Miss Wyoming (19 page)

«Jerr-Bear, it's John Johnson.»

«The happy wanderer!»

«Yeah, that's me.» John heard chewing sounds. «Are you at dinner now? Do you want me to call back?» The thought of Jerr-Bear at a nonrestaurant dinner table seemed almost impossible for John to visualize.

«Yeah, it's dinner, but big deal. What are you, a telemarketer? How can I help you, John?»

«Call me back.»

«Right.»

Jerr-Bear maintained a complex system of cloned cell phones so as to avoid tapping by authorities. A minute later John's line rang. Even then, the two spoke in veils.

«Jerr, what do you give someone who's in a lot of pain?»

«Pain's a biggie, John. Life hurts. Specifically — ?»

«Back pain.»

«Ooh — most people need heavy artillery for that one.»

«You have any artillery?»

«I do.»

They arranged for lunch the next day at the Ivy.

After the scuff with the other Chrysler, Vanessa took the wheel of the car and John sat in the back seat spinning theories about Randy and semipacked luggage.

«Drugs. It
has
to be drugs.»

«No, John,» said Vanessa. «There's nothing in Susan's banking or Visa card patterns that indicates a consistent drain of drug-caliber discretionary cash.»

«You got her banking info?»

«I gave her Susan's Visa number,» said Ryan. «It was in the video shop's computer. I mean, once somebody's got your Visa number, they can pretty well clone you.»

«Not really,» said Vanessa. «In order to clone you they'd also need your phone number.»

«Why do I bother even trying to generate ideas?» asked John. «You two are the most drag-and-click people I've ever met. You're wearing the pants here, Vanessa. Why don't you tell me what we ought to be doing next?»

«Okay, I will. We are currently en route to the North Hollywood home of one Dreama Ng.»

«She's a numerologist,» said Ryan.

«Is she going to give us potatoes, as well?»

«Oh, grow up,» said Vanessa. «Susan's been giving Dreama Ng twenty-five hundred bucks a month for a few years now.»

«I
told
you, it was drugs.»

«Your naïveté yet again sickens me,» said Vanessa, adding, «You, who spent maybe 1.7 to 2 million dollars on both drugs and drub rehab programs over the past six years.»

«
Oof.
That much?» asked John.

«Probably more. I wasn't able to access one stream of data out of Geneva.» Vanessa continued steering the car with a pinky around a sharp curve. «You know as well as anybody, John, that drug consumption only escalates. It does
not
remain stable month in, month out over several years. I also ran a check on Ms. Ng's finances, and, lo and behold, who do you think she signs over her check to each month?»

«Drum roll …» said Ryan.

«Randy
Hexum.
»

«Well, I'll be fucked,» said John.

«A bit less color, if you please,» said Vanessa. «Anyway, we're almost there. I already phoned ahead and made an appointment to get our numbers read.»

«What else have you done that I don't know about?»

«When you two were out unlocking the bumpers a few minutes ago, I phoned my brother Mark, and he is now parked across the street from Randy Montarelli's house, and you're paying him twenty-five dollars an hour plus meals so that he can maybe get an inkling where that luggage is headed.»

«Where were
you
when I was making
The Other Side of Hate
?» asked John. «If you'd been running things, it could have been a hit.»

«No, John. It was unsavable.»

Vanessa and Ryan plunged invisible peacock feathers down their throats. John went quiet. They spun onto and then off the Hollywood Freeway, and parked outside Dreama's apartment building. John had a déjà vu, but then realized it was actually a flashback to the beginning of his film career. The smell of Dreama's elevator was identical to the hallways of his first apartment in a building off Sweetzer, a blend of cat piss, cigarettes, incense and other people's cooking. Vanessa asked John, «What do we do once we're in there. John?»

John shrugged. «We'll know when we get there. I hope. Look for clues.»

«Hi.» Dreama answered the door. «Come on in. You're Vanessa?»

«I am. This is Ryan and this is John.»

«The apartment's a mess.» The most obvious aspect of Dreama's apartment was luggage on the kitchen table, evidently in the final stages of packing.

«I'm sorry,» said Vanessa. «Are we interrupting you? Are you heading somewhere?»

«Yes, but to be honest, I need the money. I hope that doesn't sound crass. I don't want you to feel exploited.» She moved a stack of dreamcatchers off a stool.

«Where are you going?» asked Ryan, feigning nonchalance.

A lying flash passed across Dreama's eyes. «To Hawaii. To a seminar on square roots.»

«Hmmm.»

«Well, let's get started. Who first?»

