The Nirvana Blues (86 page)

“Maybe if I bend myself backwards this way…”

“Ow …
stop!
That's my groin! Those are my family jewels!”

Peering up underneath her left armpit, Joe could see a patch of the rear window … against which Bradley pressed his nose and lips, staring in at them.

Joe said, “Don't look now, but your kid's getting a real eyeful.”

“Bradley?” She tried to turn her head. “Bradley, darling, open the door, please, and trip the little lever that knocks forward the front seat, okay?”

The kid didn't want to make an unduly hasty move, however. Not before assessing the potential bribe, kickback, or payola that might come his way. “What are you guys doing, Mom?”

“We were hugging and somehow got tangled up back here and we're stuck.”

“Sasha's playing in his own caca on the front windshield.”

“I know, darling. Now help us like I asked you, please.”

Bradley disappeared from the window. Seconds later Joe heard the driverside door open. The kid said, “I don't know which is the lever, Mom. Is this one it?”

“I can't see, darling, but you're probably right. Just give it a twist.”

Bradley punched in a button on the emergency-brake handle and lowered it. Parked on a slight incline, the car immediately began to roll backward.

Too late, Joe hollered,
“No, that's the emergency brake!”
Terrified, Bradley bailed out. Slowly, the car glided down the driveway and out into the middle of the subdivision's main street, where it stopped dead, blocking the road. Sasha banged his cast angrily on the roof, then returned to his chef d'oeuvre.

Joe said, “I don't believe it!”

A car purred down the street, braked, and the driver honked.

Joe whispered, “As soon as we get out of this I'm going to catch the first flight from the capital for Ulan Bator.”

Nancy said, “There's a reason for everything. This isn't just happening in a void.”

“Thanks. I feel a lot better.”

The horn-honking grew louder, more insistent. “What the hell is the matter with him?” Joe snarled. “People are insane. Can't he see something's wrong?”

Eventually, the honking stopped, a door opened, feet landed on the ground, footsteps approached their vehicle. Joe held his breath, closed his eyes, and concentrated on remembering these last few seconds of sweet life on earth. For no doubt the notoriety arising from the discovery of himself and Nancy Ryan in this buffoonish predicament would immediately commence hounding him—like screaming beasts and cawing jackdaws—into an early grave.

*   *   *

“W
ELL, WELL
,” said a disdainful, slightly limp-wristed voice; “look what we have here. Peck's Bad Boy in an uncompromising position.”

Even without twisting his head, Joe realized he was farther up a creek minus the proverbial paddle than he had thought possible. “I don't believe it,” he muttered fatalistically. “You again.”

“Oh, I'm a persistent fellow.” The angel's chuckle withered Joe. “Occasionally, I may lose a few feathers, but in general I always get my man. You certainly did frighten me, last time out, with that noisy little gun. I've always hated firearms.”

“He has a gun in his pocket,” Nancy said. “You better watch out.”

“Not to worry, my dear. Thanks to your marvelous preparation, I doubt he can contort enough to use it. This time I believe we've got him, how would you say it, properly ‘swine-tied'?”

“Hog-tied.”

“‘We'?” Joe muttered. What other gruesome twists and turns could occur in the ordinary, everyday life of an all-American boy?

Nancy said, “Yes—‘we.'”

“You two are in cahoots?”

“Cahoots,” said the angel. “What a colorful word.”

“Then it's true?” Joe asked Nancy. “They really did hire you to wreck my marriage and throw that land into limbo?”

The angel explained, “She wasn't exactly hired, Joe. Let's just say that all of us are always open for assignments on whatever happens to be expedient.”

“I don't believe it.” More rueful and bemused than angry, he said, “Nancy, how could you be so unethical?”

“I never cheated, Joe. I merely made it possible for you to do what you wanted to do. You constructed all the traps and tumbled into them yourself.”

“But I thought you loved me. I thought—”

Abruptly, he clammed up, ashamed of his outrage. After all, she had him dead to rights. His weaknesses, and not her wiles, had preordained his doom.

Time to be contrite. Though he would have welcomed a smithereen job at the hands of Ray Verboten and his teddy boys, Joe gagged at the image of a blissful annihilation engineered by this feathered creep and his psychic concubine.

