The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  “Your name’s Stillwater Mifflin, ain’t it? Or am I mistaken?”

  “You want me to go on out there …?”

  “That’s the idea. And hurry up. She’s going after another handful. Them towels cost a nickel apiece. Bring her on back in here.”

  “There’s no call to bother the girl,” Shirley said.

  But Mifflin got up tiredly and went outside. Calvin glanced at Postum, who looked back at him, smiling. The smoker had his hand in his pocket again, although he had put away the knife a couple of minutes ago, and there were no more boxes to cut open.

  Move now, Calvin told himself, but he was frozen in place. Move how? It didn’t take a high IQ to know that he was finished. With any luck, Donna could talk her way out of this and hit the road like they’d planned, put in a phone call to Taber, and then the Knights could save Calvin’s weary carcass from death and decapitation.

  “Take me along,” Calvin said without thinking. “Me for my uncle. Even trade. You’ll have the veil and a hostage both. …”

  “So now it is the veil? In that case I’ve already got the veil and two hostages, so let’s just see how this plays out.” Postum nodded out the window.

  Calvin saw Donna look up in surprise at Mifflin, who was speaking to her. She took the gas nozzle out of its cradle and gestured, shaking her head, the wind blowing her ponytail out behind her. The man pointed at the “Pay First!” sign and then at the store, and Donna nodded and hung up the nozzle.

  Don’t come in, Calvin commanded, sending out the mental message, firing on all brain cylinders. Don’t come in. But she was coming in, chatting away, followed by Mifflin, who was nodding sympathetically. The door opened, the bell jangled, and she spotted Shirley at the counter. “Didn’t know I had to pay first,” she said. Then she saw the rest of them sitting there and widened her eyes in a greeting, with no recognition in her face. She took a bill out of her pocket and handed it to Shirley, who punched up the appropriate amount on the pump. The register clanged open, Shirley put in the bill and slammed it shut, and Donna turned toward the door. Mifflin stood in front of it, unmoving.

  “Excuse me,” Donna said, as if she was dealing with an impolite bonehead, but it had no effect on him.

  “Let the girl through the door,” Shirley said. “Don’t go fooling with my customers. I don’t have enough of them as it is. That’s just plain bad for business.”

  “Just you calm down,” Postum said to her. “In fact, why don’t you go on into the back room again for a bit? Yorkmint, you accompany granny, will you? See that she’s not … uncomfortable.”

  “What’s going on here?” Donna asked, brassing it out. “A robbery or something?”

  This is it, Calvin thought. Match point, like Hosmer said. He stood up suddenly, his hands gripping the edge of the picnic table. But before he could move, Postum said, “Sit back down,” and in that same instant the small man drew out the pistol and pointed it at him. Calvin sat back down.

  Yorkmint got up and nodded at Shirley, gesturing toward the back room, but before he could take a step toward the counter, Shirley reached underneath, came up with a short-barreled shotgun, and leveled it at him. “I’ll blow you straight to Hell,” she said evenly. “Can’t miss with this riot gun. You know that.” And then to the small man, she said, “Put the pistol on the counter, peewee. I got six shells in here. Plenty to go around.” Calvin stared at the shotgun, his heart hammering and his mouth open. Shirley’s face was set like concrete.

  The small man looked at Postum, who shrugged and said, “Do like she says.” He put the pistol on the counter, and Shirley picked it up and dropped it into the big front pocket of the apron she wore, and in that moment Mifflin moved forward and grabbed at Donna, but the move was slow and halfhearted, and she slammed her elbow into his windpipe, quick and hard, then backed off a step, spun around, and hammered the heel of her shoe into his ankle. A look of shocked pain came across his face, and he made gagging sounds and clutched at his throat. Calvin stood up fast again and threw the table over hard this time, and then in the same motion reached across and slugged the small man in the side of the head as the man tried to catch the table and heave it upright. He went over backward off his bench and the table fell on him.

