All-Day Breakfast (42 page)

A
huh-huh
panting from somewhere. Maybe a generator in an outbuilding.

“Mikey?” someone called.

A lanky man with a gray ponytail stood on the porch, hands on his hips, facing out to the garage. He wore a pink-and-green tie-dyed T-shirt and I saw the edge of a salt-and-pepper beard.

“Mike?” he called again, his voice high.

“What?”

Camouflage Mike appeared from behind the garage, pushing a black plastic wheelbarrow with a pitchfork balanced across it.

“Where's all the fertilizer?” asked Tie-Dye. “I got salt licks, fine, we got the strawberries, but if—”

“Aw, shit, Doc.” Mike put the wheelbarrow down and set his knuckles against the small of his back. “I totally forgot fertilizer.”

“Well, go! This might be the last day!” Doc threw his hands up. “I've just got
dregs
in that bag and you know how she is if we don't do the smoothie by eleven!”

Mike nodded, head down, walking toward the Jeep.

“You only have to go as far as Fisher's,” Doc called. “Where's Tyrone and Dean?”

“Doin' the straw!” Mike barked, swinging up into the driver's seat.

“How's George today?”

“You know how George is.”

“He taking his feed?”

“Not so much.”

Mike backed down the driveway in a cloud of dust and slammin' beats while Doc—Dr. Q. Duffy himself?—speed-walked off the porch toward the sheds. Unless they kept their straw in the living room, maybe that meant the house was empty of staff for the minute. There couldn't be a cook if the doctor himself was up to his ears in smoothies. A crow cawed up in one of the trees, once, then everything was quiet again.

I straightened up tall and looked over the daisies, then stepped backward as the hair stood up on my head.

Fifteen feet away, on the oval of lawn below the house, a large tawny animal lay on its side—its underside was toward me so I couldn't see whether its eyes were open or if it was aware of me at all. Its white tongue lolled, its side heaving so blades of grass bent back and forth with every breath. It looked like a full-grown lioness with a slack cow's udder stitched to its abdomen below its twin rows of nipples, its front legs draped under two enormously long black wings that'd been wired to its shoulder, while a pair of black testicles shifted between its back legs and the udder—steer testicles, maybe. I felt a percolating affection for the thing. That labored breathing reminded me of someone I couldn't put a face to. The wings lifted six inches to flap like they didn't have a care in the world.

I climbed over the daisies and onto the lawn. I knelt in front of the animal, fighting the compulsion to squeeze its big paw between my hands. Its eyes were silver, its teeth yellow, and thick as my thumbs, and its hot breath smelled like sawdust. What
didn't
smell like sawdust? Its new wings weren't just wings but lumps of black-feathered shoulder, too, sewn on with copper wire that bubbled with syrupy blood against its golden skin. I saw the telltale shaved patch back on its hip.

“Hello,” I whispered to the creature.

Its brown whiskers quivered, once. Its breath collected like dew on my forehead, but the wings lifted again to briefly fan us. Had it crash-landed? No, even if they were nine feet long it wasn't possible that the two wings could've lifted it in the first place.
Four
wings—I could see two from its other shoulder, pressed beneath it. Clear fluid ran out of its ear and down its forehead. Even if I'd had bacon, the thing would've been too far gone to chew. Of the whole sorry mess, that deflated udder was really the most disgusting, and that's from the guy who'd cleaned out Patrick and Pimples' camper.

“You all right out here?” I whispered, and its whiskers flickered again. One paw moved a half-inch across the grass.

I sat up straight to see a bony guy, seven feet tall, ambling across my lawn from the direction of the porch. He was bare-chested, in overalls and gumboots, so maybe the place was staging
Of Mice and Men
in addition to its other fucked-up endeavors. He had small squinting eyes and the rest of his face could've been used to drive nails into concrete. He looked past me at the lion. Had moles all over his shoulders.

“
There
he is,” the big guy muttered.

Kneeling beside me, he ruffled the chocolate-brown fur behind its ear. He glanced at the top of my head.

“Penzler sent me,” I said.

