“And the duck?”
“He has a duck.”
“Where do I find Oom Knorrig?”
“I take it you’re good in the woods.”
“I am extremely good in the woods.”
“Is there a part of the mountains where you’ve never been, and you can’t remember planning to go?”
“Well, maybe . . . I suppose . . . not sure.”
“That’s the first thing you’ve not been sure about since you came in. You are not a not-sure sort of person. Could it be there’s a direction, or an area, or a patch of the Catskills you are a tiny bit afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid of much,” I said.
“Maybe just a little bit afraid, around the edges?”
“Well, there’s a place with big trees that cast a lot of shade, so it’s always dark, and the rocks are dark gray, almost black, and they stick up in an unusual way, and when I’ve gone in that direction there’s always a cold wind.”
“And what do you do when you approach that place?”
“It so happens that when I have approached that place, which has only been once or twice, it was just at the time I had already and previously decided I would turn back and go home . . . in order to arrive in time for lunch, that sort of thing.”
“This time, take lunch with you. The place you describe is where you will start looking for Oom Knorrig.”
“Would it be all right if I took a friend with me? I’m pretty sure she’s good in the woods.”
“Of course Leni may go with you.”
“Oh, did I mention her name when I was telling you everything and keeping it short?”
“You must have, or how would I know it?”
29.
BEFORE TACKLING THE SUBWAY, I stopped into Carlos Chatterjee’s shop. “Mrs. Pannen says you are a trustworthy person,” I told him.
“I do my best,” Carlos Chatterjee said.
“I’d like to ask you a question.”
“Ask away.”
“You deal in all sorts of odd merchandise, some rare and artistic stuff and some more on the funky-junky side.”
“I consider it all rare and artistic, but I know what you mean.”
“May I show you an item?”
“Certainly.”
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” I handed Carlos one of my Dwerg coins.
“Wow! I have not. But I have read about and seen a drawing of such a thing. It is a Dwergish coin, or maybe someone’s idea of what one would look like. They are probably mythical and don’t really exist, but if they did they’d be incredibly rare. May I ask where you got it?”
“My father gave it to me.”
“That’s quite a gift.” Carlos had whipped out a tiny scale and put the coin on it. Then he squinted at it through a magnifying thing he stuck in his eye. “It’s real gold, and worth more than a thousand, that’s just for the metal in it. If it’s old, and if it could be proven to be real, it would be worth a whole lot.”
“Is it something you would like to have?”
“I would love to have it, but it’s worth more than I can afford to pay.”
“I’m not saying this will happen, but if it were possible for you to earn this coin, would you be interested?”
“Nothing against the law, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Then, yes.”
“I have your phone number. If there is need, I will call you. It will be my first.”
“Your first?”
“Phone call.”
30.
"I WAS LOOKING FOR YOU yesterday. I have a message to deliver,” Leni Toomay said.
“I went to New York City.”
“All by yourself?”
“Yep. I had a meeting with a witch. I’m going to tell you all about it.”
“I want to hear, but before you do any telling, I have a piece of news and the message for you. The robot redcoats have struck again. This time they marched into the Knit Wit Shoppe, and ate skeins of wool.”
“They ate wool?”
“They ate wool, a sweater, a scarf, and some baby clothes, all knitted from wool, and the skeins, as I mentioned.”
“That is unusual and disgusting,” I said.
“It is. Now here is the message,” Leni said. “Billy Backus says he wants to see you as soon as possible.”
“I’ll go see him right now,” I said. “You come too. Meanwhile, are you up for a big hike in the woods?”
“Any time you like,” Leni said. “I am good in the woods.”
“To a scary part of the woods?”
“Even better.”
Off to the side of Cows and Frogs, the shop run by Mrs. Backus, there is a door marked WKIN. Open the door, and there is a steep flight of stairs. Climb the stairs, go through another door, and you are in the radio studio. There’s a sort of desk, with dials and lights, a record turntable, and various technical-looking gizmos and gimmicks. Sitting behind the desk, with earphones on, and a big microphone in front of his face, was Billy Backus. He held his finger up to his lips. Then he pointed to a couple of chairs. We sat down quietly.
“Time for some music on WKIN, it’s the Hoosier Hot Shots recording of the beautiful and spiritual ‘Ave Maria,’” Billy said into the microphone. Then he expertly put the needle at the edge of a record on the turntable, turned one big knob to the right, and then another big knob to the left. We heard the music leaking out of his earphones. “OK, girls, we can talk now,” he said.
“You wanted to see me right away,” I said.
“I do,” Billy Backus said. “You know that some of those redcoated fellows hit the Knit Wit Shoppe, and ate the stock?”
“Yes, Leni told me about it,” I said.
“And you recall that the same thing happened at Babatunji’s pizzeria, and the horrible hot dog shop.”
I said I did.
“You may find it interesting that I do advertising on the air for all three businesses. In fact, at the moment, they are my only advertisers. What does this suggest to you?”
“The radio station isn’t doing very well?”
