Hitchers

Mick just stared at his feet.

“Why can’t you at least try?”

Slowly, he raised his head to look at me. “Because it’s fucking brilliant, that’s why.” He lowered his voice. “Can’t you see that? It’s—” His eyes teared up; he shook his head, not able to find the words. “It’s fucking genius. It’s Sgt. Pepper. Anything I add will spoil it.”

Summer was back. She’d been standing quietly by the couch; now she spoke up, her voice gentle. “But it’s meant for you. He’s writing this for you, as much a gesture of friendship as anything. If you’re gone, and you don’t perform it, everyone loses. You heard him—he’s freezing up.”

Mick picked up a guitar leaning against the dining table, studied it as if he’d never seen one before. “If he finishes in time, I’ll sing it.” He plucked a string. “If not, tell Gilly he’s got my vocal cords now; he can bloody well learn to use them.” He looked at me. “Whatever you do, don’t let him overeat and turn me into a bloody Elvis. Make him take me a few laps on a stationary bike once in a while. He can go out on tour as me. My big comeback.” Silent, Mick replaced the guitar, stared down at Gilly’s work. He shook his head in disbelief, marveling. “Fucking brilliant.”

As if on cue, Summer and I approached from either side until we were at his shoulders, as if corralling a skittish mustang. Summer put a hand on Mick’s shoulder; as gently as I could I pulled out the chair Gilly had been using.

“He can always erase it,” I said, offering Mick a pencil. “If it sucks I’ll make sure Gilly chucks it. I swear.”

Mick appraised me, then looked at Summer. He pulled one side of his mouth into a dry half-smile, reached and plucked the pencil out of my hand. “Fine. You want to see how washed up I am? What an empty shell I am? I’ll write some bloody music. I’ll take a dump on Gilly’s bloody Mona Lisa.”

As he pulled up the chair and retrieved the pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket, Summer and I retreated. We grabbed our jackets and kept going right out the front door.

We tried to step through the narrow door into the elevator at the same time, bumped and stumbled in like a couple of stooges.

Laughing, Summer nudged me with her shoulder. “Klutz.”

I laughed, put my arm across her shoulders for a minute, drinking in the electricity of that touch. I wanted to wrap my arms around her. Maybe I would have, if Grandpa hadn’t taken over at that moment.

CHAPTER 35

Grandpa collected all of my sketching pencils out of the case of drafting materials he’d pilfered from Mick’s place and hurled them into the trash. “Crap. Fancy crap.” He sat at his table, in his house, plucked a plain number two pencil out of the case, slid a fresh piece of Bristol paper from the stack.

It was hard to pay attention to what he was doing, because most of my energies were directed at not slipping out. It was like holding two buckets of water in my outstretched arms while balancing on a beam, or waiting outside a restroom door with a raging case of diarrhea. For hours. Every few seconds I lunged to gain a better psychic grip.

Slowly, inexorably, it was getting worse. I could hang on for now, but what about tomorrow, and the next day? As Krishnapuma had observed, consciousness is osmotic. A water droplet can’t resist being pushed through a membrane.

The pencil Grandpa was clutching wobbled wildly over the paper. He held it there, willing my hand to hold still.

It wouldn’t.

Frustrated, he dropped the pencil. “God dammit.” He couldn’t wait to get started. If his hand would stop shaking I was sure he’d do a couple of Toy Shop strips in the old style, without Wolfie, Little Joe miraculously back without explanation, and ship them off before I could intercept them. He probably suspected I wasn’t going to waste what time I had left making calls to try to stop them from being published, and he was right.

Pushing out of his chair, Grandpa went to the kitchen cabinet he’d stocked with whiskey. He poured a generous shot of Jack, spilling twice as much on the counter. He carried his glass into the studio and stood at the window, surveying the treeless stretch of lawn.

It seemed so frivolous, to simply stand there gazing out the window. Grandpa had all the time in the world, though; I was the one in a hurry. I desperately wanted to get back to Mick’s, to see how the album was progressing, to see my friends, if only one last time.

Grandpa noticed the old Toy Shop originals stacked at his feet, some of the special ones we’d kept when I sold off the bulk of them. He picked up a few.

“Hm,” he said, thumbing through them, breathing heavily through my nose. He retrieved another handful, riffled through them, then grabbed all of them and took them to his desk.

He found a boxcutter in the drawer, and proceeded to slice up half a dozen strips, cutting circles around characters, toys, backgrounds, and separating them into piles. I watched, trying to understand what he was up to.

“Even while I was dead, the ideas kept coming,” he said as he selected a Little Joe and a Tina from his stack and set them in the first empty panel of the blank strip.

He cobbled together a “new” strip like this, pasting old images into the panels, typing out the dialogue on my computer and then pasting that over old bubbles of dialogue. It was a painstaking process, but even with his shaking hands it was still faster than I could draw a strip from scratch.

I wondered how Summer was doing. I would have given anything to have a few minutes alone with her— completely alone—to tell her how I felt, to see if she felt the same. Sometimes there was something in her eyes, something that might be veiled feelings for me. Or maybe that was wishful thinking.

When the strip was finished Grandpa packed it up, addressed it to the syndicate with a note insisting they print it immediately, that I’d had a change of heart about my new direction and wanted to get back to the basics of good writing and solid craftsmanship. More would follow soon, he promised.

Whistling tonelessly, he took the package to the post office in his Maserati and overnighted it.

In some ways losing to him was the most painful part of this. It wasn’t right, wasn’t just that the fight was fixed and this cold, arrogant bastard got to win.

“You had thirty-odd good years,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. The asshole didn’t even know how old I was. “You had use of your legs.” He took one hand off the wheel, turned it up in supplication. “I am sorry it’s got to end this way.”

Yeah, he was all torn up inside; that’s why he was whistling.

CHAPTER 36

I felt my fingers begin to tingle while Grandpa was pouring himself another drink. Grandpa dropped the bottle; amber whiskey chugged onto the linoleum, spreading toward the refrigerator.

Gasping with relief, my hands still trembling, I called Summer’s number.

“Hey. It’s Summer.” She was whispering.

I was expecting Lorena, and felt a fluttering in my stomach on hearing Summer’s voice.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“The High.”

“French Impressionists exhibit?”

“Where else?”

“How is Gilly’s album coming?”

“That’s why I’m here. Gilly’s working frantically. He needed solitude. He’ll call when it’s finished. And Finn?