'smoking vegan, smiling gun' -- part three
Yes. This is



thirteen




"I hit a guy."

"You--you what?"

"I . . . hit someone."

"In the face?" was my first question. It had, seriously, just popped into my head. I imagined my girlfriend punching the School of Journalism Dean right in the side of the hair-trapezoid.

"Shit, no. Not in the face. I mean, with my car."

"Oh, fuck -- you hit someone with your car?"

"Well, not a person -- another car."

"Another car?"

"Yeah."

"Oh." I remembered it wasn't my car she was driving. I'd only ever driven the thing four or five times. I didn't even think to ask about damages. I didn't know in which way, precisely, she wanted me to care. As she was silent, I took advantage of the moment to formulate a question. "So . . . you're going to be late?"

"No, no. Well -- yeah."

"Well, that's fine. I can . . . walk."

"No, no -- I need you to do me a favor."

"A favor?"

"Yeah. Could you go downtown, and see if the car is still there?"

"The -- the what?"

"The car. The car I hit. Can you see if it's still there, or if the cops are around?"

"What the hell -- a hit and run? You did a hit-and-run on this guy?"

"Shh! Yeah. Yeah. It was only a little bump, I mean, I don't even think his car suffered any damage. A big fucking huge car -- it was a GMC Suburban."

"A GMC Suburban?" I immediately pictured it black.

"Huge fucking car, yeah, a black one."

"Where did you hit it?"

Now my girlfriend's voice got quiet, like she was either lying about something or aware of passersby.

"Right on the . . . rear driver's-side-taillight."

"Driver's side taillight, you mean?"

"Yeah, that's what I said."

"You said rear driver's side taillight."

"Same thing."

"Well," I said, and then stopped. There was no use.

"I was trying to get a parking space outside the Village Deli."

"The Village Deli?"

"Yeah, you know, that little place with the good chili? We've been there a few times. Right on Kirkwood, right across from Kilroy's bar."

"Yeah," I said, feeling strangely underwater. "I know the place. I remember the place. I remember it well."

"There's that little ice cream place next door. Little place. You remember the name?"

I didn't.

"No."

"Oh. Hell. Well, you can see the GMC Suburban from there, I guess. Just, uh -- go out there, sit down -- they've got places to sit outside -- get some ice cream, and just keep an eye on the car for me, alright?"

"All . . . right."

"Are you writing this down?"

I opened my mouth, and gasp-sucked in a few words from the smoky remains of the bowling-alley air.

"Am I supposed to be?"

"Where the hell are you right now?"

"I'm in the Union."

"What the hell are you doing there?"

"I was . . . playing pinball."

"God damn it, you got out early, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"God damn it. God damn it."

"I . . . sorry."

"Are you writing this down?"

"Writing what down?"

"The license plate number."

"Oh. No. What was it?"

"It was simple. It was the word 'SMILING,' only with a numeral one in place of the first 'I.'"

"Smiling, I got it."

"You got it."

"I got it."

"You wrote it down?"

"I got it," I said. "SMILING, with a one in place of the first 'I.'"

"You got it," she said, and then breathed.

"So, uh . . . where are you right now?"

"Gas station," she said. "I'm going to go home and lay low for a while."

Lay low?

"What about the Law Library?"

"Fuck the Law Library. You're alright taking the bus home, right?"

"Uh . . . yeah."

"Shit, I got a broken headlight. Broken headlight. Shit."

"Shit," I chimed in.

"Shit, look for the glass. Orange glass. Make sure there's not any on the road. Make sure there's not any cops looking around the pavement."

"I -- I don't know."

"If there's no glass, ask around. Be inconspicuous about it, okay? Don't just ask if there's been any police activity or whatever. Don't be dumb."

"Oh -- okay. Okay."

"Shit. Are you on your way there right now?"

I looked at my reflection in the pinball machine. I looked at a clicking and ticking clock near the asbestos-y ceiling, and I half-yawned.

"Yeah."

"Don't use any more of my cell phone minutes. Let me know the details when you get home."

"Um, okay," I said.

She hung up on me.

I hung up on myself. I stuffed the phone into my pocket, and stepped around the corner and into the pool hall, where the black kids from earlier were gone. I half-expected the Smoking Vegan to be waiting for me with a pool cue in a kung-fu grip. She wasn't. She was nowhere in sight.

I stepped into the wide underground hallway. Before me was a staircase more than a hundred years old. At the top of it was an exit to an awning-covered outdoor corridor that led to a cherry-tree-lined sidewalk-parkway that led to the Sample Gates, which aimed at downtown Bloomington, Indiana. I was just a three-minute walk from the scene of a crime, and it was, by all printed accounts, a good day to be outside.




fourteen



The scene of the crime looked like nothing of the sort. A lazy day outside, which felt almost air-conditioned, was making my back sweat quietly. I squinted like someone who needs sunglasses, and traced Kirkwood with my eyes. Out in front of the Village Deli, every curbside parking space was empty except one. That one un-empty parking space was un-empty with a large black GMC Suburban. I stood and looked at it, with my hands on my hips. I squinted, and sneezed. There was my sneeze, I thought, looking at the broken shards of orange headlight on the pavement. I always sneeze when stepping outside on sunny days. Here, I'd stood outside, under the awning, yawning, for a whole thirty seconds, waiting for that sneeze. I wanted to get it out of the way before my little walk. And there I was, at the end of my journey, sneezing in anticlimax.

The license plate read "GVN."

"'GVN'?" I thought. What the hell did "GVN" stand for? I mulled it over for a minute. We always abbreviate "government" as "GOV'T." Would it not be more efficient to make it "GVN"? Or maybe "GVR"? Everyone forgets about the "N" in "government" -- well, that's no good. Here I was, forgetting about the "R" in the same manner.

Or maybe someone was wanting to spell "GUN" in Latin?

