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The Amigos Refuse to Run for It

When Bobby directed his friends’ attention to the right place, Spencer Truedove saw Britta Hernishen watching them from a distance, and he was certain she saw him seeing her. He hoped never to know firsthand what war was like, but at that moment in the pavilion, he better understood the chaos and the terror portrayed in Picasso’s famous painting, Guernica . He felt as the Spanish partisans must have felt when, in furious battle with insurgents, they heard the Nazis approaching in their bombers and knew they were going to die along with many civilians. His leg bones seemed to jellify, and he was overcome by an urge to flee the park even if in an embarrassing and wobbly run.

Had two of his amigos not been there, if the third hadn’t been walled behind a foldaway bed and at risk of genuine death, Spencer might have hightailed it out of the pavilion. But “all for one and one for all” meant holding your ground at any price for as long as your amigos held theirs. Besides, running away would make him too much like his father and, come to think of it, also like his mother. Not that he would cohabit with a sweaty stripper or become his own sister. But he would be so mortified of himself that he might never look in a mirror again, thus robbing himself of the pleasure of admiring how he looked in his hat.

He rather hoped that his friends would run for it so he’d be justified in running, too. But that would never happen.

Rebecca was as spirited and stalwart as Whistlejacket, the horse in the painting of the same name by the eighteenth-century artist George Stubbs. She’d trample anyone who meant to harm her amigos.

Neither would Bobby ever back down. He strove never to become as faithless as his inscrutable birth parents, who had abandoned him when he was a month old. He had been left on a church pew with a four-leaf clover taped to his forehead. Pinned to his diaper, a typewritten note declared, We have lives to live, and so does he, but not together. He’s a bad-luck leprechaun who should be fed to the snakes that Saint Patrick drove out of Ireland, but we don’t have snakes or know where to get any. The authorities called him “Baby Shamrock,” in reference to the four-leaf clover. He was offered for adoption, but no one wanted a bad-luck leprechaun. Being unwanted and knowing they have narrowly avoided being chopped up and fed to serpents, most babies would have made up their minds, right then and there, never to trust anyone again, but not Bobby. He believed in his amigos and never let them down.

In the distance, Britta Hernishen shrank backward into shadows and stepped to her right, behind a tree. The three friends waited for her to reappear, but she did not do so at once, or after a minute, or after three minutes, as if she had transformed herself into a crow and flown away.

A looming threat as frightening as Britta tended to concentrate the mind. Evidently, Rebecca had been thinking hard and fast while waiting for the caped professor to reappear.

“At breakfast, when I was on the phone with Hornfly, he didn’t like the way I talked to him. He said, ‘We will not forget. We are not a pussy-willow genotype like another I could name.’ A genotype is nothing more than the type of genes possessed by an organism. While Spencer was having fun arm wrestling Fred Sanford, I looked it up with my phone. What did he mean ‘a pussy-willow genotype like another I could name’?”

“He means us,” Bobby said. “Human beings. Compared to whatever species he might be, we’re a milquetoast genotype incapable of all the things he can do, like eat people as if they were bananas.”

“No. That’s not it. A genotype isn’t an entire species. It’s the particular genes in each organism. The three of us are human, but each of us has a different group of genes. For instance ... consider the gene for blond hair. All genes are diploid, meaning pairs of which one is dominant and one is recessive. So there are three possibilities when it comes to, say, blond hair—you either have two dominant genes for blond hair or two recessive genes, or one of each. I evidently have two dominant genes.”

“Unless you dye your hair,” Spencer said.

She looked askance at him. As a talented actress, looking askance was something she did with maximum impact. “Why would you even say that?”

Spencer was flustered. “I don’t know. Sometimes I just say things. I know you don’t dye your hair. It was this same color when we were kids, from the first time you sat with us in Adorno’s. Back then you wouldn’t have dyed your hair. You looked like something the cat dragged in, and you didn’t care.”

Cocking her head to look askance at Spencer from a different perspective, Rebecca said, “Honey, if you ever feel compelled to paint in the high romantic style of Rossetti or Millais, that would be a bad idea.”

“Oh, I know that’s not my forte. Besides, I can’t draw.”

“Genotype,” Bobby reminded them as he nervously scanned the park for Britta. “If human beings aren’t the ‘pussy-willow genotype’ he was referring to—then what is?”

