It was a strangely familiar speech. Shadow asked, “Did you ever meet a fat kid in a limo?”
She spread her hands and rolled her eyes comically, funny Lucy Ricardo washing her hands of a disaster. “The technical boy? You met the technical boy? Look, he’s a good kid. He’s one of us. He’s just not good with people he doesn’t know. When you’re working for us, you’ll see how amazing he is.”
“And if I don’t want to work for you, I-Love-Lucy?”
There was a knock on the door of Lucy’s apartment, and Ricky’s voice could be heard off-stage, asking Loo-cy what was keepin’ her so long, they was due down at the club in the next scene; a flash of irritation touched Lucy’s cartoonish face. “Hell,” she said. “Look, whatever the old guys are paying you, I can pay you double. Treble. A hundred times. Whatever they’re giving you, I can give you so much more.” She smiled, a perfect, roguish, Lucy Ricardo smile. “You name it, honey. What do you need?” She began to undo the buttons of her blouse. “Hey,” she said. “You ever wanted to see Lucy’s tits?”
The screen went black. The sleep function had kicked in and the set turned itself off. Shadow looked at his watch: it was half past midnight. “Not really,” said Shadow.
He rolled over in bed and closed his eyes. It occurred to him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them better than their opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak in clichés.
And he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall, any day.
Morning found Shadow back on the road, driving through a gently undulating brown landscape of winter grass and leafless trees. The last of the snow had vanished. He filled up the tank of the piece of shit in a town which was home to the runner-up of the State Women’s Under-16s three-hundred-meter dash, and, hoping that the dirt wasn’t all that was holding it together, he ran the car through the gas station car wash, and was surprised to discover that the car was, when clean, against all reason, white, and pretty much free of rust. He drove on.
The sky was impossibly blue, and white industrial smoke rising from factory chimneys was frozen in the sky, like a photograph. A hawk launched itself from a dead tree and flew toward him, wings strobing in the sunlight like a series of stop-motion photographs.
At some point he found himself heading into East St. Louis. He attempted to avoid it and instead found himself driving through what appeared to be a red-light district in an industrial park. Eighteen-wheelers and huge rigs were parked outside buildings that looked like temporary warehouses, that claimed to be 24 HOUR NITE CLUBs and, in one case, THE BEST PEAP SHOW IN TOWN. Shadow shook his head, and drove on. Laura had loved to dance, clothed or naked (and, on several memorable evenings, moving from one state to the other), and he had loved to watch her.
Lunch was a sandwich and a can of Coke in a town called Red Bud.
He passed a valley filled with the wreckage of thousands of yellow bulldozers, tractors and Caterpillars. He wondered if this was the bulldozers’ graveyard, where the bulldozers went to die.
He drove past the Pop-a-Top Lounge. He drove through Chester (“Home of Popeye”). He noticed that the houses had started to gain pillars out front, that even the shabbiest, thinnest house now had its white pillars, proclaiming it, in someone’s eyes, a mansion. He drove over a big, muddy river, and laughed out loud when he saw that the name of it, according to the sign, was the Big Muddy River. He saw a covering of brown kudzu over three winter-dead trees, twisting them into strange, almost human shapes: they could have been witches, three bent old crones ready to reveal his fortune.
He drove alongside the Mississippi. Shadow had never seen the Nile, but there was a blinding afternoon sun burning on the wide brown river which made him think of the muddy expanse of the Nile: not the Nile as it is now, but as it was long ago, flowing like an artery through the papyrus marshes, home to cobra and jackal and wild cow…
A road sign pointed to Thebes.
The road was built up about twelve feet, so he was driving above the marshes. Clumps and clusters of birds in flight were questing back and forth, black dots against the blue sky, moving in some kind of desperate Brownian motion.
In the late afternoon the sun began to lower, gilding the world in elf-light, a thick warm custardy light that made the world feel unearthly and more than real, and it was in this light that Shadow passed the sign telling him he was Now Entering Historical Cairo. He drove under a bridge and found himself in a small port town. The imposing structure of the Cairo courthouse and the even more imposing customs house looked like enormous freshly baked cookies in the syrupy gold of the light at the end of the day.
He parked his car in a side street and walked to the embankment at the edge of a river, unsure whether he was gazing at the Ohio or the Mississippi. A small brown cat nosed and sprang among the trashcans at the back of a building, and the light made even the garbage magical.
A lone seagull was gliding along the river’s edge, flipping a wing to correct itself as it went.
Shadow realized that he was not alone. A small girl, wearing old tennis shoes on her feet and a man’s gray woolen sweater as a dress, was standing on the sidewalk, ten feet away from him, staring at him with the somber gravity of a six-year-old. Her hair was black, and straight, and long; her skin was as brown as the river.
He grinned at her. She stared back at him, defiantly.
There was a squeal and a yowl from the waterfront, and the little brown cat shot away from a spilled garbage can, pursued by a long-muzzled black dog. The cat scurried under a car.
“Hey,” said Shadow to the girl. “You ever seen invisible powder before?”
She hesitated. Then she shook her head.
“Okay,” said Shadow. “Well, watch this.” Shadow pulled out a quarter with his left hand, held it up, tilting it from one side to another, then appeared to toss it into his right hand, closing his hand hard on nothing, and putting the hand forward. “Now,” he said, “I just take some invisible powder from my pocket”—and he reached his left hand into his breast pocket, dropping the quarter into the pocket as he did so—“and I sprinkle it on the hand with the coin”—and he mimed sprinkling, —“and look—now the quarter’s invisible too.” He opened his empty right hand, and, in astonishment, his empty left hand as well.
The little girl just stared.
Shadow shrugged and put his hands back in his pockets, loading a quarter in one hand, a folded-up five-dollar bill in the other. He was going to produce them from the air, and then give the girl the five bucks: she looked like she needed it. “Hey,” he said, “we’ve got an audience.”
The black dog and the little brown cat were watching him as well, flanking the girl, looking up at him intently. The dog’s huge ears were pricked up, giving it a comically alert expression. A crane-like man with gold-rimmed spectacles was coming up the sidewalk toward them, peering from side to side as if he were looking for something. Shadow wondered if he was the dog’s owner.
“What did you think?” Shadow asked the dog, trying to put the little girl at her ease. “Was that cool?”