I squinted more deeply at the driver's side taillight -- sure enough, it was cracked. It wasn't a big crack -- it wasn't even noticeable at all, really. The person owning the large vehicle could probably step out with their donuts and coffee or ice cream or gumbo, or whatever they had, and just get in without noticing a thing.

I walked down past the vehicle. When I'd reached Nick's Pizzeria, I turned around on my heel, and walked back. I rolled my eyes at the implausibility of what I saw: there was a piece of yellow paper stuck beneath the driver's side windshield-wiper. Was it an advertisement for a bar? Or a note written by a bystander, including my girlfriend's license plate number?

More importantly, what about the letters "GVN" had made my girlfriend think of "SMILING"? Where was the cognitive connection? Sure, I could believe she wasn't thinking straight at the time, just -- I couldn't begin to wonder what had connected where in her mind.

I put my hands in my pants pockets, and thought of what a fuck-up we had here, and shook my head a few times, and looked up at the clear blue sky -- and just then, out of nowhere came a guitar chord.

Somewhere nearby, John Mellencamp was singing "Jack and Diane."

Oh shit, it was a bad moment to be alive.

"Jack?"

"Jack!"

Someone was calling to me from a wooden folding chair set up on the deck outside the Jiffy Treet ice cream shop. I wheeled around.

Here we go:

There, sitting on a chair with a perfect view of the scarred GMC Suburban, was the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl.

I didn't have to acknowledge her. I'm weak. I'm so, horribly, sadly weak. I'm as afraid of the strong as I am of the weak, someone would tell me later that day. I'm as afraid of beginnings as I am of endings. I'm so afraid of beginnings I don't know when the endings are coming. I'm so afraid of endings I keep wondering if I'm yet past the middle.




fifteen



I acknowledged the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl for the first time in her capitalized existence, and I sat down, and let her buy me a vanilla ice cream, and we sat out of the shade, both looking at the damaged car, lower bodies covered and shaded by a broad round whitewashed table, as music I despised played not far enough away, and we caught up on old times. For a little while.

"You don't like John Mellencamp?" she asked me, at one point. I looked down into my vanilla ice cream, and at the table beneath it. Was she wearing sandals beneath the table?

"I don't like him."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. I just don't like him."

"You don't like him?"

"Well, I mean, I don't like his music."

"Why not?"

"It's just -- it has this bad feeling to it."

"A bad feeling?"

"Like a hot summer day, when the air-conditioner is broken."

"A bad memory?" the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl said. She wanted to prompt further revelations.

I shook my head. "No, it's not that simple. I mean. Not that complicated. I mean, it doesn't have a face."

"What doesn't have a face?" the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl wanted to know. She wasn't being patronizing. She really wanted to know. She was licking the concave of her pink plastic spoon with her eyes locked on me.

"I mean, the bad feeling doesn't have a face. It's like -- like, a bad feeling without a personality. It's just kind of -- you know, there."

"Oh."

"Like, there was this one day, I was in high school. And my mom's nephew--"

"Your cousin?"

"Nah, nah, my mom's nephew."

"Um . . . He'd be your cousin, then?"

I shrugged. "I never thought of him that way. Anyway. It was summer vacation for me, and this guy had come to visit my mom for some reason."

"For no reason?"

"No, I mean, he had a reason. It just wasn't overly stated."

"Well?"

"Well, my mom had just been diagnosed with diabetes. She was on all kinds of medicine. She had to check her blood sugar. She'd always be telling me, 'You better not act up, or you'll raise my blood-sugar.' It was a real load of sh--tuff I just didn't care to hear. I mean, she just did it to mess with me. I didn't need to hear that sort of thing. It was cheap."

"Well, maybe her worrying about you did--"

"No, it didn't. She didn't have anything to worry about. I mean, he--ck, she didn't even let me walk to school. She made me take the bus. I didn't eat lettuce until I was seventeen years old, because I'd been afraid of it when I was a baby, and she didn't want to expose me to it. She didn't even let me go outside. She bought me a bike for my birthday when I was twelve, and wouldn't let me ride it."

"That's no good."

"It's horrible."

"So what about your cousin?"

"Oh. Well, my mom's nephew came into town one day during the summer. He had a girlfriend. The guy was -- I don't know, in his mid-thirties. He had a girlfriend who was twenty-four, I think. She was a really . . . chunky girl. They drove all the way up from Pennsylvania."

"Pennsylvania?"

"Yeah."

"Why were they in Pennsylvania?"

"Well, I mean, that's where my mom was from."

"Have you ever been to Pennsylvania?"

"No," I said.

"Oh, I have. It's nice."

"Is it? Well. This guy and his girlfriend came from Pennsylvania. It was a long drive."

"Where in Pennsylvania?"

"Philadelphia, I think?"

"Yeah, that's pretty far. About thirteen hours."

"Yeah, thirteen hours. So they came all this way to see my mom, because she'd told her sister about her diabetes, and how I was making her worry, and how her blood sugar was up, and how she didn't have much longer to live -- and this guy came to investigate. To see if she was alright, or if she was dying, or what."

"Okay."

"So my mom was happy to have them. They were only around for a weekend. And she was driving them around town, showing them everything. See -- my mother has never been on a highway of any kind. It's just not in her blood. She's scared to death of the highway. And, I mean, Indianapolis has plenty of them. The 'Crossroads of America,' they call it. She always takes the longest routes to get wherever she has to go. She takes 86th Street to get to Castleton -- she works down there, you know. It takes her a half an hour to get to work every day, when she could take 465, and be in Castleton in four minutes."

"Maybe she likes the long way?"

"No, she doesn't. She complains about distances, gets vocally angry when the news reports talk about rising gas prices. It's a real joke."

"I bet."

I squinted. The sun was still rising, it looked like. It was already more than half past one. The sun hadn't finished rising. The grooves in my forehead collected sweat, which then curtained down toward my eyes when I relaxed my squint to finish my ice cream.


