All-Day Breakfast (40 page)

Then she didn't scrutinize a single vehicle, just stumbled toward the park with an arm around poor Megan. Maybe she would be able to go back to living with regular people without kicking their asses. Zeus swayed over us, waiting to rain havoc on the unsuspecting.

Around the first corner we found a padlocked concession stand called the Zucchini Zone, then a little kid's carousel called Zebra Crossing. Toddlers with mullets straddled plastic zebras and blue-assed mandrills while grandparents in acid-wash jeans orbited the thing, taking pictures and hollering.

“You keep a hold now, Tyler! All right, TJ!”

“Here's the ride for you, Megan,” said Clint.

The four of us stood staring like we'd staggered out of a crashed elevator, but Clint still had his capacity for nasty—well, we probably all did.
that's the zombie advantage!
the billboards would say.

How was I going to make my break? The tattooed teenager running the ride was busy picking his lower lip, so I turned to the grandma next to me as she rolled a cigarette.

“Do we buy tickets around here?”

“Right around the, uh.” She motioned with her head. “Ziggurat.”

Our two kids had an increasing spring in their step. We walked past the boarded-up Zodiac Hot Dog Stand, horned Aries emerging from a bun on its awning. Floating through an oddball dream, though for once I knew how a dream was going to end. At least I'd be leaving them with a few hundred bucks. Megan pointed out a ticket booth the size of an outhouse, labeled
Zagat Zookeeper
.

“Tickets? How many?” a guy yelled from inside, voice muffled like his head was in a picnic cooler. “Ten rides for thirty-three dollars, that's the special!” Right down to his yellow sou'wester hat, he was imitating a lobster fisherman. “Also popcorn balls, but they're a week old, things'll pull your fillings out!”

I nearly turned and said
You want popcorn anyway, Harv, you hungry?

“You don't have Zagnut bars?” asked Colleen.

“Good guess, young lady! I used to sell Zagnuts by the caseload, right here on this spot, but the wholesaler can't get them anymore—know why?”

“The
man
won't let you,” said Clint.

“No, son, no, it's because they don't contain chocolate. That's a clue. So who do you think is taking them?”

“The army,” I said.

“Yes!” said the fisherman. “The United States military takes 'em to the Congo, because Zagnuts do not
melt
! Now you all want tickets for The Zombie, am I right?”

Colleen looked at me from under her eyebrow, swallowing hard.

“Has your brain rested enough?”

“
Three
for The Zombie—me, I'll have to pass,” I told the guy. “Dental surgery. Oh, can I borrow that pen a minute? Scrap of paper?”

The
pa
blasted “Sharp Dressed Man,” ZZ Top, as we hurried across the park.

“God,” said Colleen, kicking through spilled popcorn. “The Zombie?”

Nobody screamed “Agh!” like when Eric had been alive. We were all tired of that. Nobody said,
I'll be pissed off if it doesn't look like us
.

“Hey, I'm pretty good with those
bb
guns,” said Clint. “Get my brother a killer crocodile.”

The Zombie had eight arms that lifted up and down while the whole machine rotated, and at the end of each arm a fiberglass car, made up like a gore-smeared head, held three giggling kids where the brain ought to have gone.

“Is this the line?” I asked.

“No, go right up there,” said a pockmarked grandma behind a stroller.

Two hours before, we'd been lab animals, now we were using every fiber of our freewill to line up for The Zombie.

“You dropped something,” said a grandpa with a can of Pepsi in each hand.

A wad of keys lay in a puddle at our feet, looking like a crashed helicopter.

“Oops,” said Clint.

“Let me hold onto them,” I said. “We're screwed if they fall under that thing.”

“One ride, then we go.” Colleen tucked hair behind her ear. “I don't understand how we can afford to waste
any
time getting to Lincoln, considering—”

“Leave it to me,” I said.

“Okay, just blow,” said a grandma, holding a Kleenex to a little girl's nose. The line moved forward.

“Oh, and speaking of Pawnee City,” I said to Colleen, “this is the number for my mom and Evadare.” I folded the scrap of paper into her warm hand. “In case it gets crazy at the airport.”

She looked at the paper, eyed me, then put it in her pocket.

“I shouldn't be this excited,” Megan said flatly. “Doesn't seem possible.”

My three were ushered toward the car that had an airbrushed rat squeezing out of one of its eye sockets. Hand to his ear, the operator made a big show of listening to a question from that fanny-pack woman from the Zebra Crossing.

“What do zombies
eat
? Diesel!” He staggered around with arms extended, lowering safety bars across the riders' chests. “Die-sel….”

“No tongue on the metal!” a grandma called. “Too cold out!”

