Zod Wallop (23 page)

Allan zipped his fly up. He could see a light in the farm house perhaps a mile away.

“I ain’t gonna hurt you,” the man said.

“It’s okay,” Allan said.

The man was drawing the wallet from Allan’s pocket. “I’m glad you think it’s okay,” the man said. “I’m glad you’re okay with this loan.”

“No,” Allan said. “It’s okay if you hurt me.” Allan would have liked to explain, just something brief about the effort it took to keep the rage in check—like being tormented by a thousand biting fleas and not allowed to scratch, and how pain could come as a welcome distraction.

The man laughed, spittle spraying Allan’s neck. He didn’t understand though, Allan was sure of that. “Like it, huh? Like having your butt whipped, boy? Like—”

The fat man was a gift, Allan thought, as though an angel had taken pity on his anguish and said, “Here’s something to hold you until you get to Florida. Here’s something to scratch.”

Allan held the whirlwind for two more beats, wondered if the fat man could hear the hum of straining engines, and then brought his right hand up and back and caught the man’s knife-wielding hand by the wrist. Allan’s own hand had known—full of the power—that the fat man’s wrist would be there, just so. Allan had even anticipated the feel of that wrist, rubbery and slick with sweat so that a firm, iron grasp was required.

The fat man’s wrist broke as Allan turned. The man screamed and sunk to his knees.

Allan lifted the man and slammed him on the ground.

“
Oof
,” the man said, saying the word precisely—as though reading a cartoon balloon out loud. The fat man got on his knees and tried to crawl away. His jeans were sliding down and Allan saw the crack of his ass and flesh the color of soap.

Allan lifted the man again, turned him. The man was heavier now, which meant that the rage was subsiding. Allan leaned into the man and pistoned a half-dozen blows into the broad belly and the man lolled toward him, sour breath burning Allan’s nostrils, dirty long hair licking Allan’s ear like a spider web encountered in a dank cellar, the man’s body thick and stupid now, nothing to rage at except dumb flesh.

Allan rolled the man into the ditch, made sure that he landed face up and wouldn’t drown in the inch of mosquito-rich water, and turned away.

He found his wallet in the weeds. The keys were in the car. Allan started the car and pulled back onto the asphalt two-lane. He had no idea where he was. He assumed the road led somewhere and the dashboard compass assured him he was headed south. Time would reveal more. He felt a mild regret that the man had had so little fight. Something, a small cut, some blood, would have been soothing.

T
HEY
A
TE
A
T
a family restaurant called The Pink Seahorse. The decor was tacky American tourist, with plastic lobsters, lamps made from mollusks, and paintings of sailboats and lighthouses. The restaurant was crowded with old people who ate with hunched intensity, uncertain, perhaps, of future meals. Out the window, Harry could see a tiny glittering shard of the ocean between two buildings. They had arrived.

Including an eight-dollar tip, the meal came to fifty-eight twenty-two. Raymond had four dollars and sixteen cents; Rene had a single quarter. Emily and Arbus had no money at all. Harry had two twenties, a dime and a quarter, and Helen, who said she would pay with a credit card and then discovered that, in her haste to meet Harry, she had left her cards in what she called her “dress” purse, scavenged sixteen dollars and eleven cents.

They paid for the meal and left the restaurant, exiting into a St. Petersburg sunset as effusively colored as any amateur oil painting, colors straight from the tube. Harry stood on the sidewalk as his companions bunched up around him. Their entire capital now consisted of two one dollar bills and change amounting to sixty-five cents.

The plan had been to locate the St. Petersburg Arms and register there for the night, but it seemed that they had miscalculated. While Harry was quite rich, he had no credit cards and was used to going to his local bank for cash as required. He could, perhaps, convince a bank of his identity, have funds wired… It was late in the day for such activities, however, and Harry was, in any event, more than a little paranoid. They were fugitives, after all. It was possible that a call to his bank could reveal his present location.