The GMC Suburban stood there, absorbing all the sun's rays. The windows were tinted as black as the paint job.

"So yeah. She was taking this nephew of hers and his girlfriend around, down to Castleton, and she was going like thirty miles per hour, just pointing out the window at everything. 'That's my grocery store.' 'That's a club where the kids like to hang out.' 'That's the gas station where I get my lottery tickets.'

"And it was so hot. I was baking in there. She wouldn't let me stay home. I was sitting in the back of her minivan, reading a book--"

"What were you reading?"

"What?"

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"Oh. Oh, I was reading The Hobbit."

"I've read that."

"Lots of people have. Anyway. So I was baking, and my mother refused to turn on the air-conditioning. She was afraid it'd take up her gas. So I said to her, 'Mom, why don't you turn on the air-conditioning?' And my mom said, 'We're not made of money.' And she asked her nephew and his girlfriend, 'Are you guys hot?' And her nephew said, 'No, we're alright.'"

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl nodded. I looked at my spoon, sitting atop a smear of mostly-melted vanilla. I depressurized my lungs with my lips in the shape of a small O. It was a slow, contemplating exhale.

"So, that's the kind of feeling I get from John Mellencamp's music."

"It reminds you of your mother?"

"Well, it -- no." Hadn't I said the feeling didn't have a personality? My mother, if nothing else, has a personality. "I mean, the feeling of being hot in a car, where the air-conditioner is off, yet could be on."

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl folded a napkin, and dabbed at the corner of her mouth.

"Was she listening to the radio? Was there John Mellencamp on the radio?"

I opened my mouth, and looked at the GMC Suburban. The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl looked at me looking at it. Over the spring wind, no John Mellencamp tunes played. I was prepared to lie, to embellish, to emphasize, to say, "It was this very one that he's playing right now!" I was afraid I'd not be able to remember the song name from such a distance -- we could only hear guitar, not voice -- and I was even more afraid that I would be able to remember the name. I probably knew all the songs' names. I couldn't not know all their names. I'd pretend I didn't know the song's name.

What would the next song be? He'd just belted out "Hurts So Good," preceded by "Wild Night" -- what would be the perfect song to come next?

"She was listening to the radio, come to think of it. Oh my God, you know what -- during the drive, 'Summer of '69' came up."

"'Summer of '69'?"

"Yeah, you know the song?"

"Yeah. It's by Bryan Adams."

"Bryan Adams?"

"Yeah. Did you know his mother is Japanese?"

"She . . . she is?"

"Yeah, everyone in Asia knows Bryan Adams."

"Bryan Adams?"

"Yeah. Bryan Adams."

I looked into my ice cream cup. I half thought of vomiting all the vanilla back into it. My jaw was dropped open. I almost needed some help closing it. A single white Pontiac coupe-de-something rattled down Kirkwood, past the Suburban. The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl and I followed it with our eyes. Downtown Bloomington was a ghost town when John Mellencamp was in town.

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl was whisper-singing, with her eyes closed:

"'Got my first real six-string / bought it at the five and dime / played it till my fingers bled / Was the Summer of Sixty-Nine.' That the song?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, that's Bryan Adams." She giggled. "All these years, you thought it was Mellencamp?"

I stuttered. "Well, I mean -- I mean, that's not the only song of his I ha--dislike. There are -- there're plenty of others."

"I see, I see," she said with a nod.

"'Those were the best days of my life,'" she went on. The same Pontiac rattled by again, like a lamppost in one of those cartoons where one naked yet humanized animal chases another. Except no one was chasing anyone in Bloomington, Indiana that afternoon John Mellencamp was in town.

"Do you play any guitar, Jack?"

I shrugged. "I . . . well, I've never even touched a guitar."

"Why not?"

I sniffed the air. I detected nothing of note. Then again, what I had set out to detect with the sniff, I don't know.

"It just wasn't my thing. I was never musical."

"What about in school? Didn't they make you play the piano or anything? Like, in music class?"

I thought back to my public education. I'd spent those "best days" of my life in rooms where the furniture was still made of wood. I used to watch the public television channel, where they showed university classes when my mother wouldn't let me watch cartoons, and I'd feel jealous of the neat, white plastic chairs in the lecture halls.

"I didn't have a music class."

"Oh, that's too bad."

"I've never touched a music instrument, ever," I went on.

"Oh, yes you have," the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl said, slapping her hand weakly onto the table.

"Have I?"

"Don't you remember the day we first met?"



I had taken my Scotch-Irish trombonist friend home one night. I walked her up to her dorm floor. She went into her room without inviting me inside. Her roommate was sleeping, she said. She then added that she, herself, was not feeling well. The two negatives didn't add up to a positive for me, and I headed for the elevator.

Before I could reach the elevator, the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl jumped out of the bathroom and into my life.

"Hey you!" she said.

"Yeah?"

"Can you help me with something?"

She was wearing a pair of gym shorts and a high school volleyball shirt with Korean writing all over it. Her hair was tied back in a simple, high, loose ponytail.

I followed her into the cavernous bathroom. I noted the tiles were different from the tiles that lined my dorm bathroom floor when I'd lived in the same building. My tiles had been brown, and rectangular. The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl's were pink, and square. Then again, aren't all squares rectangles, when you really think about it?

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl was wearing noisy flip-flops that thwap-thwapped and echoed all the way into the depths of the bathroom. Their color was as much a mystery as their sound wasn't.

There, in the last shower stall -- the only shower with an accompanying bathtub -- she showed me her French horn.

The water was running from the spigot. The water was steamy. The French horn, a magnificent, clean, convoluted set of skinny golden contortions, rested in the end of the bathtub opposite the running water.

"The valve is stuck," she told me. I then stood back as she dragged the multi-thousand-dollar piece of metal underneath the running water. She hooked the offending valve with her index finger, and pulled demonstrably.

"You got to pull it like this," she told me.

