“No!” the CESSNABers shout.
“That’s right. Cameron is part of our specialness, and we’re going to prove that our way is the right way, the only way. The universe wants Cameron to be happy, and all he has to do to be forgiven is to bowl.”
Daniel flicks the switch, and the ball machine thunks and rolls into action. My favorite, the purple one with a really high shine, shimmies up to my hand and waits.
“Daniel …,” I start, but he forces my hand onto the ball, his smile like a rictus grin. “Pick it up, Cameron. Crusaders, let’s give our troubled friend a little inspiration.”
The band kicks in. Ruth’s shaking a tambourine, and I don’t mean to brag, but my tambourine solo totally kicks hers to the curb. For half a second, I consider staying. Maybe I could find that bliss state again. Maybe I could stay here, follow all the rules, be safe always. But as soon as the thought enters my mind, another one swims in and eats the first one like a shark. Fuck that, it burps.
“Here goes nothing.” My fingers sink into the holes of that purple beauty; I pull back and throw the ball into the lane, where it sails down the slick middle like it’s always done, heading for a perfect strike. But the ball veers off course. It drifts toward the gutter like it has every time I’ve ever bowled here, but instead of popping back out, it slinks into the loser trough with a loud rumble and disappears. Not a single pin falls. There is complete shock and silence.
“That can’t happen,” Daniel says, eyes wide. “Everybody’s a winner here.”
“Do it again!” someone challenges.
“Great idea,” Daniel agrees, but his face is a little pale. “Come on, Cameron. Embrace the positive.”
I shrug. “Your funeral.”
Once again, the ball wobbles off course. It manages to knock off one measly pin before vanishing.
“Let me try it.” Daniel pushes me out of the way. “Embrace. The. Positive!” he shouts, letting the ball fly, then watching in horror as his ball slips sideways, taking out only two pins at the far end. “But … I’m special.”
“Holy shit,” a kid named Luke shouts. “No way!” He races for a ball at the same time his friend John does.
“Dude, I’m so going first,” Luke says.
“The hell you are,” John protests. They run out to the lanes, where Luke knocks down six pins to John’s three.
“Ha! I beat you by three pins! In your face!”
Ruth climbs on top of the Snackateria’s Holy Cheese Fry machine. “Luke, we’re not competitive here. Everybody’s a winner. Everybody is part of the team.”
John doesn’t hear her. He’s too busy lining up his next shot. “Think you can do it again, shithead?”
Luke breaks into a grin. “Dude, I will totally smoke your ass.”
Daniel’s practically screaming now. He’s running across the lanes, dodging balls as they fly. “Guys, we’re all part of the specialness. Don’t forget that.”
Luke and John stop and stand there, looking at their feet. Luke takes a ball from the carousel and hands it to John, which makes Daniel smile.
“Ten bucks says I win.”
“You’re on.”
The balls clatter into action. People start taking sides, cheering on either Luke or John. John makes a strike, a real one, and Luke yells, “You suck!” and they both start laughing.
The doors fly open. I can’t see Gonzo in the crowd but I can hear him saying, “Excuse me, excuse me, could you get out of the way you smoothie-loving happy freaks?”
“Gonz!” I say, picking his little man body up for a full-on hug.
“Can we go now?” he says. “’Cause after five days in this joint, I need to eat a bag of Cheesy Puff Fingers and listen to some hardcore face-melting music to get my synapses back to normal. If I never see a smoothie again, it’ll be too soon.”
A huge brawl breaks out in the bowling alley—people trying to best each other, idiots throwing balls into each other’s lanes, arm-wrestling matches, a few choir members playing air guitar—while other CESSNAB Crusaders try to drown them out with happiness songs and chase them down for group hugs. They’re so busy going crazy, they don’t see Gonzo and me slip away. Even Peter and Matthew aren’t at their stations in the parking lot. Just as we turn onto the road, I think I see Library Girl standing in a patch of trees, two streaks of white behind her back, but then she’s gone, and I’m pretty sure I imagined the whole thing.
