Selection Event (25 page)

In the dark, with their foreheads touching, the best he could say, the best he could think to whisper was, “You and I. We're here.”

Chapter 43

Diaz rode East, Interstate 80, fast. This time he had a four-cylinder Triumph Amazon with full-body faring, new skates lashed to the back fender, and when he lay across the top of the bike, the bumps and furrows in the padding snuggled against the bumps and furrows of his body like a firm woman. He twisted the handgrip full forward and listened to the Amazon scream with finely machined delight. His brain was plugged into the 220 version of life and the only fuse was death.

East Utah — sand and scrub, good place for people to think a lot about god.

Wyoming — buffalo on the freeway. Helped a little brown guy jimmy open a Wal-Mart truck, had a can of beans and franks with him, wrote a poem about the cosmic significance of beans/franks, plant/animal, nature/mankind, death, degradation and attractive packaging, gave the brown guy Martin's address, hit the road again, got bad gas at Rock Springs, and had good mountains after that. Trees had fallen across several lanes of the Interstate and in one place where water and dirt and rocks had washed across the pavement, he lost control, dumped the bike, screamed like a Viking as he landed on his back on some gravel and slid thirty feet. He got back on his feet and fifteen minutes later he'd pushed the bike down into and up out of the ravine and had it rolling at a hundred and ten.

Rawlings, overgrown already. Like a temperate jungle.

Cheyenne, burned.

Colorado — green. Green everywhere, everything weeded up, shaggy and overgrown. Fewer buffalo on Interstate 25, coyotes every mile or so, and in Denver, a pack of wolves, traveling single-file down Speer Boulevard in front of the Sears, bunching up when they heard his noise and watching him go by. Diaz gave them the raised fist power sign and heard a chorus of howls behind him as he roared away south to Colorado Springs. Most of it was ashes but already the weeds were coming through, greening up the gray.

Halfway through the city, a ragged figure ran into the middle of the freeway waving his hands. Diaz clamped on the brakes, slid a hundred yards, did a U, and drifted back to the guy.

He looked wasted. Gray skin around his eyes, long tangled hair, scraggly beard, hollow chest inside his rags. Not a guy he would drink after.

“Yo!” Diaz barked at him. “What's up?”

“Hey! Hey! Gimme a ride! Gimme outta here, I give you anything I got!”

“Thanks, I got all the diseases I can handle.”

Diaz was going to ask what the excitement was about, but the wind-roar in his ears had faded enough now that he could hear a lot of popping somewhere nearby. Something zinged overhead and Diaz wheeled the cycle in another U. He nodded with his head and the guy had climbed on behind him in an instant. Diaz throttled it.

Ten miles later, where a river edged the freeway, he coasted to a stop. The man climbed off. “Thanks, motorcycle guy.”

“People trying to kill you or what? They have a good reason?”

 “Kill me? Yeah, wow, they try to kill me. They see me, they open up with artillery, I don't know who they are. Nuts maybe. Or Freaks.” Standing still now, the guy's smell filled the air. He smelled bad, like his skin was rotten. “They're different, you know.”

“Nuts and Freaks? What's the difference?”

“Freaks hate the Nuts, and the Nuts hate the Freaks. That's the difference.”

“They should meet each other.”

“They do. Alla time, let me tell you.”

“Sounds like a good place to be from.” Diaz was already on his bike. “Ciao, kimosabe.”

“Hey! Wait up! Hey!”

Diaz was off, riding like the wind.

Left turn at Pueblo, Highway 50, onto the plains.

Where there used to be corn and wheat, there were weeds as high as an elephant's eye. The highway was a corridor through the green and the horizon line was about thirty feet away, at weed-top. Claustrophobic. Just inside Kansas, the Triumph developed a high whine, and a mile later, just past a gas station and grocery store called Coolidge, he had a Code Blue flame-out and barely got his skates and drug kit off the back fender before the burning gas and oil set the seat and all the plastic on fire. He had no idea there was so much plastic on the thing. The fiberglass sagged forlornly into the spokes.

He stood there cursing and kicking it for five minutes, getting stringing chunks of melted goo on his boots. At some point, he decided that this was not a productive way to advance his agenda.

If the bike had kept running, he felt up enough for another eight, nine hundred miles. On skates, he could probably get another hundred miles before he'd have to stop for a couple of days and let his feet heal up. But what the hell. Maybe back in Coolidge he could find some paper, some rum, and write some poetry. Kansas poetry. Basic corn, wheat and pig poetry. Poetry of sustenance! Poetry that rhymed, about basic things — being hungry or thirsty or horny.

That brought him up short. He stopped thinking about corn and pigs and scratched his face. Be nice to get laid, he was thinking.

He looked around at the overgrown weed fields. Red-winged black birds circled and squawked at him. No visible companionship. From here it didn't look like there was anyone in all Kansas. Lonely. But hell, hey! in this part of his cycle, he didn't care. He slung the skates over his shoulder and began the mile walk back to Coolidge.

Chapter 44

Paul and Leona took the brick-fronted ranch house two lots down from Martin's house because it had a swimming pool. Martin and Winch wired a generator for them, then Winch fixed up the smaller house across the street for himself. The two children, Solomon and Missa, stayed with Martin and Catrin for the first two nights. The third day, Solomon asked if he and Missa could stay with Winch. Since they spent most of the day with him anyway, Catrin said they could, and the next day they were calling him Winch-Dad.

The first time they did it in front of Catrin, Winch blushed and said, “Hope you don't mind. Solomon asked me if I was his dad, and I said I would be if he wanted me to be. I should've asked you first.”

“I think he made a fine choice,” Catrin said.

