through Donnie’s drunken memories that the two had been there while he had been fleeing Vanni Fucci. Small world. Bremen pressed his cheek and temple to the glass hard enough to drive thoughts away, to form a barrier between these new wavelengths of foreign thoughts and his own bruised mind.
It did not work.
Donnie hadn’t enjoyed the Magic Kingdom much, even though he’d waited his whole life to go there, because goddamn spoilsport Donna refused to go on any of the real rides with him. She’d ruined his fun by standing, ponderous as a cow heavy with two heifers, and waving as he’d boarded Space Mountain and Splash Mountain and all the fun rides. She’d said it was because her water broke an hour after coming into the park, but Donnie knew it was mostly to spite him.
She’d insisted on going into Orlando that evening, saying the pains were starting in earnest now, but Donnie had left her wedged in one of the TV chairs in the bus station while he checked out the hospitals by phone. They were worse than Huntsville or Atlanta or St. Louis about their payment policies.
Donnie had used the last of Dickie’s credit card to get them tickets from Orlando to Oklahoma City. A toothless old fart sitting near the phone banks in the bus station had overheard Donnie’s angry queries on the phone and—after Donnie had slammed the phone down for the last time—had suggested Oklahoma City. “Best goddamn place in the goddamn country to get born for free,” the old fart had said, showing an expanse of gums. “Had me two sisters and one of my wives who calved there. Them Oklahoma City hospitals just put it on Medicare and don’t bother you none.”
So they were off to Houston with connecting tickets for Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. Donna was whimpering more than a little now, saying that the contractions were just a few minutes apart, but as Donnie drank more sour mash he grew increasingly certain that she was lying just to ruin his trip.
Donna was not lying.
Bremen felt her pain as if it were his own. He had timed the contractions with his watch, and they had moved from almost seven minutes apart in Tallahassee to less than two minutes separating them by the time they crossed the state line into Alabama. Donna would whimper at Donnie, tugging at his sleeve in the dark and hissing invective, but he would shove her away. He was busy talking with the man across the aisle, Meredith Soloman, the toothless old fart who had suggested Oklahoma City. Donnie had shared his sour mash until Gainesville, and Meredith Soloman had shared his own flask of something even stronger from there onward.
Just before the tunnel to Mobile, Donna had said, loud enough for the entire bus to hear, “Goddamn you to hell, Donnie Ackley, if you’re gonna make me drop this goddamn kid here on this bus, at least give me a swig of what you’re drinkin’ with that toothless old fart.”
Donnie had shushed her, knowing they’d be thrown off the bus if the driver heard too much about the drinking, had apologized to Meredith Soloman, and had let her drink heavily from the flask. Incredibly, her contractions slowed and returned to pre-Tallahassee intervals. Donna fell asleep, her dimmed consciousness rising and falling on the waves of cramping that flowed through her for the next few hours.
Donnie continued to apologize to Meredith Soloman, but the old man had shown his gums again, reached into his soiled ditty bag, and brought out another unlabeled bottle of white lightning.
Donnie and Meredith took turns drinking the fierce booze and sharing views on the worst way to die.
Meredith Soloman was sure that a cave-in or gas explosion was the worst way to go. As long as it didn’t kill you right away. It was the layin’ there and waitin’, in the cold and dank and dark a mile beneath the surface with the helmet lights fadin’ and the air getting foul … that had to be the worst way to go. He should know, Meredith Soloman explained, since he’d worked in the deep mines of West Virginia as man and boy long before Donnie’d been born. Meredith’s pap had died down in the mines, as had his brother Tucker and his brother-in-law Phillip P. Argent. Meredith allowed as how it was a terrible shame about his pap and brother Tucker, but no cave-in had served humanity better than the one that took that low-life, foulmouthed, mean-spirited Phillip P. in 1972. As for sixty- eight-year-old Meredith Soloman, he’d been caved in on three times and blown up twice, but they’d always dug him out. Each time, though, he’d sworn he was never goin’ down again … no one could make him go down again. Not his wives … he’d had four, one after the other, y’understand, even the young things don’t last too long back in the hollers of West Virginia, what with pneumonia and childbirth and all … not his wives, or his kin … real kin, not bastards-in-law like Phillip P.… nor even his own children, them grown up nor them still in bare feet, could talk him into goin’ back down.
