The John Green Collection (38 page)

“That just doesn’t seem plausible,” Colin noted quietly.

“I’m just saying that I think we should go
somewhere
,” Hassan said, not hearing him. “I mean, I like this interstate as much as the next guy, but the farther south we go, the hotter it gets, and I’m already sweating like a whore in church.”

Colin rubbed his sore neck, thinking he would never spend another night in the car when he had plenty of money to pay for hotels. “Did you see that sign?” he asked.

“What sign?”

“The one about the grave of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”

With little regard for the road, Hassan turned to Colin, smiled broadly, and punched him softly on the shoulder. “Excellent.
Excellent.
And anyway, it’s lunchtime.”

•  •  •

As Colin climbed out of the passenger’s seat in the Hardee’s parking lot at Exit 212 in Carver County, Tennessee, he called his mom.

“Hey, we’re in Tennessee.”

“How are you feeling, buddy?”

“Better, I guess. I don’t know. It’s hot. Did, um, did anyone call?”

His mom paused, and he could just
feel
her wretched pity. “Sorry, love. I’ll tell, uh, anyone, to call your cell.”

“Thanks, Mom. I gotta go eat lunch at Hardee’s.”

“Sounds delightful. Wear your seat belt! I love you!”

“You too.”

•  •  •

After a relentlessly greasy Monster Thickburger in the empty restaurant, Colin asked the woman behind the cash register, whose body seemed to have suffered from perhaps a few too many meals at her place of employment, how to get to Franz Ferdinand’s grave.

“Who?” she asked.

“The Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”

The woman stared at him blankly for a moment, and then her eyes lit up. “Oh y’all are looking for Gutshot. Boy, you’re headed for the sticks, aren’t you?”

“Gutshot?”

“Yes. Now what you want to do is you pull out of the parking lot and you turn right—away from the highway I mean, and then in about two miles, the road’s gonna T. There’s a closed-down Citgo there. You take a right onto that road and then you’re gonna drive past a whole lot of nothing for ten or fifteen miles. You’ll go up a bit of a hill and then that’s Gutshot.”

“Gutshot?”

“Gutshot, Tennessee. That’s where they got the Archduke.”

“So a right and then a right.”

“Yup. Y’all have fun now, y’hear?”

“Gutshot,” Colin repeated to himself. “Okay, thanks.”

•  •  •

Since its last paving, the ten- or fifteen-mile-long road in question seemed to have been at the epicenter of an earthquake. Colin drove cautiously, but still, the worn shocks of the Hearse creaked and groaned at the endless potholes and waving undulations of pavement.

“Maybe we don’t need to see the Archduke,” said Hassan.

“We’re on a
road trip.
It’s about
adventure
,” Colin mimicked.

“Do you think the people of Gutshot, Tennessee, have ever seen an actual, living Arab?”

“Oh, don’t be so paranoid.”

“Or for that matter do you think they’ve ever seen a Jew-fro?”

Colin thought that over for a moment, and then said, “Well, the woman at Hardee’s was nice to us.”

“Right, but the woman at Hardee’s called Gutshot ‘the sticks,”’ Hassan said, imitating the woman’s accent. “I mean, if Hardee’s is urban, I’m not sure I want to see rural.” Hassan rolled on with his diatribe, and Colin laughed and smiled at all the right places, but he just kept driving, calculating the odds that the Archduke, who died in Sarajevo more than ninety years before, and who’d randomly popped into Colin’s brain the previous night, would end up between Colin and wherever he was heading. It was irrational, and Colin hated thinking irrationally, but he couldn’t help but wonder whether perhaps being in the presence of the Archduke might reveal something to Colin about his missing piece. But of course the universe does not conspire to put you in one place rather than another, Colin knew. He thought of Democritus: “Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.”
¹⁵

And so it was not fate, but Colin Singleton’s character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses, that finally brought him to Gutshot, Tennessee—
POPULATION
864, as the roadside sign read. At first, Gutshot looked like everything that came before it, only with a better-paved road. On each side of the Hearse, fields of squat, luminously green plants stretched out into a gray forever, broken up only by the occasional horse pasture, barn, or stand of trees. Eventually, Colin saw before him on the side of the road a two-story cinder-block building painted a ghastly pink.

