Ring Game (41 page)

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Just to talk. Like I said.”

“So talk.”

Hyatt and Carmen were arguing again. Chip could hear them right through the privacy panel. The bride was mad, and Hyatt was trying to calm her down. It reminded him of Polly and Rupe, the way they’d go at each other sometimes, only this was worse because they just kept saying the same things over and over.

At least the drive was nice, with plenty of rolling hills and trees and green fields. Chip liked being out in the country. He thought how much nicer it would be on his motorcycle, with the sound of wind in his ears instead of the whining and cajoling going on behind him.

The bride, Carmen, wanted to know why she wasn’t married. Chip could’ve told her that. He would’ve told her it was because she was a complaining, drunken, cigarette-smoking bitch. Even with the air on and the privacy panel closed, the entire limo reeked from her cigarettes. She was back there drinking champagne and smoking and bitching. He couldn’t understand how Hyatt, a founding father of the Amaranthine Church, had wound up with this one-note whiner.

“You told me it was gonna be
after
the wedding, Hy! We get married,
then
we get snatched. That’s what we talked about. I didn’t even get to go to my own reception!”

Here they’re making history, in the middle of reforming the Amaranthine Church of the One, and she’s worrying about missing her party. Chip, he’d’ve just popped her one.

Hyatt was more patient. He kept trying to explain strategies to her. About how it was better to get kidnapped before instead of after. This was some real, first-class strategizing, the kind of complex thinking that Hyatt Hilton was so good at. Chip appreciated a strategic mind. Polly, she was strategic, too, but not as strategic as Hyatt.

“This is all about public perception,” Hyatt was explaining. “It has to do with the concept of the bride. We were kidnapped
on the way to the altar
. If it happened after, it wouldn’t have the
impact
. It’s all about what order things happen in. That’s what it’s about, Carm, is
impact
. Why do you think O.J. Simpson got so much press? It was the
order
that things happened in.”

“Sophie’s gonna kill us both,” Carmen said.

“Look at it this way,” Hyatt said. “Once we get on TV, then we can do whatever we want. We can get married on the
Tonight Show
, like Tiny Tim. Would you like that?”

“I want to go to the reception.”

Hyatt seemed to run out of patience. “Well,” he said, “you can’t. Deal with it.” Chip smiled. That was much better. That was strategy.

When had she lost control? A few months ago, Carmen had been in charge of her life. She’d been the one who called the shots. She had decided when they would go out, when they would have sex, and what movies they would see. He would come to her with his ideas, and she would pick and choose. But lately—for a
long
time now, come to think of it—she had been more like a passenger, watching life coming at her, unable to get a grip on the wheel. It reminded her of her experience with her last boyfriend, the skinhead psycho James Dean who had ended up dead and almost got her killed, too. Only Hyatt wasn’t scary dangerous like Dean had been. She couldn’t imagine Hy actually hurting her. So how and when had she lost control?

She poured herself another glass of champagne, spilling a little when the limo swerved. Or maybe the limo hadn’t swerved. They were on their second bottle, so it was hard to tell exactly what had caused the glass to move just as the champagne emerged from the bottle neck. Oddly enough, although she felt a pleasant alcoholic buzz from her toes to her fingertips, her mind remained clear. Memories played one after another as she searched her recent past for clues to her present situation.

The day she had moved into Hyatt’s apartment. Was that when she had lost it?

No. By that time, the out-of-control feeling had already arrived.

Hyatt was up front talking to the driver, Chip. Carmen did not like Chip. She didn’t like his reptilian eyes and the way she couldn’t help but look into his nostrils when he faced her.

She looked further into the past, searching for that moment when she’d blinked and her life had gone off in this strange direction. Was it when she had told Sophie that she was getting married? Or before that? She looked into her champagne flute and saw, through the bubbles, the ring around her finger. She switched the glass from her left hand to her right and looked at her ring. Sunset slanted in through the tinted windows, hit the diamond, and threw sparks into her eyes.

That was it, she thought, blinking. She had lost it the moment he gave her the goddamn ring.

“So what you’re saying is that these telomeres get a little shorter every time I do something bad to my body?”

