Made to Break (20 page)

“Yeah,” Avey said. “You wait much longer, and they might have to amputate.”

“Go on, boy,” said the geeze. “That old gal with the tracks in her mouth'll take good care.”

Basil limped to his girl, who hadn't seemed so much as to blink. “You okay?” He took her hand, but she didn't twitch. “I'll be back in a flash with a Coke on ice,” he said, “just the way you like it.”

IT WASN'T TILL LATER, AS WE LAY IN OUR MOTEL, that Avey said why she told Lucille what she told her while Basil fixed his feet.

“I'm never going to see those people again,” Avey said from her pillow.

“How do you figure?”

“You think this is the first time I've hit a snag?”

“How aren't you going to see them?”

“You won't either.”

“Avey,” I said. “They're all I've got.”

She ran a finger down my chest. She kissed me there, she kissed my mouth. “
Were
, baby,” she said, “and
had
.” I considered the stains on the ceiling, adjusting to her words. “You know it's over,” she said. “I saw it coming a week after I met you guys, and I'm slow.”

“That still doesn't say why you had to tell her all that.”

“It made her feel better.”

“But it's just a name.”

“A name is not a name is not a name. And it sure as hell isn't
me
.”

I waited for her to continue, but she rolled to her back and took my hand and smiled.

“That's fucked up,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Look. I know you're restless. What I don't get is, why me?”

“A long time ago,” she said, “just after I'd run away from home the first time, I bought a fifty-cent box of chow mein down on 42nd street, in New York. I ate it all, and when I finished, I ate the fortune cookie, too. You want to know what the fortune said?”

“Fortune's are for weaklings,” I said.

“It said,
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation
.”

I didn't have to tell her the idea was worth regard. But neither did I want to say something too glib or hifalutin.

“Traveling cures these things,” she said. “I'm on the road. My secrets are my steps.”

“Sounds like a fancy way to say you're just a liar.”

“Let's go to sleep.”

“If it's the way you say it is, then why didn't you tell her your name was Mud?”

Avey put two fingers on my lips. “I've never told anybody that,” she said. “Not even you.”

There must've been more to Avey's telling Lucille her real name than she'd admit. Our friend had died, the woman was filled with grief. Lucille wouldn't've cared if Avey had said her name was Trash.

It was hard at first. Lucille's silence, it seemed, was a forest through which she couldn't find her way. We asked how she felt, for nothing. We asked was she tired, the same. We asked what she wanted now we were free, but still she said not a word. I flicked the monkey so it bumped and spun.

“The old man calls this thing José,” I said. “As if at any minute it might want to rhumba.”

Lucille was listening now. Her eyes had kicked the blur. She even almost laughed, I thought.

“I notice you haven't called me Elmira,” Avey said.

“I like Hickory better.”

“What if I told you Elmira's no more my name than Hickory?”

“I'd say that was a good thing.”

“What if I told you it's Avey?”

“You want to be called Avey, I'll call you Avey. You want the other, I'll call you that. Just tell me what you want.”

“I want for you to be happy.”

“Basil wants to get his truck,” said Lucille.

The old man had remained quiet in the drizzle. “What about him?” Avey said.

“He needs us right now,” I said.

“Somebody needs somebody,” Lucille said.

“The man is back in town!”

And so he was: Basil Badalamente, musician, doofus, drunk, asshole-cum-friend, friend-cum-foe, and foe-champ, all in the sense of huge, of extraordinaire, of bigger than life itself. Yes, yes, yes, Basil was big, Basil was huge, as huge as ever and maybe huger, but that didn't mean he wasn't a fake. Fakes was what we were, really, every last one of us, and fakery was our game, especially times like these. There's no such thing, after all, as the Comedown, so long as we never called it. Ergo, with fakery and lies, this had become routine.
I am not ugly, but stoked. I am not wounded, but charmed. I am not hurt, but pissed. And I will laugh at it all—ha! ha!—and keep on laughing—ha! ha! ha!—down to the putrid dregs
. Basil, undisputed King of the Fakes, now threw down his cane and proffered a Coke on ice.

“Am I good, baby,” he said, “or am I
good
?”

I took the soda. “Mighty white of you, friend.”

“How are you?” Lucille said.

He looked like a hairy scab. But to see his twinkling eyes and mouthful of teeth, you'd think he thought himself a hawk. “On top of the world,” he said. “On top of the freaking world!”

“Hey, Super,” Avey said, tugging at the old man's sleeve. “You ready?”

“Our name's Steady,” Super said.

“We thought we'd pick up some clothes,” I told Basil, “then hit a motel and place to eat. Then you can see about the Cruiser.”

“That okay with you, geeze?” Basil said to Super.

“So long as Horatio here lives to tell the tale, we can run the race.” And at that, Fortinbras the dog appeared in the bed behind his master.

“We're not getting back there again,” I said.

Lucille sat up to protest, but Avey cut her off. “And we shant be drawing straws.”

“It's only just down the way,” Basil said.

I offered Lucille the Coke. Little by little her face grew soft. “I'm sorry,” she said at last.

We didn't say a word. There was no word to say. Her sorrow, I saw, was more than she herself could say. Her face was the saying, and the wet of her eye. I thought of infants and of hatchlings, and of the trillions of creatures searching through this world, those in this land of wintry muck and those out there, beneath the sun, away at the world's ends. Lucille was in her hair shirt. Times like this you don't say dook. What you do is breathe.

Super drew the door and stepped aside. “Well sure you are,” he said. “Sorrow's
always
better than laughter.” Avey got out, then Lucille, the old man tapped his chest and grinned. “It's by sadness the heart's made good.”

