All-Day Breakfast (45 page)

My eyes watered to go with the juice trickling out my ears. The monkey was throwing anything he could get his hands on, going apeshit—I saw where the term had come from. Whistler's wings kept flinging her into the air in bursts, her butt banging against the barred ceiling. Roger the sea lion pressed his face to the glass and, Jesus, he had fangs to gnaw your head off.

“Quit it, dipshit!”

Mike ran in with his hands over his ears, circling the deli case and then behind me so I couldn't see what he was doing. A
clack
behind me and suddenly I had air again, then I got pulled up by the shoulders. The chimp screamed at us.

“Now,” Mike choked, “I got ten CCs to—”

But I didn't wait for a shot, I kept rolling backwards and the case toppled so I landed on my ass in the wheelbarrow. Guess it'd been there all along. Mike drove his elbow down into my eye, a syringe flashing in his free hand, but I brought both feet up and kicked him in the back of the head. The syringe fell in the wheelbarrow and blood trickled out his ear. And you know what? I was
still
making that aggravating noise.

He grabbed my hair and punched me in the face again and again, and that was great because it meant I was really in a fight. I could have stretched out, enjoying the sparks behind my eyes and the pain in my front teeth, but eventually I had to make my way home so I could tell Josie and Ray that officially I was an insoluble problem, that if they wanted Dad around he'd just keep smashing furniture until his arms dropped off and they'd have to bury him in shoeboxes. It was my duty to do that.

So I opened my eyes as the next fist came down, grabbed it between my two tied hands and wrenched Mike's arm so a splintered bone broke out of the skin above his wrist, like a wiener breaking through a bun. Compound fracture, that's called—that'd happened to Scotty Barnes, some poor kid who was dead thanks to assholes who figured we deserved what'd happened to us only because it
had
happened to us.

Mike's face went blue as he gaped at his arm, and at that point all I could do was kill him. That was the corner he'd painted himself into when he'd said that I'd be a mermaid.

I rolled out of the wheelbarrow and quit my keening, but the animals were still shitting themselves. Now I had the mobility to reach down and unhook the bungee cords from my ankles. Mike staggered back, stumbling over Styrofoam coolers into the mound of green netting beside the lion cage, then he reached his good hand into his shorts pocket and brought out a tiny black gun. I kicked him in the belly, and he shot the leg I was standing on but that didn't even make me fall down. Must've been his gun for shooting girl scouts.

“Hey!” George bubbled at us. “Hey!”

Mike vomited a mouthful of what looked like lasagna onto his shorts. I kicked him in the elbow and the gun flew up and plopped into George's tank of Sprite. Came to rest with its barrel against his ear.

“Here,” I said. “Take these off me.”

Mike leaned back against the lion's cage, cradling his broken arm in his lap.

“I can't, I
can't
,” he said.

“If you were a zombie you'd be doing fine right now, know that?”

“I
know
.”

“Unhook the cords and I'll go away.”

Without looking up he put his good hand on the bungees, and with one twist they let go. I shook feeling into my arms. I flexed my steel-crushing fingers and looked at him. He sniffed hard up his nose. Looked like the broken arm might kill him.

“Go away now,” he said. “That was our deal.”

Whistler shoved her muzzle between the bars and sank her teeth into Mike's neck—he must've been oozing bacon! He just slumped against her blood-frothy jaws, his eyes very wide. She held him like that, sighing out her flat black nostrils.

“Peter Giller! Jesus Christ, Peter Giller.” George panted behind his mask—he'd have had his head between his knees if he'd had a body. “Peter Giller, Jesus Christ.”

“What?”

“Take me with you!” He floated sideways and the pistol sank to the gravel. “See, there
is
a cure! Nobody knows but Kirk and me, and if you—”

I pulled the tape off the talk button. He floated backwards, mouth still flapping.

Now did the animals want me to blow them all to smithereens? I didn't have the brains to engineer that. I kicked in Whistler's lock so her door swung open, but she was too occupied with the tendons in Mike's neck to look up. I staggered down the aisle toward the exit and gave the calf-and-chimp's door an almighty kick too. The calf still looked stoned but the chimp shot out, vaulting along on his front paws and screaming. The aisle ended in a white metal door, swinging open as Tyrone stepped out, dressed in a hairnet and green surgical gown. He was pulling on latex gloves.

