We're All in This Together (29 page)

"And as a woman, I want you to know—because Wayne said your wife was thin—I want you know that a lot of real thin women will
fuck just about any old Joe. It's not your fault. They just can't help it."

"I ought to write that down," I said. Yolanda said I sure should.

Wayne came back and I went to the bar and played a video game where you had a screen with two almost identical pictures of
sexy men, but things—little bow ties, tattoos—were missing from the second picture, and you had to press the screen to put
a circle on the missing spots.

A dark-haired girl in red jeans and cowboy boots sidled up to me.

"That old boy on the right there doesn't have the black band on his jock."

"Thanks," I said.

"Sure," she said, and informed me that her name was Jesse and that fate had chosen me from all the gentlemen in the bar.

"Yeah? What's he want from me? Fate, I mean."

"To buy me a Tom Collins. That's a peculiar drink, but Fate is peculiar."

I had no reason to doubt her. After all, some kind of fate had brought me to Starke, Florida, where the government killed
men with massive shocks of electricity for running down other men with their sports cars. That Fate should now be guiding
me to purchase a Tom Collins for a stranger in tight red jeans seemed far less unbelievable.

"I'm Stanley," I said, and bought her drink. We played through a dozen studs, pointing at the missing socks and eyebrows,
before a Hawaiian beefcake in a towel stumped us with a vanished ponytail.

Jesse came over to the table with me, and Wayne regaled the group with a history of his two years at Cornell, and how he'd
been expelled for trying to crossbreed marijuana with seaweed. I found myself studying Jesse's pretty face, her nub of a nose.
My gaze drifted down to the tight draw of shirt across her small bra-free breasts and back up to the jagged incisor at the
corner of her mouth.

"There's thousands of beach caves up and down the northeast coast where you could grow a versatile plant like cannabis. Of
course, you'd still have to worry about federal agents and informers, but it could be a big cash crop for disenfranchised
farmers." Wayne took a meaningful pause to sip his beer. "I was getting close—certain people got nervous."

"The government is one big conspiracy." Yolanda was stuffing her third pint glass of the night into her purse.

"I didn't know you went to college, Wayne," I said, and slipped my hand onto Jesse's thigh.

She picked up my hand and examined my palm lines. Jesse massaged my fingers, cracked my knuckles. She drew my index finger
to her mouth and gnawed on a hangnail, bit it loose. "Got it," she said.

I was nauseated, confused, but undeniably erect. I told Jesse. "I feel kind of—you know." I made a vague circle in the air,
which signified nothing.

But she understood. "It turned you on, didn't it? But it was gross, right? I don't know where you've been, or where your finger's
been, but I went and gnawed on it just the same. Pretty sick, right?"

"But I liked it," I said, "even though it was awful."

"Sometimes love's like that," she said.

I sipped my drink. I stared out at the hillside, and the giant chickens strutting around in the scrub grass. I wanted to explain
to this woman about my limitations—about my infidelity, about my cowardice, about my unwritten book, about the desire I still
harbored for his food, for the good bread that my wife's lover shaped with his hands. I wanted to say all these things and
more, but the words were snakes.

I licked my lips. I grinned. "Those are big chickens."

"Not chicken. Emu," said Jesse. "They're emu."

Wayne's head hit the table.

"You pussy," said Yolanda, sounding cheerful.

"Emu?" I asked.

Jesse sighed. I could see that she was becoming disillusioned with me. In my mind, I told her that she was going to have to
get used to it.

"People make hamburgers from them down in New Zealand," Jesse said. "Some dude around here tried to ranch a few thousand,
but it didn't work out. Emus eat for shit, I guess. Dude lost his farm and the emus went wild. You see them around. People
hit em with their cars sometimes. Whatever."

"You big old pussy," said Yolanda.

"F," said Wayne. He gurgled, and then repeated the letter. "F."

"Are you angry?" I asked Jesse.

"I thought we had something, that's all." Jesse pinched her little nose, and sighed again. She casually dug at the crotch
of her red jeans. "You just better figure yourself out is all I'm saying, mister."

So I went to collect my thoughts.

