The Altonevers (26 page)

“
Uh-huh,” she
nods.

“
There's a store over there
with a yellow lit awining,” he says.

“
Uh-huh.”

“
I'm going to go to the
store to get some smokes.”

“
No.”

“
Yes.”

“
No.”

“
Yes, and what you will
have to do is...can you act?” he asks.

“
I don't know.”

“
Well, you'll have to cry
and weep and cry some more. Sob as sorrowfully as if you were lost
and tired, and injured and in pain, and in fear for your life. Say
that you were attacked by the kids who're standing in front of the
store, okay?” he says.

“
No. Why do we have to
blame the kids, what if the cop shoots one of them?” she
says.

“
Then he wasn't a good cop
anyway. Besides I’m gonna shoot him before he can okay, no
worries.”

“
I'm worrying, that's a lot
to worry about, but do you have to kill the guy?” she
asks.

“
What does it matter? do
you want to be here forever? what's more important, staying out of
the tombs, surviving, getting home? or one in an infinite number of
that guy?”

“
Don't do it...if you don't
need to. Please,” she asks with puppy dog eyes.

“
There’s an infinite number
of you's, this is unfolding in an infinite number of ways. Do you
want this one to be the one where you don't get away?” he
asks.

“
That's how you spare
yourself from your actions, not me,” she says.

“
Just tell the cop the kids
are knocking over the store. okay,” he says begging.

“
Okay,” she says, and the
two stand silently avoiding each other’s glare, just out of the pip
pip pipip of the condensation’s drizzle.

“
Hold out your hand, let me
see your wrist.”

“
I said it was fine, let's
just get this over with,” she says, unable to think of anything but
the consequences of their plan to escape. The cost of their
survival to others and of her own already questionable sense of
justice. That all her senses of right and wrong, and the scale of
existence, of what she's seen, felt and lived through to
contemplate the infinite grays of the life she's been living with
him. Resigning the moral compromises to circumstance, to
necessities of surviving the path she's chosen in taking this
stranger's hand to be the one to walk her home. She reaches to rub
her cheek to show him it really is fine, though wincing at the pain
shooting through her arm and shoulder.

He carefully extends his hand to hers
while holding a pleasant expression with his palm open. She
painstakingly reaches out until her hand is just above his. He
eases his fingers as gently as he can around her wounded wing with
all the dexterity his thief’s life has given him. Caressing her
black and blue wrist while holding the most consoling face that he
can sincerely have. Inspecting and lightly squeezing to her sudden
sniffles and blinking winces.

“
Owch,” she
cries.

“
Sorry, just tryin’ to see
how bad,” he says.

“
It's okay,” she says as
she raises it an inch and nods as an accepting gesture, gulping in
anticipation of the possible ache of his nurturing touch. Speaking
as soothingly as he can, calmed from his usual self humoring self.
Savoring being the one to tend to her, to console and comfort her,
that she entrusts him with her safety at all. Her face loosens as
her pain struck posture lightens to his touch. She feels,
understands that he cares for her, for her well being. Feeling for
the first time that she is not just on the road with him, but with
him.

“
It's not okay...Anna I'm
sorry, we couldn’t at least go to a hospital, but we will, when we
get outta here.”

“
We'll make it through,”
she says. Any ferocity in him fades to the gaze of her sniffling
smile staring back at him. She leans in slowly, fixated on the
obsidian of pupils, then feels the warmth of his breath touch her
face. Her heart beat flutters like a robins throbbing breast,
pulsing to the tips of her fingers and lips. She closes her eyes in
anticipation for his for a second to long before his mouth meets
hers. Their tongues tune to undulation of the other, settling
somewhere in the middle, he tasting the salt of her tears as she
tastes a tinge of blood from his cheek.

Pip pip pipip pip...

She winces. Biting his tongue when he
steps closer to her, accidentally flexing her wounded wing when
reaching to take her shoulder under his arm. She stands stunned for
a second then looks at him bashfully and walks away without a word.
Leaving him with a lump in his throat, as she snaps a supple smile
over her shoulder, alluringly holding his attention.

“
Anna!” he calls out. She
doesn’t answer, instead keeping him in wonder, strutting away as
smoothly as she can. Teasing a turn and perking her ears and
eyebrows, like she hasn't heard him.

“
Anna, no really,
Anna.”

“
Yes?”

“
I need your
gun.”

“
Oh,” she says, then
clumsily turns around, laughing and biting her lip with an
embellishing blush at her assumption of him calling out for just
her touch. Despite the danger ahead of them, she's more at ease in
this moment then she's ever felt in her life.

“
So the cop don't see it,
and I might need it,”

“
Be careful,” she
says.

“
Break a leg out there,” he
says strumming her cheek with his thumb. He meets her with carnal
eyes, though neither speak a word. She places the gun gently in his
palm, and the two split toward their positions, through the sweat
embalming balmy overcast enshrouding everything further than four
hundred feet away and above in a stagnant steam.
She shakes her hurt arm and blinks to ripen a
painful expression and spur tears to streak, making her desperate
face more believably distraught. She thinks of the officer and his
loved ones here, in this time and place. Making her sob and truly
weep to show the officer tears that are actually for his life, to
deceive him, she hopes not to his death. Sauntering closer to the
cruiser with sloped shoulders and head hung low, trying to
reminisce despairs from her past, and the bleakness of her old
life, though already almost forgetting when it was. Forgetting
about getting into character, that she needs no help in looking
haggard or as a desperate damsel in distress would.

