“Rock on, dude,” I called after him.
I sat down to eat. Leeli gave me a God-you’re-hopeless look. She bit into her toast with a snap, as if somehow it might do me an injury. We ate without talking for a while, then she said, “It might be true what Ava told me. ’Bout the experiment. Carl and Squire are pretty strange.”
“One’s a retard, other don’t know he’s a retard. That ain’t so strange.”
She diddled the fork in her eggs. “I can’t figure why she’d tell me that story if it wasn’t true.”
I had to talk around a bite of steak. “To make herself look like a big deal.”
“People with the money she’s got, they don’t hafta do that.”
“If they’re freaks they do.” I finally got the bite chewed. “Say it’s true. Fuck does it matter? We still get paid.”
Leeli had built a little fence of eggs around her sausage patty. “Nothing this good ever works out,” she said, staring at the plate like she was considering making a rock garden out of her cottage fries. “What I think’s gonna happen and what does happen, there’s always a mile of swamp ’tween the two.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “There is that.”
With a step that was a shade perky for my tastes, Leeli ran off to tell Ava the news. For want of better occupation, I took my Disneyworld pass and went to experience America. As I waited in line the man behind me kept ramming my legs with his gray-headed mama who was sitting in a wheelchair, gripping the arms and scowling like a fury. Everywhere you turned you saw parents yelling at kids who were bawling about they didn’t get this or that. Stuck in a photograph album, I supposed these same scenes would dredge up fond memories years from now. It depressed me that I wasn’t able to work such a change with my own miseries. Must be I come to Disneyworld too late in life for the enchantment to do its trick.
Close by the Pirates of the Caribbean, an elderly fat man with the word “Jellybean” embroidered on the chest of his overalls and dozens of jellybeans stuck on his straw cowboy hat had cordoned off a section of walkway and there created portraits of celebrities from thousands of—guess what?—jellybeans. He was working on his knees, dribbling jellybeans onto a rendering of the Statue of Liberty, which except for the spiky headdress looked a whole hell of a lot like his take on the fat Elvis. People stood around saying, “Isn’t that amazing.” He seemed so jolly in his craft, I naturally wished him ill. Odds were he was a twelve-stepper who after a lifetime of domestic abuse visited upon wife and children had gone simple enough from Jesus and caffeine to believe this shit was a suitable atonement. A four-year-old howler with the mouse on his chest and a stalk of blue cotton candy in his fist broke free of his parents and came to stand by Jellybean. Way he held the candy to his mouth and screamed, you could easily picture him at twenty-one doing the same with a microphone and getting laid by supermodels. When his mama tried to drag him off, he endeared himself to me forever by ralphing all over Miss Liberty. Jellybean offered him grandpa consolation, but I caught a glint of good old murder in his eye.
We stayed at Disneyworld four more days. Leeli spent the nights with Ava and mornings with me. The rest of the hours we traveled as a pack. At these times the air got icy. Dinners became occasions of grand formality, long bouts of chewing and swallowing broken by courteous exchanges. Please pass the butter. Would you like another dessert? Can I bring you back something? Leeli had to make sure both Ava and I got our share of flirty glances and secret smiles, and the strain of it all roughed her up some. I learned to let her relax when she came back to our room. She would take two valium from a bottle Ava had given her and sit by the window, her breath ragged, like she was pushing herself to exhale. Finally shed smile and say, “Hi” or “How you doing?” as if she had just noticed me.
“I can’t take much more of Carl,” she said one day. “It’s not about him watching. I’m almost grateful he’s there. It kinda makes it easier to switch off my head. But the talking they do… Jesus Lord!” She glanced at me for a reaction. “Am I boring you?”
“I was just letting you tell it.”
“I know you’re being sweet with me, and I appreciate it. But I’m wore out with sweetness. I could use a shot of male insensitivity. Can you handle that?”
I grinned at her and said gruffly, “Hell they talking about, woman?”
Leeli sighed like those words had hit the spot. “Ava’ll stop right in the middle of things and explain what’s going on. Anatomical stuff, y’know. And Carl he just sits there humming to himself.”
“He don’t say nothing back?”
“Sometimes he asks can he go do something with Squire, and she’ll say maybe later or naw it’s not your time to be with Squire.”
“See what I told you? He’s a fucking retard.”
“He’s not dumb! Ava’s always testing him or something. Asking him weird questions. He never gets a’one wrong. She’ll ask him to do a sum and he does ’em in his head. Just snaps ’em off!”
“Remember that Tom Cruise movie where his brother did all that? That guy was a retard.”
“It’s not just Carl. Ava, she’s…”
“What?”
“She’s a strong woman, is what it is. Sometimes I get a feeling I’m gonna drown in her, y’know. Like she’s this tide rolling over me and when it goes out again, nothing’s gonna be left of me. Leeli hung her chin onto her chest. I don’t know I can do this for a month.”
“Fine with me. Let’s take the five and split.”
The second hand must have galloped damn near ten times around the dial before she said, “Chances this good don’t come around but every so often. Let’s give it a few days.”
She come over to the foot of the bed and crawled up beside me and cuddled into my shoulder like she wanted to sleep. I did my best to be pillow and comforter, but the heat of her and my natural preoccupations got me all charged up. She reached her hand down and played with me a while, then lost interest and closed her eyes. “Want me take care of that for you?” she asked after another bit.
“We’ll have our time,” I said. “Whyn’t you rest?”
She blinked and peered at me. Wide open, those brown eyes could be like a car coming at you with its high beams on. They left me dazed and fighting for the road.
“That a real feeling I see in there?” she asked.
“Whatever you see, that’s what it is. You know I ain’t smart enough to fake nothing.”
She didn’t act like she believed this. Her lights dimmed and she lay quiet. She fingered my shirt button and appeared to be studying the stubble on my chin. I asked what she was thinking.
“Lots of things.”
“Say one.”
“I was wondering if anybody’s smart enough to know they’re faking and I was wishing we already had that twenty thousand.”
“Anything else?”
“I was thinking you got a whole crowd of people paying rent in your skull. Different sizes, different ways of doing. But they all wearing the same face.”
A woman starts to get deep on you, you know it’s just the coming attraction for a head movie that’ll be playing six shows daily in the weeks to come. She’s evaluating her prospects and unless you’re a fool, you best do some evaluating your own self. Generally speaking, a commitment is being called for, but with Ava in the picture I wasn’t sure how things were fitting together in Leeli’s thoughts. She went to drowning in moods so wide, they’d wash over me from the next room. Sometimes she wanted me to be patient and other times she wanted me to haul her off to the monkey jungle. After playing mama’s little helper at night, she needed daddy to straighten her out. I didn’t have a good record when it come to treating female mental disease, but I managed it with Leeli. I gave her to know I was there for her like Oprah and Tarzan both. It surprised me that I was up to the task and when I meditated on this, I realized the feeling Leeli had spotted in me might be for real. A runty little weed sprouted from sandy soil—that was all it was. If it was going to survive, Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye would have to drop in from TV heaven and manifest a miracle. But there it waved, baking under the sky of all the shit that had ever gone wrong with me, waggling its dried-up leaves, trying like hell to grow up and learn how to whistle. Puny as it was, it stood taller than any decision I could have made to chop it down.