“Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!” Gone Joe was punching and prying Izzy’s bung but making no headway. Detritus from the operation was scattered all over my mind, I realized. There were little lacerations too, creating lapses and blind spots randomly. It had been a quick job.
“Go on,” Nora told me.
I concentrated. “Go on,” I echoed. “Yes. The Space People picked me up and gave me something to eat at their place, just tents and a few goats and chickens out in New . . . New something. York or Hampshire or Mexico. Orleans, maybe. Did I say I want to be one with you, utterly and completely, forever?”
She nodded.
“Mm. Then I was alone with . . .”
“Shaman,” Gypsy said.
“Thanks. With Shaman. And he said some words that made a hole in my mind. But Izzy fixed it.”
“Izzy!” The word sprang from Gypsy’s mouth like air from a burst tire. As he stood, Gypsy’s jaw dropped again, this time to his knees. The flesh unpeeled from his chin to his navel like tape rolling off a dispenser. There was the snake, yellow and glistening. It turned inside Gypsy’s human faзade like an uncoiled intestine. A shadow of displeasure crossed Nora’s face, and she reached over to roll up Gypsy’s chin. She just started it, and Gypsy was shamed into finishing. No one had seen that one but us. Looking at the blithe tourists checking out at the cashier’s, I thought of all the bizarreries I might have missed in my life, just in my peripheral vision.
Look, and it’s rolled up.
Gypsy tucked his shirt in and sat down. Nora said, “Mel, tell us how you know Izzy.”
“He and Sarvaduhka,”?Gypsy didn’t stand up?”they picked me up back in New Whatever, in a helicopter or a car or a train or something. It had an elephant in it. Jasmine. He sealed up Shaman’s hole. I feel a lot better now, but I’ve got like shrapnel in here. . . . Yes, it was New Mexico!”
Nora smiled at me, and my heart turned to Silly Putty. “Don’t you have something you want to give us, Mel?” she said.
“Not that I know of. And Izzy said be careful.”
“That’s the limit!” Gypsy shouted. He slammed his fist on the table. The hand flattened and cracked away from his wrist. No blood. A grey tendril, like an octopus’s, poked through. “He has to have his nose in everything. I’m gonna kill him, Nora. I’m gonna eighty-six that scum bag. We come nearly two hundred thousand light-years to this backwater solar system, and Izzy has to gum things up, put in his two cents, jimmy everything in his direction. No, Nora. No, no, no! No more!”
Suddenly, Gypsy remembered where he was, and he froze. Moving only his eyes, he sneaked a glance sideways. The tourists were watching. The cashier was watching.
The trucker had just returned. He was sidling up to our table with a fresh, long-stemmed red rose in his hand. He gave Gypsy a nasty squint, then turned to Nora. “This is for you, ma’am. I got it in the gift shop. You’re the nicest dang little thing I seen on this highway since 1957.”
12. Liftoff
I’m pretty sure I didn’t say this out loud: “Help me, Gone Joe! Please don’t go. Help me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be. Things are turning strange.” I often prayed to Gone Joe when I was in a spot. Once I was alone in my high school locker room with a fullback who wanted to kill me for correctly naming the capital of Massachusetts, after he’d embarrassed himself by saying, “Idaho.” Another time I was alone with a girl in her bedroom, during a sweet sixteen party with no adults around. In both cases Gone Joe gave me the same advice, and I took it; he said, “Run!”
But now things were different, because Gone Joe had his fingernails at the edge of my mind, and there was a chance he would escape completely. “Don’t bother me, kid,” he said. He was in up to his shoulder. I was looking right through Gone Joe’s cuff, squeezed up his arm past the elbow now, at the trucker’s back. The trucker had gotten his smile from Nora and was walking away. The tourists, alarmed by Gypsy’s sforzandi, were pushing through the door into the glass tube over the highway, right through Gone Joe’s overalls.