Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (31 page)

“You were in Vietnam?” Paul felt the blood draining from his face.

“No,” Colonel said, narrowing his eyes, “but I served
during
Vietnam.”

“As a pastry chef?” I’d be handling this better, Paul thought, if I were sober.

“An army travels on its stomach, Paul.” Colonel didn’t seem fazed in the slightest. “It’s an underrepresented topic in the canon of military literature.”

“You’re not a real colonel, are you?” Paul heard himself ask.

Colonel dipped his head and smiled grimly at the floor. “I was—I am—Master Sergeant Colonel Travis Pentoon, United States Army, retired.” He lifted his gaze to Paul. “I say that with real pride, Professor. The heart of any army is its noncommissioned officers. It was the color sergeant who built the British Empire, not Lord Kitchener. The Roman Empire stood on the back of the centurion.”

“I didn’t mean to imply—”

“No apology necessary!” Colonel lifted his palm. “It’s an obvious question. But they also serve who only stand and bake.” He laid his hand gently on the middle stack of the three. “That’s what this is all about.”

Paul sagged back in his seat. Seriously, he prayed, to Whoever might be listening, kill me now. Please.

“Now I can see by your eyes, Paul, that you’re eager to dive into this manuscript.” Colonel leaned forward in his creaking chair and folded his hands between his knees, his Hawaiian shirt billowing over his thighs. “But you’re not ready for what’s in here yet. There’ll come a time when you are, but not yet, son, not yet. And anyway,” Colonel continued, “I mention my magnum opus only as a means to an end.”

“Sorry?” said Paul.

“Now Bob and J.J., they’re good old boys, and I absolutely trust them with my life. As they do me.” Colonel looked up at Paul from under his bushy eyebrows. “But I think of myself not just as a proud master sergeant, not just as the best goddamn baker on the Pacific Rim, but as a warrior-philosopher, Paul, in the great tradition of the samurai, or the magnificent Prussian soldiers of Bismarck’s army.” He leaned a little closer. “And what I’m hoping to bring into our brave little company is someone who is closer to my intellectual equal, my
peer
, as it were. Someone with a sophisticated appreciation of the higher things in life.”

Don’t say it, thought Paul.

“We’re exactly the same, you and I,” said Colonel.

Oh boy, thought Paul.

Colonel lifted a finger. “Don’t say anything. Just listen.” He lowered his voice. “I know you’re not where you want to be. You didn’t set out all those years ago in graduate school to be writing technical documents for the Texas Department of General Services. But what if I told you, Paul,” he continued, inching his chair closer, “what if I told you I could guarantee you lifetime employment? And not just lifetime employment, Paul, but a job that left you free to pursue almost anything you wanted to do?”

The room was very quiet, though Paul heard laughter and music from the other side of the door. He lifted his drink, but the glass was dry.

Colonel waved his hand over the three heaps of epic poem.
“When do you think I wrote this, Paul? In my free time?” He grunted with laughter, his eyes bright. “Not bloody likely.”

Paul could scarcely breathe. Colonel had literally backed him into a corner of his cramped little office. Paul couldn’t stand without pushing Colonel out of the way, and he couldn’t even lean back any farther in the chair.

“You gonna let life, that bitch, grind you down, Paul? You gonna stay whipped for the rest of your days?” Colonel’s eyes burned. “Are we not men?”

Someone rapped loudly on the door of the office, and Paul hiccupped in surprise. Colonel rolled back in his chair. He closed his eyes, drew a breath, and mastered himself. Then he laid his arm casually along the desk, lifted his chin, and raised his voice. “Come in.”

The door swung open, letting in a puff of air-conditioning from the rec room. Bob Wier stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the light from the far end of the room. He glanced from Paul to Colonel.

“He’s here,” Bob Wier said.

W
ITH HIS ARM AROUND PAUL
, Colonel guided him back through the rec room and through the sliding-glass door, into the sticky Texas night. Without releasing Paul, Colonel paused and sent Bob Wier back inside.

“Wake him up.” Colonel nodded in the direction of J.J., comatose in the La-Z-Boy. As Bob Wier slid the door shut, Paul saw, as if through the bright gate of suburban Valhalla, Yasumi and Callie behind the karaoke console on the platform selecting songs from the computer monitor; they had put their arms around each other’s shoulders and were giggling like sorority sisters. A bored Olivia inched along the wall, surveying the movie posters. Bob Wier tugged at J.J.’s wrist, trying to pull him up out of the recliner. Then Paul was wheeled away in Colonel’s iron grasp.

