Rand stretched his hands out, trying to work out the knots in his back without fidgeting too obviously. They were in South Louisville.
“Bill, let’s just hand this over to Kentucky.”
“And tell them what? Be on guard for a honkin’ big bearded guy who just happens to put you to sleep? That’ll go over well. I’m sure they’ll forget that soon enough.”
“So? He’s gone. We lost him. We have to call it in.”
“I can’t have another splotch in my record. Not after that thing in Columbus.”
“C’mon, Bill, the only one who remembers that is you.”
“Me, you, half the damn police in that town…”
Masterson had been on a Leno segment: Stupid Criminals Meet Stupid Cops. The perp in question had attempted to burn rubber as Masterson had gotten out of the car and when he turned back to get back in, he was locked out of the car. And some asshole aspiring to be on the local news had caught it all on tape. Never mind that he broke the window and eventually ran the suspect down. Never mind that he got the arrest. All anyone remembered was the yanking on the door, forever immortalized on DV.
The beard was not getting away from him.
“Rand, call Kentucky and give them the description. But tell them that this bastard is mine. Ours. Whatever.”
“I don’t know if they’re going to go-”
“Do it.”
The Bard sat back on the hotel bed. The marble on the box was all the way to the left, pointing south and glowing less and less. So she was still moving. He didn’t care. He was tired. On the other twin bed, the lyre lay, begging to be played. He grunted as he got up and walked over to it.
“Damn clerk,” he thought, recalling the snide look the little pissant had given him as he asked for a room with two beds.
“We do have king size beds available, sir.”
“Little zit,” he thought. Well, he’d get revenge tomorrow when he checked out. He strummed the lyre, not even bothering to tune it. He pulled some handwritten music out of a battered black folder straining to hold its contents. Most of the sheets had just a bar or two on them although a few were covered with thick black dots and lines, crossed out and rewritten to they might as well have just had one or two bars.
He spread them out carefully on the bed and started to play. His fingers were fat and clumsy, and the notes were muddy. He looked at his lyrics, scrawled in green pen.
“I am a wan- wan-” his fingers couldn’t keep up. “I am a wanderer lost and lorn…” moved to the other sheet. “Just a lonely wanderer, since the day I was born.”
That didn’t work at all. He growled deeply, the rumble of a truck idling. He thought of how things would be once he had the Inspiros, whispering lyrics and notes in his ear as he wrote pages at a time. Fame. Fortune. All for the fat boy who the other kids in school had made truffle shuffle, the little boy who had only been little in age. Now he was onstage
It was time to see where the meddling piece of crap in the 4Runner was taking the muse and the Inspiros. He needed inside information. The Bard reluctantly put the golden instrument back down on the slippery quilted bedspread and stuffed the music back into the folder, which ripped just a little more. From a brown satchel smudged with dirt, which looked like a kids lunchbox against his imposing mass, he drew a box of cookies. They were the most unappetizing cookies he’d ever seen. Black dry little lumps of dough, barely cooked. He placed one on his tongue and chewed it quickly and swallowed it down, followed by a chaser of Sprite from the minibar ($2).
The Bard’s eyes blinked twice slowly and the big man belched. He slept and dreamed.
The Bard was in a white room that gradually painted in with a living scene. An antique shop. There was a kindly old man at the register, writing figures into a book. He looked up and from under his old man visor, the Bard felt the man’s eyes meet his own. The antique dealer walked around the counter and approached the Bard, who was rooted to the spot. In a mirror on the far wall, the Bard could see that he was a pewter teapot on a shelf this time. The dealer pulled the teapot down and looked into the spout.
“Is there a problem?” he asked, in a warm hug voice.
“She didn’t wait for me. She went off with someone else.”
“Someone else, you say?”
“Yeah, a kid in a red jeep thingy. An SUV.”
“So I can take this to mean that you still do not have the Inspiros.”
“She went off! Maybe she got cold feet. It’s not my fault.”
“Dear, dear Bard. It certainly is not mine. Please don’t yell. This is usually a most well mannered teapot.”
“So, I was wondering if you could, um, help me. Find out where they are going.”
“My dear Bard, if I have to do all the work on my own, why should I keep up my end of the deal?”
“I’ll get them. I just need to know where they’re going. The marble’s not good enough.”
“This will take time. I will contact you in one hour. I must say, it is odd of the muse to be so skittish,” the dealer mused to himself. “Don’t let her get away again,” he said sharply, looking right down the long pewter neck of the teapot. The old man’s hands grew hot and the Bard awoke on the bed with an inward gasp of pain. He raised his XXL shirt and saw two large red handprints on his sides.
