The Fear In Yesterday's Rings Part 16

I draped my sticks around my neck and watched in amazement as the male, working the female as if he were a champion sheepdog, kept herding her toward the semi. He kept at it, nipping her first on one flank and then the other, moving her closer and closer. One last good nip on the hindquarters sent her hurtling through the air, through the open doors, into her cage in the truck.

I sprinted to the truck, virtually shoving the huge male out of my way, and slammed the doors shut, locked them in place. Gasping for breath, winded as much from tension as from physical exertion, I scowled at the creature whose face was now only inches from mine. "Sit."

It sat. Then, without really giving a lot of thought to what I was doing, I reached out and patted it on the head, then began to scratch it under its chin.

"Good b-"

The lobox's reaction was instantaneous. It uttered a sound from somewhere deep in its chest, something between a bark and a growl, then abruptly surged forward, b.u.t.ting me in the chest with its head and knocking me down onto my back. It was instantly on me, its huge forelegs straddling my shoulders, its barrel chest bearing down on my chest and pinning me helplessly to the ground. Its golden eyes stared into mine, and I tensed, waiting for the surge of a clawed hind foot that would tear away the lower half of my body, or the snap of jaws that would remove my face and throat.

It made a soft growling sound, then proceeded to lick my face with a long, red washcloth of a tongue that was at once slimy and rough, like a cow's.

I had offered it a sign of affection, and now the d.a.m.n thing wanted to play.

Well, this just wasn't the time for the leader of the pack to play, but the problem was finding a way of communicating this fact to the huge creature that was pressing down on my chest.

The first trick was to pull my right arm free from where it was pinned next to my body by one of the lobox's legs. My nunchaku sticks were within reach, but I didn't want to hurt the animal now-just get its attention, get it off me, and then get it to do the next thing I wanted it to do. I made what I hoped was an appropriately menacing growling noise, then whacked it across its wide, wet muzzle with the flat of my hand.

"Get the f.u.c.k off me!" I snapped, and whacked it again. "Work now, play later."

The lobox whined, then backed off me and stood at my feet with its head bowed, looking amazingly reproached.

I stood up, wiped saliva off my face, then picked up the nunchaku sticks and clicked them together. "School's not out yet, pal. Pay attention."

At once, the animal raised its head, p.r.i.c.ked up its ears. I walked over to the open doors in the center of the side of the truck. I beat a tattoo on the inside of one with my sticks, then started walking toward the silo. The lobox dutifully trotted along beside me, its tongue lolling out. We reached the silo and I looked up at the vent, where Garth and Harper were standing at the edge, staring down at me. Garth was grinning and shaking his head as if in disbelief. He gave me a thumbs-up sign, which I returned. Then I loosened the chain holding the doors shut, pushed one open slightly, motioned the lobox in.

From inside the silo came a cacophony of sound-barks, yelps, roars, lobox screams, and generalized bustling about. About a minute later the two females came scampering out of the silo, virtually under the startled Mabel's trunk, with the male right on their heels. There was much chasing around, with the male doing his sheepdog number, nipping at the females' flanks, and once the three of them disappeared around the other end of the silo. But then they were back, with the male herding them. I walked back to the truck, waited. It took the male another five minutes but he finally managed to get them both to leap, almost simultaneously, into the truck. I grunted with satisfaction, slammed the doors shut behind them.

"Now sit," I said to the lobox, pointing with a stick toward its flank. It sat. I unhesitatingly put my hand on its head, scratched it behind the ears. "The Road Runner's very proud of you, Coyote."

I looked up in time to see Garth and Harper emerge from the silo. Garth, ambling along with his hands in his pockets, was still grinning and shaking his head. Harper broke into a run. She came up to me, brus.h.i.+ng right past the sitting lobox, threw her arms around my neck, and hugged me.

"Robby," she breathed in her huskiest, s.e.xiest voice, "that's the most incredible thing I've ever seen. I love you!"

"Not too trashy a show, Mongo," Garth said to me as he came up and laid his thick right arm across my shoulder. "I'd have actually paid to see that."

"Thanks, brother. I realize that's your highest compliment."

Garth grunted. "That truck has a CB antenna, so it must have a radio. Let me see if I can't rustle up some help."

I said, "Tell whoever you get hold of to bring food. I don't know about you people, but I'm hungry."

Garth climbed up into the cab of the truck, closed the door. Harper and I simply held each other, gazed into each other's eyes, and I knew I was most definitely, hopelessly, in love.

"Help's on the way," Garth announced, climbing back down from the cab. "And food. Heroes and coffee for us, a hundred pounds of horsemeat and a ton of hay for our entourage."

I nodded. "That sounds like about the right take-out order to me."

"I charged it all to your personal Amex card, brother," Garth said with a grin.

