by David Beem
Next, Consuelo tricked Mark, one of four employees known collectively as the Apostles. Mark had been tying his shoe near the cow’s buttocks, and when Consuelo had snuck up behind him and made the mouth-fart noise, blond-haired, blue-eyed Mark had tucked and rolled into the parking lot like an Aryan ninja.
Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John accept the presence of the cow as their solemn responsibilities. Having shown up for work to find “divine providence,” the Apostles had gone straight to Brad to ask that they be allowed to shepherd it to safer pastures. They are in El Cerrito, after all. Gang activity, while not rampant, occasionally boiled over. Cows are hardly known for their street smarts.
Then there is Christine.
Christine has shown up for her shift at the drive through wearing the same uniform she’d worn the day before. She doesn’t care that she still smelled like chicken. The whole place smelled like chicken. The Christian Chicken couldn’t be washed out. Not out of her clothes. Not out of her hair. It took a good three-day hiatus—showering twice a day—before she could get the Spirit of the Lord out of her pores. And after this, what with the introduction of the artificially intelligent cow into the mix, it will take half a day longer and a stronger, more abrasive soap.
Chapter Twelve
As if it isn’t enough she had to look at Christian fast-food slogans all day (Pray all day at Cluck-n-Pray!), now “the Lord” had “seen fit” to send them…Actual Cow.
This place gets weirder and weirder every day.
Expelling a fierce sigh, Christine folds her arms and clicks her tongue. “When that thing makes a poo, I ain’t gonna be the one cleaning it up.”
“Way to team spirit, Christine,” says Mathew, picking something out of his teeth with a fingernail.
“Team spirit my big fat butt,” she replies.
Consuelo makes a fart sound, and when no one jumps, Mark punches him in the arm.
“Amazing,” says Brad. “It’s a miracle.”
“You’ve obviously never heard a cow scream before,” she says. The cow’s head jerks up, turns its gaze on her, tenses its brow. Christine steps reflexively back, her stomach clenching.
“This one won’t have to,” says Brad, apparently oblivious to the exchange.
“That’s what I’m saying. We can take care of it,” says Luke, who strokes Christine’s arm. “Hey. You okay?”
“Hmm?” She pulls her arm back and turns away from the cow. “Oh yeah. You were saying. Take care of it or something.”
“That’s right,” says Luke. “It could walk into the middle of the street.”
She rolls her eyes, and her gaze lands on the cow, which is now peering out at traffic like it’s gauging how difficult it would be to Frogger it across the street.
“Weird…” she mutters, tension creeping into her shoulders.
“So,” says Luke, clapping his hands in that stupid Bible school rhythm thing he does, and swaying his hips to the Wonder Bread soul of it all. “Come on, guys! How should we divvy up cow patrol?”
“I’ll draw up a schedule,” replies Brad. “And guys, this is providence.”
“Praise the Lord,” Mathew replies, smiling broadly at Brad like the suck-up he is, but when Brad blushes over the too-overt suck-up-titude, Mathew shrugs it off and goes back to picking his teeth.
“This is our big chance, guys,” says Brad.
“Wait a minute,” says John. “You mean the Q? You mean show Judas Christian once and for all which store loves God more?”
“Uh-huh,” replies Brad, his eyebrows going up and down. “Let’s use the cow at the Qualcomm spot this year, guys. It’ll be great! We’ll crush Judas. The Mission Gorge branch won’t stand a chance against us when we show up with a cow mascot. And the Lord’s light will shine down upon our food truck! And He’ll sayeth: Behold the Cluckin’ Nuggets will be plentiful!”
Everyone laughs—except for her, like always. She rolls her eyes, this time adding a fluttering eyelash variant. Consuelo makes another fart sound, this time adding a sneering lip variant.
“Nice,” she says, nodding appreciatively as they bump fists. Little differences like that show a person cares about the quality of their work, she always said.
“You got spit on your chin,” says Mark.
Consuelo wipes his chin—finds it dry—and Mark flips his finger under Consuelo’s nose.
“Shall we pray?” asks Mark.
