T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

Zoltan had arrived.

A week after his triumph on “The Tonight Show” he hobbled into the office, the cape stained and torn, tights gone in the knees. He brought a distinctive smell with him — the smell of pissed-over gutters and fermenting dumpsters — and for the first time I began to understand why he’d never given me an address or a phone number. (“You want me,” he said, “leave a message with Ramón at Jiffy Cleaners.”) All at once I had a vision of him slinging his grapefruit sack from the nearest drainpipe and curling up for the night. “Zoltan,” I said, “are you okay? You need some cash? A place to stay?”

He sat heavily in the chair across from me. Behind him, on the wall, was an oil painting of an open window, a gift from Mu’s bass player. Zoltan waved me off. Then, with a weary gesture, he reached up and removed the cap and goggles. I was shocked. His hair was practically gone and his face was as seamed and scarred as an old hockey puck. He looked about a hundred and twelve. He said nothing.

“Well,” I said, to break the silence, “you got your wish. You made it.” I lifted a stack of correspondence from the desk and waved it at him. “You’re famous.”

Zoltan turned his head and spat on the floor. “Famous,” he mocked. “Fidel Castro is famous. Irving Berlin. Evel Knievel.” His rumble had turned bitter. “Peterbilt,” he said suddenly.

This last took me by surprise. I’d been thinking of consolatory platitudes, and all I could do was echo him weakly: “Peterbilt?”

“I want the biggest rig going. The loudest, the dirtiest.”

I wasn’t following him.

“Maine to L.A.,” he rumbled.

“You’re going to drive it?”

He stood shakily, fought his way back into the cap, and lowered the goggles. “Shit,” he spat, “I ride the axle.”

I tried to talk him out of it. “Think of the fumes,” I said, “the road hazards. Potholes, dead dogs, mufflers. You’ll be two feet off the pavement, going seventy-five, eighty miles an hour. Christ, a cardboard box’ll tear you apart.”

He wouldn’t listen. Not only was he going through with it, but he wanted to coordinate it so that he ended up in Pasadena, for the swap meet at the Rose Bowl. There he would emerge from beneath the truck, wheel a motorcycle out of the back, roar up a ramp, and sail over twenty-six big rigs lined up fender to fender in the middle of the parking lot.

I asked Sol about it. Advance contracts had already made back the money he’d laid out for the airplane thing ten times over. And now we could line up backers. “Get him to wear a Pirelli patch on his cape,” Sol rasped, “it’s money in the bank.”

Easy for Sol to say, but I was having problems with the whole business. This wasn’t a plastic dinosaur on a movie lot or a stinko audience at the Improv, this was flesh and blood we were talking about here, a human life. Zoltan wasn’t healthy — in mind or body. The risks he took weren’t healthy. His ambition wasn’t healthy. And if I went along with him, I was no better than Sol, a mercenary, a huckster who’d watch a man die for ten percent of the action. For a day or two I stayed away from the office, brooding around the kitchen in my slippers. In the end, though, I talked myself into it — Zoltan was going to do it with or without me. And who knew what kind of bloodsucker he’d wind up with next?

I hired a PR firm, got a major trucking company to carry him for the goodwill and free publicity, and told myself it was for the best. I’d ride in the cab with the driver, keep him awake, watch over Zoltan personally. And of course I didn’t know how it was going to turn out — Zoltan was amazing, and if anyone could pull it off, he could — and I thought of the Sumitomo Building and Aero Masoquisto and hoped for the best.

We left Bangor in a cold drizzle on a morning that could have served as the backdrop for a low-budget horror picture: full-bellied clouds, gloom, mist, nose-running cold. By the time we reached Portland the drizzle had begun to crust on the windshield wipers; before we reached New Hampshire it was sleet. The driver was an American Indian by the name of Mink — no middle name, no surname, just Mink. He weighed close to five hundred pounds and he wore his hair in a single braided coil that hung to his belt loops in back. The other driver, whose name was Steve, was asleep in the compartment behind the cab. “Listen, Mink,” I said, the windshield wipers beating methodically at the crust, tires hissing beneath us, “maybe you should pull over so we can check on Zoltan.”

Mink shifted his enormous bulk in the seat. “What, the Fly?” he said. “No sweat. That guy is like amazing. I seen that thing with the airplane. He can survive that, he’s got no problem with this rig — long’s I don’t hit nothin’.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when an animal — a huge brown thing like a cow on stilts — materialized out of the mist. Startled, Mink jerked the wheel, the truck went into a skid, there was a jolt like an earthquake, and the cow on stilts was gone, sucked under the front bumper like a scrap of food sucked down a drain. When we finally came to a stop a hundred yards up the road, the trailer was perpendicular to the cab and Mink’s hands were locked to the wheel.

“What happened?” I said.

“Moose,” Mink breathed, adding a soft breathless curse. “We hit a fuckin’ moose.”

In the next instant I was down and out of the cab, racing the length of the trailer, and shouting Zoltan’s name. Earlier, in the cold dawn of Bangor, I’d watched him stretch out his mesh bag and suspend it like a trampoline from the trailer’s undercarriage, just ahead of the rear wheels. He’d waved to the reporters gathered in the drizzle, ducked beneath the trailer, and climbed into the bag. Now, my heart banging, I wondered what a moose might have done to so tenuous an arrangement. “Zoltan!” I shouted, going down on my knees to peer into the gloom beneath the trailer.

There was no moose. Zoltan’s cocoon was still intact, and so was he. He was lying there on his side, a thin fetal lump rounding out of the steel and grime. “What?” he rumbled.

I asked him the question I always seemed to be asking him: was he all right?

It took him a moment — he was working his hand free — and then he gave me the thumbs-up sign. “A-OK,” he said.

The rest of the trip — through the icy Midwest, the wind-torn Rockies, and the scorching strip between Tucson and Gila Bend — was uneventful. For me, anyway. I alternately slept, ate truck-stop fare designed to remove the lining of your stomach, and listened to Mink or Steve — their conversation was interchangeable — rhapsodize about Harleys, IROC Camaros, and women who went down on all fours and had “Truckers’ Delite” tattooed across their buttocks. For Zoltan, it was business as usual. If he suffered from the cold, the heat, the tumbleweeds, beer cans, and fast-food containers that ricocheted off his poor lean scrag of a body day and night, he never mentioned it. True to form, he refused food and drink, though I suspected he must have had something concealed in his cape, and he never climbed down out of his cocoon, not even to move his bowels. Three days and three nights after we’d left Maine, we wheeled the big rig through the streets of Pasadena and into the parking lot outside the Rose Bowl, right on schedule.

There was a fair-sized crowd gathered, though there was no telling whether they’d come for the swap meet, the heavy-metal band we’d hired to give some punch to Zoltan’s performance, or the stunt itself, but then who cared? They were there. As were the “Action News” teams, the souvenir hawkers and hot-dog vendors. Grunting, his face beaded with sweat, Mink guided the truck into place alongside the twenty-five others, straining to get it as close as possible: an inch could mean the difference between life and death for Zoltan, and we all knew it.