Several days later, Martin had been spading a new section for the garden for half an hour, looked up, and saw Solomon and Missa standing near him, waiting to be recognized. Solomon had his hands in his pockets and Missa played with her ear. She was wearing a very wide-brimmed woman's hat that she had stuck some silk flowers and weeds into.

“Hi guys,” Martin said, leaning on the shovel handle. “What have you got planned for the day?”

Missa began babbling something about Solomon having two daddies.

Martin looked to Solomon for another version of the question.

“Are you my daddy too?”

“I can be if you want me to be.”

“Can I have two dads?”

“Of course you can.”

“I think it's a fine idea,” Catrin said, coming over and brushing the dirt off her hands.

“Me two dads?” Missa asked, looking troubled.

“If you want.”

“Un-huh," she said, still pulling on her ear. “I do.”

“Then you have two dads. Is Winch at home?”

Solomon said he was. Remembering the power of ritual, Martin pushed the blade of the shovel into the dirt and said, “Let's make this official.”

He sent Solomon to bring Winch back, and when they returned, he and Catrin had got cleaned up and had five wine glasses set up on the table.

Martin poured apple juice into each glass, explaining, “We have an important moment here. Solomon and Missa were asking if they could have two dads, and I thought we should make this official.”

Winch looked embarrassed.

Martin handed out the half glasses of juice to the children and then to the adults.

“From this moment forward—” (He raised his glass, as did Solomon and Missa, solemnly.) “—you have two fathers and one mother,” and they all drank.

“You're a gentleman,” Winch said to Martin.

“A thoughtful gentleman,” Catrin added.

....

From that time on, the children wandered freely from house to house, accepting the three of them as parents, though it seemed to all of them that Missa had a special fondness for Winch, staying with him even when he began his first ragged practicing on his saxophone. Solomon would leave if he were there when Winch started— “It hurts my ears,” he said and would spend his time playing with Isha and Mona. Martin noticed that one of the things Solomon enjoyed was looking through picture books of butterflies, birds, insects, or any other kind of animal. Sometimes he would run excitedly into the house and announce, “A monkey! I saw a monkey in the tree!” And then he would go through his books until he found a picture of the kind he saw.

One day, with Isha tagging along, Martin showed Solomon the small city zoo, all the empty cages. “The animals were kept here for people to see.”

Solomon furrowed his small brow as he studied the name-plaques and looked at the pictures.

“Something wrong?” Martin asked him.

“Were the animals bad?”

“No, they were just regular animals.”

Solomon stepped over the curbing and went inside one of the cages. “They kept them in jail,” he said.

Martin wondered what connections he was putting together in there. “When everybody got sick, some people who thought the animals shouldn't be in jail anymore came and let them go. That's why we have monkeys and zebras in our neighborhood.”

“If they weren't bad, they shouldn't have been in jail,” Solomon said, squinting as he looked up at him.

“Seems that way to me. Come on, there's something else I want to show you.”

On their way home, with Isha sitting quietly in the back seat, Martin drove him to the library. The first thing they both noticed was the smell of mildew in the air. He looked up, and sure enough, the roof had leaked. Water had poured in over the stacks of fiction and the damage was immense in that section. He didn't see that there was much he could do.

“Want to see the animal books?”

Solomon was enthralled and went through one after the other. While he picked out three thick ones to take home, Martin found several books on photoelectric cells he wanted to show Winch.

Martin picked out a few picture books for Missa and asked Solomon to read to him from one of the simpler ones.

Solomon moved his finger from word to word and read slowly, “The little... man sat on the....”

“Elephant's.”

“...elephant's back and....”

“Shouted.”

“...shouted to the birds, 'I am the... biggest little man in the world.'”

“Good deal,” Martin said. “Now you and I can both read to Missa.”

Solomon grinned and nodded. He liked that idea.

While they drove back home, Isha riding behind them, listening and sniffing the air, Martin decided it was time to see that both Missa and Solomon had some help with their reading. If they could read, they could learn anything they wanted.

Chapter 45

Besides a few candy bars in a drawer the rats hadn't got to, all Diaz had found in Coolidge that he could use was five cans of Spam, a clean bed and some blankets that had been stored in plastic bags. Everything in the six houses around the gas station-grocery store was exactly as the occupants had left it, except for the rat damage, which was extensive. He ate, slept three hours, and went looking for a car that ran. Finding none, nor a motorcycle, he found a ten-speed bicycle with good tires, slung his skates over his shoulders with his antidepressants stashed in their toes, and took off.

Bloody stool, did he hate riding a bicycle. It made him feel so... clean cut.

In the next town, he had found a shiny 90 cc Honda motorcycle — a motorized weenie-cycle. It disgusted him more than the bicycle — but it was there and he was there and didn't want to be.

He got it running, got to Dodge City, the next town of any size, as fast as possible and stepped off it, letting it putt itself into a weed-choked ditch. Rather than ride one of those again, he'd skate. His feet would heal up, but his pride, never.

He spent the day peering through garage windows and after finding several possibilities, located a '64 Harley — O Yes! — with ape-hanger handlebars, aviator goggles dangling from the handgrip, stiff new leather saddlebags, and gleaming black paint, not a scratch on it. O Yes! O Yes, amen!

He put new oil in it, wiped it down and babied it to life.

He picked up Highway 54 and rode through a hundred miles of flat, hot, stinking burned stubble. There was nothing there, not even birds.

Wichita — burned.

Another hundred and fifty miles of ash-black landscape, and then into Missouri. It was greener there and the trees that grew between every field were already spreading beyond their bounds, creeping into the fields. In another fifty years, if the rains didn't fail, the entire state would be a forest of hickory, oak, and walnut.

In late evening, bugs stinging his face and smearing his goggles, he got thirsty. Off the side of the highway, there was a little town named El Dorado Springs, perhaps built around a natural spring, he was thinking. Eating all that Spam was making him thirstier than hell.