Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (7 page)

“My sperm count was over ninety million,” Boogie said. “They told me that was great.”

“Wow,” Glenn said. He took off a glove and blew on his fingers.

“That's good,” the doctor said, leaning forward from the back. “What did your wife's test show?”

“They said there wasn't anything they could find that was keeping her from getting pregnant. Just takes time, I reckon.” Boogie glanced back at the doctor. “Wouldn't you think if you shot off ninety million bullets at once, one of 'em would hit the target? And that's ninety million in about one drop. There's billions!”

“Depends on your aim!” said Glenn with an explosion of laughter.

Boogie wanted to ask the doctor whether something could have happened to Darlene in the Gulf War to cause her infertility, but he lost his nerve. The doctor thanked him for the ride when he got out.

As Boogie fooled with the windshield wiper knob, Glenn said, “This is the kind of night that makes you think it's time for Jesus to show up again. Don't it look like the end of the world? If Jesus was to come back here right in the middle of this snowstorm, boy would he be mad! He'd start making a list. First, he'd want to know why families ain't at home together of a night and why all the children's carrying guns to school. And then he'd go through all the murders and sex crimes. And he'd want to know why there's not enough snowplows in Kentucky.”

“I imagine,” Boogie said. He let Glenn continue with Jesus' list while he concentrated on his driving. There was so much crazy talk going on these days anyway, Boogie just let it swirl. The shifting, whispering sands kept drifting through his head.

He had a job to do. As he smashed through snowbanks, he pretended he was piloting an F-14, the Tomcat. He carried Phoenix and Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles. Birds and snakes. He was on combat air-patrol loiter time, he figured, waiting for the action. From the TV news, he had learned all the aircraft over there. The snowed-over DC-9 at the airport had twin engines on the sides like the A-10 Warthog. The Warthog was the ugliest plane ever built, yet it could pirouette. It could waltz and swing. It could probably even boogie. It had a cannon protruding from its nose that was powerful enough to kill a tank or a Scud launcher. It would fly in low, and so slowly that its tight moves were beautiful.

Back then, when Darlene was over there, he found out that the letters in
THE PERSIAN GULF
could be rearranged to spell
U.S. FIGHTER PLANE.
For months, he kept thinking there was surely some significance in that.

All evening, Boogie was busy saving lives. He ferried some nurses to Good Sam Hospital, on Limestone, and transported a woman to the emergency room after she had fallen on ice. The ambulances were slipping and sliding, too. He called the state police to see if he could get word about Darlene. They said traffic on I-75 was backed up for thirty miles. The governor had closed the interstates.

“I could drive this thing right on out to I-75 and find her,” Boogie said to Glenn.

“The cops don't want us out there.”

“They probably couldn't catch us in this. We'd hum right up the median.”

Glenn lit a cigarette and blew out clouds. He said, “I bet them rigs stuck on I-75 are mad as hell.”

Boogie nodded. Ernie, the truck dispatcher at the plant, would be full of tales of truckers trying to get their shipments through the mountains south of Lexington.

A stranded motorist cussed at Boogie for refusing to drive him to the mall. “Sorry, buddy,” Boogie said with a wave. “Hospitals have priority.”

At one of their stops, a nurse handed them slices of pizza and paper cups of coffee. Gratefully, they gulped the hot food. Boogie felt warmer. He wondered if Jesus would like pizza. A moment before, Glenn had pronounced Jesus a Republican. Glenn was a one-man talk show.

Boogie's toes felt frozen. He couldn't seem to get any heat from the engine. The Humvee was canvas-topped, so the cold came right in. On the desert, it would have been the heat. Darlene had told him it was so hot she thought she'd die. She got an infected sunburn, despite precautions. It was so dark in Desert Storm, he thought as he headed out Nicholasville to Man o' War. He recalled his fear the night the ground war began. The vision of all those tanks rumbling along seemed even darker and more hazardous than the air war. When planes like the Tomcat and the Strike Eagle took off at night, you could see a dim silhouette on the runway, in the blackness, but mainly all you saw were blinking lights and long plumes of blue-white flame bursting from the afterburners. In combat, the afterburners would glow again. Now he felt his afterburners charge. He imagined fireworks and speed.

He turned down a side street. A snowplow had created a bank of snow at the entrance to the next street. He busted effortlessly through the three-foot dune.

“Hot damn!” cried Glenn. “My little boys would sure love this.”

When they arrived back at the armory, a news team was on the scene, its familiar van topped with a satellite dish like a huge suction cup. An attractive woman was waving a microphone at him. She was standing by a snowbank. He recognized her face from the evening news—gorgeous Shelley Collins. He hadn't realized she would be so tall. She was tall like a camel.