He asked, “Is something—?”

The chimp climbed the gown and drove his dirty monkey fangs through Tyrone's top lip—the tableau might've looked charming if it hadn't been for Tyrone's flailing hands and the spurting blood. They crashed into a rack of extension cords.

So as usual that left me to mop up. The room Tyrone had come out of was full of steel tables and fridges and freezers. Drains in the floor. And a sewing machine.

I circled the room, scrutinizing each shelf, my every finger a weapon to crush wisdom teeth to powder. At knee level I saw jars labeled
formalin
, jars of Vaseline crowded on a table, and behind glass doors up at eye level sat copper canisters inscribed
tea
and
coffee
and
sugar
, though they also had masking tape stuck across each that read
desert storm
,
d.s. 2
and
d.s
. 3, respectively. I took down number three. Inside were brownish-pink iron filings that smelled like a fresh-cut Christmas tree.

I put it under my arm. It wasn't the cure, as Duffy had said, just the opposite, but since I'd met that first lion I'd been running a train of thought about one particular thing.

Another door took me into a musty garage crowded with lawnmowers and tomato cages, and the next door onto the dusty driveway beside Mike's Jeep. Keys dangled in the ignition. Swallows chased each other from the garage's eaves to away up over the house.

One of the
keys on the ring might've unlocked the black steel gates but I crashed through them at eighty miles an hour, crumpling the Jeep's hood like wrapping paper, then as I got to the road, I jumped out and let it roll across into the ditch. I walked
d.s. 3
down to my turquoise Fiesta, dug the keys out of the exhaust pipe and drove back toward the house. I still had to perform certain tasks for my employer back in Preston. Only static on the radio but to me it sounded good. Maybe it
was
better to be alone at this late date in my dissolution because that left no one to complain.

I hustled back into the room full of cages. No sign of Tyrone or the chimp, though a trail of blood zigzagged behind a stack of pallets. The calf was gone. Whistler was still pressed against the bars of her cage, paws wrapped around Mike's neck while she patiently gnawed the skin off the top of his head. I picked up one of the Styrofoam coolers and turned to see George Reid staring at me through the bubbles, the hairs of his beard swaying like kelp, letting me make my own mind up.

So I showed him my best school-picture grin and walked out, still tasting the blood between my back teeth from those punches I'd taken. I wasn't going to unplug him, not after all the wondrous things he'd done for me.

I filled the cooler with operating-room ice, then carried it into the cool farmhouse and up the dark stairs. I stepped over Dean's sprawled legs. If Natalia had raised her green eyes then I
would
have kissed her, definitely, but she was cold as key lime pie.

I cupped her bottom jaw in my hands, the skin soft as daffodils, and steadily lifted her head away from the rest of her—I couldn't think of the contents of that bathtub as
her body
exactly. I heard a slurp like a plunger in a toilet as the head came away, trailing a foot and a half of spine. A previously undiscovered jellyfish. Maybe it'd inspire Kirk Penzler to tell me anything about
d.s. 3
that I hadn't heard.

I lowered Natalia into the cooler. A lot had happened in the time we'd been apart and I couldn't expect Alice to just take my word for any of it.

Wednesday, November 2.

“Go north at
Schafer,” I said again and again. “Dirt road behind the dairy.”

Otherwise I'd forget. Carver had said “
c-a-m-p
,” that meant one specific place, and if I didn't keep reminding myself I'd forget where it was. I muttered while the country turned black outside the car, green light across my hands from the staticky radio. I kept catching myself licking the steering wheel. As the sun had risen pink over Utah I'd known the dairy's exact name, I'd written it down, but now I was trying to remember if there was really a dairy at all. Drool on my hands. The left-hand wiper had flown away into the night, and in the thick of the snowstorm the Fiesta felt like a one-window igloo sliding sideways down Interstate 70. I kept the heat off so I wouldn't have to put fresh ice in Natalia's cooler.