"Thanks a lot, Garth. What's the going rate for horsemeat and hay?"

"Beats me. I expect it's the handling and transportation charges that are going to be expensive. I thought it would be a good lesson to you. Just because you keep getting yourself involved in strange business like this, there's no reason why the company should have to pay for it. This way, it will save us the trouble of trying to explain expenses for hay and horsemeat to our accountants and the IRS."

"Oh, yeah. Good thinking, Garth."

Harper nodded toward Mabel, who was off to one side of the silo nuzzling her trunk in a patch of gra.s.s, then placed her hand next to mine on the lobox's head. "Now we really need a circus."

Garth said, "I don't think it's going to be all that difficult to find one for sale."

Epilogue.

Ah, yes. The usual congressional committees had announced the usual hearings, and they were all planning to round up and grill the usual suspect: the CIA. The thinking was that this time that venerable agency, indomitable defender of individual liberties, might even have been collaborating with the KGB-or some Eastern bloc country whose leaders were now more worried about insane mullahs, renegade Arabs, and Israelis than they were about the traditional ideological conflicts of East versus West. Such were the fruits of glasnost and perestroika, as harvested by the ever-fumbling intelligence communities. Three committee chairmen had even had the remarkable good sense to inquire about the possibility of having Frederickson and Frederickson a.s.sist in their investigation. Garth and I had told them we'd think about it. Personally, I didn't think they were going to get very far.

"I always said you had a mystical way with animals," Harper said as she wrapped her arms around my waist and kissed my neck-to the hearty applause of the huge crowd jammed inside the Big Top of the Statler Brothers Circus.

I flushed, thoroughly embarra.s.sed, and raised my arms to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd-as if being kissed on the neck by a beautiful woman while riding on the back of a monstrous elephant was an astonis.h.i.+ng trick.

"There was nothing mystical about it, my dear," I replied, leaning back slightly so that she could hear me above the roar of the crowd. "Loboxes are smart. They learn quickly. But they aren't people; they interpret things in an animal way. I've explained it all to you. Their first attack on us was a failure-"

"Thanks to you," Harper said, and I felt her shudder. "If you hadn't pulled me back, it would only have been half a failure."

"Whatever. It couldn't get us, I shot it, you killed his buddy, I challenged him for territory, and then made it stick by whacking him around. Also, it could see that I controlled Mabel, an animal that was much bigger and more powerful than he was. He probably also thought I controlled you, which is a howler. Anyway, lobox logic dictated that it should stop s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around with me. That was all there was to it."

Harper giggled. "Then it certainly doesn't appreciate the full range of your many talents. I love to screw around with you."

"Harper, this isn't the time or place to talk dirty."

"Like I said, Robby," Harper persisted in her husky voice, "you have a mystical way with animals. And it's not only with Mabel and Coyote. You make me feel like an animal . . . and there's no question that you put me in heat."

"Now you've done it. You've given me a hard-on in front of a few thousand people."

"I'll tend to it later."

Mabel had reached the enlarged VIP box and was going into one of her patented, dainty pachyderm pirouettes. Below us, the occupants of the box cheered, grinned, and clapped wildly. Phil Statler, stockholder and managing director for life of the circus that once again bore his name, looked at least fifteen years younger than when I had seen him lying close to death in Bellevue Medical Center. Garth and Mary sat on either side of him, and in the rows behind them sat the dozen or so freaks who, with Garth, Harper, and me, were also shareholders in the circus. Everyone looked most pleased on the occasion of this, the grand reopening of Statler Brothers Circus.

And well they might. There had originally been a matinee and an evening performance scheduled for the opening day. Then the -state troopers had called at eleven o'clock in the morning to tell us the roads were jammed with cars and that people were coming from all over the region to see us. Phil had hastily scheduled an extra late afternoon performance and was even thinking about adding a midnight show to accommodate the tens of thousands of people parked in cars, vans, and campers all over the local county fairgrounds.

Garth had been promised that he could ride the elephant in the midnight show.

But, of course, it wasn't the elephant, or the circus, the people were coming to see. They were coming to see the "werewolf- or, as Phil's ads put it, the EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD, BROUGHT BACK THROUGH THE CLOUDY MISTS OF PREHISTORIC TIME BY MAD SCIENTISTS.

Now, that was a draw. Already, the big indoor arenas from coast to coast, and in Europe, were offering exorbitant financial guarantees if the Statler Brothers Circus, with its strange creature, could be booked sometime before the close of the century. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to see a lobox.