“All right, you guys win. Now, help us out of this pretzel.”

“Not so fast, Joe.” The angel leered munificently. “We've decided to take you on a little trip.” Obviously enjoying his adversary's helpless position, he flicked open the door, and, after carefully arranging his wing-feathers, slid behind the wheel. Enthralled by his cacophonous windshield painting, Sasha was still up there, proving that “even a monkey could paint like that.”

“What kind of trip? Where are you taking me?”

“It's all right,” Nancy said. “Nothing bad can happen.”

“You're such a roughneck, Joe. We want to refine you a little.”

“Thanks but no thanks. I'm perfect just the way I am. Come on, Nancy, twist your leg over to the left. Hey, you in the front seat! Lean forward or get out, screw your help, I'll untangle myself.”

“My name is Lorin, by the way. Any danger he can untangle himself?” the angel asked Nancy, poking blindly about on the dash like one thoroughly unaccustomed to driving a car. “How do I start this thing?”

“There's a key stuck into the dash beside the steering wheel.”

To Nancy, Joe said, “You mean all along you
meant
to entice me into this pickle?”

“You might say that.”

“What are you, some kind of Mata Hari?”

“She's one of our best agents,” Lorin said. “Aha, here they are. Now what do I do?”

“Twist them—I think it's to the left. Don't give it gas until the engine's ready to catch.”

“What does that mean, ‘to give it gas'?”

“Place the gearshift in neutral—it's that stick in the floor by your right hand.”

“What's ‘neutral'?”

Joe said, “Is this guy for real? Didn't you arrive in a car?”

“No gratuitous denigration, Miniver. I arrived in an auto in which I believe the expression is I had ‘hitched' a ride. My wings were tired.”

“There's five gears,” Nancy explained. “Four forward and one reverse. In between all of them is a resting place called neutral, because it isn't in any gear at all. If you play around a little you can feel it.”

Joe bleated,
“Nancy, stop him, he's gonna kill us!”

“Maybe I should drive,” she suggested.

“No sir, lady!” Lorin's turn to panic. “Don't let him free, or he'll murder us both.”

“Well, the gas pedal is that rubber-coated tin lever underneath your right foot. The brake is between that pedal and the pedal on your left, which is the clutch.”

“‘Brakes'? ‘Clutch'?”

“Stop him!” Joe struggled to dislodge an arm, a leg, an anything. “If he starts the engine and finds a gear, we're goners!”

“I only need about three hundred feet, I think,” Lorin said.

“What's that supposed to mean, ‘three hundred feet'? Come on, Nancy, we've got to try. He's a guaranteed slaughter.”

“My job, Joe, is to keep you hors de combat. I'm sorry.”

“Three hundred feet is all I need to raise us off the ground,” Lorin explained. “Good God, what's happening to the windscreen?”

“My monkey defecated,” Nancy explained. “Now he thinks he's Picasso.”

“‘Off the ground'?” Joe wailed.

“Sure. It takes a certain speed to create an aerodynamically favorable situation for flight. But believe me, once we're in the air, I can handle everything.”

“Did you hear that, Nancy? He's gonna
fly
this Bug. The bum is nuts!”

“He's not a bum, Joe. He's a celestial guide.”

Lorin twisted the ignition keys. The engine turned over and the car gallumphed humpingly forward, bone-jarring them all.

“Stop!” Nancy cried. “You don't have the shifting stick in neutral.”

Joe moaned, “I wanna go home.…”

“It won't move,” Lorin complained.

“Is the clutch depressed?”

“Which one is the clutch?”

“The pedal underneath your left foot. When it's pushed to the floor, you can move the gearshift lever into neutral.”

Lorin stepped on the clutch and commenced wiggling the stick. “Is this neutral?”

“I can't see.” Nancy tried twisting her head, but failed. “You'll have to judge from the feel. Generally, when there's some play in the stick, then it's in neutral. Try starting up again, and we'll see.”

He tried, but the car jounced forward. Sasha banged his cast again and chattered angrily: full of hatred, his bloodshot eyes peered through a clearing in the windshield muck.

Joe barked sharply, “Forget about neutral. Just depress the clutch pedal, that'll disengage the gears! Nancy, this apparition is a maniac!”

