The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men Part 7

And nothing. I mean nothing.

She's got herself wedged behind the door, trying to decide whether to slam or trust some old guy with a ponytail and loose tie. Like maybe I've come to take her back to the mother s.h.i.+p. Who the h.e.l.l knows what she's seeing? So I back off, smile, try to see what it is that I'm seeing; and it's not a story. She looks about fifteen. Big honey blonde hair that hasn't seen a brush in two days, blue eyes that are way past bloodshot, and not quite enough makeup to ruin a perfect complexion. Probably a runaway. And I'm thinking, Jesus, she looks like a cheerleader that somebody beat the s.h.i.+t out of. Except that's not news and I'm already into my routine. "Janelle? Are you the Janelle Roberts who called? Because, honey, if you've got a story, I can't get it out here in the corridor. Now, do you want to talk to the cops or do you want to talk to me?" Pure bluff, but it gets the door open, doesn't it?

"I can't stop crying," she says.

Okay. I'm inside now, and it's real. The stale air. Food cartons on the floor, trash talk on the tube. And I feel this tightness in my chest, this familiar, sad fatigue that's going to drag me into some trailer park and kill me someday. I can tell she's freaked out. Got the furniture arranged around her bed like a barricade, Pooh Bear against the headboard, rose petals all over the nightstand like the flower girl went crazy at your cousin's wedding. Draperies closed. And I can feel the flu coming on, everything going numb including my emotions, and I have to concentrate just to taste the cigarette smoke-exhale, watch it drift. And here we are. She's looking at me; I'm looking at her pink toenails. Like we're the most normal couple in the world.

"You mentioned a boyfriend over the phone?"

I'm just treading water. I saw there was nothing for the front page in the first ten seconds, and I've already reduced her to a six-inch piece in the back-if I can find the angle. We avoid each other's faces and stare instead into this pile of crumpled sheets in the corner. It's the way they all do. Like they're trying to tell you something by telepathy.

Finally she says, "He's gone. I think he took the car." Easing her feet under this green blanket that looks like pond sc.u.m, then drawing her knees up the way they do when they're little girls.

So I just come right out with it, my one foray into cleverness. "Look, is he the one who hit you?"

But she shakes her head, puzzled. So I fish out the tape recorder and figure I'll give her ten more minutes because, underneath, she's beautiful, and I feel like she's somebody I knew and lost a long time ago. So I ask her if she's called anyone else.

"No," she says. "I just need the money."

And I think, G.o.d, you could be an actress. You could be Lolita. You could be my own kid, somebody I loved if the world weren't such a garbage heap, but instead I hear myself saying, "Okay. Here's the deal. You get a thousand dollars straight up if I can verify what you say. Five thousand if I get photographs. But you've got to convince me. We don't pay for scams, and we don't do counseling. So, Janelle. Have we got an abduction story or not?"

"Last night," she nodded.

"Good. Good. Now-amaze me."

"There was this rumbling noise, like a train. And then this bright light. You know, like ... a train."

"Okay, forget the recorder. Just talk to me."

"I couldn't move. It was like I was floating, up, but I couldn't move, and then I was just there."

"Where? In a room? A s.p.a.cecraft?"

"I don't know."

"Okay, don't worry about that. We can do a sketch later. Now, after you were lifted up, is that when you saw the alien?"

"Yes, I mean, no. I didn't have any clothes on, and I couldn't move. I don't remember exactly. It was so cold, and they made me lay back."

"That's when they examined you?"

"Yes."

Now I want to pick her up and shake her, shake the d.a.m.n flowers off her gown and say, You think I haven't heard this before? You think I'm paying for this? Sweetie, I've written this same story a hundred and forty-six different ways. I know who tells it, and I know who reads it. And I can get your whole life into three paragraphs.

But I hear her whispering to me, "Mr. Nussbaum, I'm afraid I'm going insane."

"Let's open the drapes; it's still light outside."

"No!"

"Okay, but tell me what really happened."

Tears now. She's winding the bedspread around her legs and s.h.i.+vering. Backing away now.

"Janelle, listen to me. I can smell a phony before it gets cooking. It's part of my job. Now if you need some kind of help-"

"There was an alien."

"Look, I've got to go. Is there somebody you want me to call?"

"There was! A person."

"Okay. There was an alien. What did he look like?"

"He was so small."

"Okay, small. What else?"

"A large head, very large. And those eyes just like the pictures. Round but, you know, pointed at the end. These deep dark eyes. And tiny little hands, Mr. Nussbaum. I'm not imagining this."

