“Tell me,” said Wren. “Would this have anything to do with Oliver Sudden?”
Anna smiled over the rim of her sangria glass. “If I knew the answer to that, my dear, I wouldn’t have asked for a ride.”
Chapter 15
MATTER OUT OF PLACE
It began as a hidden processional on the freeway. The odd car with hieroglyphics of the Man taped on the back window, an RV adorned with clunker bicycles, the occasional flatbed truck, its tarp bulging scrotally with carnival parts. For the first few hours, these encounters were random enough that you could enjoy a secret communion with the other pilgrims in the bland mainstream of traffic.
But once the freeway was gone, and the highway had become a country road, the funnel into Black Rock City narrowed to nothing and a new sort of communion began. They were stopped now, completely, thousands of engines silenced in the midst of a hazy gray desert. One by one people emerged from their metal shells to assess the situation and pee by the roadside. Michael thought of a train stalled on the tracks. Any moment now, the bandits would board them and begin to plunder.
“Let’s get out,” said Ben. “We’re gonna be here for a while.”
With no further urging, Shawna leaped out of the back seat and onto the trailer, where she pointed ecstatically to the horizon. “Omigod, guys, look!”
Ben and Michael followed her onto the lumpy hillock of camping equipment and boxed water bottles, Michael faltering in the process. Ben grabbed his hand and steadied him, an act that was simultaneously endearing and humiliating.
“I’m fine,” said Michael. “Thanks, sweetie.”
Great. Flunking the physical already.
“What are we looking at?” asked Ben.
“Our peeps,” said Shawna.
There, in the distance, the line of traffic made a single glittering brushstroke across the landscape, encircling everything like a noose.
“Shit,” murmured Michael.
Shawn mistook his horror for amazement. “Is that not awesome?” Her own tone suggested someone who’d just beheld a queue of disabled believers at Lourdes.
“And that’s not even the end of the line,” Ben told her. “That’s just the part we can see.”
Michael groaned. “Dare we ask where the beginning is?”
The three of them turned in unison. What they saw, first thing, was a fortyish guy in a sarong making an effusive bow to the sunset from the top of his Cruise America RV. He was also blowing bubbles (a little frenetically, Michael thought), as if to say that his bliss was on, motherfuckers, gridlock or no gridlock.
“Woohoo,” he called upon spotting the threesome on the trailer. He wasn’t exactly greeting them, just demonstrating his ability to make that annoying sound.
Michael woohooed back, perhaps ineffectually.
Shawna giggled, gazing up at him. “You need to work on that.” She looked radiant in this light, already halfway to pagan princess. While he, in Bermudas and XL baggy tee, still undoubtedly looked like Granddad at Disneyland.
“I have to build up to it,” he told her. “I can’t just woohoo from a cold start. I’ve never been like that.”
Shawna held onto his arm. “I know, Uncle Mouse.”
He wondered if this old nickname had been summoned for nefarious purposes. They had not discussed the sperm thing (as Michael had come to think of it) since Shawna first broached the topic. He assumed that Ben had spoken with her, bowing out gracefully, but he didn’t know for sure. He hadn’t asked. He wanted Ben to know that he, Michael, could leave the subject alone, keep his nose out of things.
“He’s got the right idea,” said Shawna.
Michael was rattled. “What?”
“The guy in the sarong. We could be here for hours. We have to let go of our traveling mentality and Be Here Now.”
“She’s right,” said Ben, taking Michael’s other arm.
He sighed. “You can’t Be Here Now if you haven’t gotten there yet.”
That would have been a lot funnier if it hadn’t become the theme of the day. The line of vehicles stopped and started and stopped again until they finally arrived in Gerlach, a charmingly mutant village that might have been too much like The Hills Have Eyes had the locals not been hawking glow sticks to Burners off their front porches. By the time they passed through town, night had fallen, bringing with it a dust storm of Old Testament proportions. Ben, as usual, thrived on the challenge, remaining cool-headed in the face of calamity. While the wipers carved adobe arches on the windshield, he drove with the focus of a tank commander, squinting into the whirlwind that repeatedly erased the taillights ahead of them. Those lights, Michael reminded himself grimly, could well be attached to Mr. Woohoo himself, who, having prematurely snorted huge amounts of K three hours earlier in a porta potty in Nixon, was now on the verge of passing out at the wheel.
“This is a fucking nightmare.”
“You’re not being helpful,” Shawna observed from the back seat.
“You’re right.” He turned penitently to his husband. “What do you need, honey? Some water? A Clif Bar? A blow job?”
Ben smiled wearily. “My neck is really tight.”
“I’m on it,” Shawna told him.
And she was, instantly, digging into his shoulders with her strong little hands.
Ben gave an involuntary moan. “We should be reaching the checkpoints soon.”
Michael did not like the sound of that. “What are they checking us for?
“Tickets, mostly,” said Ben. “Stowaways. Feathers. Stuff like that.”
“Feathers?”
“It’s the worst kind of MOOP,” said Shawna. “It’s completely irretrievable. They won’t let you bring feathers in at all.”
