“Gonzo, no hand is going to break up through a stone mausoleum, okay? Chill out.”
“Yeah, okay,” he says, letting out a deep breath. “This could be zombie heaven, man. Dude, I wish we were making a horror film. That would be mad awesome!”
Gonz snaps a few pics with his cell phone. Weird shit like his hand resting clawlike against a headstone so that it looks like he’s rising from the dead, horror-movie-poster style. These are accompanied by “aargghs” and “aaaahhhs” and various zombie-esque grunts made deep in his throat.
“Funny. Can you stop playing Dawn of the Living Ass-Hat long enough to help me find Junior’s message?”
A few feet away, three blond girls jabber on in German as they snap photos of the decaying headstones. One of the girls asks me in halting English if I’ll take a picture of them together.
“No-a speak English,” I say, turning away.
“Here, I’ll do it,” Gonzo says.
I start to remind him we’re here for a purpose, but he’s already got their camera and is using a mix of Spanish, English, and hand gestures to direct them while they bump into one another in confusion and laugh.
“Copenhagen Interpretation?” one girl says. She plays a snippet of song from her phone, and Gonzo nods, smiling, and they all nod, smiling.
I wander off down the narrow lanes till I’m alone. The air is heavy with the rain that won’t come. It presses down on me, making my legs heavy and my chest tight. I find a place to sit on the stone steps of a gravestone hidden by a weeping willow. The moss hangs so low it tickles my cheek and nose. It smells like sorrow.
“Hey, cowboy.”
At the sound of Dulcie’s voice, I whip around, left and right, searching.
“Up here,” she calls.
“Ah. Very cute.” She’s posed on the top of a white, churchlike mausoleum, her wings folded, her chin resting on her hands like the Thinker Angel. She could blend right in, except for the boots and the bright pink hair.
She hops to the ground with an impressive thud, her boots sending puffs of ancient Southern dust onto my jeans, and settles onto the new grave of a soldier. “So what do you think of the Big Easy?”
“I don’t know,” I say, sitting next to her. “It’s kind of depressing.”
Dulcie puts a hand on my shoulder. “Cam, you’re in a graveyard.”
“Funny.”
Dulcie nods at the sunglasses in my hands. “What are those?”
“Sunglasses.”
“Going for the literal. Okay. I’m game. Where’d you get them?”
She could be putting me on. For all I know, she’s been watching the whole time and has seen everything. “This guy named Junior Webster,” I say, waiting for a reaction. But her expression doesn’t change and I figure she really doesn’t know anything, which means she’s the lamest angel ever. I go ahead and tell her about our night, the Wizard of Reckoning and his Fire Giants—the dark energy—showing up to our little party, Junior’s death. The only thing I don’t tell her is how scared I am. In the distance, I can hear a smattering of German and laughing. I can make out Gonzo playing director. He’s telling one of the German girls to act like a zombie.
“Junior told me I’m supposed to bury these under the angel and wait for a message. Thing is, there are, like, four billion angels in this cemetery.”
Dulcie nods. “That’s a toughie.”
“I thought maybe you would know where? Like maybe that might fall under the category of special angel-privy info you could share?”
She leans back, crosses her legs and swings one out, touching me lightly each time with her boot. “I told you, Cameron, I’m just a messenger.”
I put my hands up. “Fine. Junior Webster wanted me to bury these sunglasses under the angel? I’m on it. If this doesn’t work, I really don’t give a shit anymore. Move your feet.”
Dulcie sweeps her boots to one side. I make a small hole in the fresh dirt of the soldier’s grave, drop in the sunglasses, and cover them up. I wipe my hands on my jeans and sit beside Dulcie to wait. Gulls circle overhead, crying. After five minutes, I check the ground, but there’s nothing.
“So where’s this secret message?”
“Beats me,” she says, dipping into a secret stash of ChocoYums. “But I love the not knowing. The sense of mystery. Don’t you?”
“No. I really, really don’t.” We sit quietly for another minute or two. My butt hurts and all I want to do is leave. “Should we say something? Are there some, like, magic words that could speed this along?”
Dulcie puts her hands out like a magician about to levitate a rabbit. “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.” She shrugs. “I heard that on the radio once.”
