I had to take my half out to the parking lot and watch while Brian and his clipboard inventoried the turquoise Ford Fiesta’s pre-existing damage, and I was still sucking sublime, nitrite-rich mayo off my thumb when he finally hurried over to show me the fifteen Xs he’d made on the generic-car-body outline he’d been provided.
“Have some sympathy for the old girl, see what she’s been through? Oh, and there’s a car seat in the back, I’ll take that out.”
“How come?” I said. “You think I don’t have kids?”
“I just thought…”
I handed over the stack of bills for my deposit, and sure I could’ve bought the car for five hundred but I didn’t give a shit so long as it got me to the post office—but then he had to hash something else out with the manager and left me with a lot of forms to sign. Instead of initialing the box that waived third-party collision insurance I turned the sheet over and drew a human being’s outline on the back of the sheet, then put an X over each place my bodywork had been gouged, going all the way back to the re-bar through my right shoulder. Thanks to Penzler my beautiful teacher-printing had gone to shit.
I imagined the day that I tracked my kids down and the two of them not being able to look at me or talk to me. I could put the drawing into their hands and they’d maybe have some notion of what I’d been through in order to be standing there.
Dear, I wrote at the top, then I had to stop and click the end of the pen a couple of times. My kids’ names weren’t exactly on the tip of my brain.
“I’ll just need a photocopy of your driver’s license.” Brian wiped his palms on his pants.
“I don’t carry a photocopy of my driver’s license.”
“Ah, no. I can take your license and make a copy, no problem.”
I ought to have used a secret identity on Travelocity—Lee Pert Girl, that was me. Lydia and I had made anagrams of each others’ names while we’d shuffled around the maternity ward, waiting for her to dilate. Lee Pert Girl and Lily A. Gilder. Maybe we’d both died and been reincarnated as somebody else. Maybe she’d been in that burrito.
Our kids were Josie and Ray—screw you, hippie doctors, you hadn’t done me in!
I waited in the Fiesta while the drduffy car was probably backing up to the post office. My hair was sweating. I found napkins in the glove compartment to dry off my ears, then Brian swung into the passenger seat and solemnly handed the key across like it was insulin. The engine rattled to life like it had marbles in its fuel pump.
“Well, happy trails! Just give a call if you need it longer than the three days!”
“Hold it—show me how to get this air-conditioning on.”
I stopped for three minutes at Miner’s Hardware, then at 8:56 I finally pulled into the post office’s parking lot and read on the door that they wouldn’t open until nine-thirty. Grasshoppers loped across the hot parking lot. But it looked like anybody with a po box could probably unlock the front door and check for mail inside the lobby, so I peered in the window on the left and didn’t see any cameras. On that side the little steel boxes were numbered 1 to 160. I tried the right and there was lovely 307, right at the bottom near a potted palm.
I drove to 7-Eleven, used their toilet in the back and got to overhear two kids decide that Awesome Dumps would be an awesome magazine. Then I bought my bacon dogs and urine-flavored coffee, drove back to the post office and parked outside the front doors like a regular citizen.
I ate while I waited for nine-thirty. I prepared my brain to spend the day staring at 307’s window—maybe all day, maybe into December if I could hold up structurally for that long. The Fiesta’s turquoise hood shimmered in front of me.
A blue minivan pulled in and a mom and four kids in soccer gear piled out, and my heavy blood beat up in my throat as I watched them cut to the right then crouch down by the potted palm. But they were more in the neighborhood of 267. A kid in cleats slipped on the tiles.
A heavyset woman in a headscarf got mail out of 47 or 48. I watched her in the rearview mirror as she got back into her car and cranked up the Fleetwood Mac—then I sat up straight as a poker when I realized a red Acura had parked beside her. I hadn’t seen it pull in. A dark-haired man in the driver’s seat. California plate, but maybe Gary had had that all along?
A skeletal African-American in a blue USPS shirt unlocked the front door from the inside then disappeared back into the depths of the post office. I slipped out of the Fiesta and through the front door. The big lobby gate was already up. The USPS guy glanced at me, then went back to arranging the racks of bubblewrap envelopes. I gazed outside and watched the Acura driver put a leg out. A dark tracksuit. I slinked back behind the doorframe.