“I think that’s Gutshot,” he said, nodding toward the building.

On the side of the building, a hand-painted sign read
THE
KINGDOM
OF
GUTSHOT
—
ETERNAL
RESTING
PLACE
OF
THE
ARCHDUKE
FRANZ
FERDINAND
/
ICE
-
COLD
BEER
/
SODA
/
BAIT
.

Colin pulled into the store’s gravel driveway. Unbuckling his seat belt, he said to Hassan, “I wonder if they keep the Archduke with the soda or the bait.”

Hassan’s deep laugh filled the car. “Shit, Colin made a funny. This place is like magic for you. Shame about how we’re gonna die here, though. I mean, seriously. An Arab and a half-Jew enter a store in Tennessee. It’s the beginning of a joke, and the punch line is ‘sodomy.”’ Nonetheless, Colin heard Hassan shuffling his feet on the gravel parking lot behind him.

They walked through a screen door into the Gutshot General Store. From behind the counter, a girl with a long, straight nose and brown eyes the size of some lesser planets looked up from an issue of
Celebrity Living
magazine and said, “How y’all doing?”

“We’re okay. Yourself?” Hassan asked while Colin was trying to think whether a worthwhile soul in all of human history had ever read a single copy of
Celebrity Living.
¹⁶

“Just fine,” said the girl.

For a while, they walked around the store, pacing the dusty, varnished two-by-fours that comprised a floor, pretending to consider various snacks, drinks, and minnows swimming in bait tanks. Half-crouched behind a chest-high rack of potato chips, Colin tugged on Hassan’s T-shirt, cupped his hand over Hassan’s ear, and whispered, “
Talk
to her.” Except in point of fact Colin did not whisper, because he had never quite mastered the art of whispering—he just sort of talked in a slightly softer voice directly into Hassan’s eardrum.

Hassan winced and shook his head. “What’s the total area, in square miles, of the state of Kansas?” he whispered.

“Um, around 82,200; why?”

“I just find it amusing that you know that but can’t figure out a way to speak without using your vocal cords.” Colin started to explain that even whispering involves the
use
of the vocal cords, but Hassan just rolled his eyes. So Colin brought his hand to his face and nibbled on the inside of his thumb while staring at Hassan hopefully, but Hass had turned his attention to the potato chips and so finally it fell to Colin. He walked to the desk and said, “Hi, we’re wondering about the Archduke.”

The
Celebrity Living
reader smiled at him. Her puffy cheeks and too-long nose disappeared. She had the sort of broad and guileful smile in which you couldn’t help but believe—you just wanted to make her happy so you could keep seeing it. But it passed in a flash. “Tours start every hour on the hour, cost eleven dollars, and frankly aren’t worth it,” she answered in a monotone.

“We’ll pay,” Hassan said, suddenly behind him. “The kid needs to see the Archduke.” And then Hassan leaned forward and stage-whispered, “He’s having a nervous breakdown.” Hassan placed twenty-two dollars on the counter, which the girl promptly slid into a pocket of her shorts, flagrantly disregarding the cash register before her.

The girl blew a lock of mahogany hair from her face and sighed. “Sure is hot out,” she noted.

“Is this, like, a guided tour?” Colin asked.

“Yeah. And much to my ever-loving chagrin, I am your tour guide.” She stepped out from behind the counter. Short. Skinny. Her face not pretty so much as interesting-looking.

“I’m Colin Singleton,” he said to the tour guide/grocery store clerk.

“Lindsey Lee Wells,” she answered, reaching out a small hand, the fingernails a chipped metallic pink. He shook, and then Lindsey turned to Hassan.

“Hassan Harbish. Sunni Muslim. Not a terrorist.”

“Lindsey Lee Wells. Methodist. Me, neither.” The girl smiled again. Colin wasn’t thinking about anything but himself and K-19 and the piece of his gut he’d misplaced—but there was no denying her smile. That smile could end wars and cure cancer.

•  •  •

For a long time, they walked silently through knee-high grass behind the store, which irritated the sensitive skin of Colin’s exposed calves, and he thought to mention it and ask whether maybe there was some kind of recently mowed patch through which they might walk, but he knew Hassan would think that “sitzpinklery,” so he stayed quiet as the grass tickled at his skin. He thought of Chicago, where you can go days without ever once stepping on a single patch of actual earth. That well-paved world appealed to him, and he missed it as his feet fell on uneven clumps of hardened dirt that threatened to twist his ankles.

