Sybil was gone, off talking to a chubby middle-aged man. She laughed hysterically at something he said, bending over and clutching her stomach, and the man smiled, looking unsure of what was so funny.
“So how do you know Sybil?” Lowell asked me.
“Just met her. At the conference.”
“You think she’s good-looking?”
I looked across the bar at her. “Sure, she’s okay,” I said.
“She keeps saying she’s ugly and fat. That girl is not fat.”
“No.” I took a sip of beer. It tasted good, thick and sharp like carbonated coffee. I wanted to change the subject. “So what got you into cartooning?”
He pressed me with a long, suspicious look. “What, because a black guy isn’t supposed to be a cartoonist?”
“Well, no, not exactly…”
“We do read the papers, you know.”
“Oh, of course, I just…”
He suddenly looked at his watch and then out the door, into the hotel lobby. “I gotta see a man about a horse,” he said, and was gone. I watched him as he left, talked into a pay phone for a few minutes and headed for the door.
“Mix! Tim Mix!” I felt a hand clap my shoulder, hard enough to make me stumble. It was attached to a telephone-booth-shaped man in his sixties whom I’d never before seen. He looked like a retired sportscaster, with his large gold watch and a puffy red face that seemed to have had a few dents knocked out of it. “You’re the spittin’ image of your old man, Godblessisoul.”
“Oh! Really? Well…”
“You know who I am? Last time you saw me you were a little shaver!”
“Ah, I can’t say I do.”
“‘Course, I might not’ve recognized you if it weren’t for that name tag.” He pointed. In fact, I was still wearing my conference name tag and apparently had been wearing it all through dinner at Bobby’s. It struck me as extremely odd that no one had mentioned it. Then I got a funny feeling that this might be the sort of person to poke me in the face while I was looking at my shirt, and I quickly raised my head.
“I’m sorry, I just…”
“Les Parr! ‘Nuts and Bolts,’ second-longest running strip drawn by the same fella in the history of comics, thanks to that Kearns, goddam him!”
“Wow,” I said. “I’ve read your strip my whole life.”
He laughed. “Thanks, thanks,” he said, though it wasn’t a compliment. “Nuts and Bolts” was set in a garage in some rural backwater. All sorts of colorful country folk stumbled in and out of it each day with their dented pickup trucks and cobbled-together farm machines, and engaged Cappy, the plucky mechanic full of folk wisdom, in slangy conversation. Occasionally they all headed for the hills in search of earthy adventure, like discovering a moonshine still or shooting squirrels for stew. The humor, such as it was, depended heavily on the readers’ conviction that the country was quaint and inherently funny. Apparently many people believed this, because the strip had hung on since 1945, when Cappy came back from the war. “Art’s Kids” was said to have begun publication a few scant weeks before “Nuts and Bolts,” and I had heard this was Leslie Parr’s pet subject.
He grabbed my arm just below the elbow and leaned close, reeking of aftershave. I adjusted my estimation of his age to a particularly hale early seventies. “Your pop was a great man. A great man.”
I made a little room between us by sipping my drink. “Hey, thanks.”
“It’s got class, that Family Funnies. Not like a couple strips I could name.”
“Well, I’m really enjoying work—”
He let go my arm, leaving a hand-shaped cool spot of sweat in its wake, and formed the hand into the shape of a pistol, which he brandished before me. “You know ‘N and B’ really got started a year before Kearns? Had a little strip in a small-town paper in Northern California. Called ‘The Shoehorn Gang.’ Wasn’t strictly ‘N and B’ but it was, whaddyacallit, its spiritual cousin.” From Parr’s mouth, the words “spiritual cousin” fell like lead weights at our feet. “Just because it doesn’t have the same name, those ninnies disqualify it. Of course, Kearns’s got ‘em wrapped around his little toe. Old man doesn’t even draw the damned thing anymore.”
“He doesn’t?”
“He’s a quivering fogy!” Parr produced a drink, something clear that magnified his fingers through the glass, and downed it in a single swig. “Can barely hold a pen!”
“So who does it?”
He leaned back, gesturing in the air with his beefy arm, as if it were the entire world supporting the great fraud that was Art Kearns and “Art’s Kids.” “Minions! Flunkies! Whatever! Living out there on that bogus ranch of his, nodding his little white head.” He reached out to the bar — what seemed an impossible distance — and slammed down the empty glass. “You and me, kid. Nothing to worry about there. We‘re the real thing.”
* * *
It was nearly midnight when the unfolding spectacle of Midnight Angel came into full bloom, like a poisonous species of daisy. “Is this on?” asked the singer without irony. She gave her tambourine a tentative shake. She had the long blotchy nose of a border collie and cheeks sunken enough to eat soup out of. Her partner, camped out behind the synthesizers, had his shaggy head tipped back and was squeezing a bottle of eye drops several inches above his face. He turned to the crowd and blinked dramatically, his mouth hanging wide open.
I was groping for the car keys when Sybil grabbed my hand and dragged me from the bar. “Igotta showya somethin’,” she said. She was drunk, but seemed not to have lost her manual dexterity. We hopped into an elevator and she pushed the button for the fifth floor. I couldn’t remember the hotel being so tall. As we rode, she stared at me with a detached intensity that made me feel like I was about to be dissected. I watched my reflection in the polished steel doors.
Of course I knew what was going on: a blunt, clumsy seduction. I didn’t want to be a party to it, but still I followed, stumbling puppily behind her. We went to her room. She used a little magnetic credit card to open the door, then told me to follow her to the bathroom, where she began running hot water into the tub.
I thought of Lowell’s question: did I think she was good-looking? Now, watching her watch me in the bathroom mirror, I thought, Yeah, Lowell, sure she is. But she was the wrong woman. Her pocket was still full of black pens. “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “I can’t.” And I fled.
twenty-five
It was nearly quarter to one when I pulled into the driveway at Bobby’s house. The device he had given me to open the garage door was bulky and crude, considering the general level of immaculate newness in the house. It had three large green buttons on it, each the size and shape of dominoes, and looked like something the Army would use to detonate explosives in the desert. I pressed each of the three buttons and nothing happened. I pressed harder. A light blinked on and a sound issued from the garage like a piece of heavy road machinery; the door rumbled slowly up on metal tracks.
Inside the house, no lights burned. Moonlight guided me to a guest bedroom, where I assumed I would be staying. Nancy (or someone) had put fresh white sheets on the bed and stacked several salmon-colored bath towels at its foot, along with matching hand towels and washcloths. The walls were covered with beige carpeting.
There was a nightstand next to the bed. I flopped myself across the comforter, making a tremendous squeak and upsetting the stack of towels, and pulled open the drawer: nothing. I was mildly surprised, having half-expected a Gideon’s Bible and a little pile of hotel stationery. It was the latter that I wanted.
I crept back into the hall. Bedsprings creaked behind a door: Bobby and Nancy? Sam? In the kitchen, I opened and closed drawers, looking for paper and a pen in the light of the digital microwave oven timer. I found both under the telephone, and a small safety envelope. Back in the guest room I undressed and got into the bed. The sheets had been tucked tightly under the mattress, and I left them that way, letting myself be sandwiched between them. It felt like I was lying at the bottom of a shallow sea. I propped my head up on the pillows and examined my implements: the pen was a black ballpoint with UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT stamped on it and the pad, perhaps a bit small for my needs, had the punchline from a lightbulb joke printed at the bottom of each page. I looked for the joke setups but didn’t find any.