The Nirvana Blues (45 page)

“I give up. What about them?”

“Is there such a thing?”

“You're asking me?”

“Well, Sanji Smatterling said he saw this great big ol' angel hanging out in the Seven-Eleven telephone booth yesterday.”

“Oh Heather, you're crazy!” Joe guffawed.

“I am not crazy. Am I, Michael?”

Her brother hemmed uncomfortably. “What about when we heard Mr. Irribarren tell us about the angel, Dad?”

“That's it!” Joe snapped. “Enough! You had your question. Now stifle.”

A quarter-mile later, Joe pulled into a parking lot opposite the ramshackle grammar school, and said, “We're here. Scram. You're late.”

“What about lunch money?”

Joe forked over the dough and stepped down. As they piled out the driverside door and raced pell-mell for the building across the potholed street, he yelled, “Wait a minute—how about a kiss good-bye?”

“You didn't shave,” Heather cackled. “I don't wanna get my face all scratched.” And then she suddenly flung up her hands, jutted one hip, did a quick jive two-step, launched a mockingly obscene cheer—

“Had a little monkey

Took him to the country

Fed him on gingerbread;

Razzle, dazzle

Kick him in the asshole,

And now my little monkey's dead!”

—and fled.

Joe settled behind the wheel, closed the door, and faced in the direction they had gone. All at once life seemed overwhelming and hopeless. Sensations of loss and of longing half smothered him. Just possibly, he might never again cohabit day in and day out with his children. After a divorce, Heidi might split. Or he'd move to Altoona for some obscure but inevitable reason. Then he would see his children only occasionally, on a weekend visit, during their summer vacations. How could they survive without Joe around to offer protection, answer their silly questions, provide wishy-washy explanations about Hanumans and God, and condemn them for noshing Cocoa Puffs? His heart threatened to break. He felt like throwing a maudlin drunk. Would he simply, from never being around, fade out of their memories? In later years, would they recall the wrestling matches, the bedtime songs, the weekend nights in sleeping-bag nests when they had watched “Star Trek” together right after the ten o'clock news? How could Michael become a Little League all-star without a father to play catch with? More to the point (feeling sick to his stomach), could he pull through without them?

As always, clutching that enigmatic suitcase, Nick Danger scuttled across the road … but Joe barely noticed.

His vision had blurred: he struggled not to let tears fall. An awareness of his own vulnerability made him shudder. Time for something to eat. Then he'd locate Heidi, sink to his knees, and beg forgiveness. Screw the cocaine—it wasn't even remotely worth the risks involved. What they shared as a family was precious: how could he have placed it in such jeopardy these past few days?

Joe ripped the monkey-cartoon death-threat note to shreds and dumped the confetti out his window. Trailing a remote aura of menace, Nick Danger disappeared around the corner of a building. Then a bullet-shaped hummingbird zipped through the driverside window, colliding against the passenger door. It flopped backward onto the seat, cold-cocked and not even quivering: its tiny feet, toes splayed, poked up stiffly out of its teeny-weeny tummy.

Never had Joe viewed a hummingbird up close. Timidly, he cupped it in his palm, astonished by the achingly precise workmanship in the minuscule feathers and in the powerful wings. The shiny ruby and olive colors seemed more like the luster of jewels than of a living thing.

Joe waited for a sign. Gradually, the weightless thing quivered, blinked its eyes. A sharp, speedy tongue flicked out one side of the needle-thin bill. Quicker than the eye could catch, the hummer turned over. Beady eyes, no bigger than the gems inside expensive, precision Swiss wristwatches, glared at him, assessing survival chances.

“It's okay,” Joe soothed. “Go ahead, kid. Fly away. I ain't gonna hurt you.”

Joe blinked his eyes, and justlikethat the broadtail zipped off, so fast he had no clear impression of its departure. There had been no little push as it jumped up, no flutter of wings—nothing, just a lightning-quick “now you see me, now you don't.”

In the center of his right palm lay the smallest feather he had ever seen, a positively exquisite piece of fluff.

Then a mischievous breeze tooled into the cab, and, although Joe emitted a heartrending “Wait a sec!,” it plucked up the almost microscopic shaft and carried it off to Never-Never Land.

