I must have been mooning at Nora, my brows bunched skyward, head cocked like a dog’s at the table. My Gone Joe was getting goner. “Poor Mel,” Nora said, straight to my heart. “You’ve been very brave. We knew you were being harrowed. We’ve come to stop it, to help you. It isn’t right. Shaman is a bad man. And powerful. How did you ever get away from him, Mel?”?her hand on my forearm, her thumb stroking the inside of my elbow.
“I just left.”
“He didn’t follow?”
“No.”
“I don’t like this,” Gypsy growled.
“You’re right,” Nora said to him. “We should leave. We don’t know what Shaman might be up to. Get rid of the other human. We need to take Mel up with us.”
“Right.” Gypsy shook off his clothes and skin, steamrolled to the cashier, opened his hingeless snake maw and swallowed the fellow whole.
“It’s all right,” Nora cooed, making it all right.
The cashier was a great lump in Gypsy’s throat. Gypsy slithered upright to the walkway door. His human body dragged along the floor like a pair of half-discarded Doctor Dentons. He licked the jambs and the seam between the glass doors, causing them to melt together. Where his tongue touched, smoke shot out. I saw the passage accordion away from the cafй like a portable airplane tunnel. Cars were braking and screeching below. Then the liftoff.
“You worthless fool,” Gone Joe said. “Izzy told you not to give them anything, and now they’re boosting your ass to Sanduleak.” Gone Joe was catching his breath, double, in Nora’s eyes.
Gypsy undulated back to the table and pulled his skin back on, just like a scuba diver stretching into his wet suit. The cashier was less prominent now; Gypsy’s digestive juices must have been formidable. “Forgive us if we don’t do a ten-nine-eight,” he said, once he had his mouth back on. The floor shook. “Goddamn Izzy Molson. One of these days I’m gonna put him right here.” He tapped the dwindling lump in his midsection.
Nora clucked and shook her head. “Gypsy!” she moaned.
I looked through Gone Joe at Gypsy. “But Izzy said you were on our side,” I said.
“I am,” he said. Outside, through the window, Earth was a smoky, blue agate, then a dot, then invisible in the solar blaze, and the sun too was dwindling.
13. What You Can See in Texas
It’s amazing what you can see from a highway rest stop table, especially in a place like Texas, where people tend to let it hang out more. Hitching west, that’s one of the first things you notice: how much more at ease folks seem to feel with themselves out west. They let you catch them scratching their navel or adjusting their hang or spitting or mopping sweat from a cleavage. It’s okay by them. There’s so much more space out there, west of St. Louis, and people are a lot more self-contained. They know they can just get up and go somewhere else if they damn well feel like it. Listen to western music. Listen to Johnny Abilene and the Haymakers, for example. They don’t take shit from anyone, bosses, lovers, fathers, children . . . “take a bite of this.”
Once, over a Swiss Miss, in a Panhandle rest area, I saw a woman and her husband duking it out on the back of a flatbed pickup. That was the best cocoa I ever had. Nobody got seriously injured, though their five kids, pasty, bleak, skulked in looking like war orphans. In New York, you’d see couples swap looks, and you’d notice their kids squirm a little?that’s it, that’s all. If one of them raised their voice slightly, everybody in the restaurant would turn and stare. Somebody would dial 911, sure. In Texas, three people would have to be murdered first.
You see more.
14. So Was the Sphinx
They were talking about me.
Gypsy said, “You see? He’s paralyzed. He can’t do anything. Everything goes in, and nothing comes out. He has no idea what he is. He doesn’t remember anything deeper than the Milky Way.”
“Shush,” Nora said, “He can hear you. You’ll upset him.”