I thought about Colleen a little bit, and the shirt she'd worn in the sauna, and that tattoo around her thigh, and Deb in her muumuu. I hated them both.

“Dirt road behind the dairy,” I instructed the gas gauge.

Farmhouses went by in the dark, whole towns, and every cluster of lights seemed like fishing boats out on the Gulf of Mexico, where I'd never been, but I told myself I was a fishing boat too. The signs all said
kansas
. I couldn't go north yet—no Nebraska until everything was done. A big tall sign like a red coffee pot,
sapp bros. food & fuel
, winked at the edge of the highway.

The wind howled between my shaky hands and the gas pumps. Lydia hovered over my shoulder. Alice floated right between my eyes, mouth open to say something.

This Sapp Bros. location also had the $6.99 Hotbar. I heaped up my third plate of bacon, stumbled over the edge of the carpet then sat and tried to draw my secret escape map on the takeout menu.

“Crap,” I said to the next table. “Do you guys have a pen that works?”

“Sure,” said the curly-headed woman, digging in her purse.

The guy wore a Donald Duck sweatshirt.

“Is that the Atkins Diet?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “I have never felt better.”

“Oh, it's a
red
pen,” the woman said. “Hope that's okay.”

I sat working on the map, tongue poking out of the side of my mouth.

“Do you guys know Dundy County?”

“Nebraska?” asked the woman.

“Is there a road that takes you from Palmerston into Schafer, or do you have to go up into Athens then down?”

“Don't know.” The man tilted the salt shaker. “The only Dundy County route we've taken was 34, I guess, through Benkelman on the way to North Platte.”

“They've got maps up behind the counter,” the woman suggested.

“Are you guys truckers?”

“Yessir,” she said.

“All the time together?”

He nodded, still salting his eggs.

“Is that really great, just the two of you?” I asked. “It sounds really great to me.”

They looked at each other, poker-faced, then he swung his gaze back to me.

“She farts.”

“It's a survival mechanism,” she said.

Then with her spoon she put a dollop of sour cream on his forehead. He tickled her down her back and when he got to the bottom she let out a whoop. I would've traded places with either of them.

I ate bacon by the fistful, seven, eight pieces at a time. More nitrite than man. I studied what I'd drawn: two intersecting lines with the word “Athens” at the top. Was it a map of Greece? I glanced at the couple at the next table as she watched him eat his eggs. They both seemed familiar, and I had an idea they might be truckers.

“Hey there,” I said, nodding.

They looked up at me.

“Crap,” the guy said as he swallowed. “Jeez.”

“Your
ear
.” Her hand went up to her own.

I felt a tingling up either side of my head.

“Excuse me.”

I put down my napkin and slipped up from the table. A lot of people stopped their conversations as I walked to the bathroom, and one woman—though stouter than that mom in Lincoln Airport—covered her daughter's eyes with a sari.

The men's room was thick with the spicy smell pee gets when guys drink too much coffee. Clean-shaven truckers stood at the urinals. I leaned between the sinks and in the mirror saw my left ear flapping against the side of my neck, attached just at the lobe. I waggled my head and watched it sway—a dangly earring above my collar. I gave my right ear a little tug to see if
it
was okay, at least, and it came off in my hand with a sound like biting into an apple. I looked at it there in my hand, its ragged edge wet under the fluourescents.

“This is such bullshit,” I announced.

I looked into the mirror again to check my left ear but it was gone too, so at that point I had
no
ears. My hair stuck up all over but otherwise my head looked slick as a seal's, aerodynamic.

“Whoosh,” I said into the mirror.

The guy beside me at the counter coughed and spat up, calling over his shoulder to his buddy, and I saw that my left ear had fallen into my own white sink. I'd had a good long run by the standard of any zombie, but I'd finally come to that stage where no amount of bacon or stapling will help. The two guys ran out of the bathroom while I wrapped my ears in a brown paper towel and dropped them past the chrome trash can's swinging lid.

The snow pelted down in chunks like calcium nitrate. I backed the turquoise Fiesta onto the highway and pointed it east, my fingers light on the wheel—I'd been living off anger for the longest time but I didn't feel the least bit angry anymore. That was the sad part.