The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [209]
“Lemme see your license and registration.”
“Certainly, Officer.” Leon rifled through his pockets for a wallet. As he did, the police officer trained a suspicious eye on me.
“You know the registration on your plates is out of date.”
“That is because this automobile does not, in fact, belong to me. If it did, I would have surely exercised enough forethought to remember to reregister it at the proper time. As it is, this car belongs to my former wife, and I am sure you are all-too-well familiar with a certain negligence in such practical matters that is characteristic of the fair sex.”
“What, like letting your damn car run outta gas on the Hutch?”
“Pish, Officer. I am only human.”
“Hey, we might run this shit after all,” mused the cameraman.
Leon handed him his driver’s license. The policeman read it under his flashlight. He looked up.
“You been drinking at all?”
“Nay, sir, not a drop.”
This could not have possibly been one hundred percent true, I thought. I wanted to say, “Why, thy lips are scarce wiped since thou drank’st last,” but I checked my tongue, considering the circumstances.
I saw the moon, tinted orange, rising above the trees like an orb of burning blood suspended on a wire before the velvety curtain of night.
“I think your buddy back there’s a little sick,” said the officer. The cameraman audibly suppressed a guffaw. “You oughta take care of him.”
“He’s recently had an operation. I was transporting him safely home, whereupon the car became suddenly and completely unexpectedly depleted of fuel.”
“Tell your ex-wife to reregister her car. It’s a month past expiration. We stopped to take a look ’cause it looked like a suspicious vehicle.”
The police officer gave Leon his driver’s license back, and the two men got back in their car and drove away. My brain was still sodden with anesthesia. I did not fall back asleep, but mumbled and gurgled to myself in the backseat, watching the shadow play created by the car passing under the streetlights lining the parkway, and listening to the traffic in the other lane whooshing past us. I felt simultaneously chilled and relaxed. I imagined I was in a spaceship, blasting away from the earth and into the cold black vacuum of space at a velocity close to the speed of light, so that time dilates and millions of years go by, and one day I crash-land on an alien planet populated by a hostile race of talking hairless upright apes, only to discover to my horror that this is really earth. I felt a great surge of affection for Leon, in spite of his appalling incompetence. He had let his ex-wife’s Wagoneer run out of gas on the parkway, then left me asleep and drugged in back of his car in the middle of the night as he hobbled down the shoulder in search of a gas station. Yet I felt no anger, no resentment, toward him. He was my friend. I felt my organs sloshing around inside my little body with every turn, every slight shift of centripetal force. Leon had the radio on, very softly, so as not to disturb me, and I think he had it tuned to an “oldies” station, which was playing a Roy Orbison song: only the lonely… know the way I… feel tonight… And I listened to Roy Orbison’s angelic falsetto mournfully cooing that bittersweet threnody to his loneliness into the rush and howl of a cold dark night on the Hutchinson River Parkway.
Soon Leon was easing the car off the highway and onto the small winding roads that led us through Pelham Bay Park, across the mint-green bridge and back to City Island. I looked out the window as we were shuddering across the bridge that took us home, and I saw the giant neon-red lobster, doomed—doomed like someone in Greek mythology is doomed in Hades to endlessly repeat some futile task—to forever repeatedly open and close his claw. His red light was reflected in the black and wobbling waters beneath him. Leon parked the car and helped me out. I tried to walk, but I could not. The earth kept pitching and shifting under my feet; it was like trying to walk on the bottom of the ocean. Leon