An Asian kid about seventeen, with horn-rimmed glasses. As he came across the parking lot he bounced a wad of keys in his hand.
I strode into the back of the post office and the USPS guy circled behind the counter.
“How are you this morning?” he asked.
“Just great. What about you?”
He nodded encouragingly.
“I was wondering,” I said, “if you carry an express envelope or something where you actually phone the recipient and tell them to come get it.”
“Well, if you sent it registered we’d take it right to the address and get the recipient’s signature, then you see the signature right online. How’s that sound?”
He didn’t even blink as he talked. The postal service was an intense endeavor.
“I guess I better tell you the whole story, it’s a weird scenario.”
“Go right ahead. No hurry just now.”
He gestured behind me—not even the Asian kid had come in yet. Flutter in my stomach, because where the hell had he gone?
“All right,” I said, “well, my friend in Minneapolis gets his mail sent to a post office box there, I think it’s the government post office right downtown—”
“Sure.”
“And we met at a conference originally, had a bit to drink, you know, and said, hey, friends forever, let’s keep in touch, so he scrawls down his information and I get home afterward and all he’s given me is the mailing address—no e-mail, no phone.”
“I see.”
“So I’m setting up a seminar out here now and I’m hoping he’ll present, and I wrote him four times but I get nothing back. See, I don’t think he checks the box! So if I send something, I don’t know, ultra-registered, then probably the post office there has a phone number for his box, right, and they can let him know it’s waiting for him?”
See? I’d make Dr. Q. Duffy come to me.
“I happen to know Eva Dixon at the Minneapolis office.” The USPS guy blinked luxuriously. “We can make that happen.”
“Ah,” I said. “Great! I’ll bring the letter and you can phone ahead for me, is that right?”
“We could do that.”
“I would really appreciate it. But just for argument’s sake, if you didn’t know that particular girl—”
“She’s just about ready to retire.”
“All right, woman. Distinguished lady. Is there an envelope that’ll do that just as a standard procedure?”
He shook his head minutely.
“Well, shit,” I said.
I turned to go and slammed straight into the Asian kid, who was looking down at his iPhone. His glasses got knocked onto the floor. I was so baffled by my plan’s not even starting that I couldn’t even get mad at the kid—I picked up his glasses and iPhone, dusted off his shoulders.
“I’m fine now.” The kid had that ragged pot-smoking voice so well-demonstrated at Hoover High.
“Sir,” I said to the USPS guy, “I’m meeting my wife here. Can I just sit in the lobby for a few minutes?”
“Help yourself,” he said flatly.
There were no chairs inside the front door, so I balanced against the e
dge of the big trash can while a well-dressed Hispanic couple emptied the contents of 215 into her handbag.
I shouldn’t have told a lie that involved my wife, I should’ve said I had to wait for my brother because I’d never had a brother.
A flabby-shouldered guy in camouflage pants and a sleeveless black T-shirt hurried in, navigated around the 215 couple, knelt beside the potted palm and opened 307. A Domino’s take-out menu. The guy had a red brush cut and triangular red goatee. The Hispanic couple said something and he smiled up at them.
My hands trembled. I glanced at my watch.
“Oh, man!” I whispered, as though time had really flown away from me.
I straightened up from the garbage can, slipped out the front door and had the Fiesta started six seconds later. The camouflage guy was throwing his menu in the recycling bin as I backed out of the spot, then even before he reached the outer door I was driving calmly and efficiently out the exit. The main thing was to stay inconspicuous. This was the start of a lucky streak and I was not going to break it.
I pulled into heavy traffic on Madonna Road, then drove behind the post office onto Dalidio and around the parking lot until I was at the intersection with Madonna, which would be the perfect spot to wait for him provided nobody pulled up behind me. I sat with my right signal flickering and peered over the gray-green yucca plants at Camouflage as he climbed into his vehicle—a black Jeep with no roof. He turned on bleeping techno music and slowly, slowly put on sunglasses.
