In another few seconds the man walked off, and the woman stood there, talking to herself. “It was a wig,” she kept saying.
John Joel gestured for Parker to come on. Parker paid no attention, and John Joel decided to give him ten more seconds and then start walking. Parker was crazy if he thought the woman wasn’t going to turn on him and start giving him a rough time if he continued to stand there. Parker was always getting involved in situations where he’d put his face in the middle of something. It was happening now; the woman, slowly realizing that Parker was there, was turning toward him, complaining. Parker listened, a silly smirk on his face. Then, after a few sentences, he interrupted the woman, and John Joel was amazed to hear him asking her if she believed in the Kingdom of Heaven. “The real Kingdom of Heaven,” she said to Parker loudly. “Not some man in a wig. That magazine wasn’t really about Heaven.” And then John Joel watched as Parker said something he couldn’t understand. The woman didn’t get it, either; she leaned forward and cocked her head. She stopped talking. Parker was doing all the talking. He was holding out the picture to her, still in its wrapping, telling her that the other man was just testing her, and that she had passed the test. Her reward was a picture of herself in the Afterlife. The woman began swaying as he talked to her. “Who are you?” John Joel heard the woman say. She began to back away from Parker. The crowds were thinning out. They were going to miss the train. He decided to give him five more seconds, and then walk away. Parker was getting into another one of his crazy routines, and what he was doing was sure not to make any sense. He stared, along with the woman, as Parker fanned his shirt away from his body with one hand, then pushed the package toward her. “You might as well see it,” Parker said. “This is who you’re going to be.” The woman reached out for the package just as John Joel turned and began to walk quickly toward the train. There wasn’t going to be a seat, just because Parker was so crazy, just because he was always kidding around. He turned to see Parker running behind him and the woman ripping open the package. A man with a beer can in his hand and a briefcase in his armpit rushed past her, past John Joel and Parker, mumbling to himself.
“Now what are you going to tell your mother?” John Joel said.
“I gave it away, didn’t I?” Parker said. “Didn’t I tell you?”
John Joel sat down in the first seat he saw. He didn’t care if Parker stood all the way. But when he turned around he saw that Parker had found a seat not far behind him. John Joel had been right about feeling Parker staring at the back of his head. Okay: So Parker had given away the picture, if that meant so much to him. He wondered why he felt guilty himself; he wondered if the right thing to do wasn’t to get off the train and run back and try to get the picture, if the crazy woman was still there. The doors closed and the train started to move out of the station. They hadn’t bought éclairs, and he was hungry. He had the nervous feeling in his stomach that meant he ought to eat something soon. He decided he’d get some peanuts from the bar car. Walking down the aisle past Parker, he was surprised to see that Parker had his bandanna out, and was rubbing his eyes. Parker was crying. Sitting on the train, crying. John Joel kept walking, and pretended not to know him.
When they got off the train, John Joel waited on the platform for Parker. He half thought that Parker wouldn’t get off, but he did. His eyes weren’t red and the bandanna was back in his pocket. Parker had gotten so sweaty that his shirt clung to him in rivulets of wrinkles. Parker shook his head to the side, and if his hair hadn’t been so damp, it would have fallen across his forehead the way Parker liked it to. He gave up and smoothed it straight back, and as he walked, he took a cigarette out of the package and put it in his mouth. He did his trick of lighting a match by bending one forward, closing the book, and striking it with his thumb. He held the match to the cigarette and shook the flame out.
“I’m walking,” Parker said.
“Walking? All the way home? You’d never be able to walk all the way home.”
“She won’t do shit to me,” Parker said. “She knows I’d tell the shrink. She’s gonna be half-crocked by the time I get home anyway.”
“Come on, Parker. Call”
“I’m not going to New York with you anymore,” Parker said.
John Joel sighed and kept walking. He felt guilty about the picture being gone and didn’t know why. It wasn’t his fault. Parker was always acting crazy, and it was his mother’s fault for asking him to do an errand like that. He tried to imagine what his own mother would do if she had sent him for a picture and he had done what Parker did. She’d probably find some way to start talking about her dog. It would probably remind her of her dog.
“You’ll get your money,” Parker said. “Give me the stubs and I’ll show them to her and you’ll get your money.”
John Joel reached in his pants pocket. His pants were tight, and he had to worm his finger down hard to bring up the two small ticket stubs. He handed them to Parker, and Parker smiled.
“Now, watch,” Parker said. Parker stopped on the sidewalk, away from where everybody was walking. He put one stub on top of the other and squatted. John Joel knew what he was going to do. He was going to light them.
He wanted to fight with Parker. He was afraid of getting hurt, but he was so tired of Parker and his craziness that he wanted to hit him. Instead, before he really thought about it, he tried to push Parker over, but Parker just braced himself with his left arm and didn’t fall. His right hand was already holding the burning match to the ticket stubs.
Some man with a briefcase looked over his shoulder at the two of them, and John Joel met the man’s eyes. The man gave a little smile and kept walking. John Joel kept watching him, but he went into the bar across from the station without turning around again. John Joel stared at the door of the bar, at the other people walking in. Then he shrugged and sighed and looked down at Parker.
“Big deal. So you burned them,” John Joel said. “You don’t want to be friends, we don’t have to be friends.”
He walked away. He hoped that Parker wouldn’t follow him, because he thought there was going to be a fight. Only he didn’t think that he was going to start it anymore: He thought that Parker was. He kept walking and didn’t turn around. He was trying to think where the nearest phone was, so that he could call his mother to come get him. As he walked, he kept thinking of the woman in the picture, and how ugly some women could be. He wondered what Parker’s mother was going to do to him, whether Parker might not tell her what he’d really done.
Then she was there: Parker’s mother, in the Oldsmobile convertible, a white visor pulled low on her forehead. She played tennis all day and got very tan in the summer. When she pulled over and raised her hand to wave, John Joel saw she had a sweatband on her wrist.