All-Day Breakfast (46 page)

Thursday, November 3.

I'd remembered the
name Hutchens Road, but I didn't remember McCauley until I saw it forking away to the left under the bare trees. The sky looked like cigarette ash. Everything looked different under all that new snow.

I thought the house would be a half-mile down the road but I came to it after fifty feet. I got out and stood beside the Fiesta, looking at the silent house and fingering the car key in my pocket like I was hoping to take a girl out for the first time and was nervous about meeting her father. If Alice was already dead I'd talk to Kirk Penzler without an intermediary.

I lifted the cooler off the back seat, pushed the Penzlers' gate open and crunched up the path. In the snow everything was silent—dogs barked somewhere behind the house but they might as well have been in another state. I hadn't slept since the plane to San Luis Obispo. I hadn't slept in a
bed
since my nap at the Lamplighter. I couldn't feel my legs though I saw them moving under me.

Flakes of snow blew off the branches and I caught one on my tongue.

It's funny to be dying at the hands of your own body. As everything slowly quits there must be some gland that purrs away so you say, “Well, all right, I guess this is okay.” If a goon in a black gas mask had wrapped his hands around my throat I'd never have quit kicking and shoving thumbs into his eyes, but since my body had decided to disintegrate of its own volition I could only smile knowingly like it was a child falling asleep. My kids would be all right, sure. That blond girl waiting inside the house would be all right, and Colleen would be fine wherever she was. None of them really needed me. Good, said my body. Rest a minute.

I sat on Penzler's front step with my arms wrapped around my knees.

How long had I been there? My brain was evaporating, just like somebody had told me it would. We each fall apart in our own time and in our own way. I brushed the snow from my behind, picked the cooler up by its wire handle and pushed the bell. A tinny clang beyond the door.

While I waited, I pushed snow off the wrought-iron railing with my fingertip. I remembered:
Cam Vincent
. He was the one who'd said that a zombie would never notice its brain rotting but he'd been wrong, the stupid fucker.

The chipped white door opened an inch, and hot air blew out through the gap.

“Hold on,” called a man's cheerful voice.

After a second it creaked back the rest of the way. I saw a square hallway of dark wood and a bearded man in a wheelchair holding the edge of door. He had charcoal hair and a broad belly, tightly packed into his plaid golf shirt.

“Peter,” he smiled. “Come on in. I'm Kirk Penzler.”

I stepped in and he shut the door before he offered his hand. I switched the cooler to my left hand so I could shake.

“Ah!” He beamed up at my face, rolling my fingers in his. “No pinkie!”

“No, sir.”

“Call me Kirk, Pete, that's a lot better.”

He spun the chair past a grandfather clock and rolled up a plywood ramp into a narrower hallway hung with sepia portraits. Women with hats like eggs.

“And no ears either now!” he said to the air ahead of him. “Streamlined!”

“Just lost them last night,” I murmured to the back of his head.

“Well, Alice is a little different now too. You'll see.”

The air turned to bacon and burnt plastic, and I stepped once more onto the yellow linoleum of his kitchen. The lino had been ripped up from in front of the fridge and replaced with a sheet of plywood, and instead of a hole out to the backyard there was a bare stud wall. The fridge was new, too, a beige one. The burnt cupboards had been ripped out so now there was room for a round table beneath the big window. Alice sat holding a coffee cup and staring down at a plate of bacon. In the gray light from outside, her face was the color of newsprint. She wore a green sweater, and her hair looked green too.

“Alice, sweetheart!” Penzler barked. “Get Pete here a coffee, the kid's wiped out.”

She looked up at me. Her eyes were big and green, like her sister's. Or was this Natalia sitting here and it was Alice's head I'd been carrying around?

“Have a seat there, Pete,
I'll
get us coffee,” said Penzler. “Alice, honey, I want you to eat up and get all of that into you. Listen up, Alice, all right?”

He rolled across the plywood and lifted two mugs out of the drying rack in the sink, then spun to the coffeepot. He held each mug in his lap as he poured.