*   *   *

T
HE JOGGERS WERE
out in full force, huffing and puffing in their rainbow warm-up suits and color-coordinated earmuff AM and FM radios. Probably a fortune could be accumulated insuring automobiles against jogger-related accidents, Joe thought, as he chugged warily toward the Perry Kahn Subdivision # 4. Or vice versa. Every year at least a dozen gasping Chamisaville runners were poleaxed by wayward autos. Especially those with earmuff radios—they never heard any vehicles coming. Too, among joggers, the newest fad form of suicide was veering into the path of an onrushing Pontiac. Also, more and more murders involved first-degree vehicular homicides, as angry husbands and miffed wives nailed their aggravating spouses with the family station wagon while those partners were out Staying Fit in Order to Live Right. A great problem for the insurance companies, in such cases, was that many such acts of mayhem did not result in instant death. Old-style ten-ton wood-paneled Chevy and Ford station wagons would have made perfect murder weapons. But today's lightweight Toyotas and Datsuns lacked real killing power: and murder attempts often resulted in agonizing manglings, vegetablizations, and other similarly gruesome injuries that stopped short of death and entailed years of lingering hospitalizations (and litigations) that could break even the wealthiest insurance conglomerate.

On Santistevan Lane, a crew of eight hardhats, manning a bilge pump, two jackhammers, a portable generator, and a backhoe, had gathered around a large cavity out of which steam and irregular burps of sewage water flowed. Joe braked, steering into the Guadalupe church parking lot where he managed to forge a circle, arriving back on the artery headed in another direction. Placitas Road seemed like his best bet for an alternative route across town. But it was soon blocked off by an enormous machine laying down a hot mix. The machine was followed by two gravel trucks and a large four-wheeled iron roller flattening the hot mix, trailed by a bulldozer gouging up the just-laid macadam. Joe braked again, executing a hairy U-turn that almost landed him in a ditch. He idled momentarily, aimed west yet staring east at the simultaneous road-building-and-destroying operation, trying to understand the paradox. Then he guessed that LeDoux Street might land him across the North-South Highway. Thirty yards short of his goal, however, even that innocuous and seldom-used path was blocked off by a crew of fifteen men, a bulldozer, a large watering truck, a backhoe, and a crane attempting to set a concrete four-way sewerline-junction-fitting into the flooded earth.

Chamisaville had a semifunctional new sewage plant in Ranchitos Abajo, completed two autumns ago. Already, it was badly oversubscribed. But recently the city fathers had wangled a half-million dollars for sewage-system expansion. The project entailed placing sixty miles of trunk lines underground: the construction involved had staggered the picturesque little village around the clock for the past year. Of course, once the trunk lines were buried, both private citizens and municipal organizations would be forbidden by federal law to hook into it, given the inadequate capacity of the new sewage plant. The plant itself could not be expanded, however, because the valley's rapidly depleting water table could not be tapped any further to form additional fecal slurry necessary for moving more shit.

Joe was only a mile from the plaza. But to get there, now, he aimed south along Suicide Lane, driving two miles down through the Perry Kahn Subdivision # 6. At the Our Lady of the Sorrows Hospital on Valverde he turned left and hung another louie a scant half-mile later, onto the North-South Highway. There, due to a jam created by a cement mixer and six men fashioning a totally useless, surfboard-shaped island in the middle of the road, Joe had to turn right onto a Santistevan Street detour. On Santistevan, the bumper-to-bumper traffic was completely veiled in a thick, dusty smog. Last week, in the
Chamisaville News,
Joe had read that this picturesque little town, in clear Rocky Mountain air at seven thousand feet, was one of the state's four most polluted areas. Its airborne particulate poisons rated favorably with the air over two uranium mines, an open-pit copper operation, and a power-plant complex whose pollution had been the only man-made crap visible to the first astronauts circling the globe.

A perfect environment for asthma!

*   *   *

R
EGULARS DOMINATED
the Prince of Whales when Joe stopped for breakfast. Silhouetted in the doorway, he wondered whether to enter, sit down, and make believe nothing had happened, or turn heel and flee. For when, responding to the doorbell's jangle, everybody (in unison) glanced up with varying degrees of recognition, Joe suddenly thought: I've become one of the lead clowns in this circus.

