Глен Хиршберг - Transitway

"That's my boy." Q started cracking eggs, but Ferdinand completed a circle and bumped him out of the way, snatching up a knife and beginning to chop at the jalapenos.

"These eggs might make you weep," he said.

"Your dancing's going to make me weep," said Q.

Several seconds went by before Ferdinand realized his friend had neither returned to the table nor cracked the remaining eggs. Instead, he was staring into the sink.

"I gave you that," he said slowly, reached down, and lifted the bowl. It was white, with a picture of an apple-cheeked Red Riding Hood and a particularly sleazy, slobbering gray wolf under a red-checked bedcover painted on the bottom.

Ferdinand nodded. "Revenge, I think. For that…" Skeleton pinata? Was that right? What had started them trading gifts like that?

Eventually, Q shrugged. "Still no reason to put bran in it."

"Sorry. Go sit."

Ferdinand wound up folding in so many peppers that the eggs turned sticky green-brown, the color of the palm fronds that somehow sucked nourishment from between the particulates in the L.A. air and kept growing alongside every deserted sidewalk and choked roadway. When presented with his plate, Q nodded his approval absently, flooded his entire plate with Tabasco sauce, then gulped it all down in silence.

From his own seat, Ferdinand stared past his friend, through the strings of dust drifting in the air like lines on an old TV set, into his living room. There was his old brown vinyl couch, the cushion on one side collapsed like an exhausted lung. Past the couch stood the matching free-standing bookshelves he'd bought from IKEA a few years back on a splurge, then accidentally assembled upside down so that the rough sides pointed out. Books crammed every available inch of those shelves, and piled up on the floor, too. He spent the great majority of his non-school time in there, so the dust all over everything surprised him.

Cracking open a Corona, Q fished a lime out of a baggie he kept in his shirt pocket, squeezed some into the beer, and drank half of it in a single draft. Then he sighed, returned the lime and baggie to his pocket, and crossed his ankles beneath the table. "Okay. What's it going to be, Ferd? What we gonna do with all this time? Santa Anita, bet us some ponies?"

"Too poor." Ferdinand initially waved off the new bottle Q offered him, then took it after Q popped it open with his thumbnail, the way he always did.

"How 'bout over to Swinger's, case us some ladies?"

Ferdinand smiled. "Too tired of people. And we're too fat."

"Plus, you dance funny. Okay, your turn."

"Clifton's," Ferdinand said.

Immediately, Q slapped the table with his open palm and laughed. "Hot damn. Clifton's, for some roast beef."

"And a pudding."

"Pudding, too."

"Eat in the trees."

Q laughed again. "Remember that time there, with the waterfall, when Moe — "

"Milt," Ferdinand corrected, and Q stopped.

Both men stared at each other. For the third or fourth time that morning, queasiness bubbled in Ferdinand's stomach. Finally, Q pushed a breath between his teeth.

"Milt," he said, as if the word were foreign, brand new to him.

"Pretty sure. Can't remember anything else about him, but that was his name."

"Just a kid."

"Field trip, maybe."

"Must have been."

After another few seconds of looking at each other, then down at the table, Ferdinand got up and put the dishes in the sink. The idea of Clifton's Cafeteria really did seem right. They'd tuck themselves at one of the tables by the indoor waterfall, beneath the giant fake trees, then sit for hours and watch Hollywood hustlers work the ground floor and get in arguments with Grand Market wheelchair thieves, while retro Zoot Suit thugs swung pocket watches and cribbed betting tips from old ladies stuffing themselves with French dips and dripping sauce all over their Santa Anita racing forms. Best people-watching in Los Angeles.

"Hey, Q. After Clifton's, how about the main library? Check out some books we finally have time to read."

"Just as long as none of them's Flecker," Q barked, and leapt to his feet to toss his second empty Corona into Ferdinand's recycle bag.

This time, Ferdinand's smile didn't make him nauseous. Just wistful. Teaching in an academic system that had ditched Dickens, Twain, Dickinson, Hurston, Faulkner, Hughes and Wright as either too difficult for the students or irrelevant to their lives, Ferdinand had devoted a week or more, over thirty-plus years of objections from department chairs and district "curriculum advisors," to The Golden Journey to Samarkind. Partially, this was because there were always one or two kids, each year, who responded to poems about getting somewhere else. Partially, it was because not one of the parents who'd actually turned up for Back-to-School night had heard of Flecker, a fact Ferdinand never failed to enjoy, since the parents almost invariably asked if he weren't the Spanish teacher.

Mostly, though, Ferdinand had stuck to Flecker because that's what his father had read by campfire or starlight during his frozen three-week crawl up the cactus-strewn wastes of El Camino del Diablo over the border into Great Depression Arizona in 1938.

"For lust of knowing what should not be known," he found himself mouthing, for the thousandth time in his life. "For lust of knowing what should not be known." His students would forget him, every one. But in their most haunted hours — on their wedding night, maybe, or the day they fled town, or the eve of their very first gangbang — one or two would inexplicably murmur the forlorn phrases of a twilight-of-the-Empire British twit who'd dreamed hard and died young. A pathetic legacy, maybe. But a legacy, nevertheless.

"Move your Fleckered ass, and let's roll," said Q, and Ferdinand went.

Moments later, humming the Macarena to himself as Q downed yet another beer, Ferdinand led the way onto the cracked and weedy driveway to his 1974 Vega, shoved his key through the channel he'd made in the rust on the doorlock, and popped the doors.

"Sweet Jesus, get the air on," Q moaned as he settled onto the scalding, split vinyl.

"Air?" Ferdinand grinned. "They make 'em with air, now?" He jammed the key in the ignition and turned it.

The car didn't kick or even cough. It just sat. The grin stayed stuck to Ferdinand's face. This was only right, after all. Only fair. Every year, usually by dark on the first night of Christmas break, he came down with the flu he'd held off all fall, arid stayed sick most of the vacation. Like his body, the Vega had apparently known precisely when it was okay, at long last, to go ahead and give out.

For a few seconds, Ferdinand sat and baked in the morning sunlight, stroking the cracking dash board as though it were the muzzle of a horse. A dead horse. Then he said, "Think maybe we should take your car."

Q grunted. "Walked."

Ferdinand turned his head in surprise. "All the way from…" Where did Q live again? He knew, of course he knew, he'd gone there all the time when…

"Wanted to see and hear people, you know? Felt weird getting up this morning, knowing no one's waiting."

Ferdinand nodded.

"Of course, L.A. being the great throbbing nowhere it has always been, I hardly saw anyone anyway."

"City of cars."

"Hardly even saw those. Had to trot onto a freeway overpass just to make sure everyone was still out there."

Sighing, Ferdinand waved a hand toward the window and the noise roaring up the 110. "Pretty sure they're still out there."

"Yeah, but where the hell are they going? Not my neighborhood."

The air in the car seared Ferdinand's lungs, seemed to seal his skin like paint. Nudging the door open, he climbed out, wanting to be away from Q for just a moment, and wandered to the edge of his driveway to stare at the row of stunted trees lining his street.