“This way, Professor,” said Colonel. “Come meet our special guest.”

Paul, still clutching his empty glass, stumbled down the slope, ducking at the last instant the glowing ball of a paper
lantern. For a moment he couldn’t see in the dark beyond the lantern, and he was dizzied by the screech of the crickets and the doppler whine of mosquitoes. Colonel released him, and Paul wobbled on his heels.

“Mighty good to see you again, Professor,” said a hollow voice out of the humid, high-pitched gloom. Colonel nudged Paul farther down the lawn, where it descended into a dry creek bed thickly bordered by juniper and bristling mesquite. Stanley Tulendij glided out of the dark, his pale face appearing at the farthest reach of the lantern light. He was wearing the same slacks and sport coat Paul had seen him in last week in Rick’s office, and he spidered up the slope on his long legs. “I hear you’re ready to join our merry crew.” He offered his bony hand to Paul. His eyes sparkled in the dark.

“What merry crew?” asked Paul warily.

Stanley Tulendij took Paul’s hand in his loose, cool grip. “I think we have some friends in common.” He tugged Paul by the hand down the slope. Paul staggered, and Colonel took the glass out of his hand and hauled him upright by the elbow.

“This is an important moment in your life, Paul,” he growled. “Pay attention.”

With Colonel on his left and Stanley Tulendij on his right, Paul peered into the gloom at the foot of the slope. At first he saw only the spiky silhouette of the mesquite against the pale limestone of the creek bed, but after a moment he became aware of a pair of pale eyes peering at him over the top of a bush. Then he saw another pair, peering through the thorny branches, and another, then four, five, as many as six pale faces with buzz cuts peering over or through the bushes from the dry creek bed. They shifted as Paul watched, moving around and behind each other, floating like balloons or dropping out of sight to reappear a few feet farther along or out of the shadow under a bush down near the ground.

Oh brother, thought Paul. I’m so fucking drunk.

Each pale face watched Paul with eyes that did not catch the light of the lanterns but seemed to glow from within like an animal’s eyes. The figures weren’t speaking in unison, but each
murmured to himself, like the pale men in his dream that very morning. Paul could not quite make out the words, but he didn’t need to. He knew what they were saying.

Please tell me I’m drunk, he thought. Please tell me I’m not really seeing this. He staggered back from the faces, digging at the grass with his heels, trying to push himself up the slope. But Stanley Tulendij and Colonel each tightened his grip on Paul, holding him in place.

“No no no no no,” breathed Stanley Tulendij. “There’s no need to be afraid. These benighted souls are my brothers, Paul.”

“Your brothers,” said Colonel in Paul’s ear.

“Our
brothers,” said the two men together.

There’s no one there, Paul told himself. I’m not really here.

“Sacked by the state of Texas, forgotten by their families.” Stanley Tulendij’s breath on Paul’s cheek smelled faintly of rot. “And cursed, Paul, yea,
cursed
, even unto darkness by the Almighty God himself.” His long, bony fingers seemed to curl all the way around Paul’s arm. “Who tried to drown them all at once, like a sack of puppies, washing them away into the long, cold darkness under Lonesome Knob, where they tumbled and rolled, and they rolled and tumbled—”

“Is he here?” said J.J. loudly, thumping down the slope from the house.

“Shh!” hissed Colonel.

“He’s getting the story,” whispered Bob Wier, padding silently behind J.J.

“—until they washed up deep, deep in the caves under the streets of Lamar,” continued Stanley Tulendij, “where I found them at last, after long tribulation, huddled together, in their final extremity, living off the very vermin of the caves.”

“Eating rats,” said Colonel.

“Spiders,” said Bob Wier.

“Centipedes,” said J.J.

Why can’t I see pink elephants, thought Paul, like everybody else?

“Lost men,” continued Stanley Tulendij in Paul’s ear, “broken men, shattered men,
hopeless
men. Drooling, gibbering,
bloodless wraiths, reduced to the state of animals. They were beyond reason when I found them, Paul, driven mad by their humiliation and their nearly deadly ordeal. I offered to lead them back up into the light again, but they wouldn’t come. They wouldn’t come.”

The pale, shifting faces in the creek bed seemed to have multiplied by mitosis, doubling every few seconds, jostling each other behind the mesquite. “Are we not men?” they muttered, though Paul told himself he wasn’t
hearing
them; it was the whisky talking, chanting inside his head,
“Are we not men? Are we not men?”