I stepped out the back door, to the foot of the hill. I started to climb. I wasn't sure where I was going, but I knew that
the interstate was somewhere beyond, and if nothing came to me, eventually I would find traffic. The moon wobbled at the top
of the rise.

Before long my shirt was plastered to my torso. I paused to catch my breath and looked back, to the bar and my friends on
the veranda. Jesse lifted a hand. Yolanda lifted my brother's head by the back of his hair.

"Good-bye," I said, and waved. "Good-bye! I'm going to run into traffic! Good-bye!" I screamed it, knowing they would never
hear it over the music.

I turned, and took another step, the first last step—and then I stopped:

An emu's silhouette was drawn against the moon. The emu was man-sized and thickly feathered. The long, bony profile reminded
me of my wife.

The bird, no more than thirty feet away, raised its head from the ground and seemed to sniff. The head swiveled, the beak
coming around like a rifle barrel, and the creature's eyes locked on me. They were bright, those eyes, pooled with moonlight.
I had seen those eyes before: every night I asked a question, and Paula told me how she cheated death.

The emu let out a howl, a half squawk, half honk.

It charged.

In a second of clarity I came to a series of realizations: I realized that my only weapon was my hands, that my only chance
was to somehow get close enough to gouge out one of the beast's eyeballs; I realized that even this move would only disable
it; I realized I would have to choke it to finish it; I realized I would have to squeeze the breath out of it with my fingers;
I realized I was fucked.

I stood and waited for the end.

Kicking up spurts of dirt, the emu's claws chewed across the ground, rapidly covering the space between us. Two small wings
fluttered angrily at the bird's sides. The bright tiny eyes bored into me, and demanded I remain still, and listen to the
story that was about to unfold.

Paula, I thought again, and the bird was Paula, her black hair streaming out, her red bathrobe whipped up into a cape, pale
skin exposed, fingers clenched to tear. This was my story. But how could I escape? How could I save myself from the kind of
love that could rip you to pieces, the kind of love that in the end still loved you enough to tell you the last hard truth,
to tell you that things had changed?

Die, I thought, and shot her with my eye lasers.

Feathers tickled my leg as the bird burst past me in a rush of air. Four or five more steps and it collapsed in the dirt with
a puff of dust.

I went to the bird and knelt down. I searched for a pulse. The animal's neck was like a giant, feathered pipe cleaner. It
was warm, but I couldn't feel anything.

Dust had settled on its black eyes and there were a few burst blood vessels around the edges. I traced the deep hollows at
its clavicles. It must have been starving. I doubted that when it charged, the poor animal even saw me at/all. A few brown
feathers lay scattered about the corpse.

I put my hands under the long bird, expecting to lurch under its weight, but it was light in my arms, no heavier than a child.
I carried it away.

My companions were waiting for me when I got to the door, the dead emu cradled in my arms. They had observed the whole thing
from the veranda and they were nothing short of amazed. The bird had been about to kill me, but I stared it down, stunned
it dead with an icy gaze.

"You got the voodoo," said Yolanda, shaking a finger at me like I was a naughty boy.

"Bruce Lee," said Wayne. He leaned against Yolanda. He shook his head and licked his lips. "Bruce Lee."

"It was his heart, I think."

"It's okay to cry," said Jesse, already grabbing my hand and guiding me to her truck across the parking lot.

"Bruce Lee," said Wayne one more time and slipped down to the ground, where the bird lay. Yolanda waved. "What you want us
to do with it?" Yolanda called after me.

"I didn't mean to kill it," I called back. "I don't mean to hurt anyone."

"Shush," said Jesse, and shoveled me into her car.

We drove away and I looked out the back window to see Wayne, sprawled in the dirt and the neon light, clutching the dead bird
like a fallen comrade.

Jesse said we needed to get married before we consummated our love. Her Uncle Bob was a minister and he could do it. "I cannot
lie with you unless we're married. Those are the non-negotiable rules. That's the tenth commandment, and you get the other
nine for free."

"I'm already married," I said.

"That's not important," she said. I had no idea where we were driving. There were fewer streetlights. Insects seemed to hurl
themselves at the windshield.