“Hush, Joe, you'll only confuse him.”

“More than already?”

Lorin properly stomped the clutch pedal, again turned the keys, and, with only minor grating, the engine caught. When he popped the clutch, however, they lunged forward and stalled. The emergency brake and seat-belt buzzer blared. Sasha stomped his little feet and tore off his pink eye-patch and threw it away.

“Oh shucks,” Lorin groused. “I'm an abysmal learner.” Flustered, he banged at the dashboard, trying to quell the warning buzzers. Instead, he whacked a button activating the windshield wipers. A rubber blade swept across Sasha's tail. Startled, the monkey did an inadvertent flip, trying to escape. A loop in his tail caught around his own neck and one leg bent upward unnaturally to head-height. Knocked awry, twisting as he fell, Sasha landed helplessly against the hood, snagged in a hangman's noose composed of his own tail, the tip of which was knotted around the powerful wiper.

“Oh my gosh!” Lorin exclaimed. “Look at the monkey!”

Jerked back and forth with each wiper pass, and hopelessly off-balance thanks to the bizarre nature of his trussed condition, Sasha screeched.

Nancy had her back to the situation. She cried, “What's the matter?”

Sasha's next holler was cut short as the noose yanked tighter. “I can't stop it!” Lorin sobbed.
“Which lever do I push?”

Tumbled to the right, then leftward, Sasha's eyes bulged horribly until a final yank mercifully snapped his fragile neck.

Joe had opened his mouth to say “hallelujah!” when a bomb exploded. That is, they were engulfed by a shocking metallic thunderclap that crumpled their little car the way a hairy fist collapses an aluminum beer can after its contents have been swigged in a single gulp. The windshield and other glass panes shattered outward in a trillion glittering bits as the Bug's exoskeleton buckled. They were airborne for a period of time Joe found difficult to judge because his limbs were being torn asunder by a gigantic invisible madman. Yet the savage whirlwind probably lasted hardly longer than a second. The Bug landed; Joe's teeth clacked, and tiny chips of ivory spewed from between his lips.

He was free! Tossed over the seats, Nancy lay in a painful heap on the front floor, dress wrenched up under her armpits, pink panties glossy as Salvation. Feathers clogged the air; Joe inhaled a bunch and sneezed. As usual, under duress, Lorin had evaporated. His remnant foliage swirled within the VW's interior. Batting feathers away, Joe could only surmise, bewilderedly, that they had either run over a land mine, or been nailed broadside by the Wrath of the Monkey God.

A figure materialized outside the Beetle. And a familiar, Spanish-accented voice asked, “Is anybody alive in there?”

“Eloy?”

“Is that you, Joe?”

“It's me, all right. What happened?”

“A miracle!” cried the old man, whose face Joe could not as yet make out—feathery turbulence created a wall between them. “An enormous bird jumped from your car and flapped off into the sky.”

“But what happened?” Joe insisted. “Why are you here?”

“I wanted to rob the bank,” Eloy said sheepishly. “I hated to do it alone, but I couldn't find you anywhere. I heard a rumor that you had kidnapped your children and gone to Alaska. Another rumor says your wife flushed all that cocaine down the toilet. So I knew you wouldn't have the money. And I figured I wouldn't be a man if I did not at least try.”

“Did you get any money?”

“I was afraid. I parked outside for half an hour, staring at the First State People's Jug. Finally, I knew I couldn't do it alone. Then I decided to drive around town and pray that I might bump into you.”

“Are you hurt?” Joe waved his arms frantically, warding off feathers that threatened to enter his mouth in droves each time he spoke.

“Not at all. Are you okay?”

“I think so. What the hell happened?”

“I hit you. I was preoccupied.”

“With your truck?”

“Yup.”

“Did you hear that, Nancy? Nancy…!”

“I'm here,” she said calmly. “I'm all right.”

“You sure you're not hurt?”

“Joe,” she said with soft chagrin, “am I
ever
hurt?”

“You double-crossed me,” he said meekly. “How could you do such a thing? I trusted you.…”

Abruptly, she was sullen. “Don't feed me that garbage. You happen to be about as shallow, Joe Miniver, as any male I've had occasion to come across.”