Chapter 7 (p.4)
At eleven that night Shadow started shaking. He was just entering Middletown. He decided he needed sleep, or just not to drive any longer, and he pulled up in front of a Night's Inn, paid thirty-five dollars, cash in advance, for his ground-floor room, and went into the bathroom. A sad cockroach lay on its back in the middle of the tiled floor. Shadow took a towel and cleaned off the inside of the tub with it, then ran a bath. In the main room he took off his clothes and put them on the bed. The bruises on his torso were dark and vivid. He sat in the bath, watching the color of the bathwater change. Then, naked, he washed his socks and briefs and T-shirt in the basin, wrung them out and hung them on the clothesline that pulled out from the wall above the bathtub. He left the cockroach where it was, out of respect for the dead.
Shadow climbed into the bed. He wondered about watching an adult movie, but the pay-per-view device by the phone needed a credit card. Then again, he was not convinced that it would make him feel any better to watch other people have sex that he wasn't having. He turned on the TV for company, pressed the Sleep button on the remote three times, which would make the TV set turn itself off automatically in forty-five minutes, by which time he figured he'd be fast asleep. It was a quarter to midnight.
The picture was motel-fuzzy, and the colors swam across the screen. He flipped from late show to late show in the televisual wasteland, unable to focus. Someone was demonstrating something that did something in the kitchen, and replaced a dozen other kitchen utensils, none of which Shadow possessed. Flip. A man in a suit explained that these were the end times and that Jesus—a four-or five-syllable word the way the man pronounced it—would make Shadow's business prosper and thrive if Shadow sent him money. Flip: an episode of M*A*S*H ended and a Dick Van Dyke episode began.
Shadow hadn't seen an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show for years, but there was something comforting about the 1965 black-and-white world it painted, and he put the channel changer down beside the bed, and turned off the bedside light. He watched the show, eyes slowly closing, aware that something was odd. He had not seen many episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, so he was not surprised that it was an episode he could not remember seeing before. What he found strange was the tone.
All the regulars were concerned about Rob's drinking: he was missing days at work. They went to his home: he had locked himself in the bedroom, and had to be persuaded to come out: he was staggering drunk, but still pretty funny. His friends, played by Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie, left after getting some good gags in. Then, when Rob's wife went to remonstrate with him, he hit her, hard, in the face. She sat down on the floor and began to cry, not in that famous Mary Tyler Moore wail, but in small, helpless sobs, hugging herself and whispering, “Don't hit me, please, I'll do anything, just don't hit me any more.”
“What the fuck is this?” said Shadow, aloud.
The picture dissolved into phosphor-dot fuzz. When it came back, The Dick Van Dyke Show had, inexplicably, become I Love Lucy. Lucy was trying to persuade Ricky to let her replace their old icebox with a new refrigerator. When he left, however, she walked over to the couch and sat down, crossing her ankles, resting her hands in her lap, and staring out patiently in black and white across the years.
“Shadow?” she said. “We need to talk.”
Shadow said nothing. She opened her purse and took out a cigarette, lit it with an expensive silver lighter, put the lighter away. “I'm talking to you,” she said. “Well?”
“This is crazy,” said Shadow.
“Like the rest of your life is sane? Give me a fucking break.”
“Whatever. Lucille Ball talking to me from the TV is weirder by several orders of magnitude than anything that's happened to me so far,” said Shadow.
“It's not Lucille Ball. It's Lucy Ricardo. And you know something—I'm not even her. It's just an easy way to look, given the context. That's all.” She shifted uncomfortably on the sofa.
“Who are you?” asked Shadow.
“Okay,” she said. “Good question. I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.”
“You're the television? Or someone in the television?”
“The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.”
“What do they sacrifice?” asked Shadow.
“Their time, mostly,” said Lucy. “Sometimes each other.” She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gun smoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.
“You're a god?” said Shadow.
Lucy smirked, and took a lady-like puff of her cigarette. “You could say that,” she said.
“Sam says hi,” said Shadow.
“What? Who's Sam? What are you talking about?”
Shadow looked at his watch. It was twenty-five past twelve. “Doesn't matter,” he said. “So, Lucy-on-the-TV. What do we need to talk about? Too many people have needed to talk recently. Normally it ends with someone hitting me.”
The camera moved in for a close-up: Lucy looked concerned, her lips pursed. “I hate that. I hate that people were hurting you, Shadow. I'd never do that, honey. No, I want to offer you a job.”
