SelectionEvent (2ed)

  “If you are wondering,” she said, “why my nose doesn't stick out like other people's, it's because when I was fourteen, I was roller skating with my hands in my pockets. It's not a favorite memory.”

  “I have a friend who's interested in roller skating, and there's something I've been wondering about for a couple of weeks. Do you think a person could skate a few hundred miles on an Interstate?”

  “Roller skate on a highway?” She looked at him.

  “I'm thinking Nevada or Kansas, say.” He explained about Diaz and the dazzling skates in his saddle bags.

  “Well, my first reaction would be to think your friend is a little loosely wrapped. But if he's in good shape, it does make a certain kind of surrealistic sense. He might be able to go thirty or forty miles a day — or night.” She shuddered. “Even after this many years, just thinking about skating gives me the creeps. I can still remember lying on the table, looking into the lights and how my nose made a grinding noise when the doctor re-set it. That's why it's this shape. Aside from my name — former name — it's my least favorite memory.”

  “I think it's attractive. And the rest of your face, too.”

  “Martin,” she said, crooking one leg up on the seat, “are you flirting with me already?”

  “I planned on waiting till later, to find out if you were crazy or not, and if you weren't, then I was going to flirt.”

  “I tend to be a little serious,” she said, “but I'm not crazy. No skeletons in any closets, no secret habits performed in solitude — or in groups. Because of my nose, I've been told that I snore sometimes.”

  “If you're not crazy, I guess I could start flirting now.”

  “I'm ready.”

  “Would you care to live with me, Ms. Catrin?”

  “Flirting goes fast these days. But, yes, I think I wouldn't mind giving it a try. Separate rooms for a while.”

  “It's not like I'm the last man on earth or anything.”

  “You're third from the last by my count.” She put her arm across the back of the seat and rested her warm hand on his neck.

  The green weed-filled world that they drove through became beautiful.

  Chapter 41

  Diaz lay knocked out, loaded past the gills with his own blend of psychoactive angst relievers. Two joints of Grade B smoke spread through the day, a gram of chlorpromazine for relief of self-destructive tendencies, and an even hundred milligrams of dexedrine to keep his heart online. Sometimes he didn't know what the hell he was doing, but improvisation was, after all, the whole point during these times. Was it not?

  Today he thought he was in Salt Lake City, or was it Slat Luck Suzie? Or Slut Lick Salty? Or was that his last I Ching reading? At least the drugs were working enough that he hadn't tried to kill himself in the last few days.

  Most of the time he hovered in that twilight of almost waking up — exactly where he wanted to be — and the rest of the time he was unconscious and it wasn't like anything at all, and that was The Best. No hunger, no thirst, no dreams, no dead people saying “Bring me back, Diaz — I didn't want to die!” None of that when his brain waves jiggled way way down in the bottom of the tank.

  One day he drifted into consciousness in a K-Mart, slumped over the checkout counter, with two coyotes sniffing his legs, probably trying to figure out if this one was dead enough to eat. His eyes came open and he watched them sniff his shoes, poke their noses up his pants cuff and sniff his skin and then look at each other.

  “This one's not dead enough,” one coyote said to the other.

  “We could kill him and call the others in. He looks helpless enough.”

  The first coyote stood up on its back legs and rested its front paws on the checkout counter, right in front of Diaz's nose and sniffed his face. “No,” it reported back to the other one, “I don't think we want to eat this one. He smells crazy.”

  Diaz giggled.

  “We'd probably get sick if we ate him,” said the coyote who looked into Diaz's eyes.

  The other coyote made a disgusted coughand they both trotted into the back of the store.

  Diaz got his hands positioned and pushed himself up. He had a box of crackers and a large can of grapefruit juice there on the counter with him. Gripped in one fist, he had a couple of dollar bills, a few quarters and some pennies. Evidently he had been wanting to pay someone.

  The coyotes came back from the aisles, each with a large dead rat in its mouth. They glanced up at him as they trotted past, and one of them muttered to him through the rat fur, “Shape up, man.” And then they hopped through the broken front window and disappeared in the midday glare.

