Destiny Doll

SIXTEEN

The brain case was nicked and battered. It had had hard usage.

I handed it down to Sara. “There it is,” I said. “That was a hell of a chance you took.”

She bristled at the anger in my voice. “It was no chance at all,” she said. “The bullet goes where I aim the rifle and I am good at it. It worked out, didn’t it?”

“It worked out just fine,” I said, still shaken. “But two feet to one side. . .”

“It couldn’t have,” she said. “I aimed it...”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Right in the center of his forehead.”

I climbed down off Paint and shucked off the robe. Tuck was crouched at the foot of one of the twisted badlands trees. I tossed the robe to him.

“Where are my pants?” I asked.

“Over there,” said Sara, pointing. “I picked them up and folded them.”

I picked up the trousers and shook them out and started getting into them.

Sara had been turning the brain around and around in her band.

“What happened to it?” she asked. “What did they use it for?”

“What would you expect a bunch of polo-playing barbarians to use a brain case for?”

“You mean a polo ball?”

I nodded. “Now they’ll have to go back to balls chiseled out of stone. They’re all upset about it,”

Hoot came swarming down the slope from where he had been standing lookout.

“You perform excellent,” he hooted at me. “For one wielding an unaccustomed weapon. . .”

“Miss Foster was the one who performed so excellently,” I told him. “She bagged my bird for me.”

“No matter which,” said Hoot, “the deed be neatly done and the game-playing hobbies are evacuating.”

“You mean that they are leaving?”

“They are forming up to march.”

I climbed to the top of the hill and the centaurs had indeed formed into a ragged line and were marching west. It was a relief to see them go. Honorable as they might be (and they were honorable; they had given me the brain case) I still would have felt slightly nervous if they had hung around.

Turning back, I saw that Tuck and Sara had hauled Roscoe’s body off the pile of water tins and were opening up his skull so they could insert the brain case.

“Do you think it has been damaged?” Sara asked. “The beating it has taken. Look at all the dents in it!”

I shook my head. I didn’t know.

“He doesn’t have to know too much,” said Sara, hopefully. “We won’t ask much of him. Just some simple questions.”

Tuck held out his hand for the brain case and Sara gave it to him.

“You know how to do?” I asked Tuck.

“I think I do,” he said. “There are slots. You just slip it in...”

He slipped it in and slapped it with the heel of his hand to drive it home, then banged the skull plate shut.

Roscoe stirred. He had been propped against a wall of earth and now he straightened to stand upon his feet. His head swiveled about to look at each of us in turn. His arms moved tentatively, as if he might be testing them.

He spoke, his voice grating. “Whyever,” he said, “wherever, however, forever, whenever.”

He stopped speaking and looked around at us as if to see if we had understood him. When it must have been apparent that we hadn’t, he said, solemnly and slowly, so there’d be no mistaking him this time, “Hat, cat, bat, fat, rat, sat, vat, pat, gnat, gat, drat, tat.”

“He’s completely nuts,” I said.

“Guts,” said Roscoe.

“He rhymes,” said Sara. “That is all he does-just a rhyming dictionary. Do you suppose he’s forgotten everything? Do you think he knows anything at all?”

I grinned at her. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“Roscoe,” said Sara, “do you remember anything at all?”

“Tall,” said Roscoe, “call, ball, mall, fall, gall.”

“No, no,” said Sara, “do you remember your master?”

“Pastor,” said Roscoe, maddeningly conversational.

“Oh, it’s no use!” cried Sara. “All the way we traveled, all the, trouble we’ve been through and you down there risking your neck and all we get is this!”

“Roscoe,” I said sharply, “we are looking for Lawrence Arlen Knight. . .”

“Kite,” said Roscoe, “sight, night, blight . . .”

“No, goddamn it!” I shouted. “We are looking for him. Point in the direction we should look.”

“Book,” said Roscoe, “cook, took.” But even as he mouthed his rhyming gibberish, he squared around and flung out his arm, with a finger pointing, holding his arm and finger rigid, like a steady sign board, pointing northward up the trail.