The Digging Leviathan (8 page)

“But this is all stuff. You’ve heard the same from Latzarel. I know you have. I didn’t drive over here today in that storm to chat about common knowledge. There’s information Latzarel hasn’t got. Nor can he get it! He knows nothing of a race of people—very wonderful people—living at the Earth’s core. Has he mentioned them to you? I think not.”

Jim heard the sound of Pinion slapping something again—a tabletop or the arm of his chair. Pinion paused, cleared his throat, and let the last bit of information settle.

“I was contacted by an emissary of these people. An interesting gentleman, to be sure. He had—how shall I say it?—certain physiological qualities that put me in mind of you. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was gilled. A merman, if you
will. And, if I’m not entirely amiss, one of your relatives. You and your family, I mean to say, are exiles from the land within the Earth. A paradise of natural beauty and riches. Gemstones for the plucking. Rivers running with gold. Vast subtropical forests ripe with fruit through the unvarying seasons. There’s no winter there, boy! Think of it. Only perpetual spring and summer.

“It’s a land out of mythology—Ultima Thule, Atlantis, Shamballa, Agharta, Pellucidar! All the ancient mysteries explained. And you, my boy, exiled from that land of eternal sun, you and your unfortunate father …. Alas!”

Jim could imagine Pinion shaking his head, perhaps fondling Giles’ shoulder—the lying old hypocrite. Approached by an emissary! Why would an emissary approach John Pinion? Why wouldn’t he approach Giles Peach? Why would he approach anyone at all? To encourage lunatics like Pinion to invade the land beyond the poles? Jim was aghast. Would Giles swallow all this? Of course he would. He was nine-tenths of the way there before Pinion’s arrival. Why shouldn’t he? Uncle Edward had. Professor Latzarel had. And when Jim considered it for a moment, he had too. He didn’t half believe in Pinion’s emissary, but Ashbless had been right at the Newtonian Society meeting. Pinion would outdistance them all. He hadn’t their honesty, their integrity. But he’d very soon have Giles’ machine.

The front door shut with a suddenness that nearly toppled Jim into the ape coat again. It was Velma Peach, home for lunch. He could hear her there, a foot away. Through the crack between the door and the jamb he could see a hand gripping a raincoat. Surely she wouldn’t hang it in the closet. She was only home to eat lunch. He shut his eyes, waiting, considering and discarding speeches. The closet was far too small to hide him.

“What are you doing here?” demanded Mrs. Peach. For one desperate moment Jim was sure she was talking to him. But then the hand and the coat disappeared. Jim could hear her feet scraping away toward the living room. It was John Pinion she confronted.

“My good woman …” he began.

“What do you want here?”

“I’m interested only in your son’s welfare.”

“You’re interested in some slimy business, I’d warrant. If
you want to talk to Giles, ask me first.
I
know who you are. Giles has enough ideas in his head without your shoving in.”

“Giles, perhaps, is the best judge of that,” Pinion replied in an abruptly icy tone. “You’re about to be outvoted by history. Take my word for it, my good …”

But he hadn’t time to finish before Velma Peach began to shout that she would “good woman” him out the door; Jim, in a wild rush, slid out of the closet unseen and fled down the hall, out through the kitchen and into the back yard. The front door slammed, Pinion’s truck rumbled away, and Jim idled casually along toward home, looking over his shoulder twice, fearful of being caught out and thinking wildly about Pinion’s Atlanteans and Mr. Hasbro’s car and of stealing Gill’s journals. How much of the day’s events could he tell Uncle Edward? All of it might be of vast importance. He’d make up some story of overhearing Pinion. And if it seemed a good idea, he’d mention the Metropolitan incident. Uncle Edward had, after all, insisted he’d been lashed with an invisible wet tentacle at The Newtonian meeting. But he couldn’t mention having seen Roycroft Squires on the flying bicycle. They’d shove him into bed and call Dr. Frosticos. The thought sobered him, and once again he thought of his father’s fear of Yamoto, of everything new or unusual. It seemed to him that whatever else might be true, they were certainly rushing headlong toward some strange fate.

There was nothing but bad weather for a month: rain and clouds and wind out of the northeast, high tides and storm surf on the south coast. Professor Latzarel haunted the coves along the Palos Verdes Peninsula, waiting for a low tide, plumbing the depths of big pools with a thousand-foot line. Word had come from Roycroft Squires. The launching of the diving bell was impossible. Not to be thought of. They’d have to postpone it.

In mid-December the Santa Ana winds began to blow again, the weather hotted up, and the sea calmed. Anticipating a three-day blow, Uncle Edward and Professor Latzarel decided to wait another few days to launch the diving bell, until Saturday, perhaps. If the wind lasted longer they’d launch on Sunday.

