golden-armored alter ego with the Penobscot Building, the lucky slob gets a few minutes of much-needed sleep and comes out of it with no headache that three fingers of Hiram Walker’s won’t cure. He takes the count quiet and gets up disheveled but clean, his necktie romantically askew and a lock of hair hanging Gable-like over one eye. The rest of us go down shouting and swallowing our tongues, and when after a lifetime we finally slog our way back to the surface, we’re crumpled in the dusty corner of a rumbling automobile in a pool of our own vomit, our pockets hanging out and the linings of our thirty-dollar overcoats flapping where the stitches have been popped loose by a sharp knife.
I hadn’t been completely out, naturally. If in the course of your daily routine you’ve ever been sapped on the underside of your occipital lobe by something like a pistol swung sideways, you know that it’s your motor functions that go first, making so much spaghetti out of the intricate nervous system that carries electrical impulses from your brain to your various muscles and turning your limbs into dead weight. Then your brain cells begin to blink out in clusters, then just one by one, until you’re left with just enough to wonder what was so bad about staying in bed that morning, and precious little else. Had the blow been just a little lighter I’d have tingled all over and caught myself before I’d gone down, and that would have been it except for a sore spot on the back of my head. Had it been just a little harder I’d have qualified for bed space in the produce section of the local supermarket, next to the other cabbages.
I knew it, but was powerless to stop it, when two pairs of hands working from opposite sides of the car turned me over and emptied my pockets and went through the linings of my coat and jacket. When I was lowered to the floor and folded into the corner under the dashboard to make room in the driver’s seat I knew that too, but only by the change of scenery since I was as numb as a victory party in the losing candidate’s campaign headquarters. My head began to throb dully as it rocked from side to side over the squishy spot with the lurching of the Cutlass being freed from its snowy prison.
For a while I fluttered in and out, and then reality slammed into me as suddenly as it had been taken away. I turned my head and retched again. That brought me up a rung or two from the bottom of the barrel, but it was a deep barrel and there was a lid on top. I attempted to spit out the farmer’s brogan in my mouth, but the taste was there to stay. Then I said something that wasn’t a sentence in any language I’d ever heard of and started the long crawl up to the seat.
“He’s coming around, General.”
The voice, which belonged to the driver, was the same one I had heard reporting my condition just after my lights were shot out. It was ordinary like the rest of him, innocent of regional accent, and about as distinctive as a paper clip. I sneaked a look at him as I was scaling the seat. He had a good profile, with a straight nose and clean line of jaw and dark, wavy hair, not short, not long, the way even politicians are wearing it these days. He could have been thirty or forty-five.
The guy in the back seat, whom I glimpsed while shifting around to sit the way I was designed, was older, about fifty, with crisp gray hair cut severely without sideburns. His face, naturally lean but beginning to go slack in the standard places, was all planes and sharp angles, like something blocked out by a sculptor before placing the finishing touches on a statue. He was bareheaded and wore a tawny car coat with a black fur collar. He didn’t pay any attention to me at all, but kept his flinty eyes on the scenery rolling past the window. His wide, lipless mouth was tugged downward into a wooden-Indian scowl that looked as if it might be terminal.
We were doing twenty-five down a street I recognized, one of the better
I hadn’t been completely out, naturally. If in the course of your daily routine you’ve ever been sapped on the underside of your occipital lobe by something like a pistol swung sideways, you know that it’s your motor functions that go first, making so much spaghetti out of the intricate nervous system that carries electrical impulses from your brain to your various muscles and turning your limbs into dead weight. Then your brain cells begin to blink out in clusters, then just one by one, until you’re left with just enough to wonder what was so bad about staying in bed that morning, and precious little else. Had the blow been just a little lighter I’d have tingled all over and caught myself before I’d gone down, and that would have been it except for a sore spot on the back of my head. Had it been just a little harder I’d have qualified for bed space in the produce section of the local supermarket, next to the other cabbages.
I knew it, but was powerless to stop it, when two pairs of hands working from opposite sides of the car turned me over and emptied my pockets and went through the linings of my coat and jacket. When I was lowered to the floor and folded into the corner under the dashboard to make room in the driver’s seat I knew that too, but only by the change of scenery since I was as numb as a victory party in the losing candidate’s campaign headquarters. My head began to throb dully as it rocked from side to side over the squishy spot with the lurching of the Cutlass being freed from its snowy prison.
For a while I fluttered in and out, and then reality slammed into me as suddenly as it had been taken away. I turned my head and retched again. That brought me up a rung or two from the bottom of the barrel, but it was a deep barrel and there was a lid on top. I attempted to spit out the farmer’s brogan in my mouth, but the taste was there to stay. Then I said something that wasn’t a sentence in any language I’d ever heard of and started the long crawl up to the seat.
“He’s coming around, General.”
The voice, which belonged to the driver, was the same one I had heard reporting my condition just after my lights were shot out. It was ordinary like the rest of him, innocent of regional accent, and about as distinctive as a paper clip. I sneaked a look at him as I was scaling the seat. He had a good profile, with a straight nose and clean line of jaw and dark, wavy hair, not short, not long, the way even politicians are wearing it these days. He could have been thirty or forty-five.
The guy in the back seat, whom I glimpsed while shifting around to sit the way I was designed, was older, about fifty, with crisp gray hair cut severely without sideburns. His face, naturally lean but beginning to go slack in the standard places, was all planes and sharp angles, like something blocked out by a sculptor before placing the finishing touches on a statue. He was bareheaded and wore a tawny car coat with a black fur collar. He didn’t pay any attention to me at all, but kept his flinty eyes on the scenery rolling past the window. His wide, lipless mouth was tugged downward into a wooden-Indian scowl that looked as if it might be terminal.
We were doing twenty-five down a street I recognized, one of the better
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