Joe Wolf Mantooth, for the first time, stood face-to-face with Cully Mantooth. He wasn’t clear on how they were related, although his father Sly had done his best to walk him through the tangle of relatives who connected them.
“My mother could have explained it better,” Sly had said when he finally gave up, “but she’s been gone since before you were born.”
He and Cully had the same last name, so Joe figured that their fathers had been kin. Since Cully was born just a few years after Joe’s grandfather, Joe thought that maybe they had been cousins, but were he and Cully blood-kin? Probably, unless somebody along the line had been adopted or unless somebody’s mom had been fooling around with the milkman. When the lines of kinship were stretched this far, the blood ties were so thin as to be unimportant. Joe had been taught that family was family, and that was that.
He stretched out his hand to and said, “Hello, Cousin Cully.”
It would never cross Joe’s mind to approach a family member as anything other than an equal, so it didn’t occur to him that Cully might find it refreshing to meet someone who didn’t look at him and say, “Hey! Movie star!” Joe only noticed the genuine warmth in the older man’s handshake, and it told him that they would be friends.
Cully introduced him to his friend Jakob Zalisky, who was friendly but quiet. This was odd, because Jakob didn’t seem like a man who kept to himself.
“So you’re Cousin Faye’s husband?” Cully asked.
“I am, and I’d really like to lay eyes on her right about now. She needs to rest up from what happened to her and stop rushing into something else dangerous.”
“You don’t look real happy about her underground adventure.”
Joe was by nature a truth-teller. Right now, he was struggling for a way to tell the truth about what he was thinking without throwing his wife under the bus. “I just don’t think she tells herself the truth when she sets out to do this kind of thing. Faye wants to think she’s immortal.”
“I only just met her, but I already think I understand your point. That woman would rather eat dirt than admit she couldn’t do something.”
“So you have met my wife.” Joe felt himself laughing. He wanted to keep being mad at Faye, so this laughter made him even madder.
“Indeed, I have. Why don’t you sit next to Jakob and me on this bench while you wait for her? I’ve been homesteading it for hours. An advantage to being old is that a lot of people will give up their seat to you. If I see a lady with a baby, I’ll get out of this comfy spot. Until then? I’m going to enjoy the fruits of age.”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
“This is a handy place for Jakob and me to do absolutely nothing while we wait for the FBI to tell me whether the conference that brought me here is still going to happen and whether either of us has a place to sleep tonight.” Cully said. “I for one appreciate the company.”
“As do I,” said Jakob.
“Don’t worry about a place to sleep. We’ll find you both a place to sleep, even if we have to drive to Sylacauga and sleep at Dad’s.”
“That is very kind of you,” Cully said. “My guess is that Faye will be back from her trip down below with her new buddies, the feds, before anybody remembers that Jakob and I are here. This is the disadvantage of old age. You get kind of invisible.”
A fan fluttered up and asked for Cully’s autograph, putting the lie to his claim of invisibility.
“Jakob here directed three Oscar-nominated films,” Cully said to a man in his twenties who wanted some time with a movie star. “And he won once. Want his autograph, too?”
The man did, so Jakob added his signature to the scrap of newsprint that Cully had just signed.
Joe settled himself beside Cully. Before his butt hit the bench seat, he asked, “How much do you know about where Faye went? She didn’t tell me much and what she did say didn’t make a damn bit of sense.”
Joe was still hurt that his wife wasn’t waiting for him with arms spread wide, but he had known who she was when he married her.
“Well, Cousin Joe, would you believe that the bomb opened up an entrance into an underground lost city? And that your wife was handy when the FBI decided they needed Indiana Jones to go down there with them, but he wasn’t available?”
“Faye’s smarter than Indiana Jones. More ethical, too. Usually.”
“You’ve gotta cut Indy a break,” Jakob said. “He was working a long time ago. Us old guys, we do the best we can.”
Joe wondered if Cully and Jakob knew any of the actors who played the indigenous people who had faced off against Indiana Jones. Hollywood was a small town and the two men had been working there a long time, so Joe figured they probably did.
Cully stretched his long legs in front of him and rested his capable-looking hands atop his thighs. For the first time, Joe noticed what he was holding.
“Is that the flute? The one you made for Faye?”
Cully nodded and held it out to him. “She’s pretty possessive of it already, but she got a fed to bring it to me while she went exploring. Guess she figured that since I made the thing, I’d keep it safe.”
Joe took the instrument, resting his fingers on precisely drilled holes and preparing to fit his mouth to a mouthpiece that a European would say was more like a recorder’s than a flute’s.
“You hold that flute like a man who knows what he’s doing. I’d just given it to her when the bomb blew. She hasn’t even had a chance to try it out.”
“I play a little,” Joe said, pulling the instrument away from his mouth. Faye should be the one who played it first.
“I know she liked it,” Cully said, “so you did good with your gift giving. When that bomb went off, it was like somebody cracked open the gates of hell. I thought it was Judgment Day, and I’m here to tell you that I’m not ready to go. I’ve got some burdens on my soul that I need to lay down before I face judgment. I’m ashamed of them but the truth is the truth. Your wife? She must have a clean heart, because she hit the ground with a face as calm as an angel. And she was clutching that worthless flute to her chest the whole time, like it was made of platinum.”
“She’s really okay?”
“She’s really okay. Well, she’s underground with some people who are certainly packing heat, and they’re underneath a building that was just bombed and is probably still smoking. And nobody’s got a clue why it got bombed, but yeah. She’s okay. I get the sense that Cousin Faye will always be okay.”
“She’s okay in a mysterious underground city from the past?”
“Yeah. In a mysterious underground city from the past.”
“Then we might as well get comfortable on this bench. My wife won’t be coming back until she’s seen all she can see.”
“It’s what Indiana Jones would do.”