"Oh -- okay."

"I'll hold it under the water."

"Okay."

"You just pull on that valve."

I pulled on the valve for five minutes.

"Why are you running it under hot water?" I asked, just making conversation.

"It loosens the metal. Here."

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl scooted her body around mine. She was still holding onto the horn.

"You hold it right around this section. Don't let any water in the bell."

"The what?"

"The bell. The big open part."

I did as I was told. The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl pulled and pulled on the valve. She stuck the back end of her gym shorts up with each pull, and I started thinking evil thoughts.

"You know, the French horn is the longest musical instrument in the orchestra," she was explaining, at one point. Like a regular TV talk show host.

"Some people think it's the contrabassoon. They're wrong. See, the French horn, if you uncoil it--"

The valve popped off.

"There it is."

"Why did you need the valve off?" I asked her, as she turned off the water.

Back in her room, she showed me why: she had another valve -- a longer one -- to replace to old valve.

"Just routine maintenance."



"Remember?" she asked me, about our magic moment, those years later. Out of the tops of her eyes, she watched the GMC Suburban.

"Yeah -- yeah, of course I remember."

"Well."

"Yeah, well, I mean -- I mean, I've never held a musical instrument with the intention to . . . play it, you know."

"Yeah, I know," the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl said.


"You know, I gave up the French horn," the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl was telling me ten minutes and two Mellencamp tunes later.

"Did you?"

"Yeah, I changed my major."

"Oh yeah? To what?"

Here, the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl beamed. A woman in her fourth or fifth decade stepped out of the Village Deli with a Styrofoam cup of something. She headed out across the street, past the Suburban, as the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl and I watched.

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl was bending down underneath the table. I didn't bend to watch her. I waited, and drummed my fingers on either side of my empty ice cream cup.

When the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl came back up, she had a long black art portfolio in her hands.

"I'm doing architecture!"

"Oh--oh?"

"Yeah!"

"Well, good for you. Did you -- uh, as a grad student?"

"No, no, I'm kind of a sophomore again. Oh, this is good stuff, though. You want to see something great?"

I smiled. It was a real smile, real as the sunshine was bright.

"Yeah, I could go for seeing something great right about now."

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl unsheathed a long piece of green, faintly recycled paper. On it were drawn many precise lines with one very precise pencil. It was a top-down look at a donut-shaped structure.

"See, see, did you ever notice how office parks always have a man-made body of water outside?"

I nodded at the donut structure. "Yeah -- yeah, I did, kind of. And a fountain, too?"

"Yeah! You know what I'm talking about. Well, see, I always thought, what's the deal with the water? I mean, the only people who ever see it are in the cars driving by. The people inside are working -- hard -- all day, and they don't get to see the water. Is it for the clients? No -- they don't have to think about that. The clients who come to some office park out on the highway are only coming there because -- well, you know, they have their reasons. They're not going to worry about some dumb little pond. Right?"

"R-right."

"Well, I figured -- why not put the water where everyone can see it?"

"E-everyone?"

I was getting choked up about bodies of water. I could have used a glass of water, myself.

"Yeah, see--" the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl took out a pencil and gestured at the diagram "--there's a hallway running through the middle of the circle. There are cubicles all around the circle, right? And each one has a window -- the walls are made of glass. And see, there's this empty space in the middle. At the bottom, there's a pond.

"Now, for the people whose cubicle windows look out on the other side, there's a moat."

"What about -- I mean, how do people get up to their floor?"

"There are two elevators," the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl explained, pointing at the three and nine o'clock positions on her donut-building.

"Do -- do the elevators have a view of water?"

Her eyes disappeared beneath her smiling cheeks.

Smiling, SM1LING.

"Of course. They have a view of the moat."

"And, uh, how do people get . . . in?"

"Well," she said, tucking her mechanical pencil behind her ear, "there's a parking garage underground. There's a ramp -- here -- that goes under the moat. Everyone parks underground, and the elevator comes straight up from the garage. Impressive, huh?"

I looked at it. I was trying to get the eyeball part of my brain around the underground parking garage idea. Was it safe to position it right under a lake-like structure?

"Isn't it -- I mean, wouldn't it be kind of, you know, bright? If the walls are all glass, I mean."

"There are -- you know, shutters and things. People can block out the light if they want."

"And block out the view of the water."

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl looked at her left thumb, and moved her eyes left to right three times. She bit, then un-bit, her bottom lip.

"Well, maybe. Still, if they wanted to see the water, they could see it."

"Of course. Sorry."

"No -- no, I know the design isn't perfect. Still, it's an -- it's an exciting idea, isn't it? I mean, no one's ever thought of it before."

"No one?"

"Yeah, no one."

I was about to ask her if she'd looked it up, or something. I didn't. At that moment, a police car came cruising down Kirkwood. The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl and I both watched it for signs of slowing down. It didn't slow down. The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl leaned forward in the silence. A song had just ended.

"Something wrong?" I asked her.

She sat back down. "No, no -- nothing."

I cleared my throat. I thought I might have found some allergies somewhere.

"So, were you -- waiting for someone, or something?"

She looked at her hands. They touched each other like a horn-player touches a horn. She looked up, and blinked.

"I saw something kind of strange, a minute before you got here."

"Something strange?"

Far away, people applauded, with the sound of popcorn popping in a mile-off microwave oven. A wind blew, and it was cool. It cooled off my becoming-pink face as the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl's own face grew pink. We were both falling into embarrassment about the same thing.

A long white van rattled onto Kirkwood, and rattled by in the still silence. It turned left on Dunn Street, and went out of sight.

"Something strange?" I said, with a chuckle. "It sounds pretty -- strange. What, uh -- what did you see?"

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl touched her blueprint with four fingers. She kept her thumb to her palm, and her little tongue to the backs of her front teeth.

"I guess you could call it -- a, uh -- a hit-and-run."

"A hit-and-run?"