“Not this again,” she replies.
“I’m not here.” Brad raises his hands in absolution and stalks back into the store.
She scowls at his back. Look at him. Like he doesn’t know damn well all the Christians Gone Wild crap happening when he’s looking the other way. Like his blind eye isn’t the same thing as endorsement. Of all the Cluck-n-Prays in the world, she just had to apply to the one with the “edgy” Christian counterculture. Front-line foot soldiers for Jesus, and all of them convinced praying doesn’t count unless you’re risking jail time.
“This place is a godforsaken Chicken Church.”
“You’re the only one forsaking Him, Christine,” Mark replies. “Now, gather round.”
Mathew, Mark, Luke, John—and Consuelo—join hands in a circle.
“You too, Christine,” says Mark. “What’s the matter? Afraid of a teensy-weensy little prayer?”
“Look, Beatitude Butt,” she says, folding her arms. “There is no war on Christianity in El Cerrito, or anywhere else in the greater San Diego area. Okay?”
“You say that a lot,” Mark replies.
“Fine. You sure you don’t wanna wait for the cops to roll up so they can ticket you for drive-through proselytizing?”
“Can they do that?” asks John.
“I don’t get your position, is all,” says Mathew, his tone gratingly reasonable. “I mean, if you don’t believe in God, then what harm is there in praying to Him? Seems like it shouldn’t matter to you.”
“Maybe she’s chicken,” says Luke.
“She sure smells like chicken,” says Mark.
“Buh-KAW,” says John.
Her eyebrows lower, her mouth sags open. She expels a contemptuous burst of air. “Puh-lease. What is this? Kindergarten?”
“You’re the only one who’s being juvenile, Christine,” says Mathew, using that gratingly reasonable voice again. Consuelo, his head bowed in ready-to-pray mode, makes another fart sound. “And him,” adds Mathew.
“Screw you guys,” she replies, dragging her feet over and joining hands with the rest. “Just get it over with.” She grits her teeth and clenches her eyes.
“Let us pray,” says Mark, and, despite her best effort to scream the lyrics of “Devil’s Child” in her head, she cannot block out Mark’s stupid cow prayer.
“Dear Lord,” says Mark, “we come together this fine morning—all of us, most especially Christine here, who has an eternal soul in desperate need of Your salvation—”
Heat erupts like a nuclear bomb in her midsection. Mark’s nauseating voice rakes over her skin. Something about using the cow to sell ten times more chicken at the football game than the Mission Gorge branch, and how Judas is always lying about his sales figures. Blah, blah, blah. When the amen comes, she wrests her hands back and rubs the sweat off on her slacks. The queasiness is in her bones. Jerks. Casting one last glance at the cow before pulling the door open, she pauses, half-inside, half-out. Something about the glint in the cow’s eyes is giving off a weird, Stephen King vibe. Like it wants to give her a red balloon and snatch her into the sewers. But, really. An interdimensional killer cow clown? Nobody would read a book like that.
Chapter Thirteen
My eyes open.
The curtains on my windows are glowing at the edges. The picture of my dad and me I keep on my desk is silhouetted by sunrise. We’re fishing. Catalina Island. Most days I see that picture and my eyes go right over it. Some days I really look at it. It’s his body language I see today. The way he holds his shoulders. The angle of his neck, and how it’s broadcasti
ng he’s had a thought just occur to him; the shape of his smile as he gazes at me holding up the fish. The frozen-in-time body language is all that’s left of him suggesting he’d once been a real person. Someone who’d once been a real part of my life, someone who could be climbed on or fished with, and not someone existing only in memory and dreams.
It takes a long time to accept a missing person isn’t coming back. Especially since weird things sometimes happen. Like Calvin and Hobbes strips coming in the mail after the paper stopped running them. For about a year since his disappearance, they came. Someone had been cutting them out and mailing them. No letter. Just the comic strips. Turns out it’d been Gran’s friend from the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra. But it’s funny how your brain plays tricks on you.
