Made to Break (22 page)

“Avey,” I said. She didn't answer. She only looked. “I don't know,” I said. “It's like this place fills me with a huge sense of, I don't know, well-being, I guess.”

“That is
so
weird,” Avey said like a high school bimbo, though I loved her for it anyway, “because that's exactly how I feel, too.”

“It's a Brady Bunch thing,” I said.

“I wish I could live here.”

“Me, too,” I said. “With you.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Me, I mean, with you.”

Steam like genies swarmed from our plates when Robin set them down, boysenberries oozed across my crepes, cheese over Avey's eggs, them and mounds of butter. A smorgasbord of syrup magically appeared—strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, maple—the whole goddamned works. And though I'd never asked, Robin had brought me a giant glass of milk. If Avey's
face was a picture of mine, we must have looked the King and Queen of Earth.

“Say, Robin.”

“Yes, dear?”

“You wouldn't by any chance know a silver-haired man called Super?”

“Super Duper? Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “You know him?”

“Can't say I do.”

“You've heard of him then,” Avey said.

“Nope.”

“Then how'd you know his name?”

“Silly! Everyone is super-duper to me!”

Avey and I laid into our meals. For a solid five minutes we didn't say a word. Finally I looked up. Avey was staring with a smile.

“What?” I said, looking at my shirt to see if I'd drooled. “Do I have a bat in the cave or what?”

“Can't a girl just smile?”

I took Avey's hands. I leaned across the table and kissed her. “Marry me,” I said. “Today. Right now.”

“AJ.”

“Marry me. We can go into Nevada and get hitched today. It's no secret the way I feel about you. Besides, you heard what that woman said.”

“That they're fairies?”

“That it's in the stars, you. Marry me.”

Avey took a sip of water. She leaned into her seat. “
AaaaaaJaaaaay
.”

“AJ nothing. Let's do it.”

My girl was smiling, the way humans do when the world turns strange, my girl was stirring her eggs. I waited, watching
her smile stay and stay, until she put her hands on the table and brought her face to mine.

“Let's do it,” she said.

I ran to the man with golden teeth and hollered for our check. “Snap, snap, Mr Wonderful,” I said. “
We
are getting married!”

“I no tell you a lie, eh? We take care of you.”

“You're beautiful, my friend,” I said, and meant it.

And then Robin appeared. “What's the matter,” she said, “are the alien's coming?”

“We, Robin, are getting married.”

“Well, can you feature that?”

I grabbed her face and gave it a giant kiss. “You are a freaking angel.”

Robin waggled her silver ball. “The more you give, the better it is,” she said. “Empty your cup!”

From the phone booth outside we called a cab, and the next thing we knew, we were at the County Clerk's applying for a license to get hitched. Avey and I both were as amazed by how well the world seemed to work, given the mayhem it had been cast into, as we had been by the mayhem at its peak. Last night, we were trapped in a cabin on a mountain that snatched up the life of our friend and set us fearing for our own. Today, our friend was gone, and we were eating crepes and eggs in a diner full of merrymaking fools, and rushing off to marriage. You never know what's coming for you, I said to Avey. And what's coming for you, Avey said, is always what's best, even if you don't know it. That was good enough for me, then: she was holding my hand. I told the preacher who answered the number off our list we needed someone to make quick work of two desperate lovers.

“Chomping at the old bit are you?” the reverend said as though he were hard of hearing.

“Right now,” I said. “Can you do it?”

“Think you can hold the old horses for about an hour?”

“What time is it?” I said.

“Noon, of course,” he said. “Listen. The old wife's got leftover turkey and stuffing on the table as we speak.”

“Where're you located?”

“I'll tell you what, son. We aren't going anywheres today, what with this infernal weather. If you can be here by one, we'll be pleased as punch to do you right.”

Good thing we'd hit the Wells Fargo inside Raley's before heading to the diner. I'd left just two bucks in my account, the balance a fire in my pocket. To hell with Super, to hell with Basil and Lucille. We didn't need them. The cab would cost plenty, that much we knew, but I didn't care and neither did my girl.

