“She’s getting some work done,” Burris Parchman remarked. The musician was a thin, medium-complexioned black man in his mid-sixties with a trim mustache and receding hairline. He wore wrinkled khakis, a short-sleeved shirt, and raggedy tennis shoes. “As you can see,” he continued, pointing at the open windows, “the air-conditioning hasn’t been put back in. But I have some iced tea. I was just about to have a glass. You?”
“Sure, that’d be great,” Monk said.
“Cop a squat,” Parchman said as he stepped into the kitchen. He soon returned with two glasses and put one before Monk on a side table. The coaster was already in place and was from the Raven’s Mill.
“So tell me about this project.”
Monk sipped his drink and began to speak, half rising from his chair to hand over the paperwork. His head suddenly felt light and he sat back down quickly, his mouth dry despite the liquid. Coltrane’s sax was moaning “Naima,” but he knew there was no music on. He drained his drink, his throat closing up. He stared at the residue in the bottom of the glass. Were those scales?
“Say,” Monk began, dropping the glass, his fingers telling him to do so. “Why would Minnie and Nazeen Love … Lo-venobody.” He giggled but it sounded like one of those demon clowns in a low-budget horror movie. “Why would they lie to me about where to find you?” Why was it so hard to get a sentence out?
“This is the West, Mr. Monk. We protect our legends around here.” Parchman seemed to be talking to him underwater. It was as if Monk were floating up to the moon and watching the earth recede beneath him. He stood but his shoes had ballooned way out of proportion like in a cartoon. He fell over and was quite content to lie there on his side, his ear to the floor listening for the woo woo of the Underground Railroad. He smacked his lips, tasting purple while he counted the infinite swirls and whirls within the wood floor. His heart beat rapidly and sweat doused his face and shirt front.
“How long will he be like that?”
“I don’t know but we need to get him out of here. Then wipe the house down for his prints and put the For Sale sign back up.”
Monk rolled over and glared hazily at the green Martians with their elongated heads discussing his fate. Through a window he could see a giant ant from Them looking at him too. He decided this was a party. Especially since Lee Dorsey was singing, “Everything I do gohn be funky from now on.” He sang along, trying to snap his fingers.
Hands lifted him off the undulating floor. The Martian with the fancy silver bracelet was talking again. “Check outside and we’ll put him in his car. Get his wallet.”
“We driving him away from here?”
“That’s too risky. It’s better to get him behind the wheel,” the silver bracelet said. Clearly, Monk cogitated, this one was the H.N.I.C., ah, the H.M.I.C. He giggled again. Kurt Vonnegut, the size of a fly with insect wings, landed on his arm. He said in a tiny voice, “Three to get ready and two to go, bro.” Kurt the Fly-Man flitted away. Monk was sad to see him go.
“He could hurt somebody,” one of them said.
“We’re in this too far now. We can’t have him hurt her,” one of the Martians said.
In a blue haze, they walked him to his car. Or was it a stagecoach? He squinted at the giant ants hitched and ready.
“Giddy-up!” he yelled. He went all rubber and, jerking his arms free, flopped to the ground. Time for a sit-down on these mufus, he reasoned. He had to catch his rocket to the moon. His honey would be waiting for him. “I got to call Jill,” he added, rolling around on the ground like a temperamental child.
“Get his ass up before somebody sees us.”
He was snatched upright and hauled to his car. Keys were plucked out of his pocket and he grabbed at them.
“Cut it out,” a nearsighted Martian said, hitting him in the face.
“We can’t leave marks or it won’t look right,” the H.M.I.C. warned.
“Good advice,” Monk said, trying to get out of the diving bell but forgetting how his legs worked. A jackrabbit with the head of a strawberry hopped onto the hood and quoted Wole Soyinka.
“The human factor, alas, is a ponderous and imponderable factor of history.”
“You got that right,” Monk mumbled. Transfixed by the literate rabbit, he became gradually aware that he was in motion. He had a hold of the steering wheel. The radio speaker fuzzed and Henry Ford spoke. No, Monk listened closer and realized it was Ann Sothern as My Mother the Car. She was trying to tell him something about pedestrians and traffic lights, but the horizon flipped over and everything came to a thundering halt.
Propelled forward, Monk cracked his head open on the windshield. Blood dripped into his eyes and he blinked them clear as he stumbled from the wrecked vehicle. The car had jumped the curb, plowed over a mailbox, and finally came to a stop when it smashed halfway through the side of a building. Martians and creatures with tentacles for arms lunged at him and he ran, so happy he remembered how to make his legs work. He knew what they really were beneath their disguises.
Canadians. Canadians terrified him. Sneaky infiltrating bastards. On he ran through the jungle and into the desert, his heart thudding in his ears, drowning out the sirens and the yelling and the cursing. He ran and ran and stared crying. Suddenly, he stumbled across an arid landscape where the snouts of crocodiles stuck out of the sand like cacti, their fearsome crooked teeth snapping expectantly.
Monk stepped tippy-toe around them and came upon the squatting marble statue of the Great Aztec Toad. Only it wasn’t a statue but the living toad god Tlaltecuhtli. The Earth Mother toad opened her maw, and after hesitating for a moment, the Canadians getting closer with their monkey sirens, he dove into the black. He swam and crawled through the murk, panicked that he’d never find his way out. It was then, at his lowest, that he saw his dead father, Sergeant Monk, Mechanic Monk, Husband Monk, stepping out of a door from nowhere.
Monk’s dad held out his big calloused hand. “Come on, Ivan, you can do it. Come on, son. Just a little further and you’ll be safe.”
“Wait for me, Pop.” Crying and bleeding, he ran and leapt through the doorway.
Dr. Justine Mumford’s private room at the Northcross Manor rest home smelled faintly of gardenias and hyacinths, her favorites. The flowers commanded the room in various baskets and vases, and her attendant had already filled three paper shopping bags with Get Well cards. There was to be no recovery for the civil rights icon, but just as she had confronted adversity, threats, and violence in her life, she faced death with bravery and aplomb.
“It’s going to be fine,” Mrs. Mumford said, her voice barely audible above the humming of the respirator.
Nazeen Loveless cried softly, holding onto the old woman’s hand. Age and illness had diminished the elderly woman’s physical shell but her voice yet reflected her power of conviction.
“It’s been three days and the cops are still looking for him,” Charles Estes whispered. He stood further back from the bed, where Loveless and Minnie Thaxton hovered. He switched off the radio he’d tuned to local news.
“Soon it won’t matter,” Thaxton said.
“What won’t matter?”
The three turned and stared mutely at Monk, who stood in the doorway. He had crashed his Galaxy 500 into some boarded-up storefronts, just down the block from the long-defunct Express Tracks recording studio. The police had been called but he’d run away howling before they arrived. He’d spent several hours hidden in a Port-a-Potty at a strip-mall construction site. At some point he pissed himself as the hallucinogen in his system wore off. Assuming the cops were looking for him, he’d waited until nightfall to sneak away. Monk had collect-called L.A. and asked Jill Kodama to wire him money for toiletries and a room at a hot-sheet motel, since it wouldn’t be safe to return to the Ramada Inn.