Mr. Gong steadied himself. He was only leading Bancroft by one stroke. He had taken a decent sized lead at the beginning of the back nine, but for some reason he just couldn’t hit on 14 to 17. So Bancroft had caught up, grinning wildly, a man who has seen his five lottery numbers come out of the machine and is waiting for the Powerball.
If only he could stop thinking about Brad. Memories kept coming back. On hole 14, he remembered Brad on the driving range at age 13, complaining bitterly about an afternoon wasted. Mr. Gong hadn’t yelled at him, just coldly told his son to walk back home. Brad had stalked off and Mr. Gong drove after him, looking but Brad had taken a shortcut through a subdivision and so Mr. Gong spent an anguished hour driving around while Brad sat in the living room watching TV. When he finally got home, he was so angry that he yanked the plug out of the socket, and Brad was so scared.
Brad had cried that whole afternoon and Mr. Gong told him to think about how immature he was being. Really he’d just done what his father had told him. Memories like this were hell on the putting state of mind. So he forced himself to think of something nicer for hole 16.
Something nicer? Come on, he was losing his tournament! This was not helping anything. And so he tried to relax.
He thought of a white pillar that was his mind.
The Bard saw the blue dot stop in Macon on his map. He took the turnoff, cackling as he went. They thought they had a good lead on him. They’d gotten cocky. They were probably stuffing their faces with pancakes and such. He’d show up behind, and bust up their brunch. The thought of food rumbled his belly.
When had he grown so attached to food? As a very young child, he’d been a picky eater. His favorite foods were various shades of green: pears, broccoli, beans. But he wouldn’t eat much else. When the Bard turned twelve, the growth spurt took everyone by surprise. He was hungry all the time. His mother bought whatever he wanted, thinking that this was just a passing phase and she needed to load him up while she could, like a train merely slowing down through a resupply station.
The Bard still remembered the first day he’d looked in the mirror and seen fat cheeks looking back. Unrecognizable. It was as if someone had entered his room the previous night and replaced his old tall skinny scrawny form with a different one. The funny thing was how he had finally grown into his frame and then his frame had just kept on going.
The map’s lines blurred and reshaped into closer detail of Macon. He followed the dot to the Waffle House parking lot. But there was no 4Runner there. He parked the Tercel poorly and leapt out of the car. Maybe she was cloaking the damn car somehow. But no. As he stepped away, he spied the broken wreckage on the ground. The dealer had never shown him the tracker, but it had the same lost antique décor as the rest of his gadgets and he knew that this was what had been guiding him to the muse and was now guiding him to this frickin’ parking lot in the middle of nowhere.
“I’ll show you,” he thought and went back to the car to get his satchel. He rummaged through the pocket where he kept the seeker marble. His scrabbling fingers closed on dirty seams. It was empty. He opened the box with the ring that he usually used. Nothing. He tried the main compartment. He dumped everything out onto the passenger seat, sifting through it and garnering paper cuts from the random sheet music he hadn’t filed yet.
A sick feeling washed through his considerably large stomach, numbing his body from the inside to the out. He rechecked everything he had already checked but as he turned the bag over and saw the duct tape repair job he remembered the spill onto the floor at the motel. He closed his eyes, trying to undo this turn of events through sheer force of will and regret. He was out of tricks. Out of gadgets. And the dealer would be out of patience.
Oh well. While he was at Waffle House, he might as well have some waffles. They might be the last meal his boss would let him have.
“You boys know anything about the casino business?” Esmerelda asked her regulars.
“You mean playing or running?”
“Playing, Dave.”
Dave Cramden took off his hat and ho-hoed. Around him the other regulars shifted slightly away. School with Prof. Dave was about to be in session and they wanted to be ready to go when he got in full spiel mode.
“Well, I’ll tell you ‘smerelda, the only game they got that you can beat is blackjack. But you got to be able to count the cards, see. That lets you maximize your chances, see.” He spoke as if he had put such a system into practice most weekends, when he wasn’t off skiing or scuba diving in places that weren’t Indiana.
“And you got to be willing to lose. That’s what most beginners don’t know. They think they count the cards they just win and win and win. But that’s just not possible. You got to lose to win.”