“My Lord,” Raymond interrupted. “We must press on. We must obtain shelter before the sky is filled with their eyes.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have money for lodging. We’ll have to spend the night in the car, or on the beach, and in the morning—”

“That won’t do at all,” Raymond said.

Raymond, Harry thought, was that particular brand of crazy characterized by immense stubbornness, an inability to reconcile what was with what should be. Indeed, all craziness might have something to do with a childish refusal to let go of a privileged view of the universe and get down in the dirt with reality.

Refusing to believe that your daughter could die, a voice within Harry said. That sort of thing?

“Ho! There’s what we want, my Lord.” Raymond launched himself across the street. The traffic was light, and those few cars on the street moved slowly, silver and black and gold cars like big, regal fish. Raymond easily dodged them, moving toward an illuminated sign reading:
ST. PETERSBURG FIRST NATIONAL SAVINGS AND LOAN
. Rene pushed Emily across the street in Raymond’s wake and Helen, with Arbus in her arms, followed.

“Dammit!” Harry shouted. “Wait!”

Nobody waited.

Grumbling, Harry ran into the street. A black Cadillac screeched to a halt and an old man wearing a suit and a hat leaned out the window and screamed, “Are you crazy?”

Harry ducked his head and kept running.

He found the others standing in front of an
ATM
. The computer screen’s green letters announced that it was prepared to handle banking needs twenty-four hours a day.

Raymond was leaning forward, smiling at the message.

He stood up as Harry came up behind him. “My Lord,” he said, “this drone will give us money. I have never availed myself of one of these machines, but I have seen them operated by others. You need only put your card in, push your secret code, four numbers I believe, and ask for a sum commensurate with your needs.”

So delighted was Raymond, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet, eyes bright, that Harry was reluctant to tell him that he had never used such a machine and did not have the faintest idea how to operate one and did not, in any event, have a card or a personal code to unlock its electronic mysteries.

He put an arm on Raymond’s shoulder. He looked hard into Raymond’s blue eyes and gave him all the sad news.

“They are very easy to use,” Raymond insisted. “They have a menu. It tells you what to do, step by step.”

Harry explained that this was all well and good, but that—to repeat himself—he did not possess the necessary automatic teller card.

Raymond turned and sat down on one of the cement steps. He pulled out his wallet, a brown, frayed object that resembled some sort of baked pastry.

“Ha ha!” Raymond said, dramatically producing a rectangular piece of yellow cardboard. He held it in the air at arm’s length. “A card,” he said.

It was, indeed, a card, a business card. It read:
MADAME RAMONE’S PALM READING
in some sort of faux 3-
D
type whose lines converged on a badly drawn open hand. Smaller type, to the right and left of the hand, noted various other arcane services offered by Ms. Ramone (including something called “Entrails Divining”) and an address in Trenton, New Jersey.

“Raymond,” Harry said, sitting down beside the younger man. “That isn’t the sort of card this machine accepts.”

Raymond studied the card. He turned it over. It was blank on the back.

Raymond fumbled in the pockets of his baggy pants, produced a pen, and began to write, printing slowly, his tongue slipping out to wet his mustache, invoking, Harry assumed, some deeper state of concentration.

When he was finished—the task was slow and arduous and caused sweat to erupt on Raymond’s forehead—he handed the card to Harry.

The flair pen, executing a series of straight, blocky letters, had achieved the following message:
PLEASE GIVE US
$300
DOLLARS. WE HAVE URGENT NEED OF THE MONEY, AND WE WILL REPAY IT AFTER, BLODKIN WILLING, THIS CRISIS IS AVERTED. I WILL TYPE
1234
FOR A CODE. THANK YOU. RAYMOND STORY.

Harry handed the card back to Raymond with new respect for that man’s insanity. It was a kind of pure saintly madness, beyond reproach, really, consistent in its otherworldliness.

Harry said nothing as Raymond stood up and approached the waiting computer screen. Raymond found the slot and gingerly inserted the card. He turned to Harry and smiled, a pleasant, faintly put-upon smile that said, Although you have all been doubters and impediments, I will never flaunt this triumph. I am not petty.

