The Bones of Old Carlisle (28 page)

Karl Arrowroot’s hands were shaking on the steering wheel as he
pulled behind the Matterhorn and into the Traxie branch of the
Heligaux Public Library.

“I’m sorry you’re hearing this from me,” Schaumberg said. “I
think someone was supposed to tell you. It was just a destruction of
property charge when it first happened. I didn’t even know about it
then. But now it’s been upgraded to manslaughter, kinda big news at
the fort. Happened yesterday. Connie’s working it, she wants him
locked up.”

Arrowroot grabbed his phone. “You mind if I send a quick text? My
daughter needs to know about this.”
“Go right ahead,” Schaumberg replied.
“Don’t do anything tonight,” Arrowroot wrote. “They already
charged the bastard that killed Robert.”
He paused for a moment, staring at his phone, lost in thought for
a moment before he wrenched himself back to the present. He closed his
phone and looked at Schaumberg. “Welcome to Little Chihuahua,” he
said. “Shall we?”
“Of course,” she said gamely, opening the truck door.
“I spent some time in that library as a kid,” Arrowroot said,
pointing as he stepped to the pavement. “The rest of it was just
parking lots and fields full of junk back then.”
While still humble, the area had enjoyed a significant upgrade.
Across the library lot stood the Chihuahua Café and the Little Mexico
Grocery, both of white adobe. Between them, tables, a wooden donkey
and a plastic sombrero suspended on cables stood under a sign that
read “Fiesta!”
Behind the two businesses, the ground sloped up sharply to a
cleared area with more tables, and what looked to be several extended
families sharing dinner.
Arrowroot’s phone rang, and he looked at it with resignation.
“Gotta take this one, gonna be a second,” he said. “Hello?”
“Hello, Karl,” said a familiar voice.
“Dammit, Mr. Smiley,” Arrowroot said. Schaumberg looked at him
with surprise, and he nodded and mouthed the words “him again.”
“To whom are you speaking?” Smiley asked.
“What?” Arrowroot replied. “I ain’t talking to anyone.”
“You just said ‘him again’ to someone,” Smiley said flatly.
“You heard that?” Arrowroot asked. “They got you on some kind of
superphone at the jail or something?”
“I hear a great deal,” Smiley said. “To whom were you speaking?”
“Dr. Schaumberg, in case it’s any of your business, which it’s
not,” Arrowroot replied, and he looked at her and scowled and she
smiled back. “She says hello, by the way. And she wants her hat back.
If you take it to your planet, she’s coming after you.”
Schaumberg burst out laughing. “She didn’t say that,” Smiley
asserted.
“C’mon, Nebby,” Arrowroot protested, “of course she didn’t. But
what if she had? Woulda been funny as hell. You know, you get back—”
“Why are you with her?” Smiley interrupted.
“You are on the edge of getting hung up on, Boy,” Arrowroot said.
“At the Carlisle estate, you referred to her as a damned Jew,”
Smiley noted.
Arrowroot bent over as if punched in the stomach, and he whirled
away from Schaumberg and put his hand over the phone.
“Boy,” he gasped simply. “Boy,” and he turned to Schaumberg and
held up a finger. She nodded, still smiling, and headed over to the
businesses of Little Chihuahua.
“I wonder why you would—“ Smiley continued.
“Don’t you say, don’t you do,” Arrowroot stammered. “Don’t you
put that on me. No, sir. I said that when my heart was broken. I’d
just found my son. My son’s body. Damn you.”
“Karl, I—“ Smiley said.
“What else you heard?” Arrowroot interrupted. “What else you
gonna tell people I said? Is this blackmail? You gonna make me help
you? What, I’m not helping you enough? Taking all your damned calls,
reading things to you, that’s not good enough?”
Arrowroot was waiting for a reply, but Smiley was silent. “You
still there, Mr. Smiley?” he asked. “Hey, you still there? Hello?”
“Karl, I’m sorry,” Smiley said weakly. “I only wanted to
understand what you were doing.”
“I’m out with Dr. Schaumberg because we want to be together,”
Arrowroot said. “And anything else about her is none of your business.
Just none of your damned business.”
Arrowroot was almost shouting now, and he looked up, expecting to
see Schaumberg watching. Fortunately, she was out of earshot now.
Walking through the little plaza with the sign that said “Fiesta!”
“I got another question for you,” Arrowroot said. “Something I
meant to ask you earlier. If there’s no god, how come everyone on
earth believes in Him?”
“In Him, or them?” Smiley asked.
“Okay, in them then,” Arrowroot said.
“How many are there?” Smiley said.
“Ah, hell, I don’t know,” Arrowroot said. “Hundreds, must be.
Maybe thousands.”
“You’ve just answered your own question,” Smiley said, and then
he was silent.