"What else?"

"Just this little gash, this purple gash for a mouth. And no hair. No hair on its body. Please. Please, help me."

I flick off the recorder. "Look, whoever you are, I'm really sorry. I know you're confused and that somebody's hurt you-okay? I'll call Social Services when I get back to the office. Here's a twenty; it's all I've got."

"It was gray!" Defiance? I can't tell, and it doesn't make any difference-what does anybody named Janelle Roberts have to defy? "Sort of pinkish gray. A little bit ... bluish gray, I think. I couldn't ... watch."

"Just one?"

"Yes."

"Well, maybe you were dreaming." It's the kindest thing I can think to say.

"You weren't there."

"I know. Good-bye."

"You weren't there when it cried."

"What?"

"When it made this crying sound. When it came out."

"When it came out of ...?"

"After it came out of me."

It takes a moment for me to realize.

"It made this tiny sound. And the eyes made real tears, so I knew it was from somewhere, but I just couldn't. I couldn't go back, and it couldn't go back, but it was real. It was from somewhere. So I took the pillow. To make it stop."

"Jesus Christ."

"And wrapped it in the sheets. Over there in the corner. You know, for the pictures."

And when I finally reach out, she settles into my arms.

The Guardian.

FOR MILES.

Okay, we're flying low now, delivering this bigmother Easter arrangement in the old panel truck looks like a hea.r.s.e, decal across the back saying WEISS FLORIST-FTD 205 South Main Street in Morton WE DELIVER inside a black ivy wreath, which maybe should have been a red cross, on account of that's the way we work. Elrod's up front fighting to keep us between the lines. I'm in the back holding this purple and white b.a.s.t.a.r.d looks like an Indian headdress, ducking when we round corners so I don't get whanged by one of the swinging metal hooks we load casket sprays on. Thing must weigh thirty-five, forty pounds except for the short periods of zero gravity when we go airborne, and it's a little top heavy too on account of the Easter lilies, but do they ever think about that back at the shop? h.e.l.l no.

So it's inevitable. I mean we're headed south on Hwy. 115, right? Toward Baxter. Low cloud ceiling, visibility less than ten miles, and me without a parachute. Comes to the railroad crossing in front of the big denim plant, and what does the son of a b.i.t.c.h do? Takes the ramp like he was Fireball Roberts and this was his last chance at the leap of death. Then, voom, right out on the floor. The water, the Styrofoam, the peac.o.c.k feathers, the ferns, and every kind of purple and white flower in the jungle, all over the inside of that green ratty-a.s.sed panel truck, and me screaming, "Holy s.h.i.+t! They fell out, El, they're floatin' out the back of the truck," but he keeps going like he's got plenty of fuel and just enough time for one more bomb run.

So what do you do? I mean, you're fourteen years old. The guy is r.e.t.a.r.ded. You got an altar arrangement looks like it's been thrown up against a wall, and this is your first real life honest to G.o.d paycheck-paying job, which you deserve only because your mamma works there in the first place. And maybe his sister does own the flower joint and maybe you really are just a kid, but that won't change a thing because you're responsible for whatever happens next. Age doesn't have anything to do with it. So you've got to communicate in terms he can comprehend, right? "El! Hit the brakes, man! Oh G.o.d, we gotta go back. Jeezus Christ, El, it looks like somebody vomited flowers back here. I think I peed my pants."

"Pull over?"

"You not hear what I'm saying? The sum b.i.t.c.h exploded. We look like a free love bus turned wrong side out."

"Can't," he moans. At least that's what I think he says. The wind's catching everything and whirling it around me like a tornado.

"Oh G.o.d! El, you gotta listen to me, man. This ain't a cavalry charge; we in the florist bidness!"

"Church ladies gone meet us five o'clock. Then we got the hospital run."

It was the way he thought. Sort of like he'd got tuned in real good and clear on this one channel and didn't care to switch. Not r.e.t.a.r.ded exactly, I take that back, but pretty d.a.m.n focused on the here and now, if you know what I mean. Somebody told me he learned how to drive in the air force during the Korean War, though he didn't climb high in the ranks. They gave him a job trucking aviation fuel where the casualty rate was higher than actual combat.

