All-Day Breakfast (25 page)

“No,” I said, like a substitute teacher. “We shouldn't.”

“So he went out in the Blue Mountains with a bunch of guys, and the first thing the LRA ever did that got in the news—”

“ 'Cause it was like two years ago,” murmured Amber.

“First thing they did was tie him up between two trees and chop down to his skeleton, but they left his head alone so we could recognize him in the picture.” No pauses for breath. “Not a lot of Asian guys in that part of Africa anyway, I guess.”

She stepped out of the sleeping bag, shuffled past the beds, sat down beside me, picked out a strip of bacon and snapped it in half. She emanated a sleepy warmth. I put an arm around her. Her mouth was a hard line and her eyes weren't even misty.

“Can't believe they showed you the picture,” I said.

“Wasn't supposed to.” She crunched bacon between her molars. “I guess his clients or whoever started screaming in Congress and stuff, and there you go.”

“Plus there was that thing with the old women,” said Amber. “And that was
way
back. All their hands and feet.”

The curtain behind the table flapped open, revealing ham-armed Jock in flip-flops, a white towel around his waist.

“So, Giller, if your chores are done and you've had your chit-chat,” he said, “we'll hit the sauna.”

Jock held the
outside door open to reveal Rob, hunched in checkered bathing trunks across from Colleen in an enormous purple T-shirt. The hot cedar smell was a solid improvement over pig shit. The door thudded shut behind us and I settled in my underwear on the bench beside Rob. My Lydia's Minnesota cousins all had saunas so she'd wanted one in our Wahoo place, but of course events had conspired so that never happened.

“Ah,” Rob sighed, “good timing, gentlemen.”

“Getting ugly with you two?” asked Jock.

“Might say,” said Colleen.

“Why don't you turn on a light in here?” I asked.

I'd seen a switch as we slipped in, but the only light now was from a crack at the top of the door and the barbecue full of briquettes, winking and steaming in the corner, and presumably poisoning the air.

“I can't take any kind of brightness as of a half-hour ago,” Rob said quietly. “Guess it's the ol' pupils. Nothing I can't deal with”

“Aw, heck, we'll all look after you!” In the dark Jock chuckled like Santa. “Takes a village, right?”

“We each fall apart in our own time and in our own way,” said Rob.

By then I could make out a vague outline of Jock and Colleen on the bench across, and Rob beside me, running fingertips down his forehead.

“Two months ago, I lost seven guys off the day shift,” he said.

“Some so-called accident?” blurted Colleen. “You
know
who must've got to Doug, but you—”

“Shut up, will you?” asked Rob. “Chivalry aside, shut up. I had seven guys enlist to go to the Congo after that horrible shit at the Catholic girls' school.”

“Anglican,” Jock corrected.

“Yes.”

That had been horrible shit. The photos that'd leaked out hadn't told the entire story but it'd sure looked like the younger the girls had been, the more depraved the LRA had been in disposing of them. And what you could see of their expressions, on the ones who'd still had faces—they'd just looked tired, tired, tired of it all.

“I'm just glad they're not around for this debacle,” Rob finished. “Thank God.”

“And if they're dead now, these seven guys, they're better off?” Colleen asked quietly. “You're telling me my husband's better off too, so I'll calm the fuck down?”

“Young lady, no,” Jock said.

“Hippie scientists,” said Rob.

“But we've got science of our own,” blurted Jock, “and Arthur says we can increase our nitrites in the liquid smoke to the nth degree! He's writing to a chemist from his magazine, then we'll be able to survive on a half-pound, quarter-pound of bacon a day! What's more, we're limiting the amino acids more every day—I really, truly mean that.”

“But is there a
cure
?” I asked. “Are you even aware of such a thing?”

“Giller, hey, this is my fifth
day
with this thing operating, if you think—”

“Is there?” I asked.

“No!” Jock threw ghostly hands in the air. “Go find Mr. Penzler himself out in Ohio, ask him if there's a goddamn cure, ask his monkeys with the beards who came out to our place of work and set the thing up, putting our lives and livelihoods at risk!”

“Good,” I said. “That was my plan anyway. Gas up the ambulance, I'm gone.”

“Me too.” Colleen held her head high. “Clint told us what happened in the jail, Peter, and that's not going to happen to my girl, you understand?”