"Y-yes."

"On that Suburban there?"

I put my hand on the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl's shoulder. It was bare. I had my hand on her skin that felt like soft rubber.

She nodded.

"I . . . I saw you looking at it," I said.

"I-I'm waiting for the owner to come back. So I can . . . tell him what happened. I was the only person who saw."

"Why don't you leave a note under his windshield wiper?"

Here, as John Mellencamp started singing "Jack and Diane," the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl went deathly silent.

"Did you leave a note under his windshield wiper?" I asked her, my insides growing hot.

She shook her head, and was in tears.

"No -- I have to tell him in person. It's just . . . I can't explain it. I have to tell him in person."

"There's a note under the windshield wiper," I said to her. "Did you--"

"No!" she wailed. "It's an advertisement. It was some kid on a bike. I -- I don't know what it's for. I'm sure it's -- I don't know. I thought I'd write something on it. I was the only person who saw. I have to tell him in person."

Mellencamp breezed through the opening and into the first verse of "Jack and Diane," which I am almost always quick to note was voted "Worst Rock and Roll Song of All Time" by some magazine I read somewhere once.

I couldn't hear the words. My mind supplied them:

"Oh yeah -- life goes on -- long after the thrill: of living: is gone."

"Didn't he sing this already?" the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl asked me, taking her hands off her eyes.

"I -- I don't know."

"He sang this already, didn't he?" she asked me.

"I -- I think he . . . he might have."

"Why's he singing it again?"

"Maybe he's . . ."

She was standing up. Her knees were bent beneath the table, when the white van from two moments earlier screeched and wailed and sailed right through the stop sign at the crossing of Kirkwood and Indiana Avenue. When it jolted with the force of its brakes, it jumped and leaned forward like about to do a front flip.

Two doors on each side, one door on the back: all flipped open when the van was stopped. Four girls' figures dressed in black from bandannas to gloves were on the street in an instant.

"You aren't going nowhere, bitch," one girl said, aiming a pistol and shooting the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl right in the neck.

With a tweet and a thud, some tiny dart appeared to stud the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl's pharynx. As she crumpled back, her right hand caught her blueprint, and pulled it down.

"You too, shorty," this short girl said to me in a smoker's voice, just before the pain of a gorilla-throat-punch socked me in the neck and knocked me down. The back of my head cracked into pavement just after my metal chair clattered down.

"Let's go. We got minutes to work with here, people," the girl was saying, as I faded to black, and she was indeed, in voice and in bones, from bandanna to boots, the Smoking Vegan.



sixteen



At the long, skinny end of a dead world, something not entirely beautiful glowed not entirely beautifully. I reached out for it with my eyes, and my head, and the liquid sounds surrounding it, all grew longer. Two sides of something too pretty were stuck together like with syrup. A hoarse voice pulled them apart.

"Wake up."

The Smoking Vegan was pointing at me with an orange cigarette tip in the white-sunlight-streaked darkness of the back of a van.

"Get the fuck up, come on. Get the smelling salts again."

The radio was turned down low. Random twangs of guitar flipped out louder than any other sound, save the swirling in my head. The Beatles were singing "Wild Honey Pie." The hyperactive bongo percussion vibrated the yellow spots before my eyes. Wailing of "Honey Piiiiie" slipped forcefully into my ears beneath the Smoking Vegan's whispers.

My polo shirt's top button had come undone perhaps not of my own doing. As "Wild Honey Pie" climaxed, a circle of hot heat touched and stuck to the top of my breastplate.

The Smoking Vegan was burning me with a cigarette. Its glowing tip held my bone-flesh like a magnet holds a refrigerator. I gasped up into a sitting position, and blacked out.

When I opened my eyes, I was still sitting. "Wild Honey Pie" had turned into "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill," and "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" was already half over.

"All the children sing . . ."

"I'm up, I'm up," I said, when my eyes opened again. The need to say so might or might not have stemmed from the fact that my hands were cuffed behind my back. It felt something like the back corners of my consciousness were torn and folded together. My internal monologue slipped into plain-style prose.

What the hell is going on here?

"You want to know what the hell is going on here, Jack?" the Smoking Vegan asked me.

"I'd, uh, appreciate it," I think I said. I was sitting on the sticky, wooden-feeling floor between two felt-covered boxy benches on which sat tall girls in black jumpsuits and ninja ski-masks. The air in the windowless van tasted like a fabric shop in the dead of summer, on a day they're having a sale, plenty of perfumed ladies showing up and sweating for many reasons.

The Smoking Vegan's lips smacked, and I took in her face. She sat with her back to the van wall, her legs pulled up and spread out with the foot-soles to the seat-floor. The bandanna-ed forehead of her unmasked face whipped around to gesture at a girl crouch-standing with her back to the partition that separated the back of the van from the captain's cabin.

"Give it to him."

The girl reached a gloved hand into her black jumpsuit's cavern of a body-pocket, and came out with a little black gun. She dropped it rectangularly in the middle of my groin. I made an "unf."

"You like James Bond, Jack?" the Smoking Vegan asked with a lip-smack.

The gun was a Walther PPK. The very same model used by James Bond.

"A little bit."

"You watch Bond films with your dad?" she asked.

"I don't have a dad. Now what's this--"

"When'd you see your first Bond film?"

"I was eighteen."

"Which one was it?"

"Octopussy. Now--"

"Octopussy. Shit, it was Octopussy. Shit."

All the girls let out high little short chuckles.

"Go on, take a look at it."

I looked at the gun. It was small. And black. I couldn't see much more, as it was buried in the loose khaki of my crotch.

"Flip it over for him."

Girl Number Three clicked open a metal pointer, like a teacher uses during a lecture involving a blackboard. With the antenna-bulb tip of the pointer, fished into the trigger-hole and flipped the gun over.

Drawn on the other side of the barrel in neon pink ink was the distinctly female shape of lipsticked lips pulled up into a tight grin.

