Myndi had been unamused to learn the ringtone he’d chosen to announce her calls. Really, darling. Passive-aggressive, are we?
He decided—manfully, mutinously—not to answer. He smiled defiantly. Whatever she had in store for him this morning, it could wait until his system had been injected with piping-hot Kenyan stimulant.
He wondered idly, what could it be this time? Another termite-rotted column? Peckfuss the caretaker drunk again?
He didn’t care. He would call back. Yes. Muahahaha! He would . . . pretend he’d been in the shower.
He poured his coffee and sat before the laptop, pressed the buttons to launch the cybergenies of news.
Post: SENATE KILLS DUMBO
Times: SUPERDRONE DIES IN SENATE COMMITTEE
Bird wondered how Chick’s hangover was coming along. Or whether he had even made it back to his hotel. Was he lying facedown in the Reflecting Pool across from the Lincoln Memorial, dead, another casualty of the appropriations process? It was a distinct possibility. Chick had defiantly switched to tequila at some point after 1:00 a.m. Always a smart move at the tail end of a long evening of drinking.
Bird maneuvered the cursor to the desktop folder marked ARM.EXFIL. He clicked open CHAP.17 and read a few paragraphs as the Valkyries shrieked anew.
“Brace for impact!” Turk shouted above the high-pitched scream of the failing engines.
Bird considered. He inserted through gritted teeth after shouted. Yes. Better. But then he wondered: can one in fact shout through gritted teeth? Bird gritted his teeth and tried to shout “Brace for impact!” but it came out sounding vaguely autistic.
The ARM.EXFIL folder contained the latest in the McIntyre oeuvre, his current novel in progress, titled The Armageddon Exfiltration. This was the third in his Armageddon trilogy. The first two novels—which had not succeeded in finding a publisher—were The Armageddon Infiltration and The Armageddon Immolation.
It was the literary output of nearly a decade now. He’d started when he went to work right out of college at a Washington public-relations firm specializing in the defense industry. During the day he wrote copy and press releases urging Congress to pony up for the latest and shiniest military hardware. But the nights belonged to him. He banged away on novels full of manly men with names like Turk and Rufus, of terrible yet really cool weapons, of beautiful but deadly women with names like Tatiana and Jade, who could be neither trusted nor resisted. Heady stuff.
He treated his girlfriends to readings over glasses of wine.
The mushroom cloud rose like an evil plume of mycological smoke over the Mall in Washington. The presidential helicopter, Marine One, yawed frantically as its pilot, Major Buck “Turk” McMaster, grappled furiously with the collective stick—
“ ‘Yawed frantically’?” the girlfriend interrupted. “What’s that?”
Bird would smile. Women just didn’t get the technology, did they? But then Bird had to admit that he didn’t get the women writers. Danielle Steel, Jane Austen, that sort.
“It’s when a plane does like this.” Bird demonstrated, rotating a flat palm around an imaginary vertical axis.
“Isn’t it a helicopter?”
“Same principle.”
“ ‘Yawed frantically.’ Okay, but it sounds weird.”
“It’s a technical term, Claire.”
“What’s ‘mycological smoke’?”
“A mushroom cloud. ‘Mycological’? Adjective from mushroom?”
Claire shrugged. “Okay.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“No, it’s fine. It’s lovely.”
Bird put down the manuscript. “Claire. It’s not supposed to be ‘lovely.’ There’s nothing ‘lovely’ about a twenty-five-kiloton thermonuclear device that’s just detonated in the Jefferson Memorial.”
“No, I guess not.”
“They have to get the president to the airborne command center. Every second is—”
Claire yawned, frantically. “I could go for sushi.”
Again the Valkyries shrieked.
“Hello, Myn.”
“Walter. I’ve been calling.”
“Sorry. Just vomiting up blood.”
“What?”
“I was in the shower. You said you needed my brain to work. So it can process. Okay. We are go for neuron function. On one. Three, two, one. Initiate neuron function. Whazzup?”
“It’s Lucky Strike.”
Oh, God . . .
Myndi launched into what Bird estimated would be a three-, maybe four-minute disquisition. He didn’t want to listen to any of it, but he understood that to interrupt an equine medical diagnosis would open him to a charge of indifference in the first degree. He let his head tilt back at a stoical angle.