Brad jerked the wheel to the left, correcting the course of the car. “It’s fine,” he thought. “You’re allowed to nod off once in sixteen hours of driving.”
“Would you like me to take over?” Callie said.
“You don’t really need to sleep, do you?”
“I can go without.”
Tempting. “No, I can make it to Atlanta. The goal is keeping me going.”
“Tell me a story, then.”
“Me, tell you a story? That’s funny. I mean stories are your thing.”
“Perhaps I am tired of giving stories to others.”
“What do you want to hear?”
“Tell me about your friend, the one who was supposed to be here.”
“Well, when we were, let’s see, sophomores, we went on this school retreat. Louie hated going on retreat. Anyway, there was this one meal where you aren’t allowed to eat whatever you want. You get a certain amount of play money to spend on the meal. It’s called the world meal. See, three guys get most of the money and they’re supposed to be America, and Japan. Then there’s a slightly bigger group who gets a little bit less and then everyone else just had a buck, which was enough for rice.”
Callie saw the scene in his mind, the groups of tables of hungry boys, divided by the watchful gaze of teachers.
“So, the point is that if the first group shares all of their cash and the second group distributes it… oh wait, I forgot to say, you’re only allowed to go talk to another group unless you pay the teacher for a passport and you can only pass stuff to the group next to you. Anyway, if everyone shares, everyone eats. See. Sharing. It was like kindergarten. It not like anyone starved; we all had snacks in our room. And we knew the trick ‘cause older guys told us about it.”
“Anyway, Louie is here trying to explain it to everyone and the teachers are nodding, they’re happy, yay, sharing. And all of a sudden, he starts flinging this monopoly money that he’d brought all around. Teachers couldn’t tell what was what. They couldn’t resetup the game. We’d have rioted! We just got to have a regular meal.”
“Did the message have a lasting impact on you?” asked Callie.
“Not really. I mean, yeah, starving children in China and all that. I mean I’ve heard it all. Thing is, I know I’m lucky to have been born today, to my family. Horrendously lucky. And I know I should share, right? I mean, if it were just as easy as giving the cash. But when I think about it, about Louie just pulling that cash out of his pocket and throwing it around… it’s cool.”
“You are hinting at something.”
“You’re telepathic. You tell me what I’m getting at.”
She smiled. “You are wondering why the gods do not just come down and feed their followers.”
“Bread and fish, right.”
“But you are scared to breech the subject of deities because you are worried I will just turn quiet.”
“Right when I got you talking, too. You come here, you tell me you’re a muse, but there’s all this crap that goes with it. So were the Greeks right? Titanomachia and all that? What’s a vaguely religious kid to do?”
“Can you just be content knowing that there are many things that go on behind the scenes of this world that the audience is not meant to see?”
“So, we’re just spectators? What are we watching? I can’t just wave my hands and call you an aspect of my God.”
“Why can’t you?”
Brad sighed. His head reeled worse than it had on any of the retreats. “Wave wave wave.”
“Keep your waving hands on the wheel, Brad.”
“We’re talking about this later.”
“If all goes well, I will be home later.”
Brad kicked himself with one foot while jamming the other into his mouth. Too much, too quickly. “Well, I’m awake now,” he said.
High above the 4Runner was a tiny whirring machine that looked like it had crawled off a DaVinci notebook. It had a whirring dome made of thin paper mounted over a metal grooved ring. Another glowing blue seeker marble slid around the ring, guiding the flier. Inside the dome was a piece of telescope. A bird, out for an evening flight, swooped under the machine. If it could have looked up, it would have seen an image of a pale blue eye in the telescope lens. If it could have looked up, it would have been spooked, in a purely primal reaction. And if it could have looked up, it would have been able to avoid the nail that shot out of the flier’s bottom and speared the bird right through the head.
Back in the shop, the dealer allowed himself a thin smile. His head was buried in a dark cloth attached to an old camera mounted on an antique tripod. His left index finger relaxed on the shutter trigger. It wouldn’t do to alert his quarry. With his right hand, he scrawled notes on a pad of legal paper with a silver fountain pen.
The machine slowly began to drop altitude. Fins on the side swung out and turned down, turning the drop into a dive. Then it swooped, scant inches from the ground. It went under the 4Runner, paper dome crushed against the bottom of the car and the telescope lens got lodged into the underbody. It only made a small thump. Somehow, it stayed attached. Hidden. Watching.
