Going Bovine (19 page)

We bury ourselves under Windbreakers and backpacks so that only the tops of our heads show. People lumber on now, looking for seats. I peek over the top of my jacket to see the cop stepping into the aisle. He cranes his neck, looking for us, but there are too many people moving around to really see.

The driver climbs on. “Excuse me, Officer. If you’re done, I got a schedule to get to.”

The cop gives a last hard look, and I duck under the safety of my jacket. After a few seconds, I hear him thank the driver. The doors close with a hiss, sealing us in. The bus rolls out of the station, but my heartbeat doesn’t get back to normal till we’re far from the city limits of New Orleans.

When he’s ready to take a nap, the guy next to us lets us borrow his deck of cards. We eat RealFruit Lassos and play Texas Hold ’Em and Jacks Are Wild. The bus bumps along the coast. Oil refineries send up plumes of toxic smoke. The smell, like rotten eggs mixed with cleaning fluid, makes me want to gag. A couple of shrimp boats bob on the water, the fishermen pulling up the soul of the sea in their heavy nets. I like watching the country roll by my window. I wish we’d taken more vacations. I try to remember why we stopped. Dad got busy with work and Mom got busy looking busy and Jen and I started hating each other and next thing you know, we’re a bunch of strangers totally uncomfortable being around each other. And who wants to go on vacation with a bunch of strangers?

Gonzo deals out a new hand. The sky’s getting darker. The lights in the bus kick on. Little cones of yellow-white shine down on our cards, making our hands look bleached out.

“You get a phone number from that German girl back in the graveyard?” I ask. “I think she was hot for you.”

Gonzo shakes his head. “Not my type.”

“What? German? Tourist? Girl?”

Gonzo flashes me a Don’t Go There look.

“So what is your type?”

He thinks for a minute. “Sweet, but dangerous-looking. I like Southern accents. And tattoos.”

I let out a sharp laugh. “Tattoos? Whoa! Who’da thunk it? The Gonzman likes ’em a little tough.”

He grins. “You don’t know everything about me, pendejo. I’m a pretty complicated dude.”

“You’re, like, a totally open book, Gonz,” I say, laughing. “I’ve never met anybody more transparent in my life.”

“You don’t know me, dude,” he says, not smiling this time. Gonzo examines his cards, prepping for his next move. “People always think they know other people, but they don’t. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won’t eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don’t know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel fucked up and sad for no reason at all.”

I’ve got an image of Gonzo sitting in his room alone feeling fucked up and sad and I hate it, because now I feel responsible for him in a way I didn’t want to.

“You’re not going to say something cheesy like ‘people are like onions; they have lots of layers,’ are you?”

“Just trying to have a conversation. Forget it, dude. Whatever. Just play.”

He discards a two and I pick it up. I’ve got a pair of twos and that’s it. My cards suck.

“So, what’s your type?” Gonzo asks a few minutes later.

“Wow, let me think. Um, anyone who would have me.” I put another card on the pile. What is my type? A brief image of Dulcie with her armor and pink hair comes unbidden to mind. I push it away. “You know Staci Johnson?”

“Staci Johnson!” Gonzo snarls. “Say it ain’t so, dude! Staci Johnson is the devil’s spawn!”

“I know, I know. She has no working brain cells, a subpar personality, and nothing interesting to say ever, unless you’re into what happened last night on YA! TV. But once you make it past that, she’s seriously fine. Yo, I discarded.”

He ignores my card and draws from the stack. “Staci Johnson. Dude. I feel like I need to shave my insides when you say that.” Gonzo organizes his cards, moving one from the end to the center of his hand. “Well, maybe when you get back from Florida, you know? You’ll have that whole road-trip mystique working for you. Plus you will have saved the world. That’s gotta count.”

“And a tan,” I add, glancing at my flounder-belly-white arms.

“Tan works.”

“Also, I won’t be dying. Hopefully.”

“Always helpful.” He fans his cards out on the table. “Royal flush, Señor Pajero. You owe me four bags of chips.”

