The makeup artist hands me a bottle of mineral water and says my tuxedo is on fire in the back.
I ask, Where's the outside?
Take that door over there, the makeup artist says.
The steel doors behind me are buckling in their frame.
Go down the long hall, the makeup artist says.
Turn right at the end.
Go out the door marked Exit.
I say thanks.
She says there's a meat loaf sandwich left if I want it.
The sandwich in my one hand, I go out the door she said, go down the hall, go out the exit.
Outside in the parking lot is a red car, a red car with an automatic transmission, Fertility behind the wheel and Adam sitting next to her.
I get in the backseat and lock the door. To Fertility in the front seat, I tell her to roll up her window. Fertility fiddles with the controls for the radio.
Behind me, the crowd is pouring out the exits, running to surround us.
Their faces are getting close enough for me to feel spit on.
Then out of the sky comes the biggest miracle.
It starts raining.
A rain of white.
Manna from Heaven. I swear.
A rain comes down so slick and heavy the mob is falling, slipping and falling, fallen and sprawled. White bits of rain bounce in the car windows, into the carpet, into our hair.
Adam looks out in wonder at the miracle of this white rain that's helping us get away.
Adam says, 'It's a miracle.'
The back wheels spin, skid sideways, and then leave black as we escape.
'No,' Fertility says and hits the gas, 'it's rice.'
The blimp circling the stadium says CONGRATULATIONS and HAPPY HONEYMOON.
'I wish they wouldn't do that,' Fertility says. 'That rice kills birds.'
I tell her that rice that kills birds saved our lives.
We were on the street. Then we were on a freeway.
Adam twisted around in the front seat to ask me, 'Are you going to eat all that sandwich?'
I say, It's meat loaf.
We needed a ride north, Adam said. He knew about a ride, but it wasn't leaving New Orleans until the next morning. He had almost ten years of doing this, traveling back and forth across the country with no money in secret.
Killing people, I say.
'Delivering people to God,' he says.
Fertility says, 'Shut up.'
We need some cash, Adam tells us. We need some sleep. Food. And he knew where we could find some. He knew a place where people would have bigger problems than we did.
We only had to lie a little.
'From now on,' Adam tells us, 'you two have a child.'
We do not.
'Your child is deathly ill,' Adam says.
Our child is not.
'You're in New Orleans so your child can go to a hospital,' Adam says. 'That's all you need to say.'
Adam says he'll handle the rest. Adam tells Fertility, 'Turn here.'
He says, 'Now turn right here.' He says, 'Go up two more blocks and turn left.' Where he's taking us, we can stay overnight for free. We can get food donated for us to eat. We can do some piecework, collating documents or stuffing envelopes, to earn a little cash. We can get showered. Watch ourselves on television, making our escape on the evening news. Adam tells me I'm too much of a mess to be recognized as an escaped mass murderer who ruined the Super Bowl. Where we're going, he says, people will have their own big problems to worry about.
Fertility says, 'Like, how many people do you have to kill to make the jump from serial killer to mass murderer?'
Adam tells us, 'Sit tight in the car, and I'll go inside to grease the skids. Just remember, your child is very sick.' Then he says, 'We're here.'
Fertility looks at the house and at Adam and says, 'You're the one who's very sick.'
Adams says, 'I'm your poor child's godfather.'
The sign in the front yard says, Ronald McDonald House.
Imagine you live in a house only every day your house is in a different town.
We had three ways out of New Orleans Adam knew about. Adam took Fertility and me to a truck stop on the edge of the city and said to take our pick. The airports were being watched. The train and bus stations were staked out. We couldn't all three of us hitchhike, and Fertility refused to drive all the way to Canada.
'I flat out don't like driving,' Fertility says. 'Besides, your brother's way to travel is just a lot more fun.'
The day after the Ronald McDonald House, we're the three of us standing in the acres of gravel parking lot outside a truck stop cafe when Adam pulls a linoleum knife out of his back pocket and slips the blade open.
'What will it be, people?' he says.
Nothing here is going due north. Adam's been inside talking up all the truck drivers. What we have to choose from is the following, Adam says, pointing at each.
There's a Westbury Estate going west out Highway 10 to Houston.
There's a Plantation Manor headed northeast on Highway 55 to Jackson.
There's a Springhill Castle going northwest to Bossier City on Highway 49, with stops at Alexandria and Pineville, then headed west on Highway 20 to Dallas.
Parked around us on the gravel are prefabricated houses, manufactured houses, trailer houses. These are broken into halves or thirds and hooked to the back of semi trucks. The open side of each modular piece is sealed with a sheet of translucent plastic and inside are the murky shapes of sofas, beds, rolls of rolled-up carpet. Major appliances. Dining-room sets. Easy chairs.
While Adam was chatting with the drivers, finding out where each is headed, Fertility was in the truck stop bathroom dyeing my blond hair black in the sink and washing the tanning bronzer off my face and hands. We stuffed enough envelopes to buy me thrift-store clothes and get a paper bag of fried chicken with paper napkins and coleslaw.
The three of us standing in the parking lot, Adam waves his knife in a circle and says, 'Choose. The men who deliver these lovely homes won't be eating their dinner all night.'
Most long-haul truck drivers drive at night, Adam tells us. There's less traffic. It's cooler. During the hot, busy day, the drivers pull off the highway and sleep in the sleeper boxes attached to the back of each truck cab.
Fertility asks, 'What's the difference what we choose?'
'The difference,' Adam says, 'is your comfort level.'
This is how Adam's been crossing and crisscrossing the country for the past ten years.
A Westbury Estate has a formal dining room and a built-in fireplace in the living room.
The Plantation Manor has walk-in closets and a breakfast nook.
The Springhill Castle has a whirlpool bathtub in the glamour bath. A glamour bath has two sinks and a wall of mirror. The living room and the master bedroom have skylights. The dining nook has a built-in china hutch with leaded-glass doors.
This is depending on which half you get. Again, these are just parts of homes. Broken homes.
Dysfunctional homes.
The half you get might be all bedrooms or just a kitchen and living room and no bedrooms. There might be three bathrooms and nothing else, or you might get no bathroom at all.
