I told her that as a matter of fact I would like to know the name of her novel. I couldn't help but feel that somebody was getting their leg pulled, but I didn't care. I was fascinated.

"I called it Teenage Girl Genius Takes Over the World! Not too shabby a title, huh?"

I conceded that I'd heard worse, especially for first novels. "First your ass! This is my goddamn third. My first was called Tits & Zits and my second is Somewhere Ovary Rainbows. Shallow shit, those first two, I admit it. Juvenile pulp pap. But I think Girl Genius has got some balls to it. Hey, let me ask you something! My publisher wants to reprint the first two and bring all three out as a package. But I'm not so sure. What's your thinking on that plan, as one novelist to another?"

I didn't know what to think. Was she on the level or lying or crazy or what? She sounded serious, but that could have been like the frown. I couldn't get over that feeling of a pulling sensation on my leg. I avoided her question with one of my own.

"Who's your publisher?"

"Binfords and Mort."

If she'd named off some well-known New York house like Knopf or Doubleday I'd have started shoveling pantomime manure. But Binfords & Mort? That's a specialty house for high-class historic stuff, and hardly known outside of the Northwest. Would she pick such company to lie about? Then again, would they pick her?

"I think you could do worse than follow the advice of Binfords and Mort," I averred, trying to probe her eyes. I couldn't get past the glass. I'd have to try another test.

"Okay, Girl Genius, I've got one for you."

"It'll have to be quick, Slick. I think my chariot has just arrived."

A black sedan had indeed just pulled up at the no standing curb. She must have heard it. An ambitious-looking young legal-type flunky got out and started for the lobby door.

"Quick it is," I said. "I'd like to know what's your thinking – just off the top of your I.Q. – on the Second Law of Thermodynamics?"

If I hoped to see her thrown by this, I was disappointed. She got very deliberately to her feet and stood in front of me. She bent her face down until it was almost touching mine. The thin lips were starting to stretch at the corners. The eager pad of driver's footsteps stopped a few feet away but neither the girl nor I turned.

"Melissa?" I heard him say. "Everything's cleared, Sweetie. Your father wants us to go to the Leaning Tower and order a couple giants – a pepperoni for him. He'll join us as soon as he gets rid of that damned delegation from Florence's fishing industry – they're still singing the blues about the salmon regulations. How does Canadian bacon sound for the other one? It's smoke cured…?

The lenses never wavered from me. But the lips continued to stretch, wider and wider, until it seemed her whole head might be split in half by her grin. The blush raged across her cheeks and neck, and her eyes flashed around their crystal cages like giddy green parakeets. She finally cupped her hand so we were shielded from the driver's eyes.

"Entropy," she whispered behind her hand, like a resistance fighter passing a vital secret under the very nose of the enemy, "is only a problem in a closed system." Then she straightened and spoke up. "What's more, a singing fisherman from Florence sounds better to me than a singed pig from Canada. How about you, Slick?"

"Much better," I agreed.

She nodded curtly. The scowl snapped back into place. Without another word she turned on her heel and stalked unaided past the waiting flunky, across the lobby, and straight out the door toward the sedan, majestically, or as majestically as possible for a knobby-jointed maybe-crazy half-green-haired nearly-completely-blind girl-thing from another dimension.

"If you're ever in Mt. Nebo," I called after her, "I'm in the book!"

She kept going. The flunky caught up to her but she disdained his help. She nearly stumbled when she stepped off the curb, but she caught the rear fender and felt her way to the door handle and got in. It was then I realized that, in her show of majesty, she'd left her cane.

They were pulling away as I ran out. I waved the feathered staff, but of course she couldn't see me. I thought of honking the thing after them but they were already to the gate, and the traffic was loud.

Besides, I knew it was the very sort of something I was supposed to bring back. It was absolutely neat. Caleb would love it. He would take it to school, show it off, brandish it, twirl it, honk it. His classmates would admire it, covet it, want one of their own. On their next trip to the Magic Kingdom they would look for them at all the Main Street souvenir shops, ask after them in all the little information kiosks…

Then, one bright blue airbrushed morn – a marvel of demand and supply! – there they'll be.

LAST TIME THE ANGELS CAME UP

"I'm so damn proud to be here today," yells Mofo.

It was the first thing I heard when I got back from Florida three days ago and found them all here, and I've heard him holler it at every lapse and lull ever since, changing only the italics: "I'm so damn proud to be here today" or "I'm so damn proud to be here today…"

"Me too," agrees the little one named Big Lou. "And I'll be just as proud when I'm gone. If the heat leaves us go in peace I'll be proud and pleased both."

It's currently against the law to ride motorcycles in the state without crash helmets. They'd been hassled by one state trooper after another, all the way from the California/Oregon border.

"They fuckin better," says the three-hundred-plus-pounder called Little Lou. "I'm tired of taking shit off these uniformed faggots. Especially when theys only-est one of them to thirty of us. Might's right, ain't it?"

"Fuckin A," answers Big Lou.

"I know for a fact that the Reverent Billy Graham says that right is might. So might is got to be right by miles, right? Thirty to one?"

"Seems right to me," says Big Lou, stretched out on his belly down in the yard, six-foot-six and a sixth-of-a-ton of dusty meat and leather. "But the only-est thing I know for fact is that, since San Fran, I got miles and miles of piles."

Then, a moment later, that measured laugh. It comes hammering up from the yard and the concrete apron in front of my shop where numerous Harleys are undergoing various repairs. I can't tell if it's a laugh about Big Lou's rhyme, or about another comment about me up here typing, or what.

"Say I'll tell ya what I've got," says the heavy voice I've come to recognize belongs to that one called Awful Harry: "I got brakes by Christ I didn't even know I had!"

Then goes roaring a doughnut and braking and raising an awful pillar of dust in my driveway to prove his point.

"See that? Brakes! This morning when I'm coming back out from the mechanic and sees this little chickie here hitchhiking, I locked 'em up. I mean locked 'em the fuck up! When I finally stops I looks behind me and all I sees a strip of rubber running a quarter mile back to her standing there with her little pink tummy hanging out. Aint that right, Chickie Bird?"

Chickie Bird doesn't answer but Rumiocho squawks his "Right on!"

"Hear that?" Harry rasps. "He says 'Right on.' The fuckin bird's hipper'n all you pukes. Hey, Parrot? I'd steal your ass if you didn't belong to friends o' the fam-bly har har har…"

Although Awful Harry isn't the biggest of the brood, he's potentially the baddest. He told me he was a security guard five days a week, keeping things tame in a Marin County shopping mall, so he requires five times as much wildness on the weekends as his Angel's recompense and right. He isn't tall but he's heavy and hard. When he walks he swings a hard heavy gut around in front of him with the efficient ease of a sumo wrestler. When he talks he comes off halfway halfwitted, except for his eyes betraying a malicious mocking intelligence. A quickness. In his intimate moments he admits to being a four-point student for the first two terms of his one unfinished year at Cal… claimed he kissed it off because the academic pace was too pokey for him, sneered up at me rattling out the window – "Is that all the faster you can type up there?"