“Could I talk with you a moment, sir? We're live on camera.”

Carefully, Boogie picked his way through the snow toward the woman. He didn't want to fall on television. He shivered with cold.

“What's your name?” she asked. She didn't even have a hat on. Her glowing blond hair was round like a helmet. Snowflakes buzzed around her face like moths.

“Boogie Jones,” he said. “William Jones, actually, but everybody calls me Boogie.” Did he have to explain this? He felt embarrassed. Who would care what his name was or even whether he was embarrassed?

“Well, Boogie, I see that you have been helping to get some emergency errands done. Can you tell us a little about what it's like to ride around in one of these Humvees that we see behind us here?”

“Well, they're powerful machines,” Boogie said, stomping the numbness from one foot. “You can drive 'em anywhere. The Humvee can go just about anywhere you want it to go except straight up.” He laughed. “It would put a billy goat to shame.”

“And how warm is it inside there? Pretty chilly?”

Boogie laughed again. He could imagine sailing easily into the deep waters of flirtation. He said, “It's got a manifold heater, meaning the heat comes off the engine? And it ain't much. It's about like having a dog breathe on your boots.”

He was about to add that he was looking for his wife, that she was lost in the snow, but Shelley Collins thanked him briskly and said, “Now, back to you, Murray.”

Ten minutes later, inside the armory, as Boogie hovered over a radiator trying to get thawed out, a state policeman came in calling, “William Jones. William Jones.” Boogie jumped.

“Got word from your wife,” the officer said with a smile. “She saw you on television and got a cop to radio in. She said to tell you she's fine.”

Darlene didn't get home until early Wednesday, when the interstates opened. She had been stranded north of Lexington and hadn't gone to Pineville. She came in chattering and complaining that her hair was dirty. She went to fill the bird feeder first thing and saw that he had filled it. She seemed edgy and impatient. It was sort of fun, she told him after she had made some coffee. She had been holed up with about fifty people—mostly truckers—in a motel lobby. The motel let them have cots and bedding.

He gazed at her, his wife, imagining her sleeping in a motel lobby with a bunch of truckers. Or in the desert with an army. They had never really discussed what she might have done in Saudi Arabia. Whenever he brought it up, she snapped something about trust. He recalled her words when he met her at the airport on her return. All smiles, she had said, “There's my rootin', tootin', boot-scootin' Boogie!”

“There were some little kids at the motel,” she said now, handing him a mug of coffee. “Their parents were bored stiff, but the kids were so full of life. I made a snowman with a couple of little boys. One of the kids was named Shane and the other one was Jade. I told them a story about the Great Snowman. I told them to make a wish and the Great Snowman would bring them something nice. Their daddy watched me like a hawk. You can't even carry on a conversation with a child these days without everybody jumping on you.”

She began to sob. A rigor surged up Boogie's spine, like a snake swishing. He grasped her and held her tight, as if he were catching her as she was falling.

“I was so worried about you,” he said, his face brushing her ponytail. Her hair was oily and smelled of tobacco.

“I couldn't get word to you,” she said. “I should have stayed with Mama.”

“It was strange,” he said. “When you were over there in the war, I kept looking for you on television and never could find you. And this time you found me on television.”

She stopped crying. “I had a dream about the war,” she said, breaking away from him. “I thought I was in the barracks again. For a second, I thought a Scud had hit.”

She sat down on the couch. He moved aside a pillow and sat close to her, putting his arm around her. She squirmed.

“It was just the snowstorm,” she said. “There was lightning, and the thunder woke me up. I couldn't believe it was thunder. How could it be thunder?”

“It was thunder snow,” Boogie said soothingly. “When you have lightning and thunder in a snowstorm, they call it thunder snow.”

“I thought it was old So-Damn Insane after me.” She laughed and blew her nose.

“No, old Saddam won't ever get you, not if I can help it,” said Boogie, grinning.

He remembered the fireworks over Baghdad, the dark sky above Kuwait, the black oil slick—all the pictures he had seen on television. He didn't know what she had seen over there. It would have been entirely different, he realized. It wouldn't have been those pictures at all.

“I wasn't crying over the war,” she said. “I wish you would just forget about that. I wanted to make snow cream with those little boys. I wanted to do that worse than anything. You're not supposed to make it anymore, everything's so dirty, but that new snow looked so pure. I haven't had snow cream in forever.”

“I bet we could make some,” said Boogie hopefully. “We could dig down and get some clean snow out from underneath.”

“I don't think we've got any vanilla,” she said.