“Don't be pissed at me, I've got no problem if you come.”

“What happened in what jail?” asked Rob.

Colleen wiped her brow on the hem of her shirt. “I'm telling Megan to stay here.”

“I don't imagine she'll fight you too hard on that.” Jock's belly glistening like snakeskin. “She likes that boy with the hair in his eyes.” He lowered his head between his heavy shoulders, flashed a frat-house grin. “But don't expect me to chaperone. Hanging a picture or contemplating marriage, always
drill beforehand
, you get me?”

“You sit on your asses,” said Colleen, “like that'll keep you alive even five minutes! If you know this hippie doctor is the problem, let's see some action, let's—”

“I've seen you two in action,” said Jock. “And you're welcome for the bacon.”

She started out the door in a burst of cold daylight, so I could see how the T-shirt clung to her. A widow of twenty-four hours. A black ring encircled her thigh.

“What's the tattoo?” I asked.

“The Van Halen logo.” She squinted back at me through an inch of open door. She seemed to be all bottom teeth. “Doug's favorite.”

She let it bang shut, and while our eyes readjusted the three of us sat there blind.

“Please, God, Giller,” said Jock. “Take that fruitcake away from here.”

Then she howled, right outside, and something hammered against the door.

The days were
so short that it was already dark by the time I'd loaded in the cooler full of bacon, warmed up the ambulance's engine and checked that my shovel was still under the gurney. Silhouettes approached from the dormitory. I leaned against the grill, waiting for Colleen. I had nine hundred miles to plan what we were going to say to Penzler and his bearded hippies so we could roll back into
pbf
with a cure. Then back to our lives.

“Hey, Mr. Giller?” Amber called through the darkness, her unseen boots crunching snow. “I think, with my arm already, you know, I think I'd better stay here in case …” Ten feet away, her feet stopped crunching. “You're not pissed off, are you?”

I was a head-stomping Lonny killer, so even
I
didn't know what might set me off.

“It's better you don't come,” I said.

Then I smelled foundation makeup and there were three arms around my middle.

“I guess I'd better stay here too,” Grace said to my armpit. “There's a bunch of white paint in the shed, when you get back we can pour it all over ourselves for the
nbzambi
parade, it'll look creepy-awesome.”

“Speak for yourself, Crazy,” said Amber.

“And I didn't hand in my phone,” Grace whispered. “We've got Franny's number, and we told her and Megan we'll text all the time.”

“Those two are coming?” I asked. “What the hell for?”

“Turn on the headlights and you might see each other,” Colleen suggested.

I flinched at her voice, because who knew who she'd hit next and with what?

“You'll be back next week, right?” said Amber, unfazed.

“Back with results, sure.”

The two girls' shapes drifted away, then Colleen must've gone beside the steering wheel and flicked the knob—a headlight flared up on either side of me. Franny, Clint and Harv stood out in the snow, shielding their eyes like I was a divine manifestation.

“Tell me you're not all coming,” I called.

“Are you really wearing that jacket to Ohio?” asked Franny. “ 'Cause you look
exactly
like a paramedic.”

“No!” I held up discouraging playground-supervision hands. “Why the hell do you think I brought you out here? I'm not dragging you into the line of fire anymore, so you all go back in there and behave yourselves!”

The kids stood there with their arms at their sides—their eyes didn't flicker, their jaws were square. They looked years older than when they'd climbed on the yellow bus to Velouria, like they already had rents to pay.

“Dude,” said Clint, “we're in a line of fire no matter where we are, could be an ankle, a shoulder—”

“My ass could slip off any second,” said Franny. “And it's not like you're a Navy
seal
, man. We don't make you any more fucked-up than you already were.”

And so the polite children trudged past me to the back doors, while Megan stood in the glare beside the cab with her arms around her mother. She'd put her sequinned cardigan back on as though it was already time to resume our pre-Velouria lives.

“Okay, I'm in no position to discourage anybody.” Colleen's voice cracked again. “I want to hold onto all of them and not move a step.”

“Naw, if you left us here we'd just be waiting for you to come back.” Harv rubbed his chin like he was at the foul line, concentrating. “This is way better.”

People only say
It's your funeral
when it's an obvious exaggeration, so I didn't, just gave a solemn nod like some hard-assed movie coach—hell, maybe Harv'd had me in mind all the time to lead his doomed basketball team.

