David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

Plus dull. An old hand, an actual chain-smoker of cigars, J.D. can also light a cigar with a match (lighter out of fluid) forefingered from its Ronald-emblazoned book and thumbed against the flint paper without being detached, all the while crushing tiny insects. This is not a safe procedure for ignition. Close cover before striking. Why not just use the dashboard lighter DeHaven fashioned out of a high-resistance iron mattress spring?

Because the lighter flies out. It gets way too hot, and suddenly'll just pop out, into J.D.'s fine lap. His son the atonal engineer. Defectively effective homemade dashboard lighter. Represents a product, won't keep a nose on, lets the nose fall into the dash, then whines about red oil lights. J.D. sometimes looks at DeHaven with this sort of objective horrified amazement: / made that?

"What do you mean, 'For whom?" DeHaven is saying to J.D.

"You've been saying it. Repeating it. Two solid days. Back and forth. For Whom. Gets in my head. Gives me a pain. Quit with it."

"Varoom, I've been saying, Pop. Varoom. It's something atonal I'm composing. It's gonna involve engines, speed, lightning-war. It's a title. My title."

" 'For whom' are the first couple words of Dr. Ambrose's best story," Mark Nechtr says. D.L. snorts. J.D. draws at his cigar. The car is Cubanly redolent and greenly fogged. Mark is subjected, via crosscurrent from J.D.'s cracked window, to the main exhaust path of the stogie, but does not object. "It's the first bit of his Funhouse story. 'For whom.' "

J.D. grunts the noncommittal grunt of a father who's been mistaken about a son in front of that son. Even a violently rouged son.

"I compose my own stuff, man. I don't go around using other people's stuff. That's for bullshit artists. I'm no bullshit artist."

D.L. nods over her notebook in support.

"Half right, anyway," J.D. chuckles. His chuckle is like neither Ambrose's maniacal cackle nor D.L.'s mucoidal laugh. Has Stern-berg laughed yet, ever?

Mark has been more comfortable with the general drift of a conversation before, lots of times. What if the stories that really stab him are really other people's stories? What if they're bullshit?

What if he alone isn't clued into this, and there's no way to know? He's afraid he does want a flower.

Plus he has other obvious troubles coming. Magda is asking to have a look at his Ziploc. Her hands are hairy-knuckled, but not orange.

"Varoom, I was saying." DeHaven shakes his head, lighting an unfiltered with the same nonchalant ease as his father. He holds the cigarette between thumb and forefinger as he drags, which looks pretty suspicious. Sternberg, too, lights a 100, which because of the eye trouble appears to the side of where it is. And Magda is holding Mark's smeared baggie up to the way-back window's southern light. The light through the NASSIN and!em HSRAW is clean and penetrating. The arches, too, are now completely behind them.

There's the sort of silence in the loud car that precedes a small-talk question. Conversations between adults and kids tend to be punctuated with these silences a great deal. Then adults ask about present or future plans.

DeHaven, hurrying gingerly in the face of unreliable lubrication data, is no longer even bothering to slow at the dangerous corn-obscured intersections. (There's still lots of corn, by the way.) He fishtails suddenly West onto a 2500W. Again the golden M lies left, now fully revealed above a fallow stretch of soil.

"So then what are you kids doing now?" Steelritter asks, smelling the proximity of the last shuttle's end, doing something oral to the great cigar in his mouth so that it recedes, protrudes. He flares the slim nostrils of his hooked nose. A splatter of distant thunder sounds. The air through the cracks cools noticeably. Magda is looking at the side of Mark's face. J.D. manipulates his burning protrusion:

"Any actors left among us?" he asks.

"Me," Sternberg says, swimming briefly into J.D.'s rearviewed ken. DeHaven snorts something about horror movies, and D.L. gives the padded shoulder of his costume a rather over-familiar hush-pinch.

"I'm still in the business, Mr. Steelritter," Sternberg says, voice up an octave as he tries to be casual but courteous. Sometimes J.D. Steelritter actually uses Clout as his middle name, when he signs contracts.

"Well good for you, kid."

"I'm based in the Boston area."

"Damn nice area."