"That's Smiley," said the Fourth Girl sitting behind me. She kneed me between my shoulderblades. "Ain't she cute?"

"Sh-she?"

The four girls let out a kind of female belly laugh. The way girls laugh when they're out of sight of men and pop-culture.

"You not privy to commit a felony with a female gun, Jack?" said the girl with the metal pointer.

"F-felony?"

"Shh, shh," Smoking Vegan vocalized. She had her arms stacked atop her knees. Her cigarette leaked flakes of white ash onto the floor by my feet. "We're gonna let you take this easy, Jack."

"Take what easy? Where's my fr--where's the Korean girl?"

"She's in the front seat," said the girl behind me.

"Sleeping like a baby on a summer day," said the girl with the pointer.

"We got good watch over her," said the girl who'd thrown me the smiling gun.

"Jack," Smoking Vegan said. "Jack, look at me."

I looked up at Smoking Vegan. Her eyes glowed beneath her partial brow ridge in the darkness of the back of the van.

"Have you ever killed anyone before?"

On any other day, I'd have told her she really should watch her "Ever . . . before" constructions. Since I was in no condition, handcuffed or not, to gesture toward her inefficient grammar, I kept quiet, and shook my head.

"Well, you will, before today is over."

"Sad son of a bitch," the girl behind me chuckled.

"Shh," Smoking Vegan said. "Now, Jack."

"Y-yeah?"

"Do you know John Mellencamp?"

"Yeah."

"You're going to kill him for us."

"K-kill him?"

"Yes. You're going to kill him."

I narrowed my eyes at the Smoking Vegan, to see if she narrowed her eyes with me. When a frat guy in the bar right across the street had said, years ago, something about my ex-girlfriend, and we ended up in a fight, this is how the fight started. I narrowed my eyes at him, and he narrowed his eyes at me, and the anger was manifest. When I narrowed my eyes, she greyly embodied her feminism with a relaxing of her face. This is how my fight with her began.

And it soon ended.

"What the fuck? Are you fucking serious?"

"Sad motherfucker," came a voice behind me.

"Hey, fuck you," I said, twiggling around left and right.

She kneed me in the back of the head.

"Dumb motherfucker," the girl with the pointer called me.

"Fuck you," I hissed up at the Smoking Vegan, who I antagonizingly wished had been smiling like her gun that was now mine.

She looked at me like you look at a penny on the sidewalk you're not going to pick up.

"Sad motherfucker," said the girl who'd thrown me the gun.

"Enough," breathed the Smoking Vegan. "Now, look, Jack," she said. "I can understand your unwillingness to do this. So we have a little incentive for you."

The other three girls' snickers clicked like Wild West gun hammers. The girl with the pointer tapped the metal shutter, and it slid open. Light from outside the windshield navigated into the stuffy cabin, and made things feel cooler. "Cry Baby Cry" oozed out the square hole and into my ears.

"Cry, baby, cry -- make your mother sad."

A hand brandishing a bandaged and red finger rode a tattooed arm out of the hole. It was carrying a cream-colored envelope. The girl with the pointer took it and gave it to the girl who'd thrown me the gun. She gave it to the Smoking Vegan, who relaxed her posture so her feet touched the floor.

She thwipped open the binder as the shutter shashed shut. As she licked her right index fingertip, a white weasel uncoiled itself from somewhere intangible around her jumpsuited groin area. Writhing and undulating, it wound its way up onto Smoking Vegan's shoulder, where it crouched down and looked off at no adversary.

Smoking Vegan took up one photograph, held it at her shoulder-level, and let go. It slid forward on air without friction. It passed back, flitted forward, edge-struck my middle-chest, and float-landed flat in my lap.

I looked down, and felt something grab my nasal septum and pull, hard and fast, and forward. I all at once wanted to produce maybe-red liquid from some part of my face, and leak it all over. My throat grew cold and tight.

It was a large black and white photograph of my apartment. From a position just outside the window, I was looking in at a frozen some-hundredth of a second of life when I wasn't around. My gay black roommate was sitting pantsless in his big black beanbag chair with his hands behind his head and his eyes forward on my television. A form wearing my girlfriend's favorite blouse was on her knees, bent forward, her face between his toned and shiny thighs.

"What the hell is this?"

"What the hell does it look like?"

I don't remember who said that.

"Is this . . . ?"

"Yeah, it's her, Jack," Smoking Vegan said. She leaned forward, and put a hand on my shoulder the way her weasel had its four legs on her shoulder.

"Fuck you," I said, shaking her hand off. "Fuck this shit. Fuck this."

"Fuck you," Smoking Vegan said. Her weasel let out a low kworwl. "I went through a lot of shit for this shit. Shit, you wanna see another photo?" She thwipped through a few more photos, and held one up with its back to my eyes. Lightless as the surroundings were, I couldn't see through to its front from its back.

"You can see her face in this one, Jack. Her eyes are open and everything. You wanna see?"

"Shit -- shit, no." I looked down to the picture in my lap, then back up to Smoking Vegan, then off at the wall between the two girls.

"So you see what we're dealing with here?"

"I -- I do."

"So you're going to help us?"

"H-help you?"

"Yes. You're going to help us, or--"

"Or what?" I said. It was more of a blurt. I simply wasn't connecting the two pieces of information they wanted me to connect.

"Or we'll send this photograph to your girlfriend."

The girls all started laughing now. The weasel growled lowly in five or six short bursts.

I scoffed.

"What's so fucking funny? What's so fucking funny?"

The Smoking Vegan shook her head. Her ratty hair swung and whipped her neck. "Ignore these dumb cunts," she said.

"Yeah, ignore us," said the girl behind me with a shoulder-blade-kneeing.