We’ve been on the road for six hours when my right leg starts to twitch uncontrollably. The E-ticket’s lost a little more color; Adventureland’s totally gone, and the second line, Frontierland, is a hazy green. I cross my left leg over my right and put my backpack on top, hoping no one will notice, hoping the twitching will pass soon. The tremor travels. My right arm goes tight. I can’t lift the sucker; it’s like lead. Please don’t let me have a seizure here. Please. Just let me make it to Florida. Out on the dark horizon, little bursts of flame pop up. They look just like the fire balls on top of the refineries. I even try to convince myself that that’s what they are. But my gut says it’s the fire giants out there. Getting stronger. Bigger. Waiting for me. My eyes get heavy watching them. The rhythm of the road lulls me to sleep.

“Cameron? I thought I’d read some more of Don Quixote to you.” Mom’s sitting beside me in my hospital bed, bathed in a pool of light. The curtains have been drawn sealing us into a little drapery cocoon. “Would you like that?”

Her voice wraps around me like a dryer-fresh blanket, and I drift in and out of the crazy knight’s amusing adventures with Sancho Panza. “‘Take my advice and live for a long, long time,’” Mom reads. “‘Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die.’”

After a while, Mom closes the book and strokes my hair. “It’s kind of nice, reading to you again,” she says. “Do you remember when you were a kid and in the summers we would go to the library? I’d let you pick out five books, and you could never wait till we got home. We’d have to find a corner and sit and read them all before we left the library.”

Why don’t I remember that? How could my mom and I have shared the same experience but I don’t remember it?

“Why did we stop doing that?” Mom wonders aloud. “We just stopped going. You didn’t want to, I think. And I was afraid of pushing you. I was always afraid of saying the wrong thing, so I stopped talking.”

Mom’s crying a little bit, quietly, the way she always does. She never utters a sound even when she’s crying, and that makes me a little sad. Doesn’t seem right. When you cry, people should hear you. The world should stop. I squeeze Mom’s hand and she squeezes back. I don’t say anything, but at least she knows I’ve heard her.

People drift in and out in my dream like actors in a play. Eubie comes to visit. He slips headphones on my ears so I can hear “Cypress Grove Blues,” and I want to tell him that I’ve been to New Orleans, that I’ve seen Junior Webster, that I played bass for him, but it’s a dream, and the words won’t come. At one point, Dad sits on my bed, reading to me from a physics paper he’s grading that’s about supercolliders.

In the corner, the muted TV plays the same cartoon of the roadrunner and coyote chasing each other in and out of doors. The last thing I see is the old lady from across the hall standing at the foot of my bed. She’s dressed in a coat and hat and has a little suitcase with her.

“A house by the sea. Don’t forget.”

“I won’t,” I say, but I’m not sure anyone hears me.

And on TV, the coyote waits for the anvil to fall.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Wherein the Angel Discusses the Wonders of Microwave Popcorn and Gonzo Gets Our Asses Stranded in the Middle of Nowhere

When I wake up, it’s morning, early. The light hasn’t been up much longer than I have. People are asleep. Their heads rest against the windows and seat backs, their jaws spread wide, like the arms of a can opener left on a counter. Through the thin, wet layer of dew on my own window, the countryside rolls past. We’re in Mississippi or maybe Alabama.

A gray mist sits on the rooftops of little tar-paper shacks where clotheslines are strung across the front yards. The shirts catch the breeze like they wish they could sail on out of there, out of those small, junky yards with their rusted car shells and broken-down plastic toys. I breathe on the window a few times, watch it fog over and retreat, fog over and retreat.

I like the feel of the road under me. The solid thump-thumpthumpthump-thump drum cadence of those big tires. Gonzo’s out cold next to me, that big head of his resting on my shoulder. He mumbles in his sleep, and I wonder what dreams he has.

“Peekaboo.” Dulcie’s face peers over the seat in front of me.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, looking around.

“There’s some welcome.”

“Look, it’s just …” I lower my voice. “I don’t want people to think I’m opening up a six-pack of crazy here on the bus. I’ll get kicked off.”

“Looks like everybody’s sleeping.”

“Can anybody else see you besides me?” I ask.

“I suppose they could if they wanted to, but maybe what they see isn’t what you see,” Dulcie answers in her typically cryptic fashion. “Hey, check it out.” She unfurls her wings slightly. Cameron rock, they read.

“Shouldn’t there be an ‘s’ at the end? Cameron rocks?”

“Yeah. I ran out of spray paint. But the sentiment is one hundred percent there.” She rests her chin on the seat top and grips the sides with her hands. It makes her look like she’s been beheaded. “You seem a little tired, cowboy.”

“Weird dreams,” I say.

