by Hal Johnson
“Well, we’re not even going to steal anything at all. We’re going to persuade people to give us stuff. It’s the only way we’ll be able to find the Rosicrucians. And anyway, we’ll be like Robin Hood, or some romantic jewel thief. We’ll only steal from the rich, and they can afford it.”
Myron was skeptical, but desperate. “Only from the rich?”
“The haute bourgeoisie only.”
But this, too, turned out to be a lie.
2.
The first thing Myron needed was a suit of clothes—the current one was unsalvageable, but he didn’t need anything that nice, really. Just anything that had not dashed through the muddy, thorny woods at night.
The bow and tube Gloria stashed at the bowling alley, under a ceiling panel in the ladies’ room. Then, on the bus ride out to the purlieus along Kimbark Avenue, she smoked incessantly and explained to Myron the basic tenet of life on the C. You simply (she said) had to be absolutely certain of everything you say. Most people are rarely absolutely certain, so if you sounded like you know what you were talking about, they would tend to go along with you. Should you ever meet someone else who is absolutely sure, apologize for the mistake and leave. This person is probably too stupid to fool and may be extremely dangerous.
The bus let them off in a quiet residential neighborhood. Two streets over they came to a small children’s-clothing store—but they didn’t go in. Leaving Myron outside, Gloria went to the bagel shop next door and came out empty-handed.
“I am pretty hungry,” Myron said.
“There’ll be time for that later, we’re working. I went in there and asked for one hundred and ninety-nine onion bagels. The woman was surprised, and she asked me why I didn’t order two hundred. I said, Are you crazy? Who can eat two hundred bagels? Then we both laughed. So you get it?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Myron said.
“This way, when I say, sure, give me two hundred bagels, she can’t object—it was practically her idea. I told her I was going to be dropping them off at various local businesses as part of a charity drive. Now I sound like a mensch. She just told me to come back in a couple of hours, with the understanding that I would pay on delivery. Do you follow it so far? Now to look at suits.”
They spent a long time in the clothing store. The proprietor was an old man who drew a sharp intake of breath when he saw Myron, but Gloria quickly explained that “boys be boys,” and she needed new church clothes for her grandson. Myron did look a fright; he always looked a fright, but this was something special. He had to be careful not to touch any of the suits, lest he get mud on them, but Gloria held them up in front of him to eyeball a size. The suit and a new shirt were priced at almost a hundred dollars, and Myron warned her in a whisper that he had no money.
“You don’t need money when you’re on the C. This is what you have to do. When I open the door, you run out, go next door to the bagel shop, and open the door; catch the woman’s eye and then leave. She should step outside after you—it’s important she step outside. Can you do that?”
They brought their selection to the front counter, and the man rang them up and boxed the ensemble, nestled in tissue paper.
“I done forget my wallet,” Gloria said, tucking the box beneath her arm. “You mind if it go on my account?” She took a step to the right and opened the door, and Myron darted out.
The proprietor looked worried, and he stepped out from behind the counter. “Ma’am, I don’t mean nothing by it, but I don’t know you. I never seen you before. You don’t have no account here, and I hope I don’t sound suspicious if I say so.” As he opened the door to the bagel shop, Myron could hear the man saying something more or less like this. And there in the bagel shop the woman gasped at the sight of this tiny revenant, and came running out after Myron, who was backpedaling.
And so, at that moment, Gloria stood in the open door of the clothing store, its proprietor a half step behind her, and the bagel seller a few feet to her right. The three of them made almost a straight line, with Myron the anomalous point, floating away backwards into the parking lot. It was at the moment that Gloria took control of the situation. Turning to the bagel woman, she said, “When you have two hundred for me, honey?”
Surprised, the woman said she needed another hour or two.
“Well, make sure he get one hundred, will you?” Gloria said. Then she smiled and nodded at the clothing store proprietor, who could no longer very well object. He was grinning, and the grin was a grin of heartbreaking trust. And as the door dinged shut behind her, Gloria said to the bagel seller, “I’m a come back in an hour.”