Michael already knew about MOOP—Matter Out of Place—Burning Man’s version of litter, only stricter than litter, since it included things like apple cores and dishwater, anything that might alter the delicate ecology of an irreversibly lifeless alkali flat. It figured that a place without birds would not look kindly upon feathers.
“Damn,” said Michael. “Good thing I hid my boa up my ass.”
Ben grinned. “Never mind that. Where’s your ticket?”
“I have it,” said Michael somewhat defensively. “It’s in my bag.”
“Which is where?”
“Shit, shit, shit!”
“In the trailer, right?”
They had been stopped for a moment, so Michael knew what he had to do. “I’ll get it,” he said. “Just don’t leave me. I’ll never find the car again.”
“Wear your goggles,” said Ben.
“Shit.”
“They’re in the bag too?”
“Don’t lecture me,” said Michael. “Not now.”
“What did I say? Did I say anything?”
“Hang on,” said Shawna, fumbling in the back until she produced a filmy blue-and-green scarf and handed it to Michael.
“I won’t be able to see,” he said.
“Just over your mouth and nose, dude. And keep your head down.”
He opened the door and plunged into the tempest of grit. It was called a whiteout, but under the headlight beams, the stinging air was a hybrid of mustard and taupe, a noxious gas on another planet. Leaning into it, scarf pressed to his face, he made his way to the trailer, where he fumbled through a web of bungee cords until he found the bag. The traffic, to his alarm, had already begun to move again, so he stumbled back to the door, expecting chastisement from an orchestra of angry car horns. But people weren’t honking at all. They were not honking.
He opened the door, scrambled into the seat, slammed the door.
“Got it?” asked Ben.
“Got it.” He dug the ticket out of his bag and held it up as belated proof of his competency. It was as intricate as currency, almost as large, an extravagance
of design worthy of admission to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
He handed the scarf back to Shawna. She dusted the side of his head with it. “You’re gonna get a lot blonder before this is over.”
“It’s a look,” said Michael.
Shawna had lobbied for years to “do something fun” with her old queer uncle’s hair, but he had steadfastly refused, claiming, now that he was gray, to be “one of God’s blonds.” He had never seen anyone his age with pleasingly dyed hair.
The dust, however, when examined in the mirror, did do something interesting—a lighter, duller, more powdery effect that bordered on Les Liaisons dangereuses.
He already wanted a shower.
At the checkpoint they were greeted by a lanky kid in dreads and buckskin who leaned into the Outback with a flashlight. He was completely furred with dust like a mannequin in an attic, or maybe an astronaut blighted with an alien fungus, but he still managed to exude proficiency and good cheer. “Welcome home, folks!”
“Thanks!” said Ben.
“How many you got?”
Ben held up the tickets. “Three. One in the back.”
“And no feathers,” Michael added.
“What?”
“I am without feathers. Feather-free.”
Ben shot him a look. “Let the guy do his job, honey.”
“It’s cool,” said the guy. “Is he a Burgin?”
“Is he ever,” said Shawna.
“A what?” asked Michael.
“A Burning Man virgin,” Ben explained, without turning back to Michael.
They were talking about him as if he weren’t there, or at least as if they didn’t care. It was oddly reminiscent of childhood road trips in Florida with his family. Is this the little feller’s first time at Parrot Jungle?
“Do I sound Burginal?” Michael asked the guy.
“A little.” Perfect white teeth flashed from the concrete-colored face. “Don’t sweat it. You’ll get into it quicker than you think. My dad did.”
“Your dad’s a lot younger than I am.”
“I doubt that,” said the guy cheerfully. “He’s pretty old.”
“Oh good,” said Michael, deadpanning.
“Take it real slow.” The guy was talking to Ben again, grown-up to grown-up.
From there, they were divided into separate lanes, the boundaries of which were almost impossible to read in the whiteout. Place de la Concorde, thought Michael, though a lot slower, of course, and some of the vehicles were as big as houses. They were houses, lumbering out of the dust like weary elephants, their hides absorbing the paleness of the land, their Rent Me ads pasteled into submission.
“You think there’ll be greeters?” Shawna asked Ben.
Michael was thinking, Is there a maître d’ at a tsunami?
“I doubt it,” said Ben. “The guy back there said ‘Welcome home,’ so maybe they’re doubling up in the whiteout.”
Shawna touched Michael’s shoulder. “Normally there are people who greet you and say ‘Welcome home’ and get all the Burgins to roll in the dust.”
“Forget that shit,” he said.
“You have to give in to it, Michael.”
“I don’t have to give in to anything. I have nothing against getting dirty under controlled circumstances—”
“Not the ritual. The dust itself. You have to make peace with it sooner or later. You have to . . . let the barnacle form.”
“Seriously, Shawna, if you tell ’em I’m a Burgin . . . I have to let the barnacle form? What sort of fucked-up shit is that?”
She giggled. “Okay, then . . . a pearl can’t be a pearl without a grain of sand.”
“Grain? You want grains?” He tousled his hair briskly. “I’ve been out in that shit, sister. Don’t talk to me about grains.”
