"What do I do? What am I supposed to do? You haven’t told me anything!"
They were pulling away, about to leave me at the rest stop. Sarvaduhka’s squareback screeched to a stop, sending a cloud of dust back into my face. I ran to Izzy’s window. Sarvaduhka was gritting his teeth and peevishly chanting, "Female action, female action, Izzy. This is what you promised me. This is what my vacation is about. Female action, female action, female action."
"Never mind Sergeant Ducky," Izzy told me through the window. "Jeez! We’ll see you next year. You’ll live till then, don’t worry. I plugged you; that’s all I do this time. Just remember, that thing is a temporary. If you start to feel pressure… what can I say? Oil of cloves? The Lord’s Prayer? My hands are tied, kid. I gotta be back at the plant in a few days or they’ll fire my ass, and kimosabe here still has to get his damned female action, and guess what: I just got this. The North Vietnamese just overran the South. A rout. It’s all over. Keep this in mind, Mel. It’s a good bench mark. Next year we’ll plow you up and sow salt, don’t worry. Nobody’s gonna farm you."
They were speeding away down the on ramp. The sun was so hot, everything was white. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there. I stared at the place where Izzy had been, until my neck got sore. Then I headed back toward the vending machines and rest rooms.
They came back, not in person, but on the juke box. The juke box was in a cafe on the westbound side of the highway. Once I had urinated, there was nothing further to impel me in any direction whatever. So I wandered across the glass-shelled pedestrian overpass, still dizzied by the physical sensation of something (my piss) actually leaving my body; I had contained everything for nearly twelve hours.
There was a juke box at every table. I sat down at the nearest one and fished out a quarter I’d never had. I pushed my quarter into the slot and pressed A-1, "If You Want Some Food for Thought, Take a Bite of This," by Johnnie Abilene and the Haymakers. Out came Izzy.
"Put your tongue back in your mouth, Mel, this is not a drug experience," he said. Everyone kept right on eating, while Izzy’s voice spilled from the jukes. A lean, sunburned trucker with faded tattoos on each bicep was drinking coffee in front of me, staring meditatively into his own cigarette smoke. A few tables bubbled with tourist families, whom every twang and gewgaw set chattering. A very fat old hippie in tie-dyes and cut-offs walked in and leaned against the mother juke near the cashier; he scanned the listings, the families, the trucker, and me. Nobody but me heard Izzy.
"Can you hear me?" I whispered into the Wurlitzer.
"No," he said, and laughed. From the left speaker?Izzy was in stereo?I heard an angry cadence, Sarvaduhka’s. "Okay, okay," Izzy told him, "I’ll be nice. I couldn’t help myself." Then to me: "The guy that just walked in, the zaftiger in flip-flops, he’s from Sanduleak, but he’s on our side. Just be careful about giving him anything of yours." Static. "… in Memphis, I told you. Give me a break, Vaduhka; this is intergalactic stuff here for crissakes and after all you said and done, put me flat out on the run, now you think you got a mess of love to shove in my face?well, take a bite of this!" It was Johnny Abilene. Izzy’s voice was swallowed into the pedal string guitar. I seemed to get a whiff of Sarvaduhka’s jasmine, then nothing. The Haymakers.
The big man came to my table. "Mind if I sit down here?" I shrugged. He sat. Maneuvering into the chair, he had to push against the next table to accommodate his gut.
The table slid back into the tattooed trucker. "Hey!"?as his coffee splashed onto the table.
"Sorry," my Sanduleak contact said, turning meekly.
"Just watch it, okay?" The trucker threw a napkin onto the spill, then lapsed back into samadhi.
"Sure. Sorry." My hippie turned back to me. "What’s your name? I’m Gypsy. I’m waiting for my sister, is all. She’s in the head. She takes a long time, I don’t know why; she just always does. What did you say your name was?"
"Mel," I said. There was a floating astigmatism, like a skyflower before me, the kind that is pushed away by one’s looking, so it’s never quite in focus. At first I thought it was in my field of vision, but the more I tried to sweep it to center stage, the more I realized it was a sort of thought. A name on the tip of one’s tongue. A half-remembered face. An inkling, an intimation, but of nothing.
It was Izzy’s temporary. My mind-tongue stroked and stroked it with instinctive curiosity, like leukocytes casing a virus, something hard and foreign patching my mind.
"You’re looking at my beard," the Sandulean said. "Is there something stuck in it?"
Stroked and stroked it. My father was in there, Gone Joe. Stroking and stroking Izzy’s amalgam, it was Gone Joe’s fingers I stroked with. He was digging his fingers into Izzy’s bung, trying to flee my mind; the rest of him had vanished when I was two, left Mom and me at the gift shop in Niagara Falls. Only this shade remained behind, Gone Joe’s shade feeling guilty in the mind of his abandoned son.
If you fiddle with the tracking on a VCR, sometimes you can see another movie just under the one you’ve been watching. It flirts between the scenes, steals outlines, blurs faces, commandeers bits of dialogue, makes a lawn into a lake, a domestic comedy into a primeval horror?duck-rabbit. Gone Joe’s old, blue watch cap wanted to preempt Gypsy’s beard.
"Did I get some butter in there or something? Robins lay an egg? What?"
"No. Sorry. You’re from Sanduleak, right?"
Gypsy’s jaw dropped. I mean, it really dropped; it hit his sternum, then sprang back, like a bungee jumper. The whole thing took maybe two seconds, during which I glimpsed Gypsy’s real body. In there, behind the phony jaw, a yellow snake bristled and shifted. There was a gasp from one of the tourist tables, babble, then hush. Gypsy stood; his hams shoved back the trucker’s table.
"Goddamnit, you fat slug!" The trucker slammed down his coffee and stood up. Gone Joe had penetrated the seam up to his elbows.
"I’m terribly sorry," Gypsy said. "I’m just fat, see? I’m big. I’m clumsy. I can’t help it."
I could see the trucker’s face cloud. It was a new one on him. He paused. He frowned. He said, "Ain’t you got no pride whatsoever?" He sat down again and mopped up spilled coffee with another paper napkin. He cussed under his breath, then said, "Just be careful, get it?"
"I get it," Gypsy said. "Thank you very much."
"What in the goddamned State of Texas you thanking me for, fat boy?"
"Here’s my sister, Nora," Gypsy said to me, sotto voce. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life came right up to our table. She stood there next to Gypsy, with her hip in the cleft of Gone Joe’s chin. She looked impellingly familiar, but I was drawing a blank; whatever she had been to me was occluded by a sliver from Izzy’s bung.