“So Dr. Dickerson said I absolutely have to stay off her until the tendon is fully healed. Walter? Walter, are you listening to any of this?”
Tendon. That word. How Bird hated that word. It had cost him tens—perhaps even hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years. There were other equine anatomical terms that made him shudder: scapulohumeral joint, fetlock joint, coffin bone—but he reserved a special odium for tendon.
“Really, it comes down to a moral issue.”
Bird had been fantasizing about dog-food factories and the excellent work they do.
“Whoa, Myn. Did you say ‘moral issue’?”
“Yes. If I keep riding her instead of giving the tendon time to heal . . . Walter, am I not getting through to you? If the tendon goes . . .” Was that a gasp he heard? “. . . I don’t even want to think about that.”
“Myn.” Bird sighed. “This is not a good time.”
“Do you want me to call you back?”
“No, sweetheart. I’m talking about . . . You saw the news this morning?”
“Walter. The speed competitions are six weeks away.” Pause. “All right—so what do you think I should do?”
Bird massaged his left temple. “I take it you’ve already priced a . . . replacement . . . animal?”
“It’s a horse, Walter. Sam”—another word that always induced a shudder: her trainer; or rather enabler—“says there’s a superb nine-year-old filly over at Dollarsmith.”
“Don’t tell me. Is this one related to Seabiscuit, too?”
“If she were, Walter, she certainly wouldn’t be going for such a bargain price. The bloodlines are stunning. The House of Windsor doesn’t have bloodlines like this.”
Bloodlines. Noun, plural: 1. qualities likely to bankrupt. 2. hideously expensive genetic tendencies.
“Myn.”
“Yes, darling?”
“How much is this nag going to cost me?”
“Well, as I say, with those bloodlines—”
“Myn.”
“Two twenty-five?”
A new pain presented—as doctors would say—behind Bird’s eyeballs.
“But we’ll need to move fast,” Myn added. “Sam says the Kuwaiti ambassador was over there the other day sniffing around.”
Despite his pain, Bird found the image of a Kuwaiti ambassador “sniffing around stables” grimly amusing.
“Baby. Mercy. Please.”
“Walter,” she said sternly, “I assure you I’m not any happier than you about this.”
“But surely it’s possible I’m more unhappy about it than you.”
“What? Oh, never mind. Look—we agreed when I decided to try out for the team that we were going to do this together.”
This, it occurred to him, was Myn’s concept of ‘together’: She’d compete for a place on the U.S. Equestrian Team and he would write checks.
“I know we did, darling. But what we didn’t know when we embarked, together, on our quest for equestrian excellence was that the stock market would dive like a submarine, taking the economy with it, and defense spending. Defense spending? You remember, the thing that makes our standard of living possible? I am looking out the window. I see defense lobbyists all over town, leaping from b
uildings. Myn? Oh, Myn-di?”
Silence. He knew it well. Betokening The Gathering Storm.
Finally, “So your answer is no?”
He could see her now: pacing back and forth across the tack room in jodhpurs, mice and other small animals scurrying in terror, sawdust flying. In the distance a whinny of tendinitis-related pain coming from the stricken Lucky Strike. “Lucky”? Ha. Myndi would have unbunned her honey-colored hair, causing it to tumble over her shoulders. She was beautiful. A figure unruined by parturition. Didn’t want children—“not just yet, darling,” a demurral now in its, what, eighth year? Pregnancy would mean months out of the saddle. Bird was okay with the arrangement. He had to grant: the sex was pretty great. One day in the dentist’s office, browsing the latest unnecessary bulletin about Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, Bird read that the Duchess of Cornwall—“like many women who love to ride”—was great in the sack. Who knew?
What point was there in struggling?
“Have Sam call me,” Bird said. The left side of his brain immediately signaled, Dude. You’re already broke, and you just okayed a quarter million dollars’ worth of new hoof? Are you out of your mind? Wimp! Pussy! Fool!
“Thank you,” Myn said, a bit formally, Bird thought. Maybe she didn’t want to sound too appreciative when really all he was doing was living up to his side of the bargain. Right?
