Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (8 page)

The trade fair people in the restaurant were pretty bemused by all this. They grasped the gist of what was going on, but not the purpose. To them we seemed to be prank specialists, a kind of elite force of jokers. I overheard one remarking to another that he thought we must be a form of entertainment laid on by the convention organisers.

“Living theatre,” he said. “That’s what this is. These guys are showing us how it should be done.”

“Yeah,” said his companion. “I see that. We peddle the stuff, but these guys are, like, improv geniuses. Experts. They’re the marines, and we’re just grunts. Never seen anything like it at the Joke Shop Jamboree before, but, I tell you, whatever they’re being paid, they’re worth every cent.”

“Agreed. We should watch and learn, my friend. Watch and learn.”

T
AME, SO FAR
, Anansi commented.
But it’s only just getting under way
.

“Should we go for Coyote?” I wondered. I was back in my room, so speaking aloud was an option. “Take him out early?”

Dear me, no. Start low, work our way up. Weed out the weaklings first. Show them who’s boss. That’s how it’s done
.

“Who do you have in mind?”

That obese German. The one with Till Eulenspiegel in him. Him or the Tibetan, Uncle Tompa. Or maybe your fellow countryman, Puck
.

“Why not all three in one fell swoop?”

I admire your ambition, Dion. Tell me more
.

T
ILL
E
ULENSPIEGEL,
U
NCLE
Tompa and Puck. Quite a trio. Till Eulenspiegel, whose surname means ‘owl mirror’ in High German and ‘arse wipe’ in Low German, would do anything to fill his belly, once even taking the job of watchman and pretending the town was under attack so he could steal the food off the table of the count and his knights as they rode to defend the walls. Uncle Tompa was a real rascal, who among other things hoodwinked a naïve young virgin into having sex with him by asking her to go to the toilet for him and filling her with his semen, convincing her that it was urine. Puck, as any aficionado of Shakespearean comedy knows, waylaid travellers, whether for his own amusement or at his master King Oberon’s behest, and was also fond of stealing food at parties and blowing out candles with his farts, not to mention sexually teasing stallions.

Did they have anything in common?

Answer: not much.

But they were all of them creatures of carnal appetite, and if I’ve learned anything from my years spent wearing an itchy horsehair wig and being obliged to come into regular contact with drunkards, thieves and rapists, it’s that such creatures are easily led. And indeed misled.

Anansi himself, after all, wasn’t immune to the wiles of others. In one Anansesem he cheated a farm-owning chameleon out of his smallholding, but the chameleon turned the tables by stitching together a cloak from vines and decorating it with buzzing flies and offering it to Anansi, at a price. The price was enough food to fill a hole in the floor of his barn. Anansi, overcome with desire for the cloak, sent two of his children to the chameleon’s house with sacks of grain. What he didn’t know was how deep the chameleon had dug the hole. Day after day the children trekked to the barn and poured grain into the hole, and it never filled up. Eventually the chameleon got back in grain the value of the land which Anansi had stolen from him, and Anansi didn’t even have the cloak to show for it. By the time he got to wear it, months after agreeing to buy it, the vines had withered to bare twigs and the flies were all dead.

I reminded him of this sorry episode, and his response was a sheepish, foot-shuffling,
Yes, but
...

“I’m just saying, there’s none so gullible as a beguiler.”

Lovely little slogan, that.
You should have it made into a cross-stitch sampler and hung on your wall
.

“You know what? I think I might.”

F
IRST ORDER OF
business was hiring a car. Sweetwater’s one and only vehicle rental place – Mojave Motors, “We Getcha Rollin’” – was run by a bickering elderly couple in matching dungarees, Jed and Gertie. A ten-year-old Ford Taurus was the best they had to offer. Jed said not to mind the patches of rust on the wheel arches, the car was still as reliable as anything that ever rolled off a Detroit assembly line. Gertie, meanwhile, alerted me to the fact that the gas tank was near-as-dammit empty and I should fill up at the Amoco on the way out of town, otherwise I’d be going no further than ten or fifteen miles.

Ten or fifteen miles sounded okay to me.