And now here we are pulling up to the curb at Baxter Presbyterian, dripping and smoking right in the shadow of the steeple. El eases out from behind the wheel like he's the only Elrod Weiss in kingdom come and it didn't pay to hurry it any. And me, I'm trying to breathe. I'm pulling myself out of the water by one of the hooks, and I can see them through the side window, flouncing down the walk, the kind of foul-tempered biddies who show up Sat.u.r.day afternoon dressed for church and wanting to inspect the big altar arrangement because they're on the Wors.h.i.+p Committee or some d.a.m.n thing and 100 percent ready to peck you to death, boy, if one leaf is out of place. That kind. Holding their pocketbooks out front like this. Lips that haven't touched nothing but lemon juice in the past twenty years. And me in the back believing in the power of prayer with all my heart.

So. He gets the door about half open and starts picking up flowers, no particular order, just picking them up and jamming them back into that liner two and three at a time. No hurry at all now, just two or three in his left hand, then half a dozen in his right, whap, back down in the Styrofoam. Church ladies getting closer and closer, El getting in a groove with the flowers, me saying, "Give it up, man. It looks like a bomb went off in here. Looks like I peed in my pants for a year. You not understand what I'm saying? El, we gotta get outta town before ..."

When the tall pruney one in the navy polka dot lurches around that door like something out of Mardi Gras h.e.l.l croaking, "May we take just one teeny look before you bring it in?" And whatever was left in my bladder? Bam.

"We must be sure the colors are right," piped another one.

El took his hat off, having been raised in the Depression, and opened the door all the way.

"Oh my wooorrrd!" said the third lady.

"Oh my," echoed the second lady.

"It's gorgeous. I believe it's the most beautiful piece we've ever had. I'm going to call Irene as soon as we get it inside."

And there you go.

We spent thirty minutes turning and centering and adjusting that avant garde train wreck on the high altar of Presbyterianism, me dripping blue preservative water, and them thinking it was beautiful, and El and me together finis.h.i.+ng the hospital run before six-thirty. He had that kind of luck.

And for a time I did too.

During that same storm he said I got to go check she might've hurt herself, and I said she works in a bank for G.o.d's sake, what're you afraid happened, a paper cut? But he drove home anyhow, I mean the little house on Doster Street, and there she was, Patsy, alone in the bedroom her hand bleeding real bad and the mirror busted, with it wrapped in one of those ladies' handkerchiefs that won't soak up a thing. I said what are you doing home in the middle of the afternoon anyway while she stared into that hot dark stillness. I didn't feel well she said there's something wrong that feels twisted inside of me and just, Chad, please stay here while he fixes the fuses, just hold me until the lights come on. But your hand I said although she was warm and moist and her hair like roses but your hand. Will be all right she said if you just hold me. And so I did thinking that I was just holding her until the lights came on.

Elrod looked like a potato. Wore a gray fedora summer and winter, sweeping it off and crus.h.i.+ng it against his heart on every occasion that demanded politeness, which, to his southern mind, was about every fifteen minutes. Black leather shoes that he never polished. Hawaiian s.h.i.+rts whenever he could. Pleated pants. White socks. Gray suit and bow tie for church. He had a nose that'd been broken enough times that you wondered what he did before you met him.

He spent his entire life looking for clues.

"Like my name," he said. "It ain't normal. Why would anybody call me that?"

It amazed him, his name did, and he printed it over and over in a blue notebook that he kept in the utility drawer of his worktable there at the flower shop. Along with a gla.s.s doork.n.o.b, a picture of his wife Patsy, broken watches, rubber bands, everything electrical that he could lay his hands on. And keys, h.e.l.l yeah, maybe a hundred of them on a wire loop all worn smooth and forgotten. He just collected stuff. Sometimes he'd go looking for the one item he needed, just pick himself up and go, wham like that, maybe returning after lunch with a burned-out fuse, thinking.

Other days he might hit the brakes so hard it would stop time-you had to be ready for this-and he'd descend into the traffic to rescue a left-handed glove, a cracked mirror, a ribbon, a radio antenna. He cleaned and saved these things, arranged and rearranged his drawer, packed items away in those little boxes that cans of spray paint came in. Write in his notebook. Why should I care? He would let me drive as soon as we hit the city limits, on account of driving made him nervous. Or maybe distracted him from the search that eventually became his life.

Like the time we were five miles out on a dirt road that'd just been laid quiet by one of those summer storms. Searching for something-I don't remember really, one of those rural cemeteries maybe or a mailbox number-anyhow something that we weren't finding-so that we're just cruising, sort of lost in the warm, damp reordering of the world. And then there, on the other side of the winds.h.i.+eld, at no particular distance from us, was a perfectly circular rainbow. For real. I didn't know the things existed.