“Plus those old guys are super-creepy!” called Clint and Franny.

“Seriously?” That mighty right arm swinging, Amber ran out of the dark toward Harv, her mouth crumpled like a washcloth. “You aren't staying here?”

“Aw,” he said, starting to smile.

She thumped into him so he stepped backward into a puddle then dragged them both out of it, holding her up. He put his fingers through her hair.

“Back next week?” she said to his chest. “I'm sorry but I really have to stay here just in case!”

“Oh.” His back was straighter than I'd ever seen, his chin on her head. “Sure.”

Considering that she'd once aspired to hump him on the hood of her car in a gravel pit, she was playing it pretty cool. Harv pressed his big hand to her cheek, pressing her wet face against him.

Saturday, October 29.

In the early-morning
darkness a
so much to discover
sign welcomed us to Ohio, and I hoped that it was right. And that the “so much”
could be discovered easily. From the back I heard the distinct crunching din of vast quantities of bacon being masticated, which meant the four kids were awake.

“We should've made all those girls come with us.” Colleen bit the corner of her thumbnail. “I can picture all the awful things that could be happening around that place.”

“What's the worst that could happen?” I stupidly asked.

“Lonny!” Colleen blurted. “You know what that place is? A leper colony. The patients get a place to sleep, they get busywork so they don't go crazy, next thing they'll build a chapel and a cemetery the size of a golf course. Doug and I had our honeymoon in Hawaii, so I read all about lepers.”

“It's the best place for them, even so.”

“I don't even think of her as my grandma anymore,” Franny was saying.

“Look out there,” I told them. “We're moving out of tall-grass prairie into the broadleaf forest biome.”

“We just saw the back of a billboard,” said Megan. “That's all we can see.”

“Bet it's for the Ohio National,” added Franny.

“Headlights flicker like lost souls,” Clint declaimed.

“Trash can,” muttered Harv.

“Shit, I just remembered hen judging's on Saturday!” yelled Franny. “I bought new Manna conditioner and everything!”

“I don't think it's that much farther into Preston,” said Colleen, fingertips cupping her chin. “Which exit was that?”

“If we were looking at the map back in class, you'd see us moving out of the beige biome, where we've spent our lives, into the dark green,” I said. “Think of that.”

“Mom,” Megan called softly from the back.

“What's happened? You okay?”

“I just remembered about Dad again,” said Megan.

Colleen slid her fingers through the window to the back and must've taken hold of her kid's hand. Me, I had Lydia's passport pictures in the wallet in my pocket, and I could feel that strip of paper's distinct weight. I never wanted to not feel it.

“Agh!” Franny yelled behind my head. “I didn't check my texts. I've got texts! A whole bunch from Amber! Aw, damn.”

“What?”

“She says, ‘Grace is so fucked up right after you left.' Here's the next. ‘Both arms gone and skin off her forehead. In the cooler with Craig.' That's it, that's all she said.”

“I hate texts,” said Colleen.

“Me too,” said Megan.

We stared out at the Ohio brown-grass medians and the huge square trucks thundering toward us in the oncoming lanes.

At nine o'clock
I filled up at a Pegasus station, alongside a little yellow Nissan 350 which I chose to ignore—no spoiler. Inside I asked how far it was to the 91a turnoff.

“An hour,” said the blue-smocked girl behind the till. “That lady still out in the parking lot? Maybe you could check her blood pressure or something.”

“I don't know who you mean.”

“Well, if she's gone it's totally for the best. She wanted bacon to eat, bacon, bacon, bacon, and I was like, ‘We just have candy bars, it's not a grocery store,' and she freaked
out
, started screaming and—”

“But you know,” said the fuzzy-moustached kid stocking WD-40, “in a way she was kind of awesome. She was so full-on.”

“Holy!” the girl yelled. “Another one going off on somebody!”

The stockboy and I collided at the door, but I let him through first because he had a pricing gun in his hand. Outside, an African-American guy in a Redskins cap stood panting behind the Nissan's back bumper, while Colleen swayed at the front, showing her teeth and holding her telescoped stainless-steel baton in front of her like a lightsaber. She took one step as if to come around the car after him and he took a corresponding step to keep it between them. Damn, damn.

