Ponty regained consciousness three days later in the logy funk of the recently medicated. The room seemed unnaturally bright, the lights above him ringed with hazy coronas. He could not have been blamed if he had misidentified his room as heaven, and indeed he might have if Jack’s large and very mortal body hadn’t appeared suddenly above him.
“Hey, Ponty!” Jack said cheerfully.
“Jack?” Ponty croaked. “Am I in jail?”
“Jail? No, no. Food’s the same, though. No, you’re in the Fishville hospital. Took them a while to get you out of the mine, Ponty. You had us worried.”
“What happened? I remember Herzog singing from Paint Your Wagon, and then everything went black.”
“Well, that’s probably for the best,” said Jack. “Let me ring for the nurse.”
“Wait,” said Ponty, shifting himself up in his bed.
“Careful,” said Jack, helping Ponty with his pillow.
“What happened after that?”
“Well, the rescue was not the smoothest ever. Herzog’s a big man. He got wedged sideways in the main shaft as they were pulling him up. As you know, because of the rock there, it was impractical to get in behind him, so basically they had to give him a good yank and he came free. Sad, though. He came up blubbering like a baby right in front of the TV cameras. Didn’t do his image much good, in my opinion,” Jack poured a cup of water for Ponty, stabbed a straw into it, and held it up for him. “Here.”
“What about Bromstad?”
“Well, the trouble with him is, he didn’t want to come up, apparently. Finally, though, they dragged his naked body out for the world to see. Ewww.” Jack shivered. “He got checked out medically and then went right to jail, along with Stig. I imagine they’re sprung on bail now. But you— they had a tough time finding you. It was the next afternoon before they got you out. You were pretty dehydrated, and your core temperature was not where it needed to be.”
“See? I mess everything up. Can’t even keep a decent body temperature going.”
“Enough now. I’m calling the nurse,” Jack said, thumbing the call button. “Then I want to give Sandi a call. She’s been here all she could, but she had to go tend bar today.”
“No! No,” said Ponty. “Keep her away from me, will you, Jack?”
“What? Why?”
“Just do whatever it takes. I can’t see her, okay?”
Jack shook his head. “All right, Ponty. Anything you say.”
Though pressure from the media was intense, Jack ably handled it, taking a lot of the scrutiny off the recovering Ponty. Consequently, Ponty’s convalescence at the Fishville Community Hospital did not last more than a week. His brother flew in from Tucson and helped him get back to his home in Minneapolis.
“Come on, bro,” Thad pleaded. “What’s here for you? Fly back with me to Tucson.”
But Ponty would not go, and Thad, shaking his head, left him in the charge of his roommates.
Two weeks later Sags, Phil, Beater, and Scotty found a new place, nearer to the university, and Ponty was not invited to join them.
“You probably want to be with your own kind anyway,” Sags had helpfully suggested.
Ponty had already packed his scant belongings and moved into a dingy walk-up with a shared bathroom when the subpoenas, forwarded from his old address, started showing up. He rang Jack.
“Yeah, it’s raining lawsuits, isn’t it?” said Jack with wonder in his voice. “Fetters is suing us, there’s a class-action suit from the readers, and P. Dingman is hopping mad. They’re bringing the big guns. I never saw it, but apparently it was right in the contract that the book was supposed to be true. Looks like the ride is over, Ponty. It’s too bad, ’cause Death Rat is still selling like hotcakes—morbid curiosity, I guess—but I don’t think we’ll be seeing much of that moola.”
“Jack, I’m really sorry I dragged you into this.”
“Hey, enough of that. It was a good time. Ponty, I got to go. I’ll see you in court.”
As the year wore on, Ponty would spend a fair amount of time in court. He appeared at the arraignment of Bromstad, Stig, and the others from Den Institut, but neither he nor Sandi, who only sent a deposition, wanted to press any charges against them. Bromstad was ordered to undergo therapy. While Stig’s henchmen got off scot-free, he was not quite so lucky: He got three months, but after pressure from the Danish consulate, he was shown leniency and allowed to serve it out in Copenhagen. Bromstad, who was responding well to therapy, was publicly contrite. At a press conference, tears in his eyes, he apologized and told his readers that his recovery process had made him realize how important it was to keep a promise. Because of that, his next book would not be a Dogwood after all.
“What’s it going to be about?” a reporter asked.
“Beauty, truth, nobility . . .” he said with a faraway look, and then he trailed off, mumbling something that had the reporters looking at one another for help.
“‘Herring,’ did he say?” they asked each other.
Bromstad went to work immediately on his thorny and impenetrable Danish historical epic Gesta Danorum, which would sell only eight thousand copies. Of those, more than 83 percent would be returned for a full refund. It sold far less even than Bart Herzog’s disappointing account of the Holey incident, Ain’t Nowhere I Won’t Go.
Ponty took a job at a mall store, avoided Jack’s phone calls, and after a time faded back into a thin but anonymous existence. There were days when he would not think about Death Rat at all. Pontius Feeb was Pontius Feeb again.