by George Foy
She fumbled at the half-sucker, pulled it off by its cord.
‘Who—’ she croaked, and licked her lips. ‘Who – on earth, are you?’
‘My name’s Joe,’ he repeated stupidly. She had very clear eyes, he thought. ‘Joe—’
‘Marak.’
His pulse rate went up. It was one thing to theorize she could hear. It was quite another to find she was listening.
‘You heard,’ he said. ‘The whole—’
‘Of course. You were practically talking in my ear.’
‘But I thought—’
‘I know.’
‘But why?’
She scrunched up her mouth. ‘Because,’ she said. ‘I din’ feel like talking.’
‘But the doctor,’ he babbled on. ‘Your mother. Your husband.’
She almost smiled.
‘I don’t get it,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s weird.’ She looked away.
‘I din’ say that.’
‘I’m tired,’ the girl said, turning to look at him again. ‘I’m sooo, sooo tired. I needed a rest. They wouldn’t understand. They’re nice to me, they’re so darn nice, everyone takes care of me, it’s . . . exhausting. Roger is sweet. But all I need is some time by myself. To get better. Just by myself . . .’
‘But why don’t you just go somewhere,’ he said. ‘They have places—’
‘Funny farms?’
‘I guess.’
‘I’m not crazy. And I don’t want not to feel. Those places, they make you not feel. Do you understand that?’
‘That makes sense to me,’ he told her, brightly.
‘Does it?’ She got up on one elbow. It took real effort. He kept his eyes away from where the hospital johnny hung wide, revealing the blinding soft whiteness of her lower breast. ‘Does it, Joe Marak?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to feel, some of the time. When it hurts. But if I didn’t feel, how would I know if I wanted to or not?’
She chewed that one over. There wasn’t much to chew. Her shoulder got tired. Her eyes lost shine.
She flopped back on the pillows and said, ‘You’re one of them, aren’t you? You’re a smuggler, too.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Or a druggie. One of those kinds of things.’
‘How do you know I’m not a policeman? Or a reporter? Or a doctor, for that matter?’ He squirmed, trying to readjust his intern’s gown. God had woken up and was trying to find a more comfortable sleeping position in the garment’s pocket. His little claws dug through the thin green nylon.
‘You need help from my father.’ She knocked the word ‘father’ out of her mouth viciously, thwacking the consonants against her front teeth. ‘Hawkley. The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook. You’re no policeman.’
‘I’m a freetrader,’ he admitted. ‘But I don’t smuggle anything stronger than jisi yomo.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Oh, that’s just great,’ she said, ‘a moralist.’
‘Look, I’m not—’
‘I wouldn’t even try.’
‘It’s not the point.’
‘I should call the police.’ The gray in her eyes was the gray of polar pack.
‘Maybe you should.’ He had a feeling she was testing him with that. Her eyes drifted down toward his lap. ‘My God,’ she burst out, ‘what the heck is that?’
He didn’t have to look.
‘It’s a rat,’ he told her. ‘Don’t worry. He’s just a pet.’
‘My God,’ she said again. The gray had warmed of a sudden, to the temperature of sun-heated rocks. ‘Can I see him? Does he bite?’
He reassured her. He put God on the covers, near her waist. The rat sniffed the blankets, whiskers working like pulse radar. Her fingers moved, but she didn’t touch him.
‘Roger won’t let me keep any pets,’ she said. ‘Not even a kitten.’
‘He does tricks,’ the pilot told her. ‘Look.’ He scratched God’s belly. The rat rolled over and shook all four paws in the air, grinning in his sickly fashion.
The corners of her mouth lifted.
‘What’s his name?’
‘God.’
‘What?’
The rat farted, audibly.
‘God. That’s his name.’
The girl’s cheeks blew out. She started to laugh. She didn’t want to, she tried to hold the laugh in, actually holding on to her chest with her fingers, but it was too strong for her. The laugh grew in proportion to the barriers erected against it till it racked her lungs with its spasms and moistened the corners of her eyes and echoed like April down the antiseptic corridors.