As Lindsey Lee Wells walked ahead of them (typical
Celebrity Living
–reader crap; avoiding talking to them), Hassan just padded along next to Colin, and even though he hadn’t technically called Colin a
sitzpinkler
for being allergic to grass, Colin knew that he
would
have, which annoyed him. And so Colin again brought up Hassan’s least favorite subject.

“Have I mentioned today that you should go to college?” Colin asked.

Hassan rolled his eyes. “Right, I know. I mean, just look where academic excellence got you.”

Colin couldn’t think of a comeback. “Well, but you should this year. You can’t just not go forever. You don’t even have to register until July fifteenth.” (Colin had looked this up.)

“I actually
can
not go forever. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I like sitting around on my ass, watching TV, and getting fatter. It’s my life’s work, Singleton. That’s why I love road trips, dude. It’s like doing something without actually doing anything. Anyway, my dad didn’t go to college, and he’s rich as balls.”

Colin wondered just how rich balls were, but only said, “Right, but your dad doesn’t sit on his ass, either. He works, like, a hundred hours a week.”

“True. True. And it’s all thanks to him that I don’t have to go to work
or
college.”

Colin had no response to that. But he just didn’t get Hassan’s apathy. What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.

Although then again, when you have just gone on a road trip to escape the memory of your nineteenth Katherine and are traipsing through south-central Tennessee on your way to see the grave of a dead Austro-Hungarian Archduke, maybe you don’t have a right to go and think anything odd.

And he was busy anagramming
anything odd—any odd night, handy dog tin, doing thy DNA
—when Colin did his DNA proud: he stumbled on a molehill and fell. He became so disoriented by the fast-approaching ground that he didn’t even reach his hands out to break the fall. He just fell forward like he’d been shot in the back. The very first thing to hit the ground were his glasses. They were closely followed by his forehead, which hit a small jagged rock.

Colin rolled over onto his back. “I fell,” he noted quite loudly.

“Shit!” Hassan shouted, and when Colin opened his eyes, he saw fuzzily that Hassan and Lindsey Lee Wells were kneeling, peering down at him. She smelled strongly of a fruity perfume, which Colin believed to be called Curve. He’d purchased it once, for Katherine XVII, but she hadn’t liked it.
¹⁷

“I’m bleeding, aren’t I?” Colin asked.

“Like a stuck pig,” she said. “Don’t move.” She turned to Hassan and said, “Give me your T-shirt,” and Hassan promptly said no, which Colin
figured had something to do with Hassan’s man-boobs. “We need to apply pressure,” Lindsey explained to Hassan, and then Hassan calmly said no again, and then Lindsey said, “Jesus Christ—fine,” and took off her shirt.

Colin squinted through his glassesless fuzziness but couldn’t see much. “We should probably save this for the second date,” Colin said.

“Right, perv,” she responded, but he could hear her smiling. As she wiped at his forehead and cheek softly with the T-shirt, then pressed hard on a tender spot above his right eyebrow, she kept talking. “Some friend you’ve got, by the way. Stop moving your neck. The two concerns we’ve got here are some kind of vertebral injury or a subdural hematoma. I mean, slight-slight-slight chances, but you’ve gotta be cautious, ’cause the nearest hospital’s an hour away.” He closed his eyes and tried not to wince as she pressed hard against the cut. Lindsey told Hassan, “Apply pressure with the shirt here. I’ll be back in eight minutes.”

“We should call a doctor or something,” Hassan said.

“I’m a paramedic,” Lindsey answered as she turned away.

“How the hell old are you?” he asked.

“Seventeen. Okay. Fine. A paramedic
in training.
Eight minutes. I swear.” She ran off. It was not the way Curve smelled that Colin liked—not exactly. It was the way the air smelled just as Lindsey began to jog away from him. The smell the perfume left behind. There’s not a word for that in English, but Colin knew the French word:
sillage.
What Colin liked about Curve was not its smell on the skin but its
sillage
, the fruity sweet smell of its leaving.