Going Bovine

“Dude, I’m so going first,” Luke says.

“The hell you are,” John protests. They run out to the lanes, where Luke knocks down six pins to John’s three.

“Ha! I beat you by three pins! In your face!”

Ruth climbs on top of the Snackateria’s Holy Cheese Fry machine. “Luke, we’re not competitive here. Everybody’s a winner. Everybody is part of the team.”

John doesn’t hear her. He’s too busy lining up his next shot. “Think you can do it again, shithead?”

Luke breaks into a grin. “Dude, I will totally smoke your ass.”

Daniel’s practically screaming now. He’s running across the lanes, dodging balls as they fly. “Guys, we’re all part of the specialness. Don’t forget that.”

Luke and John stop and stand there, looking at their feet. Luke takes a ball from the carousel and hands it to John, which makes Daniel smile.

“Ten bucks says I win.”

“You’re on.”

The balls clatter into action. People start taking sides, cheering on either Luke or John. John makes a strike, a real one, and Luke yells, “You suck!” and they both start laughing.

The doors fly open. I can’t see Gonzo in the crowd but I can hear him saying, “Excuse me, excuse me, could you get out of the way you smoothie-loving happy freaks?”

“Gonz!” I say, picking his little man body up for a full-on hug.

“Can we go now?” he says. “’Cause after five days in this joint, I need to eat a bag of Cheesy Puff Fingers and listen to some hardcore face-melting music to get my synapses back to normal. If I never see a smoothie again, it’ll be too soon.”

A huge brawl breaks out in the bowling alley—people trying to best each other, idiots throwing balls into each other’s lanes, arm-wrestling matches, a few choir members playing air guitar—while other CESSNAB Crusaders try to drown them out with happiness songs and chase them down for group hugs. They’re so busy going crazy, they don’t see Gonzo and me slip away. Even Peter and Matthew aren’t at their stations in the parking lot. Just as we turn onto the road, I think I see Library Girl standing in a patch of trees, two streaks of white behind her back, but then she’s gone, and I’m pretty sure I imagined the whole thing.

We walk the five miles to the nearest town, and just to torture me, Gonzo starts making up his own CESSNAB song about making your happiness cry uncle and feeding happiness to your dog so he has wicked happiness gas, and we laugh. It’s a pretty long walk, but my body’s cooperating and the Wizard of Reckoning feels a long way off, so far off he’s not even a sound you can pick up with the sonar of your soul. And it’s only when we get close to the highway and the constant hum of cars taking people to and away from places that could be home or a new start or nowhere in particular, just a spot on the endless road, that I see the Buddha Cows floating gently to earth like a surreal snow.

But it doesn’t seem worth mentioning, so I don’t.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Wherein We Crash at the Mister Motel and I Learn Some Stuff About the Ayatollah of Harsh

We take a crappy room in an even shittier motel, the Mister Motel right off the interstate. The blinking neon sign shows a winking guy tipping his hat, the Mister of Mister Motel fame, I assume. He looks like he should have a speech balloon coming out of his mouth: Rent rooms by the hour, real cheap. The room we get is a dark hole that looks like it hasn’t been changed in at least thirty years. Butt-ugly brown bedspreads and yellow paint on the walls. Dark, fake wood headboards. Threadbare carpet in a color that’s best described as “indiscriminately green”—great at hiding stains. The only new addition, for some crazy reason, is a bright orange balloon tied to a chair. The balloon advertises a used car lot, Arthur Limbaud’s Resale Beauties.

Gonzo, of course, is freaked about hygiene issues.

“Do you suppose they use bleach on the sheets?” he says, sitting tentatively on the bed and hugging his backpack to his chest. “I mean, really, you have to use bleach and the hot cycle to kill all the dust mites. And anything else.”

I don’t ask what “anything else” means and I don’t intend to. I’m tired. I want to go to sleep and not wake up till morning, when I’ll have to figure out how we get back on the road to Florida with no bus tickets and about three dollars to our names.

“I’m just gonna call my mom,” Gonzo says. He uses a tissue to pick up the receiver of the Mister Motel phone, which looks as ancient as everything else.