B008J4PNHE EBOK (52 page)

Now if he could just get it through his head that Booth was Booth was Booth was Booth. Booth was a dreadful disappointment. Allie was sorry about that. He had not been much of a husband, either. The particulars had been established, and the record stood. Sam needed to let that be all right.

Sometimes you had to let yourself be absolved of every mistake and every resentment and every other fixation large and small, and breathe in and breathe out a few times, and say, “Okay, this isn’t the apocalypse—and so what if it is?” and take it from the top, fresh.

Inside, Allie poured a glass of water and went to the table. The phone rang, and she let it go. On the fourth ring, the machine picked up.

“Allie, I have negotiated a cease-fire with the cell-phone people,” said Booth. “In so doing, I have discovered why our once great nation is in such a shambles. We still have the innovators, the creators, and the geniuses. What we don’t have are the ass breakers. The public sector lacks ass breakers, and it is because the cell-phone companies and the insurance companies have gobbled them all up. They have contracted all of our top ass breakers, and the nation is suffering. Additionally, this is why there are no good movies anymore. All of the great directors were ass breakers. Welles must have snapped a thousand asses over his mighty knee.”

Allie thought about standing up and getting the phone, but oftentimes it was as fun to listen to Booth as it was to speak with him. Another day she could tell her ex-husband how their son was the best special effect in the world.

“Anyway, I placated them, and here I am, my coccyx shattered but my cell phone restored, and I was thinking of you, and the many wonderful times we’ve had, and thought you might want to talk,” Booth went on. “Are you sure you’re not home, dear?”

“Should I go save that stupid turtle, Booth?” Allie asked, although he could not hear her. It was sitting out there in the middle of the road. She absently flexed her left hand—arthritis?

“Well, call me, darling. You are adored. Your attitude and your decency set a wonderful example for all of us, and I feel lucky to know you. Goodbye, Allie.”

Allie sighed. She sat up straight, stood, and left the house. This morning, life was a snapping turtle in the middle of the road. She had an example to set!

 ■ ■ ■ 

They were safe; a few seconds after Allie placed the turtle on the grass at the side of the road, a gray pickup truck passed around the curve, tools rattling in its bed. That thing would have punched your ticket, she tried
to tell the turtle. The animal was a few feet from where she was lying, gazing at her with amber eyes. Allie didn’t remember falling down—perhaps she had passed out for a moment—but there was no pain, just a vague heaviness where the left side of her body used to be. She could smell the warm pavement.

The turtle hissed at her. It shuffled away, and she never saw it again.

You’re welcome, she tried, but couldn’t. She laughed, and it sounded like someone was crying.

Sam, she thought.

Before Allie, a small pothole at the edge of the street expanded into a wide and bottomless pit. A movie screen slid up from the tear in the earth, and there was no more turtle, road, or truck. There was just the movie screen and the circular darkness beneath it. A blocky credit appeared:

A Sam Dolan Picture

The Unhappy Future of Mankind

Her favorite! Bergman, eat your heart out!

I’m in the middle of a movie, she told herself, but knew it wasn’t true. She was on the side of the road. Something had happened to her—heart attack, stroke, fit—after she moved the stupid turtle, and now she was partly stone. A pavement smell was in her nose, and a movie screen was in the street.

The movie commenced:

A red man with a smile for a head, the grinning mouth shaped like a watermelon wedge and stuck atop a body in a trim business suit, stands at the foot of a column of other scarlet-colored individuals. They are grouped against a backdrop of gray rug in the vast oblong shadow of a humongous bed.

Various considerations bobbed and sank: Allie didn’t want Sam to be upset. She wanted to remind Booth to take care of his little girl. She had a lesson scheduled with Bea Nillson Monday morning, which would need to be rescheduled for eternity. A puppet string drew her right eyelid closed.

The man who has a smile for a head twitches forward. Row by row,
the others—twisted, lumpy, and red—echo his movements. The bed’s shadow ripples across them.

It came to Allie then, very clearly, that she was not going to be watching this movie to the finish, and that was too bad. She liked what she had seen.

At the Days Inn up the street from Russell, they shared a room. Tess chose the big chair in the corner, leaving Sam and Wesley to share the bed. It was dawn by the time they turned in, and Wesley went to great lengths to block out the band of light at the bottom of the long window, using the phone book, the Bible, and all the towels from the bathroom to plunge the room into darkness.