The machine spit out the card. Raymond took the card and inserted it again. Again the machine rejected it.

Harry didn’t wanted to see the dim, sad dawning of something like resignation in Raymond’s eyes. He didn’t want to look at the others either because that defeat would be there too, mirrored in their eyes.

A potent mixture of embarrassment and guilt caused Harry to turn and move slowly away, a hands-in-pockets stroll, studying the weeds between the sidewalk’s cracks.
No, never seen those folks. Yes, they do look as though they recently escaped from some mental institution
.

An old woman was walking a dachshund, and the dog stopped to sniff Harry’s shoes. The woman was very small and frail, with wisps of white hair tucked under a gray knit cap. She wore a lavender dress and a pink, gossamer scarf. The woman smiled at Harry and said, “That’s a lovely dog you have.”

“It’s your dog,” he said, and instantly regretted saying this. Her eyes widened and then her face seemed to shrink with pain, fighting to keep the smile. “Oh,” she said. “Of course it is.”

She turned quickly, back the way she had come. The dog, hurried away by his mistress, cast one last look back, a look—Harry was certain—of reproach.

Everyone seemed to be crazy. And the coin of the realm was disillusionment. Harry sighed.

He might as well face the music.

As he came back down the sidewalk, he saw Raymond lean forward and gather the bills from the machine, snapping the currency out like paper towels from a rest-room dispenser. Raymond punched a key and his card was returned to him.

He held the card up, as though he were a celebrity touting the virtues of some credit vendor, and said, “I put it in upside down at first. What was I thinking?”

Harry said nothing.

When Raymond suggested that they move along, Harry agreed.

By the time Harry was in the car and driving again, with Helen bending over a map of the city and complaining about the size of the type, he realized that he felt, all things considered, rather good, rather hopeful.

They had reached their destination. And the magic hadn’t played out yet. Reality had not reasserted itself. Hope then. Hope for miracles.

Gabriel lay in bed under the covers, her head propped up by a half dozen pillows. Harry Gainesborough’s grim children’s book rested on the incline of her thighs. She studied the illustration of her son. In the painting he wore a shirt that appeared to be chain mail but which, upon close scrutiny, was seen to be made from linked pop-tops of the sort that one peeled off soda and beer cans before the advent of a higher ecological consciousness and the end of aluminum, tadpolelike litter. The artist’s skill in rendering this tremendous detail in a style that nonetheless suggested great spontaneity would have dazzled a student of illustration, but Gabriel’s sole concern was the story itself. Her son, whose elongated features and jutting brow displayed an implausibly angelic expression, was in grave danger, standing in a stone room whose shadows glowed with steel highlights, the mercury glitter of needles and knives, and the claws of mechanical killing machines. Gabriel read this part repeatedly, hoping each time that it would end less cruelly. A foolish hope, perhaps, but one engendered by a sense that the story did change somewhat with each reading. Gabriel could not have explained this exactly. She knew only that Henry Bottle—for that was his name in
Zod Wallop
—seemed sometimes closer to salvation…and sometimes his doom seemed inevitable.

So Gabriel read:

Henry Bottle was guided by Love and Hate. Either will serve as a guide in Zod Wallop, and only the Duke of Flatbend had ever been able to sort them out, and then only for a moment, only long enough for a small girl named Lydia to walk, foolishly, through the door of that moment with a purity and innocence that changed the balance forever, sent the two Vile Contenders into final conflict, and awakened the Cold One and his terrible, inevitable companion, the Abyss Dweller.

Henry Bottle had come across the long Desert of Academics, across the burned-out flats of Elite Despond, through the Forest of Burning Trees and, finally, to the dying ocean where Lord Draining reigned at Grimfast. He had come to tell a lady of the court that he loved her and, for her sake, to perform great deeds. In the journey, a dark spell had fallen upon him, and he had come to hate the lady, and so he arrived just as quickly and just as passionately with a will to destroy anything at hand that might remind him of his folly.