Finch made a big deal about footwear. It had to be comfortable, he said, but it also had to let your feet breathe. Wally decided to go barefoot. It would be more comfortable than anything else, and besides, Finch didn’t have any secondhand boots or hiking sandals that wouldn’t get shredded by Wally’s iron feet. As long as he was extra careful about rust, going barefoot wouldn’t be a problem.
Finch made an even bigger deal about the satellite phone. “Don’t lose this bloody phone,” he said, shaking it in their faces. “This is your lifeline to the outside world. Your cell phones will be worthless in the jungle.” He gave them a long lecture explaining how to use the phone. Wally tried to follow as best he could, but he secretly hoped Jerusha was getting it.
They unrolled one sleeping bag after another, trying to find a pair that hadn’t been afflicted with mildew. Finch asked Wally, “Committee does this to you a lot, does it?”
“Does what?”
“Sends you off to the arse end of the world without any provisions.” Finch’s ears twitched. “Seems like a bloody awful group to work for, if you ask me.”
“Uh, no. I mean, it happens sometimes. But not all the time.”
Jerusha chimed in. “Our trip to the lake is an emergency. There wasn’t time to get properly outfitted back in the States. We had to get here as quickly as we could.”
“Ah, right. Right. So you said, so you said.” Finch didn’t sound entirely convinced.
After two hours, they had almost everything they needed. Jerusha haggled with Finch, so in the end it cost them just under half of the cash they’d pooled.
Then it was time to leave. They bundled up their gear and followed Finch outside. Wally offered to carry Jerusha’s pack for her, but she didn’t seem to like that.
Finch disappeared into the hangar. Wally lingered outside with Jerusha. “I don’t think he believes us,” he said. “What should we do?”
Jerusha frowned. She looked tired. “What can we do? Stick to our story until he gets us to the lake.”
“Oy, tin man!” Finch pointed at Wally. “Get over here. Help me push her out.”
Wally set his pack down next to Jerusha. Little eddies of red earth swirled around him as he clanged over to the hangar. The dust clung to the sweat on his legs; it looked like the worst case of rust he’d ever had.
Wally had never flown in such a small airplane, even back in Egypt. He’d flown in helicopters, but those were UN things, and still larger than this plane. He cupped his hands to a window glass and peered inside. It looked like it could seat maybe four or five, or fewer with gear.
“Grab her like this,” said Finch, “gently.” He leaned on the diagonal strut that braced the wing to the fuselage. Looking at Wally’s hands, he added, “And don’t scratch her.”
Together they eased the plane outside. Finch made a musky smell when he exerted himself. Wally could have moved the plane himself, but it looked kinda fragile.
Actually… once they got it outside, in the sunlight, it looked really fragile. Long cracks spiderwebbed a couple of the windows; the fuselage had silvery gouges where the white paint had been scraped away; the wings had pits and dings and one thing that looked like a homemade patch. And the huge landing gear appeared to be more patch than tire.
“Hey, Mr. Finch? Is this safe?”
Finch’s nostrils flared again. “Tourists,” he muttered.
Jackson Square
New Orleans, Louisiana
CNN was broadcasting it live. So was every other major news outlet. Juliet told Michelle it was being streamed live on the Internet.
Michelle had been bubbling for almost twelve hours now. She was still as huge as she had been, but she could tell she was getting lighter.
The bubbles were pouring from her hands. As many bubbles as she could release. She kept them dense enough that they didn’t just pop, but light enough to float away. Just making a bunch of soap bubbles wouldn’t do, and every other variation she had thought of had risks. She’d tried to make the bubbles somewhat pop-able; it was impossible to have the kind of control over them that she wanted. Even now, even hours since she’d begun bubbling, the power was still clawing through her. It was exhausting trying to keep it in check.
On the TV there was a long shot of the temple with the stream of bubbles rising from it. Then there were overhead shots, but these were on a loop since they’d shut down the Louis B. Armstrong Airport and closed New Orleans to all air traffic. Now they were cutting away to viewer video.
