack, with her phone to her ear, having a Friday meeting.
Markie opened the door, blocking Sam and dogs with her leg. “Hi,” she mouthed to her sister and then to the people on the other end she agreed on the proposed percentage. “Come on in,” she waved.
Esmerelda bent over and picked Sam up. He was a heavy thing, but nothing her arms couldn’t handle after lifting trays for ten years. She dropped some bones she’d taken from work into the waiting mouths of the dogs. Markie blamed her for the pets getting all fat.
They only had time for a quick snack, since Esmerelda was on from lunch to dinner, and Sam had a playgroup. Markie said her usual bit in the so-much-better-than-you voice she’d gotten along with her promotion. Esmerelda nodded and uh-huhed in all the right places, but inside, even a double shift full of rowdies seemed better. Sam crawled along the floor and Markie kept taking things out of his mouth, but with no break in her talking.
Her sister, aunt, and pet-spoiler time done with, Esmerelda made it to work ten minutes early. She was pissed off as usual that Markie had walked all over her.
“Think of all that money you got,” she told herself, but it was hollow compared to all the cash Markie got just for telling people what to do. Maybe some other crazy would walk in here today blaring and handing out cash. She could hope.
She imagined taking that hundred to that casino in Gary, the Trump. She saw herself plunking it down, getting those red and black chips in a thick stack in her hand. Blackjack. Roulette. She could get one of those books, learn how to play. She walked out with a stack of bills in an envelope too thick to close. Markie, tut-tutting on the outside, kelly green jealous on the inside.
Brad kept his eyes peeled for the black Tercel in his rearview. He wished he had one of those huge school bus mirrors in the 4Runner to aid him, but he settled for quick glances and then longer looks over the shoulder. Callie was staring out her window with her legs pulled up onto the seat and her arms hugging them. She looked calm, which should have calmed Brad but he felt that at any second she was going to disappear and leave him with a lot of large man wrath chasing him through the South.
He knew from the first time he’d met the Bard on the road that the man was a crazy driver and so Brad kept the accelerator pressed to the floor as if keeping it out of a gunfight. He cranked the wheel left and right, swerving around slower (lesser) cars. When the flashing lights appeared, he didn’t even turn to Callie.
“Do the thing!” he yelled, brandishing her ability like an axe.
“What?” she said.
“There’s a cop, behind us. Blast him with something,” he urged.
“Why are you driving so fast?”
“I was staying ahead of the Bard. The man’s a fast driver. It’s the power of crazy.”
“You don’t have to worry about him, really. He lost his power to fool the cops when he lost his lyre.”
The lights got closer.
“C’mon, Callie, do something!”
She sighed. Closed her eyes. Brad slowed down slightly, to just slightly above legal speeds.
“Still, um, yeah, he’s not moving, Cal.”
“I am trying. Be quiet.” She thought for a breath and then said, “Get to the right… now.”
Brad swung the car and the cop followed. They slowed and then Callie yelled, “Go!”
The nose of the 4Runner jumped up and the rest followed and they were off. The cop was getting out of his car and walking over to an empty space as they left.
“Do not do that again,” she glared. “Just drive normally.”
“What? I’m sorry. I just thought you could get us out of trouble.”
Silence fell after his words.
“Callie, you didn’t tell me, I just assumed we had to keep ahead of the Bard.”
.3 more miles.
“Callie.”
Her face had grown pale. She gripped the thermos, but did not take a sip.
“Callie, are you OK?”
She slumped in the seat. Brad remembered all of the mandatory CPR trainings at Sedill, but did not think that they would apply for someone who didn’t normally breathe all the time. He’d been so tired that day, it was a wonder he recalled anything at all. That plastic torso. The fake head whose airway led into a bag. The thumper they tell you to compress against, not warning you that if you ever had to do CPR for real, you are going to break the person’s ribs.