Early Thursday afternoon, Giles, Jim, and Oscar Pallcheck walked along Colorado Boulevard in the wind. An occasional tumbleweed, loosed from the foothills or from some vacant lot, came rolling across the road, mashing its way under the bumper of a moving car and disintegrating in a scattering of twigs. The air smelled hot and dry, like wind that had blown across a rocky desert floor. If it were three months earlier, the charged air and the blowing dust would have been a distraction, an irritation, but in early December the wind was an Indian summer, blown in late at night from the east, almost a holiday.

Gill and Jim were set on finding Christmas gifts. It was a perfect excuse to rout through the old bookstores and junky
curiosity shops that fronted Colorado. Oscar hadn’t, it seemed, any concern for Christmas, or for bookstores or junk no matter how curious. He laughed into obscurity a series of stuffed salamanders that Jim considered buying for Uncle Edward. There were a dozen of the things pinned to a board and labeled. Aside from a couple of missing feet and a ball of wadding shoving through the ruined eye of a spotted newt, the collection was in tiptop shape. Oscar became fascinated with an unidentifiable metal contraption hung with flexible tubing that he insisted was a nasal irrigator. Then he insisted that a cream pitcher—a ceramic duck through whose beak would pour a river of milk—was also a nasal irrigator. Jim’s salamanders became nasal irrigators themselves very quickly, as did the owner of the shop, a pinched little man with two enormous hearing aids and assorted missing teeth, who not only wouldn’t sell the salamanders to Jim at any price, but who chased the three of them back out into the wind, shouting a final curse as Oscar performed what was meant to be a ridiculing dance on the sidewalk in front of the shop.

The incident primed Oscar up fairly thoroughly, and he announced that they’d spend the afternoon “playing for points,” a pastime in which one of them would challenge another to commit an act of daring in return for a specified number of points. It was a game that Oscar invariably won, unshackled as he was by any sense of morality or guilt:

‘He insisted that his performance at the curiosity shop was worth three points for openers, and neither Gill nor Jim complained. Jim netted two for himself by sliding in through the open door of the K-Y Pool Hall and shouting “Rack ‘em up” in an embarrassed voice before ducking back out onto the sidewalk. Oscar offered six points to Giles to simply walk into the Eagle Rock Public Library and flare his nostrils, very calmly and deliberately, for the space of a full minute in front of Mr. Robb, the feared and glowering reference librarian. He and Jim would keep time on the big wall clock over Mr. Robb’s head. Giles refused and wouldn’t be bullied into it. He earned a grudging point, however, by agreeing to buy Oscar a boysenberry milkshake at Pete’s Blue Chip hamburger stand, and it was then, as the three of them angled across the parking lot of a van and storage yard, that Jim became aware of the desultory jingling of a bell somewhere out on the boulevard.

John Pinion’s truck slowly turned the corner and hove to at
the curb. Giles was impassive. Jim knew that whatever transpired, he wouldn’t leave Giles alone with Pinion—not this time; not if he could help it. Oscar assumed Pinion to be an authentic ice cream man as he climbed down out of the cab, and saw in Pinion’s pink face a naivete he could play on like a fiddle.

Chewing a monumental wad of gum, Oscar accosted Pinion with something that sounded like, “Watchasay?” Pinion laughed and smiled in a fatherly way, shoving out his ubiquitous hand. Oscar reached for it, then snatched his own away an instant before making contact. “I don’t connect with sewer pipes,” he announced, breaking into immediate laughter and winking at Jim, who hastened to wink back. Giles was silent. Pinion laughed to show he could take a joke. “Call that a shirt?” asked Oscar, nodding his head toward Pinion’s ice cream outfit.

Pinion couldn’t respond. He smiled more broadly and decided to take the offensive—an unfortunate decision, as it turned out. He sucked in his stomach, shoving vital organs and fat up toward his chest—to show fads physique off to better advantage perhaps—and affected an informal tone, entirely unlike his usual mock-English performance, no doubt supposing that Oscar would find him a sort of kindred spirit.

“How old do you think I am?” he asked, winking at Giles and Jim. “Come on now, an honest guess. What do you say, forty?”

He was nearer sixty; anyone could see that. But he astounded Jim by bending forward and launching himself into a spectacular handstand. Odd change and a penknife clattered out of his pockets onto the sidewalk. Jim could see, across the street, a line of half a dozen faces watching Pinion’s antics from within Pete’s Blue Chip.

Pinion stood just so for the space of thirty long seconds before reversing the process and leaping upright. His pink face had gone scarlet, and he puffed like a steam engine. Jim was struck with the uncanny certainty that the lot of them were being inescapably drawn into some criminal lunacy. Pinion plucked his knife from the sidewalk but let the scattered change lie. He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.

