Page 41 of The Bad Weather Friend

“She’ll still be a conniving bitch,” Harper said, “but she won’t have been harmed. You can trust Spike. I do, and I’m a good judge of character.”

Fear wound the Realtor’s psyche backward thirty-five years, to when he’d been an adolescent grommet, a young surfer who didn’t yet have the hair to ride the biggest waves. “Please don’t Popsicle me, dude.”

Spike went to the sidelined woman, took the skillet out of her hand, and said to Handy, “Name an animal.”

“What?”

“Name an animal, any animal. An animal you like.”

Handy looked as if he had been asked to specify what body part he could do without. “Don’t hurt me.”

“Relax, bro. Just name an animal.”

“Squirrel,” Handy said. “I like squirrels.”

The craggle’s big hands were amazingly dexterous, moving too fast for Benny to follow all the intricacies of his art. He pinched and pleated and folded the skillet for perhaps a minute, producing a torrent of tormented sounds, and when he finished, the fry pan was reshaped into a work of metal origami. “Squirrel,” hesaid, and it was indeed a charming cast-iron rodent, although its tail wasn’t convincingly bushy. “A goodwill gift from me to you, Mr. Duroc.” He set his creation on the island beside the silver ice bucket in which the champagne chilled.

Handy stared at it, speechless and trembling.

“All we need is a few minutes of your precious time,” Spike rumbled. “A few answers. Give us a little cooperation, make nice, and we will leave you to dance the night away.”

SPIKE’S FOLDING OF THE SKILLET REMINDS BENNY OF MENGISTU GIDADA

Nineteen hours after venturing onto the roof of Mrs. Baneberry-Smith’s laboratory, the boys convened in Jurgen and Benny’s dorm room, in the subdued lamplight they preferred. They were drinking Coca-Cola spiked with aspirin, even though they didn’t fully credit the rumor—which the other boys of Briarbush considered dogma beyond questioning—that this combination produced an alcoholic beverage.

Ostensibly, they gathered during this social period, prior to lights-out, to play a version of partnerless pinochle, though no one brought forth the necessary cards. For almost an hour, they slumped in their armchairs, discussing subjects of little interest compared to the issue that was foremost in their minds and that they were loath to confront. Proposed: that the school nutritionist, at the direction of Headmaster Lionel Baneberry-Smith, daily laced the food served to students with saltpeter or another substance to suppress their libidos. Although this belief was widely held among students, the consequence of certain eventful dreams seemed to disprove it, as did the popularity of the soft-core girly magazines that one of the landscape crew, Vigor Maitre, purchased during his expeditions to civilization and resold to students at six times the cover price. On the other hand, considering the proven duplicity of the academy’s administration, neither Jurgen nor Mengistu nor Benny could dismiss the possibility that the cumulative effect of eating Briarbush food during adolescence would be permanent impotence by graduation day. The best they could do to cope with this fear was open another Coke, drop another aspirin, and hope for inebriation. Proposed: that the headmasterand the masters of Felthammer House and Kentwhistle House were secret (a) satanists, (b) extraterrestrials, (c) descendants of Hitler, (d) intelligent fungi. Unanimous conclusion: Without a doubt, they were intelligent fungi satanists who venerated Hitler, but they weren’t intelligent enough to be extraterrestrials capable of inventing faster-than-light space travel.

Throughout these discussions, Mengistu busied himself with one-dollar bills that he folded into miniature wonders of origami. He’d been taught this art by his father, Solomon, who now supplied him with three hundred crisp bills every month. Solomon required his son to create these works and present them to fellow students, teachers, and academy staff as expressions of gratitude or friendship. Solomon said that such thoughtfulness would ingratiate Mengistu with members of the faculty who could eventually assist in getting him into one of the most prestigious universities, and would help him make friends with other boys who would eventually be the honored elites who ran the world. Although Mengistu intended somehow to avoid university and become a chef, although he thought the other boys here—with the exception of Jurgen Speer and now Benny—were self-important dolts who would bring civilization crashing down around them, he did what his father directed because he was a dutiful son. He crafted origami even though he suspected that another reason Solomon required this was to fill some of the spare time during which Mengistu otherwise might be seduced into a life of sexual ecstasy of a kind that would deny his parents grandchildren. So Mengistu created dollar-bill birds, bunnies, butterflies, boats, crickets, chickens, elephants, monkeys, roses, stars, and an origami depiction of a popular Russian hors d’oeuvre calledzakuska. Briarbush Academy would have been the repository of the world’slargest origami collection if the students had not conspired to unfold Mengistu’s creations and use the heavily creased bills to purchase smutty magazines from Vigor Maitre.

During all this discussion of saltpeter and intelligent fungi, accompanied by the swilling of spiked Coca-Cola, Jurgen from time to time rose from his chair to go to a window and ease aside the shade. He studied the soccer field and the forest beyond as light drained down the western sky, but Benny and Mengistu knew that Jurgen was on the lookout for the very thing none of them could bring himself to talk about.

At last, Mengistu threw aside an unfinished wild boar and said, “Prescott Galsbury. The hideous creature that he has become. What must we do about Galsbury?”

“It’s a predicament,” Jurgen said, turning from the window.

“It is worse than a predicament,” Mengistu declared. “It is a dilemma offering only unfavorable choices for us.”

Straightening up in his armchair, Benny said, “It’s a dilemma wrapped in a quandary.”

“Even that,” said Mengistu, “is an inadequate description of what we face. But it is good to have friends smart enough to be capable of making such distinctions.”

They smiled at one another, three geeks who had lucked into a meaningful friendship, but their smiles faded.

“Galsbury is a menace,” Mengistu said, “but also a suffering victim. There is a moral issue before us.”

Pacing, Jurgen said, “He begged us to feed him. But how the hell can we do that?”

Mengistu’s large eyes became larger. “We will make no attempt to feed him, Jurgen. It is not our job to operate a soup kitchen for monsters.”

“What I think,” Benny said, “is I think what he wanted to eat was us.”

“I believe so as well,” Mengistu said. “Immediately Galsbury said it, he licked his lips with that disgusting tongue.”

Jurgen returned to his chair and sat on the edge of it. “It’s okay to have sympathy for the poor sonofabitch, but we need to remember Galsbury was a creep even when he was more human. He might be a deadly threat now. The adults will have to handle this.”

“What adults?” Benny asked.

That thorny question resulted in an uncomfortable silence as the friends contemplated an answer that wouldn’t at once strike them as ridiculous.

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