John Sayles - The Anarchist's Convention and Other Stories

Honey.

Something about honey.

She was calling him, Mary Beth, calling up the stairs to see if he wanted to get up. Get up and eat.

Brian made some noise to tell her he was coming and rolled on his back. He had shot off in his pants. Wasted one, Russ Palumbo used to say. Got to dreaming pretty hot and heavy last night and I wasted one. Lot of nice pieces round here could of used it. Brian hadn't had a wet dream since he was sixteen and a virgin. He thought maybe they were supposed to stop once you'd joined the club.

He undressed and wiped himself off with his B.V.D.'s and put his pants back on. He threw the underwear beneath the bed. Give the movers a laugh when the bank sent them.

Mary Beth had found some canned food and had it going on the range, hash and baked beans and some cream-ofmushroom soup. She had brought bread in from the car and gotten an old toaster to work.

"They didn't bother to turn off all the juice," she said. "Just unscrewed the fuses."

She had changed from her shift into a bulky denim coverall. She was wearing work shoes. It was like her flesh itself had hardened while he was asleep. She sat him down and dished him out a plate and a bowl and spoke softly to him, almost like she was apologizing for something. It was all Brian could do to keep his stomach from climbing up his throat to meet the food halfway.

"You just chew on that for a while, honey, and then I got something special for our dessert," she said. "You let old Moby take care of you."

"Moby?"

She shrugged. "Mary Beth Dickson. The kids on the campuses where I do my, you know, business deals, they call me Moby Dickson. Had it since I was a girl. Sort of followed me around."

"Oh."

"Boys yelling `Thar she blows!' in the hallways. What you call a literary allusion."

Justine yowled loudly from the front of the house and Mary Beth clonked off to see what was wrong. The toast popped up and Brian went and made himself a hash sandwich. He didn't know if there was anything he could say to Mary Beth, anything that wouldn't make her feel worse. It's not that I don't find you attractive but — but what? Everything he could think of sounded like the line Angela Rizzo used to give him when he made any serious move on her. Sounded just as slight and just as false. He swallowed his food in big bites and felt each drop distinctly into his stomach.

"I slept like a rock," he said when she came back holding Justine. Maybe it would be better if she could think that he really hadn't known she was there. "Like a zombie. How long was I out for?"

"Couple hours," she said. "You've got plenty of daylight left for hitching." She crossed to the counter by the toaster and frowned. She dropped the cat.

"Oh shit."

"What's wrong?"

"Our dessert. The acid."

"What?"

"I had a couple squares of windowpane acid sitting here. I figured we both had a lot of flat country ahead of us, might be nice to put some wrinkles in it."

"Acid."

"Yeah. You know."

"I know. But what happened to it?"

"Justine must have gotten it, she's acting a little weird. But Christ, I figured the two of us would do a half-pane each and she ate four times that. It must have been her. You weren't over here were you?"

Brian looked at her. "I got the toast. I put it down on the counter to make a sandwich."

"Oh Christ. You think you might have picked it up on the toast?"

"I don't know, what's it do to you?"

"You never done it?"

Brian shook his head. It was one of those things that had passed him by in school, like the Hong Kong flu had in the fifth grade.

"Oh, honey," said Mary Beth and took his hand, "I'm sorry."

He didn't know that they still made the stuff, there hadn't been anything on the news in years. "So it's me or Justine."

"Gonna be hard to tell right off if it's her. Cats are so spacy anyways. I don't really know what to do."

The idea kind of appealed to him. He wouldn't be responsible for anything, just stick his thumb out and let it carry him. "I think I should finish the beans," he said. "If I'm going places at least I'll have a full stomach."

Justine sat over the dash and stared at Brian for an hour and a half in the car. He stared back at her. Mary Beth drove and kept asking him how he felt. He didn't feel much different. A little nervous maybe. Still hungry. That was a strange one, still hungry.

"Some of it will hit you real quick," Mary Beth told him, "and then sometimes you get a batch that kind of sneaks up on you. You ate all that food, takes a while to digest — who knows? And then maybe it's just some weak stuff, I haven't tried any yet. How you feeling, honey?"

She drove him to the far side of Des Moines and turned south. She tried to talk him into coming with her to Kansas City. He got out of the Chevy and Justine hopped down into his seat.

"I'll be all right," he said, "you just watch your cat."

Mary Beth gave him an embarrassed smile.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Honey," she said, "you got nothin at all to be sorry about. Nothin at all."

A careening, high-speed ride in the open back of a pickup truck got Brian past Omaha and well into Nebraska farm land, where he bogged down. There was a little confusion between the energy of the wind roaring around him and his own roaring energy, but he decided it was the food and the sleep. There was no sitar music, no psychedelic colors. A lot of road and a lot of harvested cornfields, but no surprising warps or wrinkles.

There was the pointilism though. He remembered the word from art class. The sky and the fields seemed to be made of millions of little separate dots of all different shades. Maybe it was the time of day, the purple dusk, or maybe there was pollen in the air. But field stayed field and sky stayed sky and the horizon line between them held steady. He felt the same, tired and dirty and impatient with the thinning traffic. It was twilight, more purple than he remembered, and he didn't feel like hitching anymore. He decided to bag it for the night.

There was a rise to the left of the road up ahead, he started for it planning to be well sheltered from the road's view. The field had been closely mown within the last day or so, it was jagged with stubble. Every few steps another field creature would unfreeze. Albino toads, tiny mice, snakes like shoestrings, dry-rasping grasshoppers, all scattering ahead of his path. They were a luminous violet in the twilight, they seemed confused by their recent uncovering. Brian skated his feet forward and went slowly. He eased down the far slope of the rise till he came to a patch of well-kept grass.

Green grass in the middle of a cornfield.

It was a level rectangle about the size of a large house foundation, cropped short as a putting green. It was a little strange but Brian was glad for a flat spot to lie.

He paused at the edge of the plot to watch what looked like a cross between a toad and a doormat hop away. Its back was scabbed from mower blades and half of one of its hind legs was missing. When it hopped it flew sideward and almost tipped on impact. It was trying to get away from Brian but could only flop in ever-widening circles around him. He was fascinated by the thing. Had never seen anything like it. He could watch it forever. The toad struggled through three revolutions before it became too dark to see and Brian moved to set up on the grass. He sat and unlaced his sneakers.

"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?"

A voice, deep and hollow, booming up out of the ground. Brian rolled into a crouch and strained to see which way he should take off.

"DON'T YOU PLAY GAMES WITH ME, YOUNG LADY."

Oh shit, thought Brian. It's taking hold. Taking hold with a vengeance.

"DERRY? IS THAT YOU? WHO IS THAT?"

A bank of light flicked on at ground level to his rear, soft blue lights like they used for outdoor Nativity scenes. Brian whirled to face them but could see nothing beyond.