As they took their first spin past, Clint and Megan and Colleen stretched ecstatic hands in my direction, the arm lifting them six feet in the air while the shrieking car ahead of them dipped down to brush the grass. Hilariously, Clint bit his knuckles in dread. Colleen smirked at me, tucked hair behind her ear again and turned to say something to Megan, whose eyebrows were nearly up in her hair. I took a deep breath up my nose then stepped behind the fanny-pack woman, then a trash can, always keeping low. The last glimpse they might've had of my behind was as I cut through the crowd of wheelchairs in front of Zarathustra's Tower of Silence.

you must be this tall
, Zeus proclaimed.

I wasn't going to fly the other survivors to California just so they could quit being survivors, but trotting across the parking lot to Carver's truck, my righteous shame took me back to the first night I'd left Lydia to sleep alone in the cancer hospice. The gravel under my feet demonstrated more loyalty than I ever had.

At Lincoln Airport
I found a men's room and walked into a blur of multicolored tiles, and the mirrors reflecting more multicolored tiles managed to short-circuit something. I dropped to one knee. Guys in suits steered their rolling carry-ons around me as they hurried to the cubicles. Two Congo-bound soldiers in dark camouflage sidled out, poor bastards, duffel bags slung over their shoulders.

“You all right, pal?” asked a guy in a ball cap.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

I splashed cold water on my cheeks so the other bathroom guys would think I was nothing more sinister than a nice, quiet drunk. I'd only come into the bathroom to decide how convoluted a story I'd need for when security stripped me down. Half of my sideburns had dropped off, I was only half–Martin Van Buren by then, so I could probably get away with
I just had minor surgery
. But first there'd be metal detectors. Steering toward a cubicle, my eyes down on the unhallucinogenic gray floor, I whacked the corner of my head into some tall idiot's jaw.

“Hey, what the fuck?” he whined.

I squinted up into his face so I wouldn't see the wall tiles. He was pimply, with a steel bar through his
septum
—what a word to remember. Funny how the brain works. He glared like the Whig who'd lost to Van Buren in the presidential election of 1836.

“Here's where I penetrate you in the eye socket,” I told him.

“Uh…”

He held his palms out in front of him. Backed into the trash can.

“You're a disgrace,” my Lydia said in my head.

Our kids are at camp, I told her. They're fine.

I locked myself in the cubicle and undressed, shoes, socks and everything—we'd pulled those five nails out at Carver's but had there been more? Didn't find anything in the bottoms of my feet. I worked my way up, feeling carefully around my right knee especially. Someone had scratched
never trust a man in a blue trenchcoat
in the cubicle's paint, and underneath it a different pen had written
never drive a car when you're dead
. Nothing around my anus. Nothing in my shoulders or elbows, but—ah! Something in my right ear, felt like a staple, but I couldn't even get a fingernail under it. Gary'd patched me together at the blue cabin.

I got the truck key out of my pants pocket while the guys on either side released their various gases, and I tried to jab the sharp end under that minuscule strip of staple. The ear must've grown over it because I had to dig like crazy, and I knew if I slipped a half-inch the key would penetrate my only hemisphere that still worked.

“Aw, man,” I muttered.

“You and me both,” wheezed the guy in the next stall.

The staple came out slick with purple goo. I flushed it down the toilet. That reminded me that I ought to get rid of the truck keys too in case some workaholic detective used them to connect me to the camper full of dog shit and bloodstains that I'd left parked in the five-minute-only zone. I dropped them in the garbage.

Between the maroon ropes, I tried to look as bored and respectable as your average orthodontist. Only two of the eight x-ray machines were running so all of us stared like oxen at the
tv
suspended over our heads—it showed a brown-haired woman with a microphone, in front of haphazardly parked trucks and a long trapezoidal bridge surrounded by leafless trees.
breaking story: mary warner in gage county.
If memory served—and did it?—she'd had to quit being Miss Nebraska after a
dui
.

“A grisly discovery,” she barked over the wind, “made shortly before three this afternoon by a local woman jogging across this bridge two miles northwest of Adams.” Ms. Warner's eyeliner really popped the blue in her eyes, but her jaw wavered like Lady Macbeth's at the horror of it all. “The mutilated bodies of three Caucasian males, along with what appear to be three pit bull
terriers
, found here on the western bank of the Big Nemaha River.”

The woman in front of me covered her daughter's eyes with her sari.

“Paramedics on the scene estimate the victims were in their thirties or forties, but state troopers say they have no clear leads at present regarding the men's identities. They're confident dental records and tattooing on the dogs …”

As she went on emphasizing every third word, the Gage County wind wafted her bangs across the journalistic furrow between her brows. A red Acura appeared behind her and Gary, still in his black tracksuit, climbed out and walked across the shot, a cell phone to his ear.