“Okay,” said Shawna, going comically hangdog the way she had done as a child. “There’s gonna be one really disappointed hippie chick in a Raggedy Ann wig . . . with big baby-doll shoes . . . and a landing strip the exact same color as the wig.”
“Now you’re just trying to scare me,” said Michael.
Their tank commander chuckled. “It’s a moot point, anyway. I think we’re there.”
“There” in this instance could have meant a physical arrival or a simple lifting of the dust, a magician’s trick that left them on a vast darkling plain dotted with phantasmagorical color. It was probably both things, of course, but regardless of the alchemy, they found themselves, suddenly, on the outskirts of a Fellini carnival on Mars.
“We need to look for street signs,” said Ben.
“What’s our address?” asked Shawna.
Michael knew the answer to that—“Eight o’clock and Edelweiss”—so all eyes were instantly upon him, widened in exaggerated amazement.
“What?” said Michael. “I wanted to know where we live in case I get lost.”
“But you remembered,” said Shawna. “Nice job.”
Michael accepted the compliment, though he knew he could not have done it without the aid of Julie Andrews and the von Trapp children.
He remembered, too, that the streets formed concentric circles around the playa (an open space for art installations), and that the whole place was two miles wide. Two fucking miles. Like the Great Wall of China, this psychedelic gypsy camp could be seen from space: a crescent moon blazing gold in a valley of nothingness.
But even satellite photos had not prepared Michael for the immensity of the place. As they drove down one of the streets, past block after block of dust-fuzzed tents and shade structures jutting like bat wings into the sky, the night rang with the sound of sledgehammers on rebar. It was early days, Ben pointed out, so the full effect had yet to be realized; it was still a coloring book waiting for clever children and their crayons. But one by one, between patches of vacant darkness, the camps were emerging, a conspiracy of colored lights and towers and streaming banners, an ephemeral city rising to its feet.
It could be another planet, thought Michael, if not for the familiar moon lolling on the dark shoulder of the mountains.
Ben reached over and held his leg. “It’s gonna be blue while we’re here,” he said.
“What’s gonna be blue?”
“The moon, honey. We’re having a full-fledged blue moon. You know what that is, right?”
Michael did not know, actually.
“I’m familiar with the whorehouse,” he said.
Chapter 16
WISTERIA TOES
The Stanford boys were getting rowdier downstairs, howling Margaret’s name in the parlor as if it were a football fight song. To Andy, something in their tone sounded cruel, something beyond the usual coarseness of men toward the girls at the Blue Moon. He wondered if Margaret’s age had made her the butt of mean jokes they shared with each other. If so, he hoped she didn’t know it.
He had put on the dress tonight, so the bedroom door was latched. A warm, fickle breeze from the window found the chiffon and made it flirt with his legs. His toenails, as of this afternoon, were painted a shade of wisteria Margaret had chosen to match the dress. He walked slowly across the room, pivoting on his toes like an English lady going barefoot on the lawn of her country estate. Summery, he thought. That’s how I feel. He had heard Loretta Young use that word once in a movie and had always wanted to use it himself. My, don’t you look summery tonight.
He extended his leg and gazed down at the perfect nail polish, the curve of his calf under the wispy fabric. It was hard to imagine how this could be improved upon. Below the knees, thanks to Margaret, he was all he was ever meant to be.
A noise at the door made him stiffen in alarm. It was not a knock either but a thwarted invasion, which could only mean Mama herself was shaking the door against its hardware-store latch. She did it, as usual, more out of pique than in hope of entry, b
ut Andy, in his rising panic, could almost feel the screws flying out.
“I’m not decent, Mama.”
“Well, why the hell ain’t you?”
“I’m just . . . changing clothes.”
“Ain’t nothin’ I ain’t seen before!”
Andy kept quiet. Oh, the things you haven’t seen before.
“Better not be diddlin’ yourself. You gotta save that for somebody nice.”
“Mama, please—”
“I left ’em by the kitchen door.”
He was too shaken to think straight. “What?”
“You said you wanted the truck tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” He had dropped Gloria Watson’s name at supper, so Mama, going all whirly-eyed at the mere thought of Gloria’s dowry, had offered transportation. She probably wouldn’t mind one bit if Andy were to knock Gloria up. Mama had once remarked, in all seriousness, that shotgun weddings paid just as well as the other kind. Not that there was a chance of Andy knocking anyone up.
“Where are you takin’ her?”
“I have to get dressed, Mama. I’m late.”
Both things were true; tonight was Lasko’s night at the Martin, and he got off work at nine. It wasn’t the ideal solution to the problem, but Andy had been left with no other choice. Lasko hadn’t shown up at school for several days, and Andy’s low-key detective work at Eagle Drugs had produced only a cryptic explanation from Mr. Yee: “He got the day off. He’s not feeling so good.”
Andy hoped that what Lasko was feeling was remorse for having hocked the valise. If not remorse, at least embarrassment over the betrayal of their friendship. Or, barring that, some degree of fear that Andy might actually stand up for himself. A theft was a theft, even when it involved a valise left at a brothel that a hooker had entrusted to a boy who had lent it—just lent it, mind you—to another boy. The law might like to know about this, Andy figured. There could be serious consequences.