“Just hold the light right where it is,” Clyde whispered, too scared and excited to speak out loud. He shut off the metal detector and laid it gently on the floor. He took an old Boy Scout knife out of his pocket, opened up the long blade, and slit the bag from top to bottom. Reddish-brown powder hissed onto the floor, smelling like dog food.
Something glinted yellow in the midst of it. Clyde thrust his hand into the pile of MegaPro, groped around, and withdrew a long colored ribbon. Something heavy followed and swung back and forth in the light of the flashlight, glinting a rich yellow. Clyde held the mangled treasure up in the light and gazed at it for a long time, and it suddenly dawned on Chris that, like an archaeologist in a pharaoh’s tomb, he was looking at the glint of gold. But this was less well preserved; it had been hacked and twisted almost tos hreds by some kind of swinging industrial chopper.
“What is it?” Chris finally blurted.
“Olympic gold medal,” Clyde said. “Montreal, 1976. Wrestling. Heavyweight.”
“Oh, Jesus!” the rent-a-cop cried. He looked down at the pile of red powder in which Clyde stood ankle-deep. “Oh, holy Jesus!” Then he dropped the flashlight and ran for the open loading-dock door. He almost made it out to the back lot before losing his doughnuts.
“God have mercy on your soul, Tab,” Clyde said. He laid the medal down where he’d found it, picked up the flashlight, shook the red dust from his feet, and struck out in search of a telephone.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
As they stepped out of the station wagon onto the circular driveway of the big house, she came out to greet them, a rolling thunderhead of white satin preceded by a wall of dense, sweet perfume. Anita Stonefield was clutching a stick with a glittery five-pointed star on the end of it, both thickly coated with something like ground glass in an epoxy substrate, and as she threw her arms around Desiree and Maggie, the star sizzled through the air in a wide, cometlike arc, catching Clyde under the nose and leaving him incapacitated with pain.
Another car pulled into the drive and Anita broke away and wafted toward the new arrivals with the same level of intense niceness that always made the candidate for sheriff break into a cold sweat and want to run away. Desiree had surprised Clyde by showing up for the weekend; she’d wangled a couple of days’ leave out of her commanding officer and hitched a ride home with two Chicago-bound nurses. Clyde took the commander’s generosity as a sign that grim tidings were in store for everyone at Fort Riley. Desiree was certain that he was just doing it “to be nice.”
But Desiree didn’t watch CNN the way Clyde did. Just the day before, Clyde had seen Dick Cheney on the tube, announcing that many, many more troops were going to be needed in the Gulf. Clyde had already accepted an invitation to Anita Stonefield’s annual UN Day picnic. He could not imagine a politic way to cancel, and Desiree seemed to like the idea of getting out and socializing. So here they were, making their way around the side of the Stonefield mansion, following the shrill sound of excited children’s voices toward the vast backyard.
It had been a damp, gray autumn afternoon, and dusk seemed to be falling a few hours earlier than it had the day before. The Stonefields had set up a yellow-and-white tent and brought in some heavy barbecue capability. As Clyde surveyed the diverse cuts of meat sizzling on the massive grills, taken from several animal species, he found that he could not keep inappropriate memories of Byproducts out of his mind.
Anita threw one of these picnics every year, just prior to the UNICEF trick-or-treat night, of which she was the regional organizer. It was an afternoon affair—all the kids came in their costumes, were issued their little orange trick-or-treating boxes, and got the opportunity to gawk at actual foreign people brought in as part of the party’s theme. With the assistance of Dean Knightly, Anita was able to pick out a guest list that covered as many as sixty different nations. Iraq had been dropped from the list this year; in its stead was a Kurdish family studying on a Syrian passport.
Clyde had been getting a lot of invitations lately to events where he was completely out of place, or at least irrelevant, probably out of sympathy. Dean Knightly called every so often to check in on him. And the Stonefields invited him to every social function they mounted. As the result of this series of engagements, Clyde had cemented his vote among the Republican upper crust even more firmly than ever; Dr. Jerry Tompkins said that in recent weeks his share of this sector of the vote had skyrocketed from ninety-six to ninety-nine percent, with an error margin of six percent.