For a minute or two I managed to push reality from my mind, put it in a green fragile bubble and let it quiver away to wait. Catherine had wanted a cat, but neither of us was home during the day and she didn’t think it would be fair to a cat to leave it alone.
A week or so before she had died, I made up my mind to surprise her on her birthday with two cats. I’d get them from the humane society on Halstead, or maybe it was Broadway. I wouldn’t name the cats and I wouldn’t use whatever name the humane society had tagged them with. I would let Catherine name them.
I lost Sunny’s bouncing voice and the cats faded away. The bubble came floating back and for an instant I imagined a baby.
“Easy up,” said Ames, reaching out and turning the steering wheel as I drifted into the left lane just before we came to 301.
I stopped imagining and straightened out as Ames changed the station. The golden oldies station came on. Cyndi Lauper was belting out “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” She sounded too much like Sunny the Cat Lady. I turned off the radio and turned right.
We made it to the DQ parking lot, where Ames’s motor scooter was chained against a metal post.
“I could go it on my own,” he said.
“No, I’ll go with you in the morning.”
“Lock your door tonight,” he said as he got out and then leaned back through the door, his hand open, the derringer lying in it. “Two shots. Pellets are already loaded.”
“I don’t need it,” I said, looking at the tiny weapon.
“Someone trying to kill you?”
“Looks that way,” I said.
“Want me camping out in front of your door all night?”
“No.”
He reached farther into the car, the gun inches from my hand. I took it and nodded.
Ames closed the door and headed for his scooter while I parked in an open space closer to my office home.
Dave was at the DQ window. Dark tan, wrinkled skin, bleached-out hair from hours on his boat in the Gulf, he said, “Lewis, you look like a bulimic manatee.”
Even at my best I doubted if I could come up with the image of a bulimic manatee.
Dave owned the DQ franchise and four others on the Gulf coast. He filled in from time to time to remind himself of what it meant to work the counter and to prove to himself that he was still working at making a living.
“Chili and a Blizzard,” I said.
“Chocolate cherry?”
“Surprise me,” I said. “No, don’t surprise me. Chocolate cherry. Large.”
“I’m thinking of calling the sizes tall, grande and venti,” he said. “Like Starbucks. Think they’ll sue?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Hope so,” he said. “Great publicity. They ask me to stop. I tell the newspapers, argue that they don’t have trademarks on words like tall, grande and venti. Then I get the publicity free, business picks up. I reluctantly give into the pressure and come up with different names, maybe have a contest to name the sizes. What do you think?”
“Donald Trump and Warren Buffett will both come to you with big offers.”
I paid him.
“Dreams don’t cost anything, Lew,” he said, turning to prepare my chili and Blizzard.
Oh yes, they do, I thought. Dreams could be very expensive.
A pair of teen girls were behind me. I moved out of the way and stood in front of the pickup window. The girls were talking about someone named Shelly. Like Yolanda Root, the two girls used the word like at least once every other fragment of a sentence. They were wearing almost identical jeans and T-shirts with words on them that I didn’t recognize.
It took me about fifteen seconds to figure out that the “Shelly” they were talking about was the dead poet.
“Like, he’s got these great metaphors,” said one girl.
“He is so cool,” said the other.
“‘The moonbeams kiss the sea’” said the first girl. “‘What are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?’”
“Can you imagine, like, Bill Sherman saying something like that?” said the second girl.
“As if,” said the first girl. “Bill Sherman is a carved-out empty hunk.”
“Bingo,” said the first girl.
They both laughed. I shuddered once. The second girl glanced in my direction. They were both looking at me now, aware that I had been listening to them. I turned to the window as Dave came up with my order. He looked up at the sky and said, “Tomorrow should be clear. Want to go out with me on the boat for a few hours?”
“Busy,” I said. “Rain check.”
The last time I had gotten on a boat in the bay, the owner, complete with white captain’s hat, had tried to kill me.
I moved past the girls with my bag and didn’t look at them.
Were they fourteen like Kyle McClory? Did they know him? Were they closer to sixteen, like Adele? Did they know her? Did they think about vulnerability or mortality? I was afraid the answer was yes.
In my office, the phone was not ringing.
Maybe I should get that answering machine.
I sat at the desk, ate and drank, and tasted nothing. “Bingo,” I said out loud.
The word meant something. It was the key to the question that had been coming back to me, the question whose answer I needed if I were to… what? Prove Dorothy right? Find the truth about the bearded philosopher?
Nothing more came. Then I noticed both the chili and the Blizzard were gone. I didn’t remember enjoying or finishing them. Comfort food had failed to comfort.
It was almost six. I was in my white boxer shorts with the little red valentines. I wore my extra-large University of Chicago T-shirt. The phone had not rung. I was too tired to turn on the television and the VHS player and push in a tape. Covers over my head, I closed my eyes.
A knock.
Not here, I thought.
Another knock.
I’ve not returned.
Two short hard knocks.
I pushed back the covers, pulled on my pants and went to the door. It was Arnoldo Robles.
“I tried to call,” he said.
I stepped back so he could enter and closed the door.
“I remembered something,” he said.
“Have a seat,” I said.
“No time. Got to get back to El Tacito. I could be making it up or imagining it or maybe even dreaming it,” he said. “But that other person in the car, the one that killed that boy, I think she was smiling at me through the back window just when the car hit the boy, big kind of goofy smile like she was happy to see me.”
“You just remembered this?”
He sighed and shook his head.
“No, everything happened just like that and I thought maybe I was seeing things,” he said. “Maybe I thought the police would think I was making it up.”
“You could recognize her again if you saw her?”
“It’s crazy,” he said, running the fingers of his right hand through his thick hair. “I had this feeling that I’d seen her before, or her twin brother or sister or something.”
“Where did you see this twin?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “But I’ll think about it. You find the driver yet?”
I considered saying that the driver had found me, but if I told him the story of the bearded philosopher, Arnoldo Robles might begin to wonder if the man might have the key witness against him on his hit list. It was, in fact, a possibility.
“No,” I said. “But I think I’m close. I’ll let you know.”
“Could have been my kid on that street,” he said. “I keep thinking about that, you know?”
“Yes,” I said.
We stood for a few seconds. There wasn’t anything else to say.
“Well,” he said. “I better go.”
I opened the door and as he walked through the door said, “Thanks for coming.”
“Sure,” he said and turned left toward the stairs.
I dreamt of cars. Cars and cats. The cars were in a demolition derby on Main Street. Cats dashed and leaped out of their way. Clowns, little people, Charlton Heston, Sammy Sosa. Women, children and someone who might have been me dashed from door to door trying to get away from the metal on metal, metal on flesh. The doors were all locked. I didn’t see them but I knew they were there, Adele with the baby in her arms, Flo in her Western boots, Ames on his scooter.