The mayor ran off after the mob.
An autumn cloud crossed the colonel’s face and settled around his mouth.
“End of Act One, Charlie. Start thinking fast. Act Two coming up. We do want this commotion to last forever, don’t we?”
“Yes, sir—”
“Crack your brain, boy. What does Uncle Wiggily say?”
“Uncle Wiggily says—ah—go back two hops?”
“Give the boy an A-plus, a gold star, and a brownie! The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, eh?”
Charlie looked into the old man’s face and saw visitations of plagues there. “Yes, sir.”
The colonel watched the mob milling around the post office two blocks away. The fife-and-drum corps arrived and played some tune vaguely inclined toward the Egyptian.
“Sundown, Charlie,” whispered the colonel, eyes shut. “We make our final move.”
What a day it was! Years later people said: That was a day! The mayor went home and got dressed up and came back and made three speeches and held two parades, one going up Main Street toward the end of the trolley line, the other coming back, and Osiris Bubastis Rameses Amon-Ra-Tut at the center of both, smiling now to the right as gravity shifted his flimsy weight, and now to the left as they rounded a corner.
The fife-and-drum corps, now heavily implemented by accumulated brass, had spent an hour drinking beer and learning the triumphal march from Aïda and this they played so many times that mothers took their screaming babies into the house, and men retired to bars to soothe their nerves. There was talk of a third parade and a fourth speech, but sunset took the town unawares, and everyone, including Charlie, went home to a dinner mostly talk and short on eats.
By eight o’clock, Charlie and the colonel were driving along the leafy streets in the fine darkness, taking the air in the old man’s 1924 Moon, a car that took up trembling where the colonel left off.
“Where we going, colonel?”
“Well,” mused the colonel, steering at ten philosophical miles per hour, nice and easy, “everyone, including your folks, is out at Grossett’s Meadow right now, right? Final Labor Day speeches. Someone’ll light the gasbag mayor and he’ll go up about forty feet, kee-rect? Fire department’ll be setting off the big skyrockets. Which means the post office, plus the mummy, plus the police chief sitting there with him, will be empty and vulnerable. Then, the miracle will happen, Charlie. It has to. Ask me why.”
“Why?”
“Glad you asked. Well, boy, folks from Chicago’ll be jumping off the train steps tomorrow hot and fresh as pancakes, with their pointy noses and glass eyes and microscopes. Those museum snoopers, plus the Associated Press, will rummage our Egyptian Pharaoh seven ways from Christmas and blow their fuse boxes. That being so, Charles—”
“We’re on our way to mess around.”
“You put it indelicately, boy, but truth is at the core. Look at it this way, child, life is a magic show, or should be if people didn’t go to sleep on each other. Always leave folks with a bit of mystery, son. Now, before people get used to our ancient friend, before he wears out the wrong bath towel, like any smart weekend guest he should grab the next scheduled camel west. There!”
The post office stood silent, with one light shining in the foyer. Through the great window, they could see the sheriff seated alongside the mummy-on-display, neither of them talking, abandoned by the mobs that had gone for suppers and fireworks.
“Charlie.” The colonel brought forth a brown bag in which a mysterious liquid gurgled. “Give me thirty-five minutes to mellow the sheriff down. Then you creep in, listen, follow my cues, and work the miracle. Here goes nothing!”
And the colonel stole away.
Beyond town, the mayor sat down and the fireworks went up.
Charlie stood on top of the Moon and watched them for half an hour. Then, figuring the mellowing time was over, dogtrotted across the street and moused himself into the post office to stand in the shadows.
“Well, now,” the colonel was saying, seated between the Egyptian Pharaoh and the sheriff, “why don’t you just finish that bottle, sir?”
“It’s finished,” said the sheriff, and obeyed.
The colonel leaned forward in the half-light and peered at the gold amulet on the mummy’s breast.
“You believe them old sayings?”
“What old sayings?” asked the sheriff.
“If you read them hieroglyphics out loud, the mummy comes alive and walks.”
“Horse radish,” said the sheriff.
“Just look at all those fancy Egyptian symbols!” the colonel pursued.
“Someone stole my glasses. You read that stuff to me,” said the sheriff. “Make the fool mummy walk.”
Charlie took this as a signal to move, himself, and sidled around through the shadows, closer to the Egyptian king.
“Here goes.” The colonel bent even closer to the Pharaoh’s amulet, meanwhile slipping the sheriff’s glasses out of his cupped hand into his side pocket. “First symbol on here is a hawk. Second one’s a jackal. That third’s an owl. Fourth’s a yellow fox-eye—”
“Continue,” said the sheriff.
