by Dick Cluster
The girl gave him a look that could kill and said “I’m Ellen.” She proclaimed her identity, even if it was false, the way only a pretty teenager who thinks she just invented womanhood can.
“Barbarellen?” Foster said. He was finished with his belt and just kind of patting his tummy, as if the disagreeable chore had taken care of itself. “You mean Barbarella, I guess.” What’s funny about him is he has a way of being patronizing that makes you feel he’s looking down at least as sarcastically on himself as he is on you. Anyway that’s what it does for me. Gives me perspective without making me feel small or dumb, the way so many men need to do. Right then the sun was beaming off his shiny head in a way that made me want to forget these waifs and drag him back to that island again.
“Henri et Barbarella,” Foster declared. Since then those have been their names. Young Barbarella, unfortunately, gives young Jay an excuse to show off. Last night around the fire he was telling hitchhike stories. He told about getting picked up by a car full of partygoers driving the New Jersey Turnpike in the middle of the night. The driver kept drinking out of a bottle in a bag, doing ninety, and one of the women kept saying to him, “Slow down, Jesse, slow down.” Jay said he was scared shitless but also real grateful to this Jesse for picking him up. So he just figured he’d live if Jesse lived, and he’d die if Jesse died. Somewhere in the telling it became clear that the driver and passengers, except for Jay, were black.
It wasn’t a bad story, but Foster wasn’t about to let it pass uncalled. He said, “Jaybo, did you ever in all this thumb travel see a black man waiting on the road for a ride? You owe this brother your life, for his skill with the wheel that night. Do you think he could stand out there on the turnpike at three a.m. and expect any drunken white folks to baby-sit him?”
Or a woman, I pointed out— white, black, brown, or red.
Leaving the Tetons
There’s four of us now, Fab Four says Barbarella, because yesterday we put Henri— Ernie it turns out— on a bus in Jackson Hole. Barbarella was Coast or bust, but Henri found out he wanted to be back in time to take his SATs. Yours truly mediated, savior of the futures of the suburban middle class. I even called his mother and told her to expect him. His mother said, “And what about that Binder girl, Barbara, he was dating? Didn’t they run away together, that’s what everybody says!” I lied that I didn’t know anything about that. I did make Barbarella promise to call home as soon as we cross the Golden Gate.
The remaining four of us hiked up to a lake, still covered with ice, snow melting all around it, pristine. We stood there and let the cooling sweat give us the shivers while we watched winter turning into spring. That was a good feeling, a hopeful one. Then we hiked down to our homestead in the campground among the tent-trailers and Airstreams and Winnebagos and such. Foster played the flute, and Barbarella turned out to be damn good on harmonica. This morning two park rangers in Smokey the Bear hats woke us up. They came on like the law, not protectors of our flora and fauna and all. They said some of our neighbors had complained we had a rowdy party last night. They said there were families around us, families that cared what their kids had to look at, see. Ranger #2, who didn’t talk so much, spread his pudgy hand to take in the two sleeping bags out in the open, plus Foster and me having emerged together from the van. We were back on that Maryland highway, our belongings spread along the shoulder on display.
“Sir, we don’t make any loud party,” Foster said. He had on his best broken English, French accent. I knew he got off on getting over that way, he needed to stand up to them this much, but I wished he wouldn’t take chances he didn’t need to. For what? Yeah, and why did I pick up those cutters and slice through the chain link fence? Then I remembered something small but important. We hadn’t quite finished off the last of the hash last night. What was left, Barbarella had put in her film can where every cop, even a misguided park ranger, knows everybody holds their stash. Ranger #2 saw the can on the picnic table and took a step that way. We were going to get hauled in for possession, and Foster’s number was going to come up.
I coughed in Jay’s direction, he was closest. He looked up at me and followed my eyes. He screwed off the cap and dumped the contents into the milk and granola he was eating out of one of those fifty-cent plastic camp-out cups. He swallowed that spoonful fast and rinsed the can with milk while the ranger stared. “Sugar,” Jay told him. “Just get out,” the other ranger said. Under their watchful eyes we tossed our stuff in the van and left the Airstreams and Winnebagos behind.