“How much you have to lose?” she asked as the other regulars made a hasty exit. She’d responded to the bait and now he was ready to expound and spread the knowledge he’d gleaned over the many times he’d been to the casino (three, and one time he only stayed for forty minutes).
“Oh, see, when I go, I take three hundred. Any less and you’re just not going to be able to stick with it long enough to see all the cards. Unless you’re really good at seeing the patterns, you know?” With this disclaimer out on the table, then if someone blabbed about that one time that he’d lost his entire stake in less than an hour, he could say that the patterns just didn’t look good and he left early.
Esmerelda stood with a pot of coffee in a cocked arm, considering. She thought about that hundred in chips, saw it dwindle, saw the last chip raked away by a red vested dealer in a scummy room thick with tobacco and the smell of armpit. The vision she’d had of the big bills and devil may care grin faded away. This was not how she should use the money.
“Hey, ‘smerelda,” Dave called. “If you go, you should go with me. I’m good luck.” He dropped an eyelid in a come hither look that prompted her to go thither to refill other coffee cups and other hopes for the hundred.
Brad did some fuzzy math with the numbers on the TripTik. They had about 240 miles until Ocala. Some additional fuzzy math said that if they kept up their speed of 80 mph, they would be there in 3 hours. Just in time for an early dinner with Kate.
The CD playing was Ben Folds’ solo disc and Brad was bopping his hands on the steering wheel, pretending to play chords and generally trying to entertain his suddenly silent passenger. Callie fussed with her bag. She readjusted her seat. She pulled her beret low, then high. She seemed embarrassed to talk, as much as she was ever bashful. She just kept fidgeting, drawing his eyes with her movement and then freezing when he moved his head to the right.
“I was planning on spending a couple days with Kate. For the funeral, you know. But we can just breeze on through and get food. Then we’ll go to Miami and then on the way back I’ll hang out a few more days.” “After you leave me,” he continued in his head. He’d grown used the possibility that she could read his thoughts like a reality show contestant forgetting the cameras. There was no more censorship, no more apologizing for stray images or sentences.
Callie made no sign of having tuned in to BrainRadio Brad. “That sounds fine.” She went back to fussing with a bag strap, undoing it, doing it, undoing it, forgetting how to do it.
They passed Cordele. Brad drove with the cruise control set and his feet firmly on the floor, which freaked him out because his usual car had none of these conveniences. Every time a car in front started to get closer, he’d turn off the cruise control and readjust his speed. He guessed he was too type A to really enjoy having his foot off accelerator or brake.
Mr. Gong shook Mr. Bancroft’s hand. Good sport. Here we go now. Back to the locker room. Then up to the bar to toast the winner. He walked slowly, head and shoulders up, but eyes not focused on anything but the image of his last putt curving awry. His feet knew the way back up the clubhouse path. He could trust his feet. Just not his arms, his arms had failed him at the end.
He pulled the door open half heartedly, but then needed to apply a bit more force to the heavy wood door to actually open it. Down the steps, through the locker room doors and there he was at his locker as he’d been four and a half hours ago. Sat again on the perfect wood bench. He removed his golf shoes and pulled on the loafers. The crisp new leather smell poked his nose. No tears in his eyes, but a prickle in the nose. He looked around the room and saw no one. Clasped his hands.
“Your will, God. But… why?”
Mr. Gong walked back out into the main area and padded up the stairs to the bar. Bancroft was buying drinks for everyone, cleats still on his feet in blatant violation of club rules. Their presence more than anything else on the man’s face spoke to his victory. He was headed on up the ladder.
“How you doing, Gong? Let me get you a drink.”
“Thank you, Mark. I’ll have a root beer.”
“Got to be sober, right?” Bancroft wished he would just get a real beer and get tipsy enough to not care too much about the tournament. He couldn’t really get a read on the man’s face.
Mr. Gong drank his root beer quickly enough to put a carbonation spike in his head and then left as quickly as was polite.