Our driver was a tiny guy, smaller than me, a hundred pounds, if that. He looked a lot like the rat from
Reservoir Dogs
, actually, the one with the scrawny van dyke and yellowy teeth played by Steve Buscemi, an impression that sealed when he crammed a thumb against a nostril and honked some junk from the other. A scarcely concealed agitation entered his voice when we told him our destination.

“Lucky for you it's slow today,” he said. “I don't normally go nowhere past Elk Point.”

No doubt his attitude changed after I said there'd be an extra twenty in the deal if he'd shut his mouth and drive. For about fifteen minutes everything was peachy, me and my mud-paddy necking away like a couple of teenaged horn dogs. But there's always something, and the car began to shudder.

“What the hell?” I said.

“Didn't nobody tell me the gas gauge was busted.”

“Look,” I said. “We're on our way to get married.”

“So what do you want, a toaster?”

“Maybe you could get on the horn,” Avey said, “and call somebody. Think you can do that?”

The twerp picked up his radio and turned a couple of knobs. “For your sake I'll pretend I didn't hear nothing.” He rolled down the window and waved his hand at the world. “I don't hear nothing but the cars passing by.”

When we pulled up at the reverend's nearly an hour on, an old man and woman were in their garage, between two cars.

“Are you Reverend Rumsey?” I said.

A short man with a handlebar mustache and thinning hair, he wore a black wool blazer and collarless shirt played up by a diamond in gold, the size of a Canadian dime. “Friends call me Rev-Up,” he said, and noted the plates on his car. REV UP, it said, opposite the other, JMP 4 JOY. “Just like that,” the man said, “only with a hyphen.”

“You were going to conduct a service for us.”

“You know what time it is, son?”

“We had a blowout on the way up.” I gestured toward the ratman. “Our cab.”

“One-thirty,” said Rev-Up. “Or thereabouts.”

Avey flashed her best sad frown. “You said you weren't going out today.”

“I said I wasn't going out for
work
. Me and the old gal got thirsty.”

“So you're not going to marry us.”

“Did I say that?” Rev-Up stepped to the door of the car his wife had got in and said, “Looks like they're here, Dale.”

The place was warm and bright and smelled of potpourri and burning wood and mincemeat pie and spuds.

“Now I'm not criticizing you,” Rev-Up said, “but why in the heck did you kids choose today of all days to tie the old knot?”

Avey slapped her legs. “It's another one of those real-long-stories deals,” she said.

“We know all about
those
,” said Dale. Her rhinestone brooch, in the shape of a cross, twinkled in the lights from the Xmas tree. “If only we had a nickel for every time we've heard that line—”

“—we'd be gazillionaires,” said Rev-Up. He was twisting the tips of his stache. Funny I hadn't noticed, but his fingers were those of a woman, long and slender and tapered at the ends, with longish nails, too, that looked like they'd been shellacked. He was the type of guy, I saw, who studied his stamps in panties he nabbed from his wife. He finished with his twiddling and took a pipe from beside a red glass bowl of candy. “Any particular angle,” he asked, “you want to the service?”

“I've never gone in for too much Bible pounding,” I said. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Rev-Up said. He drew at his pipe and twiddled his stache. “Hows about some good old-fashioned spirituals then?”

“What do you think?” I said to Avey.

“With them,” said Rev-Up, “it's about the Great Spirit and such-like.”

All this talk was making me nervous. It didn't matter to me what the man said, so long as it was legal.

“Personally,” Rev-Up said, “for my money, I'd go with old Heyzoose Himself. The New Testament, straight down the line. But that's just me, of course.”

“The other stuff sounded good to me,” said Avey.

Rev-Up looked to see I was with her. “Then the other stuff it shall be. Any time you two're ready.”