“That’s just a temporary thing. I expect to get more sponsors. What I wanted to call to your attention was the fact that those eighteenth-century fleshopods only turned up at establishments belonging to advertising clients of mine. There are other restaurants in town they might have hit, and they ate wool, for Pete’s sake, when there was a Boopsie Burger right next door. Does that suggest anything to you?”
“I know that Boopsie Burger,” Leni said. “Given a choice, I’d eat the wool too.”
“You’re not picking up the important, and to a former boy genius, obvious, thing,” Billy Backus said. “The ghastly grenadiers went to the places they went to because they heard the commercials I broadcast!”
“They listen to the radio?”
“That, or they are radios, or have a radio built in. I think they are given instructions by radio, and do what they are told when they receive them, and, if I’m right, the frequency on which I broadcast is the same, or close enough to, the one that they listen to for orders. They hear my ads, which usually include an imperative, like ‘Go to Lonesome Cowboy Hot Wieners!’ and then they do it.”
“It’s plausible,” I said. “Interesting that, weird and probably unearthly as they are, they’re used to getting their orders in English.”
“They’re English soldiers.”
“So they are.”
“I thought I might devise a test or experiment using broadcast frequency, but I wanted to wait until I heard from you. Have you had any success in finding the Catskill witch?”
“Found her, and met with her yesterday,” I said. I could see Billy Backus was impressed.
“And she advised you?”
“She did.”
“Care to tell me what she advised?”
“She wants me to contact someone else. Have you ever heard anything about someone called Oom Knorrig?”
“Ne
ver, unless you mean the king of the wild Dwergs.”
“You’re a regular encyclopedia, Professor Knows Everything,” I said.
“It’s Oom Knorrig you’re supposed to contact? Uncle Grumpy? I’m ninety-nine percent sure he’s mythical.”
“People say that about me,” I said.
31.
LENI HAD SPOKEN THE TRUTH—she was good in the woods. Of course, I had to slow down quite a bit, so she could keep up with me, but she kept a very decent pace for an ordinary human being.
“We’re right outside my village,” I said. “You can see the smoke from the chimneys.”
“Where?” Leni said.
“I should have said, ‘I can see it.’ Maybe you can’t. Look, if we climb up onto this rock, I can see the roof of my house.”
We climbed up. “I can see trees,” Leni said.
“Look between that big maple and the almost as big one.” I pointed.
“Trees.”
“No roof? No smoke?”
“Trees is all. Are you saying you can see that stuff?”
“Clear as can be.”
“And I can only see trees?”
“That’s how it’s supposed to work.”
“How does it work?”
“No idea, actually, and if you tried to walk to the village, you’d get turned aside without realizing it, whereas if I walked that way I’d go right in. We could try it if we had more time, but take my word for it.”
“Makes you wonder what other things you can’t see and other people can.”
“And vice versa.”
Starting from our location near my village, I knew just which way to go to arrive at that part of the forest I’d found a little bit . . . how shall I say? . . . potentially frightening. It wasn’t very far, but it was uphill and rocky. As we got closer, the trees grew closer together and leafier, and blocked more and more light, there wasn’t as much underbrush, and the bare earth was black and slippery. The temperature dropped, it was cool, then slightly chilly.
“What do you think of this?” I asked Leni.
“I can understand why my Native American ancestors made a point of not coming this way unless they had a very good reason. It’s not like nature around here is hostile to us, more like it is indifferent to whether we live or die.”
“That’s how it feels to me,” I said. “For example, look at how that bear is studying us.” There was a black bear, sitting on his haunches fifty feet away. He was looking right at us, not afraid, not aggressive, not anything . . . We might have been a couple of birds on a branch.
Ordinarily, when I had encountered a bear it would act submissive or frightened, except in certain circumstances when it would warn me that it was protecting cubs, or was just in a bad mood. But I had never gotten this close to a bear that simply ignored me. I had slices of pizza in a knapsack, some for us to eat, and some as an offering to Oom Knorrig, and the bear must have smelled them, but he continued to show no interest when we came as close as twenty feet in passing him.
“Did that bear scare you?” I asked Leni.
“Nah, I know how to handle them, as I imagine you do too.”
“Sure. I’m good with bears.”
“How are you with really big fat rattlesnakes?” she asked.
“Oh, you mean like this one here? That is the biggest rattlesnake I have ever seen, it’s as big around as my thigh! It must be really old.”
“And have a ton of poison stored up,” Leni said. “And look how un-snakey it’s behaving.”
It was like the bear, the snake was making no effort to get away from us, and also not coiling up, rattling, or being defensive. It was just going about its business as though we weren’t there.