"Okay," I said. I placed my head on her lap while she drove. I looked up into her nostrils. They were hairier than I expected.
"Maybe it's the angle, but it looks like you could do with a little edger work up in there."

"Sugar," she said.

The car stopped. My body sat up, and my head followed after a second or two. We were in a trailer park. My attention was drawn
to a palm tree planted on a green island in the center of the park's looping drive. It was festooned with white Christmas
lights. I blinked at the lights, and found myself struck with a brief but pleasant sensation of amnesia, which carved away
the six months since Christmas, and left me only a few moments away from Paula. She was home, waiting for me; we had presents
to open, a birth to celebrate.

In my next blink, I was here again, in a trailer park, in Florida. Christmas: gone. Wife: gone. I banged my head against the
dashboard, once, twice, three times.

Jesse popped open the door and pulled me from the truck. My legs walked to a trailer—a clean, white-sided, black-roofed trailer
no different from any of the other trailers that were spread out around me. The alien star of a penitentiary spotlight flickered
above the field of rectangular domiciles.

"I didn't kill the emu," I said. This point suddenly seemed vital. Hairy nostrils or not, I was down to my last option. I
didn't want her to think that she was marrying a serial killer like Virgil Pendergast. I wanted to make it work this time.
"It was a bad ticker, that's all."

Jesse banged on the door of a trailer. There was the sound of something falling over inside, and a curse. A tall, grizzled
man in a bathrobe appeared. His red jockey shorts flashed from between folds in the robe. His face seemed to convey both boredom
and exhaustion, as if he had been awakened from a deep dream of secretarial work.

"Uncle Bob, I need to be united with this gentleman in holy matrimony," Jesse said.

"Oh, okay." Uncle Bob put a finger in his ear, picked, studied it, wiped it, and gestured for us to come inside.

I clung to Jesse's arm. "Is he a real minister?" Even in my current state of intoxication, the red underpants raised certain
doubts.

"As real as life," said Jesse. "But no more questions." With her index finger, she lightly touched my zipper. "This is a somber
and beautiful moment that we will remember for the rest of our lives."

There was a large cross on the wall at one end of the trailer. Uncle Bob pushed a couch out of the way and told us to wait.
When he came back he had a shoe box of plastic rings. "Pick one," he said. I took a shiny blue one. Jesse selected a yellow
for me.

Uncle Bob told us to take each other's hands. He read the service from a wrinkled piece of typing paper. When it was done
I gave Jesse her ring and she gave me mine. We kissed. Uncle Bob snapped a picture of us with a Polaroid camera.

Jesse guided me into the bedroom. It didn't occur to me to ask where Uncle Bob was going to sleep. Nothing occurred to me,
really. I looked on the floor, expecting to see little rumpled dunes of red underwear in every corner. But it was too dark
to see into the corners of the room.

The next thing she was pulling off my clothes and I was naked, lying on the bed, and she was on top of me, and I was inside
of her. There was a silver chain around her neck, dangling with maybe two dozen plastic rings. It bounced against her chest;
her tiny nose wrinkled; her boy's hair bobbed.

"How did you escape from the wild bears?" I asked, knowing she wouldn't understand.

Except, she did understand. "Sugar," said my new wife, and reared up, "I am the wild bears."

I woke up in the parking lot of the bar. My clothes weren't on the right way. It was day. I blinked. The maniacal Florida
State alligator and the Union soldier loomed above me, dusty in the morning light.

I walked back to the motel. Several times I paused to dry-heave into the brush along the side of the road. Bugs bit me and
I was too weak to scratch at them.

Wayne's bed was undisturbed. There was a note on the night table:

out with yolanda to see her old man get the juice. Some local wit
told me that yolanda was not kidding when she said the hot seat
was a little cranky, said the head popped clean off the last dude
they fried, probably bullshit but i'd like to see it.

that said, stan i hope you know that if you got sent to the electric
chair and your head popped off, i'd raise bloody hell, (truth: i
might keep your old noggin in a jar and show it off, tho. just to
mess with folks, i give you permission to do the same, bro.)

will report on head-poppings or whatever else occurs,
wayne.