We walk the five miles to the nearest town, and just to torture me, Gonzo starts making up his own CESSNAB song about making your happiness cry uncle and feeding happiness to your dog so he has wicked happiness gas, and we laugh. It’s a pretty long walk, but my body’s cooperating and the Wizard of Reckoning feels a long way off, so far off he’s not even a sound you can pick up with the sonar of your soul. And it’s only when we get close to the highway and the constant hum of cars taking people to and away from places that could be home or a new start or nowhere in particular, just a spot on the endless road, that I see the Buddha Cows floating gently to earth like a surreal snow.
But it doesn’t seem worth mentioning, so I don’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Wherein We Crash at the Mister Motel and I Learn Some Stuff About the Ayatollah of Harsh
We take a crappy room in an even shittier motel, the Mister Motel right off the interstate. The blinking neon sign shows a winking guy tipping his hat, the Mister of Mister Motel fame, I assume. He looks like he should have a speech balloon coming out of his mouth: Rent rooms by the hour, real cheap. The room we get is a dark hole that looks like it hasn’t been changed in at least thirty years. Butt-ugly brown bedspreads and yellow paint on the walls. Dark, fake wood headboards. Threadbare carpet in a color that’s best described as “indiscriminately green”—great at hiding stains. The only new addition, for some crazy reason, is a bright orange balloon tied to a chair. The balloon advertises a used car lot, Arthur Limbaud’s Resale Beauties.
Gonzo, of course, is freaked about hygiene issues.
“Do you suppose they use bleach on the sheets?” he says, sitting tentatively on the bed and hugging his backpack to his chest. “I mean, really, you have to use bleach and the hot cycle to kill all the dust mites. And anything else.”
I don’t ask what “anything else” means and I don’t intend to. I’m tired. I want to go to sleep and not wake up till morning, when I’ll have to figure out how we get back on the road to Florida with no bus tickets and about three dollars to our names.
“I’m just gonna call my mom,” Gonzo says. He uses a tissue to pick up the receiver of the Mister Motel phone, which looks as ancient as everything else.
“What are you doing?” I say, putting my finger over the clicker to disconnect him.
“I told you, calling my mom. My cell’s dead and I don’t have the charger.”
“We can’t afford a phone call to your mom.”
“I don’t like this place, man.” Gonzo starts to wheeze.
“Calm down, Gonz. You’re okay. It’ll all be fine, I promise. Just breathe, okay?” I say, talking to him like I would if I were his mom. If I can keep him from panicking, he’ll be okay. I’m not even sure he has asthma. I think he just has Freak Out lungs. Gonzo’s not having any of my Zen master shit. He’s tearing through his bag frantically, like a squirrel desperate for its nut.
“My inhaler. Dude, it’s gone! Oh my God!” His face is really pale, and even I’m getting a little wigged about him.
“Be cool, be cool. Don’t freak on me. It’s here, okay?”
Gonzo’s nodding, but he’s saying “Shit, shit, shit” under his breath. I’m grabbing around in the bag, but I don’t feel the inhaler.
“What if it’s lost for real?” he wheezes. “Or stolen. Shit. Call nine-one-one, man. Call nine-one-one!”
I keep pawing through his bag. “I’m not calling nine-one-one. Calm down.”
“Dude, I can’t breathe!”
“You’re yelling! If you can yell, you can breathe, a
ll right? We call 911 and it’s game over. We go back and I die in a diaper listening to instrumental light rock and the world goes poof and that is not gonna happen, so just get a grip.”
The neon light from the parking lot falls across Gonzo’s face like a strobe effect. His eyes are wide and he’s clutching his chest.
“Please. Dude. This could be game over. Call nine-one-one stat! Tell them to bring a nebulizer!”
I grab his shoulders hard and shake him. “Gonzo! I am not going to let you die. Okay? I’m not your mom! I am not rushing you into an early grave so I can get on with my life. Okay? Okay?”
I’m waiting for him to go medieval on my ass for talking about his mom that way, but surprisingly, he just nods, letting me get back to his bag. This time, I find the L-shaped metal canister. “Here,” I say.
