The Beard Part 9

"You know," I said as we descended the far side of the hill. "We should have taken Brilliance out of the van."

"You're probably right," Wrench said.

"It might not even be burning anymore, if the water put it out. Not to mention the fact we might never see it again."

"Those are both possibilities."

"Do you think it's possible this Jerry character is a Nefarion?"

"That, also, is a possibility."

"Do any of these things worry you?"

"Not really."

"Why not?"

"If we're meant to have the flame then we'll have the flame. If we're meant to find your father then we'll find your father. It's really as simple as that. We could have tried to hold onto the flame. We could have jumped in the river after it. But what would happen then? We would have had to chase it and our only purpose is to find your father. The more you chase something, the farther away it gets."

"But I thought we needed the flame to find Dad?"

"No. We might need the flame to get him back but I don't think we'll need the flame to find him."

"What about the Arapahoe canoe bark? Do we need that to find this secret place?"

"There's no guarantee that would help us. I think we just have to continue onward."

And we did continue onward until the sun went down. Then we both decided we were tired.

"This is probably as good as any bed we would find in a welcome station," Wrench said, thrusting his arms down to the soft, eternal gra.s.s.

"Indeed," I said.

We chose our spots in the gra.s.s, a comfortable distance from one another. I've been known to grope people in my sleep and I didn't want to wake up and find myself making out with someone who had been my father until that morning.

"Ah, cozy," Wrench said.

"Very nice," I said, looking up at the stars in the sky. The stars were different here. They made much more sense than the connect-the-dots constellations I was accustomed to. This sky contained smiley faces and frowning faces and a whole bunch of stars that made a star shape. One group resembled a dartboard. Another group resembled a giant ship. And these stars moved and fluttered around in the sky so the ship sailed off into something that could have been the sun. A heart-shaped constellation throbbed, swelled, and then burst, raining stars down into the horizon. It was all very comforting and engaging. Just enough to take my mind off everything else going on, lulling me into the sleep that was always just around the corner.

I don't know how long I slept but I woke up to a strange all-encompa.s.sing whispering sound. I looked up and, at first, thought the sky had disappeared. But that wasn't it at all. The gra.s.s had grown, immensely. It now towered above me and below me. It was so thick it had actually lifted me up and to get to my feet I didn't have to sit up. I only had to extend my legs all the way and then I was on the ground. I didn't see Wrench anywhere. The gra.s.s was too thick.

"Wrench!" I shouted, hoping he would answer me. He didn't.

"Gary!" I called out again, thinking maybe he had forgotten his last name.

Still no answer. I started walking. Now I didn't really have any idea which direction I was going. Even if I could see the stars, I couldn't have used them, since they moved. And the sun wasn't out so I couldn't follow that. I remembered what Wrench had said about chasing things. If you chased them they only got farther away. So I didn't think about finding him at all. I didn't think about which direction I was heading. I just took off walking. It was kind of difficult. The gra.s.s was so thick it felt like trying to move through mud. It made my arms itch and, even as I walked, it continued to grow. That was the whispering sound. I could actually hear the gra.s.s growing.

From behind me I heard the now unmistakable sound of the lawnmower. I say it was unmistakable because, other than the recent addition of the sound of the growing gra.s.s, I hadn't heard anything else since entering the State of Jerry.

If he didn't know I was there, he might run right over me with the lawnmower. Hopefully, wherever Wrench was, he wasn't still lying down. I didn't hear the lawnmower get caught up on anything that sounded human. I tried to walk faster. Tried to discern which direction the lawnmower was coming from so I could make sure I was out of its path. Then a giant swath of gra.s.s behind me fell and I was caught in the headlights of the giant lawnmower. Jerry sat astride it, looking hypnotized. Some people slept. Jerry mowed. He had a lot of gra.s.s to mow and it grew so quickly I didn't see how he could possibly mow it all unless he subst.i.tuted mowing for sleep. I swerved to try and avoid him but the lawnmower traveled faster than I did and he swerved after me. He was trying to hit me! Maybe that was what he used for fertilizer-the shredded corpses of travelers. Because, if he was mowing in earnest and not just trying to mow me down, there would have been some sort of pattern to it other than the random zigzag I ran.

I dug deep to find some burst of energy I had never experienced before. It would be much easier, I thought, if I were running behind him. But there was no outsmarting him. Hypnotically, the lawnmower followed me and, whenever I stumbled or hesitated, it continued on in its unflagging pursuit.

Then I burst out of the gra.s.s and entered a free fall. The inky black night was on all sides of me and I braced myself for a life-ending crash. Instead, I landed in water. I went all the way under, down deep, the water icy on my skin. Icy but refreshing at the same time. I almost expected the lawnmower, replete with Jerry, to come bombing down on my head, but it didn't. I floated to the surface and cast my gaze from where I fell. I saw Jerry up there, astride his lawnmower, staring blankly down at me.