“Doing what?”
“Working for me. I'm really sorry. I heard about the trouble you had with the Spookshow, and I was impressed with how you dealt with it. Efficient, no-nonsense, effective. Who'd've thought you had it in you? They are really pissed.”
“Really?”
“They underestimated you, sweetheart. Not a mistake I'm going to make. I want you in my camp.” She stood up, walked toward the camera. “Look at it like this, Shadow: we are the coming thing. We're shopping malls—your friends are crappy roadside attractions. Hell, we're online malls, while your friends are sitting by the side of the highway selling homegrown produce from a garden cart. No—they aren't even fruit sellers. Buggy-whip vendors. Whalebone-corset repairers. We are now and tomorrow. Your friends aren't even yesterday any more.”
It was a strangely familiar speech. Shadow asked, “Did you ever meet a fat kid in a limo?”
She spread her hands and rolled her eyes comically, funny Lucy Ricardo washing her hands of a disaster. “The technical boy? You met the technical boy? Look, he's a good kid. He's one of us. He's just not good with people he doesn't know. When you're working for us, you'll see how amazing he is.”
“And if I don't want to work for you, I-Love-Lucy?”
There was a knock on the door of Lucy's apartment, and Ricky's voice could be heard off-stage, asking Loo-cy what was keepin' her so long, they was due down at the club in the next scene; a flash of irritation touched Lucy's cartoonish face. “Hell,” she said. “Look, whatever the old guys are paying you, I can pay you double. Treble. A hundred times. Whatever they're giving you, I can give you so much more.” She smiled, a perfect, roguish, Lucy Ricardo smile. “You name it, honey. What do you need?” She began to undo the buttons of her blouse. “Hey,” she said. “You ever wanted to see Lucy's tits?”
The screen went black. The sleep function had kicked in and the set turned itself off. Shadow looked at his watch: it was half past midnight. “Not really,” said Shadow.
He rolled over in bed and closed his eyes. It occurred to him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them better than their opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn't speak in clichés.
And he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall, any day.
Morning found Shadow back on the road, driving through a gently undulating brown landscape of winter grass and leafless trees. The last of the snow had vanished. He filled up the tank of the piece of shit in a town which was home to the runner-up of the State Women's Under-16s three-hundred-meter dash, and, hoping that the dirt wasn't all that was holding it together, he ran the car through the gas station car wash, and was surprised to discover that the car was, when clean, against all reason, white, and pretty much free of rust. He drove on.
The sky was impossibly blue, and white industrial smoke rising from factory chimneys was frozen in the sky, like a photograph. A hawk launched itself from a dead tree and flew toward him, wings strobing in the sunlight like a series of stop-motion photographs.
At some point he found himself heading into East St. Louis. He attempted to avoid it and instead found himself driving through what appeared to be a red-light district in an industrial park. Eighteen-wheelers and huge rigs were parked outside buildings that looked like temporary warehouses, that claimed to be 24 HOUR NITE CLUBs and, in one case, THE BEST PEAP SHOW IN TOWN. Shadow shook his head, and drove on. Laura had loved to dance, clothed or naked (and, on several memorable evenings, moving from one state to the other), and he had loved to watch her.
Lunch was a sandwich and a can of Coke in a town called Red Bud.
He passed a valley filled with the wreckage of thousands of yellow bulldozers, tractors and Caterpillars. He wondered if this was the bulldozers' graveyard, where the bulldozers went to die.
He drove past the Pop-a-Top Lounge. He drove through Chester (“Home of Popeye”). He noticed that the houses had started to gain pillars out front, that even the shabbiest, thinnest house now had its white pillars, proclaiming it, in someone's eyes, a mansion. He drove over a big, muddy river, and laughed out loud when he saw that the name of it, according to the sign, was the Big Muddy River. He saw a covering of brown kudzu over three winter-dead trees, twisting them into strange, almost human shapes: they could have been witches, three bent old crones ready to reveal his fortune.
He drove alongside the Mississippi. Shadow had never seen the Nile, but there was a blinding afternoon sun burning on the wide brown river which made him think of the muddy expanse of the Nile: not the Nile as it is now, but as it was long ago, flowing like an artery through the papyrus marshes, home to cobra and jackal and wild cow…
A road sign pointed to Thebes.
The road was built up about twelve feet, so he was driving above the marshes. Clumps and clusters of birds in flight were questing back and forth, black dots against the blue sky, moving in some kind of desperate Brownian motion.
