The Nirvana Blues (73 page)

Michael leaned over, whispering in Heather's ear. After he finished his spiel to her, she asked: “Daddy, are we gonna go through the capital?”

“I dunno. Maybe. I haven't exactly figured out…”

Like: Where now, brown cow? To a seaside retreat in a quaint Mexican village? To Dallas or Birmingham or New York City, and a return to the ad game? He would score a mint quick, then fly to Majorca one jump ahead of detectives Heidi had hired to track them down.

“Well, if we go through the capital, can we stop at the Baskin-Robbins?”

While he, the responsible parent, worried about detectives, escape, and earning a living, his children concerned themselves with the truly crucial issues in life—namely, ice cream!

“We'll see.”

First off, Joe steered into the plaza, parking in front of Harbinger's Ski and Sport. Nick Danger happened at that moment to be darkly passing by, casting no furtive glances either to the left or right as he plowed along with his suitcase full of—money? dope? Dead Sea Scrolls?—to yet another mysterious assignation.

“What are we gonna do in here?” Michael asked.

“Stay in the car. I'll be back in a minute.”

“But why are you stopping?” Heather demanded.

“None of your business.”

“If you don't tell us, Daddy,” Heather teased, “I'll shoot you right through the heart.” She pointed Diana's revolver—the very weapon for which Joe planned to purchase ammunition in Harbinger's—at her father.

“Where did you find
that?
” Joe snatched it from her, too surprised even to castigate her for pointing a real gun at an alive person.

“It was on the floor when we got in the car.”

And therefore must have fallen from his pocket. “Christ on a crutch,” Joe moaned, slamming open a glass door into the sporting goods store: “I should be wearing diapers!”

Returning to the car, he tossed a box of .22 shells into the glove compartment, and they took off. Heather opened her mouth, but Joe beat her to the punch:

“Don't ask, kid. Like I said, it's none of your business.”

A silent quarter-mile later, they hit their first roadblock. It consisted of all the usual amenities: two backhoes, a telephone-company truck, a generator, three ninety-thousand-pound prefab concrete four-way sewage pipe connectors, eleven worker-owned pickup trucks, twenty-one indolent hard-hats drinking beer and scratching their bellies, and one large pit emitting noxious vapors.

Joe braked, fishtailed, turned around, and sought escape from the Chamisaville quagmire by another road. For six minutes they headed due south on the bumpy dirt artery until a fairly extensive puddle, of a fluid somewhat resembling water, blocked their path: yet one more faultily constructed and sloppily interred sewage main had sprung a leak. How bad were the potholes beneath the surface? Pinching his nose, Joe decided not to risk it. No point to bogging down in that hideously noisome pool of excrement, whose fumes, no doubt, would kill them long before a Highway Department helicopter arrived to whisk them away.

They traveled in reverse for a hundred yards, negotiated a turn in someone's driveway, and chose another route in another direction. Heading west, this time, they soon found their escape route blocked by a cable TV crew whose trencher had just chopped a ditch across the road prior to laying down cable.

Asked how long the delay might be, the foreman, one of Wilkerson Busbee's hippie capitalists, replied, “Aw hell, man. It's late, we're all quitting for supper in five minutes. Tomorrow we're all going to the Hanuman fiesta. So this won't be done until the weekend.”

“But I can't drive across that trench like it is now.”

The foreman assessed first the trench, then Joe: “I never said you could, man.”

“Well, then how am I gonna get out of this crazy town?”

“Did you try Alta Mesa yet?”

“It's blocked off by another sewage-line break.”

The amiable freak scratched his head. “Geez, whaddayou know? How about Route 240?”

“It's all messed up south of the S-turn by a convention of backhoes and monstrous prefabricated concrete culverts.”

“Wow, that's too bad. Why don't you try Valverde? That'd get you a little bit south of all the construction down where they're excavating the underground cables for the high-school-and-hospital traffic light they just installed that doesn't work.”

“Are you positive Valverde is clear? Last week, didn't they yank out an old culvert and forget to replace it?”

“That was last week. I heard they installed a new one this morning.”

