Merryweather Unleashed, Part II

But soon enough, as the very first needle rays of sunlight shone through the dark branches of the skeletal trees that fended the parking lot from the park, Andreas Stackenwalter saw come forth from the gates of the wildlife refuge a bizarre trio of beings, maybe the last of the nocturnal creatures caught on the Tlasiwapsit't Wildlife webcam.  (5 new subscribers daily, on average.)

Striding into the parking lot came a stirringly upright, tall, and well-groomed male figure who looked neither to the left nor to the right, a figure of frost, not merely because the pale rising sun made a halo about his head (defended against the biting morning chill by a muffed cap) but because he wore an immaculate lab coat, glittering with frost like diamond dust over we hope something warmer.  His hands, however, were fat with gloves and about his neck hung like the head of an enemy a strange horny black device.  Flanking this fellow loped a pair of copper-colored mastiffs panting clouds of frozen breath, their drool all-but phosphorescent in the Nordic dawn and freezing into blunt icicles as they stomped along.


The threesome stopped a few feet from Herr Stackenwalter.  The newborn sun shone on the newcomer's round, owl-eye glasses and showing up the red of his faultlessly trimmed beard and mustache.


Andreas took a hand from a glove and offered it the stranger.  "Phineas," he grunted.

"Herr Trainer," Phineas said, his greeting hidden in a white cloud of sub-freezing breath, and shook the extended hand.


"Und how is your iron cross?" asked the older man.


"Es läuft gut," said Phineas, exercising his Plattdeutsch.

"Gut," answered Andreas and rubbed the head of one of the unneutered behemoths.  "Which one is this one?  I always am forgetting."

"Sangreal."


The German nodded at the other one.

"Siege Perilous, since none may sit on him."



(Herr Stackenwalter, although a true knight, was never trained in the classics, and should be forgiven for not catching the Arthurian references, but Phineas--or Dr. Phineas Fairfax to the cognoscenti--had yet to find college graduates of French, English, and Celtic descent who appreciated the beasts' names, either.)  Sangreal gave a communicative shake of his enormous noggin and sent balls of freezing drool flying. 

The niceties at an end, Stackenwalter asked, "You saw him?"

"One of them," Phineas said and rested a hand on the night-vision goggles about his neck.

"Greek manufacturing?"

"German," he said, finding a chance to impress the old man again. "The Polyphemus Monocular."  (Indeed the device possessed a single eye.)  "Sicht mit Night Vision Technologie."

Andreas grunted again, grimly happy to hear a normal language, if only in an advertising slogan.  "Und what did you see in the forest?"

"He had something, but what, I couldn't tell."

"The dogs, they did not attack?"

"Yes.  And he ran.  But I saw enough.  He knows that someone's on to him."

"Someone.  Let him think 'someone.' Well, this is good enough.  Now to home and the kitchen.  We must be thankful.  You brought it?"

Phineas nodded and strode on to the far end of the parking, Sangreal and Siege Perilous tramping along in his wake.  The trio arrived at an ancient SUV, black, nondescript and faceless, and all-but camouflaged before the leafless thickets of red-hipped wild roses.  Here Phineas opened the back hatch for the beasts which put up a rather pathetic fight against gravity, then crawled within.  Phineas himself was making a search through a cooler and soon was bringing Andreas an insulated bundle.

"They uncovered it outside Irkutsk where they were putting in a luxury condo village."

"Oligarchs..." Andreas muttered, but taking the bundle added, "Sehr gut.  Danke," He gave Phineas another quick shake of the hand and turned back for his own car.

But then a new vehicle entered the lot: a pistachio green van blazoned in mulberry purple Doogle's Doodles.  "Speak of the devil," said Andreas. 

 "Time to go," whispered Phineas.

"Ja," said Andreas.  "He will not come out until we go.  But the other one has told him of our hunt." The old man said, a smile of appreciation thawing as the sun rose another micron, "Danke, Phineas," and patted the bundle again.

