I Don't Like Where This Is Going (27 page)

I said, “We both just went through hell, friend. Why don't we call it even and go home. What do you have to gain by shooting me?”

“I'm doing my job.”

“You fire that gun and the cops will be on us like buzzards on a shit wagon. And you're in no shape to make a getaway.”

He aimed the pistol but had a coughing fit. If I'd had any energy, I would have charged him, I suppose. I like to think I would have, anyway. I said, “What's your name, Ronan?”

He re-aimed the pistol and squeezed the trigger, but the waterlogged gun didn't fire. Clearly not Ronan's day. He got furious with himself and his uncooperative weapon, slammed the gun against his thigh, and shot himself in the foot. He dropped to the ground.

I said, “You're a goddamn mess. Time to cut your losses, bub.”

He shot again, but his eyes were shut, and he missed. But that got my attention and kindled my drowsy adrenal glands, and I was up and able to avoid the next erratic shot as well. I picked up a hefty boulder, about a foot wide and three inches thick, and while the reprobate writhed on his back in agony, I dropped the stone rather emphatically on his face, and I didn't hear from him again in the hour I sat there against the concrete abutment, waiting for Bay.

The skies had cleared; the rain had stopped; the voluminous moon was glistening. The gravel wasteland beside me was littered with dozens of plastic milk crates, assorted scraps of busted furniture, a rusted oil drum, strewn garbage, agitated crawfish, two dog carcasses, tattered clothing, and a wire birdcage sans canary. I walked to the tunnel entrance and called Bay's name.

I climbed up the abutment to an empty street, not knowing if Bay was dead or alive, and if alive, was he wandering lost and alone in the pitch-black tunnels? I would have walked to Caesars if I had known where I was. My cell phone was kaput. I walked toward the distant light of the Luxor's blue beam and wondered if they would let my bruised blue and contused barefoot self on the bus should I see one. I had a pocketful of damp bills in my sopping wallet. I saw
a young woman on the corner in front of a Laundromat. She wore a lacy white summer shift, drop earrings, and platform boots. I kept my discreet distance and asked her where we were. Where in Vegas? I knew that much.

She said we were a few blocks from Boulder Highway near Duck Creek, where, apparently, I had taken a bath. I asked her if I could please use her phone to make a brief call. I'd give her ten bucks. She said I could make the call free for nothing. I called Patience's number, and Bay answered and said how happy he was to hear my croaky voice. He had feared that I might have become an ex-therapist. His own phone was dead, he told me, so he borrowed Patience's and came looking for me.

He told me that right after I had floated off, he'd opened the manhole cover and climbed out. None of the passing motorists paid him any notice. “I could have been a zombie rising from my tomb, for all they knew.” He took a cab home and tipped the cabbie well for the aesthetic damage to the seats and the foul-smelling air in the cab. He said he was driving west on East Sahara. Where was I? I told him, and he told me to sit tight. He would call Patience and tell her I was alive and kicking. I gave the phone back to my benefactor. I heard the sizzle of tires on wet pavement. A car pulled to the curb, and my new friend poked her head in the window, turned, and waved goodbye to me, whistled, said, “It's off to work we go,” got in the car, and away she went.

Bay and Mercedes pulled up in her car. I collapsed in the backseat. Bay handed me a bottle of cognac, a towel, and a UNLV sweatshirt. He showed me a photo of a baby and said, “It's a girl.”

The pink baby, swaddled in a white blanket, wore a purple knit hat. Her eyes were shut, her brow lifted. The vermilion border of her upper lip rose to an adorable piquito, like a tiny peak of cherry icing. I said, “What's this sweetie's name?”

“Emma Grace. Seven pounds, two ounces. All the requisite fingers and toes.”

BACK HOME AT LAST,
I showered and threw out the rank clothing I'd been wearing. I wouldn't realize this for months, but I also threw away my father's broken pocket watch with the jeans. I had kept the watch as a memento and a good-luck charm. And you see how well that turned out. The watch was correct twice a day at 11:20. I would tell you that my father died at 11:20
P.M.
AKST, but you wouldn't believe me.

Patience had cooked up a pot of green chili stew and a pan of jalapeño corn bread. We sat at the kitchen table and ate. Mike said we should eat all of the food in the fridge since we were leaving tomorrow.