Gonzo grabs it with both hands, shakes it hard, then positions it at his mouth like a tiny pistol and fires away. His eyes close as he holds his breath, waiting for the medicine to do its work. Exactly thirty seconds later, he takes another hit, holds his breath again until he can’t anymore, and it all comes rushing out of him in a whoosh. There’s a lot of coughing. In another minute, the color returns to his face. The air conditioner clicks on. It pushes the orange balloon back and forth in the artificial breeze.
“You okay?” I ask.
He shrugs. He can’t really commit to being okay. It might kill him.
“That wasn’t cool, what you said about my mom,” he says quietly.
“Okay, sorry,” I say, because I don’t have any fight left in me. “Let’s just crash.”
I turn off the lamp and lie down. The room is tomb dark. Only hotel rooms ever get this dark, like they know it’s their function to close you off from the world. When my eyes adjust to the lack of light, though, I can still make out Gonzo sitting on the edge of his bed, not moving.
I sigh. “Gonz, you’re not, like, having heart palpitations over there or anything, are you?”
“No. I was just thinking.” His voice sounds weird in the dark. Hollow and detached, like he’s as full of air as the orange balloon. “You ever have, like, these totally random memories sometimes?”
“I guess.”
“I was thinking about this one time when I was a kid. I was, like, I don’t know, five? Six, maybe? It wasn’t too long after my old man took off. The kids next door had this new swing set. It was ridiculously tricked out: swings, clubhouse, slide, monkey bars. The whole bolo, man. Way cool. To a little kid, anyway.”
He pauses, and I wonder where this little trip down memory lane is taking us. My pillow’s heating up under my head. I flip it over, settle my head against the cool cotton.
“Anyway, they told me if I wanted to be in the club, I had to be able to cross the monkey bars without falling. Dude, those bars looked like they were about four thousand feet high. But it was the first time they’d asked me over, so I didn’t want to mess it up. One of the boys gave me a boost and I started making my way across. I was totally sweating it. But I got to the second one and then the third one. By the time I got to the fourth rung, they started cheering for me, telling me to keep going. It was this freakin’ amazing feeling, like … I don’t know how to describe it. I was doing it, you know? I was making it, muchacho. Two more to go and I’d be home free.”
I can hear him playing with his inhaler; it makes a soft rattle.
“I was about to reach for the next one when I heard my mom scream my name. She was standing in our yard with this look of terror on her face. I could tell she was ready to run for me—she didn’t trust, you know what I’m saying? When I looked back at that next rung, it seemed about a million miles away. I didn’t feel so sure anymore. I reached for it, but sorta half-assed, you know? And I missed. Fell down and broke my arm and a rib and started crying. The kids thought I was a weenie, and their moms said I couldn’t come over anymore because they didn’t want me getting hurt in their yards. I spent a few days in the hospital and my mom bought me a bunch of Fast Wheels cars that I told her I loved and then I buried them in the backyard later and told her I lost them and she acted all hurt and said I took things for granted just like my dad.”
He makes a funny sound that at first I think is a hiccup. But then I realize he’s crying. “That was the first time … the first time I got that feeling … that … the only thing keeping me alive … was my mom. And I hated her for it.”
Outside, somebody’s getting ice. The machine thunks against the wall like a dying man’s cough. It mixes with Gonzo’s strangled, silent crying.
“So …,” I start. “So, you know, what did you have against the Fast Wheels?”
The sniffling slows down. Gonzo shifts on the bed in the deep motel black. “Huh?”
“I know you hated your mom. Shit, I don’t blame you. But what did those little toy cars ever do to you to deserve such a fate? Buried alive. Dude, that’s harsh.”
Gonzo goes totally silent—not even a sniffle. For all I know, I’ve pissed him off so completely, he’s about to risk another asthma attack just to kick my ass. I position my pillow as a shield just in case I have to ward off forty-two inches of the Gonzman pounding at me in Little People fury. And then I hear it in the dark—a bubbling laugh through tears.
“My friend,” he says with a snort. “I am the Ayatollah of Harsh. Do not fuck with the little people. We will lay waste to your souls!”
“Oooh,” I say. “Now you got me scared, dude. Terrified.”
“I put a freakin’ fatwa out on those cars.” He’s laughing so hard he sounds totally manic, but hey, whatever it takes to keep him up.
I put the pillow back behind my head. “Well, they didn’t deserve to live. They were tools of the infidels.”
