“Clyde!” Del shouted, outraged by Clyde’s pigheadedness. “Slow down for half a sec and I’ll block ’em!”
Clyde pounded forward another ten paces, then turned back and lateraled the ball toward Del, whose finely honed Dhont reflexes took over; he caught the ball and tucked it expertly beneath one arm before his brain had worked out the implications. One of the defenders—not Desmond—smacked into Clyde and knocked him on his backside. Desmond and the third defender plowed into Del at warp speed, sending him flying backward through the air for some distance before he even hit the ground. The ball bounced loose; the defender who’d bumped into Clyde scooped it up and started running the other way. Clyde stuck around long enough to check Del’s vital signs, then trudged back toward the house. The dinner bell was ringing.
Fried chicken came out borne on an oval platter the size of a stretcher; Mrs. Dhont and one of her daughters-in-law each had to take an end of it as they maneuvered through the doorway from the kitchen. Mr. Dhont had fashioned a table from a single four-by-eight-foot sheet of inch-thick plywood, which was suitable for intimate dinners but nowhere near big enough for these larger family feeds. At such times he had a couple of his sons go down to the rec room, fold up the five-by-ten-foot Ping-Pong table, wrestle it up the stairs, and graft it onto the old four-by-eight-footer. This provided a total of some fifty feet of linear seating space, plus generous acreage in the center for stockpiling of strategic food reserves.
As a rule of thumb Mrs. Dhont liked to slaughter and cook one chicken per guest, and the heap of grayish, blood-flecked feathers in the side yard testified that she had done her best this morning; but there had still been a shortfall, and so she had also heated up some selections that had been mellowing in one of her deepfreezes: a side of roast beef, and a ham the size of a short-block Chevy V8, which continuously orbited the fifty-foot circumference of the makeshift table on their own platters. Clyde was hardly able to eat for all of his platter-passing obligations.
He snapped out of a reverie. Someone had just asked him something, and everyone was watching him and waiting for an answer. They all seemed to have vaguely malicious looks on their faces.
“Beg pardon?” he said.
“I said,” Darius said, “Princess cooked up real good, didn’t she?” He nodded at the big haunch of meat on the platter.
Princess was Desiree’s horse. She’d been presented to Desiree as a Christmas present when Desiree was twelve. She must be twenty-five years old by now; Desiree still came out to fuss over her every week or two. She had not been ridden, nor done any productive work, in a decade. The Dhonts, who liked their humor predictable, could scarcely make it through a dinner without speculating as to Princess’s possible merits as a source of nutrition.
Clyde was obligated to play along. “Finally retired her, huh?”
Much smirking around the table. “No kidding this time,” Darius said. “Go and have a look.”
They wouldn’t leave him alone until he looked. So he excused himself and went over to a window from which he could see the stable that had been Princess’s home.
The stable was gone. A new concrete slab had been poured in its place, bolts and pipes sticking up out of it.
Everyone laughed at the surprise on Clyde’s face.
He returned to the table, eyeing the big piece of meat. “Princess must’ve spent too much time hanging out with the cattle,” he said, “’cause she sure tastes like beef to me.”
More laughter. Clyde continued, “I’ll tell Desiree next time she calls.”
This forced them to own up. “We’re just pulling your leg, Clyde,” Dick said. “We took her over to the vet lab. She’s fine.”
“What are they going to do to Princess over at the vet lab?”
No one was exactly sure. Finally Mr. Dhont spoke up. “She’s doing her patriotic duty. Just like Desiree.”
“What’s that mean in the case of an old horse?”
Mr. Dhont shook his head. “Don’t really know. We weren’t encouraged to ask,” he said significantly.
“They put out a call for old horses,” Dick said. “If you had a horse who was about to end up in a hopper at Byproducts Unlimited, you could just call the vet lab and they’d come around and take it off your hands for free.”
“You were going to knacker Princess?”
“Of course not, honey,” Mrs. Dhont said, “we’d never do that. But the man from the vet lab said that all these horses had to do was give blood every so often.”
“What’re they doing with horse blood?”
“They won’t divulge that,” Mr. Dhont said bluntly. He looked a little miffed at Clyde’s prying.
“We felt that since all Princess ever did was mow the lawn anyway, she might as well do it for a good cause.”
“How many horses they have over there now?” Clyde asked, trying to sound offhanded about it.