I roll over. My brain lags behind, untethered, like it’s floating in maple syrup. The aroma of cooking sausage wafts up from the kitchen. My stomach rumbles. Bits and pieces from last night begin pushing through the porous barrier separating my subconscious and conscious mind.
Mikey’s offer.
Mary’s spying.
Caleb Montana drugging and kidnapping me.
I throw back the sheet and scramble out of my bed like it’s full of snakes. My heart is racing. I’m still wearing my work clothes from yesterday. I pat my pockets—cell phone!
Ten new texts. Nine from Fabio. One from Wang.
My head still listing in maple syrup, I toggle up favorites, select Fabio, press Send. He picks up on the first ring.
“Holy shit!” he says.
“So I didn’t dream it,” I reply.
“Hell no, you didn’t dream that shit! There was a needle and everything. One minute Caleb’s pulverizing you with that football, and the next thing I know, there’s a second Lamborghini pulling up and you’re getting loaded into the passenger seat.”
“What? In front of God and everybody?”
“Well, I mean. Yeah.”
“And nobody called the cops?”
“Dude. You were loaded into a Lamborghini. By Caleb Montana. Who was with three beautiful women. Where is the crime?”
“Three beautiful women?”
“Uh-huh. Third one was driving the other Lambo. Dark, short hair, gorgeous—but kinda aggressive-looking, like that tattoo girl on that one FBI show. You know which one I mean? I’m serious. Edge, you should’ve seen her. She was hawt. She had on this—”
“Dude—I don’t care. Focus. You said there was a needle. You mean, like, a hypodermic needle?”
“Oh yeah, that. Well, Shmuel didn’t show us that for, like, twenty minutes. Just kind of pocketed it after it happened, I think. You know he really loves the Chargers. Wouldn’t give anybody the football. And you know Shmuel and drugs. I once caught him snorting brown sugar off the top of his oatmeal.”
“Football?” I say. “I thought we were talking about the needle.”
“The needle was in the football,” says Fabio. “It was weird, dude. There was, like, a metal attachment stuck into the football. In the tip. You know, for the needle to screw into.”
“What?”
“And I think a compression mechanism to push out the drug on impact.”
“What?”
“What I’m saying is, spy shit. Serious spy shit, Edge. Which is what made me think Hot Girl in the second Lambo was all…”
His words float around in my head, no longer forming sentences per se, as I process what he’s told me.
“Hey,” he says, using a tone that cuts through the fog. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” My head is reeling. “I mean, I feel a little queasy.”
“No shit. Where are you?”
“I’m at home, why?”
“So you just woke up there?”
“Yeah.”
I cross to my desk and wheel the chair around, plop down. My paddle ball is sitting there. I pick it up and give it a good flick, my plan being to whack out my frustrations on the tiny ball, but it slaps the window blinds and then careens wildly back to hit me in the cheek.
“Dude?” asks Fabio.
I chuck the paddle at my bed. The rubber band wraps around my arm at the last second, and the wooden paddle springs back, raps my elbow, and then loops around my arm.
“Edge, are you there?”
“Caleb told me not to take Mikey up on his offer,” I say, rubbing my stinging and throbbing elbow, which now has a dangling paddle attached to it. I pinch the phone into my shoulder and carefully begin unwinding it.
“He did?”
“Yeah,” I reply. “There was an interrogation spotlight and everything.”
The paddle now fully disentangled, with two hands I set it back on my desk like it’s a sleeping Monster Book of Monsters from Harry Potter, which could at any moment wake up and bite my face off.
“Well, what’re you gonna do?” asks Fabio.
“What I said I’m gonna do. Turn Mikey down.”
“I don’t know, dude. There’s more to this. You should totally march right up to Mikey’s office and find out how much more.”
Find out how much more? I sit there for a second in silence, fuming at the monster paddle, and my hostility transfers from it to Mikey.
“You know what?” I say. “I should do that.”
“Yeah,” replies Fabio. “You should!”
I kick off in my chair toward the bed, but when the wheels hit the carpet, I topple backward, crash, and my head rebounds off the floor. Gran calls out from downstairs. Blinking back spots, I put my hand over the phone.