In every frame they showed, pretty, iridescent bubbles floated and bobbed like a child’s playthings. They went up, up, up and then floated here and there, carried by the prevailing winds, until they slowly started to fall back to earth.
It was raining bubbles in New Orleans.
The TV showed a long shot of a young man in front of the Super Dome, preening for the camera. “Yeah, I know she saved the city, but damn, couldn’t she have done this bubble thing somewhere else?”
The camera cut to another shot. A harried-looking woman held a toddler on her hip.
“I’ve got babies to think about. You don’t know what’s in those things. Oh, they look pretty enough, but have you tried to keep a baby away from one of them? They put everything in their mouths. I saw American Hero. She can make those things blow up.”
Michelle yelled at the TV. “ These aren’t blowing up! They’re not supposed to!”
“See, that’s part of your damn problem, Bubbles.” Joey turned down the TV sound. “You worry about what fuckers think about you. Me? I don’t care.”
“Did you tell Juliet about us?” Michelle blurted. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she thought.
Joey gave her an annoyed look. “Fuck no. Christ on a crutch, why would I do somethin’ like that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you wanted to unburden yourself. Feel less guilty.”
“I don’t feel guilty about nothin’ I do.”
“Then why didn’t you tell her?”
“You know why,” Joey replied. “She sat here for a year waiting for you to wake up. She kept your parents away long as she fucking could, considerin’ she don’t have no rights. And she did it expecting nothin’.” Joey shook her head. “You and me, we’re alike. We’re used to having to look out for ourselves. Juliet, she don’t know how to do that. She loves you and that means putting everything else aside to take care of you.”
“I suppose you know more about my girlfriend than I do,” Michelle snapped.
“Yeah, I do.” Joey slouched down in her chair. Juliet had gone out for coffee and beignets and it was the first time Michelle and Joey had been alone.
“Oh, my God. You’re sleeping with her!”
“Jesus, you are one crazy bitch. No, but it ain’t because I didn’t want to. You just don’t know a thing about Ink, do you? Fuck me all to hell.” Joey jumped up from her chair and grabbed her gimme cap. “I’m gonna go see if she needs some help with those doughnuts.”
Michelle fumed. She wanted to run after Joey. To tell her she was wrong. That she did so understand Juliet. But she was still too big. And then there were those damn bubbles. They went on and on and on…
Jokertown
Manhattan, New York
The famous bowery wild Card Dime Museum was a short ride on the subway. Ellen spent the time looking out the windows at the speed-blurred concrete and the darkness. She had a slight smile on her face, and a sense of peace that was almost postcoital, though Bugsy knew for a fact it wasn’t.
He knew what it was. “How’s Nick?” he asked.
Ellen took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The hat itself is a little the worse for wear. It’s strange having him back again. I still can’t quite…”
Ellen’s voice got thick for a moment. She hadn’t expected to get Nick back. He’d died before she’d met him, and with the physical locus she used to channel him gone, she’d thought he was gone again. She’d been in the middle of mourning him.
Now he was back, and she
had spent most of the last day communing with him-bringing him up-to-date, sharing confidences, no doubt telling funny stories about Bugsy and Aliyah and that one time when the FedEx guy opened the apartment door when they were in flagrante in the kitchen.
There was something basically unnerving about hearing the same mouth you kissed when you were making time with your girl laughing about you in a man’s voice.
The subway reached their station, and Bugsy and Cameo ascended into the light.
Jokertown made up a section of Manhattan small enough to walk across in half a morning. It was also a different world. In the pale sun of early morning, two jokers jogged slowly down the street, one half mastodon half insect, the other with the body of a beautiful woman and the head of an oversized horse fly. But they were talking about Tara Reid’s latest fashion blunder, so maybe it wasn’t such a different world after all.
On one of the city buses that stopped to let out its cargo of freaks and misfits, a teenage girl was weeping. The cell phone pressed to her ear let out squeaks and buzzes, making words in no known language. An old man still drunk from the previous night urinated in an alley, his penis talking in a high, gargling voice of its own about imagined sexual conquests. A bat the size of a rottweiler with the face of a twelve-year-old Chinese girl flapped desperately, trying to catch up with a distant school bus. The coffee shops filled with the morning press of men, women, and who-the-hell-knew all grabbing a cup of joe and a corn muffin on their way to work while a neon-blue man in the back booth sucked down eight breakfasts, the plates stacking up beside him higher than his head.