“Oh,” he murmured. “Sorry about this, I guess.”

So I had some authority? I stood up—and even then his eyes were only a foot below mine—and folded my arms mightily.

“Are you Tyrone or Don?” I asked.

“Dean.” He went on petting, flattening the thick folds of skin each time. The thing's breathing was turning into a continuous hiss, like the end of a record before the needle comes off. “I guess they didn't know anybody was coming.”

“What's happened to it?” I asked.

“He's had all the chemicals and everything.” Dean shrugged. “Did Dr. Duffy tell you how this happens every time? No matter what. See his grafts? They're all good. None of them work, but they're solid. Now I let him go around wherever he wants.”

He gave the neck one final emphatic stroke then clambered to his feet, throwing his shadow over me.

“It's dumb, I mean, how's the balls going to work without a cock attached, right? He's done already and that's such a dumb combination! But I think the wings are pretty, I do, I do. Poor Hopper.”

I craned my neck to look up at him, shading my eyes because of the sun breaking from behind his head.

“This isn't an extended visit,” I announced. “Take me to Natalia.”

Dean nodded, folded his arms around himself and started for the porch, his first two steps taking him eight feet. Then he looked back at me.

“Dr. Duffy should show you,” he murmured. “He doesn't think she'll—”

“I don't have time. Mr. Penzler needs me to fly back tonight.”

I strode up the grassy slope, stepped for a second onto the dirt driveway then turned onto the porch. A red painted bench ran the length of it, displaying the same big-eyed ceramic kitten Kirsten McAvoy had glued to the dash of her car. Conspiracy of inane shit.

“I'll get that screen door,” Dean said. “The handle kind of sticks.”

He tried it but the door just rattled, so he gave a yank and the hinges tore out of the wood. He glanced down at me.

“Crap,” he said.

He leaned it against the bench and I followed him into the cool house, through a narrow foyer with a bighorn sheep's head on the wall, then down a dark corridor. A rectangle of light showed around a doorframe at the far end, maybe the kitchen, but Dean pivoted left and started up a staircase that twisted to the right every five or six steps. The house smelled sawdusty, but lemony like insect repellent too. On the third step it came to me: the slow-breathing lion was like my mom.

Upstairs was bright thanks to windows at either end of the hallway. Framed needlepoints on the walls showed rampant dragons and such, maybe a family crest. Dean led me across into the first room—the door stood open. The room was pale pink, its ceiling tilting down with the pitch of the roof, flowery dresses spilling out of the closet toward a single mattress smothered with magazines. A stony-faced model on the cover of
Allure
. Rose-tinted perfume floated in the air but it couldn't disguise a sawdust stench so strong it just about turned my stomach, even though the same smell was coming out of my armpits. I burped up a taste of hot dog and coffee.

“I forgot.” Dean pressed one great hand against the ceiling. “They put her in the other room.”

He wandered into the hallway and tried the next door down, which was a small yellow room containing a pull-chain ceiling light and a toilet. He shut the door, embarrassed.

“I don't come up here much,” he said.

We went to the end of the hall where he wavered between closed white doors on either side.

“Why don't you yell her name?” I asked.

He looked down at me, eyes wide. “I sure don't want to wake her if she's sleeping!”

He swallowed hard, decisively, reached for the knob on the right. The door opened an inch and I saw a strip of navy-blue wallpaper.

“Okay.” He jumped back. “You go in.”

His cinder-block feet clumped down the stairs.

I could've stood there savoring the moment, my trail's hard-fought end, but I swung the door open with the flat of my hand. The room contained an ancient claw-foot bathtub, its enamel striated and yellow. The tub in turn contained a red-haired, white-faced girl, though I couldn't quite make out what she was doing. She looked up at me.

“Yeah?”

“Oh,” I said. “Can I come in?”

“You're in, looks like. Did you forget the smoothie?”

“Uh, that might be another minute. Um…”

“Sit on the edge. That's what everybody does.”

“You don't mind?”