“Okay, that just makes no sense at all,” Arrowroot said. “Anyway,
what you calling me for this time? You better have a good reason or
we’re through. We’re done talking.”
“I’m getting out tomorrow,” Smiley said. “I’m being sent to a
group home.”
“Where?” Arrowroot asked.
“I’ve only been told Traxie,” Smiley replied. “I’ve instructed my
attorney to contact you with my address when I arrive.”
“Well, good luck, I hope you make some friends there,” Arrowroot
offered.
“I’m not sure about that,” Smiley said, and then he laughed in
the same way he had at the Carlisle house. “It’s a home for the
mentally deficient.”
“So you think being retarded is funny?” Arrowroot said. “I guess
you just love laughing at other people.”
“No, that’s not funny,” Smiley said. “But my presence in that
home is funny.”
“Why?” Arrowroot said.
“Because I am the most intelligent individual on your planet,”
Smiley said.
“Huh,” Arrowroot said. “Pretty impressed with yourself, I guess.
But let’s not forget that the first thing you did after you landed was
get your ass put in the damned jai.”
Smiley laughed again.
“I still don’t see anything remotely funny in any of it,”
Arrowroot said, looking up. Schaumberg had climbed the rise and was
bending over to talk to a child. Not far from her, a man was tuning a
guitar.
“It’s as funny to me as your threat was to you,” Smiley said.
“What threat?” Arrowroot asked.
“That your doctor would follow me back to my home planet in order
to retrieve her hat,” Smiley said.
“Oh my god, you call that a threat?” Arrowroot said, and he burst
out laughing. “You’re a trip, Nebby. You really are.”
“My lawyer will contact you tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll need to be
picked up.”
“What?” Arrowroot demanded, incredulous. “What the hell—“
The line clicked dead and Arrowroot looked at his phone. Danielle
had still not replied to his text. He put the phone in his truck,
walked under the “Fiesta!” sign and joined Schaumberg on the hill.
“Very sorry about that,” Arrowroot said. He showed her his empty
hands. “Locked the phone in my truck. There will be no more
interruptions.”
She smiled and nodded and introduced the child she was talking
to, a boy who called himself Garcito. Arrowroot shook hands, then
turned and drew in his breath. There was nothing to see from the
library parking lot but the library and the other buildings, but from
here, just a little higher, the entire valley opened up. He could see
downtown, the Mittlekopp glinting in the late afternoon sun, and
across the river, all of Fort Shergawa, its trees bright green, or
turning white with the first blossoms of May.
“I never knew this was here,” he said. “I’ll never get tired of
looking at those mountains.”
“So that was the infamous Mr. Smiley?” Schaumberg asked.
“An absolute nut job,” Arrowroot said. “You never know what’s
gonna come out of his damned mouth next. He said he was the smartest
man on the planet. He really said that.”
“Is that what upset you?” Schaumberg asked.
“Huh?” Arrowroot replied. “Oh, uh, no. No. He said something
else. Seems like he can hear everything. He heard something I
shouldn’t— uh, something I shouldn’t have said. He mentioned it.
Trying to get my goat, I think, or more likely to make me do something
I didn’t want to do.”
“What does he want you to do?” Schaumberg asked.
“He said I had to pick him up tomorrow,” Arrowroot said. “He’s
getting moved to a home. You know, a home for, uh, special people. All
the charges been dropped apparently. Then he hung up. Just hung up.”
“He was calling from jail?” she asked.
“They seem to have pretty liberal phone privileges over there,”
Arrowroot observed. “He calls me like every 30 minutes with more
nonsense. Hey, you wanna go order some dinner?”
Schaumberg followed Arrowroot back down the hill to the Chihuahua
Café. “Do you think he’s the smartest man on earth?” she asked.
“Heh,” Arrowroot laughed. “If he’s from earth, he’s just a damned
liar, and possibly a murderer too. But he told me he’s from another
planet. Said that earlier today. From another planet. I asked him,
just point blank, and that’s what he said. If that’s the case, he
probably is smart. Probably knows more than anyone on earth, anyway.
But you know what I told him? You know what I said? I said, ‘Hey,
Nebby, if you’re so smart, how come you got arrested as soon as you
landed? That doesn’t seem all that smart.’”
The interior of the Chihuahua Café was dark and spare, with walls
of white, patchy plaster and high ceiling supported with thick,
exposed pine logs.
“Looks like they just flew this place straight from Mexico,”
Arrowroot observed. “I bet it’s all built to their standards down
there. Blueprint all in Spanish. The men that built this place, I bet
you couldn’t get 10 words in English from the lot of ‘em. Not 10
words.”
A dozen people, all clearly Mexican, looked up at Arrowroot and
Schaumberg with a range of expressions, from curiosity to mild
concern. Arrowroot looked back and smiled. Some of them might be
voters, after all. Or probably not.