"See, Jack, we've had you checked out," said the girl with the pointer. The Smoking Vegan lit up another cigarette as the girl went on explaining. "We send this to your girlfriend -- we'll make it kind of a normal-looking piece of mail, with her name on it. We'll make it look like a bill or something, something you'd never open. Just in case you start getting all pissy-vigilant with the mail, we'll send a fresh print of it every week until we're sure she's got it."

"And then," began the girl behind me.

"And then," the girl with the pointer went on, "she'll want to marry you."

I scoffed. "Shit. What the fuck?"

"And you won't say no," said the girl who'd thrown me the gun. Her tone was cheery.

"What? What makes you so--"

Before I could finish my own sentence, I interrupted myself. I looked over at Smoking Vegan, who was in the middle of a cheeks-concave-making drag. She merely closed her eyes in my direction, and gave a short nod: They know what they're talking about, the nod said. Best just listen to them. It was the nod of a nurse with a clipboard who stands by as a doctor delivers a leukemia diagnosis.

"We've got it all figured out, Jack," the girl behind me said with the tone of a grave nod. "She'll never tell you that she knows, and you'll never tell her that you know."

"It'll be misery."

"It'll be the worst thing that ever happened to you."

"It'd be a long life worse than a quick death."

"We've had you profiled since you wrote that god-awful poem."

"Hey, my poem wasn't--"

"Wasn't what?" the girl with the pointer asked with a shake of the head. "If you're going to tell us the poem wasn't some kind of cry for help -- if you're gonna say you didn't mean to communicate something in that shit, don't. There's no point lying here."

"We've so got you covered," said the girl behind me.

"I can -- I can."

"It was only a few times, Jack," the Smoking Vegan spoke up. "We only caught her twice. She feels worse about it than you do. And she never has to know that you know. I mean, you sure as fuck wouldn't tell her, right?"

"And besides, you're not exactly innocent yourself," said the girl who'd thrown me the gun. "You have lusty thoughts about other women."

"I don't -- they're just --"

"What? Just manly thoughts? Puh-leeze. We've heard a share of that bullshit. Shit. It makes me sick."

"You sad bastard."

"How's about this for some incentive: you don't do this shit by four PM, and we off your little footy bitch here."

"You -- what?!"

Smoking Vegan looked down at her black lap. "By midnight, we deliver the photos. The whole reel of them. Do as we say." She looked at me. I squirmed a tenth of a degree to the right. "Please."

"There'll be cops -- bodyguards. They'll see me. What do I do, just walk up with a pistol and shoot him?"

"In the face, preferably."

"The . . . the face?"

The Smoking Vegan looked at me, and made herself cold.

"Yeah, the face'd be the best bet, don't you think?"

"I'll -- I'll go to jail," I spat out. "They'll fucking execute me."

"Shit, shit, nah. You don't got to worry about that shit. What's gonna happen is--"

"What's going to happen," the Smoking Vegan picked up, "is they're going to arrest you. You'll be all over the news. And then, you spend a week in jail, and you mysteriously get off. No harm done to nobody."

"Except that Mellencamp bastard," one of the girls chuckled. She stopped when the Smoking Vegan shot a steely cold glare.

The Smoking Vegan let out her current lungful in my direction.

"I -- I'll get off?"

"Start a new life," Smoking Vegan exhaled. She tapped her cigarette on her knee, and leaned forward. She folded her hands like in lazy prayer. Her cigarette stuck out between two locked fingers. "New name, new face, new everything. We got you covered."

"What's -- why Mellencamp?"

Here the Smoking Vegan stood up, and gave a whistle. The van rattled to a start, and dipped to the lower left, and tipped half-over, and started to said down Kirkwood away from the music I couldn't hear.

"Best not to think of why it has to be Mellencamp," Smoking Vegan said. "Just think of him as a figment of your imagination. Imagine you're killing an inner demon. Think up something insane. Like you're killing an abstract concept or some shit. Just believe me when I say it's going to be alright."

"Be-believe you?"

"Just like you believe me when I say this."

Smoking Vegan clamped her lips on her cigarette. The van sped around another left corner, squealing hard. The weasel let out a kworwl as Smoking Vegan pried up the semisolid felt that draped her former sitting platform. Revealed were four pairs of giant plastic jugs with an alarm clock duct taped to the front.

"C4," the girl behind me said, with a knee.

Smoking Vegan's clunky digital watch swung low, around to the underside of her wrist. She held her arm up limp-wristed, and gazed at the flow of time with her wide eyes.

"It's coming up on three o'clock. Your girl wakes up at five. The bomb goes off at four -- unless you give us a reason to disable it."

The brakes jolt, and I fell onto my right shoulder, clacking the upper-right-corner of my head onto the ribbed metal floor. The force of the fall managed to slam shut my jaw.

"Uncuff the bastard. We're here."

It was Smoking Vegan who'd spoken to the girls who uncuffed me. Then she spoke to me.

"Don't even think of shooting us. That gets you in trouble. We've got plenty more photos."

The van's back doors creaked open with the sound of a wood-chipper. A wide girl with a flat rectangular off-fleshtone gauze-riding bandage engulfing her nose looked in at me and clicked her teeth.

"Time to kill, shorty," she said.

I let my fingers feel the smiling gun, and I stood half-up mostly weakly.



seventeen


I crossed through the basement of Jordan Hall, where some students faced no greater trouble than method of payment for copies of transcripts. I had a little, cold, not-silenced gun in my khaki cargo pocket. I grasped its fabric outline as I walked half-bent-over to my right. I stopped at a water fountain to inundate my cotton throat. The pillowed gun clunked against the water fountain when I bent over. Machine hit against machine in a way that made me paranoid. I stood up, rubbed my hands over my body, and headed to a tunnel into the Union Building. I entered on the side of the computer kiosks. I took my hand off my shorts covering my gun so I could crack my fingers and make ready to type on a too-small keyboard.

I opened my school email account. There was one message -- and the sender was a girl. I scratched my unshaven face, wondering if I knew the girl. The subject was "J351." There was a file attached to the email. Closer inspection revealed it to be a text file of her final project.