«Me,» said Vanessa. «Vanessa Louise Humboldt, that's one N, two S's, with Louise spelled the normal way, and Humboldt spelled with a
d
, as in Humboldt County.»

«Okay …» Dreama sat down and reached for a box of sparkly pencils and a light-powered calculator bearing a $1.99 price tag.

«Do you always let people in here?» asked John. «Strangers? Right into your home?»

«You're friends of Susan. That's good enough for me.»

«Yes,
John
,» Vanessa cut in, «Susan's been wanting us to do this for years.» Vanessa turned to Dreama: «Just ignore him. Susan says your accuracy is chilling.»

«I guessed the Seneca plane crash the day before it happened.»

«That's amazing,» said Ryan, who suppressed an itch to tell Dreama that his message on Susan's answering machine had been the last before the accident.

«I got the message to her too late,» Dreama said, «but she made it anyway. Her prime number that day was so high she could have been struck by a Scud missile and walked away with no more than a nice new set of bangs.»

«Prime number?» asked Vanessa.

«That's how I work. With prime numbers — they're the ones that can only be divided by either one or themselves. Like 23, 47, 61 and so on. There's a prime number for all people and events.» Dreama's fingers twiddled the calculator's buttons. Her pencils produced spidery loopy letters and numbers so faint they were like strands of thin hair fallen onto the page.

«What's mine? asked Vanessa.

«Give me a second here.» She fiddled a bit more. «One hundred seventy-nine.»

«That's good?»

«That's excellent. You have strong instincts, you'll never lack money and, as I understand the psychic makeup of 179s, you'll probably go through your life with a man as your slave.»

«Why a man?»

«All 179s are het.» To emphasize this, she said, «It's a
fact
, but not one you should let dominate your choices.»

«I'll remember that.»

John was standing in a corner, pretending to read the spines on Dreama's CD rack, a blend of folk and earth sounds, as he tried to think up a probing question. He spun around, a touch overtheatrically, with his face caught in a patch of light coming off a paper lantern. «Your last name is Ng. That's a strange name — Asian — you don't look Asian. Is there a Mr. Ng?»

Dreama was nonplussed. « “Ng” is the Cantonese word for the number five. I chose it for that reason, and also because it doesn't have any vowels. And there is no Mr. Ng anywhere. I'm a lesbian.» She paused. «Does it bother you … ?»

«John.»

«Does it bother you, John, to have a strong fertile woman shed her father's name and assume one on her own?»

«Uh …»

«What's your full name, John?»

«John Lodge Johnson.»

Dreama began doing John's number, then dropped her pen and stared. John asked what was wrong, and Dreama told him she'd made a mistake. She redid his numbers and said, «Well, I'll be …» Dreama looked up at him with fresh eyes now, as if he'd been revealed as the murderer at the end of the final reel. «I have to ask you a question, and you have to give me a straight answer. Are you lying to me?»

«What?»

«Are you here under false pretenses?»

«What are you … ?» John was adrenalized.

«Let me see your driver's license.»

He pulled out his driver's license, just one month old, and handed it to Dreama. She looked at it, handed it back to him and said, «Sorry. I had to see if that was your real name — if this was a hoax of some sort. You're a 1,037, John Lodge Johnson. Do you know what that means?»

«No. You tell
me
.»

«You're a four-digit prime number. Most numerologists go their entire lives without encountering a four-digit prime.»

Dreama grilled John, asked what he did for a living and took a distinctly arch manner with him. Ryan then asked to have his number done. It was 11.

«Eleven?»

«Sounds like you're set for a career in the dynamic and fast-growing world of fast food, Ryan,» said Vanessa.

«Eleven?» Ryan was crestfallen.

«Eleven is a perfectly good number,» Dreama assured him.

«I hear 11s are really loyal,» said John.

John paid Dreama, who gave them a sheet describing their prime number's characteristics. Dreama became fidgety and scuttled the three out of her apartment.

Back in the car, John said, «Well, that was a fucking waste of time.»

Vanessa's phone bleeped and she answered it. «It's my brother,» she told the other two. She finished the call and pressedEND . «Randy is in a minivan headed this way.»

«Do you have your GPT?» asked Ryan.

«What's that?» asked John.

«My global positioning transmitter. It's the everyday equivalent of the black box they use behind the cockpit in jetliners. I keep it sewed into the hem of my purse.» She yanked a small black rectangle from her bag, smaller than a TV remote control. «A satellite can track me down at any place on earth plus or minus a freckle.»

«You're giving it to
me
?»