The next stage was to round up my three intended victims. I cruised the hotel, quizzing other avatars as to the whereabouts of Till Eulenspiegel, Uncle Tompa and Puck. Soon enough, all three got wind that I was after a meeting with them, and we congregated in the lobby.

They looked cagey, understandably enough, and I went to great lengths to put their minds at ease.

“I’m proposing a little road trip,” I said. “Just the four of us.”

“Where to?” demanded the German. His name was Gunther, and with his pig-bristle ginger hair and red blubbery lips he was almost a caricature of the
bierkeller
Bavarian, a living archetype.

“There’s a pueblo Indian village not far from here.”

“So?” said the Tibetan, a wizened individual by the name of Rinzen.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but there’s a place there that serves amazing food. It’s quite famous in the area. Little family-run restaurant, half a dozen tables, Mexican cuisine, generous portions, very exclusive.”

“And you’re inviting us there?” said the Englishman. He was a children’s party entertainer called Robin. The sprite inside him liked to keep things straightforward. “Why?”

“Why not? No fun going on my own. You’re all appreciators of fine dining, and you seem convivial sorts. I thought you might like to come along and check it out with me.”

“Forgive me,” said Robin, “but this smells very like a trap.”

The other two nodded and grunted in agreement.

“I’d be astonished if you
didn’t
think that,” I said. “But look at it this way. How can I possibly be hoping to trap you? There’s three of you and only one of me. Each of you is my equal in intellect and cunning.” In my head I heard Anansi snort. “To try and take on all three of you at once would be rash indeed. More than likely it would backfire on me and I’d wind up the loser. All this is is a comradely, peaceable gesture. We get to go out of town, have a look-around, see some of the sights, and enjoy a feast into the bargain. The chimichangas, I’m reliably informed, are delicious, and the burritos are stuffed so full you can barely get your mouth round them.”

Their eyes, to varying degrees, lit up.

“Plus,” I added, “there’s beer.”

Gunther moistened his lips with a glistening pink eel of a tongue.

“So what do we say, gentlemen? Are we interested?”

They remained wary, but I knew I had them.

“We do outnumber you,” said Rinzen.

“And the hotel food’s nothing to write home about,” said Robin.

“But if there is any funny business...” Gunther growled.

I smiled serenely. “Transport awaits. This way, my friends.”

W
E GLIDED OUT
of Sweetwater in the Taurus, straight past the Amoco without stopping. For a time the road followed the erstwhile shoreline of the lake. Disused, decrepit jetties reached out aimlessly over a deepening depression in the ground. The lakebed – dry, cracked – shelved into the distance, dotted here and there with the sun-parched hulks of motorboats and kayaks. Perhaps a mile away, a thin ribbon of water glimmered, writhing in the heat haze like a trickle of mercury.

I followed the interstate for approximately twenty minutes until a turnoff appeared. I remembered it from the bus journey in. The road was pitted and potholed, its asphalt cracked at the edges. I slowed to around 20mph, dodging drifts of dust and the occasional, honest-to-goodness rolling tumbleweed.

There was indeed a village at the end of this unimpressive highway. What my passengers didn’t know was that its residents had abandoned it thirty years ago. I’d looked it up on Google. A handful of adobe dwellings, some of them dating back to the late nineteenth century and once occupied by a Zuni tribe, now lay uninhabited, home only to scorpions and lizards. The village was protected by some sort of heritage status, but to be honest, it was unlikely that a property developer was going to happen along, deem the spot a prime site for commercial exploitation and try to raze the buildings to the ground. It was more a case of the American government wishing to be seen to be actively preserving indigenous culture, compensation for the many long years when it had tried to do the exact opposite.

Anyway, we didn’t make it to the village. Some six or seven miles after we left the interstate, the Taurus’s engine began to plink and splutter. Moments later, I was coasting to a halt, the driver of a car that was most assuredly going nowhere.

“What’s this?” snapped Gunther. “We cannot be stopping. I see no restaurant.”

“Or any village,” said Rinzen.

“Is there something wrong with the car?” Robin asked.

“Not as such,” I replied. None of them had noticed the fuel warning light that had been glaring on the dashboard all along. Nor had any of them cottoned to the significance of the fact that I was wearing running shorts and trainers. “Nothing a tank of petrol couldn’t fix.”

