The Bones of Old Carlisle (22 page)

“Hey, guess who I met,” Arrowroot said. “Talked to that damn Mr.
Smiley today. Talked to him at the jail. You know, the one we picked
up at the big house out there?”
“What do you mean you talked to him?” Schaumberg asked.
“Oh, he was talking up a storm,” Arrowroot said. “Perfect
English. Not a single ‘gleeb’ or ‘glub.’ Oh, and that was all Gaelic,
that other stuff he was saying. That’s what he told me.”
“Gaelic?” Schaumberg asked. “As in, what they speak in, uh,
Scotland, Ireland?”
“Somewhere around there, I think,” Arrowroot said. “He didn’t
tell me where exactly he was from. Said he was on some kind of
mission. For the US government. I’m pretty sure that was all nonsense,
though.”
“I thought the courts said he was mentally incompetent,”
Schaumberg said.
“Court hasn’t ruled on that yet,” Arrowroot said, and he realized
he was having a normal conversation with another human for the first
time in two weeks, and he was glad. “Courts haven’t declared him
anything, he’s still a murder suspect or whatever. But mental
incompetence, that’s his lawyer’s plan. You shoulda seen her when she
found out I’d been talking to her client. Damn near sued me in the
jail parking lot!”
“So you’re the only one he’s talking to?” Schaumberg asked, and
Arrowroot thought he detected some suspicion in her voice.
“I know it sounds crazy,” he said. “And if I dreamed it all,
well, I’ve dreamed crazier things. So I don’t blame you if you don’t,
you know, if you don’t believe me.”
“No, I’m not doubting you,” she said. “There’s something very
strange about him. About all of it.”
“Well, you were the one out there doing the, uh, autopsies,”
Arrowroot noted. “Did you find out anything since then?”
“I haven’t done any more work on them,” Schaumberg said. “They
locked all the corpses away. They’re on ice now. But their teeth.
That’s the thing.”
“What about their teeth?” Arrowroot asked.
“Well, most of them, their teeth had no fillings, no aging, no
wear or damage,” she said.
“Yeah, I remember you mentioning that,” Arrowroot said.
“And then, the man with his neck broken,” Schaumberg continued.
“And the man they arrested. Their teeth weren’t human.”

“There were some things missing,” she replied, “and some things
there that shouldn’t have been.”
“Huh,” said Arrowroot. “Like what?”
“Kind of hard to describe over the phone,” she said.
“Okay, tell you what,” Arrowroot said. “You ever heard of Little
Chihuahua?”
“No, I haven’t,” Schaumberg said. “Is it a store?”
“No, it’s a whole part of town, apparently,” Arrowroot said.
“Someone told me about it today. I’d like to stop by. Make an official
visit, sort of. Got good tamales there, I’m told. Beer. Wanna go after
work tomorrow?”
To Arrowroot’s surprise, she said yes and they made arrangements
to meet at City Hall at six the next evening. To his further
amazement, he was glad she agreed – pleased in a way he did not think
he could ever be happy again.
He clicked off his phone, thought of Robert and his eyes fogged
over. Every joy was going to be followed by sorrow, he told himself.
Probably forever. But Robert would have wanted him to be happy, he
knew. The tears were a part of living. Always had been, always would
be. The joy was going to be harder to justify, but it might still come
on occasion.
Arrowroot blinked, saw that it was almost 5:30 and turned on his
truck.
National Microscopy was less than a mile away, on the main road
through Traxie. Highway 6, it was called officially, although it had
several other names depending on where you were on it. Burning Bush,
Waters Road, Coaltrain could all be found on the map.
It was certainly the ugliest street in Heligaux. Five lanes of
patched and faded asphalt running between 50 years of architectural
whim and commercial expedience; cheap, flat-roofed, single-story shops
sheathed in light blue aluminum and gray vinyl, some surrounded by
chain link fences, some by defunct cars, emptied boxes and rusty
scrap.
Here and there, battered old brick homes persisted, tiny
structures with rusty awnings and badly-painted doors, with flowerless
weeds and leafless bushes where grass was meant to grow.
Mount Steeple peeked out over a building or between two decrepit
structures, but the scene was otherwise no different from any other
blighted American thoroughfare.
No mayor could do anything for a street like that, Arrowroot
knew, so he had given up long ago and just tried not to drive on it
too often. Until people developed enough collective pride that they’d
sacrifice some money to not contribute to the ugliness, there would be
places like this, everywhere.
National Microscopy was in one of the better, newer buildings on
6, constructed to house a bank branch 20 years ago, then sold when the
bank thought better of its investment. Arrowroot pulled up, glad to
see that the lights were still on, and he stepped out of his truck and
went in.
“Hey there, what can we do for you?” asked a tall, muscular man
with dark hair across his shoulders. He looked to be in his early
30’s, very likely had some Native American blood, maybe even descended
from the tribes that used to roam this area.
“Hoping you can tell me what’s on these things,” Arrowroot said,
handing over the crystals.