«For a 1,037 you can be awfully dim. When young Randall's Ford Aerostar van pulls up in» — she looked at her wristwatch — «under two minutes, you are going to have to stick this onto the car without being seen. And as we seem to be fresh out of duct tape, what exactly will be your brainy plan to attach it to the vehicle, John?»

John shut his eyes to concentrate. «A man, a plan, a canal — I was born in Panama, you know.»

«Oh, shut up.»

«
Juicy Fruit.
» He wrenched open the glove compartment and from it threw packs of unopened gum to Ryan and Vanessa, taking several for himself.

Randy's van swung into a spot directly in front of Dreama's building and across from their car. The three watched Randy walk to the building's main door, buzz and head to the elevator.

John gently opened the side passenger door and crawled behind the car. He roadrunnered across the street and fastened the GPT to the inside of the rear bumper with a cooling glob of his gum. The dogs, sensing John beneath them, grew frenzied, scratching at the windows and barking. Just then the apartment's door opened, and Randy and Dreama came out with her luggage. Both looked worried. There was nowhere for John to hide except underneath the van, where he quickly rolled, listening to the doors above him open and shut. Randy shouted at the dogs to sit. Finally, John heard the engine ignite and watched the van drive away, leaving him facing the sky where he saw the lights of jets preparing to land at LAX sweep in from the distance.

In Erie, Pennsylvania, three weeks after Susan's arrival at Randy Montarelli's house, she floated down the stairs, her nightgown trailing. «
Christ,
Randy, my nipples feel like hand grenades. What are
you
doing up at» — Susan looked at the clock on the top right-hand corner of Randy's Mac — «four twenty-sevenA .M.?» Upstairs, Baby Eugene, three weeks old, screamed for milk.

«Oh, you know, no rest for the wicked.»

«Are we out of pineapple juice again?»

«We are.»

«Right. Do we have any Goldfish crackers left?»

«Cupboard above the toaster.»

«Good.» Susan foraged about. «What lies are you cooking up tonight?»

«
You
just gave me a good idea. Here, let me try it out.» Randy read aloud the words he'd just typed into an Internet chat room:

That's not what I heard from my friend who does the makeup on the
Friends
set. *He* told me that Jennifer Aniston delayed taping for three days because she had nipple fatigue.

«Know what it reminds me of?» Susan asked, running her finger around the rim of a peanut butter jar. «Last month, when you started the rumor that Keanu Reeves has ‘reverse flesh eating disease.' »

«That
was
a classic, wasn't it?»

«It's like your brain doesn't know what image to conjure up.» Susan tasted the peanut butter and found it delicious.

«That's the coolest kind of rumor,» said Randy. «Like the one I did about Helen Hunt — having the operation to remove the remains of a vestigial beaver tail from the base of her spine.»

«Yet another classic.» Susan cradled a box of Ritzes and some apples in her arms. She kissed Randy's forehead, sprinkled crumbs onto his keyboard, then gallumphed upstairs.

Randy was a rumormonger. Before the 1990s he thought of himself as a gossip, but more tellingly he considered himself a zero, some sort of alien love child abandoned on an Erie, Pennsylvania, tract house doorstep where he grew up clumsy and socially inept. Randy was 30 percent over the national recommended body weight for his height, and possessed a sensibility so totally
not
of Erie that he was unable to be even the class clown or a bumbling mascot to the cruel and good-looking girls. The only friends he ever attempted to make were the brassy, cynical girls with whom he dissected
Mademoiselle
and who seemed to have affairs only with married men — girls who bolted from Erie the moment they graduated high school.

Checking out of Erie was an act Randy hadn't been able to do himself. It was a case of the devil he knew versus the devil he didn't. As a teenager, he had first seen the devil he
didn't
want to know in a 1982 TV news documentary. The devil was on-screen for perhaps fifteen seconds, but that's all it took.

The devil still burned in his mind fifteen years later, in the form of a diseased gay clone, emaciated and mustached, wasting away as he guarded the gates of hell. He made bony come-hither disco dance hip sways, and his skin was pitted with prune-tinted Kaposi's sarcoma lesions. His eyes had become white jelly from a cytomegalovirus infection.

In Randy's mind, somewhere around 1985, the image of the sick man acquired chaps and a cowboy hat. Around 1988, each time Randy thought of the sick man, the man began to wink back at Randy with dead white eyes. If the cowboy signified adulthood, then Randy wanted nothing to do with it. If
that
was the image that stood for sex, then Randy was going to be a monk. And so he hadn't left Erie, which, whatever else it didn't have going for it, was also seemingly lacking in people with AIDS.

