Mildred Pierced (4 page)

“I’m interested in the Survivors for the Future,” I said. “I’m looking for Lawrence Timerjack.”

“You just found him,” he said. “You interested in joining us?”

“Might be.”

“Mind showing me your wallet?”

I took out my wallet and handed it to him.

He flipped it open, looked at it with one eye, then back at me. The woman and boy and the other man hadn’t stopped staring at me expressionlessly.

“Private investigator,” he said.

“We like to survive, too.”

“We’re not a joke, Mr. Peters,” said Timerjack.

“Okay,” I said. “One of your members was arrested yesterday for murdering his wife with a crossbow. He said he learned how to shoot it from you.”

“Pigeon Minck,” Timerjack said.

He pronounced it “Pidg-ion.”

“He called me a little while ago,” Timerjack went on. “From the jail. Said you might be coming to see me. You carrying a weapon?”

“No,” I said.

“You should. Come in.”

He nodded. The boy and the woman lifted the log and pulled it toward them so I could enter. Then they put it back.

“Come,” said Timerjack.

I followed him to the center cabin with the boy, the woman, and the other man behind me. With gravel crunching under our feet, we passed a green Ford sedan with dark windows. No one spoke till we got inside and the door was closed.

The room we were in was large. A desk with a blackboard behind it stood facing us across the room. A dozen metal folding chairs in two rows added to the schoolroom look. Detracting from it, however, was the array of weapons hung on hooks around the walls. There was a painting of an archer in green with a little green pointed cap. He had his bow pulled back and he was aiming at a boy with an apple on his head.

“William Tell,” said Timerjack, moving to the desk and putting his bow and quiver on it. He had followed my gaze. “One of our patron saints.”

The painting looked as if it had been copied from a poorly drawn comic book.

“Legend has it that after Tell shot the apple from his son’s head, he went into the woods and defended himself from all attempts to capture him,” said Timerjack, moving behind the desk and sitting.

I sensed the boy and woman behind me.

“What about the painting next to it?”

That one was of a man in a tan leather jacket and pants. He had an old rifle on his shoulder aimed at war-painted Indians running toward him. Their tomahawks were raised.

“The Deerslayer,” Timerjack explained. “The ultimate Survivor.”

“Impressive,” I said.

“No, you are not impressed,” Timerjack said. “But I’m not trying to impress you. If you had been trying to assassinate me or attack our compound, you would have been dead before your gun came out.”

Timerjack nodded his head, and I heard a shuffling at my sides. As I turned, the boy whipped a thin bamboo tube from his pocket and the woman was pulling her knife from its sheath. The man with the shoulder holster and gun just stood there with his arms folded and smiled.

There was a whoosh of air as the knife shot past me and a thin shaft of wood or metal flew out of the tube the boy was holding up to his mouth.

The knife thudded into the William Tell painting, and so did the missile from the blowgun.

“Now are you impressed?” asked Timerjack, looking at me with one eye and at nothing with the other one.

“She killed William Tell’s kid,” I said. “So did he.”

Timerjack smiled. It was a loony smile.

“That’s what they were supposed to do, Mr. Peters.”

“Now you’ve got holes in your painting,” I said, as the woman went to retrieve her knife. The boy stayed behind me.

“We have others.” Timerjack sat back and fished in his desk drawer.

He came up with a pipe and motioned for me to sit in one of the folding chairs. I had the feeling I was going to get lesson number one. The woman had a little trouble digging the knife from the wall, but she managed and gave me a less-than-friendly look as she returned to her spot behind me. I moved to the front row and sat. Timerjack nodded his approval.

I raised my hand.

“Yes?” asked Timerjack.

“May I go to the washroom?”

“Right through that door.” He pointed toward a door to his right, but looked somewhere behind me. I didn’t move.

“Forget it,” I said. “It just seemed like the right thing to say to the teacher.”

“Are you like this all the time?” Timerjack asked.

“Only when someone feeds me a good setup for a punch line. I do have some questions, a few of them about Sheldon Minck.”

Timerjack puffed and nodded his head knowingly.

“Pigeon Minck has been with us five—”

“Six,” the woman behind me corrected.