“That’s it. I’m out of here.” I stand up and promptly trip over a large rock on the path. Under the rock is a scrap from today’s newspaper, the classified section.
“Did you find it?” Dulcie asks, peering down at me from her new perch at the top of the willow tree. She’s totally showing off.
“Could you let me read this, please?”
She mimes a zipper over her lips, and I scan the section of newspaper. It’s all a random jumble:
HERE AND THEN NOT—MYSTERY OF THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION SOLVED! NEW PHOTOS OF LONG-LOST INUIT BAND FISHING IN SNOW.
BUY NOW. VALHALLA YARD GNOMES—LAWN ORNAMENTS FIT FOR A GOD.
DEAR TOBIAS, I FORGIVE YOU. TO ERR IS HUMAN; TO LIVE, DIVINE. LET US LIVE TOGETHER FOR THE REST OF OUR DAYS. I WISH IT TO BE.
NEED A RIDE TO THE YA! PARTY HOUSE? WE’VE GOT SPACE IN OUR CAR.
THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS CORPORATION’S TRAVEL OFFICE IS NOW OPEN.
LOOKING FOR WORK? OUR OPERATIONS ARE EXPANDING! CALL UNITED SNOW GLOBE WHOLESALERS
AT 1-800-555-1212.
There are at least twenty different classifieds here, none of them particularly meaningful or helpful.
“This is hopeless,” I say.
Dulcie’s voice floats down from the tree. “Keep looking. You’ll find it.”
“Yeah? How do you know?”
“Because I believe in you, Cameron,” she says without a hint of sarcasm.
I look again, and this time, way down in the right-hand corner, I see a tiny, illustrated ad for the Roadrunner Bus Company with their tagline: Follow the feather.
“Hey, is that it? Is this what Junior meant?” I start, but the willow tree’s empty. Dulcie is already gone. A sudden gust of wind tears the paper from my hand and blows it far away. I’m left with just a scrap. Two words: to live.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In Which Junior Webster’s Cryptic Message Does Not Become Any More Uncryptic, and the Worst Pictures Ever Taken of Us Are Circulated
We’re at the bus station, feeding my dad’s credit card into the ticket machine. Our bus to Daytona is scheduled to leave in five minutes. I don’t know if that’s the bus we need to be on; I’m just going off what I saw on the classifieds page. It mentioned the YA! Party House. The Party House is in Florida. There are three buses leaving this evening and one of them is headed to Daytona; ergo, we are headed to Daytona. I am divining my future based on a classified ad I found in a graveyard.
“So, you think this is part of the secret message?” Gonzo asks, looking at the newspaper scrap.
“Don’t know, don’t care right now,” I say. The ticket machine wheezes like an old man, coughing out two tickets to Florida in a painfully slow fashion.
“To live. Maybe he means too live,” Gonzo says, making a long “i” sound. “You know, like, like, hey, cats and kittens, it’s all too live,” he says, adopting a hipster voice.
“Or maybe it’s just bullshit. To live? That’s not a secret message. That’s a fortune cookie.”
“Maybe he meant you needed to live. Maybe he’s telling you Dr. X will cure you and everything will be okay. Dude, I’ll bet that’s it!”
Gonzo’s face lights up now that he thinks he’s solved the puzzle, but I just feel like some kind of jerk who’s having a cosmic prank played on him.
I wanted something concrete—turn left at the Auto Mart. Dr. X’s office is on the corner of Fifth and Main and you have an appointment at eleven o’clock next Tuesday.
Just as they’re making the announcement for our bus, a couple of cops enter the station. At the sight of them, we automatically go low-profile, hiding at the back of a pack of people heading for the buses. They’ve got a flyer they show to people in the station.
“Keep your head down,” I whisper to Gonzo. The cop stops to ask a lady with three small kids if she’s ever seen these two guys, and I get a look over his shoulder. The flyer shows two very bad school photos of Gonzo and me under the word MISSING. I hate that picture of me. I look like a complete putz. But at least I’m not sporting the ridiculous upper-lip peach fuzz Gonzo’s got in his.