Bugsy and Cameo crossed in front of a slow-moving delivery truck and went into the museum. The place smelled like old french fries and mildew, but it looked like the best secondhand shop ever. Display cases were filled with oddments and curios. A waxwork Peregrine stood in the corner in the same pose and outfit as the copy of Aces framed behind her. The joker at the counter could have been a man or a woman. The long face was something between a melted candle and road rash. Thick, ropey arms spilled out of a Yankees jersey. “Cameo!” it said.
“Jason,” Ellen said, smiling. “It’s been a while. How’s Annie?”
“The same,” the joker said, spreading his splayed, tumor-budding hands in a gesture that meant Women. Whatcha gonna do? “What can we do you for today?”
“My friend here is doing some research. People’s Park riot.”
“The what?”
“Apparently there was a riot in People’s Park in 1969,” Bugsy said.
“Could have been,” the joker agreed. “I was two, so chances are I wouldn’t remember.”
“Thomas Marion Douglas was there,” Ellen said.
“The Lizard King? Oh, fuck yeah. We’ve got crates of stuff on him.” The joker squinted, scratched himself, and nodded. “None of that’s on display anymore. The whole sixties rock thing we don’t put up unless there’s a revival or something going on. But… yeah. I think we’ve maybe got something back in the newsreels, too.”
“Anything you’ve got would be great,” Ellen said.
The joker held up a disjointed finger. One minute. He disappeared into the shadowy back of the museum. Bugsy walked around slowly, taking in the hundreds of small items and pictures. A poster for Golden Boy, the movie where the ace had gotten his name back before he got tangled up with McCarthy. Weird to think it was the same guy Bugsy had seen in Hollywood two years before. He looked just the same. Still pictures from the Rox War. A cheesy pot-metal action figure of The Great and Powerful Turtle, the grooves in the top making it look like a hand grenade cut along its length.
“I love this place,” Ellen said.
A dress Water Lily had worn. A copy of an arrest warrant for Fortunato. A metallic green feather off one of Dr. Tachyon’s hats. A solid two dozen pictures along one wall, each of them different, and all of them Croyd Crenson. “It’s a trip,” Bugsy said.
The joker stepped out of the shadows and motioned them in. The dim back office was stuffed to the ceiling with cardboard boxes and piles of paper. A ten-inch color monitor perched on the desk. It showed an image of a newscaster in the pale, washed-out colors that Bugsy associated with 1970s television.
“That’s the footage I was thinking about,” the joker said. “I’ve got a wash towel from his last concert in the box there. We got it off eBay a couple years ago, so it might be bullshit, but it’s the only thing I’m sure he’d have worn after the People’s Park thing.”
“You’re great, Jason,” Ellen said.
“I try,” the joker said with a sloping, awkward grin.
Bugsy squatted down, found the remote, and started the video playing. There he was. Thomas Marion Douglas. He was shouting at a crowd, exhorting them. A line of National Guardsmen stood shoulder to shoulder, facing him. This was before the advent of the mirrored face guard, so Bugsy could make out the nervous expressions on the soldiers.
Something loud happened. The reporter ducked, and the camera spun. A Volkswagen Bug was in flames. The camera pulled back to an armored personnel carrier, Thomas Marion Douglas on the upper deck, twisting the barrel as if it were nothing. The Browning came off the APC, and Douglas held it up over his head, bending it almost double.
“Watch this part,” the joker said. “This is great.”
The Lizard King bent down and hauled someone in a uniform out of the carrier. The poor nat kicked his legs in the air, and the Lizard King went down.
“Wait!” Bugsy said, poking at the buttons on the remote. “What happened?”