Something was becoming clear to me that I had never really given enough thought to, Dwerg that I am, and skilled as I may be in not making the least commotion in the woods, it is still a very different woods when no human is around. Everything that lives in the woods, all the birds and animals, and I’m going to guess plant life, too, is constantly aware and watchful when there are people present, even people like me. This makes sense if you consider the sort of things humans get up to. For some reason, the rules were suspended in this section of woods, and while we were uncomfortable because we didn’t feel the rustle of fear and apprehension all around, as we had become used to, it was really the most peaceful place either of us had ever seen. We had just met two animals capable of killing us, and neither of them was even interested in us. What scared us a little, and apparently had scared Leni’s ancestors, was that this was a place where humans were just another animal, not the top one. Once I got it, I began to like it. It was relaxing to feel like some bird, or bunny, or mushroom in the woods.
The angle of ascent got more acute, and sharp rocks stuck up toward the tree canopy, which was thicker, and blocked out more light. By now, we were mountaineering, or climbing rather than hiking, using our hands as well as feet to move along. Then we heard a voice.
It was the sweetest, cutest, most lovable voice we’d ever heard. And it spoke with an accent so adorable that we wanted to pick it up and stroke it, as though you could pet a voice. Ever since animated cartoons were invented, studios in Hollywood have hired voice actors who could make that kind of Kewpie-doll, Betty Boop, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig sort of voice, but they had never found anyone who could produce sounds like we were hearing now.
“Who dares to approach the domain of Oom Knorrig, the horrible, the terrible? Bow to Oom Knorrig, and beg for your miserable lives!”
We could not help ourselves. “Awww,” we both said.
32.
THE MOMENT WE HEARD the sweet and delightful, cuddlesome little voice was the exact moment we’d stepped on a flat rock that rocked. It was a rocking rock. It just rocked a little, but that was enough to pull a string someone had attached to it, which string pulled a switch on an old-fashioned phonograph, the kind that didn’t run on electricity, and had to be wound up with a crank. This phonograph we discovered seconds after being enchanted by the poopsie-woopsie, snuggly-wuggly, sweeter-than-sugar voice.
“It’s a recording,” I said.
“What do you suppose that is all about?” Leni asked.
“Possibly Oom Knorrig is so ghastly and frightening that he had some sweet-sounding type record the warning to stay out of his territory so people won’t drop dead from fear.”
“That sounds like a reasonable explanation to me,” Leni said. “So what do you think we should do?”
“Well, I’m for going further into his territory, especially now that we’re prepared to come across something ghastly and frightening.”
“I agree,” Leni said. “Forewarned is forearmed, and we have four arms between us. Let’s wind up the phonograph for him, and reset the arm thingie, so it can scare the next victim.”
“Good idea. Shows we’re nice and helpful. We can tell Oom Knorrig we did that just before he eats us or chops us into little pieces.”
The ground under our feet had turned more muddy. We tried not to slip as we followed an almost invisible trail. We felt reassured that we had not wandered off the path when we saw a signpost: Catskills Mountains Parsnip Festival This Way. It was faded and barely legible, the letters painted on rotting boards. There was another sign a little further along: Turn Back Or Die.
“I’m getting a little bored with this,” Leni said. “Do you think we should start hollering for Oom Knorrig to show himself?”
“No need,” I said. “Look what’s up ahead.”
“Talk about ghastly and frightening,” Leni said.
Up the trail was a figure nobody could possibly fail to take seriously, or ever forget . . . maybe seven feet tall, or close to it, with a huge mop of tangled black hair, a gigantic nose, eyes of fire, a body completely disproportionate and knotty, with hands and feet like shovels.
“Wow. I am not disappointed,” Leni said. “But isn’t Oom Knorrig supposed to be a male?”
“That’s how I’ve heard
him referred to,” I said. “But I suppose he can be anything he likes, and are you suggesting that we’re looking at a female?”
“I’d say yes, technically,” Leni said. “But what I’m more interested in knowing is whether we should run for our lives now.”
“Oh, don’t run away, now that you’ve come so far. Stay and have some roasted parsnips.”
It was the voice we’d heard on the phonograph, and sitting on a tree stump was a person who was more than a match for it. This guy was cuter than a whole litter of kittens. It was all we could do not to throw our four arms around him.
“This is Hortense, my henchwoman,” the little guy, who we were gratefully realizing was Oom Knorrig, and not likely to eat us or anything of the kind, said. “She does most of the henching around here, and is the most accomplished parsnip roaster in these mountains. I hope you will partake, not to do so would hurt her feelings.”
I, personally, am partial to parsnips. In my opinion, they leave carrots in the dust, not that I have anything against carrots. Leni had somehow grown to advanced girlhood without ever encountering a parsnip, but she got the idea when Hortense handed her a tin plate of sliced ones, roasted to perfection.
We ate the parsnips with our fingers, making Mmm! and Ahhh! noises, while Oom Knorrig watched us beamingly, looking like the combined, never-realized dream of Walt Disney and every artist who ever worked for him. Hortense, I supposed, was showing us her pleasant expression, it was hard to tell, but the parsnips made up for a multitude of horribleness.
After the parsnips came tin mugs of blueberry tea. Oom Knorrig blew on his to cool it in an unbearably adorable manner and said, “Now, please refrain from telling me why you have come to see me. I know all about it already.”
Adventures of a Dwergish Girl Page 7