‘God,’ she gasped, ‘I can’t believe it. I have to – tell you,’ she said. ‘Haven’t heard from him – fifteen years. ’Cept Christmas card.’
‘Hawkley?’ he asked, not wanting to believe.
She nodded. The effort of trying to control her laughter made her hiccough and utter noises that sounded like agony. ‘Eeee – eee.’
‘He’s abroad—’ she gasped, ‘’s all I know. Last Christmas.’
Footsteps rang down the hall.
Roger Taylor burst into the room, and recoiled, both hands spread tense, partly at the sight of his wife, awake and laughing her guts out, mostly because of the rat on her bed.
‘Ela!’ he shouted, ‘God!’
‘God,’ she gasped. ‘Oh! Roger. God! Eeee!’
‘Ela.’ He started to approach her, but the pilot was in the way. He stared at the rat in utter disbelief. ‘Stop it, Ela,’ he said, and ‘Who is this?’
Martha Cahoon Crane hustled in behind him. She saw the rat and muttered, ‘Shit.’ She looked at her daughter and said, ‘You’re awake!’
The pilot grabbed God by the scruff of the neck and stuffed him in his pocket.
‘You aren’t a doctor,’ Roger Taylor said, running his fingers through his comb-over. ‘Who are you? What are you doing in my wife’s room?’
‘I’m a – uh, therapist,’ the pilot said. ‘I’m a, uh, mammal therapist. I use animals as tools. Very few people are aware that rats are one of our more intelligent mammals. Sensitive, too. They, uh, work wonders on this type of case. It really works. See?’ He pointed at the girl.
‘Are you okay, honey?’ Martha Cahoon Crane asked, bending over the bed to touch her daughter, but keeping her eyes on the pilot.
‘Honey’ was unable to talk. The initial displacement of humor, the world-out-of-joint, banana-peel kick that first jolted her into laughing had created a second displacement, and a third. She was laughing even harder, only now it was because she probably shouldn’t, and because of the disapproval in her mother’s mouth, and most of all because of Roger, and the expression on his face, which looked somewhere between a possum launched unexpectedly into earth orbit, and a cow who had just swallowed a ten-pound bag of pop rocks.
‘Control yourself, honey,’ Ela’s mother said.
‘Eeee,’ Honey said. But she quieted down eventually.
‘He wants to – find my father,’ Ela whispered, between giggles.
‘I don’t understand this,’ Roger repeated, taking off his glasses and polishing them as if this would allow him to see things in better perspective.
Ela’s mother was looking hard at the pilot. Her eyes were like airframe aluminum. If her mouth had been tight before, it was taut as a cable on the Golden Gate Bridge now. ‘I think I do,’ she said. ‘I do. He’s one of them. He’s one of Forrest’s goddam freaks, and I’m calling the police!’
‘Don’t do that,’ the pilot shouted, ‘don’t do that!’ But Martha had already pulled out a cellphone and was punching the buttons.
‘Nice meeting you, Ela,’ the pilot told her. ‘Nice family you got here. Real nice. Real happy you’re better, an’ everything. Nice to meet you too, Mrs Crane, or should I say – Cahoon.’ He moved backward out the door and into a nurse who was coming to see what all the hoopla was abo
ut. He could hear Ela’s laughter winding up again. It rang most of the way down the staircase. Then it stopped, all of a sudden.
*
Luckily PC is in the waiting room. They move fast, out the door, to the Chevy. Rocketman is at the drooling stage of sleep and does not budge as they get in and start off, but the parrot yelps.
‘Fuck this hospital shit,’ he screeches, in faithful mimickry of what he’s been hearing from Rocketman over the last twelve hours.
A security guard pops out of the front entrance and looks around bemused just as they slip behind the emergency-room wing, headed for the exit. A figure in a pus-green hospital johnny comes hurtling through the ER doors, arcs of lily ass flashing out the loose garment. The figure brakes to a halt in the middle of the circuit road, arms and legs and sandy brown hair seeming to catch up independently, she’s been moving so headlong. The girl looks around, bewildered by the cool sun.
‘Stop!’ the pilot yells – PC is driving. ‘It’s her!’