“I could not lead them home,” said Stanley Tulendij, trembling with emotion, “but I could not abandon them.”

“Why not?” chorused Colonel, J.J., and Bob Wier.

“Because they were men!” exclaimed Stanley Tulendij.

Honest to God, Paul thought, I’m never drinking Glenlivet again.

“But what could I bring them from the world above that had thrown them away and forgotten them?” Stanley Tulendij went on. “What does a lost man want more than he wants food or shelter or woman?”

Dream or not, Paul thought, here’s hoping the answer isn’t “tech writers” or “failed English professors.”

“Work,” said Stanley Tulendij tremulously. “A place in the world. A reason to live.” He squeezed Paul’s hand to the point of pain. “And what do they offer their comrades in the world above?”

“Freedom,” breathed Colonel.

“Amen,” said Bob Wier.

“Fuckin’ A,” said J.J.

The other men were all crowded around Paul now, looming at him in the lantern light. Okay, Paul told himself, if I’m dreaming the figures in the creek bed, then I’m dreaming these guys, too.

“Have you ever read the story,” asked Bob Wier urgently, “of the shoemaker and the elves?”

“It’s a pretty sweet deal,” said J.J.

“It’s a dialectic, Paul,” said Colonel, the warrior-philosopher. “They do all the work, and we get all the credit.”

“I’m dreaming, right?” said Paul aloud. He looked at his feet, hoping to see himself floating half a foot off the ground.

“It’s a kind of a dream,” said Colonel, “a dream come true.”

“Okay.” Paul sagged a bit in the grip of Colonel and Stanley Tulendij. “I’ll play along. For the sake of argument, let’s say this is really happening.”

The other men laughed. “Really happening,” said Colonel. “That’s rich.”

“Typical,” said J.J. bitterly.

“They do your work for you,” Paul said, nodding down the slope into the dark. He thought of what Nolene had told him last week about Colonel, J.J., and Bob Wier—“They don’t do a lick of work,
ever”
she’d said, “but every morning the work they’re not doing shows up on my desk.” The pale faces below seemed to bubble a little higher; the murmur rose to a rumble. “But what do
they
get out of it?” Paul said.

The four men crowded around Paul exchanged a glance.

“We offer them something from time to time,” said Colonel.

“Like a sacrifice,” said J.J. “Kind of.”

“ ‘The fire and wood are here,’ ” Bob Wier said with a catch in his throat, “ ‘but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ Genesis twenty-two, seven.”

Colonel shouldered Bob Wier aside. “Don’t listen to him,” he murmured, his breath hot in Paul’s ear.

“Okay,” said J.J., “ ‘sacrifice’ is maybe too strong a word.”

“It’s something you’ll never miss,” said Stanley Tulendij, and he swung Paul around and started to walk him back up the slope towards the bright rectangle of the sliding door. “Not really.”

Paul surprised himself by resisting a bit; he tried to twist out of the grasp of the men on either side, tried to crane over his shoulder to see into the creek bed at the bottom of the slope. All he saw was Bob Wier gnawing on his knuckle, his eyes brimming with tears in the lantern light. Then the grip on each of Paul’s arms tightened, and they marched him towards the house.

“So are you in, Professor?” said Colonel, digging his blunt fingers into Paul’s elbow.

“You’re either with us or agin’ us, Paul,” said Stanley Tulendij, tightening his grip.

“The line forms on the right, babe,” J.J. said.

Paul gave up struggling and let them carry him back towards the house. Fuck it, he thought, it’s all a dream anyway. Behind him, the murmur of the pale figures in the creek bed faded into the electric burr of the crickets. From the house came the jolly thump of a galloping bass line, and through the door they could see Callie and Yasumi dancing together on the platform, swinging their hips and singing along with the Bananarama version of “Venus,” more or less in harmony.

“ ‘She’s got it,” they sang,
swing, swing, swing
, “ ‘yeah, baby, she’s got it . . .’ ”

The giant TV screen pulsed with parti-colored light like a sixties discotheque, and vivid greens and blues and reds washed over the faces of the five men just beyond the glass.

“ ‘I’m your Venus,’ ” sang Callie, “ ‘I’m your fi-yuh, at your de-zi-yuh.’ ”

Stanley Tulendij’s eyes widened, and he relaxed his grip on Paul’s hand.