  Diaz stared into the glare for a minute, looked back down at the can of grapefruit juice, noticed a lot of new cuts and scabs on his hands, and thought, “When rat-eaters give Diaz advice, Diaz is attentive.”

  After a while he staggered back into the store collected some cans of fruit cocktail, some canned meat, a bottle of vitamin C tablets, and followed his trail of blood drops back down the street to the motel where his motorcycle still lay on its side in the parking lot.

  His mood was rising. It was time to dry out.

  Chapter 42

  They arrived in Santa Miranda at 6:00 PM, and when Martin looked at his watch, he saw that it was June 21, probably the first day of summer — but this was no normal June 21st. A cool north breeze had turned into a cold wind, and it looked like there might be still more rain.

  Isha pranced and yelped excitedly behind the gate-bars, and beside her, a yellow-eyed blob of black, Mona watched the people with measured suspicion.

  “Lassie! Lassie!” Solomon said, pointing, and going over to her. “It's Lassie!”

  “You like dogs and cats?” Martin asked Catrin.

  “Of course. She's beautiful. A female?”

  “Her name is Isha. The cat, Mona, is technically her pet. She found her and brought her home.”

  Catrin gazed at him with an amused smile. “A lovely place for a garden,” she said.

  “Your cat's missing a tail,” Leona said. “Why didn't you get a normal cat?”

  Winch saved Martin a dismal explanation when he came up behind Paul and Leona, and pointed at the houses across the street. “Any of those you want, you can have. That one's got a good fence around the backyard and a pool where you could keep fish.”

  “I never thought I'd have a pool,” Leona said. She glowed at the prospect, but Paul seemed a bit bewildered.

  Martin was thinking of the power the wedding ceremony had in breaking the barrier of unfamiliarity between all of them. They needed more of that. “I think,” he said, “we need a wedding dinner.”

  “Ohh!” Leona clasped her hands in front of her breast. “I never thought....”

  Even Paul grinned sheepishly.

  “Show us the way to the kitchen,” Catrin said.

  ....

  Martin put in the two table leaves, got out all the candles, and Catrin put them in a row down the middle of the table. Paul and Leona sat together on one side, their faces glowing with wine and candlelight. Catrin made their cake from frozen bread dough into which she kneaded sugar and cinnamon. Leona had brought the Mendelssohn music which played as the newlyweds held the bread knife in their clasped hands and cut the first piece.

  Martin never thought he would see this kind of happiness again.

  Winch whispered to him, “Gets to you, don't it.”

  Martin thought, Yes it does, and wiped his eyes discreetly with the back of his hand.

  They sat and talked for a while, finishing another bottle of wine, and Martin got a clearer picture of who Paul was. Shy, above all, he was the son of a bus driver and a housewife, and his only job, the three summers between his high school years, was grilling and selling hamburgers at a fast food restaurant. This whole situation — being a survivor, being married to Leona scared the hell out of him. But, Martin thought, at eighteen, he himself would also have been a little on the tense side.

  Leona, he thou
ght, was easily excitable, didn't listen well and was a bit scatterbrained. Except, he noticed, every time questions came up about her past, she consistently managed to get completely off the subject and talk about the bird she used to have or people she knew at high school or if it might be possible to have a car of her own. Whatever out of her past she was hiding, however, it was now utterly irrelevant.

  When the candles burned near their bases, Catrin said, “Martin, I'm getting awfully tired. Where can I go to bed?”

  Winch nonchalantly chewed a bite of wedding cake, a faint smile on his lips, waiting to hear the answer.

  “We have three bedrooms. The newlyweds can have the one on the far end of the house, out through the kitchen.” He pointed the way.

  Leona nodded and said, “Okay,” while Paul studiously examined his plate.

  “The kids and I can camp out in the bedroom here at the end of the hall,” Winch said. “I'll get their sleeping bags.”

  “Thanks, Winch.” To Catrin he said, “You can have the room down the hall on the left.”

