"Fifteen hours. Twenty, maybe. Depends on the roads -- you can hit
cottage traffic or a bad accident and get hung up for hours. There are
good motels between Huntsville and North Bay if we get tired out. Nice
neon signs, magic fingers beds. A place I like has 'Swiss Cabins' and
makes a nice rosti for dinner."
"God, that's a long trip," she said.
"Yeah," he said, wondering if she wanted out. "I can pull off here and
give you cab fare to the subway station if you wanna stay."
"No!" she said quickly. "No. Want to go."
#
She fed him as he drove, slicing cheese and putting it on crackers with
bits of olive or pepper or salami. It appeared that she'd packed his
entire fridge in the picnic bags.
After suppertime, she went to work on an apple, and he took a closer
look at the knife she was using. It was a big, black hunting knife, with
a compass built into the handle. The blade was black except right at the
edge, where it gleamed sharp in the click-clack of the passing highway
lights.
He was transfixed by it, and the car drifted a little, sprayed gravel
from the shoulder, and he overcorrected and fishtailed a little. She
looked up in alarm.
"You brought the knife," he said, in response to her unasked question.
"Couldn't leave it with him," she said. "Besides, a sharp knife is
handy."
"Careful you don't slice anything off, okay?"
"I never cut anything *unintentionally*," she said in a silly-dramatic
voice, and socked him in the shoulder.
He snorted and went back to the driving, putting the hammer down, eating
up the kilometers toward Huntsville and beyond.
She fed him slices of apple and ate some herself, then rolls of ham with
little pieces of pear in them, then sips of cherry juice from a glass
bottle.
"Enough," he said at last. "I'm stuffed, woman!"
She laughed. "Skinny little fucker -- gotta put some meat on your
bones." She tidied the dinner detritus into an empty shopping bag and
tossed it over her shoulder into the back seat.
"So," she said. "How long since you've been home?"
He stared at the road for a while. "Fifteen years," he said. "Never been
back since I left."
She stared straight forward and worked her hand under his thigh, so he
was sitting on it, then wriggled her knuckles.
"I've never been home," she said.
He wrinkled his brow. "What's that mean?" he said.
"It's a long story," she said.
"Well, let's get off the highway and get a room and you can tell me,
okay?"
"Sure," she said.
#
They ended up at the Timberline Wilderness Lodge and Pancake House, and
Mimi clapped her hands at the silk-flowers-and-waterbeds ambience of the
room, fondled the grisly jackalope head on the wall, and started running
a tub while Alan carried in the suitcases.
She dramatically tossed her clothes, one item at a time, out the
bathroom door, through the clouds of steam, and he caught a glimpse of
her round, full ass, bracketed by her restless wings, as she poured into
the tub the bottle of cheap bubble-bath she'd bought in the lobby.
He dug a T-shirt and a fresh pair of boxers to sleep in out of his
suitcase, feeling ridiculously modest as he donned them. His feet
crunched over cigarette burns and tangles in the brown shag carpet and
he wished he'd brought along some slippers. He flipped through both
snowy TV channels and decided that he couldn't stomach a televangelist
or a thirty-year-old sitcom right then and flicked it off, sitting on
the edge of the bed, listening to the splashing from the bathroom.
Mimi was in awfully good spirits, considering what she'd been through
with Krishna. He tried to think about it, trying to make sense of the
day and the girl, but the splashing from the tub kept intruding on his
thoughts.
She began to sing, and after a second he recognized the tune. "White
Rabbit," by the Jefferson Airplane. Not the kind of thing he'd expect
her to be giving voice to; nor she, apparently, for she kept breaking
off to giggle. Finally, he poked his head through the door.
She was folded into the tub, knees and tits above the foamline, wings
slick with water and dripping in the tile. Her hands were out of sight
beneath the suds. She caught his eye and grinned crazily, then her hands
shot out of the pool, clutching the hunting knife.
"*Put on the White Rabbit!*" she howled, cackling fiendishly.
He leapt back and she continued to cackle. "Come back, come back," she
choked. "I'm doing the tub scene from *Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas*. I thought you were into reading?"
He cautiously peeked around the doorjamb, playing it up for comic
effect. "Give me the knife," he said.
"Awww," she said, handing it over, butt first. He set it down on the
dresser, then hurried back to the bathroom.
"Haven't you read all those books?"
Alan grinned. "What's the point of a bunch of books you've already
read?" He dropped his boxers and stripped off his T-shirt and climbed
into the tub, sloshing gallons of water over the scummy tile floor.
#
When I was two years old,
(she said, later, as she reclined against the headboard and he reclined
against her, their asses deforming the rusted springs of the mattress so
that it sloped toward them and the tins of soda they'd opened to
replenish their bodily fluids lost in sweat and otherwise threatened to
tip over on the slope; she encased him in her wings, shutting out the
light and filling their air with the smell of cinnamon and pepper from
the downy hair)
When I was two years old,
(she said, speaking into the shaggy hair at the back of his neck, as his
sore muscles trembled and as the sweat dried to a white salt residue on
his skin, as he lay there in the dark of the room and the wings,
watching the constellation of reflected clock-radio lights in the black
TV screen)
When I was two years old,
(she began, her body tensing from toes to tip in a movement that he felt
along the length of his body, portending the time when lovers close
their eyes and open their mouths and utter the secrets that they hide
from everyone, even themselves)
When I was two years old, my wings were the size of a cherub's, and they
had featherlets that were white as snow. I lived with my "aunt," an old
Russian lady near Downsview Air Force Base, a blasted suburb where the
shops all closed on Saturday for Sabbath and the black-hatted Hasids
marked the days by walking from one end to the other on their way to
temple.
The old Russian lady took me out for walks in a big black baby buggy the
size of a bathtub. She tucked me in tight so that my wings were pinned
beneath me. But when we were at home, in her little apartment with the
wind-up Sputnik that played "The Internationale," she would let my wings
out and light the candles and watch me wobble around the room, my wings
flapping, her chin in her hands, her eyes bright. She made me mashed up
cabbage and seed and beef, and bottles of dilute juice. For dessert, we
had hard candies, and I'd toddle around with my toys, drooling sugar
syrup while the old Russian lady watched.
By the time I was four, the feathers had all fallen out, and I was
supposed to go to school, I knew that. "Auntie" had explained to me that
the kids that I saw passing by were on their way to school, and that I'd
go some day and learn, too.
She didn't speak much English, so I grew up speaking a creole of
Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and English, and I used my words to ask her,
with more and more insistence, when I'd get to go to class.
I couldn't read or write, and neither could she. But I could take apart
gadgets like nobody's business. Someone -- maybe Auntie's long dead
husband -- had left her a junky tool kit with cracked handles and
chipped tips, and I attacked anything that I could get unplugged from
the wall: the big cabinet TV and radio, the suitcase record player, the
Sputnik music box. I unwired the lamps and peered at the workings of the
electric kitchen clock.
That was four. Five was the year I put it all back together again. I
started with the lamps, then the motor in the blender, then the toaster
elements. I made the old TV work. I don't think I knew how any of it
*really* worked -- couldn't tell you a thing about, you know, electrical
engineering, but I just got a sense of how it was *supposed* to go
together.
Auntie didn't let me out of the apartment after five. I could watch the
kids go by from the window -- skinny Hasids with side-curls and
Filipinos with pretty ribbons and teenagers who smoked, but I couldn't
go to them. I watched *Sesame Street* and *Mr. Dressup* and I began to
soak up English. I began to soak up the idea of playing with other kids.