“That’s right. You go out in the bright sun, your cells got to fight the light, your skin telomeres shorten up faster. You smoke a cigarette, your lung telomeres get shorter. You eat a Twinkie, you messing with all kinds of ’em.”

Flo said, “Huh.” It made sense to her. “What about when I work out, breaking down those muscle fibers.”

“That different. That not damaging cells, it challenging them.” Chuckles held up a clenched fist, saluting the concept. Flo could see his grin in the rearview mirror. They were still cruising down I-35, coming up on the Iowa border. Chuckles had lowered the privacy panel a few miles back. He was not bad looking. He knew how to wear gold. A lot of men didn’t. A lot of men, especially black men, had these big yellow watches and rings and such but it was the gold wore them. This Chuckles, he wore the gold.

She couldn’t remember exactly what he had said that had got her to listening. Somewhere back around Owatonna, he’d started to make sense. Chuckles—or Charles Thickening, which was his real name—was a very smart man. He knew all kinds of stuff about cells and telomeres and the mind-body interface. He knew things she’d never heard before.

Flo said, “But that lady that got younger, that was fake.”

“Rupe, him and Polly have a philosophy. They figure it’s cool to fool folks if that’s what you got to do to teach ’em the real thing. See, one secret to longer telomeres is you got to believe. Rupe, he says it don’t matter if you fooled or not, long’s you
believe
.”

“You are what you think you are,” said Flo, quoting one of her favorite articles from
Muscular Development
.

“You got that right, what Rupe called the first step:
believe
. And there’s more. The second step is … you know, you not suppose to know this one yet, but I gone tell you anyway.
Live longer.
”

“Sounds sort of obvious.”

“A lot of the steps do, until you really think on ’em. See, the longer you live, the more science you got to help you live longer. For instance, a fifty-year-old man in 1950, he could expect to live maybe to fifty-eight. But if he manage to live to seventy, his life expectancy went up to seventy-nine. And if he make it to ninety, he might could expect to live to 100. Every year he live he get another year! According to Rupe, anybody who can make it to the year 2078 is going to live forever.”

“I’d be pretty old.”

“Yeah, but you’d look and feel young. Those are just two steps I told you. There’s five more. Once you do all seven, you there.”

“Tell me one more.”

Chuckles chuckled. “I don’t know you ready, Mizz Peeche.”

“Tell me.”

“Okay, I tell you. You ready?”

Flo nodded.

“
Be there.
”

“That’s mine!”

“That number three.”

“It’s mine. Tell me the rest.”

Kathie: What are you rebelling against?

Johnny: What have you got?

—Mary Murphy and Marlon Brando,
The Wild One

“L
ET ME ASK YOU
something, Crow. How many times have you been hit on the head so hard it knocked you out?”

Crow lifted a hand and felt the back of his head. It was bandaged, and numb. His mouth tasted awful. He had awakened in hospital rooms before, and his mouth always tasted the same.

Debrowski sat back in the beige plastic chair, playing with the zippers on her jacket. “Do you even remember?” She had something on her head. An old 1950s-style motorcycle cap.

“I think four or five … or six. What’s that on your head?”

“You know, most people go their whole lives without getting knocked out.” Zippers opened and closed, making soft metal buzzing sounds. “How many times has it been this month?”

Crow frowned. “Two?”

“That’s what I told the doctor. He said you’re lucky to be alive.”

“Doctors say that all the time.”

“Maybe it’s true.”

“Of course it’s true. You’re alive, too. Do you feel lucky?”

“Yeah. I’m lucky I’m not you.”

Crow turned his head away, taking a break from Debrowski’s eyes, which became unbearably rectangular when she was angry. On the other side of the bed, Sam sat slumped in a chair, snoring gently. The zipper noises merged with Sam’s snoring, sounding like a slowed-down recording of buzzing insects. Behind Sam, Crow could see a street lamp through the dark window.

“What time is it?” he asked.

Debrowski said, “A little after eleven. Maybe you should get yourself a motorcycle helmet. What would you think about that? Since people keep hitting you upside the head. You know, I’m kinda P.O.ed at you, Crow.”