Alice folded her hands neatly under her chin. I pulled out a plastic chair and sat across from her.

“How was…your trip?” she asked, like she'd been dragged out of the ocean.

“It was fine.”

She folded a strip of bacon in half and shoved it in her mouth.

“Are you growing a beard?” she asked.

“There you are, sir!” Penzler rolled up and set a
bourbon street dixieland
mug in front of me. “Get that in you, you'll feel all right. You'll feel all right. So you got all the way out to California, did you? Where's Nattie now, is that her there?”

I'd put the cooler beside the table leg.

“Alice, just pop that outside the back door, would you? House is probably too hot for it. There now.”

Alice stiffly pushed her chair back and shuffled around the table. I put my gray hand against the hip of her jeans but she just picked up the cooler and shuffled out toward the piano room. Outside the window, the blue stables lay under their tarp of snow, a
dockside
refrigerator truck backed in at the far end.

“She hasn't been in much of a mood since you were here last—not that you should take that
personally
,” grinned Penzler. “Her new boyfriend rides away, her heart breaks, that what you're thinking? No, I'll get her to show you.” He blew on his coffee, took a sip. “And you should see Shamanski these days! But did you notice a couple of the boys put a bullet through Alice? Right through here.” He prodded the side of his belly. “Tore up her liver, kidney, her gallbladder, and right away she went septic. People don't get better from that. I served in the Persian Gulf so I know they don't. Lingering death, that was the prognosis for my girl. My formula, my compound, you know all about that—it was for Nattie in the first place, did either of them tell you that much?”

“Maybe they—didn't Natalia have a bad back?” I asked, getting up. “I'm going to see if Alice needs—”

“She's all right!”

He pressed my wrist hard against the table, so I sat back down.

“Well, of course you know my little compound,” he said. “Drink up now, while it's hot! Show me that hand again—funny how it healed, that little gap should've closed up. I'll need a closer look later on.”

I sat with my cup between my hands and gave Penzler a hard sideways look. I figured without my ears I must've looked intimidating as hell, but he just raised an eyebrow like he didn't quite recognize a song on the radio.

“I want a cure,” I said. “Then I'm leaving for home.”

“Uh-huh,” said Penzler. “Here's the thing. Alice has healed up real well—I'll get her to show you. The compound's real reliable for that sort of thing—the military's bought into the production, isn't that something?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Josh, um…Josh Q. Carver.”

“Oh!” Coffee sloshed onto his thumb, and he sucked it. “Must've been after you ran away from Jones that you figured that out, is that right? You're a keen little bugger—and you had
help
getting away from Jones, didn't you? We've looked into that.”

I'd remembered
Josh Q. Carver
? Funny how the brain works, I won't quit saying that. I pushed back from the table again.

“Alice must've fallen,” I said.

“No, no, sit tight!” Penzler patted my hand. “She's just slow these days. See, I didn't want her getting all
enraged
like you people were doing—that's just, I don't know,
untidy.
So I monkeyed with the numbers a little before her injections. So she's not angry like you, Pete, more like down in the dumps.”

I'd been wiggling my toes inside my shoes, but it seemed like the ones in the left shoe weren't wiggling.

“I don't think anything I've said has
penetrated
, has it?” asked Penzler. “God gave you ears to listen with, man!”

He rolled away from the table, opened the door of the new fridge. Alice shuffled back in, a scattering of snowflakes in her hair. She sat down and I took her hand and she let me squeeze it there in the middle of the table. If there was anything to wring out of Penzler I was going to need her.

“Hee hee!” Penzler said. “I just realized what I said, hassling you about ears, I didn't even clue in! Ah, Christ.” He rolled back far enough to eyeball me around the door. “You want salami, pal?”

“Yes, please.”

He started slicing it on a cutting board beside the sink. Alice squeezed my hand back, her fingertips in my palm.

“You never told me Nat was in that thing,” she whispered. “I
saw
her.”

“I meant to say.”