Her tone was coy:

"I figure, since in a real newsroom, editors are free to share their stories with one another, I could ask you to look over this, just, like, as a favor, right? I mean, if there was some rule against it, that'd be, like, telling a physicist that he couldn't use a calculator."

I opened my mouth like I'd just tasted bile. Actually, what with my cold skin and shaking stomach, I probably was tasting a little bit of bile.

I looked at the girl's name for a solid five minutes I could have been using to kill John Mellencamp. In the cold air-conditioning of that low-ceilinged ghost-town of a basement, I tried to connect the girl's name to an image. I kept coming up with the braces-face of the girl who'd asked me whose cell phone I was carrying, the girl who wanted to see the Dean, and that just seemed ridiculous. I couldn't see that girl talking this way.

And then my eyes opened. I patted down my left pocket.

The phone was gone. All I had was an apartment key.

I looked back at this girl's email, and hit "reply." With cold fingers, I typed:

"Hello. I'm having a bad day."

I looked at the two would-be sentences for two cycles of thirty seconds. Each cycle brought to mind some fresh and overflowing new and exciting idea for a handle on my situation, or else a way to continue the writing.

When I was done thinking I decided to stop thinking. I canceled the email, almost thinking, If not her, if not someone I don't know, then who do I have?

I patted down my gun, logged out of my email, and continued down the low hall toward the Dunn Meadow end of the Union Building.


I surfaced a hundred-some meters from Mellencamp. I kept my right hand in my right pocket in such a way as to let me grip the gun. I came up on a low concrete stairwell populated by smoking guys in hard hats. One of the guys said something to me.

"Yo," I think it was.

"What's up?"

I headed down the stairs and behind a brown dumpster. I paced behind the dumpster, temporarily unaware of the girls saying their goodbyes at the Indiana Daily Student's specialized Journalism Building exit. When I heard one let out a shrill cackle, I patted down my body and skipped off toward the hubbub in the street.

Girls in T-shirts and guys in T-shirts just couldn't help standing around and being proud. They shouted at their hometown hero, and he looked up and to the right as he wailed and sang.

Mellencamp was out of my sight. When I rose to my tiptoes, his scruffy mat of hair plucked into view, then dipped away. He was singing about "Little Pink Houses," like the kind you'd see and be proud of in a small town. He was singing the shoulder-length of two hundred people away from me. Using my own shoulders, I moved the shoulders of others. Without shouting, without singing along, and almost without knowing the words, I rhythm-walked my way to the front of the crowd with slowness and minimum bumpage.

Once, a guy in face-spanning sunglasses and a mullet turned and glared his teeth at me. He clearly wasn't a college student. His face was too dark with tan. His neck was tanned red. His mustache was fuzzy enough.

"The hell you think you are boy."

He didn't say it as a question. It was hardly language.

The sun was moving up when a final chord infected the spring air. Mellencamp cleared his throat at the microphone as I tiptoed with haste to within a small lynch mob's viewing distance.

"This is my last song. 'I Was Born in a Small Town.' Ain't it the truth."

He didn't speak his last sentence as a question.

His swarthy stature, however, lent him the air of being right. Quick and to the point, he'd announced the fun time was coming to an end. Alone and with an acoustic guitar and an amplifier and a microphone, John the former "Cougar" Mellencamp stood in faded wrinkled blue jeans with a black belt and a tight white T-shirt. His neck was framed by two thin strips of muscle. His fingers, from a distance, appeared to be with flat tips and short fingernails, like a man who works for a living.

I meekly muscled my way to the top of the mob. Now three people-thicknesses from the Man From Indiana himself, I felt down my gun again.

"I was born in a small town."

I spied the front of Mellencamp's head with the front of mine. Like the music or hate it -- as I did -- I couldn't help feeling some kind of feeling. It was the feeling of standing in the middle of something performed live. It was the feeling of something being live before something dead.

I felt down my gun as I looked for Mellencamp's shining eyes. This wasn't what I wanted to do. This wasn't where I was supposed to go. My esophagus stretched to accommodate a raw, packed snowball of some feeling.

Was it guilt, or fear, or something else? I almost felt around long enough to find out.

My hand squeezing clothed metal, my eyes locked looking for another man's eyes, I felt alone in the spring wind. Hair on my arm became self-aware. My fingers went light. My center heated up.

I felt for the gun.

Mellencamp locked eyes with me. He opened his mouth, smiled whitely, and gave me a deep, dark, glassy-eyed wink.

I turned, and bolted. A crowd jiggled like bowling pins that weren't going to fall. My center of gravity slipped a foot; my right hand touched my right knee.

Some man with a mullet gripped a big red Thermos with his arms when I slid his way. He turned his back in an effort to save his beverage.

"Damn, boy."

"Sorry. Sorry."

I apologized my way out of the crowd. The northern fringe of the crowd was the northern fringe of Tenth Street. I stood back, leaned forward, listened to a song about a small town with my hands on my knees, and breathed in the wind.

Sitting on the sidewalk near the stop sign at Tenth and College was a girl in jeans and a sorority sweatshirt. Her feet spread out in front of her, displaying nylon sandals. Blonde and thick-faced, she kept her eyes and thumbs on her cellular phone. A friend in a blue camisole and a linen skirt was watching the semi-far-off mob with little interest. I looked at her with less interest than she looked at Mellencamp. I was panting out cold air. She widened her eyes at me, a flirty substitute to a wave -- or a signal of animosity. Hardly thinking, as fast as I'd even run anywhere in my life, feeling two handfuls of quarters I'd planned to use on pinball and the bus slap against my left knee, my right hand keeping the gun from doing the same to my right knee, I bolted down Tenth Street without looking back, not hearing -- not this time -- the girl with the cellular phone ask her friend "What the fuck was with that guy?"



Part four -- the ending -- is coming.

Yes.