Going Bovine (18 page)

Gonzo’s going on about Captain Carnage and the time he beat a flock of Teddy Vamps. His voice is white noise. My body aches, and my arm’s shaking. I just want to sleep. My eyelids fall, closing out the world.

I’m dreaming of Disney World, but it’s like a herky-jerky, grainy home movie with the sound turned down. Hotel bathroom, Mom smiling, rubbing my wet head with a white towel. Dad and me waving from the line to the Peter Pan ride. Mom holding Jenna, who blinks at the sun. A random shot of Tomorrowland looking like another planet made of colorful balls and gears. The dark of the Small World ride. Mechanical kids going around and up and down. A splash. Me underwater, sinking, opening my mouth wide.

I wake with a gasp. Gonzo’s not talking anymore, and there’s a face inches from mine.

“Buy me a cup of coffee?” One of the schizo dudes hovers over me. He’s as matted as a feral cat and smells like he rolled in his own piss. He’s got about four teeth left, and they don’t look long for this world.

“Buy me a cup of coffee, please? I’m a homeless vet. Me and my wife got burned out of our home and I gotta support five kids and the littlest one needs an operation on her eyes and I wouldn’t do this, man, I wouldn’t be out here if it wasn’t for them, and a guy’s gotta live, you know, gotta make his way and find his meaning in life and love, and to do that he needs coffee, he needs coffee and coffee and coffee.”

Gonzo’s shrinking down into his chair till I can only see his eyes and that huge ’fro, but I can tell by the redness in his cheeks that he’s holding his breath. The smell is pretty harsh, but I know Gonzo’s probably more afraid that he could catch some rare, untreatable disease just by sharing the same airspace as this guy.

“Here you go, man.” I leave a dollar on the table and he snatches it up.

“Thank you. Thank you. I got burned out of my houseboat and my kid needs an operation on her lungs so I need to get me some coffee and head out to the cemeteries to take care of things. To the cemeteries you just take the Canal Street cable car to the end, all the way to the end of the line, to the end where the angels live, and that’s where you go to bury things.”

My skin’s tingling now, but it has nothing to do with my disease. “What did you say?” I ask the homeless guy, but the cook’s shooing him away.

“Come on, Spanky, leave these people alone, now,” the cook says. He yanks the string to the front window shades and the café is flooded with light.

CHAPTER TWENTY

In Which We Visit a Cemetery and I Receive a Message. Sort of. I Hope.

We take the Canal Street car out to the cemeteries near the interstate. It’s a depressing ride. Sandwiched between the refurbished law offices, used-car lots, and prisonlike schools are tiny little houses that look like they could fall down any minute, all peeling paint and chipped shutters. Some of the wounded doors have red X’s drawn on them like animals marked for slaughter. Abandoned cars peek out from coats of dirt, rust, and leaves. On the corner, there’s a bent ONE-WAY street sign pointing to the ground.

“End of the line,” the guy says, which is pretty funny, considering. All around us are cemeteries—left, right, center.

“Now what?” Gonzo asks as we get off the cable car and cross over the tracks.

“He said I’d know the one,” I say, eyes scanning the miles and miles of gravestones.

Gonzo snorts. “Well, that’s helpful.” He calls out the names of the cemeteries around us. “The Odd Fellow’s Rest? That sounds like your speed, amigo. The Greenwood?”

Gonzo’s waiting for some direction from me, but hell if I know what we’re looking for. Junior Webster’s sunglasses feel heavy in my hands.

“Cypress Grove,” Gonzo says. “Or the …”

“There’s one called Cypress Grove?”

“Yeah. Over there. The small one.”

“This way,” I say. We pass under the wrought-iron arch that spells out Cypress Grove and into the cemetery. A grass and gravel path leads us past limestone mausoleums, pretty little houses for the dead. Set into the ground are raised stone platforms with inscriptions that read OUR BELOVED BROTHER or OUR DARLING BABIES.

“What are we looking for?” Gonzo asks.

“An angel.”

We scan the mausoleums and headstones. In this row alone, I count twenty-seven angel statues.

“Could you be more specific?” Gonzo asks.

“He said I’d know it. Let’s keep looking.”

“Hey, check this out!” Gonzo yells, climbing up onto the platform of a coffee-colored mausoleum. “It’s like a fucking castle. Oh shit. Can you say ‘fuck’ in a graveyard or will that jinx you with the undead?”

I suck in my breath. “Well, it’s too late now.”

Gonzo’s eyes get huge and I can tell he’s heading for a full-on feardown. “Seriously. You don’t think there’s some voodoo action on this place, like hands sticking up through graves and stuff? Dude. For real?”

