Mike Nelson's Death Rat!

by Michael J. Nelson

  “Earl, I’d like you to meet King Leo. King Leo this is Earl. Earl . . . Topperson.” Jack used his eyes to apologize to Ponty for the poor choice of a last name. “Earl is staying here while his house is being bug-bombed.”

  “Hello, hello, hello, Earl Topperson. You can call me King Leo, or you can call me the Sovereign Ruler of Groove, Milord Nasty Pants, the Magistrate of Penetrate, the Pharaoh of Funk, Maharaja of the Mojo, Caesar the Pleaser, Benevolent Despot of the Lower Places, the Commander in Chief in the Overstuffed Briefs, or the Exchequer of Milk Chocolate Soul.”

  Ponty was staring wide-eyed at King Leo when he finished. Jack rushed to fill the horrified silence that ensued.

  “Or, as he said, you can call him King Leo, Earl,” Jack said nervously.

  “Muh . . . muh . . . Milord Nasty Pants?” Ponty asked weakly. Clearly, of all the pseudonyms, he was most traumatized by this one.

  “Yes, yes, yes. Or Sheik Shake and Bake, or the Mogul of Rock ’n’ Roll-gul, or the Crowned Head of the Squeakin’ Bed. Wooo!” King Leo added enthusiastically.

  “Or King Leo,” Jack added.

  “Milord Nasty—” Ponty began, but he was cut off by Jack.

  “He wants to see the mine, Earl. And I know that as a local expert on it, you’d want to be the one to take us there.”

  Ponty shook his head like a boxer shaking off a well-done uppercut.

  “I was just going to take a nap. I’ve been doing quite a bit of turkey hunting this week. And, you know, if you want to catch a turkey off guard, you gotta get up pretty early.”

  Jack gripped Ponty deliberately by the front of his new flannel shirt. “Earl. Earl. Friend Earl. So happy you’ve been having fun turkey hunting, but”—and here he nearly picked up Ponty—“he wants to see the mine.”

  If King Leo was bothered or embarrassed at all by Jack’s sudden forcefulness with this kindly-looking resident of Holey, he didn’t show it. While Jack was lightly roughing up Ponty, King Leo was lifting his tangerine-colored sleeveless turtleneck, absentmindedly touching the taut muscles of his abdomen and humming a tune, as though scenes such as these were something he had become accustomed to seeing.

  Ponty responded to Jack’s persuasion. “Ouch. Okay. Okay. Watch the shirt. Let me just get ready, and we’ll go see the mine.”

  “Good,” said Jack, and he honored Ponty’s request concerning his shirt.

  “All right, then.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “I’ll just be a second,” said Ponty, brushing at his chest as though Jack had grasped him with soiled hands.

  “Take your time.”

  “King Leo, you’ll excuse me?” Ponty asked regally.

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

  “Hang on, then,” Ponty said to Jack.

  “I’ll be right here.”

  “I’d ask you in, but—”

  “Would you please just get going?” Jack demanded.

  Ponty slunk quickly back inside, and Jack heard faint noises of Ponty-style bustling—in Jack’s opinion a staggeringly inefficient state for him to be in, what with its needless redundancy of action and frequent incidences of glass breakage. Jack, remembering himself, checked in with King Leo, who seemed quite undisturbed by recent events, as he was currently dispensing some sort of cream or unguent from a small white tube into a mound on the fingertips of his left hand. He deftly replaced the cap, put the tube back into a tiny over-the-shoulder bag (Jack presumed it was not to be taken as a purse, despite having all the traditional earmarks of one), and, after rubbing it between his hands, smoothed the emollient into his close-cropped hair. To Jack’s questioning look he replied, “Flaxseed sculpting gel. You need some?” he offered.

  Jack refused graciously, withholding his own strong opinions concerning the rubbing of flaxseed derivatives into one’s scalp.

  “It’ll keep that flaking down,” King Leo said.

  His dudgeon still near the surface, Jack considered and rejected the idea of grabbing the front of King Leo’s sweater and giving him a few shakes. A second scheme involving flinging him to the ground by his purse was also set aside for the moment as Jack’s better man prevailed. Both schemes, however, were reconsidered briefly when King Leo then produced what Jack at first assumed to be a lip balm of some sort, but King Leo corrected him by identifying it as “peach glaze lip essence.” Again Jack conquered his baser instincts.