Andreas went to his little kingfisher blue speedster.  Once within he found that his own beasts only wanted to get within the bundle, Olga and Una scenting no doubt ancient smells, smells lingering in their minds from their ancestors hunting across the steppes of prehistoric Asia.  But the old German gave a "Nein," drove forth from the Tlasiwapsit't Wildlife Refuge, and made for home and kitchen, even as he eyed the parking lot through the side mirror.  The devil was there, in a chariot of pistachio green.

But he would forget for today, the American Thanksgiving.  He must bring the bundle home to start the marinade for the horly de filets de rhinocéros laineux (known on the streets as fried woolly rhinoceros steaks).  (The h was silent, just like the 't in Tlasiwapsit't.  Herr Stackenwalter knew that undisciplined moderns spelled it orly de &c., but on his kitchen shelf sat a luxury reprint of Le Cuisinier parisien, Deuxième édition, revue, corrigée et augmentée.  If orly was good enough for Carême, it was good enough for Andreas Stackenwalter.)  He would be serving his woolly rhinoceros with steamed potatoes with quail gravy, corn, squash, and a pumpkin-cranberry mousse.  Ja, it would be a good dinner.

Through the bright canopy of a fall-time walnut tree, its leaves Robert Frost yellow, the October sun shone in glints and glances upon an impromptu memorial service that dear old Connie had thrown together for Ms. Marjorie Mayfield, whom no one had seen in about a month.  The muted light was probably for the best, since one might misinterpret someone squinting in the bright sun as being in the first stage of weeping, and really, no one liked Marjorie Mayfield very much.  Wherever she was, dead or alive, the unspoken consensus seemed to be that she had better just stay there.

Dear old Connie had posted a notice of these obsequies on the bulletin board at Summerfield Estates, then paid for a blurb in the Silver Tsunami newsletter, and crossed her fingers.  At the tepid response, however, she just told herself that this handful gathered under the big old walnut tree, its leaves as gold as the dome of a Byzantine church and its nuts like meteors bonking the picnic table and an occasional head, well, these folks were the ones that loved Marjorie Mayfield the most.

Despite their small number, they embraced the spectrum of Merryweather humanity: the narrow-eyed Jay-Douglas "Doogle" Hanson and his fungal amanuensis Anjay Shapurian (no one, even Anjay, was quite sure what nationality he was--but in Merryweather almost everyone had been brainwashed to believe that nationality did not exist); the billiard-ball bald Radu Prinzulescu and his toad-like mother, Maria, looking very much like a Transylvanian barn spirit; the elderly but undiminished Geoffrey Durant-Dupont and his longtime housemate Andreas Stackenwalter, with their Pekingese; and finally young and hale Marco Panzi and Michael Peighsley, whom some (read Doogle and Anjay) whispered were present just to get face-time with any grieving relatives and make a buck by selling off whatever was stewing in Marjorie Mayfield's condo.  But, then, so were Doogle and Anjay.  For as they lifted their plastic dishes of gourmet ice cream, dodged a few black walnuts, and shared highly-edited reminiscences of the mysteriously missing Ms. Marjorie Mayfield, Doogle and Anjay were recalling what she had always said: So many jackals, so few carcasses.

The faithful stood about for a few minutes with their cups of ice cream (which somewhere no doubt was seen as the food of the dead) and smiled pleasantly at one another.  Since Connie had worked hard to put this whole shindig together and was such an angel, it would not do to break her heart.

But in time, everyone (gratefully) dispersed, leaving Connie to gather up the ice cream-coated spoonlets and serving cups and place them in one of those leaf-green Bye-O degradable garbage bags: her little contribution to the Keep Merryweather Green campaign.  With this service to our little town out of the way, she slipped the tops on to the tubs of Cha-Cha Cherry, Mustafa Mocha-Chocolate, Cumulus Cloudberry, and Little Black Bits Vanilla and sighed.  She would have to bring all of this ice cream home, and with her husband being diabetic and even at 79 Connie still trying to keep her figure...But let her freezer bulge.  Anything for a friend.