“Holy Christ, lady,” he yelled, “this car never ran anybody over!”

The stockboy held his hands up like Moses. Maybe that was the Pegasus technique for allaying crises.

“Colleen,” I called, “it doesn't have a spoiler. Take a look at it.”

She lowered the baton, pulling in a deep breath.

“It's the right color,” I said, “you're right about that, sure, but that's all. Let's keep driving.”

Still squinting at the poor panting guy, she twisted something in the handle so the baton went back to the size of a flashlight, then she stalked between the pumps toward the ambulance. Her door still hung open.

“Okay,” she said.

The Redskins guy leaned against his trunk and looked sideways at us, shaking his head. I jogged past him on the way to the ambulance.

“Really sorry, sir,” I said. “She's not well.”

“Put a leash on her!” he screamed.

I jumped up into my seat and started the engine. Colleen still hadn't shut her door and had the baton extended in her lap like a piece of expensive plumbing.

“What the shit is happening?” the kids yelled from the back. “Can we get out?”

Colleen looked me in the eye, her face all crowsfeet. “Sorry,” she muttered.

I said, “That's—”

Then she was out her door, the baton flashing over her head between the gas pumps before she brought it down on the Nissan's windshield. I heard the thump, then yelling. I let the ambulance roll across the pavement. I heard three more thumps then a final shattering, and by the time I'd rolled twenty feet Colleen had flung herself back in, slammed the door shut and fastened her seatbelt. We roared across the service road onto the on-ramp, getting up into third before the engine was ready. Another crash behind us as the kids were flung against the back doors.

“Hey, shit!”

“Who's driving?”

“Um,” I said, once we'd passed a line of dump trucks, “he had it coming?”

Colleen lowered her window a half-inch.

“Somebody did.” She picked cubes of greenish glass off her sleeve and dropped them through the gap, her face placid as if she were rolling out pie dough. “Somebody somewhere had it coming.”

“You guys need bacon?” Franny said through the window. “Is that the trouble?”

“Give me ten or twenty,” I said. “Jesus, yes.”

“No, thanks.” Colleen glanced at me, bit her lip. “Never mind, I guess I'd better.”

“Sounds like there's another one of us wandering this neck of the woods,” I said while I chewed—because why belabor Colleen's little quirks? “Some poor woman screaming for the good food, so they threw her out.”

Colleen sported a strip of bacon between each finger. “God, the poor girl.”

“Might be a good sign as far as we're concerned. Maybe a scientist who—”

“Should we look for her?” Harv asked from the back. “Try to help her?”

“Nope,” Colleen and I said together.

I was coursing
with so many nitrites by then that the fact I'd been awake for fifty-plus hours didn't even faze me. I watched the used-car lots flicker past and chewed my bottom lip while I went over the plan I'd constructed for when I actually had an unflappable Penzler executive staring at me from across his or her desk.

1. I did not need Penzler to admit that the industrial mishap in Velouria had brought about—how best to phrase it?—long-term medical difficulties. In my paramedic persona I would present that information as a given.
   
2. I'd describe the Dockside workers' kids who were even now watching their daddies dissolve before their eyes, and in the name of humanity I would request access to the cure for these daddies. The goo could not have gone into production, by anyone's reckoning, without a cure. Or thoughts of a cure. I would describe the kids more than once, if need be, and their little sweaters wet with tears. My fists like hammers beneath the lip of the desk.
   
3. And if forthright beseeching did not produce results, I would take meetings until someone gave me a name I could use—“The gal you really should talk to is Dinah Shore in R&D, she's a big fan of the hippie doctors,” something like that. And if not a name then a place, because the research had to have happened somewhere and I wouldn't need an invitation to walk into that place, wherever it was. I could knock down walls, I could flip guard dogs off bridges, I could put my hand clean through a person's chest so that fragments of vertebrae lodged under my nails.
   
4. But before that, I'd be painfully civil.
   

“Do you still have Rob's number?” Colleen asked. “For an emergency?”

I prodded my pants and felt the crinkle of George Reid's fax.

“Hey, G!” Franny called. “Megan says snow is still H₂O, but that's messed up, right? It's got to have nitrogen to be so cold!”

“No,” I said. “Snow's water, only slower.”