Up the road a ways we parked the van and hiked a half mile up to a low meadow full of early wildflowers, nobody there but us. Foster sat and read, in his silent mode again. I tried to go back to sleep, my head in his lap. Jay announced that he couldn’t stay still because everything around him wasn’t, he felt the field rolling up like a carpet and carrying him away. Less poetically, he’d ingested quite a hunk of hashish and it was threatening to blow a hole in the top of his head. Barbarella volunteered to help him walk it off. About six hours later they came back, bathed in the light of love. I don’t know where our friend Jay will land once he finally finds his right mind, but apparently he speed-rapped all the way up a two-thousand-foot ridge, lots of it still in snow. On top he clung to Barbarella, each in their own way stunned by the view. Then he asked her to tell the story of her life, which he absorbed and explored obsessively all the way down. Now a romance with a mature and knowledgeable and hip and radical guy is making Barbarella’s escape from suburban St. Louis complete. It’s empowering to have taken care of such a guy in his hour of drug-induced need. I know all this because Barbara quickly dragged me off for a mother confessor heart-to-heart. I issued one of my map-and-plan warnings, suggesting he might be a little older, a little more jaded, might not be taking this as seriously as she. She said, “So, you didn’t know Foster, right, any better than I know Jay?” She tossed that at me with an adorable defiant look. “Anyway, right now it’s just an interlude, dig it? I’m not even telling the dude my whole name.”
So now I’m sisters-in-interlude with this precocious teenybopper. Meanwhile Foster chuckles and puts his arm around Jay and slaps him on the ass and like that. I sit here and smell the wildflowers and write down one more fortunate escape on this exceedingly charmed trip. In the distance there’s thunder, both literal and figurative, but I try not to let that in. It’s a two-line struggle, as the Maoists like to say. Everybody’s making love or else expecting rain.
Alex tapped the edges of the pages on the plastic meal tray attached to the seat in front of him, lining the pages up straight. All around him passengers were sleeping or reading or fidgeting, because there was no movie or dinner on the red-eye flight. He drained the residue of bourbon and melted ice from his plastic glass. All in all— maybe it was just the effect of Dee’s rendition— he’d rather be crossing the country more slowly, and seeing it, and tasting compressed resins of hemp rather than distilled fermented corn. But had he learned anything from Agnes Amelia Sturdevant that made it worth having crossed the country at all?
She would deliver his message to Foster if she could, Alex did believe that. If Foster was involved in the theft of Linda Dumars’s bone marrow, however, the message wouldn’t tell the man anything he didn’t know, beyond the name and phone and address of Jay’s hired hand. Foster himself wasn’t quite so shadowy anymore. He had a shape, a history, a personality, and so did this Barbarella, somewhat, and so did Dee. Alex tried to see Jay Harrison through their eyes, then and now. Did any of them know a secret he wouldn’t want known? Did any of them have a reason to want to see him hurt, humbled, or to want to make him pay through the nose?
Foster might resent the ease with which Jay had stepped back onto his career track, certainly. Jay said he’d worked nights in a lab to pay the rent while he supported military resisters, but once the war ended and he decided to go to medical school, he’d no doubt been able to call up Dad for help with the fees. Foster on the other hand would have come bac
k with a bad-paper discharge, no B.A., no vets benefits, no family money, no Dad. Yet Dee’s selections had ended on a note of comradeship, and all debts paid. If Dee had chosen to point anywhere, she was pointing toward Barbarella or that quickly eclipsed boyfriend, Henri. More likely she just wanted to convince Alex he was on a wild-goose chase.
Alex thought he ought to run the diary by Meredith, see whether her eye might pick up something his had missed. But he suspected another message from the kidnapper, however cryptic, would probably be worth a whole lot more than these pages that he was straightening once more against the tray.