In the distance, I heard an ah-ooogah horn and hoped that it was Wrench. What I thought was the river was actually a lake and after paddling hard, I saw the headlights on the other side.

Eighteen.

More than halfway across the lake I saw, bathed in the flood of the headlights, a figure clamber up the far sh.o.r.e of the lake. My imposter!

"Hey!" I shouted. "Wait!" But maybe I was too far away to hear or maybe Wrench was so over-excited to see me, which wasn't the real me at all, that he stopped paying attention to much else. Or, and this was one of my fears, Wrench was in cahoots with the Nefarions, leaving me all alone on a voyage that Wrench had, more or less, concocted on his own.

The imposter boarded the van and it sped away. A few minutes later, I washed up on sh.o.r.e, soaking wet and shivering in the chill of the night. This was not good at all. Wrench almost had to be working in collusion with the Nefarions. My imposter looked nothing like me. I was able to make out that he had, indeed, added a beard. But even from my distance, I could tell that it was a false beard so how could Wrench, sitting only a couple feet away, mistake it for the real thing? And if he had mistaken the imposter for me, what kind of danger did that put him in? After all, I was the keeper of the flame. He had appointed that position to me. And now the keeper of the flame was one of the very people who coveted it. If the flame changed hands then it could very possibly ruin our mission.

Or, maybe, as was the case with the book, the imposter would do a better job of it than I would. He had sold my book merely minutes after I had tried. So mightn't he be able to deliver the flame to the exact location it needed to be, coming back with my father and possibly even my grandfather?

I wouldn't rule it out. Still, I remembered what Wrench had said about chasing things. But I didn't see how I could not chase them. If I didn't go after them then I was the same exact purposeless person who sat on the bench in Central Park. Without the goal of locating my father, it was just me and my beard and, as much as I liked the beard, I'd have to say that Wrench made a better companion.

I found myself walking along a dirt road in the darkness. The moon, nearly full, hung in the sky. Here, I couldn't really see any stars at all. What was happening to the world? It seemed to be shifting and changing every minute, every second.

In the distance I saw a blue glow from something that looked like stadium floodlights. It seemed as good a destination as any.

Coming upon it, I realized it was a town. A large sign hung at the entrance to the town. It read: GO AWAY. WE ARE FULL. YOU ARE NOT WANTED HERE.

That seemed clear enough but, really, where else did I have to go? Nowhere. I certainly couldn't lose anything by trying to enter this forbidding town.

I squinted into the light and stepped into the harsh fluorescent glow. It looked like the Main Street of any other small town except this one was perfectly illuminated in the middle of the night and people seemed to move about freely in stark contrast to the dead still of most small town main streets in the middle of the night. An enormous man wearing a grease stained suit and sitting atop a very small motorcycle eyed me sternly.

"Didn't you read the sign?" he said. "You're not wanted here."

"You can't keep people out of towns. I can go wherever I want to."

"That's certainly the right philosophy," he said, and sped away on his motorcycle.

A building to my right bore some graffiti in dripping green letters. The graffiti read: WE ARE ALL CONTRARIANS HERE and, below that, someone had spray painted in black: f.u.c.k YOU SPEAK FOR YOURSELF.

A wiry man in an ap.r.o.n shot out of a storefront, grabbed me, and dragged me inside. He roughly shoved me into a chair at a table and began going through my pockets. I slapped at his hands.

"What?" he whined. "You ain't got no money?"

"No, I don't have any money. Why would I give it to you, anyway?"

"You got your coffee. You got your sandwich. Thought you might like to pay me." He gestured to the table in front of me. I did indeed have a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

"But I didn't ask for this," I said.

"Ain't you hungry?"

I actually was kind of hungry. "Yeah, but..."

"But what? Choice is for losers. Eat your sandwich. Drink your coffee. In fact, I'll pay you!" He dug into his dirty black ap.r.o.n and pulled out a bunch of crumpled bills of indiscernible origin and threw them at me.

"I couldn't..." I began.

"You can and you will. Now eat and get the f.u.c.k out!"

He collapsed onto a stool behind the bar and watched a TV filled with static. He was sweaty and breathing so hard it was audible. I looked around at the cafe or bar or restaurant or whatever it was. There were quite a few people in it. Two guys wrestled in the middle of the floor. Several other tables were locked in what seemed to be very heated arguments. At one table sat what had to be a boyfriend and girlfriend.

The girl was crying. She kept picking up her fork but, wracked with sobs, kept dropping it back on the table with a loud clatter.

"Yesterday you said you loved pie," the boy said.

"No," the girl shook her head, staring at the uneaten piece of pie on her plate. "I've never said I liked pie."

"Don't be difficult," the boy said.

