The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [208]
“Where—where is Leon?” I said, my mind still hazy.
“What?” said the police officer, returning to my side of the car.
Now I was aware of a second presence. There was a man in blue jeans and a black T-shirt following the policeman. This second man carried, mounted on his shoulder like some sort of weapon, a camera: a video camera. He pressed one of his eyes to the viewfinder, the other eye a squint. A red light on the machine blinked on and off, an evilly winking little red dot. Why do humans always feel this urge to document?
“Who is he?”
“They’re filming this stuff for a TV show,’ ” said the cop.
“Yo,” said the cameraman.
“They’ll ask you to sign a waiver, unless you want ’em to blur your face on TV.”
“Probably won’t have to,” said the cameraman. “We only air the good shit. You know, where something actually happens.”
Is a dispassionate observer supposed to interlope the conversation like that?
“My, um, my friend—Leon,” I stuttered. The cop turned to me again. “He was supposed to drive me home after my surgery.”
“Some friend,” said the cop.
I was sitting up in the backseat now, clutching the blanket, wondering suddenly if it was all I had to cover my nakedness. I could tell by the dilation of the camera lens that the cameraman was zooming in on my face. Seedlings of panic begin to sprout beneath my skin. Was there a German shepherd present? Would they beseech him to rip the fragile flesh from my bones? I wondered if I would be on TV.
But hark!—there, in the distance, a lone figure is seen, approaching in the harsh orange lighting of the urban night. And he is a really big lone figure. He’s so girthy it looks as if he’s hiding a floppy sack of potatoes under his shirt, and he is huffing and wheezing with each toilsome step as he hoofs it along the shoulder of the Hutchinson River Parkway. His gigantic figure makes the man unmistakable, even to my bleary eyes.
“Leon!” I shouted from the back of the car, still wrapped in my blanket. As I opened my mouth wide to shout a sharp pain zinged all over my face, and I guessed I should refrain from straining my facial muscles until my nose had fully healed. An eighteen-wheeler, lit up like a circus, blasted past us in the night. The police officer responded to my shout by shining the flashlight in my eyes again. I winced. I pointed at Leon, loping and puffing up the shoulder of the road.
I said: “There!—him!—that’s my friend.”
Leon had clearly spotted the police officer, and in his steps there was now a marked hesitation, a heaviness, indicating a dread of entering this situation, mixed with his mind working wildly to come up with a way of evading it, which, as his steps drew closer, turned into a wild working of trying to think of what he was going to say.
“Hey buddy!” said the cop, redirecting the flashlight’s pale annulus at Leon. “Hey—you! This your car?”
Leon, approaching, waddled along the shoulder of the parkway as quickly as he could, looking exactly like a walrus attempting a lumbering and poorly planned escape from a zoo. In one hand, he carried a gas can. It was then I realized why the car was parked on the shoulder of the road. When Leon arrived, the police officer had to allow him some time to catch his breath.
“My—sincerest—(gasp)—apologies, Officer,” he said, pushing each word out of his mouth as if they were heavy objects he was heaving one at a time over a wall. “You see, gentlemen—I—my automobile—was—depleted of fuel—hence—it came to—an unfortunate halt—in this most inconvenient—location. However—” catching his breath and holding the gas can proudly aloft for all to see, including, presumably, the television audiences watching at home “—in response to the problem, I valiantly betook myself, an empty gasoline receptacle in hand, down the road to a local fueling station—a Mobil—whereat I procured this gasoline, which I have conveyed hither and with which I now plan to replenish the fuel tank of my automobile.”
“Where’d you learn to talk, jackass?”
Leon arched his eyebrows and lifted