“What!” Gunther roared. “You mean to say the car has run out? You let it?”

“Looks that way,” I said, opening my door and getting out.

“Where are you going?” Rinzen asked.

“Back to town.”

“How?”

“On foot.”

“That’s insane,” said Robin. “It must be a hundred degrees out there.”

“Hundred and eleven, according to the thermometer on the dash,” I said. “But I’ll be fine. At a steady jog I can make it to Sweetwater in under an hour, I reckon. I’m pretty fit. How about you lot? You fit too?”

Judging by their looks of dismay, Gunther’s especially, the answer was: not very.

“Phone,” said Robin, fishing a Nokia out of his pocket. “I can call for help.”

“Really? And how many bars have you got there?”

Robin frowned at the screen, then hissed in annoyance. “None. No signal.”

“That’s funny, there weren’t any on my iPhone either, last time I checked.” Which I did, surreptitiously, while driving just a few minutes earlier. “This is the back of beyond. Network coverage’s pretty much nonexistent. Tell you what, when I get to the hotel I’ll arrange for someone to come out with a can of unleaded. Can’t say fairer than that. Until then, you three sit tight, don’t exert yourselves, stay in the shade, try to keep cool.”

“And the restaurant?” Gunther said plaintively. Even now he couldn’t quite give up on the dream of those plump, grease-dripping burritos. “The meal?”

“Oh, Till Eulenspiegel,” I said with a sorrowful shake of the head.

I set off, leaving them to their own devices. A last look back showed me Robin clambering onto the roof of the car, vainly angling his phone to the heavens; Rinzen watching me go, hand shading his eyes, his posture phlegmatic; and Gunther stamping around in impotent fury, filling the air with guttural Teutonic oaths.

I
T WAS A
hard run, the hardest I’d ever done. The heat was atrocious. Every mile seemed to sap a bit more of the life out of me. The sweat on my face dried to a salty crust. My throat burned with dust and dehydration.

But Anansi lent me the stamina to keep at it. He drove me onwards, telling me I had the body of an African, designed to cope with lack of water and withstand the blaze of the sun. It was in my blood, in my very DNA, to endure these sorts of conditions. I was as much a creature of harsh, arid lands as Nanabaa Oboshie had been, as all my ancestors had been, as Anansi himself was. We’d both agreed beforehand that I could do this. We were both counting on it.

Reaching Interstate 15, I got lucky. Some Good Samaritan in an RV saw me trudging along by the roadside and pulled over.

“Need a lift, pal?”

I got round the “What the hell are you doing out here on foot?” questions by simply saying my car had broken down.

Minutes later I was back in Sweetwater, where I gulped water from the drinking fountain in the hotel lobby until my stomach could hold no more. I was planning on phoning Mojave Motors from my room to tell them where their Taurus was and ask them to send help, but first I needed to lie down and recover from my ordeal.

Let those three stew for a while
, Anansi said.
Rub their noses in their shame
.

In the event, I sank into a exhausted doze, and it wasn’t until mid-afternoon that I managed to make the call. A couple of hours later, Gunther, Rinzen and Robin were brought back to Sweetwater in the cab of a tow truck, with the Taurus hooked up and trundling along behind. Gunther was moaning about the awful headache he had from his hunger and thirst, while Rinzen and Robin simply professed themselves glad to be alive.

All three, it goes without saying, were out of the contest.

T
HAT SAME DAY
, more fell by the wayside.

Mullah Nasruddin, the Islamic scholar cleric renowned for his pithy aphorisms, was tripped up by his own vanity when he responded to an invitation to give a lecture in one of the conference rooms, only to find there was no audience when he arrived.

Bulgaria’s Hitar Petar, who arranged this prank at the expense of his eternal foe Nasruddin, was literally tripped up – by Kaggen of the Kalahari bushmen – and broke his nose on a chair back.

Kaggen in turn suffered a broken nose, and worse, when he was sent over to deliver a message and a beer to a biker in one of Sweetwater’s rougher drinking establishments and, owing to his poor command of English, failed to realise that he had been set up so that it looked like he was making a sexual proposition.