Gloria gestured Myron over and took him by the hand. The woman returned to her bagels. Myron and Gloria walked away. They hopped on the first bus they saw.
“That was called the Laurie, after Joe Laurie, who invented it,” Gloria lectured.
“What’s that woman going to do with two hundred onion bagels?” Myron asked. “What’s that man going to do when he figures it all out?”
“You did a good job today. Now we’ve got to get you cleaned up.”
Gloria was currently staying in an abandoned and crumbling building. To get to her section of the building you had to pass over a part with no floor. Gloria as a gorilla could go hand over hand above the hole, but Myron could only nervously balance his way across a narrow beam. On the far side, Myron got washed in a basin of rainwater, and Gloria put on a bright orange muumuu.
“You put on loose clothes and hope they’ll work with the change,” she complained, “and it almost all works except for the underthings.”
They cleaned off Myron’s shoes, Gloria fashioned fake socks (she’d forgotten to get socks!) out of the pieces of his vest that had not been soiled, and, after a quick amateur haircut, Myron was presentable. “Now let’s go see what we can find out.”
With the speed of a montage, they went on a whirlwind tour of retirement communities in Chicago and environs. The plan was Gloria’s. Myron would go in the front. Usually he could just duck under the front desk and no one noticed him, but if they noticed him, and didn’t ignore him under the assumption that he was someone’s renegade grandson, one look at his face usually shut them up long enough for him to get away; now that he was well groomed, and it was clear his face was not the result of a raw wound but was actually stuck that way, they were just too embarrassed to stop him. Then Myron would hasten to a rear fire door and let Gloria in. That was his only job, and sometimes he would slip out as she slipped in, to meet up with her later; but sometimes he would stick around to learn. Gloria would go to the rec room, pretend to be new here, find three more for bridge, and after losing a few rubbers, say, “Well, we could continue to play for pennies, but why don’t we make this next rubber interesting?”
Basically, she cheated old people at cards. Myron didn’t see how this helped him, but she did, on occasion, ask her partner casually about a particular canine fellow. Angel Sanchez, his name might be, or Hussein El-Agale, or Jack Thompson. On street corners, she’d approach a news vendor, or a prostitute, and make a casual inquiry. Days went by. The doomsday device and Myron’s precious bow were moved to a more secure hiding place. She and Myron ate well, and the squatter’s quarters Gloria favored were surprisingly warm and even cozy. But there was no sign of any coyote.
Myron was practically writhing in frustration at the delay. “Maybe you shouldn’t go see the Rosicrucians after all, maybe you should just live life on the C,” Gloria suggested. But Myron was adamant. He had no reason to trust the Rosicrucians; but the fact that he had no reason to distrust them made them, he maintained, unique in all the world. Gloria sniffed at his answer and launched into another lecture.
Because Gloria lectured Myron, incessantly, especially on how there was no point in lecturing anyone. The only true propaganda was propaganda by the deed. As far as Myron could tell, propaganda by the deed meant doing whatever jerky stuff you felt like doing. “‘There are no innocent bourgeois,’” Gloria said, quoting Emil Henry
, who had been guillotined by the French government in 1894 merely because he was a murderer and a terrorist.
“‘The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of the doer,’” she added, quoting Nietzsche. And she shook her fist, at the world, over the tragic fate of Emil Henry.
“Did you know Nietzsche was murdered,” Myron said, “by the flying squirrel?”
“That’s just an urban legend,” Gloria said. Her eyes were blazing with fire. When they started to blaze, Myron knew he was not going to get a lot from her. But at other times her advice was useful. She taught him to watch, at cards, for people’s tells, little twitches or gestures that would reveal their hand. She also taught him how to read cards in the reflections in people’s glasses, and switch decks while pretending to cut.
And watching her he learned how to change his dialect to fit in with whomever he was talking to. No matter what animal you were, Gloria explained, to get along you also had to be a chameleon.
