Crane’s View was Little Fran’s town while at the same time this town wasn’t. But the changes he must have seen everywhere didn’t appear to bother him much. When puzzled he would only stop, look back at me, and wait for instructions. Keeping Floon a few steps in front, I mainly watched the boy and found myself continually smiling. I liked his willingness to accept changes of scenery; anything different from his own world seemed okay. The expression on his face said he was open to it all. “McCabe?” Floon turned to look at me. I gave him a shove. “Keep moving, asshole.” “I am moving. Why do you think we’ve been sent back here?” “I know why I’ve been sent back, Caz. You’re here by mistake. You’re a fucking blemish.”
“How do you know?” “The aliens told me.” “That’s very helpful.” “Glad to be of service.”
We walked on, the boy still a ways in front of us. “Hey, Caz, how do you row a boat across a wooden sea?” “I couldn’t care less. Cute little arcane questions don’t interest me.”
“With a spoon.”
Both of us looked at the boy. “A spoon?”
“Yes, because there’s no such thing as a wooden sea. So if there was then it’d be a crazy thing, which means you’d have to use something crazy to row across it, like a spoon. Or maybe it’s not a wooden sea, but a wooden C, like in the letter? See?” He grew a wicked grin. “Which one of ‘em do you mean?”
“Christ, I didn’t even think of that.”
Floon looked from one version of me to the other and back again. “Didn’t consider what?”
“That it might be a C and not a sea.”
Floon frowned. “I take it back, McCabe—maybe he is your son. There’s a real family resemblance in the recondite way you two think.”
“Recondite. You sure know your vocabulary, Caz. Wasn’t that word on our last spelling bee?”
The boy fell into step next to me. He skipped a few steps and then to my real surprise, took my hand in his. I didn’t know what to say. It felt strange but sweet too. Holding hands with yourself, forty years apart.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I knew the answer but wanted to hear him say it anyway. Wanted to hear him living inside that dream again as I had for many of my boyhood years.
He actually puffed out his chest a bit before answering. “I wanna be an actor. I wanna act in monster movies. Maybe be the guy inside the monster suit.”
“Oh yeah? Do you know The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad? That’s my favorite movie.”
He dropped my hand and jumped aside. “Mine too, mine too! That’s the greatest movie in the world. The Cyclops in it is my favorite. I made one just like it out of clay in my art class.” He put both hands up and curling them into three-clawed paws, roared Cyclops-style. “That part where Sinbad sticks the torch in his eye and burns it out so he’s blind and he stumbles back and falls off the cliff? Do you remember that?”
I nodded in complete understanding. “How could I forget? It’s the best.” How many times had I watched that scene both when I was his age and sitting with my buddies in the fourth row of the Embassy Theater, and then after my thoughtful wife gave me a copy of the video for Christmas a few years ago? Whenever she was angry with me, Magda would call me “Sekourah,” who was the villain in the film.
The short rest of the way to George’s house we talked about the movies we loved and our favorite scenes in them. It was nice to be able to agree on absolutely everything. Floon got fed up and disgustedly asked if we would please change the subject? In happy unison we said “No!” and kept talking.
“What kind of car is that?”
Parked in front of George’s house was a very futuristic looking four-wheel-drive vehicle. I’d seen it advertised on TV—an Isuzu, some kind of Isuzu. Everything about it was more round and aerodynamic than those weekend-warrior standbys. It looked like the kind of too-cool car you see in music videos on MTV.
Floon spoke before I had a chance to answer the boy’s question. “It’s an Isuzu Vehicross. A marvelous car. Two hundred fifteen horsepower, torque-on-demand four-wheel-drive. I owned one exactly like it when I was a young man. The first new car I ever bought.” He sounded so smitten with the car that I half expected to see little hearts come rising off his head like lovebirds in a Disney film.
“It’s really ugly if you ask me. Looks like a big silver frog. Can you drive it in the water? It looks like one of those cars in a James Bond movie that you can drive off the road into the water.”
Floon looked positively miffed at what I thought was the kid’s fair assessment. “No you can’t drive it into the water, for God’s sake. But you can go off road with it, although sometimes that’s dangerous because there is an awful blind spot in the back. That’s what caused my accident.”
“What’s a blind spot?”
Floon ignored the kid, all the while grinning at the Isuzu as if it were his child.
“My goodness, Caz, you’re actually smiling now. I didn’t think you knew how.”
Sliding a stubby hand across the roof of the car, he patted it affectionately. The sound was louder than usual because everything else around us was very quiet. “Seeing this brings back nice memories. I was twenty-nine and working for Pfizer. They gave me a raise and at the time all I wanted in the world was one of these. I thought if you owned a car like this you could rule the world: You would be so cool you could eat lions for breakfast. Remember when a car could fill your life, McCabe? I distinctly remember the day I realized I could afford to buy one—in exactly this color. But I purposely waited two weeks before going to the showroom. It was like standing outside a candy store with a pocket full of money. You put off going in as long as you can bear it just to prolong the pleasure of anticipation. I had been mooning over the catalog for months. I’d memorize all the details and the specifications I wanted on my car. I still remember most of them to this day.” He stopped talking. Staring at the car, he let the good memories wash over him.
Unimpressed, Junior crossed his arms and frowned. “I still think it looks like a frog.”
Floon started to walk around the car. I tensed, not knowing what he was about to do.
“I’d only had the car two months when I backed into someone at a parking lot because of that ridiculous blind spot. It was a really stupid flaw in the car’s design. I put a big dent right—” Bending down, his head disappeared behind the other side of the car. Things got even quieter and stayed that way. Finally the boy and I looked at each other and simultaneously walked around the car to see what was going on.
Floon had squatted down and was busily running his hand back and forth across a large dent on the lower left side panel. Although he said nothing, his busy hand would go slow then speed up, then slow… so that it looked like he was trying to sand the section with the flat of his palm.
“Whacha doin’ there, Caz?” I said it as gently as I could, not at all sure where the hell his mind was at that moment.
When he looked up his eyes didn’t tell a happy tale. “This is exactly the same dent.” He tried to stand, winced, stopped. Putting a hand on his lower back, he rose much more slowly. Without a word he shuffled toward the front of the car and opened the driver’s door. Surprised by his calm chutzpah, I was about to play cop and say hey, you can’t do that but this looked too interesting. I decided to wait and see what he’d do next.
Floon climbed into the car. Instead of sitting down, he stayed on his knees on the driver’s seat and appeared to be searching for something on the floor. Then he started talking to himself. Not just a word or two but whole long sentences. When I got close enough to hear what he was saying I couldn’t understand anything because he spoke in a guttural foreign language. It sounded like German but later turned out to be Dutch. Every word sounded like he was trying to clear his throat. Everything he said came out sounding like a loud distressed mumble; the kind of annoyed/worried conversation you have with yourself when you can’t find your keys and you’re in a big hurry.