  Postum was already up and moving, dodging around the fallen table and saying, “Calm down, just calm down,” and waving his hand at Shirley. The small man shook off the punch and stood up from the floor. He smiled at Calvin, who looked around for a weapon of some sort, spotted his own picnic bench, and picked it up with both hands, swinging it back behind him like a baseball bat. There was a shattering explosion then, and Calvin let the bench go on the backswing, ducking forward and putting his hands over his head, his ears ringing with the concussion of the blast, barely hearing the bench smash through the food racks behind him. Fragments of ceiling tile and neon lightbulb clattered down around him, and then water started leaking down from the swamp cooler.

  “Next shot kills the fat man,” Shirley yelled, pointing the shotgun straight at Postum.

  Mifflin was bent over, wheezing and holding his neck, but still blocking the door.

  “Out of the damn doorway,” Shirley said to him, coming out from behind the counter and handing Donna the pistol from out of her apron.

  Donna pointed it with both hands at the bald man, and he limped away, waving her off. “Christ!” he wheezed. “Give a man a chance!”

  Shirley pushed open the door, gesturing Donna and Calvin outside, letting the door shut behind them. “Let’s go,” she shouted, and Calvin found himself running fast toward the Mustang. Then there was another shotgun blast, directly behind him, and Calvin threw himself to his hands and knees, rolling sideways into the front tire, gaping back at the Gas’n’Go where glass from the window and door was collapsing in a waterfall of fragments.

  “Let’s go!” Shirley shouted, turning back toward him and dropping the barrel of the shotgun toward the ground. She pushed him into the front seat when Donna threw the door open, and then hoisted herself into the back and rested the barrel on the doorframe, pointing it through the open window toward the building. No one came through the door. The Mustang tore out onto the highway, heading east, and Calvin started to breathe again.

  “You did good,” Shirley told him after a moment. “Nobody figured they’d ante up Al Lymon, but it was worth a try. You stood up to them like a Knight. We knew you would. Split your knuckle, didn’t you?”

  “I was scared to death,” he said, looking at the blood on the back of his hand. “I think I still am.” A big tumbleweed hopped across the road ahead, narrowly missing their bumper and rolling away into the limitless freedom of the desert.

  “If you’re going to pass out, breathe into a sack,” Shirley told him. “If you’ve got one.”

  “Who isn’t scared?” Donna asked, smiling at him as well as she could. “That big ape nearly had me.”

  It came to him that Donna could undoubtedly beat up Yolanda Kleemer. “Where’d you learn to do that?” he asked. “Beat people up?”

  “Miles Taber. He used to be some kind of commando.”

  “He told me he taught literature at U.N.L.V.”

  “He did that, too,” she said. “I was impressed by the way you took out the food racks with that bench. It reminded me of Carrie Nation, breaking up a bar, except it was Calvin Bryson, breaking up the Little Debbie snack cakes.”

  “There it goes!” Shirley said.

  Calvin looked back through the rear window and saw a black plume of smoke billowing into the sky. “What the hell?” he asked.

  “They’ve torched the store. I wish I’d have gotten that fifty off the table and cleaned out the till. You can bet Postum didn’t let any money burn.”

  “Chickenshit bastards!” Calvin yelled back down the highway. He shook his fist. “Hey,” he said, “my car’s back there!”

  “There’re worse things to worry about,” Shirley said, “although we’ll get George to pick up what’s left of it s
o they don’t connect you to all this.”

  “That was a shocker when you came up with the shotgun,” Calvin said. “I thought we were done for.”

  “Last thing I wanted to do was shoot anyone. The thing about a shotgun, though, is that it’s a scary object, like a big, mean dog. It makes people pay attention, and then if you’re lucky you don’t have to use it. You just have to make them think you will.”

  Calvin looked at Donna, who glanced away out the side window, but not before he could see that she was crying. He remembered her talking to him about the store a couple of times over the past two days, about hanging out at the Gas’n’Go when she was growing up, the Hoptoad out back—all the memories literally up in smoke now. He patted her leg awkwardly.

  “We can build a new one with the insurance, honey,” Shirley said, and Donna nodded, wiping her eyes. “Unless I decide to retire out to New Cyprus on the proceeds.”

  “You’re a Knight, too,” Calvin said to her. “Of course.”

  “Got my forty-year pin last May,” she said.