Masterson was not smiling, thinly or not. The grimace on his face could not be called a smile by the nicest of definitions. Rand wondered the best way to extricate himself from a rapidly deteriorating situation.
“I heard a story about two troopers, went outside their jurisdiction once… One got busted back to the boondocks, but the other one, yeesh, they threw the book at the poor sucker.” Rand continued, staring at the windshield. “You know, I’m just saying. Bastard was two years from retirement. Just wanted to make a big bust, make a name.”
Masterson didn’t twitch. Which was odd, usually the older trooper had a lifetime of mannerisms that all together formed the man that the younger guys sneered at. Tapping music on tables, steering wheels, and his lunchbox. The way he would growl.
“You got stuck with ‘Old Hickory’?” one of them had said to Rand when the patrol assignments had been made. “Hope he doesn’t have a heart attack out there, or slip and fall.”
Rand had shut them up by not even rising to the bait. He didn’t try to defend Masterson’s twenty years of experience, or tell them to be more mature. He just walked out of there. All sorts of quick comebacks had jumped into his head as he left the door. “I’d rather have him behind me than a shit shot like you” or something. But he had just left, uncertain in his place in the pecking order. Rand still felt guilty about it.
What did those punks have over him anyway? Rand had graduated near top of his class. He believed in what he was doing, what the force did for Indiana. They were all supposed to be on the same team. But there are teams within teams. Right now he had the choice, to back his partner’s play or to give him up to the rest of the force in disgrace. Maybe they could get the Tercel. Maybe it would be a big bust. Maybe it would overwrite Masterson’s locked out video clip with one of the two of them, holding hands in the air in victory.
And maybe it would give Rand the ability to stand up for himself.
“Who is this Tasha person that keeps running through your mind?” Callie asked.
Brad divided his attention into one more piece to handle her question. He was trying to feed a new CD into the slot while changing lanes. He skipped the first two tracks of the Moxy Früvous CD to get to his favorite song on the disc and to formulate his reply.
“Can’t you just pull that out of my head?” he asked, buying more time.
“I like seeing how your thoughts come together. By themselves, they’re just disconnected memories. When you pull them into narrative order, they become a story. And you might say that I am an aficionado of story.”
“Really? You don’t tell me any.”
“I could fill the rest of your days with all of the stories that I know. But more importantly, I can make new ones. But so can you.”
“Yeah, I can tell you about Tasha. But that’s not a story. It’s just what happened to me. I mean, it’s just personal history.”
“What do you think all history is? It is facts chained into order. It is the story of why the present is the way it is.”
“Man, I hated history. Our textbooks did not read like a story.”
“Your books are written to disguise opinions and biases. It is considered to be a bad thing to feel one way or another about events. Without the tugging on the emotions of the audience, there is no connection between writer and reader. Of course the bias slips through, no matter how much the author tries, and so you are just left with poorly written stories.”
“I have to bring you to school to meet Mr. Foreman and have you bust his chops. Please. Please please,” Brad grinned.
“You should read histories written with a character narrating. Seeing how just one person is affected will imprint history in your mind greater than some weak attempt to generalize.”
“And the bias?”
“Read two books with different biases. Why stop at two? Read all that you can get your hands on.”
She seemed to have forgotten about Tasha. Brad congratulated himself on playing her conversational avoidance game.
“Who is this Tasha person who keeps running through your mind?” she asked again.
Never play mind games with a telepath. Brad started.
“So, she’s this girl I met at work. She was an intern also at Sedill. That’s where I work.”
Callie smirked. As he began talking more, the words just flowed out of him.
“See, she worked in the same section as my friend Louie. She sat in the cubicle next to him. Anyway, I met her when I was getting him for lunch. She’s so cute, but here’s the thing, she’s really good at programming also. I mean, that’s hot. Here I am, I can make web pages and things, no problem. But I can’t build my own or anything. I’m really in awe of people who can do that.”
“Awe is a good start,” Callie said, witness to countless stories that had begun in the same way, many of them sad.
“Right, so I didn’t ask her out right away. I figured, anyone that beautiful and smart, gotta be dating someone. Anyone worth dating is dating already, right? So, I ask Louie to do some reconnaissance.” Brad opened his window a crack to get some fresh air into the cabin. Then he continued. “He told me he didn’t think so, that there were no pictures on her desk or anything. She never mentioned one. They never do.”
“They?”