A beige Ford Taurus stopped behind me so I switched to my left signal and made a big show of craning my neck one way and then the other so the driver would get the idea this might take ten minutes. If I pulled onto the shoulder, it was too likely Camouflage would notice my turquoise glory as he came out and so notice me five miles later and the mile after that. Thankfully I wouldn’t be the only conspicuously crappy car driving around San Luis Obispo—a rusted-out Eagle Talon whizzed by and that gave me a lot of confidence.
The Taurus leaned on its horn, so I switched to signaling right and started to creep onto Madonna Road. The Taurus revved its engine four inches behind me. The Jeep thudded and beeped out of the exit and turned right onto Madonna, so I pulled out after him, calmly and efficiently, a hundred feet back.
Then two hundred feet, because he was driving so fast, then instead of turning at the next intersection he cut through a corner Pegasus station like a smart-ass. But I caught up at the crosswalk outside a seniors’ center where an elderly woman in a sundress pushed her walker across, a smile surgically installed beneath her floppy hat.
A Central Coast Brewery truck slid between us before a red light, and the hair stood up on my arms—because maybe he only checked the box once a month, what would I do if I didn’t see him turn off and he got away from me for good?—but then I turned down the air-conditioning and held my breath and realized that even over the rumble of the truck I could hear the oonce-oonce-oonce of his music. God bless the geeks in small rooms who manufactured the stuff.
With every coffee-flavored burp I drew closer to Natalia. She was going to look like Alice, only red-headed, and she’d also resemble Peter Giller, famous for his feathery scar tissue and perpetually dazed expression.
We rolled past farms where horses dozed under the palm trees, then up across hills covered in tall dead grass. It was a terrific road and I envied Camouflage’s vestige of hair fluttering in the wind, but at least the Fiesta was keeping up. I kept a hundred yards back because every side road and driveway was dirt, so when he finally pulled off I knew there’d be a beautiful plume of dust. I decided I didn’t much care if he caught a glimpse of me, because unless a driver’s robbed a bank who really pays attention to whether they’re being followed? Camouflage probably drove around thinking, Hey, I’m helping out Dr. Duffy and he’s helping out the world with science and if we get a kitty for the office I’ll name him Bela Lugosi in the film White Zombie.
He went out of sight over a hill topped with an organic turkey sausage sign, then as I came down the other side, I saw telltale dust rising to the right. I got down to an unmarked driveway and turned in after him as quickly as I could, thinking my dust might merge with his and no one would be the wiser. And if Penzler goons with knapweed stuck to their Kevlar pants stepped out in front of me, I’d ask, “Turkey sausage?” I turned into the driveway too fast, gravel spraying under me, and nearly fishtailed into the ditch.
Then for a quarter-mile I drove up the hill at twenty miles an hour until I came to a pair of closed steel gates, ten feet high. They weren’t marked with a wrought-iron QD or anything at all. A ten-foot chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire loops, stretched out on either side. I sat in the idling Fiesta, watching through the gate as Camouflage’s dust settled. The follicles crackled across my head. From my quest’s pool-of-blood basement origin in Preston, Ohio, this was finally the place.
I drove back to the paved road and down the hill until I came to a stand of yellowish willow trees growing beside a black creek. It seemed like a reasonable place for people to leave their car if they were looking for frogs.
I opened the back of the Fiesta and lifted out the plastic Miner’s Hardware bag containing my new hammer, wire cutters and big slot screwdriver. I hadn’t thought to get myself a knife or a pistol. I’d have to be the weapon.
Hadn’t thought to get a staple gun either. Some strategist.
I tucked the big rental car key into the exhaust pipe so I wouldn’t have to worry about misplacing it. Nobody on the road in either direction, so I hopped the ditch into the crunchy knee-high grass and started cross-country for the fence. I still wore Carver’s dark green dress shirt, so at least I couldn’t have stood out as badly as if I’d still had that red shirt from Preston—this is what I thought as I jogged through the brush, bent low like a baboon with his plastic bag. The air smelled like freshly mown lawns and urinal cakes.