‘What do you mean, “stop”?’ PC hits the brakes anyway.
The pilot jumps out. He is looking back at the girl. For her part, she takes one look at him and runs toward the car. Comes to a halt one foot away from the open sedan door.
‘Take me with you?’ she says.
‘What are you talking about?’ he asks her.
‘Please. Just let me come.’
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ she says, ‘I have – to get – out of here.’ Coughing lightly between every two words.
She looks behind her, anxiously. She is sweating and unsteady. She puts a hand on the car roof for support. The other hand clutches a tiny vaporizer, and a bottle of pills.
‘It don’t make sense,’ he tells her.
‘I can help you find him. My father,’ she adds, unnecessarily.
He looks around the parking lot.
‘But you’re sick,’ he says.
She glares at him. Her eyes, like a deep well, summon echoes.
‘No, I’m not,’ she tells him in exactly the tone of a ten-year-old child proclaiming the opposite on a school Monday. ‘I was mostly pretending.’
The pilot thinks about it, then stops thinking about it. If you think about things too much, he decides, nothing makes sense anymore.
‘What the fuck,’ he says, and stands away from the door. ‘Get in.’
‘Missiles closing,’ the parrot intones. ‘Evade, evade. Coño!’
They move away at speed.
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘It’s not where you go. It’s how you get there.’
Hawkley-ite slogan
They drove east and north toward upstate New York where the pilot knew he could get them across the border into Canada with no more effort than it took to cross his parents’ living room.
BON would likely have checked out his parents, but he doubted they would keep surveillance teams active for more than a few days.
Anyway, there was something at home he needed.
They stopped at an Army and Navy store to buy clothes for Ela; blue jeans, army jacket, flannel shirts, WAVE underwear, paratroopers’ boots. While Ela was shopping the pilot went into a police equipment store to purchase electronic antisurveillance gear, not because he needed any – the ECM-pak was more than sufficient for his purposes – but because it was the perfect cargo to run into EC-occupied Poland, where such gear was illegal and therefore expensive.
The men had become suddenly conscious of personal hygiene, now there was a woman in the car. They stopped at a truck stop in western Ohio to buy gas and deodorant and take showers. Once Ela asked to stop at a post office. She had to tell Roger what had happened to her, she said. No specifics, Rocketman warned, nobody should know where they were. No specifics, she agreed. Rocketman followed her in anyway, watching her as she bought credit and stood in line for the e-mail terminal; watched the screen as she typed.
After that they kept going, holding to the anonymity of the second- and third-rank interstates.
The girl slept most of the time. She slept with dedication and enthusiasm, as if she hadn’t rested for months. She cried out a lot when she slept, and coughed, and threw her hands about. Sometimes she would say things to Roger. A lot of the time, she would simply say ‘No,’ in tones of pleading or great finality. She slept so hard that when she woke up there were always one or two minutes of wild-eyed disorientation as her dream-soaked mind struggled to take in the highway, the car, the strangers riding beside her. Then, what had happened would filter through, and she would take a hit from the vaporizer to soothe her scoured lungs, shift around in the long Naugahyde indulgence of the Chevy’s front seat till she found a good position, and doze off again, coughing softly.
So it was easy to get used to her presence. PC, stunned by her physical appearance, by the details of how she brushed her hair back or shifted her hips in the seat, tried to talk to her at first, rashly expending his reserves of interesting conversation, but she shut him off with monosyllables – and went to sleep.
Rocketman observed her with great suspicion. When she was unconscious, he made fell comments about coincidence, police plants, and the Trilateral Commission. But it was difficult, even for Rocketman, to remain paranoid for long about a girl who slept as hard and seriously as she did.
As for the pilot, he figured that this whole expedition was so strange, the extra bit of strangeness involved in bringing Ela aboard would not matter. It might even help, he reasoned. If you were going to cast off from the normal rules of logic and probability and set off on a wild expedition that based itself on other laws, you might as well do so as thoroughly as possible.