A
pproaches cautiously as a mouse, coming close enough to make
out their escape. Shaped like the nose of an airplane spanning six
feet in width and eight feet long. Wingless with the entire round
rear packed with thousands of tiny propulsive rockets. Anna
scuttles up, frantically wrapping on the cruiser's mirrored window
that wraps around three sides of the vehicle.

“
Help! help me,” she cries.
Startling the officer awake from his graveyard shifts nightly
nap.

“
Hey stop banging on the
window lady!” Anna flustered and frantic shouts over him, as sweat
and saliva fly from her face onto the officer’s shirt. A jolly
seeming officer looking much like a seal, with bushy straight
eyebrows and a fat dumpy body clumped comfortably in his seat. In
grey blue with a brass badge, and clearly nearing retirement.
Though at first upset with her barging behavior, he softens to her
pleading and distressed demeanor, and becoming enraged when seeing
her injured arm.

“
What is it dear? what
happened? has your man hit you?” he asks.

“
No, no,” she wails, “I was
attacked, they broke my arm please, please help me!”

“
Yes, yes of course dear
but I can't help if I don't know what's it that's happened to
you.”

“
Kids, the kids in front of
the store, there's a bunch of them. One of them has a knife, help
please they're robbing the store. They have my husband hostage,
help please help me,” she pleads like her life depends on
it.

“
This is per,
per..preposterous,” he stutters, still retaining a tone of
authority “Where are they? where? I'll get ‘em. Damn rotten
kids.”

“
Uh, I Uh,” she
stammers.

“
You don't know? how?” The
officer doubtfully asks.

“
You'll have to take me
there, it's the only way we can get there soon enough,” she
says.

After a minute of skeptically staring
her up and down, the officer says, “Get in the back.”

“
And if you have to arrest
one of them,” she says dreading the idea of being trapped that
close to where she thinks she maybe should be.

“
Fine, fine get in the side
seat, hurry,” the authority commands. The door lifts vertically and
closes behind her as her behind is seated. They take off with a
burst of flame streaking from the rear of the rocket. Already
speeding toward Cider who seems to be in a Mexican standoff with a
drunk and otherwise intoxicated bunch of larrikin children. Though
they’re actually listening to him explaining that it's not the
people’s money he's taking, it's the banks, giving them his robin
hood bit, and what the difference between the two is, to himself at
least. The group is just surprised they’re meeting someone who's
saying he’s from another dimension while standing right in front of
them. Looking and speaking as though he is in fact from another
dimension.

“
Hey kid you want a knife,”
Cider says to a gray haired boy in a beaten yellow tweed jacket,
who seems like the leader of the little rapscallion
brigade.

“
Yeah, I'll take a blade
mister.”

“
Where's it from?” asks
one, then another and the next in a domino effect.

“
Very far away from here,”
Cider says.

“
How far, yeah how far?”
they ask.

“
Think of everything place
you've ever seen, ever been, every day you've lived yet. Then try
to imagine if you could somehow see all of that at one time, in the
same view. Now think of how expansive a scene you'd have to be
seeing it in. Multiply that by every person you'd ever seen,” he
says with the enthusiasm of a traveling salesman. Wanting to share
with their childish imaginations the idea of the inconceivably
immeasurable scope of even the simplest things, like their own
lives. Sirens zoom in from far over his right shoulder, in seconds
the cruiser is twenty feet behind Cider who puts his hands up,
yelling.

“
Help! help! officer they
attacked my wife, that one has a knife!” Cider shouts, pointing to
the tweed clad kid.

“
Run!” one of them
shouts.

“
Freeze you little runts!
If you run I shoot!” the officer says sternly. They don't move,
petrified in place at the law and his loaded weapon waving back and
forth over their crowd. The cop edges closer until he's between
Cider and the youths.

“
Drop it kid!” the sealish
man demands.

“
Of course, of course,
but.”

“
Drop it now!” the man
shouts now red faced in anger. A chorus of beer bottles break
against the pavement, at least two fall from the pockets of each
little ruffian.

“
Drop it...now,” Cider says
slyly, while pointing his gun to the unsuspecting officer's face
from ten feet behind him. Anna watches on in safety, through
condensation dripping in streaks down the windshield, that she sees
as the bars of a prison cell.

“
What!?” The officer asks,
in shock of what's happening.

“
Drop it now. I’ll kill you
if you even flinch,” he laughs, along with the bellows and whistles
of the now drinkless troupe of larrikins.

“
You, she, you tricked me,”
the seal man flusters flabbergasted with flame in his eyes. Then
quickly deflating in defeat, and dropping his weapon to the
ground.

“
Lay down, and stay down
alright,” Cider says, strolling to the cruiser, to Anna with her
knees on the dash riding shotgun. The cop lays face up with arms
and legs together as though going to bed.

“
That was crazy,” she says
to herself.

“
Did you see that,” says
the tweeded kid.

“
Hey kid,” Cider
says.

“
Yeah?” the boy asks in
awe.

“
Cut that radio wire on his
walkie,”

“
But he's a...Okay,” the
youth says, then apologizes to the man as he severs his only link
to safety, to backup, and the only way to stop the two from
escaping. Another scoops the weapon from the sidewalk and weaves
back into the group, his badge belt and baton are pilfered seconds
later. Anna who'd watched the whole thing from the silence of the
cruiser, opens the door from the inside, that vertically closes
behind him as he sits for a second in silence, then lighting a
smoke.

“
I'm proud of you,” she
says, sneaking a peck to his swollen cheek.

“
I know, I'm great with
kids, I should be a dad.”

“
No, no...you should not,”
she says.

“
Oh,” he says sadly. Though
never wanting children, a bit let down she's so dismayed by the
thought.