Just as I saw the fence at the top of the slope I tripped and fell on my face, jamming dirt between my front teeth. I looked around for somebody’s mouth to punch and just saw the gopher hole. A horse would’ve broken its leg.
Gophers could mean rattlesnakes, that’d been the case at my grandpa’s, so I put my sweat-filled ears on alert as I maintained my baboon lope. And I heard them in front of me, chicka-chicka-chicka. I crept up to the fence. Lines of rattling sprinklers stretched fifty yards up the lawn, and buildings with white walls and red roofs stared down at me—a two-story farmhouse surrounded by trees and flowerbeds, a three-car garage, square outbuildings. Camouflage’s Jeep sat in front of the garage. No living thing moved, and it was impossible to hear a sound over the army of sprinklers.
I got to work with the wire cutters and wriggled through onto the wet grass. I leaned the triangle of wire back into place against the fence, then loped straight up the lawn for the apple trees below the house. No cover to speak of, and I kept waiting for a face to appear at an upstairs window and start hollering—or maybe a pale girl with red hair who’d silently set her fingers against the glass. But I saw nobody in any window.
I slid behind a tall bed of orange gerbera daisies. Lydia had loved those. Josie preferred cornflowers. I lay on my side and peered through the daisies—there was another stretch of lawn right below the house, maybe a basement door, but I’d have to stand on tiptoe to see. The garage and sheds were away to my right, opposite the house’s front porch. I couldn’t see the front door. I wiped at my dripping ear with the collar of my shirt and all of a sudden things went quiet. The sprinklers had been turned off, steel heads gurgling like their throats had been cut.
A huh-huh panting from somewhere. Maybe a generator in an outbuilding.
“Mikey?” someone called.
A lanky man with a gray ponytail stood on the porch, hands on his hips, facing out to the garage. He wore a pink-and-green tie-dyed T-shirt and I saw the edge of a salt-and-pepper beard.
“Mike?” he called again
, his voice high.
“What?”
Camouflage Mike appeared from behind the garage, pushing a black plastic wheelbarrow with a pitchfork balanced across it.
“Where’s all the fertilizer?” asked Tie-Dye. “I got salt licks, fine, we got the strawberries, but if—”
“Aw, shit, Doc.” Mike put the wheelbarrow down and set his knuckles against the small of his back. “I totally forgot fertilizer.”
“Well, go! This might be the last day!” Doc threw his hands up. “I’ve just got dregs in that bag and you know how she is if we don’t do the smoothie by eleven!”
Mike nodded, head down, walking toward the Jeep.
“You only have to go as far as Fisher’s,” Doc called. “Where’s Tyrone and Dean?”
“Doin’ the straw!” Mike barked, swinging up into the driver’s seat.
“How’s George today?”
“You know how George is.”
“He taking his feed?”
“Not so much.”
Mike backed down the driveway in a cloud of dust and slammin’ beats while Doc—Dr. Q. Duffy himself?—speed-walked off the porch toward the sheds. Unless they kept their straw in the living room, maybe that meant the house was empty of staff for the minute. There couldn’t be a cook if the doctor himself was up to his ears in smoothies. A crow cawed up in one of the trees, once, then everything was quiet again.
I straightened up tall and looked over the daisies, then stepped backward as the hair stood up on my head.
Fifteen feet away, on the oval of lawn below the house, a large tawny animal lay on its side—its underside was toward me so I couldn’t see whether its eyes were open or if it was aware of me at all. Its white tongue lolled, its side heaving so blades of grass bent back and forth with every breath. It looked like a full-grown lioness with a slack cow’s udder stitched to its abdomen below its twin rows of nipples, its front legs draped under two enormously long black wings that’d been wired to its shoulder, while a pair of black testicles shifted between its back legs and the udder—steer testicles, maybe. I felt a percolating affection for the thing. That labored breathing reminded me of someone I couldn’t put a face to. The wings lifted six inches to flap like they didn’t have a care in the world.
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