But he did, finally, talk himself into goin’ back down. And he’d continued goin’ down until the company its own self made him retire early at age fifty-nine just because his lungs were filling up with coal dust. Well,
Donnie disagreed. Donnie thought that dying underground in a cave-in or gas explosion wasn’t nearly the worst way to go. Donnie started listing terrible ways he’d seen and been around. The time when that biker, Jack Coe, the one him and the others called the Hog, had been working for the highway department and had rolled backward off his mower on an incline and gone under the blades. Jack Coe’d lived on in the hospital for another three months until pneumonia’d got
Then there’d been Donnie’s first girlfriend, Farah, who’d gone down into niggertown to a bar and gotten gang-raped by a bunch of black bucks who ended up using things other than their dicks on her—their fists and broom handles and Coke bottles and even the sharp end of a tire iron, according to Farah’s sister—and …
“Don’t tell me she died’a gettin’ raped,” said Meredith Soloman, leaning across the aisle and taking the bottle back. His voice was soft and slurry, but Bremen could hear him as if in an echo chamber … first the slow, drunken structuring of the words in Meredith’s mind, then the slow, drunken words themselves. “Hell no, she didn’t die of getting raped,” said Donnie, and laughed at the idea. “Farah killed herself with Jack Coe’s sawed-off shotgun a couple of months later … she was living with the Hog then … and that’s what made Jack go and get a job with the highway people. Neither one of them never had no luck.”
“Well, a shotgun ain’t a bad way to go,” whispered Meredith Soloman, wiping the mouth of the bottle, drinking, and then wiping his own mouth as some of the moonshine dribbled out onto his sharp chin. “The tire iron an’ stuff don’t count ’cause none of that ain’t what killed her. And none of the shit you’re talkin’ about’s near as bad as layin’ there in the dark a mile underground with your air runnin’ out. It’s like bein’ buried alive an’ lastin’ for days.”
Donnie started to protest but Donna whimpered and tugged at his arm. “Donnie, hon, these pains’re coming real close now.”
Donnie handed her the bottle, pulled it back after she had taken a long drink, and leaned across the aisle to get back to his conversation. Bremen noticed that the pains were only a minute or so apart now.
Meredith Soloman, it turned out, was on a quest not terribly dissimilar from Donnie and Donna’s. The old man was trying to find a decent place in the country to die: someplace where the authorities would give his old bones a decent burial at county expense. He’d tried going home, back to West Virginia, but most of his kin were dead or moved away or didn’t want to see him. His children—all eleven if you counted the two illegitimate ones by little Bonnie Maybone—fell into the last category. So Meredith Soloman had been on a quest to find some hospitable state and county where an old boy with his lungs clogged as thick as two Glad bags full of black dust could spend a few weeks or months duty free in a hospital somewhere and … when the time came … have his bones treated with the respect due to bones belonging to a white Christian man.
Donnie began an argument about what happens to the soul once you die … he had specific views on reincarnation that he’d got from Donna’s brother-in-law with the credit card … and the two men’s urgent whispers turned into urgent shouts as Meredith explained that heaven was heaven, no niggers or animals or insects allowed.
Four rows in front of the arguing drunks, a quiet man named Kushwat Singh sat reading a paperback by the light of the small reading light above him. Singh was not concentrating on the words in the book; he was thinking about the slaughter at the Golden Temple a few years before—the rampage of Indian government troops that had killed Singh’s wife, twenty-three-year-old son, and his three best friends. The officials had said that the radical Sikhs had been planning to overthrow the government. The officials had been right. Now Kushwat Singh’s mind, tired from twenty hours of traveling and sleepless nights before that, ran over the list of things he was going to buy at that certain warehouse near the Houston airport: Semtex plastic explosive, fragmentation grenades, Japanese electronic