“Want to tell me about it? The doctor is in.”

“Just stuff about my mom. She was talking about how she used to take me to the library when I was a kid, and I didn’t remember that at all. But just as I woke up, I did remember it. Crystal clear I could see myself sitting in my mom’s lap over near the water fountain, and she was reading some rhyming book about monsters to me. She had on sandals and she smelled good, like shampoo. And I was happy. How did I manage to forget that?”

“That’s a nice memory,” Dulcie says.

We listen to the road thumpity-thumping beneath us, and for a few minutes it feels like we’re the only two beings in the entire universe.

“Do you have some nice memories?” I ask, offering her some Cheesy Puff Fingers from our open bag. “You know, from before you were …” I gesture to her wings in a completely ineffectual way. “You know.”

Dulcie gets a funny little smile. “I’m making a nice memory right now.”

“Now?”

“Here. With you.” She downs two Cheesy Puff Fingers.

“But what were you before you were an angel?” I press.

She takes a sip of my warm soda, makes a face. “Does it matter?”

“Yeah. I think it does.”

“Okay, then,” she says, taking another drink from the can. “I was somebody else.”

“What does that mean?” I say, getting pissed off. “Did you have parents? A dog? A parakeet? A Social Security number? Can you remember? How do you feel? Is there a God? What happens when we die? Will I be like you, spray-painting my wings with misspelled messages and guiding people on stupid, insane missions?”

“It’s not stupid, Cameron,” she says softly.

“I’m out here on the road looking for some renegade miracle man, totally sticking my neck out for you, and you can’t even answer one single fucking question!”

The guy across the aisle opens one eye for half a second, then turns over, and I lower my voice. “I think you owe me that.”

Dulcie wipes her mouth, but some of the Day-Glo cheese powder clings to her lip. “All right. I’ll answer one of your questions.”

“Thank you.”

“I feel like I swallowed a Magritte.”

“What?”

Dulcie reaches in for another Cheesy Puff Finger. “You asked me how I feel. And my answer is: I feel like I swallowed a Magritte. Like on the inside, I’m made of clouds and floating eyes, green apples, and slowly rising men in bowler hats.”

“You are officially the most annoying unreal creature ever.”

“Meet a lot of us, do you?”

“Lately it’s gotten very weird.”

“Cameron.” She puts her hand on my arm. “The point is, you’re alive right now. Look around.” She widens her arms to include the sleeping passengers. “Half the people I see aren’t really aware. They aren’t in the game at all. They never notice how fabulous stuff here is.”

“Like what?”

“Like …” She thinks for a few seconds. “Microwave popcorn.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Think about it. You put this flat bag of kernels in the hopper, wait four minutes …” She opens her mouth and taps her fingers against her taut cheeks, making a popping sound. “And voila! You’ve got a steaming bag of buttery goodness right there.”

“This is your miracle of human existence?”

“No. But it doesn’t suck. It’s a simple pleasure, okay? You got any of those?”

“Sure,” I say.

She folds her arms over her armored chest. “Such as?”

“Masturbation.”

“Yeah? What else?”

I think about it for a good, long minute. “Eubie’s.”

Dulcie sits, waiting. “And?”

“Can’t think of anything else.”

“Well, how about pizza—in-restaurant, not delivery. Water fountains. That chill on your arms when you go from an air-conditioned movie theater into the heat. The smell of Laundromats. Snow. CDs …”

“No, not CDs, records. Gotta be vinyl.”

“Vinyl, then. What else?”

“You know I hate that you’ve drawn me into this, don’t you?” The morning light’s falling on Dulcie in a way that makes her glow, and I have the impulse to say, This. Right here. Right now.

I shrug. “That’s all I got.”

She shakes her head. “We’ve got work to do, Bucko.”

The bus driver’s got his signal on. We’re exiting.

Dulcie gets up. “That’s my cue.”

“So, like … when will I see you again?”

“Soon,” she says, ducking into the john. “Get out there and make some memories, cowboy. Oh, and don’t forget to save the universe.”

Five minutes later, the bus pulls into a rest-stop area. The sign welcomes us to the fine state of Mississippi. A bunch of eighteen-wheelers are parked near the gas pumps. The bus comes to a stop and the driver opens the doors. “Y’all wanna stretch your legs, get some air, go ’head. Just be back on this bus in ten minutes. I got a schedule to keep.”