“Gonzo,” I say. “Be cool. Those cops are looking for us. Blend in.”
“Blend in? Easy for you to say!”
The line presses forward toward the bus. The driver opens up the metal jaw on the side and passengers hand over their suitcases for storage. Why do people have to travel with so much stuff? The cops are out here now, scouring the buses for two teens—one a dwarf—who escaped from a hospital in Texas. I position Gonz in front of me so I can block his body with mine. Trouble is, he’s wider than I am, and it makes it look like we’re one of those Indian goddesses with lots of limbs. After what seems like forever, the driver opens the doors, and Gonzo and I nearly kill each other in our rush to reach the back of the bus, where we pile into our seats and slink down.
“Cover your face with your jacket. Pretend you’re asleep,” I say.
We bury ourselves under Windbreakers and backpacks so that only the tops of our heads show. People lumber on now, looking for seats. I peek over the top of my jacket to see the cop stepping into the aisle. He cranes his neck, looking for us, but there are too many people moving around to really see.
The driver climbs on. “Excuse me, Officer. If you’re done, I got a schedule to get to.”
The cop gives a last hard look, and I duck under the safety of my jacket. After a few seconds, I hear him thank the driver. The doors close with a hiss, sealing us in. The bus rolls out of the station, but my heartbeat doesn’t get back to normal till we’re far from the city limits of New Orleans.
When he’s ready to take a nap, the guy next to us lets us borrow his deck of cards. We eat RealFruit Lassos and play Texas Hold ’Em and Jacks Are Wild. The bus bumps along the coast. Oil refineries send up plumes of toxic smoke. The smell, like rotten eggs mixed with cleaning fluid, makes me want to gag. A couple of shrimp boats bob on the water, the fishermen pulling up the soul of the sea in their heavy nets. I like watching the country roll by my window. I wish we’d taken more vacations. I try to remember why we stopped. Dad got busy with work and Mom got busy looking busy and Jen and I started hating each other and next thing you know, we’re a bunch of strangers totally uncomfortable being around each other. And who wants to go on vacation with a bunch of strangers?
Gonzo deals out a new hand. The sky’s getting darker. The lights in the bus kick on. Little cones of yellow-white shine down on our cards, making our hands look bleached out.
“You get a phone number from that German girl back in the graveyard?” I ask. “I think she was hot for you.”
Gonzo shakes his head. “Not my type.”
“What? German? Tourist? Girl?”
Gonzo flashes me a Don’t Go There look.
“So what is your type?”
He thinks for a minute. “Sweet, but dangerous-looking. I like Southern accents. And tattoos.”
I let out a sharp laugh. “Tattoos? Whoa! Who’da thunk it? The Gonzman likes ’em a little tough.”
He grins. “You don’t know everything about me, pendejo. I’m a pretty complicated dude.”
“You’re, like, a totally open book, Gonz,” I say, laughing. “I’ve never met anybody more transparent in my life.”
“You don’t know me, dude,” he says, not smiling this time. Gonzo examines his cards, prepping for his next move. “People always think they know other people, but they don’t. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won’t eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don’t know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel fucked up and sad for no reason at all.”
I’ve got an image of Gonzo sitting in his room alone feeling fucked up and sad and I hate it, because now I feel responsible for him in a way I didn’t want to.
“You’re not going to say something cheesy like ‘people are like onions; they have lots of layers,’ are you?”
“Just trying to have a conversation. Forget it, dude. Whatever. Just play.”
He discards a two and I pick it up. I’ve got a pair of twos and that’s it. My cards suck.
“So, what’s your type?” Gonzo asks a few minutes later.
“Wow, let me think. Um, anyone who would have me.” I put another card on the pile. What is my type? A brief image of Dulcie with her armor and pink hair comes unbidden to mind. I push it away. “You know Staci Johnson?”
“Staci Johnson!” Gonzo snarls. “Say it ain’t so, dude! Staci Johnson is the devil’s spawn!”
“I know, I know. She has no working brain cells, a subpar personality, and nothing interesting to say ever, unless you’re into what happened last night on YA! TV. But once you make it past that, she’s seriously fine. Yo, I discarded.”