  “Thank you,” Catrin said, a faint smile on her lips as she turned her wine glass in her hands.

  ....

  Later, holding her against him, his hands on the silky skin of her back, Martin listened to a mockingbird outside the window trilling and whistling.

  “I've known you less than a day,” she whispered.

  “Life is brief.”

  She snuggled closer and he felt her breath on his chest. Her skin was smooth, like soft glass, she felt like his second self. She smelled of sandalwood and skin.

  Outside the mockingbird sang on and on, endless variations of its song.

  Martin wanted to say something to her as pure as that, something untainted by old usage or the corruption of the past world. But he didn't yet have any words that would sing for her.

  In the dark, with their foreheads touching, the best he could say, the best he could think to whisper was, “You and I. We're here.”

  Chapter 43

  Diaz rode East, Interstate 80, fast. This time he had a four-cylinder Triumph Amazon with full-body faring, new skates lashed to the back fender, and when he lay across the top of the bike, the bumps and furrows in the padding snuggled against the bumps and furrows of his body like a firm woman. He twisted the handgrip full forward and listened to the Amazon scream with finely machined delight. His brain was plugged into the 220 version of life and the only fuse was death.

  East Utah — sand and scrub, good place for people to think a lot about god.

  Wyoming — buffalo on the freeway. Helped a little brown guy jimmy open a Wal-Mart truck, had a can of beans and franks with him, wrote a poem about the cosmic significance of beans/franks, plant/animal, nature/mankind, death, degradation and attractive packaging, gave the brown guy Martin's address, hit the road again, got bad gas at Rock Springs, and had good mountains after that. Trees had fallen across several lanes of the Interstate and in one place where water and dirt and rocks had washed across the pavement, he lost control, dumped the bike, screamed like a Viking as he landed on his back on some gravel and slid thirty feet. He got back on his feet and fifteen minutes later he'd pushed the bike down into and up out of the ravine and had it rolling at a hundred and ten.

  Rawlings, overgrown already. Like a temperate jungle.

  Cheyenne, burned.

  Colorado — green. Green everywhere, everything weeded up, shaggy and overgrown. Fewer buffalo on Interstate 25, coyotes every mile or so, and in Denver, a pack of wolves, traveling single-file down Speer Boulevard in front of the Sears, bunching up when they heard his noise and watching him go by. Diaz gave them the raised fist power sign and heard a chorus of howls behind him as he roared away south to Colorado Springs. Most of it was ashes but already the weeds were coming through, greening up the gray.

  Halfway through the city, a ragged figure ran into the middle of the freeway waving his hands. Diaz clamped on the brakes, slid a hundred yards, did a U, and drifted back to the guy.

  He looked wasted. Gray skin around his eyes, long tangled hair, scraggly beard, hollow chest inside his rags. Not a guy he would drink after.

  “Yo!” Diaz barked at him. “What's up?”

  “Hey! Hey! Gimme a ride! Gimme outta here, I give you anything I got!”

  “Thanks, I got all the diseases I can handle.”

  Diaz was going to ask what the excitement was about, but the wind-roar in his ears had faded enough now that he could hear a lot of popping somewhere nearby. Something zinged overhead and Diaz wheeled the cycle in another U. He nodded with his head and the guy had climbed on behind him in an instant. Diaz throttled it.

  Ten miles later, where a river edged the freeway, he coasted to a stop. The man climbed off. “Thanks, motorcycle guy.”

  “People trying to kill you or what? They have a good reason?”

  “Kill me? Yeah, wow, they try to kill me. They see me, they open up with artillery, I don't know who they are. Nuts maybe. Or Freaks.” Standing still now, the guy's smell filled the air. He smelled bad, like his skin was rotten. “They're different, you know.”

  “Nuts and Freaks? What's the difference?”

  “Freaks hate the Nuts, and the Nuts hate the Freaks. That's the difference.”

  “They should meet each other.”

  “They do. Alla time, let me tell you.”