“We haven't got any milk either,” he said, disappointed. “I forgot to get any.” For a moment, he felt inadequate, as if the best he could do for her was reassure her that thunder could indeed occur in a snowstorm. But he knew he could do better than that. It struck him that he had to stop hovering over her so much, so a clear avenue would open up between them.
Then
they would have a baby. It had to be this gulf between them that was keeping a family from taking root. He knew it would seem silly if he said that aloud, but there was truth to it, he was sure.

Darlene stood up, shivering, like a tree shedding snow from its branches in the wind. Her hair was pulled back with a ruffle of gauze, a glorified rubber band. Her eyes had slightly blue shadows under them. He stood beside his wife, speechless, as she vibrated with energy.

She said, “As soon as the roads are clear, I'm heading down to Pineville with Fentress's medicine. I'll have to take off from work again, but she's got to have it by tomorrow night.”

What flashed into Boogie's mind was the Tomahawk cruise missile, sailing directly above a Baghdad street, with tiny little fold-up wings like some weird bug's. It cruised along as if it had a mind of its own, and when it reached the corner, it turned left.

Rolling into Atlanta

Each night when Annie got in from work, she watched the late movie on TV and ate a cold boiled egg with a Coca-Cola, sometimes with sesame crackers if she remembered to bring a few packets from the restaurant where she had been a hostess for the past two weeks. She had been drifting off to sleep between one and two, and at five o'clock a loud noise somewhere in the building always woke her briefly and made her visualize a door slamming on her past. That she translated every sensation into metaphor nowadays was perfectly appropriate, she thought.

She was staying in a rent-free condo. The owner, a lawyer named Clayton Scoville, was white-water rafting on the Zambezi. She had never met him and didn't know what he looked like. There were no photographs in the place, just undistinguished oil reproductions (a mountain, a waterfall, birds in flight). She wasn't used to such luxury—Mexican-style tile, curvilinear cabinets, halogen lighting, bottomless carpet, two bathrooms. Red parrots cavorted in the emerald jungle print on the shower curtains. The lawyer used black bath soap, bright green towels. He subscribed to
Outside
and
Time
and
Smart Money.
A closet was crammed with sporting goods, mostly items that didn't seem to belong here in Atlanta—ice skates, skis, ski clothing, a fur-lined cap with fold-down earflaps. She imagined he was a person who could pick up and leave, a person like her. She had arrived with two suitcases and within hours had bought a secondhand Honda Civic that had been repossessed by a finance company. In the car's trunk were a pair of baggy-style shorts and a matching loud-pink floral shirt—size ten, too large for Annie—and a tattered copy of
Freaky Deaky.

Tonight a fund-raising pledge drive on the public television station had delayed the late movie, so Annie turned on the classic-rock radio station she listened to in the mornings. The Rolling Stones were coming to Atlanta later in the month, and the station was sponsoring a contest for free tickets. The D.J.s urged listeners to construct and decorate a box, no larger than seven by four by three, to live in for twenty-four hours, in isolation. The best three boxes would be set up in a corner of the studio. Annie had been hearing Stones music all week, and its raunchy urgency made her feel important things were happening in this city. She liked Atlanta—its clean, busy beauty. She opened the sliding doors to the sundeck and finished her Coke out there. The deck—with a tub of gardenias, a cherry-tomato plant, and a clematis climbing a trellis—opened out into a cozy, fenced yard. It was a mild autumn night, and the lights over at the shopping center silhouetted the feathery palm trees outside the nearby T.G.I. Friday's. The sound of the radio spilled out like light into the dim parking lot.

Annie was a sort of undercover agent. She had been hostessing at a Chez Suzanne's in Texas and had met one of the executives, Andrew Parrell, from the New Orleans corporate headquarters. She had drinks with him a couple of times, and he hired her to seek out irregularities at the chain's Atlanta restaurant. He even found her this place to stay—Clayton Scoville was an old friend of his. So that the Atlanta management wouldn't suspect, she had to interview for the job, which she got on the spot. Andrew wanted her just to observe, to find out if anything funny was going on. He suspected stealing. She wrote detailed daily reports on staff morale and telephoned Andrew every two or three days.

Annie Rhodes, Girl P.I. It sounded like one of the juvenile mysteries she used to read. It had a nice ring to it. And she'd earn more money than before—even more if she got to switch to cocktailing. Andrew wanted her to stay a month or two, and then he would send her to another restaurant. She hadn't minded leaving Texas, a place she didn't really know anyway. It was just the place she landed after college. Most of her college friends had spread out, and a few of them were in the Southeast, so she jumped at the chance to come here.