The colonel did so, and his voice rose and fell, and the sheriff’s head nodded, and all the Egyptian pictures and words flowed and touched around the mummy until at last the colonel gave a great gasp.
“Good grief, sheriff, look!”
The sheriff blinked both eyes wide.
“The mummy,” said the colonel. “It’s going for a walk!”
“Can’t be!” cried the sheriff. “Can’t be!”
“Is,” said a voice, somewhere, maybe the Pharaoh under his breath.
And the mummy lifted up, suspended, and drifted toward the door.
“Why,” cried the sheriff, tears in his eyes.
“I think he might just—fly!”
“I’d better follow and bring him back,” said the colonel.
“Do that!” said the sheriff.
The mummy was gone. The colonel ran. The door slammed.
“Oh, dear.” The sheriff lifted and shook the bottle. “Empty.”
They steamed to a halt out front of Charlie’s house.
“Your folks ever go up in your attic, boy?”
“Too small. They poke me up to rummage.”
“Good. Hoist our ancient Egyptian friend out of the back seat there, don’t weigh much, twenty pounds at the most, you carried him fine, Charlie. Oh, that was a sight. You running out of the post office, making the mummy walk. You shoulda seen the sheriff’s face!”
“I hope he don’t get in trouble because of this.”
“Oh, he’ll bump his head and make up a fine story. Can’t very well admit he saw the mummy go for a walk, can he? He’ll think of something, organize a posse, you’ll see. But right now, son, get our ancient friend here up, hide him good, visit him weekly. Feed him night talk. Then, thirty, forty years from now—”
“What?” asked Charlie.
“In a bad year so brimmed up with boredom it drips out your ears, when the town’s long forgotten this first arrival and departure, on a morning, I say, when you lie in bed and don’t want to get up, don’t even want to twitch your ears or blink, you’re so damned bored. . . .Well, on that morning, Charlie, you just climb up in your rummage-sale attic and shake this mummy out of bed, toss him in a cornfield and watch new hellfire mobs break loose. Life starts over that hour, that day, for you, the town, everyone. Now grab, git, and hide, boy!”
“I hate for the night to be over,” said Charlie, very quietly. “Can’t we go around a few blocks and finish off some lemonade on your porch? And have him come, too.”
“Lemonade it is.” Colonel Stonesteel banged his heel on the car-floor. The car exploded into life. “For the lost king and the Pharaoh’s son!”
It was late on Labor Day evening, and the two of them sat on the colonel’s front porch again, rocking up a fair breeze, lemonades in hand, ice in mouth, sucking the sweet savor of the night’s incredible adventures.
“Boy,” said Charlie. “I can just see tomorrow’s Clarion headlines: PRICELESS MUMMY KIDNAPPED. RAMESES-TUT VANISHES. GREAT FIND GONE. REWARD OFFERED. SHERIFF NONPLUSSED. BLACKMAIL EXPECTED.”
“Talk on, boy. You do have a way with words.”
“Learned from you, colonel. Now it’s your turn.”
“What do you want me to say, boy?”
“About the mummy. What he really is. What he’s truly made of. Where he came from. What’s he mean . . .?”
“Why, boy, you were there, you helped, you saw—”
Charles looked at the old man steadily.
“No.” A long breath. “Tell me, colonel.”
The old man rose to stand in the shadows between the two rocking chairs. He reached out to touch their ancient harvest-tobacco dried-up-Nile-River-bottom old-time masterpiece, which leaned against the porch slattings.
The last Labor Day fireworks were dying in the sky. Their light died in the lapis lazuli eyes of the mummy, which watched Colonel Stonesteel, even as did the boy, waiting.
“You want to know who he truly was, once upon a time?”
The colonel gathered a handful of dust in his lungs and softly let it forth.
“He was everyone, no one, someone.” A quiet pause. “You. Me.”
“Go on,” whispered Charlie.
Continue, said the mummy’s eyes.
“He was, he is,” murmured the colonel, “a bundle of old Sunday comic pages stashed in the attic to spontaneously combust from all those forgotten notions and stuffs. He’s a stand of papyrus left in an autumn field long before Moses, a papier-mâché tumbleweed blown out of time, this way long-gone dusk, that way at come-again dawn . . . maybe a nightmare scrap of nicotine/dogtail flag up a pole at high noon, promising something, everything . . . a chart-map of Siam, Blue River Nile source, hot desert dust-devil, all the confetti of lost trolley transfers, dried-up yellow cross-country road maps petering off in sand dunes, journey aborted, wild jaunts yet to night-dream and commence. His body? . . .