Brad took the next exit into Macon and pulled off into the first parking lot he could find, cutting off an entire line of traffic to get close to the door in case he had to pull her into the Waffle House quickly. He leaned over her like an overeager drivein date and yanked the seat release while pushing the back down. Her head rolled off the seat and Brad pulled it back to the center. He pulled the thermos from her hands and unscrewed the top.
Thermos in his left hand and her head cradled in his right, he put it to her lips and tried to pour a trickle into her mouth. It went in and welled up. He put his fingers to the side of her mouth, trying to save it. It felt like warm honey. It felt like sun rays coming through a window on a lazy afternoon. Like flannel pajamas under a warm quilt. He fought the urge to lick his hand (“I should warn you about my ambrosia” ran through his head) and instead wiped it off onto her lips.
And then she jerked against him. He put his hand over her mouth in case Callie spit, but that wasn’t necessary. She gulped and swallowed and kept snorting against his hand. Brad tried not to think about what the scene looked like to people outside looking in and just concentrate on keeping her from hurting herself. Gradually she calmed down. Took a deep breath.
She opened her brown eyes and said, “Thank you.”
“Are you OK now? Can we take any time to rest?”
“The Bard is tracking us somehow. How else could he have come to the transmitter?”
“I’m not the expert on all these magic artifacts.”
She furrowed her eyebrows. Brad kept eyeing her, in case of a relapse. She sat up and got out of the car.
“Maybe in the fuel tank? No, he was never close enough. There must be something on the…” she threw herself on the ground.
“Hey, take it easy,” said Brad who had come around to her side.
She got on her back and scooted underneath the car. And she saw a crushed bit of machinery wedged into the undercarriage that did not look like it belonged. Something that might have come from a Da Vinci notebook. A piece of it was still whirring, slightly. Callie yanked it off with her hands.
“That’s it, huh?” said Brad, really just for the sake of saying something. He felt like a doctor had just removed a surgical instrument from his midsection months after the procedure. “Hey, let’s put it on another car.”
“That would not be very nice, now, would it?”
“Yeah, but it would a very sneaky and effective way of getting him off our tail.”
“Too many mortals are in this already. We can just leave it here.”
“I thought almost dying would make you a bit more amenable to doing what we have to do to get to Miami safely.”
“I have almost died before.”
“You… are getting insufferable,” he said. They got back into the car and drove away from the still moving wreckage of the spy machine.
When they got back on the highway, Callie said, “Brad, really. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“We will be landing shortly in Boston,” said the pilot’s voice.
Louie packed his magazine and put away his CD player and resumed staring out the window. Around him, the passengers in the aisle seats did the same. Anything to be ready for that dash down the plane once the fasten seatbelt light went off at the gate (of course those seatbelts would have been undone at the first contact of the wheel with the ground). They tensed their bodies like sprinters prepping for a race. Louie was in a window seat, so he knew he would not be in the running. His parents were content to wait their turn in the rows. Dashing would be undignified. Usually the experienced travelers in Louie’s seat position (but how experienced are you really if you don’t ask for an aisle? Windows are for children who haven’t flown before, their demeanor screamed) would have their cell phones out and poised to be revived once the plane hit the tarmac. But Louie wasn’t expecting any calls. Neither were those other people, they just wanted to call as soon as the flight landed to bitch about how terrible it was and to arrange a quick escape from the airport as if staying around one second longer than necessary would be justifiable ground for a civil suit against the transportation industry for wasting precious moments of their lives. And forget about picking up their bags at baggage claim. Obviously they can’t trust the airlines with anything and so they have to carryon everything (soon they’d have to buy an extra seat for a Sherpa) in massive wheeled cases calculated to fill just over half of the overhead bin so that there’s no way two of them will fit up there.
The plane began its descent into Logan and again Louie wondered how Brad’s trip was going. His friend was supposed to hit Ocala today and stay with Kate for a few days. If Brad pulled this off, he wasn’t going to talk about anything else for months. Louie half hoped that the Gongs found out about the whole thing, just to keep his friend from becoming intolerable.