He ignores my card and draws from the stack. “Staci Johnson. Dude. I feel like I need to shave my insides when you say that.” Gonzo organizes his cards, moving one from the end to the center of his hand. “Well, maybe when you get back from Florida, you know? You’ll have that whole road-trip mystique working for you. Plus you will have saved the world. That’s gotta count.”
“And a tan,” I add, glancing at my flounder-belly-white arms.
“Tan works.”
“Also, I won’t be dying. Hopefully.”
“Always helpful.” He fans his cards out on the table. “Royal flush, Señor Pajero. You owe me four bags of chips.”
We’ve been on the road for six hours when my right leg starts to twitch uncontrollably. The E-ticket’s lost a little more color; Adventureland’s totally gone, and the second line, Frontierland, is a hazy green. I cross my left leg over my right and put my backpack on top, hoping no one will notice, hoping the twitching will pass soon. The tremor travels. My right arm goes tight. I can’t lift the sucker; it’s like lead. Please don’t let me have a seizure here. Please. Just let me make it to Florida. Out on the dark horizon, little bursts of flame pop up. They look just like the fire balls on top of the refineries. I even try to convince myself that that’s what they are. But my gut says it’s the fire giants out there. Getting stronger. Bigger. Waiting for me. My eyes get heavy watching them. The rhythm of the road lulls me to sleep.
“Cameron? I thought I’d read some more of Don Quixote to you.” Mom’s sitting beside me in my hospital bed, bathed in a pool of light. The curtains have been drawn sealing us into a little drapery cocoon. “Would you like that?”
Her voice wraps around me like a dryer-fresh blanket, and I drift in and out of the crazy knight’s amusing adventures with Sancho Panza. “‘Take my advice and live for a long, long time,’” Mom reads. “‘Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die.’”
After a while, Mom closes the book and strokes my hair. “It’s kind of nice, reading to you again,” she says. “Do you remember when you were a kid and in the summers we would go to the library? I’d let you pick out five books, and you could never wait till we got home. We’d have to find a corner and sit and read them all before we left the library.”
Why don’t I remember that? How could my mom and I have shared the same experience but I don’t remember it?
“Why did we stop doing that?” Mom wonders aloud. “We just stopped going. You didn’t want to, I
think. And I was afraid of pushing you. I was always afraid of saying the wrong thing, so I stopped talking.”
Mom’s crying a little bit, quietly, the way she always does. She never utters a sound even when she’s crying, and that makes me a little sad. Doesn’t seem right. When you cry, people should hear you. The world should stop. I squeeze Mom’s hand and she squeezes back. I don’t say anything, but at least she knows I’ve heard her.
People drift in and out in my dream like actors in a play. Eubie comes to visit. He slips headphones on my ears so I can hear “Cypress Grove Blues,” and I want to tell him that I’ve been to New Orleans, that I’ve seen Junior Webster, that I played bass for him, but it’s a dream, and the words won’t come. At one point, Dad sits on my bed, reading to me from a physics paper he’s grading that’s about supercolliders.
In the corner, the muted TV plays the same cartoon of the roadrunner and coyote chasing each other in and out of doors. The last thing I see is the old lady from across the hall standing at the foot of my bed. She’s dressed in a coat and hat and has a little suitcase with her.
“A house by the sea. Don’t forget.”
“I won’t,” I say, but I’m not sure anyone hears me.
And on TV, the coyote waits for the anvil to fall.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Wherein the Angel Discusses the Wonders of Microwave Popcorn and Gonzo Gets Our Asses Stranded in the Middle of Nowhere
When I wake up, it’s morning, early. The light hasn’t been up much longer than I have. People are asleep. Their heads rest against the windows and seat backs, their jaws spread wide, like the arms of a can opener left on a counter. Through the thin, wet layer of dew on my own window, the countryside rolls past. We’re in Mississippi or maybe Alabama.
A gray mist sits on the rooftops of little tar-paper shacks where clotheslines are strung across the front yards. The shirts catch the breeze like they wish they could sail on out of there, out of those small, junky yards with their rusted car shells and broken-down plastic toys. I breathe on the window a few times, watch it fog over and retreat, fog over and retreat.