She dropped her eyes. I perched my behind on the curved lip of the tub. There was no water. The girl's naked body filled the bottom as a shapeless mass, like her bones had dissolved, leaving her head propped at one end of a bag of freckled skin. Her hair, for what it's worth, looked thoroughly brushed.

“You new?” she asked.

“I don't work for Duffy,” I said. “Your sister sent me to bring you home.”

“Oh, finally.” She blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Let me get my things and we'll hit the road.”

I smiled at her. My jaw ached as though Dean had already hit me.

“She hoped maybe you'd be cured,” I said.

“You're Alice's type, definitely. Did she move pretty fast with you?”

I nodded. She had at that.

“God, I love her,” Natalia said.

“I don't want to pester you,” I said, “but if they have anything
close
to a cure—”

“You see the horse they made me? They killed a lot of birds to make that horse. They worked on it a long time before I even got here, supposed to cheer me up.”

“Did it?”

“Huh. I guess you haven't seen my horse. If you have to ask.”

“I'll get them to show me.”

“There used to be this transmitter tower up on the hill, did you know that? My horse flew into it.”

“Flew?”

“I had a bad back for a long time. Like razors,” she said. “Then I did such a
terrible
thing to Dad.”

“What was that?”

“Our dad's very protective.” She chewed her bottom lip. “Maybe Alice told you our mom had stomach cancer. She was outside the clinic in Columbus and got hit by a motorcycle.”

“That's terrible.”

She didn't answer. Her eyes had glazed over, but then her head suddenly gave a hop and she sucked in frantic breaths, one then another. After half a minute of that she shot me a bored look.

“Dad said if he'd been there he could've saved her life with this thing he was doing with his buddies, and Alice and I were like, ‘What the fuck, Dad? You manufacture rubber boots.' That tanked. No Mom anymore, and Dad figured he was on such a roll, he was like, ‘I've got this stuff right here, girl, so you never get that pain in your back ever again.' ”

“And do you still have pain in your back?”

Her eyes darted down at the expanse of herself.

“No. Problem solved.” She gazed up at me. “You better kiss me.”

She did have a lovely face. Those brown eyelashes, the creases around her eyes like she'd grinned a lot in her time, her top lip a little upturned like it was
made
for kissing. But I didn't lean across. I looked at the enamel edge of the tub.

“You know Alice pretty well,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“So pretend I'm her, for Christ's sake. I remind you of her, right?”

“That's why I don't want to.”

“Because of where I am?”

I hadn't flown from Nebraska to hurt the girl's feelings. But even so, I nodded.

“You don't want to picture Alice all melted down in a bathtub,” she said.

“No.”

“All right, mister, that's fair.”

She was looking out the window, her green eyes open wide like she was studying hummingbirds and all the acrobatic things they could do. I could gleefully crush Carver's skull but I couldn't kiss this girl? Sure, I could.

I knelt on the floor, the tub's edge digging into my belly, leaned across and kissed her on the lips. They were soft as a Kleenex. I kissed her for about two seconds but she didn't kiss back. I opened my eyes. Her gaze was still on the window. No breath was coming out of her.

I put my hand on her cheek, rocked her back and forth. Her red hair swayed across her white skin, but she might've been moulded out of plastic. Natalia Penzler was dead.

I sat on
my behind, laid my hands on the floor, and for a minute just studied her. It was easy to imagine that she'd
never
been alive, that the people-manufacturers had fouled up her components too much to ever bother plugging her in. One day I'd be looking out of a dry tub myself, wondering how such a pool of meat had ever been alive.

Every thought I'd had for the future dissipated because there was no cure.

My arms shook and I covered my face with my hands, and pinkish tears as thick as pancake batter trickled between my fingers. PBF, my kids, Styrofoam containers of bacon.

I sat up, gasping for air.

“Huh,” I said.

Hairy feet in a pair of ragged Birkenstocks stood in the doorway. I closed my eyes and gulped back snot.

“Hello, Dr. Duffy,” I murmured.

“Did she pass?” he calmly asked.

“Obviously.”

A dumb teenage thing to say, sure.

“I
thought
it would be today,” he said slowly. “I'm sorry I wasn't up here.”