“Yes,” Timerjack agreed with a smile. “Thank you, Martha. Six weeks. I’d say he’s making slow progress in his skills, but we have no intention of giving up on him. He is a difficult project. We like the challenge.”

“Progress in what?” I asked.

“Survival in the wild, in dark alleys, making and using weapons, blowguns, knives, clubs, spears, bows and arrows, crossbows and bolts, slings. We don’t believe in guns.”

“They exist,” I said, looking pointedly over my shoulder at the craggy-faced man with the gun and holster.

“If other people make them.” Timerjack ignored my look. “They need bullets made by other people, parts made by other people. When the time comes, we will be able to slip into the woods here or anywhere and survive. Of course, in these times, we make exceptions.”

Now it was his turn to look at the man with the gun. “You mean Pathfinder Anthony. Even Natty Bumppo was forced to use a gun,” he added.

I ignored the inconsistency and raised my hand again.

“You don’t have to keep raising your hand.” Timerjack was irritated.

“How many of you are there?” I asked.

“That is restricted information. We don’t want our enemies to know our numbers.”

From the size of the compound and the number of folding chairs, I guessed we were talking about twelve or fifteen.

“Your enemies?”

“And yours, too.” He pointed the stem of his pipe at me. “The government, foreign powers. Indians. We live on a ridge along the Slough of Despond in the Valley of Despair.”

“Indians?”

“They’ve been secretly conspiring for nearly a century to take back the land,” Timerjack said. “Like Magua and the Hurons, they’ll coordinate their move at night taking out the president, the cabinet, Congress, the governors, and generals. They’re already in place.”

“I didn’t know there were that many Indians left,” I said.

Timerjack smiled knowingly.

“We’ll thwart them,” he said. “When we have enough people, we’ll thwart them; but just in case, we must learn to survive.”

“The next Indian attack?”

“The next effort to destroy our resistance, to enslave us. It could come from almost anywhere.”

I could have said, “You’re nuts,” and added, “Good-bye and keep your arrows sharp,” but I had a mission.

“Maybe you’ve got a point,” I said.

“You don’t believe that,” he countered. “I’ve gotten where I am because I can read people.”

Where he was, as far as I could see, was three log cabins, some homemade weapons, a gun or two and about a dozen people wanting to buy into a religion of survival.

“What about Jews?” I asked. “Negroes?”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand. The Jews are too smart to want to take over. There aren’t enough of them, and they’re doing fine the way they are. Hitler’s an idiot, a con man. While he’s been busy killing harmless Jews, the British, Russians, and Americans have been killing Nazis. Negroes don’t have the capacity to constitute a threat. They don’t have the will, with a few exceptions. Negroes are nothing to be afraid of. Waste of effort. They just let out two more of those Scottsboro Boys after thirteen years. Two more of them are still in jail. They didn’t do it. Pigeon Minck is a Jew. Pathfinder Jackson is a Negro. We have no prejudices here. We are all human beings determined to survive.”

“Pathfinder?” I asked.

“Our levels,” said Timerjack. “Pathfinder Lewis will explain.”

This time the pipe stem pointed over my right shoulder and I turned as the baby-faced boy said, “Pigeon. Bumppo. Pathfinder. Deerslayer.”

Timerjack gave a smile of approval. It was pretty much what Shelly had told me. The boy smiled back and looked at me. It was the look and smile of someone Mrs. Plaut would call “simple of mind.”

“You beginning to understand?”

I was beginning to understand that he was a loony and belonged in a loony bin, but I had a dentist to try to save.

“How good is Shelly with a crossbow?” I asked.

“Pigeon Minck is improving by the week.” Timerjack examined the bowl of his pipe.

“Improving?”

“When he started, he couldn’t hit the broad side of a large barn. Now he can. I’m not talking figuratively here. I’m talking about an abandoned farm through the woods over there.”

He pointed to his right, looked that way with his right eye and at me with his left.

“So, what would be his chances of hitting a person about twenty yards away from him?”

“Given amazing luck or lots of tries, it would be within the realm of possibility.”

“You willing to say that to the police?”

“I don’t talk to the police. They come for me, and I go to the woods. I’m ready.”

“But not to save Pigeon Minck?” I asked.