“I don’t know how many genes we have—thousands, I guess—but the possible number of genotypes is almost infinite. They think at least a hundred billion people have been born, and no two were alike except for identical twins. Hornfly always says ‘we’ or ‘us,’ never ‘I’ or ‘me.’ Yet he refers to his kind as a ‘genotype.’ A genotype isn’t a species. It’s always and only a unique organism. Human beings are a species, each human being is a unique genotype.”

As he listened, Spencer understood why he had become an artist instead of a scientist. “But what does all this mean?”

Rebecca said, “What it seems to mean is that Hornfly and those ten naked men in the basement and the creature that was molting in Ernie’s house are all part of one organism, one consciousness, that can manifest in different forms, a colony of individuals that act as one. And they—it—lives among us. Or more likely under us, as it seems to move around through drains. When the manifestation calling itself Hornfly says it’s not ‘a pussy-willow genotype like another I could name,’ I think it means there is a second creature similar to it, and they’re some kind of rivals.”

Bobby was impressed. “You got all this info about genetics from your phone while Spencer was losing at arm wrestling?”

“No, no. As soon as I got a firm definition of ‘genotype,’ all the rest came together for me. I’ve just been refining it in my mind before dropping it on you.”

“How is that possible? How could you figure that out from just the definition of ‘genotype’?”

“I was up for the female lead in a big-budget flick based on something Michael Crichton scribbled on an index card that was found after his death. The idea was on one side of the card, and on the other side he had written ‘bigger than Jurassic Park. ’ It was about genetic engineering, so I studied the subject at the time. During a development process that took four years, there were nine writers and three directors who worked on it, but Michael was a very smart man, and no one in the biz seemed to have the brain power to figure out what he meant.”

“Wow,” said Spencer, “that’s a lost opportunity that must have given you some sleepless nights.”

“For sure. Especially because I was in for eight percent of the gross from first dollar.”

Bobby said, “Yeah, okay, but all this seems to leave us with even more questions than before. And what, if anything, does this tell us about why there’s no crime in Maple Grove anymore? Or why Ernie is in a coma or suspended animation or whatever the hell he’s in?”

Spencer regarded Rebecca expectantly, apparently assuming that from now on she would be a fountain of unassailable theories, but he was to be disappointed.

She said, “I don’t know yet.”

“And who locked away our memories, and how did they do that, and why are they now unlocking them?” Bobby asked. “And where is Hornfly? And why didn’t he deal with us when we were kids, like he threatened to do that night in the pavilion? In fact, since his goal—their goal, its goal, whatever—is to destroy humankind, why hasn’t that war begun? Why hasn’t it begun at least here in Maple Grove?”

They stood in a silence of profound befuddlement.

As the world continued to turn, it seemed the pavilion did not turn with it, as if time had stopped inside this fanciful structure, as if the pavilion were the stable core of the universe from which all reality was generated and set in motion. For clarity, a point needs to be made: The pavilion was not in fact the stable core of the universe from which all reality was generated. That is only how it felt to the three amigos who were befuddled by urgent questions for which they desperately needed answers if they were to survive. You see, their inability to think their way through the maze of questions rendered them mute, left them paralyzed by dread and by recognition of the depth of their ignorance. This, of course, is a condition of brief duration; they will not be standing in the pavilion for the remainder of the story.

So the leaves of the surrounding maple trees fluttered in the summer breeze, and songbirds graced the sky, and people walked their dogs, and the amigos remained frozen in perplexity. One can hardly imagine a circumstance in which they would be more vulnerable to the sudden arrival of Britta Hernishen. However, they were not at the moment subjected to that ordeal. Abruptly, as one, they said, “The hospital!” That exclamation brought an end to their paralysis but did not fully cure their befuddlement.

They looked at one another, expecting someone to say something more definitive about the hospital, but that brief cry was the whole of it.

“What? What about the hospital?” Bobby asked in frustration. “Who put those words in our minds? How did they do that? Are we supposed to go to the hospital? What do we do when we get there?”

Before Bobby could ask enough questions to cast them into paralytic befuddlement again, Rebecca said, “Something happened there. It was around Thanksgiving that year. No, not ‘around.’ It was smack-dab on turkey day.”

“What year?”

“The year of Hornfly. A few weeks after that Halloween night when he ate Bjorn Skollborg.”

Spencer said, “He probably ate Bjorn’s wife that same night.”

“Karamia,” said Rebecca. “You think he could eat two people in one evening?”

“The way that geek chewed into Bjorn’s head, he could probably eat as many as he wanted to.”

