“Okay.” Another screeching fleabag swung down from the roof, intending
to enter through the broken window, but Roosevelt whacked it with a t
sledgehammer-size fist, and it flew away into the night as though it had
been fired out of a catapult.
Doogie was still putting the Hummer through quick serpentine maneuvers,
and at the tailgate, the monkey hanging upside down from the roof rack
swung back and forth across the unbroken window, as if it were a clock
pendulum. Orson tumbled off his feet but sprang up at once, snarling and
snapping his teeth to remind the rhesus of the price it would pay if it
tried to get inside.
Looking beyond the tick-tock monkey, I saw that the rest of the troop
continued to give chase. Doogie’s slalom trick, while shaking loose some
of the attackers, had slowed us down, and the bright-eyed nasties were
..
gaining on us.
Then the sass man stopped swerving, accelerated, and rounded a corner so
fast that he almost stood us on end when he had to jam the brake pedal
to the floorboard to avoid plowing through a pack of coyotes.
The monkey at the tailgate shrieked at either the sight or the smell of
the pack. It dropped off the Hummer and ran for its life.
The coyotes, fifty or sixty of them, parted like a stream and flowed
around the vehicle.
I was afraid they would try to come through the broken window.
With their wicked teeth, they would be harder to hold off than mere
monkeys.
But they showed no interest in canned people meat, racing past, closing
ranks again behind us.
The pursuing troop rounded the corner and met the pack. Monkeys shot
into the air with such surprise that you would have thought they were on
a trampoline. Being smart monkeys, they retreated without hesitation,
and the coyotes went after them.
The kids turned backward in their seats, cheering the coyotes.
“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, ” Sasha said.
Doogie drove us out of Wyvern.
The clouds had cleared while we’d been underground, and the moon hung
high in the sky, as round as time.
With midnight still ahead of us, we took each of the kids home, and that
was totally fine. Tears are not always bitter. As we made our rounds,
the tears on the faces of the children’s parents were as sweet as mercy.
When Lilly Wing looked at me, with Jimmy in her arms, I saw in her eyes
something that I had once yearned to see, but now what I saw was less
fulfilling for me here in time present than it might have been in time
past.
When we got back to my house, Sasha, Bobby, and I were prepared to
party, but Roosevelt wanted to get his Mercedes, drive home to his
handsome Bluewater cruiser at the marina, and craft a pirate’s patch out
of filet mignon to cover his swollen eye. “Children, I’m getting old.
You go celebrate, and I’ll go sleep.” Because he was off duty at the
radio station, Doogie had made a midnight date, as if he’d never doubted
that he would come back from never land and feel like dancing.
“Good thing I have time to shower, ” he said. “I think I smell like
monkey.” While Bobby and Sasha loaded my and Sasha’s surfboards into her
Explorer, I washed my bloodstained hands. Then Mungojerrie and Orson and
I went into the dining room, now Sasha’s music room, to listen to the
tape that I had heard twice before. Leland Delacroix’s testament.
It was not in the machine where I had left it when I’d played it for
Sasha, Roosevelt, and Mungojerrie. Apparently, it had vanished like the
building that had housed the Mystery Train. If Delacroix had never
killed himself, had never worked on the train, had never gone to the
other side, then no tape had ever been made.
I went to the rack in which Sasha stores audiotapes of all her
compositions. The dupe of Delacroix’s testament, labeled “Tequila
Kidneys, ” was where I had put it.
“It’ll be blank, ” I said.
Orson regarded me quizzically. The poor battered boy needed to be bathe