It was a bit late to try to salvage the remains of his manhood, so he said, “I don’t know if the bank’s going to go for it. I wouldn’t if I were the bank.”
“Things will turn around, darling,” Myn said. “They always do. And you’re brilliant at what you do.”
“All right. But I get Lucky Strike.”
“Why would you want Lucky Strike?” she asked suspiciously.
“For the barbecue this weekend.”
“What?”
“Aren’t we having Blake and Lou Ann over on Saturday for a barbecue? At this rate, we can’t afford beef. They say horse meat’s tasty, but you have to cook it slowly.”
“Really, Walter. That’s in appalling taste.”
But her tone was playful, frisky. And why not—she’d just scored a new horse.
“Call Sam, darling,” she said. “I have to go deal with Peckfuss. There’s an awful smell coming from the woods. And you have to do something about his teeth. I just can’t bear to look at him anymore. It’s revolting.”
“Whoa. Choose: new horse or Peckfuss’s dentition.”
“See you Friday. Oh—don’t forget the sump pump. They’re holding it for me at Strosniders.”
So now Bird had his to-do list for the rest of the week: (1) Borrow $225,000. (2) Pick up sump pump for the basement, which had now been flooding since, oh, 1845. (3) Peckfuss’s dentition. All the elements of a terrific weekend.
Myn had always wanted a place in the country. The real estate agent who’d sold it to them had said, perhaps even truthfully, that Sheridan’s troops had looted it and tried to burn it down.
“And do you know, it was the slaves who saved it!”
Bird thought, Oh, really? This was the third house in the area they’d been shown that had allegedly been saved by devoted darkies. He wondered—it was surely a logical question: Why would slaves risk their lives to save the Massa’s house? Oh, never mind. The agents also delighted in pointing out scorch marks, supposedly mementos of General Sheridan’s slave-thwarted arsons.
It was a lovely old house, though, on 110 acres and at the end of a long, winding oak-lined driveway. Stables, barn, willow trees, trout stream—source of much of the flooding.
The original name was Upton. After a few years of paying bills, Bird renamed it Upkeep. When his mother’s Alzheimer’s progressed to the critical point, he moved her in—not in the least to Myndi’s liking. One night Mother was found wandering the hallways in her peignoir, holding a lit candelabra.
“Sort of perfect, in a Southern-gothic kind of way, don’t you think?” Bird said, trying to put a good face on it. When Myndi didn’t bite, he added, “Or is it just another cliché?”
“Walter. She’s going to burn the place down. With us in it. You have to do something.”
The caretaker, Peckfuss, volunteered his daughter, Belle, to keep nocturnal vigil over Mother. Bird felt sorry for Belle. She had five children, each of whom, insofar as he could tell, had been sired by a different migrant worker. Belle’s amplitude—she weighed in at about three hundred pounds—put a strain on the ancient staircase. At night Bird and Myndi would listen, holding their breath, as the staircase groaned beneath Belle’s avoirdupois. Bird playfully proposed to Myndi an arrangement whereby Belle could be winched up to the third floor with block and tackle. But dear, sweet, kind Belle was an ideal companion. She’d sit by Mother’s bed through the night, consuming frozen cakes, watching reality-TV shows. Her favorite was a showcase piece of American programming imbecility called 1,000 Stupid Ways to Die. One night Bird found them both watching an episode that re-created the demise of a man who had sought to conceal from the police a canister of pepper gas—in his lower colon. Mother was riveted. Bird thought sadly of the days when Mother read to him and his younger brother, Bewks, from The Wind in the Willows. When her condition deteriorated further, the impecunious Bewks moved in to help. Bird loved Bewks. Bewks’s great passion was “living history,” the term preferred by its practitioners to “reenacting” or “dressing up in period military costumes and playing war.”
As it happened, Bewks’s period was the Civil War. His specific adopted persona was that of a Confederate colonel of cavalry. Nutty as it all was, Bird conceded that Bewks cut a neat, dashing figure as he clumped along the porch in his cavalry boots, tunic, and saber. He styled his hair long, after the windblown look of George Armstrong Custer, hero of Gettysburg and Little Big Horn.