They went to the library, purportedly to follow a lead about Angel Sanchez, but probably, Myron suspected, just to look up where there were more old folks’ homes. Gloria pointed out to Myron a hand-lettered sign on the wall. NO GUM CHEWING ALLOWED.
“So?” Myron asked. “That makes sense. People might put gum under the tables, or in a book.”
“So why don’t they just make a rule that you’re not allowed to put gum under the tables? Why do they ban gum altogether?”
“Well, it’s hard to catch people sticking gum somewhere. It’s much easier to catch them chewing it.”
Gloria nodded. “That’s very important. Most rules are there not to help you or make your life better but to make things easier for the rule enforcers. Always remember that.”
And as soon as she said it, Myron suddenly understood a lot about his junior high experience. It made a lot more sense now.
“The moose never taught you anything like this,” Gloria gloated.
The lead was a dud, of course. Lead after lead was a dud, and the coyote, as coyotes do, remained elusive. They did manage to acquire quite a nest egg, though, and one day Gloria said, “Now I’m going to teach you about the system.”
Gloria had never spoken so positively about the system, so Myron was confused. But it turned out Gloria meant her system for betting on the ponies. This system proved flawed, too, and she lost almost all their money in forty-five minutes, and then spent the rest on gin. That night, Myron finally told Gloria that Spenser was dead, and she cried and threw the gin bottle off a rooftop, and then had to go steal a new one. Myron was worried he was getting nowhere.
And one day, as he walked along the back alleys, he felt his neck prickling, and when he looked up, he saw something that might have been a cat leap across the gap between rooftops and then run away. Black and white on its tail. It might not have been a cat. Myron was getting scared.
3.
Of course, Gloria was not really looking for a coyote. She only made inquiries when she knew she’d get a negative response. She only looked for his spoor down alleys she suspected he would never go. Anything to prevent another clue from materializing, while offering the promise of another clue like a rainbow’s end, always just at the horizon. I know Gloria, and I know how she works, and she was running the long con. And on the long con, all you need to do is wear your mark down. Myron was tenacious, but perhaps she could have worn him down in time, perhaps she could have gotten him acclimated to life on the C. She had never believed what Myron believed, as he became more and more frightened of the shadows: that time could possibly run out.
Gloria took a lot of risks, frankly, since she was used to dodging the cops and not the lion, or the bear, or me. It’s hardly surprising that someone would catch wind of her antics, and one day she telegraphed carelessly what joint she’d hit up next. And so Myron was killing time outside a rest home, while Gloria took advantage inside, when a slim man in a tweed cap came slinking up. He was smoking a cigarette in a long, thin quellazaire. Myron could tell that he was one of us.
“You want to find the coyote, come with me,” he said gruffly, trying to grab Myron’s arm.
“I don’t want to find the coyote,” Myron said, twisting away. “I just want to find the Rosicrucians.”
“What, the main temple in Portland?”
“Yeah, that one,” Myron said.
“The one behind the Twenty-Four-Hour Church of Elvis? Everyone knows where that is, why would you care? Now come on, the coyote’s waiting for you.”
But Myron turned and ran straight into the rest home. “No running!” shouted the guard. And Myron stopped in the lobby and looked over his shoulder. The slim man was watching him through the glass double doors, and then with a shrug he slunk away.
“No running,” said the guard again, trying not to look at Myron’s face.
When Gloria turned up again, wearing a strand of pearls she had just won, Myron excitedly told her what had happened. The Rosicrucians were in Portland! Must be Portland, Oregon! All they needed to do was take their winnings and hop a bus!
But Gloria waved him off. “Myron, that fellow was obviously the ermine, and the ermine has never been trustworthy. The whole thing is a trap.”
“No, no, I tricked him into revealing the location,” Myron insisted.
“You didn’t trick him, he was trapping you.”
“So the Rosicrucians aren’t in Portland?”
