Five drunk farm kids in a pickup rolled him one evening at sunset because he was there and they felt like doing it. His UPS uniform was Rorschached with blood puddles and he had to throw it into a gas-station litter bin. He spent his accumulated recycling money, fifteen dollars, on a discounted yellow T-shirt that readMY OTHER SHIRT IS A PORSCHE and a Corona beer wind-breaker that came free with a six-pack, which he drank, metabolized and pissed away in the space of one thunderstorm.
One night in Winslow, Arizona, he met a friendly-enough guy, Kevin. They'd both been checking out the pickings around an Exxon station's groceteria. It was around sunset. One or two stars had risen in the sky. John had just found a pack of timeexpired hot dogs when Kevin said, «I've got a place not far from here. We can go eat there.» Kevin seemed friendly enough and John missed simple conversation. Truth be told, he hadn't had a profound thought in weeks.
Home was underneath a sun-rusted bridge that crossed a dry gully, decorated with high school graduation graffiti, so-and-so-was-here felt-pennings, sun-rotted condoms and a mattress so verminous that John consciously swept his way around it, as if he might catch athletically hopping crabs.
«Here. Get a fire going.» He helped John light a twig fire beneath an inverted Chevelle hubcap filled with the lame trickle of water dripping down the gully's bottom-most rift. The water came to a boil and John put his time-expired hot dogs into it and the two watched them cook and said nothing. John figured so much for conversation.
They ate the hot dogs, shared only the most cursory of stories — mostly about planned trips, whether the other was headed east or west, or what the weather might do; neither offered up his past — and then the sky was dark. Kevin went to sleep on the mattress. John found a sandy nook high up in a corner underneath the bridge where it joined the road. He'd learned that there was little, if anything, for a Nobody to do past sundown. He fell asleep to the sound of the occasional vehicle passing overhead.
Somewhere in the night he felt a jolt of pain inside his dream, and he woke up to find Kevin walloping him with a broken-off metal rear flap from a shopping cart. Kevin was spewing out random invective: «Take my hot dogs away from me, will you? Steal a man's food right from under his nose, you're no better than Detroit automakers …»
Blood dripping from a gash in his cheekbone, John ran away, down the road, into flat landscape, nothing on either side, finally far enough away to feel safe. He scuttled off the road, into a patch of desert, found a rut, crept into it, heard small animals scurry away, and then once more slept.
The next day in Flagstaff he ate a discarded hamburger for lunch. The meat tasted strange, but he ignored it. Four hours later he was walking down a gravel road in what he thought was the direction of a meteorite crater he'd read about as a sick kid in Manhattan, when his gut collapsed as if he'd been judo-chopped, and he keeled over, into a dry ditch alongside the road. He began to shit and vomit as though all the cells in his body were screaming to empty themselves of toxins. In the haze of illness he removed his pants, knowing he had to keep them clean, and clumped his still clean clothes in a heap above him. He lay on the gritty soil and his body exploded. He could see the mountains and the mesas on the horizons, and billions of acres. John tried to imagine a bunch of children — all the kids in Arizona — standing around the edge of this landscape so savage and broken and freshly ripped from the kiln, and imagined as he clutched his stomach that children might one day play on this desert, this blank space; but he knew they never would, the land would always outsmart them, always be just one notch more cruel.
He asked the stars to give him some kind of word, but the stars gave nothing. Then he recalled being in the hospital a few months before — had it been so recently as December? — the night of his flu and the vision. He remembered seeing Susan Colgate on TV — before he conked out completely — and he suddenly realized that his vision of Susan's face was a rerun that had been playing on his bedside TV, and it meant nothing. His time on the road was a sham as well. His exercise in going solo was a cosmic joke. He was inside a hellish one-panel New Yorker cartoon captioned,«Her face was just some TV actress your neurons glommed onto.» And here he was, near death again, except this time he just didn't care.
He fell unconscious, and when he woke up, he didn't know how much later, he saw the Milky Way and some shooting stars, and knew that the worst had passed, but his body felt like a chunk of salt licorice, as if all its moisture was gone. Then he heard an idling engine and a woman's voice. The woman was carrying a flashlight and she told him he was going to be okay, he could come with her. He forgot he was naked and crawled up the crumbling ditch. A man's voice said, «One wrong move, asshole, and I'll blow you into hamburger.»
The woman said, «Eric, put that thing down and pass me the bag of groceries. Jeanie, get the blanket from behind my seat.» Jeanie, a teenage girl, was videotaping John. «My name is Beth,» the woman said. «Here …» She placed an Arapaho blanket around his shoulders and then opened a cardboard carton of orange juice. «Here, drink this up. You're dehydrated.»
John guzzled the juice and collapsed on his knees. His teeth chattered. Beth retrieved his bundled clothing. He saw the man in a truck. «Eric, goddammit, help this guy out. Get out here.» Eric put down the gun and reluctantly helped Beth lift John onto the truck bed. She spoke to John over the bed's rim. «What's your name, hon?»
He said, «John.»
«John, you lie down and we'll have you home in a few minutes, okay?»
John said, «Okay,» then lay back and watched the blinking red light of Jeanie's camcorder taping him. Then he tilted his head back and looked at the stars, and he began to cry because it had all been a waste and because the voice of Susan was only a sound buried under a laugh track he'd heard by accident in a stale white room.
Chapter Twenty-one
Even the most anal of the 4A .M. bread-baking monks would be unable to compete with Eugene Lindsay's compulsion for getting his postal fraud mail-outs into the local postbox before morning pickup. Susan was drafted into this work pronto, and even when she was half a year pregnant, Eugene still had her lugging box loads of heavy documents and paper up and down the basement stairs. Susan could have cared less. For the first time in her life she felt as if there were no tightly coiled springs waiting to lurch out from beneath her skin. She felt as if she were on holiday. Added bonus: wild sex, up until the baby got too big.
«Yooj, I feel like a Cambodian peasant or something, freighting these — what are they?» — she looked down at the envelopes in the box she was holding — «mail-outs to the Greater Tampa, Florida, postal region. I could drop Junior into the rice paddy and be back on threshing duty the next afternoon.»
Eugene attended his Xerox 5380 console copier like a surgeon with a patient, bathed in strobes of Frankenstein green light. «Hey, sunshine, God bless Florida. All those seniors with nothing but free time and too many radio stations. They hand in their mailing addresses like they were spare change. Now let's get them up to the front door. Mush!»
When winter came, the air in the house became drier, but the daily schedule went on unchanged. In December, when Susan had realized she was pregnant, Eugene forbid her to go near the microwave oven or to drink alcohol.
Spring and summer came and went. She liked her job. She opened the daily mail, which Eugene picked up at a post-office box a few streets over. Inside the envelopes came crumpled money, sent in by superstitious radio enthusiasts whose names Eugene purchased from an old college pal who'd become a telemarketing whiz — suckers! Most often it consisted of two twenties and a ten, but sometimes Susan collected wads of ones and fives in dirty little clumps, likely scrounged from under the front seat of a teenager's car. What did these people want? What kind of cosmic roulette wheel did they hope to spin by responding to Eugene's fraudulent thrusts?