The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [22]
I leaned against a car.
“You okay?”
I nodded and tried to smile. “Excellent.”
In retrospect, there’s the humiliation: I forgot to be outraged, tried to play the cowboy.
“If you want to press charges, I’ll show up in court.”
“It was just one of those ridiculous—aah,” I assured him incoherently, “you know how it goes.”
“That was a completely unprovoked attack.”
I recognized him. He was a grad student with an office in our building, the Humanities Building. I didn’t know what subject he taught, but whenever I went down the stairs I passed his office, and it seemed he was always there, always talking in a self-assured nonstop voice to one of his students while others waited outside his door or sat on the stairs nearby. In a way, he was a junior colleague of mine. My embarrassment was now complete.
“If there’s anything I can do—”
“I’d really feel worse if you troubled yourself about it at all.”
“Yeah, I get you,” he said. “Okay.”
“Thanks.”
“Just tell me you’re navigating on your own power, and I’m outa here.”
“I just needed air. I’m all right.”
After he’d left me I moved myself a few paces and sat on the bumper of a truck while I tried to make a plan for the rest of the day, which looked completely unappealing now. I determined I’d check on bus schedules. If I didn’t learn of a bus leaving very soon, I’d get a motel room and watch TV or nap while I waited.
But now I found myself signaling across the parking lot to Flower Cannon as she came out of the casino. She headed right over, whether to greet me or because her car was parked close by I didn’t know.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a man’s wrinkled linen sports coat. Her makeup was gone.
“We’re actually acquainted,” I said.
“Yes. Hi,” she said.
“Do you remember me?”
“Sure. You just got knocked out in there. You’re quite memorable.”
“I was just going to ask you for a ride back to the University, if you remember me.”
“Michael Reed, right?”
“Yes. Michael Reed. I need a ride.”
“Did he steal your car, too?”
“I’m glad one of us sees the humor in it.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just laughing because I’m drunk.”
“Drunk? And you’re driving?”
“All over the road like a goddamn maniac. We’ve got plenty of room,” she said. “Hop right in.”
Actually her grad-student Japanese hatchback was crowded with boxes, books, clothing, trash. I cleared a space on the passenger side by shoveling junk over the back of the seat.
“I’m sorry it smells funny,” she said. “It needs to go through the car wash sometime with the windows open.”
She started the car after a couple of tries. “Wasn’t there somebody else?” I asked.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Who’s we?”
“We?”
“You said we. Who’s we?”
“I don’t know. You and me.”
“Okay. I just didn’t want to forget someone.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fuck ’em,” she said, “whoever they are,” and we swooped out of the lot.
I’d stayed in Riverside no more than two hours, probably less, been conveyed there swiftly and stayed briefly to be assaulted and now was conveyed back again over the flat landscape where the fields lay in perfect sterile rows of dust. I felt wonderful in a way. But my head ached.
“I missed your act,” I told her. “What was the alias you performed under?”
“‘O. O. O’Malley,’” she said.
“And you won.”
“I sure did.”
“Very good.”
“You take it all off, you get the prize. Gynecology triumphs.”
“I missed that.”
“‘Skin to win.’”
“Excellent.” I couldn’t really converse. I worried about Flower’s driving. She didn’t give it her full attention. She took her eyes off the road whenever she addressed me and had a trick of jamming the gas suddenly and accelerating up into the seventies for no good reason. In a sports car she’d be a demon. I could feel the cogs and guys of the steering about to snap. I worried about the tires, certainly they were the cheapest. Yes, sometimes part of me wanted my life to end like this, in a bad wreck, as a way of sharing the horror of Anne and Elsie’s last