“I’ll take it up with … I’ll think about it. Pigeon Minck took the oath. He knows that the survival of the individuals in our group takes precedence over the survival of a prisoner of war.”

“Who taught him how to use the crossbow?” I asked.

“I did, and Deerslayer Helter,” he said, pointing this time at the woman.

I turned to her. She didn’t look at me.

“Deerslayer Helter used to be a Catholic nun,” Timerjack said.

“Mind if I ask Pathfinder Helter a few questions?”

“No,” said Timerjack, “but don’t expect any answers. She’s taken a vow of silence in penance for a violation.”

I was going to ask what the violation had been, but decided it might take me down a path with a pathfinder that I did not want to follow.

“Other people here have crossbows?” I asked.

“We all do,” Timerjack said. “We all learn to use whatever weapons we might be called upon to take up.”

He stood up suddenly, emptied the tobacco from his pipe into an ashtray, pocketed the pipe, and announced, “Four o’clock. Judo in Fortress One. Care to join us, Mr. Peters?”

“I’ll watch.”

“No,” he said. “Our lessons are open only to members. I want to know if you want to join us, become a Pigeon, and learn to be a survivor. Special rates this month. Three hundred dollars to register. Eighty-five a month after that.”

“I can’t afford to survive.” I stood up.

“We can work out a payment plan,” he said, coming around the desk and handing me a pamphlet with a rough green paper cover.

“No, thanks.” I pocketed the pamphlet.

“Didn’t think so,” he said with a sigh, picking up his bow and arrow. “But remember where we are and pray that you have enough warning to get to us when you realize that the enemy is in the streets. You forgot something.”

“What?”

“Twenty-five cents for the pamphlet.”

I dug out a quarter and handed it to him. He grinned.

“There’s hope for you yet,” he said. “You’ve just taken the first small step. It starts with curiosity and ends with commitment.”

Pathfinder Helter held the door open for me, and I went out of the house of the mad tea party into the sunlight. The quartet ushered me up to the gate and watched as I got into the Crosley.

“I’ll call before I come next time,” I said through the open window.

“We don’t have a phone,” Timerjack said.

“Of course,” I said and drove away, not looking back at them.

D
ANGEROUS THOUGH THE
journey was through streets that might suddenly be filled with war-painted, hatchet-wielding Hurons, I decided to go to my office to read the pamphlet. I also wanted to do some checking on Timerjack and talk to our receptionist, Violet Gonsenelli.

The trip was also dangerous because I had to get up to my office on the sixth floor of the Farraday Building without being drawn into Manny’s Tacos on the corner, get through the lobby to the elevator or stairs without running into my landlord, Jeremy Butler and, most important, avoid an encounter with Juanita the Seer from New York City.

Parking was easy. A spot was open on Hoover, a few doors down from the building entrance. It was too small a spot for anything but a Crosley.

Traffic wasn’t bad for a weekday afternoon, partly because of the gas shortage.

It took me about ten seconds to fail to get past the first obstacle in my path to my office.

I was hungry. I smelled tacos. Through the window of Manny’s, I saw a businessman in a neat suit with a briefcase on the counter eating a taco special. I went in. The businessman was the only customer. The businessman ate solemnly, taking small businesslike bites.

Manny stood behind the counter, his potbelly covered by a white apron. Manny was smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. His son was fighting Nazis somewhere in Europe, and Manny had become an expert on the war thanks to the
L.A. Times
and the radio updates by Drew Pearson, William Shirer, and H. V. Kaltenborn.

The radio was on, a swing version of “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?”

I sat a few stools down from the businessman, and Manny looked over his newspaper at me.

“Two and a Pepsi,” I said.

“Right,” Manny answered, folding the newspaper and putting it neatly down on the counter.

“Big battle in the Pacific,” he said from the grill. “Seventeen Jap planes, two freighters, one cruiser blown to hell.”

“We lose any?” I asked.

“Four planes. Boyington’s missing.”

Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington was the 31-year-old ace credited with shooting down twenty-six Japanese planes. The young man from Okanogan, Washington, headed the Black Sheep Squadron. His twenty-six enemy planes tied him with Major Joe Foss and World War One’s Captain Eddie Rickenbacker.