All-Day Breakfast (56 page)

“Oh!” He sat up like I'd finally called a briefing. “I had to get the hood hammered out! Told the garage I'd hit a
seagull
, they believed it. People are ignoramuses. Ignorami.”

He smacked his stubbly lips, trying to look me in the eye, it seemed, but not getting higher than the armless shoulder.

“Sure,” I said, “that's professional, take the customer's word for it. How big a car did you say?”

“That's the thing, just a—just a little Cobra! Parked right over …”

He waved a finger beside his ear.

“A Cobra.” Had that even been on our list? “Let's take a peek, buddy. I can't quite picture how you did it.”

He started to climb past my knees, though the door wasn't open yet, and his armpit in my face smelled of parmesan. I pulled the latch and slid out ahead of him. Asphalt heat climbed me like rising water. The parking lot was nearly empty, the kid in the
war is over
shirt climbing into a pickup.

“Hey!” I called, pushing my hair back. “Where'd you get the shirt?”

He grinned. “My dad made it!”

“Here, here,” Svendsen said behind me. “Down here by this dumpster.”

We strolled, his back straight as a flagpole, and now that he was upright I could see his distended belly. We rounded a motorhome with Arizona plates and the next five spots were empty until the yellow Cobra parked in the corner.

Colleen studied the front bumper, one hand in her purse. She eyed us for three or four seconds as we ambled toward her.

“This yours, sir? Nice car,” she called, her voice thin as glass. “Don't see a lot of these Mustang Cobras. What is it, a 2000?”

“She's a 2003,” Svendsen drawled affably. “It's mostly the women who stop me about it, you know that? Must be the color—or might be it's my abs.”

He couldn't have been anticipating problems. He kept moving toward her.

“Of course, '03.” Sounded like her throat could barely let air out. She wandered around to the back. “Brake lights right there in the spoiler.”

A chunk of gravel bounced away from under her silver dress shoe. Svendsen breathed on a handprint on his side window, then diligently rubbed it with his sleeve. This was a model of little yellow car I hadn't seen in all our searching—only looked six or eight feet long, and the rest of the car was an afterthought behind its mass of front bumper, like it had been designed specifically for running people over. I realized Colleen was staring at me, still with her hand in the imitation-crocodile purse. I flicked my hair off my forehead and gave her what I intended to be a meaningful nod—here I was to help her. Not from the other side of the world but the other end of the car. The corners of her mouth turned up in a smile, which disappeared just as quickly. The sun was an arc welder on the side of my face.

“You'll have to pardon our manners, Miss,” I said. “We've had a little to drink.”

“Oh.” Svendsen resumed his flagpole posture. “Thought, thought you two knew each other.”

“Enjoy the ceremony?” I asked, still trying to prove our ignorance of one other.

“I guess there's parties all over town now.” She tapped a knuckle on the spoiler. “You gents know of any? Bet you're on your way someplace right now.”

“No.” Svendsen kept his gaze on her lower half. “This town's not too friendly.”

Colleen looked at me stonily, then behind me, so I glanced back too and saw the parking lot was empty of people. She stepped forward and put a hand on Svendsen's shoulder, her eyes artificially bright like a model's in a catalogue.

“There's one in my neighborhood we can go to,” she said softly. “You boys are ahead of me, though, I've just been eating Ritz crackers! But I've got some pot, do you want to smoke some pot? It's been
such
a busy day.”

“Yeah?” Svendsen dropped a thick gob of spit between his shoes. “Lady, we're the same kind of people. We are.”

Colleen turned on her silver shoe and led us between the pickup trucks toward that patch of woods beyond the parking lot. A dirt path cut between the weeds then up into the trees, and she stopped at the edge of the pavement to beckon us on like an usher at a wedding. She still kept her hand in her purse. I wasn't thinking about whether I could get back to Picu in time for dinner or of Penzler's shareholders around the big oak table, I was back in that morning when our house had been on fire, the desruction of all that for the kids and me, Deb had come to pick me up because I'd been covered in blood, when we hadn't been in control of anything. Not like now.

Colleen stayed four steps behind us.

“Is she coming?” Svendsen asked out of the corner of his mouth.

I gave his thin shoulder a squeeze, and he went right on walking. The path ran up a slope and then across it, black bugs scattering from the undergrowth, and when I looked back toward the school all I saw was the trees. We'd come into another country.

I'd renounced violence; it was no way to move humanity forward.

We came to a campfire ring beside a trickle of water disappearing into a culvert. The circle of stones was littered with cigarette butts and twisted ends of joints, so Colleen had known what she was talking about.

“Here's a peaceful spot.” He talked in a higher voice, nodding. “This is the kind of thing I like.”

With his shoe he prodded the rotten orange cardboard of a Lucky Bucket case.

“Enjoy the view a minute,” she said behind us. “I'll get us organized.”

Between the tree trunks we could see new red-roofed duplexes at the edge of town, a blue slide curving down beside a backyard pool, then the green corn beyond that and a plume of dust where someone was driving through the fields fifteen miles away. It wasn't the same Nebraska we'd driven our ambulance through—now the world was fertile, openhearted.

“I do like this.” Svendsen shoved his hands into his pockets and walked forward with a strange tin-man gait. He'd have made a memorable grandpa for somebody.

Then motion. My brain translated what I saw in my peripheral vision as Charlie Chaplin twirling a bamboo cane—that motion was so distinctive—but of course it was Colleen, wet-eyed, showing her yellow bottom teeth and swinging her telescoped baton.

“Ah.” Svendsen put his hands on his hips. “It reminds—”

I set a leg behind his knees, pressed my hand against his chest. As he tensed I felt a sinewy strength, but all the same he tumbled back toward the cigarette butts, his two hands grasping air, gaze wide like he was a kid falling off the monkey bars. His eyes found mine but that one-third of a second wasn't long enough to explain why we were doing this thing to him, to point out the beauty of such a just act, and that was too bad. At the midpoint of his descending arc Colleen brought the steel down on his head.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Nicole
Handford for her patience, resourcefulness and rare ability, as well as for her valuable feedback and belief in the project. Thanks to editors Barbara Berson, Anna Comfort O'Keeffe, Derek Fairbridge and Chris Labonte, who soak overnight in enthusiasm, savvy and skill.

Thanks to all students and colleagues at UBC Okanagan Creative Studies, both the hyperactive and low-key; to the Scotts, Purton-Schwarzes and Alex-Longs; and especially to my resilient mother-in-law, Carol Handford. Thanks to Rob MacDonald for Rob Aiken, and to Sgt. Gary Yeung for himself.

Thanks to all of my Advents, Collises, Handfords, MacArthurs, Schroeders and Suttons.

Photo credit
: Nicole Handford

About the Author

Adam Schroeder
is the author of three previous books:
Kingdom of Monkeys
(Raincoast Books, 2001),
Empress of Asia
(Raincoast Books, 2006) and
In the Fabled East
(Douglas & McIntyre, 2011), which was a finalist for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book, Canada /Caribbean region, and chosen as one of Amazon.ca's best books of the year. Schroeder currently lives in Penticton, BC, with his wife and two children. You can read more about him at:
adamlewisschroeder.com
.