Crow thought, I could get hit by lightning, and she’d get mad at me. She’d say, why didn’t you duck? All he’d been doing, he’d been trying to do a favor for Axel. Then something had happened. Something not his fault.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” he asked, watching a bead of drool form at the corner of his father’s mouth.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

Crow explored the scrambled regions of his brain. “I remember going into a place to buy a pack of cigarettes for Carmen.” He turned back toward Debrowski.

“The Clark station.”

“Right. What’s with the biker hat?”

“You don’t like it?”

“It looks like somebody else put it there, doing a remake of
The Wild One
.”

Debrowski removed the leather cap, gave it a brief inspection, tossed it through the lavatory door into the open toilet.

“Nice shot.”

“I never liked that movie.”

“You think it’ll flush?”

“You never know. So, you were at the Clark station …”

“Yeah. Carmen wanted Marlboros in a box. Then the guy behind the counter did something. No. He
saw
something. Somebody.” Trying to remember made his head hurt worse.

“You don’t remember running a half mile to the American Legion?”

“Uh-uh.”

“You made quite an entrance. Blood all over your shirt. You don’t remember any of that?”

“I remember the guy at the counter. He saw something. That’s it. Look, just tell me what happened, okay?”

“Okay. I talked to one of the cops and he told me that the kid behind the counter said that a man dressed in black followed you into the store, slapped a gun up against the side of your head, then robbed the place of two hundred nineteen dollars and a carton of Snickers.

“So, it was just a robbery?”

“More than a robbery. Apparently, the robber needed wheels, and you’d left the limo idling out front. The guy took the money and his candy bars and jumped in the limo and took off. With Hyatt and Carmen in it.”

“No kidding? Then what? They get dropped off someplace?”

“Nobody knows. The cops aren’t using the word kidnapping yet—my guess is they want to avoid getting the FBI involved—but nobody’s heard from Hyatt and Carmen, as far as I know. You’re supposed to call this guy—” She unzipped a side pocket and produced a business card. “—When you’re able to answer questions.”

“Who is he?”

She frowned at the card. “Wes Larson. Some cop.” She tossed the card on his bedside table.

“As far as he’s concerned, I’m still unconscious.” Crow found the bed control and pressed buttons until he found one that raised the back. “Am I supposed to stay here overnight?”

“I think so. They want you to be here in case your brain swells up and your head explodes.”

“They know I don’t have health insurance?”

“They’ve got my American Express card.”

“Ouch. Maybe we should just go home while you’ve still got your fortune.”

“Forget it, Crow. You die tonight, you do it here.”

That was fine with Crow. He wasn’t sure he could stand up, and he didn’t want to put it to the test.

Debrowski said, “The wedding has been postponed, of course.”

“Axel should be happy about that.”

“To tell the truth, he’s pretty upset.”

A liquid rumble exploded from Sam, a laugh turning into a wet cough. Crow and Debrowski looked at him, waited for the hacking and throat-clearing to subside. Sam pushed the suitcoat off his chest, sat up straight, and thumped his chest with a fist.

“You okay?” Crow asked.

Sam cleared his throat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s the food’s got his bone in a knot,” he said. “All these people goin’ nuts, you on the floor bleeding off your head, waiting for the ambulance, that one guy runnin’ around with his camera, Sophie screamin’ at the cops. All this and Ax says to me, he says, ‘What am I gonna do with all this food?’”

“You see this?” Chuckles plucked a thin orange carrot stick from his salad and held it between his thick dark fingers.

Flo nodded. She watched Chuckles insert the carrot stick into his wide mouth and chew. She noticed for the first time that he had a gold canine tooth to match his earring.

Chuckles said, “Eat life.”

They were sitting in a Union 76 truck stop just north of Des Moines having a late supper.

“Eat life?” She dropped her eyes from his mouth to his black silk warm-ups, some kind of design on the chest, black on black embroidery, two segmented worms swirling around each other, the same design as he had shaved onto his close-cropped temples. She pointed at his chest. “What is that, anyway?”

“The Amaranthine coil. It’s like the double helix, you know, like DNA. Cell software. The heart of the cell, where regeneration take place.” He pointed at the twists of black thread. “You got your genes, which are the secret code. And these lumps on the end here, they’re the telomeres, what tell the cell to keep on keepin’ on. You got to make your telomeres longer. The longer telomeres you got, the more years you got. What the seven steps do is they stretch ’em out.