All-Day Breakfast (18 page)

Couldn't remember whether I had or not.

Clint waved a dismissive glove. “Let's just get somewhere.”

“Okay, boys better not look up any skirts,” Amber said, pulling her hair back with her one mighty hand.

“You're wearing pants,” said Harv.

“I could change that.”

I stepped back and swung the heavy doors shut.

“Lincoln!” shouted Grace. “Or I scream 'til—”

We drove out
of Burroughs County just as James Jones of Penzler Industries had kindly suggested. The gas tank was full, so we could've carried on escaping eastward for hours, but after ninety minutes out on 33, I steered into a truck stop, so low on nitrites that the feeling had left my feet. Must've been pretty funny to watch me stumble indoors and hunt around for a table, followed by one shivering-tired woman and some ugly kids with pointed heads.

The place was crowded even though it was after eleven. The waitress sauntered over with her coffee pot. She was an older woman with ample hips.

“What do you serve at this time of night with bacon in it?” I asked.

She said, “You can order nothing
but
bacon if you want,” and gestured with her order pad to a banner over the cash register.
All-Day Breakfast
.

Clint and his chair fell backward but he continued through a flawless somersault across the thin brown carpet and came up on his feet.

“I love you,” I said.

“I do hear that from time to time.” The waitress slowly blinked as she scratched her inner arm. “What'll it be?”

“Well.” My mouth had filled with a pint of saliva. “We can each probably handle, what, twenty or thirty strips of bacon? I'll hold onto the menu in case.”

“Well, how many
exactly
?”

“Oh, God.” Like constellations, the kids' faces spun around me—I already held my knife and fork in either hand. “Seven of us. Let's say two hundred pieces. ”

She wrote
side b
×
100
before sliding the pen into her blouse pocket.

“I love you,” I said again, and meant it.

“Ma'am?” Grace clasped her hands as though in prayer. “We all love you.”

“Yes, dear, okay. I'll see this gets out as quick as possible.”

A horrible possibility occurred to me as she started toward the kitchen.

“Miss, Miss!” I called.

She stopped in her tracks and turned back, rolling her eyes for the benefit of the tattooed truckers at the table across from ours, and if those guys had looked sideways I would've smashed their heads together so hard they'd have spat out each other's teeth. But they just stirred their coffee.

“What
is
it?” she asked me.

“We don't want the bacon
too
quickly, all right? Overdone is fine.”

“Burnt?”

“Burnt is fine, sure.”

She shook her head over the order pad.

“For
each
of the two hundred pieces?”

“Peter,” Colleen muttered. “Don't.”

“I get the feeling you're taking our goodwill for granted here!” I called.

“Oh!” The waitress swallowed. “No, sir.”

She hurried through the swinging door into the kitchen, where she and a guy in a crumpled chef's hat looked out at us through the rectangular order window. I waved at them, half-heartedly, to show that I was a regular guy, really just as bored to death as anybody else. Clint finally got his chair back beside the table.

“Know what my dad would say?” Franny folded a napkin into a hat. “
Exactly
.”

“You don't tell them what you want, how're they supposed to know?” said Clint.

Colleen rubbed her eyes then looked across at me. They were bloodshot as hell.

“I like this place!” Harv spread his arms. “This is…really great.”

Then I realized I didn't have cash in my wallet. Credit cards were gone in the house fire. After the shit I'd just stirred up! I must've looked confused as hell because the kids started to get up out of their chairs—I felt in the
velouria medical
jacket's pockets and found nothing but chapstick and some flimsy business cards,
burroughs county emergency medical services
, without anybody's name on them.

“Don't you have money?” Colleen asked quietly.

Throat constricted, I nodded dumbly. I was only capable of overreacting.

“I've got plenty now, and I'll get plenty more.” She set her purse on the table and it clattered like it was full of cutlery, though maybe it was just her baton. “Doug wanted Megan not to have to worry, so he got us both the fattest policies Mutual offered, and, oh, he was so excited!”

She smiled at all of us around the table and the kids did their best to smile back.