“I'll believe it when I see it.” Again, Joe backed up, regained 240, and hung a louie on Valverde, another quaint dirt path teeming with rocks and potholes. As they jounced over mounds of ungraded gravel covering the new culvert, Joe gave a cheer: “Free at last!” Ruffling Heather's hair, he added: “Cheer up kids, I think we made it.”

But, as always, he was a fool, he'd spoken too soon. As they rounded a bend, an enormous felled cottonwood tree blocked the route. A guy wearing a black widebrimmed Mack hat with a leopardskin band, a red-velvet sheepskin-lined Afghanistan vest on which a monkey had been embroidered, and prefaded Gucci denims, and a girl in a silk granny dress and air-force flight boots, sat on top of the tree sharing a joint.

“What the hell happened here?” Joe asked.

The Afghanistan vest shrugged: “I dunno, man. I must of miscalculated.”

“We thought it would fall the other way.” The girl giggled. “But it didn't.”

Joe said, “If it had fallen the other way it would have crushed your house.”

“Naw, it wouldn't have hit it, man. That house has got powerful karma.”

“Why did you cut it down in the first place?”

“Oh we asked it permission first,” the girl explained. “It said it was okay. Like, you know, it granted us this really beautiful favor.”

“But why?”

“Sunlight,” the vest replied. “We got a ton of skylights, but the tree was still blocking out most of the light. Plus, of course, firewood.” He extended his arm, offering the roach. “Want a toke? This is dynamite shit.”

The transmission complained loudly as Joe jammed the shifting stick into reverse, and wheezed off to search for another of their rapidly diminishing escape hatches from Chamisaville.

Heather asked, “Are you and Mommy gonna get divorced?”

“That's what she implied in her note this afternoon. In any case, she hired Chamisaville's number-one gunslinger to do the job.”

“Well, if you guys get divorced, which one are we gonna live with?”

“Neither. We'll probably send you to a military orphanage for juvenile delinquents.”

“Come on, Daddy, be serious. Which one are we gonna live with?”

“I imagine we'll split the responsibility. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Michael will live with me and you'll live with Mommy—during the days, that is. But every night you'll switch: Michael will go to spend Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights with Heidi, and you'll spend them with me. Tuesdays and Thursdays, we'll do it backwards. You'll spend the days with me and the nights with Heidi, while Michael does just the reverse. And every other weekend you'll spend together with me, except in February when you'll each spend two contiguous weekends together, first with Heidi, then with me. Got that?”

Heather said, “If you and Mommy get divorced will you marry Nancy Ryan?”

“Hey, Heather, you know sometimes you're really an obnoxious little girl.”

“Well, will you?”

“I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may tend to degrade or incriminate me.”

“I wouldn't mind that too much,” Heather said brightly. “I think it'd be neat to have two mommies. Then, after you get divorced, maybe Mommy will get married again, and we'll have two fathers, too. I hope she marries somebody who isn't a garbage man, with a real car that starts up every time and has a heater.”

“I like that. I paid your hospital bill when you were born, I changed your diapers for two solid years, I spent billions of dollars filling you full of the best food money could buy, I took you to the hospital when you had pneumonia and stood guard over you night and day until you got better, I gave you birthday parties and lavish Christmas mornings, I taught you how to bake cakes and cookies, I gave you kitties and puppies to make you happy, I held your hand on the first day of school … and you'd throw me over, just like that, for some creep in a late-model car and a cushy job.”

“I only call 'em as I see 'em,” Little Miss Wiseass rejoined.

“What about you, Michael? Don't you have any savage or ironic verbal daggers to thrust into the quivering belly of your defenseless father?”

“What's ‘ironic'?” he asked.

“It's when they put machines inside your body to make you like Superman,” Heather said before Joe could answer.