When Sam awoke, he felt around on the bedside table until his fingers found the digital clock. He thumbed the button to show the readout: 11:21
A.M.

“You’re awake.” Tess was somewhere to his left.

“How long have you been up?” he asked.

“Since eight.”

Sam blearily calculated that Tess had been awake for three hours. “Jesus. Why?”

“It’s my body clock. I have a job. They make you get up early for those.”

“That seems harsh.”

As his eyes adapted to the dark, he could somewhat make her out in the big chair, a cloud of dark hair over the edge of a blanket. He was amazed and, in the awareness of a new day, sharply embarrassed that she had stuck around. He was glad, too—it would have been a punch in the stomach if she’d sneaked out—but on top of everything else that had passed between them, now she had met his family, too. Her continued company was making him feel increasingly naked.

“You really didn’t cry during
E.T.
?” she asked. “I still find that hard to believe. I was just trying to make a mental time line of all your lies, and I want to put that first.” He had expected her to ask him “What’s the
deal with you and Polly?” or “Do people try to kill you often?” or even “Was your father in movies?,” so
E.T.
came from the left-field bleachers.

“What else did I lie about besides meeting you for a drink outside the Stables?”

“So you did lie about
E.T.
”

“Yes, I cried at
E.T.,
” Sam admitted. “But it made me mad, too.”

“Why?”

“Maybe it hit a little close to home,” he said.

“You were friends with a space alien when you were a kid, and the government tried to steal him for experiments? I think I understand you better all of a sudden.”

“My parents were divorced. My personal experience was more depressing than exciting. No space aliens. I never saved anyone, I never had any adventures, I didn’t have a cool big brother. We didn’t live in California. The movie made me intensely aware that my reality was disappointing and a lot more complex.”

“Yeah, but how was that the movie’s fault?” asked Tess. “That your reality was disappointing?”

Sam could see a little more of her now, the hollows of her eyes, the line of her jaw and neck. Tess couldn’t have clocked over 120 pounds at the outside, but her presence was weighty. He had no explanation for why it was
E.T.
’s fault that his childhood had been disappointing. It was kind of an obvious point, so obvious he couldn’t conceive of even a token defense. “I don’t know,” he said.

A duck call—the pitch starting low and rising to a poignant whine—came from his right. Like a thunderclap, the smell of Wesley’s fart was delayed for two or three seconds before it materialized into a palpable force. The stench was crappy and beery, with notes of fried meat.

“Oh my God.” Tess pulled her blanket over herself.

“Gotta chuck a shit, folks.” Wesley thumped down from his side of the bed. A moment later, the entryway light flickered on, affording Sam an unwelcome glimpse of his roommate’s hairy ass before the bathroom door shut.

“Oh my God,” said Tess again, voice muffled by the blanket. “That is so horrible.”

“So what’s the appeal, then?” Sam was still on
E.T.
Years of living together had rendered him largely immune to Wesley’s farts.

“Of
E.T.
?” asked Tess. “That it’s not supposed to be your reality. It’s about what might happen to a kid like you. Not you but like you. If there was an alien he had to save. If he lived in California. If he had to rise to the occasion.” The blanket rustled. “It’s not supposed to be complex. It’s a fairy tale. It’s supposed to appeal to your sense of possible impossibility.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

The men left Tess the room and descended to the lobby. Beyond the registration counter was a tiled space with a carpeted island in the center and a pair of catercorner plastic-covered armchairs. Each man took a crinkly seat. Hung on the wall above Sam’s head was the gilt-framed photograph of travelers enjoying the complimentary breakfast. Rich afternoon sun poured through the glass walls of the reception area.

“Beautiful,” said Wesley, chinning at the photograph.

Sam inhaled and shut his eyes.

“How are you doing?” asked Wesley.

“I’m magnificent. I feel like a lumberjack.”

“Like Paul Bunyan.”

“Just like Paul Bunyan.”

“You don’t look like you feel like Paul Bunyan. You look like a scabby old homeless man just took a hot, leisurely piss in your mouth.”

“My sister kicked your ass, Wesley. You got pummeled by a teenage girl.”

