Page 49

49

White Horse, Black Hat

When they came out of Saint Mark’s rectory, the sun still bathed Maple Grove in the golden light of late afternoon because the amigos preferred to return to the last block of Harriet Nelson Lane when they could see the Nelsoneers coming.

At the house where Spencer had lived alone during his teens, on the second floor, Bobby pulled the foldaway bed out of the wall.

Ernie was tucked in there, wearing the clothes in which they had dressed him at the hospital two days ago. He was awake and patiently waiting to be released. As he clambered out, he said, “Hi, guys! Alpha finished reading my memory a little while ago, woke me, and told me everything that’s happened since you came back. It’s wild, huh? Totally nuts. I’m sorry Mother wanted you all dead, but you know how she is.”

Rebecca hugged him, and Bobby hugged him, and Spencer hugged him, and they all engaged in a group hug, and then they got out of there before the doorbell rang and neighbors showed up with food.

Night had still not fallen when they arrived at Ernie’s house. He had not bathed since before being admitted to the hospital, and he felt unclean.

While Ernie took a quick shower and changed into fresh clothes, the other three amigos gathered in the kitchen. Rebecca tried to resist wiping down everything with an antiseptic solution—and found that she could control the urge.

When Ernie reappeared, he said, “I’m starved. What about dinner at Adorno’s?”

That sounded good to all of them, but just then an ear-pleasing voice spoke to them from the sink drain. “Hey up there, it’s only me, Alpha. Fear not.” A mass of fungus sludge erupted from the sink drain, spilled over the counter, and piled up on the floor.

Initially it seemed like an unnecessary volume of material, but then it shaped itself into a white horse, and the volume proved to be required. From the horse’s mouth came the voice that first spoke from the drain. “As you know, I find it morally objectionable ever to deceive human beings by passing for one of them. I respect your species. I love you guys. So I thought ... well, a horse. Horses are so beautiful. It’s not a real horse. It’s not going to take a dump here in the kitchen. Is a horse okay with you?”

The four amigos agreed that a horse was okay.

“Here’s the thing,” said the horse. “When I started reading Ernie’s memories, I was deeply moved. Deeply, deeply moved. He has suffered so much, but he remains an optimist in love with life. He holds no grudge regarding anything that happened to him. Ernie is incapable of resentment, even toward his mother, which in my book makes him a saint. Through Ernie’s memories, I became familiar with all of you, deeply familiar and deeply moved. Are you with me?”

The amigos said they were with him. After their experiences of the past two days, they found nothing at all strange about engaging in a conversation with a horse.

“I fell in love with all of you,” the horse said. “I don’t mean romantic love. I’m a fungus, after all. Platonic love. But very deep platonic love. You are special people. If I could cry real tears right now, I would, but I can only cry fake tears, and that wouldn’t be right. That would be disrespectful, especially because the tears would be coming from a horse. Please don’t feel awkward about my expression of affection. I’m an old softie, a very old softie, and that’s just the way I am.”

The amigos assured him that they did not feel awkward and that in fact they were touched. It was always a blessing to hear that someone cared about you, even if the someone wasn’t human.

“I made a mistake years ago,” the horse admitted, “when I took the liberty of repressing the memories of what you saw in the church basement and of your encounters with Hornfly. I wasn’t trying to protect Beta. Who would? I was only trying to protect myself from being discovered by others than the folks at the institute. I am basically a shy individual. I abhor the prospect of fame. I love people, adore people, but the idea of great crowds of them tramping over these four thousand acres, hoping to talk to me ... I would be mortified. But because your memories were repressed, you became neurotic. Are you at all aware that you are neurotic?”

“We’ve had an inkling,” Rebecca admitted.

The horse said, “Bobby, you travel the world incessantly, never settling down. You’re fleeing from something, but you don’t know what.”

“I know now,” Bobby said. “From Hornfly. From Beta. I can put that behind me now.”

“You, Rebecca, always scrubbing things because what happened left you feeling unclean. Not because you should feel unclean, but because you couldn’t remember and therefore imagined worse things than what really happened. Spencer, why do you wear that black hat twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?”