Louie braced himself for the endless procession of aunts and uncles and well meaning family friends who kept appearing at his dad’s old home to visit and pay their respects. This wasn’t going to be a rousing wake, but that’s not what he really expected. Louie only wanted to meet one of his grandmother’s old friends. He wished that he could talk to elderly people without that are-you-deaf quality creeping into his voice. But no matter how he tried to suppress it, it crept back in around the edges, lifting his voice into a lilting parody of its regular self. And you couldn’t get anything of import into that voice, just platitudes and scripted pleasantries. Because you’d probably have to repeat yourself and then the conversation would grind to a halt. Who could understand anything said in that little kid tone?
You couldn’t ask, “What did my grandmother like to do with her free time, and what did she like about doing it?” “How did she cope with losing Grandfather?” “If she could do it all over again, what would she change?”
But who could answer those things for her?
And why hadn’t he asked them before, when she was alive?
The Bard drank the rest of his apple juice with satisfying glugs. This was the best meal he’d had since he had hit the road four days before to go from Cleveland to Indiana to intercept the muse, and then all this way down south. He hadn’t realized just how big this whole country was. He was used to just shrinking it down in his head to the icon of America, bite size, and easy to handle.
He knew he was in trouble, and if he weren’t already, he would be as soon as he contacted the dealer. He was holding off on it. He debated the decision to pop a message into his transmitter box to avoid the painful retribution of a face to teapot visit. For now he was content to carefully measure the consequences over waffles. He noted that the apple juice had been incredibly sweet in order to stand up to the dousing of syrup he’d put on his lunch. The Bard approved.
Maybe if he had put as much effort into his garage band as he had put into this muse business, he’d have made it by now. He thought of the endless hours of rehearsal with Greg and Don in Don’s basement. They never let him have any input, which led to him storming out every other weekend. Greg’s songs were all the same, slow ballads that led to anguished screaming over his lost love Gina. The Bard still shuddered when he remembered the lyrics to “Gina’s ‘Gina.” The big man knew that the chords he was playing were crap, but when he tried to sit down and put his own down, he didn’t have any clue what would be better. If anything, he hated what he put out more than Greg’s drivel.
But the urge to hear his music made won out over his disgust at it and he brought it to the next rehearsal and begged them to just bash it out, so that he could work on it more. Don was fine to play whatever (drummers just like drumming) but Greg kicked up a huge fuss. Alpha male clashed with pudgy male and then he capitulated, as if this favor of his musical talent would have to be repaid at a later date, with interest.
They played it. It was terrible. The Bard was pretty sure that Greg was playing just a hair behind, missing entrances that were supposed to pop, letting the rhythm out of the piece. Greg blamed the messy handwritten score. Don just liked drumming.
The Bard stormed out, leaving his artistic failure and his band behind on the stands.
Back at the Waffle House, his lunch finished, he threw some cash from his dwindling supply onto the table and walked out to his car.
Rand figured that his past day and a half had been surreal enough to fill years of drunken blather in bars in the future (“So then he pulls out this marble!” he’d say to a sympathetic bartender who had heard the tale too many times), but more stories couldn’t hurt. Like Masterson said, they had gone too far to turn back now.
How had he ever become a trooper, he wondered. All his life he’d just been that guy who follows everyone else, or follows orders. He hadn’t wanted to go Army or any armed force, but he figured that being an Indiana State Trooper would have the necessary rules and checklists he craved. Pull over the car. Run the numbers on the plate. Issue the ticket.
The first thing they had told him at the academy was that the rules, the checklists, they were all important, but mostly he’d have to learn to trust his own judgment and to make his own decisions. The standard operating procedures were fine for day-to-day operations, but what they were expecting out of him was to do the right thing in those fuzzy blurry situations. Rand hated fuzz and blur.
He had brushed off all the inspirational talk as just the sort of thing the upper echelons told themselves. Rand followed the rules. He excelled. He was third in his class. And in his five years on the force he hadn’t run into any situation he couldn’t assign to a chapter in the book and follow the steps inside. A recipe for justice, for preserving the peace.
This situation was also in the book. The one on how to handle a partner breaking the rules. He knew what he was supposed to do. But the book said nothing about marbles, nothing about what to do if that partner was already in minor disgrace and didn’t need more, nothing about the force that moves Ouija boards (sure, it may have been cousin fingers, but at the time there was faith there. And the book had absocrap nothing on faith).