  They drove on in silence. Calvin watched through the rear window as a car zoomed up behind them—an impatient Mercedes-Benz that passed them doing ninety. There was another car in the distance, which might have been the van or Postum’s pickup, but it stayed a mile back for the time it took them to drive to the outskirts of Needles, where a fire truck passed them heading west.

  “That’s all the excitement for today,” Shirley said. “They’ll take the veil back and show it to Lymon, which means he’s still alive. He won’t be fooled for more than about sixty seconds, although maybe he can convince them somehow. Next time Bob Postum comes calling, though, he’s going to be loaded for bear.” They slowed down, hitting Needles traffic. “Pull off here, honey,” she said to Donna, “and drive down to the water, out there on the other side of the bridge. That’ll be them in the Jimmy, with the boat trailer on the back.”

  Donna slowed down to a crawl as they left the asphalt, cutting the engine and rolling into the shade, hidden from the highway. Calvin realized that his hands were still shaking, and he sat on them to keep them still.

  BEAMON’S YARD

  We board over the stern,” Taber had told them. Calvin rolled the words around in his mind as they slipped downriver aboard the New Cyprus fireboat, a twenty-five-foot pontoon boat with a shallow draft, a long aluminum canopy, and water cannons fore and aft. There was a sliver of moon in the sky, the night clear and balmy. Taber hadn’t been hesitant about any of it, and that was reassuring. “No talking, no calling out, no one left behind, especially not Al Lymon. We slip the mooring lines and tow her out into the stream. If Al’s not aboard, we set her adrift.”

  Calvin sat at the water cannon in the bow. “Control that cannon,” Taber had told him half a dozen times. “Don’t blast our own people unless there’s no other way to stop trouble. It’s not a damned squirt gun, but it won’t kill anyone, either.” Calvin reminded himself of the advice now, and then he reminded himself that he would have to keep focused here—more focused than he had been yesterday at the Gas’n’Go. Today he had only one job to do—gunner—and he meant to do it well. The river was smooth and glassy in the moonlight, and the wind had died down aside from occasional gusts that swept across from the Arizona shore.

  They had run through the details of the boarding yesterday, right there under the bridge above Needles, sitting around a couple of folding tables set up in the shade of the old bridge and eating cold fried chicken and potato salad, while two Knights had gone downriver in a little outboard to take a look at the setup behind Beamon’s yard. What they had found was de Charney’s houseboat tied up to the dock, with someone apparently living on board—maybe Al Lymon, maybe not. Carrying what was apparently the cardboard carton that held the veil, Bob Postum had come through the back gate of Beamon’s storage yard, stepped aboard the houseboat, gone into the cabin, and come out again ten minutes later, heading back up the dock.

  It was nearly three in the morning now—fifteen sleepless hours later, although Calvin was anything but sleepy—and there wasn’t another living soul on the river aside from them. They had dropped Donna and Shirley off ten minutes ago at a spot on the river where Taber’s International Harvester had been hidden, and the two of them had driven away up the highway toward a bend in the river a mile beyond Needles—a little beach where a person could climb out of the water after drifting clear of town. So if any of the Knights went over the side, and were swept away in the current, they only had to tread water until they sighted the truck on shore and then do a little swimming.

  The big Chevy engine made a low, gurgling sound, with just enough speed on it to navigate, but still it sounded loud in the desert stillness. On the other hand, there was nothing in the sound that would give them away. They might be any group of houseboaters running down to Havasu in the cool of early morning—except for the absence of lights and the water cannon mounted at the bow and stern.

  Powered by the 454-cubic-inch engine, the cannon had a fifty-yard range, able to blast a heavy stream over the tops of the riverside houses and into New Cyprus proper. Firing it didn’t take a lot of study. The cannon swiveled up, down, and sideways, and had a piece of pipe welded to the shut-off valve so that a person could make small adjustments quickly and could close it off in an instant. After dark last night Calvin had spent a half hour firing the cannon while they ran the boat up and down the river—a common enough drill for the New Cyprus Volunteer Fire Department. He was sure now that he could knock down anyone within range. With any luck he would get a chance to clean the leftover ketchup out of Postum’s beard.

