49
Andrew emerges from his bathroom, carrying the little duffel he took to New Orleans. No baggage claim, no bored security guards watching you walk past the point of no return; fuck you, Homeland Security. The day a user decides to go terrorist is going to be a bad day indeed.
His phone, temporarily confused, and perhaps insulted, by the rapid shift from Central to Eastern Time zones, resets itself and chimes the arrival of a text message it had temporarily misplaced.
Anneke Zautke
Dad’s on the way out. Don’t come. I’ll keep you posted though. Sorry & thanks. God damn this anyway.
Und zo.
He goes upstairs, sits on the edge of his bed, and peels off his Old Gringos. The warm, animal smell of his own feet hits him—it was so hot in the Quarter—and he notices a hole that will soon allow his big toe to peep through his sock.
Time to get rid of these.
Knot them together and give them to the dog to chew.
Only the dog isn’t a dog now.
As if summoned, Salvador knocks at the door frame, keeping politely out of sight, the clack of wood on wood startling the tired magus.
“Come in,” he says, almost adding boy.
Isn’t a dog.
Then what the fuck is he?
A monster. You’ve turned him into something unnatural, as you do with everything. He should be a handful of ashes on the breeze. He should be chasing rabbits in Elysium.
Will you put Karl Zautke’s heart in a basket and make him wash your boxers, too?
Salvador walks in, the Etch-a-Sketch he uses to communicate hanging by a leather cord around his wicker neck. The knobs turn themselves, and black-on-gray letters appear.
“Closer, Sal, I can’t see.”
The automaton lopes close, the knobs still turning.
Salvador has cleaned up the media room and put in a new television.
He chopped garlic because, even though he doesn’t know what Andrew wants to eat, it will certainly contain garlic.
“I’ll cook. Thanks.”
Boy.
I can’t even scratch your ears now.
The picture frame cocks, Salvador Dalí’s head now at a quizzical angle. He wants further orders. Just like a border collie, happier with a task.
He always asks who cooks even though Andrew hasn’t let him near the gas range since he caught himself on fire two years ago. But he’s not afraid of fire, not afraid of anything except displeasing his master.
What else has he got?
Me.
He just has me.
Andrew stands up, puts on the orange running shoes Anneke teases him about, and grabs a tennis ball from the closet. They go into the backyard. For the next half an hour, Andrew throws the ball and the wicker man sprints on his synthetic legs to grab it, scooping it with his wooden hands as nimbly as an outfielder, then throwing it back to his master. When it goes into the brush, Salvador turns his framed head sideways so it doesn’t drag branches.
John Dawes, the neighbor across the street, watches with military binoculars, can’t figure out for the life of him why the Spanish-looking butler would play catch with the strange bachelor, both of them laughing, only one of them soaked with sweat when they go back into the house.
It isn’t the strangest thing he’s seen at 4700 Willow Fork Road, though.
Not by half.
Dusk is coming on.
Andrew’s fingers are yellow with turmeric and his squash soup is boiling when the phone chimes again.
He knows what it says.
Anneke Zautke
Dog tell, og tell.
Let Go, Let God.
Elvis has left the building.
Out of nowhere he cries.
For his dead policeman father.
For his dead user mentor.
But also for Anneke, who’ll have to learn for herself how hard it is when the second parent goes. How real it gets when you’re sweating down into the cardboard boxes bound for Goodwill and the Salvation Army. When the other parent isn’t there to tell you stories from before you were born. When you go in the attic and the plastic tchotchkes crumble in your hand, and you sob like a bitch when you realize your mom saved a little bundle of report cards from third and fourth grade because they said something nice about her kid.
About you.
And that those cards waited in that peeling old folder for your adult hand to fish them out and throw them away because there’s just nobody else in this world who’ll ever give a damn about them again.
Maybe you really and finally grow up when you see the wall behind the last box of mysteries and it’s just a wall.
Your wall now.
50
Andrew drives with the foreknowledge that he will see at least one deer, which has nothing to do with magic; these farm-mottled woods are teeming with them, and they fling themselves across the roads with such abandon that wise drivers scan the margins of the trees. Their once-balletic bodies lie strewn from here to Buffalo, and if more of them are visible on the great deer-killing buzz saw that is Interstate 81, that’s only because the highway department cuts the grass there. Here in the sticks they tumble into ditches choked with greenery, hidden from the eyes of motorists, but advertising their spoiling perfume every few miles to those who go on foot or bicycle or in the slow, open tractors that beetle along between farms.
Andrew is not beetling tonight.
He has opened up the Mustang’s 302 and it roars like something hungry, like something that has been waiting too long to run.
It is the day after Karl’s death, two days before his funeral, and Karl’s daughter is drunk. She has a lapful of her dad’s PBR and a bottle of Tullamore Dew between her feet, and she has turned the volume knob up almost as high as it goes. One of the classic rock stations; Andrew switches between them at every commercial, so he rarely knows which one he’s listening to. Whichever one it is, “From the Beginning” plays so loudly Andrew has to shout to speak to Anneke.
“Look!” he says, pointing across the road to his left, where a doe stands so still she might be made of felt, her eyes blazing coke-bottle green in the headlights, a tiara of fireflies winking about her head. Anneke does not look, just hangs her heavy shag of hair down and does her best to sing along with the radio. Ignorance of a song’s lyrics is not proving to be an impediment to Anneke tonight.
Andrew readies his hand above the horn and readies his foot for braking, but the doe does not stir, and, as always with her kind, he wonders afterward if he has really seen her.
Now he relaxes.
He has seen his nightly deer.
Anneke is watching the road now.
Andrew is tempted to do that naughty thing he used to do quite often in the days before sobriety—the very thing he had been doing when he wrecked the ’65.
Yes, let’s do this.
When he sees that the road is empty of traffic both coming and going, he slows to twenty miles per hour. He cuts his headlights now so they can see the ballet of fireflies where they twinkle in the low places on the farms to right and left.