For a time there had been considerable pressure from some quarters, understandably, to kill Coyote-the name Harper and i had decided on for the lobox, for no other reason than the fact that it made us smile-and all the female hybrids and younger breeding stock, to destroy them all as killers and menaces, but cooler heads had prevailed. It had been patiently pointed out that a lobox could not be held responsible for its natural instincts, any more than a leopard, tiger, or other wild beast. The evil existed in the men who had exploited those instincts to murder other men. Loboxes were killers, yes, but they weren't murderers. In any case, there was a very real chance that the lobox would once again become extinct if Coyote died before a solution could be found to the genetic problem that had doomed it to extinction in the first place. Somehow, Coyote had to keep making babies with the hybrids, and a way had to be found to diversify the gene pool of the offspring.

When it was decided that the creatures would not be destroyed, and when no individual, organization, or corporation had rushed forward to claim rights to the lobox, owners.h.i.+p to Coyote and the animals in the van had gone by default to the Statler Brothers Circus, through me, and it was further decided-at my insistence-that I would be "nature conservator" on behalf of the animals. I'd arranged for them to spend the off-season, half a year, in a special compound in the Bronx Zoo-named, again at my insistence, the Nate b.u.t.ton Crypto-zoological Research Center-where experimenters would study them and work to keep the species alive. There was speculation that loboxes, properly trained, could become the greatest "Seeing Eye dogs" ever, and much talk about all the other uses the animal could be put to.

I didn't much care, as long as the military-ours or anyone else's-didn't get hold of them. Or the CIA. Or anyone else who would use them to kill.

"We're going to be married, of course, aren't we, Robby?"

Suddenly I felt light-headed, short of breath. "Say what?"

"You heard me. I just offered you a proposal of marriage."

"No, Harper, we're not going to be married."

"I'm serious, Robby. I love you, and I know you love me."

"I certainly do love you, Harper," I said, glancing around me at all the thousands of pairs of eyes following our progress. "But I can't marry you."

"Why not?"

"Wild things should stay wild."

"Are you talking about you or me?"

Suddenly I felt a lump in my throat. Not trusting myself to speak, I simply shook my head. I was, I realized, very happy- even if I couldn't marry Harper. She loved me, and I considered that a great gift.

Then Harper's arms tightened even more around my waist, and I could feel her lips against my right ear. She continued, "It's because you're a dwarf, isn't it?"

"Maybe," I said tightly, after a long pause.

"Oh, really, Robby," she said in an exasperated tone. "With all the remarkable things you've accomplished in your life, don't you think it's past time you stopped worrying about being a dwarf?"

"But I am a dwarf, Harper. It's not something you grow out of, if you'll pardon the expression."

"It's not what I meant, and you know it."

Suddenly I recalled the innumerable times Garth had joked- half seriously-about my constant need to overcompensate. He was right, of course. Certainly, if Robert Frederickson had not been born a dwarf, he would never have become Mongo the Magnificent. And the chances are that he would never have become a Ph.D. criminologist and college professor, earned a black belt in karate, or become a private investigator. Still, loving and being loved by a woman like Harper Rhys-Whitney in marriage was not an adventure I was ready for. I did not have the courage for that kind of undertaking and wondered if I ever would. But I did have the courage to give Harper-and myself- honesty.

"I'm afraid of you, Harper," I said evenly. "I'm more afraid of you than I ever was of Coyote and the other loboxes. A lobox might take my life, but you could take my soul. You wouldn't mean to, but it could happen. It would be something I might do to myself through insecurity and self-doubt. Precisely because you are so beautiful and so desirable, and because I love you so very much, I'm afraid of marrying you. It would make me even more vulnerable than I am. If I marry you, the first thought I'll have every morning when I wake up is that I'm a dwarf. I just don't have the courage it takes to accept love, Harper, and maybe I never will."

I thought-maybe hoped-she would argue with me. Instead, she squeezed me hard, said, "I think I understand."

"Thank you."

"Do you think that someday you might have the courage and good sense to make me happy by marrying me?"

"Maybe someday," I said carefully.

"So maybe I'll just hang around and wait. h.e.l.l, it's not much of a commute between Florida and New York, especially when you have your own plane, and I like the city almost as much as you do. Do you think you can handle it if we spend a lot of time together?"

I swallowed hard, managed to say, "That would ... be just fine with me, Harper."

"Good," she said. Then she pulled my head back, leaned over my shoulder, and kissed me hard on the mouth. Mabel pivoted, and the crowd roared.

By George C. Chesbro.

The Mongo novels.

The Fear in Yesterday's Rings.

In the House of Secret Enemies (novella) The Language of Cannibals Second Horseman Out of Eden.

The Cold Smell of Sacred Stone Two Songs This Archangel Sings The Beasts of Valhalla.

An Affair of Sorcerers City of Whispering Stone Shadow of a Broken Man.

Other novels.

Bone Jungle of Steel and Stone The Golden Child Veil.

Turn Loose the Dragon King's Gambit.

Writing as David Cross Chant.

Chant: Torture Island Chant: Code of Blood.