But then over the years he began to see the devil everywhere he went. On a trip one night in 1988 he kissed a trucker at a stop outside of Altoona. He shut down emotionally and spent the next five years waiting to die. When he didn't, he decided he was going to live, but his was to be a life without love or affection save for that which came from his two spindly café-aulait Afghan hounds, Camper and Willy. He'd bought them as puppies from the trunk of a 1984 LeBaron parked outside a Liz Claiborne factory outlet. Its driver was a hippie girl who said the puppies would be drowned that afternoon unless they found homes, because God had summoned her to Long Island where she was to cornrow the hair of teenagers as well as monitor the sunrise.

As he aged and lost his hair and wrinkled, Randy figured he deserved no love or affection because he hadn't been brave or suffered or fought a good fight across the years. The newer, younger, more beautiful children arrived, and with annoying ease inherited the rubble of the sexual revolution, plus the freedom and the easy knowledge of love, death, sex and risk. Randy extracted his revenge on the world for poisoning both his coming-of-age and his youth, through the creation of lies and rumors. Locked inside his Erie town house at night, numbed by his day job doing payroll for a roofing company, he fed thousands of deceptions into a Dell PC which multiplied them like viruses, out into the world of electrons. Most of his rumors died, but some became self-fulfilling prophecies. Who could have known that young ingenue truly
was
so ripe to become a compulsive handwasher?

And then one September night Susan Colgate fell into his life. He was watching
Matlock,
had a refreshing cucumber facial scrub on his face, and was drinking weak Ovaltine, when there was a thump on his front door. He braced himself — midnight jolts on the door, even in Randy's relatively safe neighborhood, were not a good sign. He looked through a small pane of a bay window and saw a pregnant woman, whom he didn't recognize, slumped on his doorstep.

He raced to the door and opened it. The woman was evidently in great pain, and Randy carried her into the living room and lay her down on his two-week-old Ethan Allen colonial couch. He started to dial 911, but the woman screamed, «No!» and yanked the cord from the wall before he could even dial the third digit. She lowered her voice. «Please. Randy Montarelli. Help me. You were the only person I could think of to come to. I saved your letter.»

Randy wondered what she could mean by a letter. She briefly calmed down, and Randy realized that this was Susan Colgate.

«You're not dead!»

Susan burst into tears.

«Oh good Lord, you're alive!» Randy ran over to hold her tightly and he whispered, «Oh, Susan — Susan — please — you're safe here. Everything's going to be fine. Just fine.»

«I'm scared, Randy. I'm so
scared.
» she grimaced, then yelped like a coyote. «Shit, the contractions are close. I'm landing any moment now.»

A Boy Scout pragmatism seized him. «I'll get things ready. What do you need right away?»

«Water. I'm thirsty.»

«Right.» Randy raced into the kitchen, his thoughts scrambled like popcorn. Nothing in his life had prepared him for an event like this. He filled a plastic jug with tap water and relayed it to the living room with a plastic cup. He ran into the guestroom and grabbed a pile of down comforters and told Camper and Willy to stop whining. Random thoughts went through his brain. Susan was supposed to have been long dead. He clearly remembered his pilgrimage to Seneca, one of his few forays outside the Erie region. He then remembered reading in a magazine that Prince Charles wished he hadn't witnessed Prince Harry's birth. He'd wondered what it was Charles had seen, and now he'd soon find out and the idea made him woozy. Was that bourbon he smelled on her breath?

He raced again into the living room; the TV was on. He turned it off. He laid the blankets on the floor but Susan's bag of waters had already burst. He ignored the stains on his couch and rug. Susan reached over sideways into her purse and pulled out Randy's letter. «Here …» she said. «You wrote this to me. It was the nicest thing I ever had anybody say about me. Come here, Randy. Hold me a second.»

Randy hugged Susan tightly. She held him away from her and looked deeply into his eyes: «We're going to get through this okay, Randy. We've been having babies for a trillion years. This isn't something new. Let's just breathe and play it cool. Here …» Susan straightened out some blankets. «We're going to do just fine.»

«Does it hurt?» Randy asked. «I've got some Vicodins left over from my root canal.»

«I'll take them.»

Randy ran into the bathroom and fetched them and some towels. Back in the living room Susan was screaming, «This is it, Randy!»

The next twenty minutes were wordless. They became a grunting, shouting push-me—pull-you animal team, and a baby boy finally emerged in a squalling pink lump. Susan held him up to her chest and Randy severed the umbilical cord. All three of them cried, and by sunrise, they were asleep in the wreckage of the living room.