“Oh, hell,” the man replied doubtfully, and he peered at each
crystal in turn, then set them down on the counter and drew a
magnifying glass from his back pocket.
“Hmmm,” he said, and started humming. “Hmm hmm hmm hmm.” Then he
stood and peered at Arrowroot with as much concentration as he’d just
applied to the crystals. “Man, where’d you get these?” he asked.
“Found ‘em outside a few days ago,” Arrowroot lied.
“But you knew there was something in them?”
“Just a hunch,” Arrowroot lied again. “Seemed like there might
be.”
“Never seen anything like it,” the man said. “But you might be
right. C’mon back, let’s put ‘em on Bessie and see what happens. I’m
Art, by the way.”
Arrowroot shook Art’s hand and followed him toward an electron
microscope about the size of a portable toilet in the middle of the
building. A sign reading “Bessie” had been affixed to the top of the
machine, along with a gray image of something very small and detailed.
“Bovine Zygote (Bessie as fetus),” read a label over the image. More
pictures lined the walls of the shop, and as Art fired up Bessie and
turned on an adjacent computer, Arrowroot peered at them. They were
mostly bug faces, but none of them looked like anything Arrowroot had
ever seen, and some of them were clearly abnormal – non-symmetrical,
deformed, an eye missing or one antenna kinked up like spent baling
wire.
“We do a lot of work for an entomologist in Chapel Hill,” Art
said. “He fucks with their genes, makes new stuff.”
“What ya mean new stuff?” Arrowroot asked.
Art slid one of the crystals into Bessie and closed the cover.
“New species,” Art said. “Evolution on steroids. Did some amazing
stuff with flea penises. Did you know fleas have penises?”
“Shit,” Arrowroot retorted, deciding not to say more. Where would
he start?
Art sat down at his computer and began focusing on the innards of
the crystal. Suddenly, what had been faint white blobs came into sharp
relief, a dozen intricately carved shapes.
“Looks like writing,” Art observed. “But I don’t recognize the
alphabet. You found these around here?”
“More or less,” Arrowroot said.
Art hit a few keys and they took a dizzying trip among the
characters, arranged in neat rows on pages that ran from the top to
the bottom of the crystal, and filled all the space within it from the
front to the back.
“Someone wrote a whole book in this thing,” Art said. “Holy crap,
I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Can you print me a page or two?” Arrowroot asked.
“That’s gonna take awhile,” Art admitted.
“How long?”
“Probably an hour,” Art said. “Let me mess with it some.”
“You mind if I hang out?” Arrowroot inquired.
“Hey, make yourself at home,” Art said. “You want this on regular
paper or glossy?”
“Regular’s fine,” Arrowroot said. “How much?”
“First page is gonna be $50,” Art said, “but that’s because I
gotta set everything up for this. The rest should be cheaper if you
decide you want them.”
“Knock yourself out,” Arrowroot said. “Just one page for now.”
“Where should I start?” Art inquired.
“Oh, I don’t care,” Arrowroot said. “Somewhere in the middle.”
Art lit a stick of incense and started humming again as he
manipulated the buttons of his computer. Arrowroot returned to the
front of the building, dropped down on a battered black couch and
pulled out his phone.
“They’re doing the first page for me now,” he texted Danielle.
“Costing me fifty and going to be all nonsense, looks like.”
“When will it be done?” she immediately texted back.
“About an hour.”
“Can you drop it off at my place then?” she wrote.
“Pick it up here, can you?” he texted back, determined to bring
his errand-running to a close for the day.
“We’re on our way,” Danielle texted.
From the couch, Arrowroot could look out the large picture window
at the front of the shop, and he watched the sky go pink above Steeple
Mountain. Below that, immediately across the street from National
Microscopy, a fast food store glowed, its architecture of plastic
yellows and reds blazing against twilight’s ancient hues.
For a few minutes, Arrowroot poked at his phone, reading
headlines, checking tomorrow’s weather, searching the terms
“microscopy” and “insect evolution.”
Insects evolve quickly, he read, thanks to rapid reproduction
rates and high fecundity. He looked up “fecund,” a wrong-sounding word
that he’d read in a poem or something weeks before, and learned it
meant fertile. Then his phone rang, another local number, and he
answered it.
“Karl?” a voice whispered.
“And who might this be?” Arrowroot answered, hoping it wasn’t a
citizen who needed something right now.
“Mr. Smiley,” the voice said. “Mr. Smiley.”
“Aw, hell, whatcha callin’ me for?” Arrowroot demanded. “Your
lawyer told me not to talk to you.”
“Did you send the message?” Smiley asked.
“What? Oh, yeah, I did,” Arrowroot said. “Nothing happened.”
“It was wrong,” Smiley said.
“I typed what you gave me,” Arrowroot said. “Checked it twice.”
“I gave you the wrong information,” Smiley whispered. “Here’s
what you need to send. Dollar sign, the letter n, lower case, the
number eight—“
“Ain’t doin’ it,” Arrowroot interrupted.
“Hey, Karl,” Art shouted from the back of the shop.