Louie hadn’t been to Boston in ten years. Glen Oaks wasn’t quite the sun drenched retirement community that most grandparents went to. He guessed that the facility was for old bluebloods who thought that Florida fashions were simply too gauche to bear. He’d visited when his grandmother had first moved in, the whole family had gone out in a show of solidarity for the decision but after that, nothing. They were supposed to visit during Louie’s college tour but then he decided not to take off school to take one, since he and Brad did early admission to Yale and the interview had been conducted in Milwaukee by an alum.
He regretted it now. Missing school for a dying relative would be seen as important as missing for seeing colleges. He just always figured that Grandma would be around. She was an institution.
Landing on the runway now, the airbrakes on the wing slamming open, everyone on the plane a little anxious. The seatbelts popped. People yawned their ears open. The phones came on. Louie gripped his bag in his lap.
The sprinters wrestled their midget coffin cases down from the overhead bins and started down the aisle as if the people behind were actually flames of Perdition. This trip, one of them tripped on an errant seatbelt and went sprawling, twisting his body to protect his laptop case. The people behind weren’t so rude as to vault his fallen form, but Louie could feel the displeasure rising off them and the man entered their database of bad travel experiences, to be recounted to family and colleagues. Fall Guy picked himself off and continued his run down the aisle, but now the people in the rows ahead had gotten up and clogged the aisle. He bounced on the balls of his feet, trying to show the glares behind that he was really sorry and he really did want to get off the plane and now it wasn’t really his fault that they were all delayed.
“OK, Bill. I don’t drive another mile until you tell me what we’re going on. We haven’t called Georgia state patrol at all, but you just keep sniffing,” Rand said.
Masterson turned a baleful stare at his partner. Rand drew the car to the side of the road.
“No, keep going!” the older man said. “He’s getting away!”
“He could be anywhere. We have nothing.”
“No, I know where he is. I mean I can follow him.”
“How?”
Masterson drew his right hand out of his pocket. A blue marble rested in the palm of his hand.
“It’s like the end of a string. I can feel the tug. That’s how I know where to go. But it’s getting weaker.”
“Let me see that,” Rand said reaching out for the marble. Masterson reluctantly placed it in Rand’s hand. He grasped it like Masterson had.
“I don’t feel anything.” It reminded him of the time he’d played with a Ouija board with an older cousin. When they’d both placed their hands on the widget, it had spelled out the name of Rand’s future wife (Clarice), his cousin’s address in the future (630 Trinity Lane) and the winner of the World Series that year (Rangers, which turned out to be completely wrong but Rand had given good odds on the Mariners because he trusted the board and he lost his allowance for a good three months to pay it). The cousin gave him the planchette and he felt nothing. The explanation was that he was too young to fully tap into the spirit world. Little Rand went home and cried to his mother about the incident (“I can’t tap into the spirit world,” be had blubbered) and she yelled at her sister for having an occult device in the house. He never got another chance with a Ouija, although when he saw them now, he felt a hint of exclusion, back behind his eyes.
Rand moved his hand under the blue cats eye. It just seemed like a normal little sphere of glass. Masterson looked at his partner’s hand anxiously, afraid of losing his marble.
“Let me check it,” said Masterson, as if the marble were a lawnmower that wouldn’t mow or a clicker that wouldn’t click. He took it back. “It feels different now. It still works though.” He held his hand open and showed how the marble rolled right up to the edge of his hand and how he had to keep it tilted back or else it would roll right off.
“Well that’s a very cool trick, but it’s not enough to convince me that we haven’t just risked our asses on some dumb hunch of yours. You know, if you’d just asked me, I might have considered believing you. But you pull out this horseshit and it pisses me off.”
“I’m telling the truth, dammit. I don’t know why you can’t feel what’s plain as day. No, I don’t know how it works. It’s magic, yeah. You just don’t have the touch, Rand. You’re not-” (gifted) he trailed off, wondering where the stray thought had hit from. “Just give me a chance, partner. If we turn back now, we’re screwed. It can’t get any worse.”
Rand stared at the marble. Thought of the Ouija. Then he spun the wheel and took the car back onto I75, down through Georgia.