How Mother’s brain processed Bewks’s 19th-century appearance, Bird could only guess. For her part, Myn found him “odd.” But Bewks knew his way around a stable and was a bit of a horse whisperer himself, so he and Myn could talk about tendons. Myndi was far too smart to let condescension get in the way of convenience.
Sitting on the porch of a summer evening with an old-fashioned in hand, watching the sun set over the Shenandoah and turn the fields purple, Bird reflected on his fortune: a trophy wife, candelabra-wielding mother, staircase-threatening caregiver, saber-wielding brother, dentally and mentally challenged caretaker, crumbling house, money-sucking mortgage, dwindling bank account.
If he was not from these parts himself, Bird felt at such halcyon moments that he was at least a reasonable facsimile of a Southern gentleman. He smiled at the thought that just the other day an impersonal letter had arrived notifying him that Upkeep’s mortgage was now held by a bank in Shanghai. So if he wasn’t an authentic Southerner, he was at least an authentic American, which is to say, in hock up to his eyeballs to the Chinese.
CHAPTER 2
TAURUS
Bird emerged from the chill interior of Groepping-Sprunt’s corporate jet into the Turkish-steam-bath heat of Alabama.
For the umpteenth time, he wished Al Groepping and Willard Sprunt had built their first rockets in a more temperate clime. Years of visits to corporate headquarters in Missile Gap had taught Bird to limit his outdoor exposure to sprints between air-conditioned spaces. But it wasn’t the heat that was troubling him most just now.
Yesterday there had arrived from Chick Devlin a terse e-mail summons slugged URGENT. Bird knew that layoffs would follow the Dumbo shoot-down. Was his own head on the chopping block? Losing Groepping as a client would be . . . well, disastrous.
Chick was not his usual grinning self. He barely looked up from his desk when Bird entered. Bird braced to hear, Sorry, pal, but this isn’t going to be easy . . .
“Coffee?” Chick said, mustering a brief, perfunctory grin. “I swear I’m still hungover from last week. Why in the name of all that is holy and good did you let me start drinking tequila at that time of night?”
“I tried to
stop you,” Bird said, “but you seemed intent on suicide.”
“Felt like roadkill. So guess who I just got off the phone with? Lev Melnikov. Man, oh, man, is he one pissed-off Russian.”
Melnikov was chief executive officer and chairman of the Internet giant EPIC. And he had recently thrown a tantrum of (indeed) epic proportions over China’s censorship and hacking of his operations there. In a retaliatory snit, he’d pulled EPIC out of the country.
“I imagine he would be a tad displeased,” Bird said. “It’s not every day you lose two or three hundred million customers.”
“Weird thing is how personally he’s taking it. That’s unlike him. Lev’s a nerd. Nerds don’t get emotional.”
“You’re a nerd,” Bird said. “You get emotional.”
Chick grinned. “Only about our stock price. Hell, Lev Melnikov’s got more money than God. But you got to remember about Lev—he grew up in Soviet Russia. He doesn’t like getting jerked around by a bunch of Commies.”
“Commies.” Bird smiled. “Ah, for the good old days of the Cold War. Course, I’m way too young to remember all that. More your era.”
“Lev was about thirteen or fourteen when he and his folks got out. But he remembers what it was like, growing up scared, waiting to hear that three a.m. knock on the door, KGB hauling your daddy off to the gulag.”
“And now he’s an American citizen worth twenty billion dollars. The only midnight knock on his door he needs to worry about is the IRS. Tell him to chill. Buy a football team. That’ll take his mind off Chinese Commies.” Bird set his coffee cup down on the glass with a clunk. “Okay, I guess that’s enough small talk. So, why did you drag my sorry ass down here to this swamp? Give it to me straight up. Am I getting the boot?”
Chick sighed. “Bird, I had to lay off three hundred people this morning.”
“I don’t like to hear that, Chick.”
“Three hundred people. Three hundred, times all their families. So many lives. You run the nums. I may be an engineer, but let me tell you, today my heart is hurting.”
“I know it is,” Bird said. Chick, pull the trigger. Put me out of my misery here.
They Eat Puppies, Don't They? Page 2