She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. I recognized her sister's upper lip. Five days before we'd been horny teenagers.

“Sweetheart,” said Penzler, rolling forward. “You read that e-mail from California before I did, we knew by simple process of elimination what he'd be coming back with.” He set a plate on the table. “Oh, holding
hands
now! A regular Hallmark card, you two.” He opened a box of saltines from the bottom cupboard and arranged them carefully on a daisy-patterned plate. “Hallmark. So what are your intentions here, Pete? And how long before you degenerate completely, two, three days?”

“Two weeks at least,” I said, though it'd probably be two hours.

“Alice, you've got years more than that. No reason to think otherwise, hey? Long years, I guarantee it, my dear.”

“Yeah,” she murmured. “That's great.”

“But I want grandchildren. I need to raise a few more children in my last years, kids, because I did
so
well the first time around. Every thought I think is to keep my girls healthy, keep my family with me. Can you produce grandchildren, Peter?”

“I've got a friend named Colleen Avery, and last week you ran over her husband.”

“I don't drive, Pete, but I sympathize. Traffic accidents break families apart.”

“Sure. Natalia said about your wife in Columbus.”

“Did she? I guess you know it all, then, you've got the world on a string.”

Then I was lonely for the smell of Josie's sweaty socks on the coffee table and the way Ray balled up his fist to punch me in the ass. Penzler made a big show of looking at his watch.

“If you're wondering why we're still unchaperoned,” he said, “the fellas have just run into town to get the isolation truck. Decided yesterday I'd better get it scrubbed for the great Peter Giller. We've been tracking you since you came out of Kansas, the folks at Pan-American have been so helpful—listen, didn't it ever cross your mind to rent that car under another name? That too complicated for the zombie Che Guevara?”

“I don't eat brains,” I said. “And zombies only eat brains.”

I looked into the bottom of my coffee cup. No weird powders. Penzler still had his eye on me. What the hell was he waiting for?

“Giller, you dumb bugger,” Penzler said. “Look at your sleeve.”

I still had both hands on the table, present and accounted for, but my right wrist was four inches further out of its sleeve. My left hand shot up to check the shoulder but just found some empty shirt.

“
Shit
, baby!” Alice yelled.

My heart thumped behind my sternum. I felt down in my shirtsleeve for the shoulder, stumbling to my feet, the ceiling spinning over me like a fairground octopus.

“Pete, calm down,” said Penzler. “You're making a goddamn mess.”

The room was
long and twenty feet tall, cold as a snowbank, and from the blue paint and stone floor I figured that I was out in Penzler's stable. I was upright, and naked, as far as I could tell. Steel bands held me to a wall, each one cinched tight around me with a metal belt so that I was able to wiggle about a quarter-inch.

“Good,” I said with my leather tongue.

Beakers and laptops on desks and tables, long tubes flashing like Christmas lights. Shapes like fish tanks with towels thrown over them. I smelled sawdust, pungent as molasses, and hay, too, and livestock poop, and that chalk smell, delicious, of calcium nitrate fertilizer—a full dozen bags stacked against the opposite wall, showing grapes and watermelons forever spilling from their cornucopia.

I could see my bare feet. Four white toes lay spilled on the floor, their exposed bones squinting up like worms. My right foot just had the big toe, then I remembered about my right shoulder. All I saw at the end of my collarbone was the edge of a hole like an open can of tomato sauce. Nobody'd bothered to nail my arm back on.

Alice, then the guy in the motel, then Carver, then the red-bearded guy, now Penzler—since leaving Hoover I'd been tied up and held captive
five times
. But I didn't mind. It's like a holiday when you're tied up as tight as that, because you can't make decisions anymore—good, my body. You can rest a minute.

I shut my eyes and inhaled sawdust. I felt no pain, nothing, maybe thanks to the cold. But being tied up also reminded me of the heinous shit that my kids might be getting subjected to while I wasn't lifting a finger.

Here was a better tombstone:

—peter kingston giller—

wound up in ten thousand pieces

&

not one of them