“That's ‘bionic,' you nincompoop.” Joe cuffed her head. “Ironic means, um, you know…” But he stalled. How did you explain it to a kid? “Ironic is kind of like when, well, suppose you were going to board an airplane for a flight to Denver. But at the last minute you couldn't get on it because your mother was sick. So the plane took off and crashed, killing everybody in it. You would really be counting your lucky stars your mother was sick, right? But then, say, that on your way over to see her, your car hit a patch of ice, you skidded off the road, turned over, and died. Well, it would be real ironic that, having escaped certain death in the airplane, you wound up being killed anyway in a stupid car accident on the way to see the mother who saved you from a horrible death in the first place. Is that clear?” he asked feebly, knowing damn well it was about as clear as mud.

Intellectual lazybones from the word go, both kids sagely nodded their heads. Their complaisance, their lack of curiosity, and above all their bland acceptance of such a piss-poor definition, angered Joe.

“All right, so go ahead, Heather, explain to me what ‘ironic' means.”

“But you just did, Daddy.”

“Yeah, but I wanna hear it from your own lips. Just to be sure that you correctly grasp the concept.”

“It's, you know, when a plane crashes and you have a car accident at the same time.”

Through gritted teeth, Joe said, “What about you, Michael?”

“It's like Heather said.” He averted his face from Joe's, obviously somewhat derailed by his father's emotional instability.

“No it is not like Heather said!” Joe roared belligerently. “It isn't even remotely like Heather said. In fact, it isn't even remotely like
I
said. That was a horrible definition! And you creeps just sit there, not even listening, nodding your heads like brainless automatons when it's over. Don't they encourage you to have any intellectual curiosity in school? If you don't understand something, then
raise your hands, dammit!
”

Heather said, “I have a question about something I don't understand.”

“Okay, shoot.”

Michael pointed his finger, pistol-style, at Joe: “Bang! Bang!”

Heather pushed her brother's hand away. “What I don't understand, Daddy, is how come you're kidnapping us?”

“Because you're such dear, sweet, adorable children I can't live a minute more without you.”

“We don't want to be kidnapped,” Michael said.

“Why—you hate my guts?”

“Well, where are we gonna go?” Heather asked shrilly. “What are we gonna
do?
Are we gonna live in motels? I hate motels. We won't have any friends. And anyway, Mommy promised to take us to the movies tomorrow night.”

“Oh she did, did she? What's playing?
The Son of Flubber Meets Gidget?
Honkies Versus Niggers in a Pornographic Race War?
The heartwarming story of how a woman with a clitoris in her throat learned to off corrupt cops by jabbing them with hypodermics full of battery acid when their attention was diverted by her singular talent?”

“Nuh-uh.” Michael genuinely wished to placate his old man. “It's just about killer bees that take over America.”

“Let's call it the United States of North America.” Joe was really hitting his stride, here, as a carping SOB. “I don't know where we get the arrogance to call our country America. Mexico is also America, Central America and South America are also America. And so is Canada. It's absurd for us to call ourselves America, like we're the only country that exists in America.”

That did it. They lapsed into stony silence.

A mile south of the plaza, Joe had to brake again. A small crane, a large unpiloted tar-laying machine, and a chauffeurless bulldozer blocked the route.

For almost a minute they remained stationary, confronting this latest blockade. Joe could feel his adrenaline dissolving. All the fight, all the anger, all the determination to heist his kids and blow this manic burg drained from his body, trickled down between his toes, left behind a mere shell of a man—weary, demoralized, defeated. He clung to the steering wheel as if to a life preserver. His head buzzed, his ears rang. Life was hopeless. Nothing would ever work out as he wanted it to. Why not sign up for a spiritual lobotomy, accepting enervation as a way of life? I'll eat nothing but taco chips and bean dip, I'll grow fat and lethargic and stupid. A rebel no more, I'll spend hours every day gooning at the boob tube: “Charlie's Angels,” “The Gong Show,” and “The Waltons.” Ultimately, green leaves will sprout from my earlobes as I achieve a vegetal state, devoid of ambition and passion and intelligence and sexual desire. My only quality will be Placidity Personified.

Heather broke the silence. “Why are we just sitting here?”

Joe rubbed his aching eyes. “Because I'm tired.”

“You're wasting gas letting it idle,” Michael said.