I said, “I thought you were staying overnight at the City of Dreams.”

“I ran into someone.”

“Who?”

“I saw Eli. He did not see me. And then the power went out.”

“What happened?”

“Security locked the doors so that none of the losers could run off with someone else's chips or the casino's loot. When the emergency's generator kicked in and restored power, Eli was lying facedown on a busted blackjack table, and guards were shooing people away from the scattered chips. Most people were too busy gambling or cheering the restoration of light to pay much attention. He had apparently taken a tumble over the side of the Stairway to Heaven escalator. I smell a lawsuit.”

The table went quiet. Django the spy jumped down from the top of the fridge onto the counter, sniffed at the stew, and sneezed.
Patience suggested we talk about something a bit more cheerful and less scandalous. Something amusing.

Mike said, “My mother was a clown.”

Mercedes said that wasn't a very nice thing to say about the woman who raised him.

He said, “No, she really was a professional clown. She was a member of Clowns without Borders.”

Bay said, “You‘re making this up.”

“Called herself Dumpling the Hospital Clown. She loved visiting sick kids at the cancer hospital. Wore this big orange fright wig, a green bow tie, red foam nose, a frilled shirt with pom-poms for buttons, baggy blue pants, and these oversized polka-dot shoes. An Irish clown, for God's sake. Who ever heard of such a thing? And, of course, she wasn't even funny. She was terrifying to most people. She made horrifying balloon animals for kids. All her dogs looked like Cerberus; all her butterflies looked like sausage flowers. Whenever she wore her clown costume, she was in character, even when we were all home at supper. Dumpling didn't speak. She honked her
yes
and
no
horns and she whistled her sentences.”

Mercedes said, “That's great and I'm putting it in a story.”

“Put this in, then. She was a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound narcoleptic with asthma and ulcerated lips, and she scared the shit out of those little kids. My brother Danny tried to feed her clown poison—blood sausage with freezer burn. He mixed it into her corned beef. When she tasted it, she whistled that she was going to kick his fat ass to Kingdom Come.”

Patience said, “Well, that was fun.”

Bay said he had packing to do.

I said, “Where are we going?”

Epilogue

We flew to Phoenix and then to the Twin Cities and arrived at last in Sioux Falls the next morning, where we rented a Dodge Grand Caravan with my actual credit card. We drove three hours to Aberdeen and checked into the TownePlace Suites, the closest motel to Flaubert, still seventy miles away to the southwest. On our way, Django nestled between Bay's shoulder and the headrest, and Patience read Elwood's post about our rescue mission and the vicious and moronic public comments that followed, until we couldn't stand it anymore. When Patience texted Elwood our congratulations, he responded with a note saying that Jory Teague, director of Refuge House, had been arrested along with several of his associates, that Helen Lozoraitis had resigned her position at the Crisis Center, and that the T-Shirt vendors on the strip had cleaned up their act and their grammar and now advertised
PIZZA
!
PIZZA
!
PIZZA
!
DIRECT TO YOU IN 20 MINUTES OR FEWER
!

JULIE WADE CALLED BAY
and told him that Kit had arrived in Memphis, found herself a studio apartment near Beale Street, and
would start work for the Wade Detective Agency on Monday. Julie thanked Bay for filling her assistant's position with such a bright young woman. Julie had driven down to see Layla and Blythe's aunt Rita Davis in Monroe to deliver some of Layla's effects. Ms. Davis asked if either of her nieces might have left a car behind. They had not. She held Layla's microwave on her lap, stroked it like a pet, and rocked in her chair. She told Julie that her brother, the girls' daddy, had been killed by his cat, Twinkie, an orange tabby, over in Carthage. Alton got up in the middle of the night to fetch a bottle of Dr Pepper from the fridge downstairs. To settle his stomach. Twinkie was lounging there on the top step, just where Alton set his slippered foot. Alton's feet came out from under him. He went ass over teakettle and cracked the back of his head against the top tread, and that was all she wrote.

For some reason, as I stared out the window from the backseat, stared at the green fields, the cattle ponds, and a distant farmhouse outside of Waubay, I remembered the Little Miss and Mr. Nevada Glitz Pageant and wondered how Mylie and Colt had fared. Patience read us an online account of the pageant that included brief bios of the celebrity-impersonating judges—a male Cher, a female Wayne Newton, and an anorexic Roy Orbison. Mylie won Miss Supreme Personality, which, the somewhat snarky reporter noted, she was not at all happy with. A bubbly eight-year-old bleached blonde from Butte, named Destiny, won Grand Supreme.