  Calvin spotted the shadowy outline of a coyote on the California shore, drinking at the edge of the river, and a moment later an owl flew past so close that he heard the whoosh of its wings. The sky was endlessly deep and starry, reminding him of walking home from the steakhouse the night before last with Donna. He saw the lights of Needles ahead on the starboard side now—not many lights yet, just streetlights and all-night diners and the three a.m. lights of insomniacs and insanely early risers.

  They swept nearer as he watched, and then the dance of reflected stars in the river vanished and the boat fell into shadow crossing under the bridge. Then they were out in the moonlight and starlight again and Taber was hugging the California shore, moving just a fraction faster than the current. There were houses along the river now, and vacant lots that would grow houses in the coming years. He spotted a big corrugated-steel building ahead, with a tall fence around it strung with barbed wire and with an inlet dug into the bank and a long dock running out from a gate in the fence. De Charney’s pontoon houseboat lay moored fore and aft along the dock, dark and silent, a heavy electrical cord snaking away from a portable air conditioner running in one of the cabin windows.

  The question was simple: who was living on board? De Charney himself, or Al Lymon, or both? It made sense that it was Lymon, Calvin thought, since they could keep him on the move that way.

  Whatever the answer, they were playing it the same way—grapple on at the stern, the boarding party away to cast off the mooring lines, the engines throttling up to power the cannon. Whoever was in the cabin would know they’d been boarded, but by the time they’d woken up and come outside they’d already be towed out into midstream, and Calvin would wash them straight off the deck and into the drink.

  The fireboat shuddered, slowed, and then the engine reversed and they bumped alongside the dock and tied on. Two Knights stepped onto the dock, one of them carrying a big pair of bolt cutters, the other a heavy steel flashlight as long as his forearm. They bent over the mooring lines, working hurriedly in the light of a mercury vapor lamp on one of the high fence posts. The big engine on the fire-boat geared up, powering the water pumps, and the night was suddenly churning with noise. A light came on in the cabin and then went out again, and then an alarm bell sounded some ways away—in the warehouse, probably—a wake-up call just barely audible to Calvin over the roar of the
engine.

  He bent over the water cannon, listening to the pumps winding up beneath him. The boarders were beyond the edge of the cabin now, working at a chain with the bolt cutters, the two of them leaning into it. He levered the gun around and shot a tentative blast out into the river, drawing a big squiggle with it, shutting it off and on—plenty of pressure to sweep the decks clear. The engines backed off slightly, and then, with a suddenness that was disorienting, spotlights blazed, blinding him, and he threw up his forearm to shade his face. More lights came on in the yard, dogs started to bark, and there was the heavy clank of a steel gate slamming open.

  He could only half see the boarders now. They stood up straight and hurried back across the deck, and one of them leapt aboard and shouted, “Go!” just as the second man, carrying the bolt cutters, tripped and went down hard on the deck of de Charney’s boat. Two big Rottweilers came flying out of the darkness from the direction of the yard; bounded across the deck, and leapt at the back of the fallen Knight, who was only halfway to his feet. He swung around now and tried to ward the dogs off with the bolt cutters, but was slammed over backward, covering his face with his arms and curling up.

  Calvin depressed the lever of the water cannon, swiveling the barrel too high across the deck, the water blasting out a cabin window and blowing off the corner of the roof with shocking force before he could back it off and get it trained on the dogs, which were spun entirely around by the force of the deluge. One of them was swept beneath the railing into the river, and Calvin saw the black, furiously barking shadow floating away downstream in the moonlight. The other dog was up again instantly, and it made another silent, determined rush at the Knight on the deck, who had been pinned against a railing post by the water and was just pushing himself to his feet again, stumbling forward and trying to make it to the fireboat, his pant leg torn and his leg bloody.

  Calvin waited a split second, until he could train the cannon behind the man, and then swept the dog backward again, just catching its hindquarters the moment before it leapt. It disappeared behind flying water, but when Calvin shut the flow down it was scrambling to its feet again, although it must have been half drowned by now, and it stumbled sideways into someone who had come through the open gate of the yard and had just now stepped aboard. Calvin saw that it was Mifflin, the bald man from the Gas’n’Go.