Dinky drew himself up to look at this strange man. “We hate doctors,” he said.
“Then which way you going?” I said.
“The only way that’s good,” Super said, “and that’s the way we come.”
“That is good,” Dinky said with a smile. “Because we sure do hate a doctor.”
BIRDFEED AND BULLETS, THE WEEPING BARK OF A million pines…
A freezer’s scent of the clinic and the morgue…
The gleam of a roadside can…
The road wound on, the road kept winding, and sound was a cat’s rough tongue…
Super’s face was constant motion—that silver beard, those leathery cheeks, tiny eyes that flitted and bounced…
He ranted and sang and whispered and howled, and he did it all with ease…
We’d been forsaken, more or less, adrift with the phantoms that were the old man’s words, loosed, it seemed, with each wave of his troubling hand…
At some point he set in about the doings in our cabin, inexplicable, he said, slippery, he said, though never exactly what…
I saw the lovebird, its gaping beak and eyes, I smelled ice cream and road kill and blood…
That familiar longing had returned, for my noons of summer, counting minnows in a jar and naming each breeze. What had happened to those days?
A meerschaum appeared in Super’s hand and then from the glove a bag of gnarly weed, but Dinky went on drooling. Super crammed the stuff in the pipe and with a nail snicked the match he’d somehow managed to keep…
He chortled and smiled, puffed and drove, happy is as happy can…
I took the pipe, he the bottle…
The road was thick with water and mud and stones from the crumbling earth. At every pothole my friend yipped like a dog asleep till at last he jerked to with eyes that could’ve been eggs. When Super gave him the pipe, I thought he’d start coughing, but instead his face melted with the smoke from his lips.
“I was going to ask where we were,” he said, “but now I don’t even care. Onward, Benson!”
“We are no man’s slave,” Super said, and jerked his thumb aft, referring, I supposed, to the bed of broken dolls. “If you care to differ, interrogate the rest.”
“I’m an army man, mister whatever-your-name-is,” Dinky said.
“The name, boy, is Super.”
“The way I said, Super,” said Dinky, and drew himself up, “I’m an army man. And the only thing I’m good for is knowing what makes the grass grow green.” He pointed at Super. “You know what makes the grass grow green?” he said. “Bright red blood.”
“See what you know after you’ve been wearing that grass for a hat a few years.”
“He’s not always like this,” I said.
Super let out a noise, maybe a chuckle, maybe not. “Oh, but you know he is,” he said. “He’s the marathon man. Catch our drift?”
“I am man!” Dinky shouted. “Hear me roar!”
In the distance a light appeared, I hadn’t seen it off to the west as we came in—who lived out there? I thought, there’s a light out there attached to nothing, it looked, a lonesome bulb in the trees—but then soon enough, like everything else, the question fell away, and when I looked up, we had reached our cabin.
The man turned his body and head in tandem. His mouth was an earwig, his eyes gleaming coins. “We’ll be sorry to see you go.”
“You don’t have to go,” Dinky said. “This is our place.” Super fixed his gaze on my pal and said no more. “But we’ve got booze,” Dinky said.
“We’re a free man, boys, and wish you alike.”
It must’ve been a good ten minutes we stood in the rain while Dinky worked to bring Super in, but the man evaded my friend until he had no choice but to turn away.
“There’s nothing you can take from me,” said Super when Dinky announced he’d take his leave, “but my life, but my life, but my life. Fortinbras!” he shouted at his dog. “It’s time to make the soldiers shoot!”
Fortinbras appeared in the cab with his nose out the window, and the truck sputtered on. The last thing I saw was a sticker on the bumper. I Have a Dream!
WE STOOD IN THE RAIN, WATCHING BASIL through the window, berserk with his cherished knife. The freak never left without it, plus some rope and his grandfather’s stupid hatchet, what, with the sack that held them, he called his man-bag. Every so often he’d mellow some, long enough to hypnotize whatever conjured fool had been dumb enough to block him. Then he spun off into the kicking, punching, and cutting he thought his moment of glory, the killing time. Well, the boob was dancing, and who could tell him otherwise?
Soundgarden was the band they’d picked to beat the ghosts. Hickory of course was what my eyes wanted, but they got Lucille—goddamn—snapping her fingers as she twirled. When finally Hickory did float up, Dinky fairly groaned. She was too lovely for her own good, it was true, and I was a fool in the rain.
“She’s so beautiful,” Dinky said.
“Lucy?” I said. “She’s all right.”
“Look at her,” Dinky said. “She moves like… smoke.”
“I don’t know about you, but I am freezing.”
Dinky wiped his nose. It could’ve been rotten fruit. “Basil won’t be happy about his truck,” he said. “He won’t be happy at all.”
My pal didn’t look so hot. In fact my pal looked downright fucked. “Basil,” I said, “can gargle my nut sack. Let’s go call you a doctor.”
“Who do we think we are, always telling us what to do?”
“We think we’re the guy who’s smarter than the moron we’re taking care of.”
“Where’s our bottle?”
“Milk’s all gone, Dink,” I said. “Diapers, too, in case you’re wondering.”
My friend glared like I’d stuck him with a shiv. “Have you ever chased a pig with a spear, AJ, then realized there was no pig?”
“What?” I said.
“Exactly,” he said, and walked up the stairs.
SOMEONE HAD SET OUT THE CASE OF OLD CROW we’d brought, and the liter of Safeway coca-cola, all in a row with five new glasses. The rest lay spread across the table—CDs, lighters, bottle caps, shades, smoke packs empty and full, a half-munched bag of Chips Ahoy and a full one of Doritos, gum wrappers, peanut shells, matches, gum. Basil still had the knife, but now he had a bottle, too, stuck in his hole, what else. I thought he’d drain the thing for sure, but somehow he found the grace to pull up short and squirt an arc of whiskey through his teeth. Maybe fifteen bottles and cans lay about him, Lucky Lager, this round, with rebuses in their caps.
Hickory pointed at us the way children point at people who are fat. “They’re here,” she said.
Lucille ran outside, looking, I guessed, for the ice we’d never got.
“Some rabbits ran across the road,” I said, and listened to the phone hum like a seashell at my ear.
“Where’s my truck?” Basil said, moving in.
He did this sort of thing a lot, most recently to some pencil-necked kid at Radio Shack.