15. Bobby
The man who was calling himself Bobby Lynch slid his spine slowly up against the padded backboard of the bed. He tried not to disturb the woman sleeping next to him because he didn’t want to explain where he was going now. It was one thing that they’d been drunk and rich together, and that they’d come back together to the room where they were registered as Mr. and Mrs. Lynch. Despite a lot of careful planning, he hadn’t planned one way or the other about her. Bringing her along on the spur of the moment had seemed like something Bobby might do. Guys named Bobby were like that— kind of vacant, impulsive and nonchalant. He hadn’t realized how much fun, what a relief it would turn out, this business of being somebody else. In advance, he’d only thought about the practical value of having another identity to use. As it turned out, though, he’d been playing with eating different things, drinking differently, and more.
They’d come back up here from their tour of the casinos, collapsed on the bed, and then he’d sunk the pickle, as somebody he had known somewhere used to say. As Bobby might say. And that had been fine for all concerned as near as he could tell. All along, she’d been a good sport if a gullible one, and that was one more reason he didn’t want to wake her up now. He didn’t want to have to concoct some new lie about where he was going and why, some new elaboration on exactly what they had sold for three hundred thousand dollars in cash.
He slid out from under the covers and smoothed the sheet over her white shoulders. It would be easier to just stay here, but he had an obligation to get up and drive to L.A. Or almost to L.A., since maybe he could use Riverside or San Bernardino, places he knew only from the map. It could be anyplace big and busy where people sent things out by Federal Express and where nobody’s memory would register any trace of him even as Bobby Lynch. He’d be one among a string of customers dropping their goods and their contracts and whatnot on the counter, anxious to speed these things on their way.
Once his package was shipped and delivered, his obligation would be over. One other wrinkle would remain to smooth out if possible, and then he’d have more freedom than he’d had in years. Soon he could go where he wanted and do what he wanted— what he decided he wanted— and that would surely be a change. He was giving serious thought to Mexico. Bobby didn’t seem like a good name for Mexico, but by then he could be leaving Bobby behind. Nice being you, man, and thanks for the loan.
He left a note, just saying he’d be back sometime in the afternoon. He might need to grab a nap, actually, before he could drive all the way back. He went quietly to the bathroom, not turning on the noisy shower but washing up and then putting on clothes that were clean and anonymous: a short-sleeved oxford cloth shirt, a pair of flannel slacks. He rode down in the elevator and went out into the casino, where it might as well have still been day.
Leaving here was harder. Here it wasn’t one sleeping woman, but a twenty-four-hour party that was still in full swing. He bought a drink and put some dollars in the dollar slots. God, how many different casinos they’d been in since they got here: turning cash into chips, winning or losing a few, and then turning the chips back into cash, but not the same cash, and then the new cash into bank checks and traveler’s checks. This was Las Vegas, and under the legal limits nobody looked twice at transactions like that. Probably none of this laundering was necessary, probably he was overestimating how easily the feds could locate specific serial numbers— if they were trying, if they’d been notified at all. But it was one more way that this trip to Las Vegas made up, ten times over, for having to skip it that other time.
He laughed when, in confirmation of this thought, one of his dollars brought him back ten. The whole thing had been a colossal gamble. No matter how well planned, it had been a gamble. He had told himself it wasn’t, it was a sure thing, but now that it had paid off he could admit what a gamble it had been. The payoff had been more than money, and more than turning defeat into victory. He was just starting to feel how big the payoff really was. The payoff was freedom, nothing more and nothing less. He bought one more drink and told himself that was the last one and now he’d just play those ten new dollars, no more. He kept his promise. He strolled through the casino, watching but not playing anymore, and then took the elevator downstairs to the garage.
You’re a little bit drunk, he told himself. You’re tired, even if you feel your nerves zinging like tight piano wires up at the high end of the keys. Driving the streets, he concentrated on red lights, on using his turn signals, because right now he didn’t need a ticket or a fender bender. The gamble had paid off, the theft had been as easy— if heart-stopping— as he’d thought it would be. There had been one glitch, one unforeseen screw-up, but that degree of error could hardly be avoided, after all. Accidents did happen, that was why they froze the stuff in two batches. But it meant that he had to take good care of the cooler holding the frozen marrow, which rested in the trunk of this rented car. In a few hours it would be on its way home to Mama and then everything ought to be okay.