“Gonzo, no hand is going to break up through a stone mausoleum, okay? Chill out.”

“Yeah, okay,” he says, letting out a deep breath. “This could be zombie heaven, man. Dude, I wish we were making a horror film. That would be mad awesome!”

Gonz snaps a few pics with his cell phone. Weird shit like his hand resting clawlike against a headstone so that it looks like he’s rising from the dead, horror-movie-poster style. These are accompanied by “aargghs” and “aaaahhhs” and various zombie-esque grunts made deep in his throat.

“Funny. Can you stop playing Dawn of the Living Ass-Hat long enough to help me find Junior’s message?”

A few feet away, three blond girls jabber on in German as they snap photos of the decaying headstones. One of the girls asks me in halting English if I’ll take a picture of them together.

“No-a speak English,” I say, turning away.

“Here, I’ll do it,” Gonzo says.

I start to remind him we’re here for a purpose, but he’s already got their camera and is using a mix of Spanish, English, and hand gestures to direct them while they bump into one another in confusion and laugh.

“Copenhagen Interpretation?” one girl says. She plays a snippet of song from her phone, and Gonzo nods, smiling, and they all nod, smiling.

I wander off down the narrow lanes till I’m alone. The air is heavy with the rain that won’t come. It presses down on me, making my legs heavy and my chest tight. I find a place to sit on the stone steps of a gravestone hidden by a weeping willow. The moss hangs so low it tickles my cheek and nose. It smells like sorrow.

“Hey, cowboy.”

At the sound of Dulcie’s voice, I whip around, left and right, searching.

“Up here,” she calls.

“Ah. Very cute.” She’s posed on the top of a white, churchlike mausoleum, her wings folded, her chin resting on her hands like the Thinker Angel. She could blend right in, except for the boots and the bright pink hair.

She hops to the ground with an impressive thud, her boots sending puffs of ancient Southern dust onto my jeans, and settles onto the new grave of a soldier. “So what do you think of the Big Easy?”

“I don’t know,” I say, sitting next to her. “It’s kind of depressing.”

Dulcie puts a hand on my shoulder. “Cam, you’re in a graveyard.”

“Funny.”

Dulcie nods at the sunglasses in my hands. “What are those?”

“Sunglasses.”

“Going for the literal. Okay. I’m game. Where’d you get them?”

She could be putting me on. For all I know, she’s been watching the whole time and has seen everything. “This guy named Junior Webster,” I say, waiting for a reaction. But her expression doesn’t change and I figure she really doesn’t know anything, which means she’s the lamest angel ever. I go ahead and tell her about our night, the Wizard of Reckoning and his Fire Giants—the dark energy—showing up to our little party, Junior’s death. The only thing I don’t tell her is how scared I am. In the distance, I can hear a smattering of German and laughing. I can make out Gonzo playing director. He’s telling one of the German girls to act like a zombie.

“Junior told me I’m supposed to bury these under the angel and wait for a message. Thing is, there are, like, four billion angels in this cemetery.”

Dulcie nods. “That’s a toughie.”

“I thought maybe you would know where? Like maybe that might fall under the category of special angel-privy info you could share?”

She leans back, crosses her legs and swings one out, touching me lightly each time with her boot. “I told you, Cameron, I’m just a messenger.”

I put my hands up. “Fine. Junior Webster wanted me to bury these sunglasses under the angel? I’m on it. If this doesn’t work, I really don’t give a shit anymore. Move your feet.”

Dulcie sweeps her boots to one side. I make a small hole in the fresh dirt of the soldier’s grave, drop in the sunglasses, and cover them up. I wipe my hands on my jeans and sit beside Dulcie to wait. Gulls circle overhead, crying. After five minutes, I check the ground, but there’s nothing.

“So where’s this secret message?”

“Beats me,” she says, dipping into a secret stash of ChocoYums. “But I love the not knowing. The sense of mystery. Don’t you?”

“No. I really, really don’t.” We sit quietly for another minute or two. My butt hurts and all I want to do is leave. “Should we say something? Are there some, like, magic words that could speed this along?”

Dulcie puts her hands out like a magician about to levitate a rabbit. “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.” She shrugs. “I heard that on the radio once.”

“That’s it. I’m out of here.” I stand up and promptly trip over a large rock on the path. Under the rock is a scrap from today’s newspaper, the classified section.

“Did you find it?” Dulcie asks, peering down at me from her new perch at the top of the willow tree. She’s totally showing off.