"You're being difficult," the girl said. "I said I wanted meat."

"No. Yesterday you said when we came back today you were going to try the blueberry pie because you love blueberry pie."

"No," she said. "I never said that. I wasn't even with you yesterday."

"You're lying."

"I've never lied. I don't even like boys."

I was enthralled. I sipped my coffee and took a bite of my sandwich. It was a pretty good sandwich. I tried to follow their conversation but it didn't make any sense. Maybe it was all some sort of s.e.x game. Like elaborate foreplay.

"Fine," the boy said. "You want meat. I'll get you meat." He raised his hand up above his head and snapped his fingers. "Waiter!" he called. "Bring me some meat!"

The old guy in the ap.r.o.n resignedly stood up from behind the counter and walked over to their table. He pulled something that looked like a large piece of ham, translucently thin, from the pocket of his ap.r.o.n and slapped it down on the table.

"Can you please take this pie away?" the boy said.

"But you ordered it!" the man shouted.

The boy chuckled. "I most certainly did not. Have I ever ordered pie?"

"Yeah. You order pie all the time. You ordered it yesterday for that other girl."

"Just..." the boy closed his hand around his head and ma.s.saged his temples. "Just take it away."

"Fine. But you're still payin for it."

"We'll see," the boy said.

The old man picked up the pie, plate and all, and threw it back behind the counter. "That was our last piece of pie, too!" he shouted before going back to his stool and his static-watching.

The girl picked up the piece of meat and began wiping the tears from her eyes.

"Now they don't have any pie," she cried. "Why don't you ever get me pie?"

I wondered how long they could continue. I didn't know if I wanted to know. The two men wrestling in the middle of the floor were now both sweaty and exhausted and supporting each other in a bear hug.

I finished my sandwich and coffee. The restaurant, in place of framed artwork, had pieces of cardboard duct taped to the walls. The word *No' was written, in different styles, on each of them.

The Town of No, I thought.

Apparently, my scrutiny enraged the old man. He came out from behind the counter to grab my empty dishes and give me a lecture.

"I see you lookin at my pitchers!" he shouted. "You don't like em well you can get the f.u.c.k out! This here ain't like other towns! We do what we want when we want and everybody else can just f.u.c.k off! You hear me!"

"Do you have a pen and paper?" I asked.

He made a braying whining noise and filched a pen and a receipt out of his ap.r.o.n, throwing them at me rather than placing them on the table. They bounced off my chest. I bent to pick them up from the floor.

"You people think you know everything!"

"I was wondering," I said. "If you could tell me if you've seen two men. One looks like me. The other looks like this." And I drew a horrible sketch of Wrench on the paper.

"Why?" the man said. "They in trouble with the law?"

"No. I'm just looking for them."

"'Cause there ain't no laws here."

"That's good. No. They're not in any sort of trouble. They're my friends and I was just looking for them."

He crumpled up the piece of paper and put it in his ap.r.o.n. "I think maybe you should get out," he said. His eyes were glazed over and murderous, as though I had done something to insult him at his deepest level.

"Perhaps I will," I said. "Your tip." I threw the crumpled bills he had given me and secretly enjoyed watching his elderly, skeletal frame wincingly stoop to pick them up. Then I said, just because the environment filled me with such hostility, "I'm going to burn this place to the ground." Then I turned and left.

"You do that!" he shouted. "You just do that! I've been tryin to do it for years!"

He continued ranting but the door banged shut on his voice and I was once again on the fluorescent sidewalk. A man with a hat shaped like a lobster came down the sidewalk toward me. Rather than trying to step out of my way, he purposely stepped into it. I'd move to my right and he to his left. Then I stopped, giving him the pa.s.sage, and he pushed me. I kicked him and he smacked me in the face and laughed. I moved out into the street and he flipped me off before continuing on his way. Maybe everyone here was just a jerk, I thought.

The street proved to be a dangerous place. No one could decide which side of the road they wanted to drive on. In my short walk down the block I witnessed three accidents. Interestingly, whereas the people of this town seemed hostile in almost every other way, when they ran into someone else, each of the drivers would get out of their respective cars, laugh, have a brief conversation with the other driver before swapping cars and whatever was inside (wives, children, friends), and continuing in the direction they were going.

Back on the sidewalk, I saw a horsedrawn carriage with what I a.s.sumed were a bride and groom riding in the back. The carriage drew to a stop and the bride hopped off.

"This is the happiest day of my life!" she shouted at me, grabbing me, pulling me into a kiss and thrusting her tongue deep into my mouth. The groom began making out with the carriage driver. "Let's run away together," the groom whispered l.u.s.tily. They both hopped off the carriage and ran, laughing, down the street. The bride pulled me toward the carriage, took hold of the reins and whipped the horses into action. Before I could say anything, we had left the town behind and were racing through the dawn countryside.