Part 29 (1/2)
”Did once! Got rejected. Here we are!”
And there indeed they were, in a place with no calendar, no month, no days, no year, but only vast spider shadows and glints of tight from collapsed chandeliers lying about like great tears in the dust.
”Boy!” cried Charlie, scared, and glad of it.
”Chuck!” said the colonel. ”You ready for me to birth you a real, live, half-dead sockdolager, on-the-spot mystery?”
”Ready!”
The colonel swept charts, maps, agate marbles, gla.s.s eyes, cobwebs, and sneezes of dust off a table, then rolled up his sleeves.
”Great thing about midwifing mysteries is, you don't have to boil water or wash up. Hand me that papyrus scroll over there, boy, that darning needle just beyond, that old diploma on the shelf, that wad of cannonball cotton on the floor. Jump!”
”I'm jumping.” Charlie ran and fetched, fetched and ran.
Bundles of dry twigs, clutches of p.u.s.s.y willow and cattails flew. The colonel's sixteen hands were wild in the air, holding sixteen bright needles, flakes of leather, rustlings of meadow gra.s.s, flickers of owl feather, glares of bright yellow fox-eye. The colonel hummed and snorted as his miraculous eight sets of arms and hands swooped and prowled, st.i.tched and danced.
”There!” he cried, and pointed with a chop of his nose. ”Half-done. Shaping up. Peel an eye, boy. What's it commence to start to resemble?”
Charlie circled the table, eyes stretched so wide it gaped his mouth. ”Why-why-” he gasped.
”Yes?”
”It looks like-”
”Yes, yes?”
”A mummy! Can't Can't be!” be!”
”Is! Bull's-eye on, boy! Is Is!”
The colonel leaned down on the long-strewn object. Wrist deep in his creation, he listened to its reeds and thistles and dry flowers whisper.
”Now, you may well ask, why would anyone build a mummy in the first place? You, you inspired this, Charlie. You put me up to it. Go look out the attic window there.”
Charlie spat on the dusty window, wiped a clear viewing spot, peered out.
”Well,” said the colonel. ”What do you see? Anything happening out there in the town, boy? Any murders being transacted?”
”Heck, ”Anyone felling off church steeples or being run down by a maniac lawnmower?”
”Nope.”
”Any Monitors Monitors or or Merrimacs Merrimacs sailing up the lake, dirigibles felling on the Masonic Temple and squas.h.i.+ng six thousand Masons at a time?” sailing up the lake, dirigibles felling on the Masonic Temple and squas.h.i.+ng six thousand Masons at a time?”
”Heck, colonel, there's only five, thousand people in Green Town!”
”Spy, boy. Look. Stare. Report!”
Charlie stared out at a very flat town.
”No dirigibles. No squashed Masonic Temples.”
”Right!” The colonel ran over to join Charlie, surveying the territory. He pointed with his hand, he pointed with his nose. ”In all Green Town, in all your life, not one murder, one orphanage fire, one mad fiend carving his name on librarian ladies' wooden legs! Face it, boy, Green Town, Upper Illinois, is the most common mean ordinary plain old bore of a town in the eternal history of the Roman, German, Russian, English, American empires! If Napoleon had been born here, he would've committed hara-kiri by the age of nine. Boredom. If Julius Caesar had been raised here, he'd have got himself in the Roman Forum, aged ten, and shoved in his own dagger-”
”Boredom,” said Charlie.
”Kee-rect! Keep staring out that window while I work, son.” Colonel Stonesteel went back to flailing and shoving and pus.h.i.+ng a strange growing shape around on the creaking table. ”Boredom by the pound and ton. Boredom by the doomsday yard and the funeral mile. Lawns, homes, fur on the dogs, hair on the people, suits in the dusty store windows, all cut from the same cloth....”
”Boredom,” said Charlie, on cue.
”And what do you do when you're bored, son?”
”Er-break a window in a haunted house?”
”Good grief, we got no haunted houses in Green Town, boy!”
”Used to be. Old Higley place. Torn down.”
”See my point point? Now what else do we do so's not to be bored?”
”Hold a ma.s.sacre?”
”No ma.s.sacres here in dogs' years. Lord, even our police chiefs honest! Mayor-not corrupt! Madness. Whole town faced with stark staring ennuis and lulls! Last chance, Charlie, what do we do?”
”Build a mummy?” Charlie smiled.
”Bulldogs in the belfry! Watch my dust!”
The old man, cackling, grabbed bits of stuffed owl and bent lizard tail and old nicotine bandages left over from a skiing fell that had busted his ankle and broken a romance in 1885, and some patches from a 1922 Kissel Kar inner tube, and some burnt-out sparklers from the last peaceful summer of 1913, and all of it weaving, shuttling together under his brittle insect-jumping fingers.
”Voila! There, Charlie! Finished!”
”Oh, colonel.” The boy stared and gasped. ”Can I make him a crown?”
”Make him a crown, boy. Make him a crown.”
The sun was going down when the colonel and Charlie and their Egyptian friend came down the dusky backstairs of the old man's house, two of them walking iron-heavy, the third floating light as toasted cornflakes on the autumn air.
”Colonel,” wondered Charlie. ”What we going to do with this mummy, now we got him? It ain't as if he could talk much, or walk around-”
”No need, boy. Let folks talk, let folks run. Look there!” They cracked the door and peered out at a town smothered in peace and ruined with nothing-to-do.
”Ain't enough, is it, son, you've recovered from your almost fatal seizure of Desperate Empties. Whole town out there is up to their earlobes in watchsprings, no hands on the clocks, afraid to get up every morning and find it's always and forever Sunday! Who'll offer salvation, boy?”
Amon Bubastis Rameses Ra the Third, just arrived on the four o'clock limited?”
”G.o.d loves you, boy, yes. What we got here is a giant seed. Seed's no good unless you do what with it?”
”Why,” said Charlie, one eye shut. ”Plant it?”