You’ve made that mistake before, a voice told him, the mistake of relaxing too soon.
Just leave me alone, he told the voice. I’m not making it now.
In a few minutes he was on the highway, out of the traffic and the neon gallery, alone, just him piloting the fast car through the night. It felt great. It wasn’t for nothing that in this country the man in the driver’s seat was the symbol of success. Even if you could stack up the arguments against the automobile from here back to Boston, there was no denying the way it felt to do seventy-five through the desert this way. So many other kinds of success— and failure— involved doing what somebody else thought you ought to do. He pulled over into the breakdown lane, to get out and savor this night. The air was dry and comfortable. Overhead was an intense and powerful panorama of stars. He sat on the hood of the car, lay back against the windshield, looking up.…
With a start he pulled himself out of his doze. He’d have to get some coffee. People must drive this road at all hours, there had to be a lot of places you could get coffee, even now. Probably if you knew the right codes you could get more than coffee; benzedrine, whatever you needed. But at the first exit he passed, the gas station with the big tall Chevron sign was closed. He turned on the radio, and his nerves began zinging again. He thought of the marrow transplant unit, where people lived like zombies. They never got out, never felt any thrill of motion. Nothing changed for them except the numbers that came out of microscopes and machines.
The response of the car under his hands and his foot grew more exhilarating, the speed an extension of himself. He drummed in time to the music, an oldies station, a Rolling Stones tune, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Not always, but sometimes. Right now everything felt right. It even amused him to be Bobby Lynch, Robert Michael Lynch, according to his driver’s license. That name appeared next to the photo that was obviously of him.
Sometimes the name, which had popped up by accident, did scare him, yes. But he hadn’t wanted the clerk to particularly remember anything, so he hadn’t prolonged the occasion by fishing through the lists longer than necessary. The next day he’d gone down to the records department at the statehouse with all the necessary information. His blood had raced as fast as when, later, he’d walked out with the marrow. Would this method still work, he’d wondered? It had. He’d come away with a birth certificate that said he was Robert M. Lynch.
From then on he’d tried to laugh at the prophecy that he’d finish strung up from a tree. He’d tried to settle into the name the same way you could settle in behind the wheel of a rental car like this Buick Skylark here. You put the car through its paces, but mostly you took it for granted. This was temporary, not a permanent relationship, nobody whose long-term quirks and strengths and weaknesses you had to get to know. Acquiring his papers had been a milestone, the first mile down the road that had brought him here now.
Now there were opportunities to stop for coffee, two of them in fact, but the man registered in Las Vegas under the name of Bobby Lynch passed them up. Then, an hour out of Vegas, there was nothing. The names on the infrequent signs weren’t even real names, just labels. Maybe that was prophetic. In any case, whatever had allowed him to operate beyond his capacity ran out midway between a place called Mountain Pass and another one called Valley Wells.
He nodded off again. The Skylark veered into the median strip, not flying, just bouncing. If he’d been more alert he might have been able to understand what was happening and bounce his way back up unto the pavement without mishap. But alert did not accurately describe his condition anymore.
He woke to bouncing springs and bumpy noises and the wheel going nuts under his hands. In a flash he concluded he must have driven off the right shoulder into the desert. He hit the brakes and threw the wheel to the left. That sent him swerving onto the other strip of concrete, the lanes headed back toward Vegas, the lanes for gamblers who hadn’t yet won or lost. Seeing headlights coming from his right and a guardrail ahead, he threw the wheel further and hit the gas this time. Now he didn’t have any idea where he was. He just knew he needed to outrun the lights bearing down on him. The car rolled in protest against the turning radius and the speed. It flipped over the rail and crashed down into the hard-baked desert.