“I’m okay!” I yell, then put the phone back up to my ear.
“Dude—what the hell? It sounds like you butt-dialed me from the inside of somebody’s luggage. Are you sure you’re okay?” asks Fabio.
Clear my throat. “Yeah. Sorry. I was just thinking.”
“Do you bruise when you think?”
“Sometimes. Solving Mikey’s nonlinear partial differential equations, for example.” I climb back into bed, ease my head left and right to stretch out my neck, and then lie back and stare up at the Star Wars poster on my ceiling. Darth Vader’s helmet behind Luke and Leia.
“So, what’re you thinking?” asks Fabio.
“I’m thinking maybe I should just go back to bed. I’ve got a feeling this day isn’t gonna work out.”
“Okay. But what else are you thinking?”
“I’m hungry?”
“Dude.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’m thinking I haven’t seen Mikey in five years. I’m thinking then he calls me up with all this crap out of the blue. And then Caleb shows up at The Palace? And then he drugs me?”
“Exactly! And don’t forget about the pretty girl spying on you.”
“Right. Her.” I chew on my lip, and despite my generally queasy condition, throbbing elbow, back, head, and neck, some part of me still thinks maybe it’s not such a bad idea to head back to Emerald Plaza after all.
“But you know, something about this is bugging me,” says Fabio. “I mean, why you, dude? You know?”
“Yeah, I know,” I reply, my gaze panning back to the picture of my dad and me off Catalina Island, then back up to Darth Vader behind Luke and Leia. “I’ve got an idea about that.”
“You do?”
“Mmm-hmm. I think maybe it’s because of my dad.”
Chapter Fourteen
Brush, shave, shower.
I scrub shampoo into my scalp, and a hazy picture from my dreams begins to form. I focus on it and try to sharpen the memory, but it’s useless. Not that this is unusual. I’ve always been dream-remembering challenged.
After I’m dried and dressed, I head back to my room and open my laptop. I click Safari, type: Caleb Montana Mike Dame. About twenty-five thousand results come back.
I add my last name to refine the search.
Fifty-seven results.
I lean back in my seat, and when the wheels skid forward, I snap upright and grab the desk with both hands. I hold that position until I’m confident I’ve
cheated death, and then I add the words “nano-neuro medicine” to my search.
Your search—Caleb Montana Mike Dame Bonkovich nano-neuro medicine—did not match any documents.
The aroma of sausage and eggs gets me moving again. My stomach is rumbling by the time I make it downstairs. Gran and Shep are in their robes in the kitchen. Shep slides his hand from Gran’s waist, kisses the top of her head, and takes the morning paper into the living room, aglow in bars of sunlight.
“Good morning, dear,” she says, pouring me a cup of coffee. “How’d it go last night?”
I round the corner, accept the piping-hot coffee, and kiss her cheek. It takes me a second before I realize she’s asking about Murder Mystery Night.
“Yeah,” I say, striking a positive tone and nodding. “It was good.”
She slaps my shoulder. “Oh you’re such a terrible liar.”
“Yeah,” I say, striking a negative tone and taking a seat.
“I don’t know why Fabio moved in with those two. He’s lucky they aren’t all in jail.”
“They didn’t move in together,” I reply, grabbing a napkin out of the wicker holder. “They moved in next to each other.”
“Same difference.” Gran sets breakfast in front of me.
“Says here there’s no power on the Eastern Seaboard,” Shep calls from the living room. My stomach tightens.
“That’s nice,” Gran replies, not paying attention. “Hey,” she says, and she slaps Homebuyers magazine next to my plate. It’s folded open to a listing in Mira Mesa for one fifty. A low-level discomfort churns in my stomach.
“We’ve talked about this,” I reply, pushing the magazine across the table and digging into my breakfast. What with whatever drugs are still in my system, the sausage juices exploding in my mouth are intensely restorative. I chase it down with a bite of toast and sip of coffee before continuing. “We’re gonna get you into Pine’s Place. Okay? Let’s do that first, then we can talk about where I’m going to live.”