The joker lifted the remote from his hands and the images streamed backward. Frame by frame, they went through it. The burning car. The broken APC. The captain plucked out like the good bits of an oyster. And then the blurred arc of something moving fast. Thomas Marion Douglas’s head flew forward and to the right, and he went down like he was boneless.
The man who stood where the Lizard King had been wore work overalls and a hard hat. A long iron wrench was in his hand. The guy was huge, but seemed to be shrinking. “Go home!” the previous generation’s Hardhat called. “Go home now. Is over. You must not fight no more.”
It looked like the big guy was weeping. Someone shouted something Bugsy couldn’t make out, and the previous Hardhat went from maudlin to enraged in under a second.
“That’s not good,” Jason the joker said. But just as the guy with the big wrench was about to start in on the crowd, he went down too, tripped by Thomas Marion Douglas. The Lizard King got up as Hardhat regained his feet. The picture was jumping back and forth now, the cameraman torn between a great story and the threat of becoming collateral damage. Bugsy leaned forward. The Lizard King, blood running down his forehead and into his eyes, took a solid swing straight to the ribs and went down again. Hardhat stood over him, ready to crush the man’s skull. The wrench rose, and then something-a chain, maybe-wrapped around it and spun Hardhat to face a new enemy.
Tom Weathers. Bugsy stopped the frame.
He looked familiar, but not quite the same. Slender, with blond hair down to his shoulders, wearing only a pair of blue jeans and a saucer-sized peace medallion on a chain, but this was absolutely unquestionably the Radical. The man who had threatened New Orleans, who had killed enemy and ally alike for almost two decades.
But Bugsy couldn’t help thinking that the Tom Weathers on the screen looked… not younger, precisely. Softer. Kinder. Less ravingly homicidal.
He started the tape again. Hardhat, the Radical, and the Lizard King carried on their battle until it ended with Hardhat on the ground, reduced to merely human size and weeping, the Radical and the Lizard King in a victory embrace that was almost sexual.
“That’s all we’ve got,” Jason said.
“Okay,” Cameo said. “Ready to meet the Lizard King?”
Bugsy nodded. Cameo took the old grey terry-cloth hand towel from Jason the joker’s outstretched hand, settled it around her neck like a prize-fighter, and closed her eyes. Bugsy could see the change almost a
t once. She slouched into her chair, the angle of her shoulders changing, her head slipping back on her neck like a petulant schoolboy. He knew that Thomas Marion Douglas would be the one to open her eyes.
Apparently Ellen spent the two or three silent minutes prepping the Lizard King, because he didn’t seem surprised.
“I have risen, man,” Tom Douglas said in a slow, theatrical drawl. “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and in strange eons, even death may die.”
“Yeah, okay. So my name’s Jonathan,” Bugsy said. “I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the Radical. From the People’s Park riot?”
Tom Douglas shook his head as if he expected his hair to be longer and leaned even farther back and lower in his chair. Arrogance and contempt came off him in waves. “He’s still fighting the good fight, is he? Cool for him, man. He was righteous.”
“How well did you know him?” Bugsy asked.
The Lizard King shook his head. The movement was languorous, as if designed to stall just for the joy of stalling. “Just that one night, man. Just that one bright, shining moment. We showed the Man that we would not be intimidated. The people would not be pushed down. We stood the National Guard and their aces on their asses, man. And afterward, it was love, sweet love until the dawn.”
Bugsy blinked, mentally recalculating. “So you and the Radical were… ah… lovers?”
“That make you uptight, man?” the Lizard King asked with a smile.
“Well, not in a queers-are-yucky way. I just never really thought of Tom Weathers as a sexual object.”
“Everyone was with everyone, man. No jealousy, no possessiveness, no hang-ups. We were free and wild and full of love, man. But no, Radical and me were the power and the light. People were drawn to us. There was too much of us not to share around. Radical, he spent most of his night with a chick called Saffron… no, no. Sunflower. That was it. Seemed really into her.”
“And after that night,” Bugsy said. “Did he keep hanging out with her in particular?”
“There was no after that night, man. There was that one authentic moment, and then nothing. Dude came when he was needed and vanished with the dawn.”
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