Bobby the Sham was always listening not only to what people said but also to how they said it. He believed that a good novelist needed to be a keen observer of diction and idiom in order to create believable dialogue. Even in the current circumstances, with peril waiting around every corner, he found himself wondering exactly how he would convincingly portray those exchanges between Spencer and Rebecca if this were a novel he was writing.

“It’s not possible,” he said.

Spencer said, “How do you figure? I mean, if I can easily eat two cheeseburgers at a sitting—and I can—why couldn’t a creature like Hornfly eat two people?”

“I wasn’t referring to eating people,” Bobby said. “I was just thinking about ... Never mind. Listen, the three of us thought of the hospital at the same time, but the rest of the memory seems to be returning in dribbles, not all at once like before. So maybe we’re beginning to remember things on our own.”

“Britta doesn’t believe in Thanksgiving,” Spencer said.

Bobby frowned. “Britta doesn’t believe in anything but Britta.”

“Yeah, and so Ernie was with us on that Thanksgiving. The four of us were together.”

Rebecca recalled, “For the holidays, Grandpa Charlie and Grandma Ruth went to Key West with their friends Jack and Sandy Reamer. They all hate one another and have the time of their lives pretending they don’t.”

“The Pinchbecks always ate dinner at four o’clock,” Bobby said. “Then he worked crossword puzzles and she crocheted until they went to bed at seven. That year, every year, they had their traditional Thanksgiving dinner—fish sticks, boiled potatoes, brussels sprouts, and tapioca. I begged off and met up with you guys at Spencer’s place in the late morning. We spent the day making dinner together.”

“I hadn’t sold the kitchen appliances yet,” Spencer said. “Dad was already living at the church with Porifera. There was a holiday orgy that night.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember,” Rebecca said. “You showed us the flyer they sent to parishioners. It was an especially naughty orgy.”

“They called it Spanksgiving,” Spencer said.

They were silent for a moment, although they were not paralyzed by befuddlement.

Then Bobby shuddered. “I don’t like to think about how insane we might be now if we’d never teamed up and become amigos.”

“So why did we go to the hospital that day? It was in the evening, long after dinner.”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither,” Spencer said.

Face wrenched with frustration and anxiety, Rebecca stood lost in thought. Even with her face thus contorted, she was strikingly beautiful.

Bobby couldn’t stop staring at her, and he thought it was a shame that her beauty would always limit the roles for which she would be considered. She could never play a homely woman, let alone an ugly one. Her talent would allow her to do so, but the director would require her to perform under ten pounds of makeup, a fright wig made of oxtail hair, matching eyebrows, with a hunchback prosthesis—and still she would be gorgeous.

Over the more than two decades they had known each other, he had regarded her strictly as a friend, not with romantic interest. In this world of loneliness and alienation, true friends were rarer and more desirable than potential lovers. He treasured her as a friend and understood that by pursuing a more intimate arrangement, he would perhaps diminish or destroy what they had now. Only since their return to Maple Grove had he now and then regarded her with romantic longing. It had to stop. He loved her as an amigo, like a sister, and he dared not risk that profoundly valued relationship. Because he wouldn’t go so far as to put his eyes out, he had to rely on willpower.

Of course if he died horribly in an encounter with Wayne Louis Hornfly (a possibility for which a warning was previously issued), that would resolve the matter.

Rebecca’s wrenched face returned to its usual spectacularness. She said, “Maybe we should go to the hospital now. Maybe just seeing the place or walking into it will jog our memories.”

Late-afternoon sunshine slanted through the maples, layering a magical light among the shadows as the amigos exited the pavilion. Squirrels scampered up trees, fearing that one dog or another would pull loose of its leash and savage them, while here and there a dog squatted or hiked a leg to pee. Hidden in a bower, an owl hooted in anticipation of the mice it would snatch off the grass to devour, come night. A new crop of infants in strollers gaped anxiously at the world, innocent of its true nature but intuitively, vaguely cognizant of terrors to come.

The world is a hard place. There are moments of great beauty and peace and plenty. Eventually, however, it was like the Gene Pitney song: sooner or later, you found yourself in a town without pity.

Soon, twenty-four hours would have passed since Ernie Hernishen disappeared from the hospital. By this time tomorrow, the police—who otherwise had nothing meaningful to do—would initiate a search for him, find him, and give him to a coroner or mortician who would make sure he was as dead as Bjorn Skollborg.