“Goddamn right,” he says, his voice less tight. He flops down on the bed.
It’s quiet for another minute, and I try to get my body to relax. My legs really ache, and I hope it’s just regular, tired aching from the long walk.
“Cameron?”
“Yeah?”
Gonzo turns on his side, facing me. I can make out the silhouette of him, my shadow friend. “You ever think about it?”
“Think about what?” I say.
“Dying.”
Do I ever think about it? What does he want to hear? That lately I think about how my mom’s face looks when she’s drinking her coffee in the morning, staring at her crossword puzzle like she just might beat it today. I think about driving with my dad to the lake the day before he and Mom bought the new house when I was eleven, him singing along to the radio and looking like all he wanted to do was keep driving and singing. I think about the Jenna who made me a Christmas ornament out of macaroni when she was six, and the current Jenna, Jenna of the dance team, Jenna who can’t stand me, Jenna who will miss me when I’m gone, even if it’s just because I’m not there to make her look so much better to the world. I think about the fact that I will probably never bone Staci Johnson, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I think about dying every day, because I can’t stop thinking about the living.
I fake a yawn. “Oh, man, I’m wiped out, okay?”
Gonzo shifts onto his back. “Oh, sure. No prob. Good night.”
“Yeah. Night.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Which Treats of My Visit to a Keg Party and of My Chance Encounter with the World’s Grumpiest Yard Gnome
Within thirty seconds, Gonz is snoring lightly. It’s 12:20, and I’m wired. I can’t turn on the TV, so I put on my shoes and pad out to the Mister Motel’s parking lot with its magnificent view of I-10. A big semi roars past, followed by another. All those trucks carrying things that people think they can’t live without—new sofas and light-up sneakers, ponchos and twelve different kinds of processed cheese in cubes, strings, squares, or shred pouches.
I trip along the access road to the blinking yellow lights of the underpass. On the other side of the freeway, there’s a Gas-It-N-Git all lit up like a fluorescent mirage.
&nbs
p; There’s only one car in the lot and no people except the guy behind the counter, who’s watching a little TV he’s got by the register. I’ve got three dollars in change in my pocket and I slide it all into the pay phone. My fingers are stiff. I keep dropping coins that I have to pry off the pavement.
The phone rings a few times. Dad picks up. “Hello?” he says in a barely awake voice. For a second, I don’t say anything. I just listen to his sleep-heavy breathing on the other end of the line.
“Dad?”
“Cameron? Is that you? Are you … Say something. Please.”
His voice sounds different to me coming from so far away over thousands of miles of thin wire. It doesn’t sound pissed off and controlled. I hear other notes in it. Fatigue. Hope. Sadness.
“Cameron?” he whispers. “I know you can hear me. I don’t care where you are right this second. I just want you to know you are my boy. You’re a part of me and I’m a part of you. Always.”
“Dad?”
“Cameron?”
“Love you,” I say, just as a big semi roars past on the highway, taking more stuff to more people to pack around the empty spaces of their lives.
Mom’s waking up. I hear her asking Dad what’s going on, who’s he talking to, did the doctor come in? Dad tells her it’s nothing, go back to sleep.
“Cameron?” Dad whispers. “Can you hear me, pal?”
A recorded operator voice politely asks me to deposit more change, but I don’t have any more, so I hang up. It feels like there’s a walrus sitting on my chest, and my eyes sting. I’d give anything to get high right now, to get good and numb.
There’s a girl at the other end of the Gas-It-N-Git standing around like she’s waiting for something. She’s got on shorts and a fake fur jacket, even though it’s muggy and my T-shirt’s sticking to my chest in places, leaving those little pellets of sweat, like a giant connect-the-dots. I nod to her on the way in, and she ignores me, which is fine, really.
The unnaturally bright lights hit me like a punch. That and the rancid nacho cheese smell from the big dripper beside the counter is working me over pretty good. The speakers administer a muzak dosage of a Copenhagen Interpretation song. The DJ’s soporific voice follows the end notes. “And that was ‘Words for Snow’ by the Copenhagen Interpretation, from the Wonder Whatever Happened to Them files. …”