Masterson drove the car onto the offramp into Macon, twitching less now that he was driving. “There!” he pointed with the hand holding the cats eye.
The black Tercel was in the parking lot.
Rand felt a twist in his stomach. He wondered if this was how miracles felt to Aaron when he saw Moses turning water into blood or calling frogs down from the sky. Awe and fear wrapped together into an icy hot ball. Masterson grinned madly at their quarry. And as they pulled in, the big man came right out the door, as if on cue.
Callie snuck glances to the side. Brad had been driving hard since his blowup. She tried to find a way through the tangle of thoughts in his head: red threads of anger with the white smoke of confusion, and a black snarl of hurt. She tried to find some way through it all, to restore the open mind she’d first seen (after she’d regained her strength there by the side of the Indiana tollway). She was lucky, as much as she believed in luck, to have run into Brad instead of the Bard. It was a complicated turn of events.
She had been tracking the Inspiros. It had arrived in the country and was being trucked to the Field Museum in Chicago. It was hard work getting to the exact truck, but she knew that once it hit the museum there would be more people to deceive. Some of the people she had giving her rides suddenly found themselves called by a hunch, a feeling, to alter their routes through Indiana. It took almost all of her strength to follow the truck until it stopped for fuel.
She picked the lock on the back with some parts from her pen and crouched in the small space between the boxes. Just her luck that it was three levels deep. Quaffing more ambrosia, she upped the strength on the body she wore and moved the crates in her way as quietly as possible. The statue called to her, as it was a part of her, and of her sisters, something that had been taken long ago, and it desperately wanted to be returned. It was packed in its own wooden box, too big to fit in her pack. She pried the lid off with her pen and wrapped it in some fabric. She replaced everything and leapt lightly out of the truck, pausing to lift the vision she’d left in the driver’s mind of a trip to the beach. He shook his head to clear it, paid for his gas, and left.
Then she’d sent the message to the Bard, the man who had sent her the first missive claiming that he had Erato’s lyre. Sending it to him took up the rest of her reserves. The slug of ambrosia she’d taken in the truck still burned through her mind and she knew to drink more would give her strength but also run her ragged. She needed real rest.
She’d been tired, so tired, and that’s when she holed up in the Iron Skillet at Esmerelda Jackson’s table to wait for the Bard. Too tired and confused to scan Brad when he picked her up.
And perhaps deep down she sensed his basic goodness, knew that she could trust him. She could read him like a book within a few minutes of meeting him. She could read anyone, except herself.
Brad was still glaring ahead. He was silly to think that he could have a future with this goddess. He and Louie had called many girls goddesses before, but this time he’d really found one. And really, how had he messed it up? In the past, he’d asked girls out too soon, revealing his intentions before they were ready to think of him in that way. But this girl could see what he wanted as soon as he thought about it. How could he fight that? She was probably listening to him berate himself even now. And it all didn’t matter.
“I will leave you,” she said. “Do not be so hard on yourself.”
Yeah, she had been listening in on his interior monologue.
“Brad, please. Just let me out here.”
“With your bag and a lyre, just you against the world, huh? Why don’t you dive out like you did last time?”
“I just want to make sure that it is your choice to drop me off.”
“I don’t want to see you, I don’t want you hearing me, and still I want to drive you. And you want to know why? Because you are going away. Gone. Forever, or for a long time, I guess and I want to spend the rest of the time you’re here with you. OK? I don’t know why. Maybe I’m a crazy masochist. Maybe I only like pining after girls who are on pedestals who I can never reach and you’re the most perfect example of that I will ever meet, because everyone else, well they’re human and somehow there’s a minor chance no matter how slim that it could work out one day. But I have no illusions with you. But I can’t just see you go. Not if I can still help. I guess this makes me a patsy.”
They drove a mile with only the strains of The Magnetic Fields, Brad’s words still hanging in the cabin of the car and mixing with the sad music.
“You are not a patsy, Brad. You are helping me more than anyone ever has. And you do it without thought of reward.”
“Well, I’ve got nothing better to do on this trip.” A smile broke out, for a moment obscuring the harder feelings lying underneath.
“I am glad I fit into your busy schedule,” she said.
The 4Runner crossed the Florida state line.