A luggage cart bumped my calf—I needed to move.

I dropped my belt, boots and wallet into the plastic bin and watched it slide between the black flaps of the x-ray machine. The white-shirted security guard waved me through the metal-detector with his black baton, then it crossed my highly scientific mind that the dried-out finger still in my shirt pocket might be high in, say, mercury. I'd dropped eight people and three dogs into the Big Nemaha River, yet only the uncontaminated had washed ashore, from which we can infer—yes, a hand up at the back of the class? Zombies must not
float
?

“No carry-on, sir?” asked a white-shirted guard with a bow in her hair.

“No, ma'am. I'm traveling light.”

I smiled and it must've looked gruesome as hell.

Tuesday, November 1.

In the LAX
food fair the sign above the sandwich counter showed a smiling
bandito
, but it should've been me with my face dripping into my trouser pocket. It was six
am
.

“I don't want
sandwiches
,” I told the heavily moled woman. “Can't you just sell me the bacon?”

“How much bacon?” she asked.

“All the bacon you have.”

“We…we need it for sandwiches.”

“Fuck you,” I said through my teeth. “Twelve bacon melts.”

She and her co-worker exchanged glances, then she adjusted her clear plastic gloves and got to work. There'd been no bacon with the omelette they'd served on the plane. I gripped my left earlobe as I watched them throw pointless vegetables on the bread. I had another day or two before I went the way of Donny Brown and instead of reading Josie and Ray
The
Berenstain Bears and the Haunted Hayride
, I was hoping to crawl into a hippie bunker with pink goo in its Slurpee machine.

“Meat and salt remind us we're human,” I told them.

“Forty-seven fifty-two,” the lady replied.

The twenties I handed her were dappled with purple. As I shuffled toward my gate, two giant candies smiled at me from the M&Ms vending machine, a red M&M and a green one, trying to break my concentration though they'd been created in a CIA
lab in South Dakota and were my deformed and unclean brethren.

“Fuck you,” I told them.

Just eat the bacon, I said to myself. You need to be a detective.

“I want to go home,” I said to the air.

Tanned dads, pushing twisted, sleeping babies in strollers, steered wide arcs around me.

We landed at
San Luis Obispo at 7:19
am
. In the security monitor above the exit doors my nose had melted into my upper lip and my hair looked like a rooster's. Outside I found a Beach Cities cab, yellow, with a surfboard painted on the side.

“Let me guess,” the driver said into the backseat. He wore a patchy beard. “Birdwatcher.”

“No, um…”

“Nah, I guess you don't have the look in your eyes. Ever since last year, I get birdwatchers at the airport, oh, three times out of four.”

“I want to go to the post office in town,” I said.

We rolled through the parking lot, hemmed in with palm trees.

“What happened last year?” I asked.

“What?”

“Last year with birdwatchers.”

“Oh, those big ones started nesting at Pismo Beach! What, they're…black-footed albatross! Nesting up on the bluffs there. Buddy told me each one of their wings is nine feet long, and they're the only kind of albatross who nests in, like, this hemisphere. Whole bird's black but they call them black-
footed
! Whole thing's B.S.”

“Huh,” I said.

The airport was out on the flats, of course, but as we rolled into San Luis Obispo the pointed hills sprouted uniformly around us with the tree-lined town nestled between them like the city fathers had snapped their fingers and the landscape had obliged. Nature was malleable.

I shut my eyes and remembered what Alice had done to me two mornings before—I might have enjoyed it even more if I hadn't been tied up like a rodeo calf, but in hindsight it sure seemed like a glimpse of the blessed afterlife. Though now that I knew her slightly better, it made my half a brain a little sad that she hadn't climbed onto the table and put me inside her so we could've looked each other in the eyes. Or maybe she knew that Stage 4 zombies were still capable of getting girls pregnant—hell, if anyone knew that, it'd be Penzler's daughter, right?

Had she told me her dad had
deliberately
made Natalia a zombie?

A top-heavy brunette in a halter top jogged across the street in front of us.

“Holy shit, look at that,” the driver said. “You say you're from the Midwest so you might have never heard it, but two out of three boob jobs in America happen right here in California. That's fact, that's gospel.”

That spirit of anatomical innovation had brought Natalia's doctors to this very spot. Cutting-edge treatments to keep single fathers and their social circles from gruesomely dissolving.

“It's not why I moved out here, myself, but it keeps me hanging around.” The driver moved us gradually through the intersection while the girl leaned against a lamppost, stretching a sinewy leg. “All right, let's get moving—the post office, you say. There's more like her in the post office, even. I'm guessing you're unattached, am I right? Lucky man?”