I say, "Good G.o.d A'mighty, do you see that?" But of course he's been watching longer than I have; and who, besides El, could keep perfectly still and perfectly quiet inside of a miracle?

"You can't close it up like that," I insist. "You can't make no bull'seye out of a rainbow."

"Sometimes you can," whispers Elrod Weiss.

Pretty soon I've got my head out of the driver's side window, squinting, one hand on the wheel, because for a moment it does seem like there's a figure in the center of the thing, the face of someone I might recognize. The air finally turning pure and cold in the after breeze, but I'm s.h.i.+vering from something else, and he's saying, "Patsy. That's my Patsy all up there in the yellow and blue. And pink. You see that? That's who it is." Not even surprised. "Better let me drive now; it's a rainbow here but a cloud over Morton, and she gets afraid." Though his hands didn't shake a bit.

Before Irene took him in, he drove a water truck for the county, one of those big tankers that sprinkles down the dust on gravel roads or washes dirt and trash off the regular highways. Big yellow boy with one of those black-and-white license tags saying "Bladen County-Permanent" like it was a monument or something. And thank G.o.d he didn't smoke and had a sister who could offer him a job when, you know, times got bad.

Because once he wheeled into Bub's Esso, said to the new guy fill her up, and headed off to visit Patsy during his lunch hour, before they were married I guess. And the new guy's yelling after him, "Filler up? Filler up? That mother holds five thousand gallon." Which would have turned a normal human being around, suggesting, as it did, frightening possibilities; but we're talking about Elrod Weiss here, who didn't veer one degree off course for anybody, yelling back, "Dus put it on the county ticket."

Well, that's what the kid does, because this is NASCAR country and, h.e.l.l, anybody might need five thousand gallons of high-octane racing fuel. So it must have taken the whole hour to fill that tank until it was slos.h.i.+ng over the hatch and smelling like whiskey. Then here comes El back from lunch or whatever, hops in, and heads out to the bypa.s.s for his first run of the afternoon.

Okay, gets out to the new bridge, kicks on his sprayers just like always, and starts was.h.i.+ng down the pavement with the highway equivalent of lighter fluid. He can't smell a thing, you know, on account of the busted nose, and he can't hear anything either on account of the radio. And he can't see anything either-like the road crew diving left and right-on account of he's in a groove now was.h.i.+ng all that c.r.a.p away like it was cheap sin. Pretty soon there're little rivers of gasoline. Then the port-a-john gets deodorized. And maybe a few guys have their pants hosed down when they're too slow in vaulting for cover. But no more damage than that: G.o.d is watching over him just like always. So he drains the tank all the way down to empty over a three-and-a-half-mile straightaway without dropping a match, scratching a gravel spark, or backfiring. Then, same as always, he turns off the highway and heads back into town for another fill-up. Simple as that.

Which is when the far flagman starts sniffing and the site supervisor starts bellowing, "S'going on down there?" and the fellas wave their arms and yell back but don't come far out of the bushes. And the supervisor goes purple in the face howling at the flagman and the others, "You bastids wanna get fired? You think this is communis' Russia, you can take a corporate rest period?" Staggerwalking down the embankment at about the same time that the flagman clambers over the side of the half-built bridge that's sticking out into nowhere, figuring he needs to get his cigar going again in order to establish his full transportation department authority, and lights up.

It's like he lived a charmed life.

I told her I really did I said you think I don't know you're probably faking just to get attention. G.o.d knows you've got Daddy and Aunt Lib wrapped around your little finger and now you want to be my mamma too well you can forget it. I'm hanging around with whoever I want to hang around with okay because it's maybe all right to smile every once in a while and enjoy life instead of being you. We're not twins, not really, I mean is there a boy in the entire school who's ever touched you? I don't see how you can stand yourself I really don't you're such a faker. You think I don't know what you're doing in there, your own sister doesn't know, running to the bathroom every time so they won't think you're such a cow with that fake cough oh please. It's like you're being so pure you can't defile yourself with food or whatever, like you're the virgin bride or something, and then you think you can just preach to me like that? Let me tell you something pretty baby you ought to look in a mirror sometime. You are a cow. And if you want to starve yourself to death that's fine with me.

Every once in a while we'd pa.s.s a blur on the side of the road, and he might say tomato can or dead dog or chain gang, like they were all parts of the same puzzle, which if he twisted and turned just right would all at once fit together. A week might go by and then he'd say, "Remember that tomato can?" Like it didn't make any difference as to who was hearing him.

And one of the yahoos down at Bub's would say, "Damaters?"