“Just be yourself,” Andrew said reassuringly. “And don't get personally involved.”

She was herself, for the most part. The lie was the guy she'd moved here to be near. Andrew said she had to have a cover. So she invented Scott. He was six feet tall, a runner, and he had dark hair with a little kink to it. His work had something to do with computers. He traveled the South, coming to Atlanta frequently on jobs that were vague in her mind, but she hit on some realistic touches about him. His mother was a Catholic and his father a Protestant; they ran a grocery in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Scott had a retarded sister in an institution. He broke his leg once playing football. Annie had met him at school, where he had a computer-science scholarship that paid for everything but his books. His grandmother paid for his books, Annie figured.

Annie, the Spy. So far, she hadn't noticed anything unusual. The caramel drops on the meringue dessert; the food inspectors hanging around a long time one evening, buddy-buddies with the manager; the waitress who had once worked for the Carter family when Jimmy Carter was in the statehouse—“A cold fish if you ever saw one,” she said, and shivered.

Annie's hostess smile was efficient and convincing. She had heard that keeping up such an act made that sort of job among the world's most stressful, but she didn't mind. It was like being on automatic pilot. Occasionally, a man tried to slip her a five for a good table. But that was against policy. Tonight she noticed that the ficus tree in the foyer was remarkably dusty and sticky. Its leaves gave off a gummy substance that had dripped to the floor. In the mellow, atmospheric lighting the splotches were hardly noticeable, but her senses seemed sharpened now. She felt incredibly observant. She noticed the small ways the design of the abstract beige-and-blue decor varied from that at the sister restaurant. She noticed the supply of maraschino cherries arriving in a stained box that had been taped together; the colored lights that danced in the outdoor fountain at a slightly different speed from the similar fountain lights at the Texas place; the bartender's cold, sad eyes. He had told her he had a daughter in college, a daughter who had frilly hair like hers. He used the word “frilly.” He meant permed.

During the pre-dinner lull, she mentioned the sticky ficus to the head waiter, Wes Simmons, a pleasant fellow who seemed to be on good terms with everyone. Wes had a silly manner of joking with the staff, but at the same time Annie detected a genuineness beneath his conventional Southern charm. He was good-looking, in a weird way.

“Why don't they get an artificial tree?” he said, testing his shoe on a sticky spot. “This is ridiculous.”

Theresa, a waitress with a modest, outdated punk hairstyle, said, “That tree's got a case of scale.” She felt the leaves. “You can't hardly see them. They're little bitty brown bugs that make all that sticky stuff.”

“What can I do with it?” said Wes, squinting at the underside of a leaf. “Spray it right here, with all this food?”

“Set it out in the sun for two weeks,” advised Theresa. “And repotting helps.”

“You can put it on my sundeck,” said Annie.

“I'll have to do something,” Wes said. He yawned, then apologized. “I was in line since midnight last night to get Stones tickets and then found out they wouldn't take Visa! But this nice lady in line with me offered to let me borrow the cash. Nowadays something like that is so hard to believe, and then I think: Hurray, this is still the Old South.” He lifted his shoe again and examined the sole.

“Oh, do you have any extra tickets?” Annie asked. She hadn't even imagined being able to get tickets.

“All I got are spoken for. I wish I could help you out.”

“I love the Stones. My sister saw them once in Lexington, but I was too young to go.”

“I always say if I could just see the Rolling Stones, I could die happy,” Wes said dreamily. He moved into the dining area and straightened a stack of napkins. Casually he twirled a peach-hued napkin into a fan and thrust it into a wineglass. Annie had learned that he had an extensive collection of
Nova
shows on tape and that he used to work for an escort service, but she didn't know what to make of those facts. She wondered if she should have mentioned her sister in Lexington. Maybe she should have made up a brother in Chillicothe, Ohio. She shouldn't have offered her sundeck for the sick plant.

In the kitchen later in the evening, Wes grabbed a croissant and stuffed it with a hunk of chicken.

“My tastes don't run to paté and coq au vin,” he said as he squirted ketchup onto his sandwich. “Want to go with me to Uncle Frog's Rib Shack sometime and get some real food?”

“What would my boyfriend say?”

“He'd say I feed you good,” he said, teasing. “Sorry I can't take you to see the Stones. I could take you to Stone Mountain. But I guess that would be a dumb substitute.”

“Did you mean what you said—that you could die happy if you saw the Rolling Stones?”

“Sometimes I think like that,” he said, embarrassed. “I just can't think of anything that would top the Stones, ecstasy-wise.”