“That's right,” I said.

“No kids to feed either, I can always tell that.”

A boy and girl ran along the sidewalk, backpacks bouncing. The little boy veered toward the curb but the sister grabbed his hand.

“Fuck you I don't have kids,” I drawled.

I was too worn out to sound excited but my heart pounded with righteous anger.

The driver hunched his shoulders and squinted up at the rearview mirror.

“You want to piss people off, keep talking shit about their kids. Asshole.”

“I said beg pardon, okay?”

We passed blocks
of two-story houses with cedar shrubs and swing-sets. The driver started chewing spearmint gum. Stewing over my kids was not going to help, so I unfolded the telegram and flattened it against my leg.

mr k penzler

n's progress less dramatic than first hoped stop other work wildly successful will incorporate n if you advise stop will telephone immediately when cell tower repaired stop

dr q duffy

Written by Alice on the back:
PO
Box 307, San Luis Obispo, Dalidio Drive.

“What's their names?” the driver asked.

I could picture who he was talking about but couldn't answer him just then.

“Thought we'd be there by now,” I said. “How big is this town, anyway?”

“Post office's around the other side of the lake here. You mean the new one, right? Because the old one's downtown.”

“Dalidio Drive.”

“That's right. For sure.”

“How busy are you going to be today?”

“Next flight in from LA's at eleven-thirty, then Phoenix, other than that it's hit and miss. Welfare bums buying groceries. You looking for work out here?”

“I'm going to wait for somebody to go to his post office box, then I'm going to see where he goes. I might wait five minutes, might wait two weeks. I've just been to the cash machine. You interested?”

“Here's a rent-a-car place with very reasonable rates.”

While I stood
on the asphalt between silver rental cars, California turned hot as a stovetop even at eight in the morning. I
felt
heat, too, not like with cold. Sweat trickled out my ears and down my neck and I had to keep peering at it on my fingertips to make sure it
was
sweat, not some toxic compound that was government property.

“Mr. Giller?” said young Brian, his wide forehead freckling even as he trotted back out. “She says it's
not
impossible! If you could just get
access
to a credit card number, even if it wasn't your own, the cardholder could give us permission over the phone to use it as a deposit, then we could—”

“Do you use a post office box?” I asked.

“No, sir.”

“How often do you go and check it, like every day?”

“If I had one, yeah, probably every day.”

I could just watch the post office for a guy with a lab coat, a
drduffy
vanity plate and a hysterical redhead in his passenger seat.

“What if you weren't expecting any mail?”

“Do you mind if we step inside? I think a drink of water'd be a good idea.”

We walked across the shadow of the
pan-american rent-a-car
sign—did that name make sense if I'd never heard of them anywhere else in America? Maybe I had and forgotten. Funny how the brain works. We each fall apart in our own time and in our own way.

While I sat outside the manager's closed door, the front-desk girl brought me glasses of water as quickly as I could drain them. Brian's voice was just a murmur but the manager seemed to be talking right in my ear.

“Fuck it,” she finally said, “for a hundred cash he can take that piece of shit Fiesta, I seriously don't care. Tell him, I don't know, twenty a day.”

I smelled something.

“What kind of sandwich is that?” I asked the girl behind the desk.

“Bacon breakfast burrito,” she said, wiping her chin.

“Give it here.”

I had to take my half out to the parking lot and watch while Brian and his clipboard inventoried the turquoise Ford Fiesta's pre-existing damage, and I was still sucking sublime, nitrite-rich mayo off my thumb when he finally hurried over to show me the fifteen
X
s he'd made on the generic-car-body outline he'd been provided.

“Have some sympathy for the old girl, see what she's been through? Oh, and there's a car seat in the back, I'll take that out.”

“How come?” I said. “You think I don't have kids?”

“I just thought…”

I handed over the stack of bills for my deposit, and sure I could've
bought
the car for five hundred but I didn't give a shit so long as it got me to the post office—but then he had to hash something else out with the manager and left me with a lot of forms to sign. Instead of initialing the box that waived third-party collision insurance I turned the sheet over and drew a human being's outline on the back of the sheet, then put an X over each place my bodywork had been gouged, going all the way back to the re-bar through my right shoulder. Thanks to Penzler my beautiful teacher-printing had gone to shit.

I imagined the day that I tracked my kids down and the two of them not being able to look at me or talk to me. I could put the drawing into their hands and they'd maybe have some notion of what I'd been through in order to be standing there.

Dear
, I wrote at the top, then I had to stop and click the end of the pen a couple of times. My kids' names weren't exactly on the tip of my brain.

“I'll just need a photocopy of your driver's license.” Brian wiped his palms on his pants.