“Megan's great,” said Grace.

“She's hilarious!” said Amber.

“Insurance is excellent,” I said. “Hope we're around long enough to collect it.”

Then I was so relieved about the money that I had to push my chair back and sit with my head between my knees.

“Say, buddy?” One of the truckers smiled ingratiatingly.

I straightened up. “What?”

“Where'd you go to school?”

“Champlain State,” I snapped.

Though I'd gone to UC Denver. Before Wahoo we'd lived in Champlain, where the upstairs neighbor's son had written his paramedic-qualification exam up at the university, though for all I knew he'd taken the actual courses on Planet Krypton.

“That a good school?”

I must've heard that as an accusation, because my ears went hot—I had sufficient circulation for that, apparently, though the pins and needles had spread up to my knees so that walking the four steps to crack his skull might've been a chore.

“Why do you ask?” I gulped, all ho-hum and normal.

“Oh, 'cause my niece is down in Velouria, too, thought I'd pick your brain to see how far away she'd need to go to qualify, you know? Good program at Champlain?”

“Oh, sure.” I dropped a sugar cube in my coffee. “The lectures weren't so hot but the field practicums were amazing. Every night on shift I thank God I went to that school, their practicums are killer.”

“That right?” He raised his eyebrows.

“There's a bloodwork research program in the lab that's just awesome.”

“Huh, okay.” He turned back to his friends. “I'll tell her.”

“Bathroom?” asked Amber.

All four females got up and went. Colleen took her purse. I sipped coffee that tasted like weak tea. I'd impressed the hell out of myself—as long as all I had to do was
talk
, I could pass for a paramedic any day of the week, and that could get me in the door at Penzler Industries, 1616 Highway 91a, Preston, OH. A concerned medical professional representing the equally concerned citizens of Velouria. Harv and Clint were tearing their napkins to shreds and eating them.

“Say, buddy,” the trucker called, “you all right?”

I was sitting with my cheek against the placemat.

“Just hungry,” I answered. “Thanks.”

“Shit, Harv,” Amber said as she slid into the chair across from him. “What's up with your arms?”

The other girls sat and we all stared at his bare arms—they were peppered with what looked like scabbed-over chicken pox. He folded them to his chest.

“Yeah,” he said. “They're just old cigarette burns. Not healing too good.”

“How exactly did you get them?” Colleen asked, her chin on the heel of her hand.

“Well.” He gazed past my shoulder. “After the thing with how my head healed up, they wanted to make a movie of everything else. They wanted to break a world's record for all the bacon they got in me, so that was cool, they filmed that for like two days straight. Then he and Kim were arguing like crazy, and Dad came in with the tin-snips and told me to put out my fingers and I just thought, I am getting
out of here
.”

He smirked at us. Clint and Franny had lost interest and played demolition derby with salt and pepper shakers.

“Hey, what'd the team do this week if you were home?” asked Amber.

She'd smeared on mascara for some reason, then I remembered the Harv conversation in Cam's office.

“Dunno. We weren't answering the phone.” He chewed a fingernail—his lips seemed too heavy for his mouth, so he looked slightly stupid. “You know I hit eleven threes last Friday?”

“
I
knew that,” said Grace.

The waitress set down two platters of bacon, heaped high as footballs. The kids began to rake it onto their side plates, but I did not pick up a single piece, though my arms shook.

“Excuse me, Miss,” I said. “I'm sorry about before.”

She smiled down at me, squinting too much for it to be genuine.

“Well, we've both come out the other side. Stressful job you've got there.”

“You're very understanding.” I felt a vein twitch in my neck. “We're going to want some to go too, yes?”

“You give me a number,” the waitress said, “and I'll see what's in back.”

“My brother never even
took
Chemistry 11,” said Clint, “and he could eat all this!”

“Wouldn't he barf?” asked Grace.

“He'd just burp in my face.”

“You think he's doing okay?” asked Franny.

He glanced at her, tucked his chin down but kept on chewing.

“Christ almighty,” one of the truckers said. “I never saw so much bacon!”