What those other laws were he had not a clue. Maybe some sense that cause and effect were not the only realities, that the universe sometimes worked by affinity, like-patterns attracting like, circles pulling in circles, squares, squares. You could call it sympathetic magic, or the separate existence of form; whatever you called it, to associate Hawkley’s daughter, and Gershwin’s rumors, and some kind of arcane secret that in mysterious fashion would enable square-up smugglers to evade the clutches of BON had more to do with high gambling than logical positivism, and if Ela was one of the expressions of that gamble, then they should take her along and see how the dice rolled.
On a more intuitive level he suspected that they were all adrift at this particular point in their sad adulthood, even, or especially, Ela – and that the most vital thing in such circumstances was to set yourself a geographic goal and head for it, and never, ever stop. It was the movement that counted, as the Smuggler’s Bible said somewhere, not the destination. The movement would create its own rationale.
Highway driving was perfect for this kind of mindset. The art of the American road; the parameters of sex and submission packed into traffic rules and the play of brakes, wheel, accelerator; the impulse to go, go, go without stopping, go without thinking, go; the idea that movement was salvation; that when the Sarin winds had come and gone, the Eisenhower Interstate System would remain to lead the survivors to safety, roads just like this one, broken, crazed, weeds growing in the cracks, dangerous with potholes and pitfalls and rust-weakened bridges, lined with pillaged cars and prewar steamrollers, but still basically in one piece. The esthetics of the highway tranq-ed their minds in a clash of Pepto-Bismol sunsets, a sense of horizons parsed by telephone poles, a game of license-plate numbers – one long unending moving violation. The wipers snapped at ozone flurries; they polished arcs on the windshield that let in sparkle after the tiny storms had raged away. The V-8 rumbled quietly, raising a taste of power and purpose. The heater warmed them, the defroster blew the windscreen clear.
They never got out of the car except for pit stops, and once, in Lima, Ohio, to buy sandpaper, brushes, and two gallons of navy housepaint. Down a dirt road, well outside town, they sanded the Chevy down and painted it blue. He did not think anyone in Indiana had linked the car with Ela, the pilot said, but it didn’t hurt to take precautions.
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nbsp; They scored food from drive-in pizza franchises. They bought beer from drive-in liquor stores, and maintained the brews at a perfect temperature in a cooler full of ice.
The pilot kept the ECM on spectrum-scan, absorbing the buzz of cop chatter through the headset in his flying helmet. The others listened to pop tunes, country music, talk shows, and all-night religious fund-raising gospel electronic hallelujah hoedowns on the big AM Motorola. The call signs changed, as did the addresses in the ads, but otherwise the shows were all the same. Even the ‘Jimmy Hoffa Resurrection Gospel Hour,’ newly syndicated to just about every country music station in every state they crossed, used the same dynamics, the same in-group out-group techniques as the other evangelists.
Huge agribusiness grainfields alternated with former factories in which small automated security-electronics firms had taken root. In between stood suburbs where dwelled the people who served the machines that cranked out the electronic equipment – churches, zoned developments, satellite-TV dishes, and wall-malls blurring into one whole, a satellite-TV-mall-development-church where salvation could be obtained like Ginzu knives, direct from Mobile or Newark or Burbank, only nay-unh-teen ninety-nay-uhn, UCC-cards only accepted, thirty days trial, satisfaction guaranteed or your credit back.
There were a lot of penitentiaries on this stretch of road, and asylums for the criminally insane. Most were brand new, built of concrete and alloy, ringed with barbizons and ditches. All were farmed out to corrections corporations, outfits with names like American Remedials Inc., High Security, ProCon. One of the prisons sported a huge billboard with a picture of an IV and the boast ‘OHIO PUTS AN END TO CRIME’ and ‘Next Execution Nov 18’ and ‘Get Your Tickets NOW.’ At night their searchlights feathered the horizon, and during the day the sun glinted on their razor-ribbon perimeters. Whenever they appeared Rocketman would grow thoughtful and withdrawn.
‘I feel like we’ve completely lost track,’ Rocketman said at one point when there were no jails in sight. They were, in fact, somewhere between Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and Canton. ‘That we’ve become some kind of American road-critter, that eats dust and no-lead and shits miles out the back. Some kind of expression of the American psyche. I don’t know.’