"You bet. I like the area a lot."

"Working steady? Who've you got representing you? Do I know any of the people you're under?"

"I'm kind of still in the exciting breaking-in stage," Sternberg says casually. "I'm waiting for a callback on a Bank of Boston gig. I'm up for the part of a really helpful teller."

J.D. exhales at his own tip, holding the thing up, inspecting it coolly for an even burn.

"I have call-forwarding, for callbacks."

J.D. smiles to himself. "Maybe I can introduce you around to some of the more important folks, while you're all reveling."

"Gee."

"The way I see this business going, after this McDonald's thing, you could have a real future."

"Hey, that's really encouraging to hear, sir."

"Bet your life it is, kid. That's what I do."

"What do you mean that's what you do?" Sternberg asks, confused.

Magda clears her throat demurely against the oxides of three different brands and asks about Mark Nechtr's plans.

"Yeah, Nechtr," J.D. says. "You look like the acting type. Photogenic. Natural. At ease in designer jeans and that doctors' wear. Any acting in your future? Your father's in laundry, Nola said back there?"

Needing very much to exhale anyway, Mark explains that he's really just a graduate student. When DeHaven laughs and asks what in, Mark gets really interested in the floor. Sort of English, he says.

"In creative writing," D.L. amends, mostly to DeHaven, who still holds his cigarette like a joint, squinting against smoke between dashlight and road. D.L. turns slightly on the front hump. "He's actually embarrassed to tell people what he really studies, when they ask. He actually lies. Why do you do that, darling?"

J.D. chuckles that chuckle. "Hell, Nechtr, no need to be shy about it. A lot of writing teachers make good solid incomes from teaching creative writing. There's a demand for it. Sometimes over at Steelritter Ads we get copywriters who're just coming out of creative programs. Ambrose himself makes good solid steady money over at East Chesapeake Trades."

"That's where Mark is. Mark's under him."

J.D. ignores this girl. "Creative programs are one reason the whole Funhouse franchise thing's finally gotten off the ground. Writing teachers don't press. They know when to concede. They defer to people who know what's what in an industry."

"Technically part of English Department. . technically a degree in English," Mark mutters indistinctly into the roar of the window he's opened. Smoke is drawn out the big crack, sliding like the last bits of grainy stuff down a drain. The combined smokers' smoke is the same general color as the clouds that have drawn past the Westward arches and are moving visibly this way. Threads of bright light appear and then instantly disappear in the clouds' main body— filaments in bad bulbs. The air cools further, and there's that rain's-coming smell through the window's crack. Magda leans a bit over Mark with the flowers and breathes deeply at the roar of the crosscurrent:

"Rain," with a sigh.

And they pass a sudden and alone farmhouse, right up next to 2500W, with its trees and little skyline of silos, and tire swing, and rusted machinery at angles in the dense grass of its limitless yard. The fields around the house are full of odd grass-or-hay material. A big-armed woman in a lawn chair waves from the gray porch, a wet scythe and styrofoam cooler at her feet. The house's mailbox has a name on it and is yawning open, waiting for mail. The woman waves at the growling jacked-up Reunion car. Her wave is deliberate and even, like a windshield wiper. She's a storm-watcher. A spectator sport in rural Illinois. Obscure elsewhere. But storms move like the very wind out here, no fucking around, building and delivering very quickly, often with violence, sometimes hail, damage, tornadoes. Then they move off with the calm even pace of something that knows it's kicked your ass, they move away, still tall, bound for points East, behind you. It's a spectacle. Mark would normally be more interested in the implications of the lawn chair and wave. He'd kind of like them to stop at the house and try to get some definite directions. Surely they can't be lost. The Steel-ritters live around here. And if they've been shuttling for three solid days and nights, as J.D. says, the precise way to go should be a deep autonomic wrinkle in DeHaven's brain by now. But they're circling. They are not, by any means, creating for themselves the shortest distance between C.I. Airport and Collision, 111. Mark does know about straight lines and shortest distances. Maybe J.D. and DeHaven are the kind of people who can't navigate and talk at the same time. Mark feels in his designer hip pocket the giant key of the O'Hare rental locker.