“backslash,” Smiley continued. “capital letter A.”
“Hold on, hold on,” Arrowroot said into the phone, “got someone
else talking at me.” He pulled the phone from his face and shouted,
“What ya got?”
“Fleas can fuck for like, nine hours,” Art shouted back.
“Why the hell they do that?” Arrowroot asked.
“Because they can, I guess,” Art replied. “That guy in Chapel
Hill, he gave them dicks that are, like, two feet long.”
“Impossible,” Arrowroot retorted.
“No, I mean proportionately,” Art shouted. “It’s totally
microscopic to us, but to a flea it’s giant.”
“Why the hell did he do that for?” Arrowroot shouted.
“He wasn’t trying to,” Art said. “Just happened while he was
fucking with their DNA.”
Arrowroot raised the phone to his ear. Smiley was still talking.
“the numbers 3 and 9,” Smiley continued. “the letter o.”
“Ain’t doin’ it,” Arrowroot repeated. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“What’s that?” Art yelled. “I’m serious, I make a living taking
pictures of flea dicks.”
“On the phone,” Arrowroot shouted. “Be right with ya.”
“Oh, sorry, man!” Art shouted.
“I need you to do this,” Smiley said.
“Okay, tell you what,” Arrowroot replied. “Have your lawyer call
me. Tell your lawyer to call me and give me all that nonsense. If she
calls me, I’ll do it.”
The line went dead, Arrowroot returned the phone to his pocket
and stood.
“Now, what the hell you talking about?” Arrowroot asked.
“Check this out,” said Art, pointing at his screen. “I can fit
one page from the crystal on four sheets of eight and a half by
eleven, to make it halfway readable. Then we just have to piece them
together. That work?”
“That’s fine,” Arrowroot replied. He sat back down and watched
the cars go back and forth on Highway 6. One slowed and pulled into
the parking lot. Danielle and Tamani stepped out and walked briskly to
the front door.
“You got some visitors,” Arrowroot shouted.
“Tell them we’re closed,” Art shouted back.
“They’re with me,” Arrowroot said. “Can I let them in?”
“Oh, yeah,” Art replied.
Barely looking at Arrowroot, the women slipped into the shop and
headed toward the building’s interior. The probability that one of the
few people who had met Tamani – Chief Hatfield, Juarez, one of the
officers at Fort Shergawa – would happen to be driving by and see her
in the shop was small but not nil.
The women introduced themselves to Art, Danielle first and then
Tamani, who called herself Adele and immediately began asking him
questions about everything – what he was doing, how old he was, why
his hair was so long, how his equipment worked. When he answered, she
would laugh and cover her mouth, and the two of them quickly fell into
an animated conversation as Arrowroot and his daughter looked on.
“Let’s go outside for a minute,” Arrowroot said, and Danielle
followed him back to the parking lot.
“Looks like she’s found a new boyfriend,” Arrowroot said.
“Probably has,” Danielle sniffed.
“Okay, I’m gonna ask,” Arrowroot said. “What the hell?”
“What the hell what?” Danielle asked.
“She’s living with you and she takes your boyfriend,” Arrowroot
observed. “And then she keeps living with you and you’re like best
friends and all. So I repeat, what the hell?”
“It’s complicated, that’s all I’m going to say,” replied
Danielle.
“Are you okay?” Arrowroot asked. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I found out my brother was dead two weeks ago,” Danielle said.
“I found out the fucking Army killed my brother two weeks ago. They
blew him up and he fucking died alone, you know?”
“Please, Honey—“ Arrowroot choked.
“So losing my boyfriend for a few days to my roommate,” she
continued, “let’s just say my perspective’s been altered a little.”
“For a few days?” Arrowroot repeated. “She checking him out like
a library book?”
“Yes,” Danielle said simply. “Look, when it comes to her, forget
everything you think you know about how people are supposed to act.
She’s completely off the reservation. She’s had someone new every few
days. She says meeting new guys is a happiness. That’s the way she
puts it – it’s a happiness, like a thing you can have. So I knew it
was just a matter of time with Guillaume. We’re kind of arguing right
now anyway.”
“This act is gonna get old,” Arrowroot warned. “There are reasons
people aren’t supposed to live that way.”
“I know, I know,” Danielle said, “but it’s working for now, she’s
strange and amazing and I’m glad to know her. And I need her for
something.”
“For what?” Arrowroot asked.
“I can’t say now, but you’ll find out soon enough,” she said.
“Have you called anyone at the Fort yet?”
“I have,” replied Arrowroot. “Gonna get together tomorrow night.”
“What do you mean get together?” Danielle asked.
“Hey, let me have a few secrets too, will you?” Arrowroot
protested.
From inside the building, Tamani shouted. “Oh!”
“Sounds like things are going swimmingly with Art,” Arrowroot
noted, only half-joking. Her exclamation might have been romantic, but
it was not too different from the cry she’d issued two weeks ago, when
she was looking out Arrowroot’s window at Fort Shergawa.
The next sound was an unbridled scream, a cry of horror or fear
or pain or all three.