Avey didn't have a veil. Dale offered a rhinestone tiara, but Avey took my snowcap, the one I'd got from Dinky, and
garnished it with toilet paper, green. And there we were, hand-in-hand to Rev-Up's voice, sonorous and warm. “It is,” I heard him say, “an important moment when two people, who at one time were strangers to one another, are drawn together by an irresistible force, so that, henceforth, their lives will not be divided by space or by time…” And later a bit of Kahlil Gibran snuck into the picture, something about singing and dancing in the midst of being alone. “The strings of a lute,” Rev-Up intoned, “though they quiver with the same music, are alone. And you will stand together, yet not too near together, for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow… You are performing an act of complete and utter faith…” And then my head went south, a misty curtain draping from the wings. Rev-Up was asking for the symbols of our commitment. It took a minute to find the rings we'd got from the gumball machine at the diner. Our man was dismayed when he saw them, but discretely forged ahead. “These rings are a symbol in this your wedding ceremony and in your marriage of two things. First, they are made of a material that does not tarnish, and this symbolizes your love for one another remaining forever pure and untarnished. Second, they are made in a complete circle, having no beginning and no end. This, too, symbolizes your love for one another, remaining forever.”

A minute later found me saying, “With this ring I thee wed. Let it ever be to us a symbol of our eternal love,” and a minute later yet Rev-Up said, “By the authority vested in me by my church and by the state of Nevada, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss each other!”

And then Avey was on my back. Snow had somehow appeared, or maybe it had been there always, I don't know, but we were piggybacking through the stuff, and falling in the stuff,
and laughing and kissing and laughing. Just across the way an old pair of Czechs had set up a store that sold us cheap champagne. The ratman told us we were nuts, and we laughingly agreed.

BACK AT THE MOTEL, WE FOUND SUPER IN HIS truck with his Pall Mall, Fortinbras as ever by his side.

“We have the curious suspicion something heterodoxical's in the air.”

“Super,” I said, “meet Avey vanden Heuvel, my new wife.”

“Well, well,” Super said. “Isn't that a thrifty board you've set.”

“I don't catch your drift.”

“What's to catch? There's not a fool this side of the pass that can't see the funeral-baked meats'll do fine for the marital feast. If that's not thrift, we don't know it.” The old man clapped me on the shoulder and said his heart was glad. Then, with a stiff but passionate dip of his head, he took Avey's hand and kissed it. “Reap while you can, butterfly,” he said. “Reap while you can.”

In our room, alone at last, we dallied in love till solitude took us, followed by dreamless sleep. We woke to the sounds of laughter. The room now was black, I didn't know where I was. Something brushed my cheek, a strand of hair, I thought, that made me think of a man I'd known, who when he saw hair on a motel bed thought it from a Turk. It's true how rooms like these harbor what's left of others, bits of tawdry fact crying out from time—the illegible guest books and marked-up scriptures in the Gideons by the bed, a forgotten pair of panties beneath the mattress and burns on the stand, the solitary clip of nail
that scrapes your feet and conjures to mind this day or that long past. Once, as a child, my family had stayed at the only motel in town. Death Valley was the place, or maybe some dump near the waste that is Needles. It was hot and dry and dark, with a skyful of stars I remember as sad. The clerk that night had stepped out for a smoke and seen me by the fence round the pool, staring at the water.
Don't go getting any far out ideas
, he'd said,
about sticking your tootsies in that, my friend. But it's so hot
, I said.
You don't figure that fence ain't there for nothing, do you?
he said. I asked what he meant, and he knelt in the rocks and told of the boy who'd drowned last year, a boy, in fact, about my age. His parents had put him to bed and gone to eat, then come back to a TV lost in fuzz. It wasn't till morning, after they'd phoned the police and firemen and county sheriff too that the man himself found the kid, floating in the pool by a little dead mouse. All my life I'd remember that story. And more than once I'd find myself thinking of the lights in the pool, the boy above, luminescent, void, bobbing with the ripples of the cruising snake…