“Well what do you say,” he asked Oscar. “Have you ever seen anyone as fit as me? No you haven’t. I’m a polar explorer.
The
polar explorer. That’s who I am.”

Oscar leered at Jim, determined not to let Pinion out-wink him. He spat the great gob of wrinkled gum into the street and said, “What do you figure, boys, ninety or a hunnerd?” Oscar winked again at Jim to alert him that the situation was under control. With a growing sense of dread, Jim did his best to be in on the gag. He winked back. Pinion seemed to be fueled by the winks.

“Well, a hundred is it?” He began bouncing and jabbing out into the air as if punching phantoms. “Son,” he said impressively, puffing away there for Oscar’s benefit, “I was the champ of Arkansas. I used to fight ‘em all. It didn’t matter who they were.” He jabbed and ducked and feinted his way through the lie. Jim, anyway, was certain it was a lie. He’d never heard anything about Pinion’s being a boxer, even in his youth. He determined that it was simply Pinion’s monumental ego that wouldn’t allow him to be bested in an exchange with Oscar. He was using psychology, no doubt—appealing to Oscar’s obvious sense of brutality.

Oscar, in fine form, bounced once or twice in the style of the Champ of Arkansas, throwing an imaginary windmill punch and eyeballing Gill and Jim. It was just the sort of thing Oscar lived for and that Jim feared. Gill, Jim could see, was fading.

Pinion pressed the issue. “Ever hear of O’Riley the Irish Miller?”

“Sure,” Oscar lied, “who hasn’t?”

“Well it was me who taught him to fight. I was in the gym every day, over in east L.A. O’Riley went on to whip Stud Pritchard at the Olympic. Took him apart. I was in O’Riley’s corner, and it was just like I taught him. For three rounds it was
_N
a little of this …” and Pinion threw three quick left jabs.

“And a little of this …” Pinion whirled his right around in a tight hook.

“And one of these,” said Oscar, hopping backward ridiculously on one foot and screwing up his face into an appropriate grimace.

“Then late in the third,” said Pinion, undaunted by Oscar’s performance, “Pritchard made what we fighters call the ‘fatal pause.’”

“Sure he did,” said Oscar, mimicking what seemed to him to constitute the fatal pause.

“And I jumped up and yelled, ‘Cut loose, Miller!’ and O’Riley cut loose!”

At the utterance of this revelation, Oscar could contain himself no longer, and he erupted in a wild howl of laughter, the term “cut loose” having certain slang connotations that Pinion didn’t intend. Oscar immediately acted out Stud Pritchard’s horror at Irish O’Riley’s cutting loose, and then went on to act out the cutting loose process itself with such grim majesty that Jim burst into uncontrollable laughter. Pinion wasn’t half so impressed.

He stepped back a pace, stiffened up as rigid as he could manage, and tapped himself on the stomach. “Punch me,” he gasped, squinting at Oscar. “Right there. Hard as nails.” And he thumped his stomach again, ready to weather the punch of O’Riley the swinging Irish Miller.

Oscar huffed himself up and let fly at Pinion’s abdomen, to the horror of both Jim and Gill. Pinion deflated like a sprung balloon. There was a shout from the direction of Pete’s Blue Chip. Pinion doubled over and whistled into the dirt, his lips turning a sudden shade of pale blue and his eyes rolling up into his head.

For the space of three seconds Jim stood transfixed with honor, but when Oscar, screaming with laughter, broke and ran down Hubbard Road, Jim snatched Giles’ arm and dragged him along in Oscar’s wake. Gill watched over his shoulder for some sign that Pinion wasn’t, as both of them feared, dead. When a half dozen cheeseburger-clutching bystanders emptied out of Pete’s into the street, Giles forgot about Pinion and ran along at Jim’s heels, both of them cutting away down the first available alley, losing Oscar in the process and leaping out onto Stickley Street where they forced themselves to slow up and walk along at a disinterested pace until they reached the safe port of Jim’s house. There they found Uncle Edward, Professor Latzarel, and Roycroft Squires messing with an unlikely looking diving bell perched on the back of a flatbed truck. Jim sailed past as if it weren’t there, still half expecting a mob, perhaps waving hayforks and lit torches, to round the corner with a shout. He worked at convincing himself that he and Gill had merely been bystanders and were in no way responsible for the crippling of Pinion. But then he pictured himself laughing aloud and cheering Oscar on an instant before Pinion’s collapse. They’d find him as guilty as Oscar. Giles they wouldn’t touch. Pinion, after all, wouldn’t press charges—not against Gill. He’d be full of fatherly concern—if
he was still alive. But he’d chase Jim and Oscar down. There was no doubt about that. Pinion was vicious and obviously jealous of Professor Latzarel and Uncle Edward.