What Would Satan Do_ - Anthony Miller [113]
Raju sat up. “Yes! Yes, I do. And it is sweet.”
“Where is it?”
“Somewhere.” He started looking around on the ground, as if he’d dropped a coin. Suddenly his head shot up, like a superhero’s might on detecting a cry of distress somewhere. “I think it is parked to the back of the shop. Perhaps.”
“Give me the keys.”
“I don’t have them.”
“Where are they?”
“There are no keys.”
“What?”
“It is powered by love. Keys are unnecessary.”
Lola paused to let her palm and face enjoy a moment together, and to do some sighing she’d apparently failed to take care of earlier. “Alright,” she said, “let’s go.” She grabbed him by the collar and shoved him forward.
They walked around the side of the guitar shop and into the overgrown jungle of garbage and weedy colonizer plants behind the shop.
Lola stopped. “Where is it?” she asked.
Raju stopped short and went into sort of a crouch. “What? What’s wrong?” he said, scanning. He very nearly did a dive roll to take cover under a nearby bush, but then noticed that Lola was standing with one hand on her hip. That looked pretty hot, he decided, and so he stood back up and began nodding to the beat, a slight, sly smile on his face.
“Raju? Can you please stop dancing so we can find your car?”
Raju looked lost for a minute. He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it, and then opened and shut it once more. He squinted at Lola. “Wait, what?”
“Where is your car?”
He pointed an uncertain finger at a large, van-shaped topiary.
“That?” she asked. “That’s a car?”
Raju nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“That’s not a car. That’s a Chia Pet.”
“Right. You are so right!” Raju did his nod-dancing thing again, this time to a tune that had a heavy, funk emphasis on the downbeat.
“Why is your car covered… in plants?”
Raju looked at the van. If he were being honest, it really did have an unusually large amount of foliage. “It’s earthy.” More nodding. “Man.” Another sly smile.
“Give me the keys, and zip your pants back up, right now.”
“Okay.” He tossed her the keys. “It’s kind of tricky to drive.”
“What do you mean?”
He grabbed the keys back, and opened the door, revealing an interior held together with a larger quantity of duct tape, clothes pins, and bungee cords than would be expected in, say, a Mercedes Benz.
“You kinda gotta…” he said, bracing himself with one arm as he jiggled a lever back and forth. “And you gotta watch out for…” He bounced up and down on the seat as he put all of his weight into pumping the gas pedal. “And once it starts…”
“Raju?”
He stopped.
“You’re driving.”
“All right!”
“Leave your pants on.”
Raju paused mid-zip. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.
“Okay.” He shrugged. “I could take off my sh—”
“No.”
“All right.”
“Let’s go,” she said.
“Where are we going?”
“To church.”
Chapter 44. There Are a Lot of Weirdos Here
Once upon a time, back in the day, some enviro-Nazis showed up in Austin with charts and graphs and all sorts of other crap, and tried to persuade the Governor that the State of Texas should invest in viable public transportation.
“Trains?” asked the governor, incredulous. “Communal transport? Funded by the state? Sounds like Communism to me, boys. I think we’ll just build more freeways instead.” He tipped his ten-gallon hat, nodded congenially, and moseyed off to get in his enormous convertible Cadillac with the steer horns on the hood. Then he drove straight over to the Capitol Building, marched into the Senate chamber, and announced a plan to “pave the hell out of everything.”
So now, every free and independent-thinking, non-Communist Texan needs a car, preferably with really big tires and terrible fuel economy. Texas may be famous for its big skies and wide open spaces, but all too often, those wide-open spaces are filled with horseless carriages.
The parking lots and fields surrounding the Driftwood Fellowship Church were overflowing with trucks of all shapes and sizes. There were green military Humvees, less-imposing, but similarly green military Jeeps, and an apparently random sprinkling of pickup trucks. Most of the pickups sported