  When Ponty reappeared a moment later, Jack couldn’t help but notice that his top lip—moments ago free of any facial hair—was now thoroughly covered by a thick layer of mustache. He leaned toward Ponty in disbelief, blinking as though perhaps the newly acquired cookie duster was just a spot on Jack’s contact lens. King Leo stopped the process of recapping his peach glaze lip essence to stare at “Earl” for a second. Ponty, a man sensitized over the years to the disbelieving stares of others, looked from one staring man to the other.

  “What?” he asked.

  King Leo said nothing but simply cocked his head to the side in a questioning manner before shaking it off. “Nothing, nothing, nothing at all, Mr. Earl. Lead on to that magic place.”

  “Well, I don’t how much magic is there. It’s all boarded up. Pretty junky-looking. And the mine itself is actually on a guy’s property, so we’ll have to check with him first.”

  “Oh, it’ll work out. I know it. Big things are gonna happen there, Mr. Earl. Big things.”

  “What kinds of things, do you think?” Ponty asked as they walked.

  “Gonna be a revival.”

  “Yeah, Jack mentioned that. A revival of what, exactly?”

  “Oh, my, my, my, Mr. Earl. I’ll tell you what. What it will be is a revival of the one Funka-Lovely-Creative-Spirit-Being that all people used to share. The same one that was at work when your Mr. Lynch was rescued from the beast in that mine. We’ve lost that in our time, and we need to get it back. But we’re gonna do it. Me and Jack—with your help. We’re gonna get it back.”

  “Well, okay. We can take my Tempo.”

  King Leo insisted on taking the backseat, despite objections from Jack. This turned out badly for King Leo. For when Ponty shifted his weight in his seat and pushed back, the improperly repaired seat collapsed yet again and reclined, Ponty ending up in King Leo’s lap.

  “Ooh, ouch, Mr. Earl,” said King Leo, looking down at Ponty.

  “Son of a . . . sorry. So sorry. They were supposed to have fixed this thing!”

  “Ponty, get out of the man’s lap,” Jack said.

  “I’m trying, okay? King Leo, could I ask you to just reach behind the seat and give me a push?”

  “It would be my pleasure,” said King Leo, and he did.

  Ponty played around gingerly with the seat adjustments until he was satisfied that he would not be flying backward anymore. Just to be safe, King Leo moved to the spot behind Jack.

  Once they’d started driving and the remaining awkwardness of the seat incident had dissipated, no one spoke for a moment, so Ponty attempted to get something going.

  “So . . . King Leo. You do much fishing?” he asked, looking in the rearview mirror.

  Jack, who had spent more time with King Leo, knew that Ponty had just opened himself up to a conversation-killing response, like “I am fisher of love” or “I fish the body electric” or some such thing, so he was surprised when King Leo responded simply.

  “No,” he said. “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Well,” said Ponty, “we could get after the walleye while you’re up here. How long you planning to stay?”

  “Until we are all saved by the Universal-Spirit-Being.”

  Ponty was rocked somewhat by this reply, but he pressed on. “Well,” he said, “if that’s not gonna take long, you can always get a temporary license. They’re a lot cheaper.”

  “Perhaps I’ll do that,” King Leo said, and there followed a long pause before he spoke again. “Mr. Earl, I could not help but notice that you have an unopened hot-dog steamer in the backseat of y
our car. Can you tell me about that?”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s kind of funny. I got it as a gift, and I have to say, I have almost no occasion to steam a hot dog of any kind, but I just never got around to returning it.”

  “May I have it?” King Leo asked respectfully.

  “You want my hot-dog steamer?”

  “I’ll pay you.”

  “No. You can just have it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You like hot dogs, huh?” Ponty asked pleasantly.

  “Not particularly, no.”

  After another moment of silence, Ponty spoke. “King Leo, can I ask why you want my hot-dog steamer?”

  “I’d rather not say,” he replied. “Can I still have it?”

  “I guess so,” said Ponty tentatively.

  They drove through town till they came to County Highway P, traveled on that for just under a mile, pulled off into a dirt driveway, traveled down it a quarter mile, and stopped the car in front of a large chain-saw sculpture of Linus Pauling.