“So he told you he’s from another planet?” Schaumberg asked.
“That’s what he said,” Arrowroot recalled. “What do you think?”
“It makes as much sense as anything else,” she said.
“Now, that bit I was saying about your hat and all, you know that
was a joke, right?” Arrowroot asked. “I was just messing with him. He
loves it when I do that.”
“You’re very funny,” Schaumberg noted.
“Nebby didn’t think so,” Arrowroot said. “He thought it was a
threat. That’s what he said. He says, ‘That’s a real threat, there.
Your doctor’s gonna come after me for her hat. I’m shakin’ and all.’”
They ordered and brought their food back up the hill. The man
with the guitar had started playing, and the families, their dinners
finished, were talking quietly among themselves in Spanish.
Arrowroot sat down in the grass and looked up at Schaumberg.
“That’s a nice dress to sit on the ground in,” he said. “You wanna sit
down inside?”
“I’ll stand,” she said. “It’s beautiful here.”
“Okay, I’ll stand with you,” Arrowroot said, rising. He felt a
hand on his shoulder and turned to find a tiny old woman staring up at
him. She spoke a few words in Spanish and shoved a rough, woven
blanket toward him.
“Aw, I couldn’t,” Arrowroot said, shaking his head.
The woman persisted, speaking sharply to him.
“Gracias,”
Schaumberg said, taking the blanket and spreading it
out on the grass.
The sun had fallen behind Steeple Mountain and the sky was
beginning to darken. Arrowroot looked behind them and pointed. “Hey,
see that kinda reddish star?” he asked. “That’s right, right there.
It’s Mars.”
Schaumberg looked and nodded.
“So here’s the thing,” he continued. “The light you’re seeing,
the light from Mars, it started out on the sun. Just a bunch of
hydrogen and helium, burnin’ up, burnin’ up. Making heat and light and
other things. And the light, it goes everywhere. Even to Mars. Like,
225 million miles or thereabouts, takes like 20 minutes to get there.
And it hits that red sand on Mars. It’s all desert there, you know. Or
mostly desert. And some of it bounces back off, goes back into space.
And a tiny, tiny bit of it comes back to earth. Another 100 million
miles or so, another 10 minutes. And then a tiny, tiny bit of all that
is coming to our eyes right now. Photons from a huge fire, going
through space, bouncing off a few grains of sand on a desert 100
million miles away, finally getting to us, hitting our eyes, and their
trip is done. The photons took just a wild trip, and finally they just
get to our eyes and we think nothing of it. Just like, hey, there’s
Mars.”
Schaumberg laughed.
“Kinda thing that’ll keep you up at night,” Arrowroot said. “I
bet that’s what Mr. Smiley thinks about. ‘Damn, there’s Mars, gotta go
there, I bet they won’t arrest my ass on that planet.’”
Arrowroot looked toward the man with the guitar. “Any idea what
that fella’s singing over there?” he asked.
“I can pick out a phrase here and there,” Schaumberg said. “It’s
a love song. ‘The world can change,’ he’s singing, ‘I still love you.’
Then ‘pretzel.’ He’s saying something about a pretzel. Okay, ‘the
world can become a pretzel. And I still love you.’”
As they talked, the sky over Steeple Mountain turned from dark
blue to deep purple, and the lights of impossibly distant planets,
stars and galaxies came out one by one.
Schaumberg said she had one daughter who’d left for college last
fall. She and her husband had split up a few months later for reasons
she didn’t get into.
She wasn’t aware of Arrowroot’s difficult history. Along with
losing a son, his wife had died in late fall, in a one-car accident on
the mountain.
“She was a little like my momma,” Arrowroot said. “A lot of
energy. Maybe too much energy. Always raisin’ hell about something.
Car went right through the rail, fell 100 feet. Not much left. How was
dinner?”
“The best Mexican I’ve ever had,” she said. “I had no idea this
was here.”
“Let’s just make it our little secret,” Arrowroot whispered.
“Feds come through here looking for illegals, this whole place gonna
be shipped back to Mexico, including probably the buildings.” He
stood, folded the blanket and handed it to the tiny grandmother.
“Gracias!”
he said with all the enthusiasm he could muster.
“Gracias!”
She said something back he couldn’t understand, and those around
her laughed.
“She said, ‘You are the mayor,’” a male voice announced from
within the little gathering. “She said that she made the blanket, and
now that the mayor and the mayor’s woman have sat on it, it is
special.”
A tall man with gray hair and mustache stepped forward and shook
hands, introducing himself as Scotty.
“Karl Arrowroot, at your service,” Arrowroot replied.
“You have a beautiful city,” Scotty said. “But there is something
strange.”
“Oh no, you got that right,” Arrowroot said. “What you seein’?”