The way he said “ecstasy-wise” made Annie laugh. He was mocking the restaurant manager's pompous jargon. She liked Wes, but she caught herself, as if there were a child inside her about to slam through a car windshield. What if she fell in love with him? She suddenly felt as though she were in a movie but simultaneously watching it, waiting to see what would happen. That evening at a corner table a pair of lovers were celebrating their engagement. They ordered everything rich, starting with brandy Alexanders and oysters on the half shell and finishing with fluted chocolate cups plopped full of peanut-butter mousse. He gave her the ring during the dessert, just after the champagne was poured. Annie got the impression that the proposal had been a total surprise to the woman. Annie heard her whine, “But I have to study for my CPA exam.”

“When are you going to settle down?” Annie's father wanted to know when she called her parents a little later that evening. She used the pay phone in the corridor by the restrooms and called collect, something her parents still insisted she do.

“I'm not through rambling yet,” she said. “I haven't even been to California. Or Alaska. I want to go to Alaska and roam around the tundra someday.”

“It's cold in Alaska,” he said. “Do you plan to live in an igloo?”

“Funny, Dad. Very funny.”

She didn't tell her parents she was working undercover. They watched too much television.

Her father said, “I worry about you, honey. Atlanta's a big city.”

“Yes, but it's really very interesting. Everything's called Peachtree here. Peachtree Street. Peachtree Plaza. It's a real peachy place.”

“I know I can't talk you into getting a handgun, but at least you need a dog.”

The thought of a dog struck her deeply, like what journalists call hard news. She hadn't had a dog in three years. She didn't mind being alone, and she kept thinking fondly of her suddenly widowed aunt Helen, who had jaunted off to Europe alone when getting a refund on the trip she'd planned with her husband proved to be problematic. Aunt Helen had the adventure of her life. It occurred to Annie that she'd rather have a dog than the ghostly Scott, who was beginning to seem like a creep. The notion of Scott had come to her during the flight to Atlanta, when she read an article about Japan in an airline magazine. In Japan, there were agencies that rented people out as wedding guests. It was cheaper to rent a person to play an old grandmother than to ship the real one in from the mountains. And people wanted important guests at their weddings, so they rented actors to impersonate public officials. All week Annie had been thinking about how some people wanted to believe that appearance and reality were the same. Later that evening, she realized that when she said good night to the bartender and told him she was going to see Scott that weekend she had momentarily believed it was true. She drove home from work, imagining Scott as one of those rag-doll dummies frightened women set in their passenger seats to ward off strangers.

“Andrew, I don't have much to report. Agnes went home early with an upset stomach. Frank, the salad man, said his car was being repossessed. One of the busboys flirted with me.”

“You're doing fine,” said Andrew. “It'll take a while.”

“One of the customers insisted he smelled pot in the restroom.”

“Write that down. And just keep your eyes open. I always thought the problem there could turn out to be drugs.”

“Are you kidding? You didn't mention that.” Annie was exasperated with Andrew at times. He assumed too much, and he had such a limited life. All he did besides work was watch
Star Trek
reruns and ESPN. She knew little more about him except that he was stingy and insisted on a first-name basis with Annie, which made her feel peculiar and wary. She was glad she hadn't slept with him those times she went out with him. He was too old, for one thing.

“I'll tell you exactly what to do, and you'll be fully protected,” he was saying.

“I don't know if I can handle this.”

“Don't worry. You're doing fine.”

“You didn't tell me about this before.”

“Just act normal. Nobody knows who you are.”

She hung up the phone and sped eggshell fragments down the garbage disposal. She turned on her late movie and double-checked the chain on the door. Andrew was in outer space, she thought. She couldn't imagine a serious drug problem at the restaurant. The bar was so relaxed, the clientele upscale, the waiters so correct. She wondered about Boyd and Jim, the rock-and-roll busboys. They belonged to a band called Exact Change Lane. Boyd used to work in Texas, and he had chatted with Annie about how Dallas had changed. Annie hadn't realized it had changed. The only time she was in Dallas there had been a horrible crash on the highway because of the blinding sunset reflections off one of the gold-glass buildings on the outskirts of the city. Boyd and Jim acted a bit haughty because they played in a band, but Annie liked most of the people she worked with. She had gone for drinks with some of the staff a few times after work. They were beer drinkers, except for Yvonne, who liked rusty nails for their sweetness. Yvonne had black Diana Ross hair and wore huge amounts of amethyst jewelry. Annie went out for ice cream with another waitress who confided she was having an affair and her husband didn't suspect. Annie felt like a rat, reporting the woman's secret to Andrew, who wasn't even interested. Everyone asked Annie, “How do you like Atlanta?” and everyone said Atlanta was on the move.