Ralph Kapansky held forth at his regular corner table by the jukebox, on his eighth coffee already, procrastinating, as usual, from writing filth. At his feet, Rimpoche dreamed—twitching—and stank to high heaven. On his left, Tribby Gordon had disheveled hair and uneven facial stubble. His jacket dribbled fluff out of flak holes, his sneakers had no shoelaces; several legal briefs were scattered on the table before him. Had he spent all night atop the pyramid blowing potent numbers while gooning at the stars? Or, more to the point of how he looked, had he gotten careless and tumbled off his perch at 3:00
A.M.
?

Also enveloped in smoke wreaths at their table was Jeff Orbison, Suki Terrell's ex, EAT ME's lead mouth, and a gun freak into the bargain.

Off in a corner sat Nick Danger, his eyes lost in dark shadows cast by the Tyrolean brim: he was sucking something up through a straw, and clutched his battered suitcase to his lap.

The only other solitary person around was Diana's old pal, Angel Guts. He glowered at the world from underneath the floppy brim of an old-fashioned cowboy hat.

Two shoved-together tables accommodated Nikita Smatterling and his entourage, including a saffron-robed bald-headed holy man with a spot on his forehead; the radio astrologer, Pancho Nordica; Nancy Ryan's ex-Hanuman-nik lover, Randall Tucker; Sam Halaby, the metaphysician on his last reincarnation and hubby of Sarah (whose children by a former husband had just been kidnapped); Baldini Miller, the silent one, with his bandaged foot and his wife, Ipu; Ray Verboten, the valley's biggest coke dealer and rising Miniver nemesis; and Roger Petrie, embezzler supreme, double agent, and dark horse in the Eloy Irribarren Land-Grab Derby.

At another table sat Bernard Laver, the Tennis Heaven pro. Skipper Nuzum and his wife, Natalie Gandolf, and the tattoo artist, Noelle Paxton, accompanied him. The craggy-faced but intriguing woman with them Joe had never seen before. She wore one-way dark glasses, gold hoop earrings, a black turtleneck jersey, a Guatemalan sash, black pants, and knee-high, high-heeled beige suede boots. In the old playground days, the boys would have said:

Hubba hubba

Ding ding

She's got

Everything!

At a third table, Egon Braithwhite was bending Wilkerson Busbee's ear, no doubt with ersatz Indonesian slang phrases. Abruptly, Joe flashed: Wilkerson Busbee? Wasn't he supposed to be locked up in an Ohio jail? Wilkerson's two-way taxi walkie-talkie crackled even as he violated the Nestlé's boycott by washing down his lox and bagels with Pero.

Then Joe realized the rest of them were present also: Fluff Dimaggio and the entire Unfug family—Rama, Shanti, and Om. Bleary-eyed and doomed-looking, Fluff had a broken arm; Shanti and her angelic butterball daughter looked fresh, pert, and lively. Rama crouched off in corner shadows, an eight-millimeter camera stuck in front of his face like a pig snout, filming the scene.

The bald geezer in yellow must be him, Joe realized—Baba Ram Bang. And the hubba-hubba lady?—who else but Iréné Popapopcorn, the big-city journalist!

Somehow, they—and their statue?—had arrived.

Instinct suggested flight, if only on the grounds that Ray Verboten and one of his alleged henchpeople, Angel Guts, were on hand. Yet habit spurred Joe to enter the abuzz joint. Why he felt so equivocal, beyond his fear of Ray Verboten, was a puzzlement. Perhaps in his former life as loyal husband and trustworthy father, Joe had always been a spectator in the Prince of Whales, enjoying its messed-up denizens' colorful woes from a secure haven Above It All. But now a change had occurred. And his revulsion for this crowd must stem from the fact that he had fallen among the heathen. Their hideous scars, banal emotional tribulations, and fatiguing little holocausts now had something in common with his own traumatic dilemmas. Rudely gone, though not forgotten, was that superiority complex he had wielded for so long. Screw the abyss: it was absolutely no fun bumping elbows with all the other gargoyles and fallen angels!

Egon Braithwhite called out: “Ho ming no cum chow ki!”

Annoyed, Joe nevertheless replied: “Hideyashima. He ho gum shur crap.”

“Moyo mookie! Pi shedi
ye
shi!”

“What does all that mean?” Natalie Gandolf asked him as he passed her table.

“Beats me. He took a vow, remember?”

The foxy stranger laughed. “Oh my God!” Joe couldn't quite pinpoint her accent: it sounded too guttural to be British. “That's simply marvelous! Natalie, who is this ludicrous and wonderful man?—you must introduce us.”