With something akin to affection, Spencer patted the crown of his hat with one hand. “It’s part of my image, makes me memorable. Without it, I’m the kind of person who fades into the furniture.”

“Okay, then,” the horse said, “that had nothing to do with me repressing your memories. It’s because your father endlessly told you that you were as plain as white bread, with a personality less interesting than that of a squash. I’m not to blame for that. I feel much better about myself. But please get rid of the hat. Your dad was a jackass. He still is—a jackass in prison.”

Ernie said, “What about me? What are my neuroses?”

“You don’t have any. You’re the sweetest, most uncomplicated soul. Your memories are not colored by negative emotions. But you have allowed yourself to become a mama’s boy—and she’s one really bad mama. You need to get away from her and stay away. Sell your house, leave Maple Grove, live near your amigos, and write your wonderful songs.”

“Will you come visit?” Ernie asked. “Maybe not as a horse, at least not such a big horse. That would be awkward. Maybe a bird?”

“Neither I nor Beta has any power to control our avatars beyond this place where we have grown,” the horse said regretfully. “But if from time to time you get an emoji that is a smiling fungus, you’ll know who sent it.”

Rebecca stepped closer to the horse and smoothed a hand along its magnificent neck. “Why is it that you speak of yourself as ‘I’ and ‘me,’ while Beta says ‘we’ and ‘us’?”

“Beta is a fascist-communist fungus that favors collectivism. I am a fungus with a great respect for freedom. We will be contesting over Maple Grove for a long time—another reason you don’t want to be here. Beta will be destructive. Although I will do my best to be con structive, I will no doubt make mistakes. My brain does not weigh two and a half tons, as the institute estimates, but two and a third tons. We grow slowly. I am embarrassed to say it will be two hundred sixty years until my brain weighs two and a half tons. I believe I have thus far done the right thing by making this town crime-free, but because my brain is not yet as big as it should be, I suspect I have inspired too intense a feeling of community among the residents in the last block of Harriet Nelson Lane.”

“You might be right about that,” Bobby said.

“However,” Rebecca assured Alpha, “in general you’ve done a great job.”

“A spectacular job,” said Spencer and Bobby simultaneously.

“No one could have done better,” said Ernie.

The horse lowered its head, humbled by praise. “Ah, shucks.”

From a bowl of fruit on the kitchen island, Rebecca plucked an apple and offered it.

Whatever Alpha fed on, it didn’t feed on apples, and it didn’t feed itself through an avatar. However, the amigos and the fungus understood this was a gesture that symbolized many things, in fact too many to start listing them all at this late point in the story. Suffice it to say the horse that wasn’t a horse ate the apple that definitely was an apple. Rebecca didn’t take further fruit from the bowl, because one symbolic apple was enough to make her point.

This seemed to be the ideal moment for the amigos to flank the horse and hug it goodbye, whereupon it would become fungus sludge once more and return to Alpha by way of the sink drain.

Evidently it was not the ideal moment, after all, because the horse had something more to say. “My dear friends, if you remain in town beyond tomorrow, Beta might find a way to harm you. It’s always scheming. Beta turned evil eight thousand years ago, and it’s not likely to join an evil-fungus redemption program. Besides, there isn’t any evil-fungus redemption program. I’ll keep you safe for twenty-four hours, which is all I can be sure of. Have a wonderful dinner at Adorno’s and a good night’s sleep at Spreading Oaks Motor Hotel, but hightail it out of here by tomorrow afternoon. I have already given the institute a cure for the lethal toe fungus with which Beta afflicted them, but you never know what will come next.”

Now the amigos flanked the horse and hugged it. The magnificent equine avatar became fungus sludge once more and returned to Alpha by way of the sink drain, leaving the friends emotionally exhausted.

Ernie suggested that they sleep here rather than at the motel. He had enough bedrooms to accommodate them.

That invitation allowed them to walk to Adorno’s as they had often walked the picturesque streets of Maple Grove when they had been young and nerds. So that they could fully enjoy the beauty of the town, it still remained afternoon, with everything bathed in golden light, the Victorian architecture of the houses conveying a comforting sense of stability and timelessness.