Part 16 (1/2)

”Where's Charley?”

”I loathe a woman who talks in riddles.”

”My Dan Wesson model 12 .357 Magnum with a four-inch barrel, which is longer than yours, by the way. I want him back.”

Shane sputtered and twitched. I never met a man yet couldn't be put at a disadvantage by making sport of his d.i.c.k size.

”I don't have your precious pistol,” Shane said. ”You probably got drunk and lost it.”

”That's impossible. I would never lose Charley.”

”You got drunk and lost your baby, why couldn't you get drunk and lose your gun?”

Andrew had to use the bathroom twice between the time we loaded him into Moby d.i.c.k and we left the motel. Right then I could foretell the next 1,500 miles. For some reason, Marcella handed Hugo Jr. to Shane. Hugo Jr. reacted by going into high wail. The kid wouldn't shut up, not even when Shane gave him back. First thing Critter did in Moby d.i.c.k was light incense-smelled like Dothan's hands during his taxidermy period. The kitten peed on a sleeping bag.

Lloyd asked me to drive the first s.h.i.+ft. ”I have something for you,” he said. He leaned in the pa.s.senger door and opened the glove compartment to show me a half-pint of Yukon Jack. ”When you need it, tell me and I'll take over the driving.”

”Isn't there a rule against you AA guys buying booze for other people?”

”No.” He pulled himself up into the seat. ”You will stop drinking when you decide to stop. I see no reason for us to repeat yesterday afternoon.”

”Good point.”

He turned his eyes on me and it was like being under a full moon. ”When you are ready to stop killing yourself I will be there to help.”

”I'll keep that in mind.”

The trip boiled down to a leapfrog from bathroom to bathroom. We didn't even make the Amarillo city limits before Andrew started hopping on one foot and whining.

”Why not hook him up with one of Shane's catheters,” I suggested.

Marcella said, ”Maurey,” and Lloyd cut his eyes at me like I'd made a social blunder.

Critter pretzeled her legs and made her thumbs and index fingers into little O's and hummed into the smoke. Shane explained the s.e.x life of armadillos.

”The egg is fertilized months before the female attaches it to the uterus wall and begins gestation. She always has quadruplets, and they are always all four the same s.e.x. I once saw two armadillos having oral s.e.x, but I don't know if they were the same s.e.x or not. The woman whose car I was riding in refused to stop after we ran over them. I've always regretted not returning to inspect the bodies. h.o.m.os.e.xuality is fairly rare in animals.”

”I knew a dog that would hump anything or anyone,” I said.

”That's what you said about your husband,” Marcella said.

Shane didn't like being interrupted. ”We're not discussing dry-humping dogs. We're discussing oral s.e.x in the animal kingdom.”

”What's dry humping?” Andrew yelled. He was coloring Moby d.i.c.k's interior walls. Gave the ambulance the feel of a hippy bus, but Lloyd didn't seem to mind. He was staring at Sharon's picture, searching for a clue, I guess.

”Why chase after a wife who's hiding from you?” I asked.

Lloyd didn't answer-just looked at the picture, then out the window, then down at the picture again.

Critter's home was in Comanche, Oklahoma, which she showed me on the map as a dot down south near the Red River. Way the heck out of our way, but I didn't say anything. I didn't really care where we went so long as we didn't get there. Getting somewhere would mean I had to start feeling again and figuring a way to wrest Auburn from his evil p.r.i.c.k of a father.

”Is Hugo still following?” Marcella asked.

I could see the big Oldsmobile in the side mirror. He'd dropped back behind two pickups and a black limousine, tailing us like a detective in the Mike Shane Mystery magazine. ”Yeah, he's back there.”

”He's just being stubborn. He's afraid losing his family will make him look bad at the Presbyterian church.”

”Hugo's a religious adulterer?”

”He joined the church to play softball. The Northside Presbyterians have the best team in the Panhandle.”

Critter said, ”G.o.d is in us all.”

The road was weird. It was a four-lane divided highway but with curbs like a town street instead of shoulders like a normal highway. I kept being afraid the right trailer tire would drift over and sc.r.a.pe, so I tended to keep it close to the middle, which p.i.s.sed off the Texans who wanted to pa.s.s. One man shook his fist at me. After years of watching people flip each other off, his expression of anger seemed almost wholesome.

In Memphis, Texas, we turned east on this state highway about the width of a Ping-Pong table. Every time a semi-truck came at us we about crashed mirrors. Made me tense.

A billboard for Mildred's Manure read ”We're Number 1 with Number 2.” Four white crosses next to the road marked the spot where four people had died in traffic accidents. In Hollis, Oklahoma, a sign outside a church read ”The road to G.o.d is always under construction.”

”I know a man in Hollis can cover his entire nose with his lower lip,” Shane said. ”Maybe we should stop and see him.”

I felt fingers on my neck and almost jumped through the winds.h.i.+eld.

Critter said, ”Relax, think about a cool place where the gra.s.s is green and the water pure and cold.”

Home. ”What the h.e.l.l are you doing? Did I say you could touch me?”

”These muscles are tight as guitar strings. I've never met anyone so Saturn-squared. Even Freedom isn't this tight after an all-night run to Dallas.”

My automatic impulse was to reject kindness from an airhead-it seemed the strong thing to do-but her fingers felt nice. All the way through the muscles and blood to the bones, everything gave an inch. ”What's Freedom?”

She kneaded the base of my neck. ”He's my man. Freedom is kind and gentle. He travels freely on the sixth level. Wrap your mind around that. I've never even seen past the fog of level five. Sometimes I have corporeal thoughts, jealousy, hunger, yangy stuff like that.”

”Nothing wrong with jealousy and hunger if that's how you feel.”

”Freedom is immune to pain. He has surrounded himself with an invisible hedge of protection.”

Her fingers were firm and strong. Her words were the droolings of a droid whose brains had been scooped at birth, but I ignored the words and heard the voice. Her voice was a ballad sung to a baby by a mother who didn't take her clothes off at rodeos. It was like being in the mountains alone. I must have been starved for human touch because I didn't care that Critter was a girl or, even worse, a girl who said ”karma” and ”yangy” and had a man named Freedom. You know, sometimes it's good for people to touch each other without s.e.xual undertones. Some of my best friends are people I haven't f.u.c.ked.

Critter's voice drifted into a soft rhythm punctuated by the ba.s.s of Shane's lecture on trucks or truck drivers or whatever. Driving the divide in the geometric design of road, telephone poles, fences, fields, I floated back to Lloyd's offer to be there when I decided to stop. I'd taken the offer as a nose-in-my-business, but he meant well. Lloyd was wise to the point of being guruish when it came to things other than his wife.

Fact: Someday, in the distant future, I would have to face reality and stop drinking alcohol. It would be a pain in the a.s.s but I could stop. I could. Lloyd had stopped. Shane had stopped. Surely if old winos could pull themselves together enough to get off the juice, so could I. But it was such a cheat to be forced to stop. Other people drink whiskey all the time and no one says they are killing themselves.

I would stop as soon as I hit that bottom they all talked about. What could be more bottom than driving with your baby on the roof?