That morning Randy phoned in and quit his job. He had become privy to some, but not all, of the details of Susan Colgate's precrash and postcrash life. By the afternoon he had the living room pieces hauled away. He ordered a vanload of groceries and baby furniture. He emptied his bank accounts. He stripped Susan's car of Indiana plates and replaced them with fakes he bought from a junkyard. He had momentum. The action made him thrive. He didn't feel like Randy Montarelli anymore. He felt like … Well, he wasn't sure yet who or what he felt like. That would come. But within the week he'd thrown away many of his clothes and knickknacks and photos and things that to him reeked of the old Randy — sweaters he wore out of duty to the relatives who joylessly gifted him with them every year; drugstore colognes purchased not because he liked their scent but so as not to inflame redneck strangers with overly exotic aromas; his high school ring, which he kept because it seemed the only piece of jewelry he'd ever have earned the right to wear. He also began legal proceedings to change his surname to Hexum, something he'd always wanted to do but had never found the will to act on.

Randy had been offered this one doozy of a chance to rewrite himself, and he wasn't going to blow it. He'd kill for Susan and little Eugene if need be, and he hoped that in the near future Susan might go into further details on what she hinted was a plan for leaving Erie. In the meantime, Susan spent much of the first month either crying or locked in silence. Randy didn't push her. And the thought of Randy phoning somebody to announce this Bethlehemical miracle was out of the question. This was something for him alone: no mocking relatives or evil coworkers and chatterboxes from his model railway club allowed.

«Randy,» Susan said, «why bother reading those infant care books? Any kid of mine is going to be tough as nails. His genes are made of solid titanium.»

«We want the baby to be a god, Susan. We want him to
glow.
He has to be raised with care.»

Whether to alert the authorities to the birth was not an issue. In Susan's mind, Eugene Junior wasn't to enter the public realm. He was to be unknown to the world and protected from its stares and probes and jabs. «Especially,» said Susan, whenever Randy broached the subject, «from my
mother.
»

The more Randy had Susan and Eugene Junior to himself, the happier he was. He was a born provider, and now he had been blessed with souls for whom to care.

Late one night in her fourth week in Erie, the trio was watching TV — an old episode of
Meet the Blooms
. Eugene was clamped onto Susan's left breast. The TV's volume was low. On the screen was an episode in which Mitch, the eldest child, develops a cocaine habit for exactly one episode. Susan watched the TV as if it were an aquarium, garnering neither highs nor lows — just a constant dull hum.

A log in the fireplace burst aglow with new vigor. «Do you ever miss Chris?» Randy asked.

«Chris? I barely ever think of him, the old poofter.»

Randy's eyes goggled. «Poofter? You mean — no
shagging
?»

«Good
Lord,
no. I mean, I like Chris now, but at the beginning we were about as close to each other as you'd be, say, to some FedEx guy dropping an envelope off at Reception. Well, that's behind us now, isn't it? Far, far away.» She drained her glass.

«But those pictures,» said Randy, «and all those stories that were in the tabloids week in, week out — ‘Chris and Sexy Sue's Hawaiian Love Romp' — big burly Chris with the scratch marks on his back. I
saw
them.»

«Those scratch marks? His masseur, Dominic. I was over in Honolulu getting blepharoplasty on my eyes.»

«Your tat
too
— it said,CHRIS ALWAYS .» Randy's disillusionment was growing more vocal. «But then I guess I didn't see it when Eugene was being born.»

«No, you didn't. I had it done for a
Paris Match
photo shoot. It was laser-removed in 1996.» Susan stood up, shook her head as though her hair were wet, then positioned her body to meet Randy's full on. «Randy, look at me, okay? It's all lies, Randy. All of it. Not just me. Chris. Them.
Whoever. Everybody.
Everything you read. It's all just crap and lies and distortions. All of it. Lies. That's what makes the lies you spread so funny, Randy. They're
honest
lies.»

The baby snored. A tape that had been spinning in the VCR without playing hit the end of the reel and made a
thunk.
Susan tried to change her tone. «Having said that, Randy, tell me, what's the big lie of the day?»

Randy chuckled. «Whitney Houston.»

«Oh
dear
.»

«It's true.»

«About her left foot.»

«What
about
her left foot?» Susan played along.

«You haven't heard?»

«Break it to me.»

«It's pretty weird.»

«Just
tell
me!»

«Cloven hoof.»

«Oh
Randy
.»