“You look like you guzzled whiz, and not by choice.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“I take it that it’s over with Polly?”

“Yeah. I’m glad. I think she is, too.” Sam, eyes still closed, explained how she’d confessed that she was the one who tipped Jo-Jo to where Sam might have gone. In this light, it seemed as though maybe she, too, had had enough of the affair. Naturally, since she was Polly, a breakup note couldn’t suffice—she had to release her steroidal husband from his kennel so he could go on a hand-chopping rampage.

“If it’s for the best, why the glum ’tude?”

Sam opened one eye. His friend had adopted a psychiatric pose, elbow planted on the arm of the chair, chin on fist, gaze placid, lips pursed. Once again Wesley was wearing the jabot, along with a dingy Russell College sweatshirt and a pair of wrinkled Dockers.

“Don’t,” said Sam.

His friend shrugged and sat back.

The lobby doors opened. A middle-aged woman, dressed for some kind of function, crossed to the front desk, the thin gold chains draped around her boots jingling in step. A son, ten or so, wearing a black suit, trailed behind her.

While she was filling out a form, the boy strolled to the carpeted island. He scowled at the men from behind long black bangs. Sam was reminded of the recent vogue in horror films for evil ghost children.

“What’s up?” asked Wesley.

“Just checking out a couple of dirtbombs,” said the evil ghost child. “Dirtbombs in chairs. Illing in the hotel lobby. Being dirty. Nice napkin, dirtbomb.”

“It’s a jabot.”

“Whatever.”

“You know what?”

“What?”

Wesley flicked a hand. “Go away. That’s not how you talk to people.”

The evil ghost child’s mother called to him, and he departed without further comment.

Sam peered at his friend, studying for signs of irony.

Mildness and maturity were qualities that no one had ever attached to Wesley Latsch. Wesley had made a pastime of worrying at a large cauliflower-shaped plantar wart on his right foot. He had conserved and accumulated the dead skin until he amassed a full canning jar of fawn-colored shards. It was something he “felt compelled to do.” The jar of wart pieces lived on the shelf above Wesley’s bed, like a religious icon. In the years that Sam had known Wesley, he had never left a room by saying merely, “I have to go to the restroom/bathroom.” It was apparently incumbent upon Wesley to say specifically what it was he was going to do in the restroom/bathroom (i.e., “chuck a shit,” “tinkle the ivories,” “cast a cum spell with the flesh wand,” etc.). Not only did his mother make frequent visits—
from Maryland
—to do his laundry, he had no qualms about bitching her out if she couldn’t remove the stains from his favorite shirts.

To see him behave like an adult caused Sam apprehension. “What was that?”

Wesley made a
what can you do?
gesture with his hands. “Kids act out.”

Sam craned his neck as if a bit of extra distance might reveal his friend’s game. Wesley yawned and scratched the puffy unshaved chins piled atop his jabot.

“I call bullshit,” said Sam.

“Whatever.” The other man shrugged. “Are we going to get something to eat before we go to the cemetery?”

“No, no,” said Sam. “I don’t believe you. What’s the scam?”

“No scam. I’m not here to make a scene. I’m here because someone tried to grease my main man.”

A television was buried in the wall directly in front of the armchairs. It was set to the news and muted: there was a crowd of elderly white protestors, and at the bottom of the screen, a ticker read,
TEA PARTIERS RALLY ON THE MALL
. Sam noticed that the protestors were, to a one, armed with cell-phone belt clips.

“I saw Booth watching it.
Who We Are
. He was laughing his ass off.”

“I’m sorry, Sam. That sucks.” Wesley picked at the fabric of his armchair. “But . . .”

His friend of many years—dissolute, blithe, a jokester whose best joke was perhaps on the verge of not being so funny any more—met Sam’s eyes. He had a wide-open smile on his face. Wesley’s teeth were so awful, they looked singed—and yet for an instant, his expression was completely earnest, and he was Mrs. Latsch’s bright little boy. “But she came here for you,” said Wesley. “Sam, you know, I don’t think there’s a person in the world who would so much as cross the street for me. I don’t know if I’d cross the street for me. And this girl, she’s laying it all out there for you. She came all this way. She thinks you might be worth it. That’s something to be happy about.”