“If only this were another day,” Lucille said.

“Oh, but you're wrong, young misses. This here day's better than the rest, by far.”

“Not to change the subject or anything,” Avey said, “but do you know where these guys can get a change of clothes for cheap?”

Super said he did, and sure enough, at the 89 and 50, it was: a Millers Outpost, like a beacon from the mist. With the $52.38 in my pocket, the bills completely soaked, I bought some 501s, a cheap blue flannel and long sleeve tee, and was left with some change till I could tap my nest egg, 262 lousy bucks. Basil got identical stuff, fifty sizes larger, and a pair of Reeboks, size 17, for the bindings on his feet.

“You wouldn't happen to have a paper I could buy?” I said to the kid who helped us. He was a white boy, skinny as Fred Astaire, with a baseball cap and little bald head and giant shirt across which, in skate-punk graffiti, read the word
THINK!

“Don't be crazy, man.” He took a paper from under the reg and tossed it on the counter. “Y'all can
have
it.”

“Slap me some skin,” I said, and held out my hand.

The kid eyed my hand like it might become a snake. “You a weird-ass.”

“Slap me some skin,” I said.

Basil was waiting. The kid ran his hand across mine, way too fast, and our business was complete. “You a weird-ass dude,” he said. “I check you out.”

I opened the paper. LAKE MAROONED BY TORRENTIAL RAIN, said the headline. Basil leaned over my shoulder:

With rushing floodwaters undermining U.S. Highway 50 in numerous locations, the main route from Sacramento to South Lake Tahoe will remain closed indefinitely… Rain and melting snow have filled rivers and caused dangerous mudslides throughout the Tahoe Basin, where more than 2,000 US West customers were without phone service… About 7,300 Northern California customers were without power yesterday, while about
13,000 Washington households were without power, down from a peak of 250,000…

“I wasn't going anywhere, anyway,” Basil said. “You going anywhere?”

“I'm just a weird-ass, Basil. You know?”

He pinched one of his little ears, and it struck me he didn't have his hat. He'd slept and showered and shit with the thing for the better part of ten forsaken years, and now, someway, it was lost.

“Speaking for myself,” he said, “I'm one famished son of a bitch.”

“We need a room,” I said.

“Mark my words. We'll be sleeping in the old man's crate.”

On top of the flooding, it was New Year's Eve, a not-so-small fact that happened to've slipped my mind. Super rolled to the 50 again and headed for Nevada. The world was still a sad-sack place, its folks a sad-sack lot. Every roach trap along the way had someone sleeping in a closet. Maybe he was right, Basil, and we were doomed to a night in the basement of a church, eating macaroons and Jello with bluehairs and bums and other sundry dopes.

Through this spot and that we made our way, past the unlucky bastards we'd seen the journey in, the roofs of their cars nearly swallowed. A grown man sat on one, a big old dude with a Grizzly Adams beard and shearling vest. From a distance it seemed he was talking to himself, or maybe even singing, but closer it grew plain the bear was sobbing like a kitten. He just stood there on display, right in the open, pouring out his guts.

“Pity,” Super said, “never cries in the streets. But wisdom. Every day it's howling on the roads, and not a varlet hears it.”

Was he a cream puff, this man? We thought not, though, again, he was no insensitive beast… The song about the man who
couldn't cry until he'd been taken to the place for the insensitive and insane. Who after that not only cried, but cried every time it rained. Who once it had rained for forty days and forty nights died on the forty-first day—he just dehydrated and died…

And it was true, I thought: he was there, and then he wasn't…

We hove on, getting the brush at every joint—stuck in and shut out, all at once. I picked up the paper. “‘Fed by a week of pounding rain and melting snow,'” I read, “‘Lake Tahoe rose to its highest level in modern times Tuesday, rising six inches in a day to surpass the lake's legal storage capacity—'”

“Needles in your brain, Horatio, is all that is.”

“Says here it's a twelve hour drive just to Sacramento.”

“We got a friend,” Super said. “Up yonder.”

“What friend is that,” Avey said.

“Fear not, butterfly. She will feed you.”

Around the bend the lake rolled into view once more, turbulent, vast, and blue, roiling with whitecaps, and scarves of mist, and not a single squawking gull, nothing from a painting on a doctor's wall, just apathy, brutal, just eternity, cruel. A flooded shopping center drifted past, and then a golf course, flooded, too. Then more concerns, the Mickey D's again, the crowded Shell's, that diner packed with refugees and locals and archangels and creeps. And then we were parked before the Thunder Chief Motel, a drowsy looking joint with dripping eaves and needles on the porch. But just like the rest, this one had its blinking sign: NO VACANCY.

“I know you can read,” I told the old man.

“We've got a friend.”

“By the looks of it,” Avey said, “he's doing a good business.”

The old man wriggled in his seat. I looked at his fingers on the wheel: BEND and GIVE.

“What's the deal?” Basil said.

“The old man says he's got a friend in there,” Avey said.

“The implication,” I said, “is he can somehow squeeze us in.”

“I'll hold my breath,” Basil said.

Inside, I rang the bell. To the left hung a pic of two of the scariest entities I had ever seen. The woman reminded me of something from Poe, risen from ancestral vaults. She had a forehead like a boxing glove, her eyes bulged over a steak-knife nose above a scratch for lips, and her beehive do was purple. Next to her, and much taller, stood her giant of a freak, Herman Munster's brother, his iron hair in a bowl-cut and skin like the rinds on nasty cheese. At least the office was warm. It smelled of TV dinners and mentholated smoke. I rang the bell again.