Like zombies are people only slower, and also gradually melting.

“Mr. Giller?” This was Harv. “Did you ever read
The Sneetches
by Dr. Seuss?”

“Maybe eighty or ninety times.”

“Okay, but you know the Sneetches, right? Because I said we were kind of excluded but we're actually more like the Star-Belly Sneetches because we get to hang out together and have the weenie roasts—”

“Except it's bacon marathons,” Clint added.

“Yeah,” said Harv, “and it's everybody
else
who has to sit out in the dark on the beaches, that sounds good, right? But Amber says the difference between us and the rest of the world is
less arbitrary
than if we've got belly-stars or not.”

“Though it'd be cool if we did,” said Clint.

“Amber's a very bright young woman,” I said.

“Yeah,” murmured Harv.

At 9:15 I found the pine-shadowed turnoff for 91a and felt my stomach knotting. We passed rows of long cowsheds, then, inexplicably, corporate headquarters: Shell Oil behind a tall fence, Toys “R” Us without any fence, an outfit called American Leaf built right against the road. Smoke drifted across the landscape, probably from farmers burning cornstalks in their fields. A sign advised that that particular stretch of 91a had been adopted by Penzler Industries, and the next sign advised that Penzler Industries was fifty yards away. A tall cedar hedge sprang up alongside the road, then distant granite pillars showed where we'd be turning in.

“How are you going to do it, Gillbrick?”

“Should I get into the back?” Colleen asked, zipping her tracksuit to her chin.

I didn't have a paramedic costume for her, so that seemed like a good idea. I pulled over beside the ditch and she slid down from her seat. A long black helicopter rose above the hedge, then descended again. The hippie doctors?

“Okay,” Colleen said from behind me. “Do your thing.”

“Think like an ambulance driver,” said Franny.

“Will anyone be working on a Saturday?” asked Harv.

We drove on, and under an x-ray my stomach would've resembled a complete pretzel. I intended to make my entrance as an upright citizen. I hit the turn signal with philanthropic gravity.

But then I had to brake hard because an ambulance was already parked in the entrance lane. The back doors stood open and an African-American woman lay strapped on the gurney, her arms swathed in bandages while the attendant lifted a saline drip. I managed to squeeze between the ambulance and the pillar onto the Penzler grounds—yes,
at last
—only to discover a dozen more ambulances lined up in front of the first, their top lights quietly flashing, while far across the green-turfed grounds a mob of fire trucks sat in front of what looked like a smouldering football field, that helicopter hovering overhead.

“The hell?” asked Clint.

If Penzler
hq
had been leveled then I had no plan, and my new plan would have to be to keep Josie and Ray in my rearview mirror permanently. A female cop in an orange safety vest waved me into the front of the line of ambulances, and I shut off my engine. Her nametag read
holmes
. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose, and as she walked past she put her hand on my door

“The triage people will bring you someone to run into town, okay? Sit tight. Plenty of customers.”

I guess I must've looked pretty forlorn hunched behind that wheel.

“I know,” she said. “Just keep your chin up.”

“What happened exactly?” As though I already had a pretty good idea.

“Accident,” she shrugged. “Explosion. But not a ton of people here on a weekend, thank God.”

She hurried away up the line—a black
tv
news van was trying to get past the pillar. Holmes waved it back.

“When the situation's not so critical!” she yelled.

Frantic whispers from behind my head.

“Mr. Giller,” Clint murmured, “do you think this was where they brought those guys who got bailed out of jail?”

“How should I know?” I squealed.

A woman screamed from an ambulance behind us, then a big black sedan with tinted windows steered around the news van on its way toward the smoke, down the hill. I'd have to go down myself, despite orders—maybe some sad-dog-faced researcher in a lab coat was waiting for me with a file marked
pink goo
, I'd never know unless I had a look.

“Back in a while,” I said.

I slid to the pavement, quietly shutting my door, and started down the driveway. I wore the white paramedic shirt but not the really-conspicuous fluorescent jacket. I didn't want anyone else's life placed in my hands. The driveway dipped so the fire trucks disappeared below the horizon and for a minute I walked in silence amidst the weird Penzler topiary: shrubs shaped like mermaids, like Pegasus himself, like whatever you call a lion with wings and an eagle's head. The smoke gusted over them all.