“Beautiful talented women. Anyway, we all started having lunch together and I just tried… I guess I just tried too hard. I’d crack jokes that weren’t funny. I’d spend time crafting the perfect side comment while meanwhile the rest of the table had moved on. Half the time I’d just swallow it and the other half, I’d go ahead with it. I felt like I was moving a train off the tracks to apply gleam to my boxcar, but really I was just messing the whole mess up. Even worse, the times I’d make a quick off the cuff remark, it would just fly by everyone and I’d have to sit and explain the whole damn thing. At the end of every lunch, as we headed back to our offices, I’d grade my performance in my head.”
“You are very hard on yourself.”
Brad gave a Han Solo half smile. “Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing? Eh. Guess not. Yeah, I was getting mostly C’s and D’s. It got worse once our projects got underway and we stopped doing much work. See, we just chatted online. The kiss of death for productivity came when we stopped eating lunch in the cafeteria. We’d get to work late, jump on the chat to discuss lunch. Then we’d go to lunch for like two, two and a half hours. Coming back from lunch, we’d have a little digestion time and then do about two solid hours of work before jumping back on the chat to kill the afternoon before going home.”
“And you did not feel guilty for taking so much time off?”
“No, see, I was getting as much work done in those two hours as I used to get done all day. Fewer mistakes. I told myself that I was just percolating all my ideas in my head so I was more efficient when it came time to put the pedal to the metal. And since I was out of the cubicle, I didn’t get so many people asking me to fix their toolbars.” He related the whole toolbar saga and Callie laughed.
“Anyway, one day, Tasha and I were chatting and I asked her out to dinner. She asked me, ‘Who else is going?’ Shot down!” He made a swooping gesture. “I was so pissed. Told Louie and we commiserated. This other intern, Ryan, bought us some beer and the three of us bitched about women for a while that night.”
Callie tasted the bitter in his memory. The three of them shooting pool in a white carpeted rec room.
“Thing is, Louie started talking to her a lot. Turns out she had been dating a guy earlier in the summer, but they’d had a bad breakup and she was wary of seeing anyone else, even casually. But she started calling Louie all the time. We’d be out at the movies. Call. We’d be at dinner. Call. He’d just leave the group and come back like half an hour later. We mocked him, but it was all just jealousy.”
Brad turned down the volume on the CD. “The worst, though, was when he came up to me and asked me for permission to go after her. You know, ‘cause we’d never fought over a woman ever and he wanted to make sure that we didn’t fight over one now.”
“And you said yes.”
“It was the only thing I could say.”
“And what happened to Louie’s attempt?”
“Well, it was all leading up to this date, this big date between the two of them. It was in planning far a while, but it wasn’t supposed to be a date, she just wanted him to go to this party with her. And at the last minute, she called it off. Said that she had heard he’d been talking about it and it wasn’t supposed to be this big deal and if it was going to be, well whatever, it didn’t happen. Afterwards, Louie and I would be talking and he’s just rip on her, like she was just so unstable and crazy. He acted like it was no big deal. When she’d call, he’d still talk to her, but then he’d come back and say, ‘She doesn’t talk about anything! It’s all this blather!’”
“And yet she keeps running through your mind, this blatherer.”
“It’s just one of those could-have-been things. No, not even. More like a I-guessed-wrong thing. See, when I first saw her, I gave her all these attributes, right? And every new fact I found out about her, I fit into this image of her, but in the end, she wasn’t anything like what I’d thought. She wasn’t my dream girl. My dream girl don’t exist.” The chorus to the Neutral Milk Hotel song of the same name went through his head.
Brad slowed down, his story ended and analysis beginning. “In the end, I guess she wasn’t as amazing as my expectations, but she wasn’t as bitchy as I imagined the day she turned me down for dinner. She’s just someone normal, not sure of who or what she wants.”
“You seem to know what you want. It shines. In your brain.”
“K, that’s just creepy, OK? Every time I think you’re just this typical person, you have to pull one of those I’m-a-supernatural-being moves.”
“I am sorry. I will try to be more obtuse,” Callie said.
“No, no, whatever. You are someone magical, who knows what she wants and just happens to know what everyone else wants too.”
“You should know that I have no idea what the Bard wants, beyond the Inspiros.”
“Yay. I bet you could have a normal conversation with him.”
“Yes, but I am enjoying my conversation with you.”
That stopped Brad short. He beamed. Callie reclined her seat and put her feet up on the dashboard.
“You know, if we get into an accident, your legs are going to get snapped off,” he warned lightly.
“No, they won’t.”
They continued down I24, crossing into Georgia (“Hey, we’re in Georgia!” Brad said) briefly and then back into Tennessee (“Hey, we’re in Tennessee!”) and then once more into Georgia (“Eh. Georgia.”).