“Oh, we do this now and then.” I rolled up my sleeves. “Our night to howl.”

Colleen hadn't wanted
to go to the till so she'd handed me the cash and taken the kids outside, so now I had four strips crackling in my mouth, my jaws working like shears, and another forty side orders crammed into three Styrofoam takeout containers that sent angelic gusts of steam up my sleeve. Backing out the diner door in my fluorescent jacket, I nodded once more to the wide-eyed truckers—obviously I was trying to drum up resuscitation work for myself—and considered beatifically that before long I'd have my whole litter of kittens well-fed and hidden away while I went off to serve my still-higher calling of figuring out how to deplasticize us. And who'd be accomplishing that? Just me, alone again.

I trotted around a Freightliner semi just in time to see Clint's denim elbow arc back, then his fist flashed out to connect with Harv's nose, reproducing the pop of an ice cube dropped in lukewarm lemonade. Harv swayed back one step then fell down.

Franny stomped the pavement. “Yeah!”

“Woot, woot!”

Amber slapped her thigh and Grace clapped. The four women stood beside the ambulance like a boisterous police lineup under the lot's yellow lights.

“Fuck him up!” Colleen yelled, hands cupped to her mouth.

“Aw, bash me around all you want,” Harv said, licking his upper lip, propping himself on an elbow. “You
are
a panty-wearing faggot.”

“Shit, just get up, man,” said Clint, holding his fists stiffly in front of him. “I got to hit something so bad.”

“Fuck! Him! Up!” the women yelled.

“Why do I have to deal with this?” I asked. “You two need bums wiped, you wipe each other's bums. The rest of us need to be somewhere.”

The boys dropped their arms and stared at me like I was directing a
Raging Bull
remake and I'd told them their acting stunk.

“Don't listen!” Colleen yelled, slapping her thighs. “Fight!”

“Is that the bacon?” asked Clint.

Then all six shuffled toward me, guided by salivary glands, so I circled to the driver's side where I threw a long shadow. Colleen stumbled ahead of the others, arms extended.

“I'll hold those,” she said. “You'll be driving.”

I carefully set the three tepid containers between her hands, and she turned and gave them to Grace. Then she spun back and clocked me across the jaw with her left—like me, she still had a wedding ring on, so of course that stung. I teetered around a step, trying to shake it off as the blaze from the floodlights wove between my eyelids, then she must've leapt right on me because my head was jammed in an armpit as I looked at the ground and a elbow, pointy as a chisel, tenderized the middle of my back. Then I was slammed backwards into the ambulance, and a pair of fists tried to break through my belly to my spine. I could barely get an eye open to see her tracksuit bobbing there but, snaking my hands in front of me, I managed to get hold of her wrist.

“Don't you goddamn!” she said, and head-butted my chest.

I brought my foot up hard into her crotch then my knee connected with her chin so her teeth clacked together. She straightened up and I rammed a shoulder into her chest so she stumbled backward, pinwheeling her arms until she spread-eagled across the hood of a silver car with reptilian headlights. The old guy inside woke up, hollered and leaned on the horn, then he was out beside the little car before Colleen was even on her feet. He sported a comb-over and a puffy down vest.

“Look at my fucking hood!” He actually stamped a foot. “Lady, you better, you better have a checkbook, because…”

He couldn't have noticed the half-dozen of us happily beating the shit out of each other fifteen feet away or he might not have gone on, screaming at the bum-shaped dent in his hood. She meekly stood beside him, one hand pressing the small of her back while she wiped her mouth on her sleeve. She gazed up at the guy, back at the car. Its paint looked distinctly yellow under those lights. She looked back at the guy

“You in Hoover yesterday?” I heard her ask.

Then she grabbed the back of his collar and slammed his face into the car's roof, jumping back onto the hood for leverage. Blood and drool ran down the edge of the windshield, but after four or five good crunches, he pulled himself out of the vest and reeled away backwards. By then I had my arms around her waist. Thrashing, she flailed the vest at me so the zipper caught me in the lip.