In the morning I checked Django into Noah's Ark Critter Center for an overnight stay and a kitty spa treatment: the posh wash and fluff dry, but hold the spritz of cologne and the pet-a-cure. When I left him with the attendant, he gave me one of those soundless kitty meows that just breaks your heart. I met the others for breakfast at Francie's Bacon & Eggs, but I couldn't eat.

•   •   •

FLAUBERT, SOUTH DAKOTA,
consisted of five numbered, quarter-mile-long streets running east and west, and four named streets running north and south for the same distance: West, Church, Main, and East. On the south side, Main Street became County Road 221A, which connected the hamlet to State Road 20. The couple of dozen houses were built in a plain, vernacular style and most were painted thunderhead-gray. Mike said, “Kill me now!”

Little Bob and Lorena lived at 11 Fourth Street in an austere side-gabled house. An unpainted railing, missing a few balusters, ran the length of the front porch. A satellite dish was attached with duct tape to a porch column. Someone had fastened a celebratory red balloon to the railing cap; someone had planted a bed of splashy pink tulips in the repurposed bathtub by the front steps, a someone who loved us all, a someone unvanquished by what I had, unfairly, seen as desolation.

And then the screen door opened and Little Bob and Lorena, cradling Emma Grace on her arm, emerged from the darkness as we piled out of the Caravan. Little Bob was trim, just this side of gaunt, grizzled, balding, and smiling to beat the band. Lorena was compact, blonde, and unadorned. Her eyes were cornflower-blue, her cheeks dimpled, and her face freckled. She wore a V-neck floral print housedress and white sneakers. Patience couldn't get her hands on that baby fast enough. Bay made the introductions, and we all went inside, where Lorena's sister Ophelia was telling no one present that she could summon UFOs at will and that the aliens from the planet Aetheria were here to save us from ourselves.

The main room of the house served as kitchen, living room, and dining room, was flanked by the two bedrooms and furnished with an oyster-gray bistro table and three Windsor dining chairs, a green upholstered sofa, and a somewhat exhausted Ultrasuede La-Z-Boy recliner by the potbellied woodstove. A mahogany
bureau had been moved to a corner of the main room to make way for the baby's crib.

Out in the yard, the caterer, Dot Lutz, and her affable husband, Ernst, were preparing the food for Emma Grace's coming out party. The folding tables and chairs were set up, the tables covered with paper tablecloths. The air was so still that the laminated paper plates and the napkins lay undisturbed.

All thirty-six of the residents arrived and so did the Dischlers, a farm family of ten from nearby. Five of the guests, three men and two women, were easily identifiable as crystal meth addicts: baggy eyes, open facial sores, fractured teeth, periodically agitated, but in their particular cases, easily mollified.

Lorena said, “Bless their hearts for coming. Life is all trial and tribulations for these suffering souls.” The two of us were sitting with Patience, who was nuzzling Emma Grace's neck.

Mike had set up a bar and was making vodka martinis for the guests. Lorena introduced me to the eager young Methodist minister, Kyle Kline, who was here to baptize Emma Grace by water and the Spirit. Kyle said what a blessed day it was. The Lord had shone down His glory on Lorena and Little Bob. Lorena told me that the woman getting all the manful attention was Zandra Schine, the village philanderess. Her husband, Sonny, had gone off to work the oil fields in North Dakota. Lived with about a thousand other men in a modular housing settlement up there.

I said, “The wives haven't ridden her out of town?”

“The wives are quietly grateful. If you didn't notice, we haven't exactly fielded the first-string here.”

Ophelia came back outside dressed in a golden choir robe and a blue-and-gold-striped Egyptian headdress, looking like a lady of the pharaonic court of Akhenaten. Reverend Kline called for us to gather around the unheated bain-marie, which would serve as the
baptismal font. Emma Grace was sprinkled, not immersed. Bay held her up for all of us to see and then handed her to Ophelia, who whispered into the baby's ear. Bay then lit the candles on the baby cake with a snap of his fingers. We all cheered for Emma Grace Linkletter-Lettique.