  “Sounds like a good place to be from.” Diaz was already on his bike. “Ciao, kimosabe.”

  “Hey! Wait up! Hey!”

  Diaz was off, riding like the wind.

  Left turn at Pueblo, Highway 50, onto the plains.

  Where there used to be corn and wheat, there were weeds as high as an elephant's eye. The highway was a corridor through the green and the horizon line was about thirty feet away, at weed-top. Claustrophobic. Just inside Kansas, the Triumph developed a high whine, and a mile later, just past a gas station and grocery store called Coolidge, he had a Code Blue flame-out and barely got his skates and drug kit off the back fender before the burning gas and oil set the seat and all the plastic on fire. He had no idea there was so much plastic on the thing. The fiberglass sagged forlornly into the spokes.

  He stood there cursing and kicking it for five minutes, getting stringing chunks of melted goo on his boots. At some point, he decided that this was not a productive way to advance his agenda.

  If the bike had kept running, he felt up enough for another eight, nine hundred miles. On skates, he could probably get another hundred miles before he'd have to stop for a couple of days and let his feet heal up. But what the hell. Maybe back in Coolidge he could find some paper, some rum, and write some poetry. Kansas poetry. Basic corn, wheat and pig poetry. Poetry of sustenance! Poetry that rhymed, about basic things — being hungry or thirsty or horny.

  That brought him up short. He stopped thinking about corn and pigs and scratched his face. Be nice to get laid, he was thinking.

  He looked around at the overgrown weed fields. Red-winged black birds circled and squawked at him. No visible companionship. From here it didn't look like there was anyone in all Kansas. Lonely. But hell, hey! in this part of his cycle, he didn't care. He slung the skates over his shoulder and began the mile walk back to Coolidge.

  Chapter 44

  Paul and Leona took the brick-fronted ranch house two lots down from Martin's house because it had a swimming pool. Martin and Winch wired a generator for them, then Winch fixed up the smaller house across the street for himself. The two children, Solomon and Missa, stayed with Martin and Catrin for the first two nights. The third day, Solomon asked if he and Missa could stay with Winch. Since they spent most of the day with him anyway, Catrin said they could, and the next day they were calling him Winch-Dad.

  The first time they did it in front of Catrin, Winch blushed and said, “Hope you don't mind. Solomon asked me if I was his dad, and I said I would be if he wanted me to be. I should've asked you first.”

  “I think he made a fine choice,” Catrin said.
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br />   Several days later, Martin had been spading a new section for the garden for half an hour, looked up, and saw Solomon and Missa standing near him, waiting to be recognized. Solomon had his hands in his pockets and Missa played with her ear. She was wearing a very wide-brimmed woman's hat that she had stuck some silk flowers and weeds into.

  “Hi guys,” Martin said, leaning on the shovel handle. “What have you got planned for the day?”

  Missa began babbling something about Solomon having two daddies.

  Martin looked to Solomon for another version of the question.

  “Are you my daddy too?”

  “I can be if you want me to be.”

  “Can I have two dads?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “I think it's a fine idea,” Catrin said, coming over and brushing the dirt off her hands.

  “Me two dads?” Missa asked, looking troubled.

  “If you want.”

  “Un-huh," she said, still pulling on her ear. “I do.”

  “Then you have two dads. Is Winch at home?”

  Solomon said he was. Remembering the power of ritual, Martin pushed the blade of the shovel into the dirt and said, “Let's make this official.”

  He sent Solomon to bring Winch back, and when they returned, he and Catrin had got cleaned up and had five wine glasses set up on the table.

  Martin poured apple juice into each glass, explaining, “We have an important moment here. Solomon and Missa were asking if they could have two dads, and I thought we should make this official.”

  Winch looked embarrassed.

  Martin handed out the half glasses of juice to the children and then to the adults.

  “From this moment forward—” (He raised his glass, as did Solomon and Missa, solemnly.) “—you have two fathers and one mother,” and they all drank.

  “You're a gentleman,” Winch said to Martin.

  “A thoughtful gentleman,” Catrin added.