  “Mr. Earl, I have to ask you—what is that?” asked King Leo after they’d gotten out to get a closer look at Pauling’s likeness, carved from the stump of a large oak. Before Ponty could answer, Jack guessed, with a fair amount of what turned out to be unwarranted confidence, that it was a sculpture of Robert Loggia. Ponty corrected him, explaining that the owner of the land they (and the mine) were on, Gerry Iverson, was a fan of Pauling. King Leo and Jack nodded knowingly, tipping Ponty off to the fact that neither one had the vaguest notion of who Linus Pauling was. Ponty was just giving them a brief biography when from around the backside of a large grass mound a savagely barking black dog took the vanguard position ahead of a far less fierce-looking man in a flannel shirt and white painter’s pants.

  “Firesign, man, knock it off,” said the man to the dog. The dog obeyed but then ran excitedly toward them, choosing King Leo to jump up on, smudging thick mud all over the front of his sweater. “Firesign!” the man cried sharply, and Firesign the dog shrank away and lay down on the ground, his tail wagging in apparent eagerness to leap on King Leo again.

  “Hey, I’m really sorry, man,” the man said. He was a thinlegged fellow of about fifty, with a small potbelly, a shiny bald pate, and long, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail and secured by a small band of beaded leather. His voice was a rough tenor, and he spoke with a vague accent or affectation, though his face was open and gave the impression of guilelessness. His eyes were surrounded by wrinkles and crow’s-feet, and they were slightly rimmed with red. He touched the dog with the toe of his heavy sandal. “Firesign isn’t used to guests, man.”

  King Leo was obviously in some sort of sartorial state of shock and could not speak. The man looked at Ponty. “Hey, Ponty,” he said, and then he squinted and leaned in to get a better look at Ponty’s mustache.

  “It’s Earl, actually . . . um, Gerry,” said Ponty, not at all smoothly.

  “Earl? You told me your name was Ponty.”

  Indeed, there was every reason in the world for Gerry to hold the belief that the newly mustachioed person now identifying himself as Earl was really named Ponty. For when Sandi had taken Ponty there several days before, he’d been nothing but Ponty.

  “No. No, my name’s Earl.”

  The man looked understandably confused. “But I called you Ponty the other day, didn’t I, and you didn’t correct me?”

  “Well, they sound a lot alike. Sorry about the mix-up,” said Ponty.

  “Well . . . okay, man. Earl it is.”

  Ponty introduced Gerry to the other men, and Gerry took the opportunity to again apologize to King Leo for his dog’s having soiled his “sweater set,” as Gerry called the sleeveless turtleneck. King Leo had recovered enough to accept the apology gracefully, telling Gerry that it was okay, as he had dozens more sleeveless turtlenecks (which was quite true), but he did not offer his standard list of alternate names, for which Jack and Ponty were grateful. The introductions complete, Ponty asked if they could speak with Gerry for a moment, and he invited them into his house.

  “Gerry has an earth home,” Ponty informed the others.

  “Yeah, me and Bilbo,” Gerry laughed.

  “Now, Gerry, is Bilbo your wife?” King Leo asked good-naturedly.

  Gerry checked to see if he was kidding and, discovering he wasn’t, said, “No. No, Bilbo’s a hobbit, from the Tolkien books.” They walked around the other side of the large earth mound toward the entrance with Firesign the dog tagging along behind. They had to walk past a large array of flat panels mounted about four feet off the ground. “My solar collectors,” Gerry explained, though no one had asked. And he continued, “I got off the grid back in ’84. Just couldn’t take it. Saw an episode of something called Night Court, and that was it for me. I was done. Now, here, see, the aluminium”—he used the British pronunciation—“plates heat up in the sun and warm the water in the coiled pipes, and I pump that into reservoirs under the foundation.” Not reading his audience very well, he kept the solar-collector information coming as they entered his earth home. “Works well until it gets really cold, and then I’m forced to use our dead ancestors as heat. But I suppose that’s better than burning our friends the trees,” he said, sounding a little sad. “I use photovoltaic panels for my lighting, but they’re way pricey, man, so I can’t use ’em for heat.”

