Marilyn was disdainful. «Give me one good reason I should even come near you.»
John thought a second and remembered Vanessa's telling him about Marilyn's polyandry. What was his name? He remembered and blurted out, «Duran Deschennes would have wanted you to be close to Susan.»
Marilyn let out a thimbleful of air, and her face lost all harshness, briefly becoming young, and John could see the beauty she had obviously once been. She tottered over to him, as though walking on a wobbling dock. They went outside, where she and John sat down beside a transformer box and some scrub pines. «You know, I've been broke before, Marilyn,» he said. Marilyn nodded. «And I've been jobless before, too.» She nodded again. «But mostly I've had nobody to join for dinner at six-thirty every night,» he said. «That was the worst of it for me — sunset — six-thirtyP .M. and nobody for dinner.»
Susan, Randy and Dreama were by the van, their breathing harsh and quivering. Ivan was still in the car speaking Japanese. Ryan and Vanessa were discreetly turned away from John and Marilyn, but still trying to take in each word, and John shooed them off like children past their bedtime.
«Ryan, would you get Marilyn a cup of coffee. Vanessa, can you grab my coat from the car.»
As they went off, Ryan whispered to Vanessa, «Oscar clip,» and Vanessa giggled. A minute later they were back. «Drink some coffee,» said Ryan. «It'll be good for you.» He handed Marilyn a paper cup filled with hot coffee.
John walked over to Susan, who was holding her child upside down by the ankles. A cold breeze shot by and he buttoned up his jacket.
Susan looked up and smiled and said, «Seems like a hundred years ago since our little walk together, eh?»
«A thousand.»
Randy and Dreama, fifth wheels, made quick hellos, and walked away with the two dogs.
«So how'd you do it? Find my mother, I mean. I've been here in Wyoming going crazy for days now. I haven't slept in, like, forty-eight hours. How'd you even know I was looking for her?»
«I didn't. I was looking for you.» He sat down beside Susan. «I had some luck and I followed a hunch or two. And the Hawaii Five-0 crime lab pitched in.» He pointed to Ryan and Vanessa. «Don't ever cross those two. They're so smart, even their shit has brains.»
Susan brought Eugene Junior right side up and hugged him while smiling at John. «Never a dull moment when Mom's around, that's for sure. Hey, know what? I know your home phone number.»
«Really now?»
She told him.
«Aren't you the sphinx.» John turned toward the child, who was fumbling with pebbles to his far left. «How old is … ?»
«Eugene.»
«Eugene?»
«He was two last week.»
«You gonna go talk to your mother?»
«I suppose I have to.» Susan grabbed him by the arm. «You want me, you better see this, too.»
The two walked over to Marilyn, who had the lost look of a seabird covered in oil. Susan was going to speak, made a false start and stopped. It turned out for once, Susan didn't have to say anything. Marilyn whispered, «I'm sorry about those pageants.»
Susan made a noise, emptying her lungs of air and stress. She said, «Mom, look. If I ever hear you so much as a hint that my kid needs a haircut or has to go to the gym to develop brawny shoulders or even that he needs a dab of Clearasil, then I'm going to stop inviting you over for Christmas, okay?»
Marilyn sighed.
Susan and John went over to the minivan and sat down beside it, Eugene on Susan's lap. Susan said, «I got your number from a friend at the Director's Guild. I was about to call you when the shit hit the fan known as my mother.» She gave a lusty yawn. John picked up a piece of cardboard and played peekaboo with Eugene.
«I can't act,» Susan said.
John snorted. «Oh God, where did that come from?»
Susan smiled. «Well, I don't want you getting it in your head you can save me from myself by starring me in one of your movies. I'm a crap actress. I really am.»
«You can take lessons and — »
«Stop. I don't want to be an actress. I never did. It just happened. I want my life to change, but not in that direction.»
«So you still want to change, then?» John tried to ask this casually.
«Well, yeah. Don't you?»
«How about I'll stop if you stop.»
«You think you can?»
John thought this over. The wind seemed to get stronger, blowing down from the Rockies onto the Plains. «Look at us,» said John, «two clowns who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.»
Susan put her hands in her face and said, «Oh God, my mother is back in my life.»
Ivan had finished his phone call and sidled over. He reached John and Susan just as their hands touched. «Mega Force blew them to bits in Nagasaki, John-O.»
«Ivan, this is Susan. Susan, Ivan.»
John's and Susan's hands were carelessly touching. «John-O, I tell you what — why don't I pile everybody into the rental car and take them back to Los Angeles?»
Susan's eyes were as wide and as open as the cobalt sky above.
«Okay,» John said.
Susan got behind the wheel of the minivan and John jumped in and rode shotgun with Eugene Junior on his lap. Susan started the van and drove off.
Looking back, John saw the mystified crowd, with Ivan preparing a plot synopsis for their next six hours.
Susan, exhausted or not, was a confident driver. The three sped across the dark flat continent, nobody in the minivan knowing where they might be heading, just that they were heading away from where they had been before.
Eugene Junior fell asleep in John's lap. John turned his head and looked out the window. Outside, there was a barbed-wire fence, a road sign sayingOMAHA 480, and John also saw what he thought were the eyes of an animal.
He looked at Susan's reflection in the black window glass. John remembered once yelling at a cameraman on a film, whom he was convinced was color-blind. During a break John went off to props and brought back with him a piece of shiny black plastic. He gave it to the cameraman, and the cameraman asked him, «What's this for?» and John said, «It's something the Impressionist painters used to do. Whenever they were unsure of the true color of something, they'd look at its reflection in a piece of black glass. They thought that the only way they could ever see the true nature of something was to reflect it onto something dark.»
Police lights erupted behind them, but the police were after another car, not theirs. Susan looked over at John and arched her eyebrows in conspiracy. John watched the pale black road, and he remembered a single moment during his time away in the wilderness. He wished he had told Doris about it — a single moment in Needles, California, months and months ago, facing west in the late afternoon. There had been a heavy rainstorm over just a small, localized patch of the desert, and from the patch beside it, a dust storm blew in. The sun caught the dust and the moisture in a way John had never seen before, and even though he knew it was backward, it seemed to him the sun was radiating black sunbeams down onto the Earth, onto Interstate 40 and the silver river of endless pioneers that flowed from one part of the continent to the other. John felt that he and everybody in the New World was a part of a mixed curse and blessing from God, that they were a race of strangers, perpetually casting themselves into new fires, yearning to burn, yearning to rise from the charcoal, always newer and more wonderful, always thirsty, always starving, always believing that whatever came to them next would mercifully erase the creatures they'd already become as they crawled along the plastic radiant way.