“They’re probably in Portland. Myron, truth is more dangerous than lies at this point.”
“We can go scope the place out at least.”
But Gloria had invested all their savings in lottery tickets, which, it turns out, gave them a microscopic chance of being able to travel to the West Coast in a private jet and a very good chance of not being able to afford leaving Chicago at all.
“You said,” Myron objected, “that you don’t need money when you’re on the C. Why can’t you just talk your way onto a bus?” She’d more or less done it before, after all.
But Gloria wanted to wait for the lottery drawing. She said Myron didn’t know when he had a good thing. She insisted (against all evidence) that it was safer in Chicago.
“How can it be safer here?” Myron asked. The lion knows we’re here.”
If Gloria was thinking, Well, he knows you’re here, she was too smart to say it out loud. “I’ll tell you what. If one more person gets wise to us, we’ll leave.”
But she was no more careful than before, and two days later a Volkswagen Bug pulled up next to the two of them as they were trying to hustle a businessman at a bus stop. You should have seen Myron’s eyes light up when he saw who was driving.
I was, of course. And that’s when his adventures began.
IX. The Adventure Begins
And there was the body—mere flesh and blood, no more—but such flesh, and so much blood!
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
1.
It will be unnecessary for me to enumerate the tricks and schemes I went through to find Myron. I’d heard a few rumors about Mignon Emanuel’s plans, of course, but I’d heard them all too late. And then a friend of a friend of an acquaintance had a tip that led me to a back-alley unlicensed tattoo parlor in Hartford, where Angel Sanchez told me he had learned that Gloria and some “mutant kid” were looking for him. Gloria wasn’t answering my calls (I think she had actually lost her phone), and Alice, with her pickup truck and my forty-five, was three thousand miles away—so I borrowed the Bug from Angel “for a day or two” (which was a lie) and drove to Chicago. I didn’t find Myron right away, but I found him. It can be a small world, this animal world of ours.
The boy was practically giddy with excitement. We stopped by Gloria’s nest to grab Myron’s stuff. I noticed that the tape seal had been broken around one end of the doomsday device, but Myron claimed he’d never opened it all the way. I grabbed from the trunk two canvas bags and stashed the device in one, Myron’s compound bow in
the other. Both ended up on the back seat. I also pulled out my typewriter, a jadeite green Hermes 2000 in a leatherette case. I have a job, naturally—I would never admit it to Myron, but I currently ghostwrite the best-selling Magic Pony Club books—but I was currently behind on more than one deadline, so I’d brought the typewriter to try to catch up on the road, and I stuck it in the back seat, partially in case I needed it and mostly to clutter up the back seat so it would look there was no room for Gloria to come along. Oh, I invited her for appearances’ sake, but the answer was never really in question. The adventure was beginning, why bother with the hindrances of the past? She gave Myron a sawbuck and a bit of advice (“Never play cards with an actuary”), also an awkward hug, and we were off. After several unpleasant potholes and a steam grate that was frankly blinding, we entered the long stretch on I-80.
“We’re going to Portland,” Myron said as we motored west.
“No, we’re going to Sacramento to meet Alice,” I corrected him. “She has a safe house there.”
Myron flipped out. “What? The Rosicrucians are in Portland.”
“Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t, but you’re not going to go meet the Rosicrucians. It’s obviously a trap.”
He crossed his arms and sulked. I think he might have tried to jump out of the car if we hadn’t been speeding. Also, I can assure you that his deep-seated respect for me would have kept him in check.
“This is going to be a long trip,” I goaded him, “if no one talks.”
But Myron could not stay mad at me for long, though. Who could? Gloria forgave me, Alice time and again forgave me, I’m sure you’ll forgive me, too, after the part where you find out and get mad. My crime against Myron, the crime of not driving him directly to his doom, was comparatively minor. And he warmed up eventually.
I tried to help him understand. “Ask me anything,” I told him. “You’ll be surprised what I know.”