  They stepped into his rustic kitchen, and he offered each of them a chair (and though all the chairs he offered were unique in style and color, the two similarities they shared were their chipping paint and an immediate need to be shimmed and glued in order to be considered structurally sound), and they pulled them up around his fiberboard kitchen table, a remarkably stained piece of wood set atop two sawhorses. “Can I get you some stinging-nettle tea?” he asked them.

  “I—I don’t think so,” Jack said. “Or is it good?”

  “Oh, it’s great. I throw a little comfrey leaf in there, too,” he said, hoping to close the deal.

  “It won’t sting when I drink it, will it?” Ponty asked.

  “No, it shouldn’t.”

  They all reluctantly accepted, so he drew water into a battered old aluminum teapot, lit a small can of denatured alcohol, and set the pot on a grid above it. “It’ll take a while,” he said. “But every good thing does.” He took a large plastic pail from a spot next to the sink, overturned it, and sat down near his guests. “What can I help you guys with?” he asked.

  “Well, King Leo here—Are you familiar with him, by the way?” Ponty asked.

  “Just what I know of him from when we met a minute ago to now,” Gerry said honestly.

  “Well, he’s a . . . a singer-songwriter from the Twin Cities, and he’d like to take a look at the mine. Is that right, King Leo?”

  “Gerry, I want to see the mine in preparation for a funkadelic cosmic event such as history has never known,” King Leo clarified.

  “What’ll that involve?” Gerry asked.

  “The coming together of many into one. An up-and-down, whacked-out, joyous, dizzy funk being laid down in praise of the Source, the . . . the, Spirit-Being, the Funky One, the Rat of Dee-vine Power.”

  Gerry whistled. “How many people we talking about?”

  “Gerry, if I’m right, and I am right often, the Source, the Funky One does not require a certain number of people in attendance to show his Dee-vine will and pour out the funk on those involved in the revival.”

  “I see . . . So . . . ?”

  “I couldn’t imagine more than forty to sixty-five participants.”

  “Would that be okay?” Ponty asked.

  Gerry passed a hand over his balding head. “Well,” he said, “as long as you leave it in the condition you found it in, I don’t have a problem with that.”

  “That is excellent,” said King Leo. “Gonna be a revival. Thank you, Gerry Iverson.”

  Gerry waved off King Leo’s praise. “Bah,” he said.

  “No, really, thanks,” added Ponty.

 
“Ahh,” Gerry croaked, with another demure movement of his arm. He paused while looking King Leo over. “So you’re a musician, huh?” he said. “You know, I used to do a little fingerpicking and whatnot myself. Hang on a second.” He left the table with surprising alacrity, disappeared around a half wall behind which the sounds of enthusiastic rooting around could be heard, and returned a moment later with a battered Ovation six-string and a banjo. Jack looked at Ponty with concern, but Ponty was looking at King Leo, who in turn was watching Gerry with a mildly amused expression.

  “While we’re waiting for the water to heat up, what say we jam?” Gerry said, thrusting the guitar at King Leo. “We can start with a few Weavers tunes and see if we get anything clicking.”

  It was during the fourth stanza of the Irish Rovers’ setting of “The Unicorn,” King Leo strumming along with Gerry, that Jack felt a hollow sense of revenge for King Leo’s poetry assault. Then Gerry swung immediately into “The Gandy Dancer’s Ball,” and Jack’s feeling of revenge was swamped by one of intense personal misery.

  CHAPTER 14

  It was 8:45 A.M., and Bart Herzog, the governor of Minnesota, was rappelling out the third-floor window of the governor’s mansion to greet his guest.

  “Bromstad, you son of a tinker’s son, how the Hec Ramsey are you?” he asked, unclipping from his carabiners to shake Bromstad’s hand.

  Bromstad had expected a more conventional approach, something along the lines of Herzog’s opening his door in response to Bromstad’s knocking upon it. He answered Herzog with a question of his own. “Governor, are your stairs out?”

  Herzog began the process of laughing, extracted an El Rey del Mundo Churchill maduro from the breast pocket of his military-issue M-65 field jacket, paused his laughing to bite the end off, resumed laughing, pulled a pack of Ohio Blue Tip matches from the thigh pocket of his BDU tiger-stripe trousers, took one out and struck it on the side of his lifted boot, interrupted his laughing again to light his cigar, and, after some strenuous puffing, threw the match over his shoulder, took a long drag, and resumed his laughing on the exhale.