“Could you let me read this, please?”

She mimes a zipper over her lips, and I scan the section of newspaper. It’s all a random jumble:

HERE AND THEN NOT—MYSTERY OF THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION SOLVED! NEW PHOTOS OF LONG-LOST INUIT BAND FISHING IN SNOW.

BUY NOW. VALHALLA YARD GNOMES—LAWN ORNAMENTS FIT FOR A GOD.

DEAR TOBIAS, I FORGIVE YOU. TO ERR IS HUMAN; TO LIVE, DIVINE. LET US LIVE TOGETHER FOR THE REST OF OUR DAYS. I WISH IT TO BE.

NEED A RIDE TO THE YA! PARTY HOUSE? WE’VE GOT SPACE IN OUR CAR.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS CORPORATION’S TRAVEL OFFICE IS NOW OPEN.

LOOKING FOR WORK? OUR OPERATIONS ARE EXPANDING! CALL UNITED SNOW GLOBE WHOLESALERS

AT 1-800-555-1212.

There are at least twenty different classifieds here, none of them particularly meaningful or helpful.

“This is hopeless,” I say.

Dulcie’s voice floats down from the tree. “Keep looking. You’ll find it.”

“Yeah? How do you know?”

“Because I believe in you, Cameron,” she says without a hint of sarcasm.

I look again, and this time, way down in the right-hand corner, I see a tiny, illustrated ad for the Roadrunner Bus Company with their tagline: Follow the feather.

“Hey, is that it? Is this what Junior meant?” I start, but the willow tree’s empty. Dulcie is already gone. A sudden gust of wind tears the paper from my hand and blows it far away. I’m left with just a scrap. Two words: to live.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

In Which Junior Webster’s Cryptic Message Does Not Become Any More Uncryptic, and the Worst Pictures Ever Taken of Us Are Circulated

We’re at the bus station, feeding my dad’s credit card into the ticket machine. Our bus to Daytona is scheduled to leave in five minutes. I don’t know if that’s the bus we need to be on; I’m just going off what I saw on the classifieds page. It mentioned the YA! Party House. The Party House is in Florida. There are three buses leaving this evening and one of them is headed to Daytona; ergo, we are headed to Daytona. I am divining my future based on a classified ad I found in a graveyard.

“So, you think this is part of the secret message?” Gonzo asks, looking at the newspaper scrap.

“Don’t know, don’t care right now,” I say. The ticket machine wheezes like an old man, coughing out two tickets to Florida in a painfully slow fashion.

“To live. Maybe he means too live,” Gonzo says, making a long “i” sound. “You know, like, like, hey, cats and kittens, it’s all too live,” he says, adopting a hipster voice.

“Or maybe it’s just bullshit. To live? That’s not a secret message. That’s a fortune cookie.”

“Maybe he meant you needed to live. Maybe he’s telling you Dr. X will cure you and everything will be okay. Dude, I’ll bet that’s it!”

Gonzo’s face lights up now that he thinks he’s solved the puzzle, but I just feel like some kind of jerk who’s having a cosmic prank played on him. I wanted something concrete—turn left at the Auto Mart. Dr. X’s office is on the corner of Fifth and Main and you have an appointment at eleven o’clock next Tuesday.

Just as they’re making the announcement for our bus, a couple of cops enter the station. At the sight of them, we automatically go low-profile, hiding at the back of a pack of people heading for the buses. They’ve got a flyer they show to people in the station.

“Keep your head down,” I whisper to Gonzo. The cop stops to ask a lady with three small kids if she’s ever seen these two guys, and I get a look over his shoulder. The flyer shows two very bad school photos of Gonzo and me under the word MISSING. I hate that picture of me. I look like a complete putz. But at least I’m not sporting the ridiculous upper-lip peach fuzz Gonzo’s got in his.

“Gonzo,” I say. “Be cool. Those cops are looking for us. Blend in.”

“Blend in? Easy for you to say!”

The line presses forward toward the bus. The driver opens up the metal jaw on the side and passengers hand over their suitcases for storage. Why do people have to travel with so much stuff? The cops are out here now, scouring the buses for two teens—one a dwarf—who escaped from a hospital in Texas. I position Gonz in front of me so I can block his body with mine. Trouble is, he’s wider than I am, and it makes it look like we’re one of those Indian goddesses with lots of limbs. After what seems like forever, the driver opens the doors, and Gonzo and I nearly kill each other in our rush to reach the back of the bus, where we pile into our seats and slink down.

“Cover your face with your jacket. Pretend you’re asleep,” I say.