Dollar For Your Thoughts, Part 5/14

             Connie bailed and went around the back of the ramshackle cinder-block building. Then I rolled out. Soon I heard a shout from her.

            “Do you have a phone?”

            “No.”

            My phone had gone with the personal assistant.

            “Anything?” She shouted. “We gotta capture this image.”

            “Of what?”

            “Of a little pink one. It’s so cold here I’m sure that he wants to get back in the egg.”

            “You and your horned toads! No. I don’t have a camera.”

            She hook-waved me over. I was headed in that direction anyway.

            “Just look at him! You’d melt. I wish I could send an image back home. ‘Imno denies existence of horned toads’,” she said, framing a headline with her hands.

            “We don’t deny their existence.” I saw a little pink streak and pointed where it had begun. “They’re just not here.”

            “How’d you do that? You scared him away.”

            She pulled the strange object out of her jacket and popped a lozenge into her mouth. By now, I understood that it was candy. The cylinder had some sort of face on it.

            “You wanted me to look at him. And I did. Now, I’m melting. My turn. To drive.”

            I went behind the building and found a place to use. We headed back to the car which sat there in a state of dismay. Connie patted the cylinder within her jacket.

            “It’s just candy.”

            “I believe you. I just think you’re in a walking trance.”

            She looked back.

            “Goodbye, Merle!”

            We trudged back to the car. The gravel crunched.

            “I named him after you. Hope you don’t mind.”

            We got in, and I noticed that she was smirking at my Betty Boop steering wheel cover. I’d seen that before. I told her-

            “I love this. I got it after I rated the company car. It’s a trophy.”

            “You don’t understand,” Connie told me. “I like it too. Growing up, I wanted to be Betty Boop.”

            Again, we headed north, toward scudding clouds.

            “Don’t laugh,” Connie said. “It was either Betty Boop or Tinkerbell. When I was growing up, we had so little.”

            I laughed. “I’m not laughing.”

            This body-image politics. I found Connie nice. She was who she was and she was fascinatingly unique. Couldn’t tell her things like that, though. Yet. I thought that it was rotten that, growing up, she felt limited to two freakish options.

            “Besides,” she told me, “Imno stole Betty Boop. I got by with drawings friends made for me.”

            “Tenger could’ve used any licensed product,” I told her.

            “Uh-huh! Imno jacked up the price. They had it cornered by recreating the image for their novelty items. Before the corporate renaissance.”

            “But Tenger had the corporate renaissance itself cornered.”

            “True.”

            “You can’t patent healthy competition.”

            All this was ‘commissar speak’. Our bread and butter. Breakfast meeting talk which we naturally slipped into.

            “Which translates to: ‘Imno stole Betty Boop!’.”

            Connie won the set, and I laughed. My ties with Imno were being cut. Snipped left and right. I just kept the car pointed north down highway 65. Despite enough sleep, though, we were both on the verge of a trance. We knew that instinctively. It was a crap-shoot as to who would have one first, and then we could get a handle on the rhythm. We were in a car that would only go in the direction someone would point it, and would plow into something if I weren’t careful. I had no connection to the outside world, and was escorting a Tenger woman with a lizard fetish, who would, at regular intervals, pop something that I hoped was just candy into her mouth. Who asked:

            “What did you dream of last night?”

            I mean, really.

            “I can’t remember.”

            “Well, you dreamt.”

            I thought. I had dreamt, but couldn’t recall specifics.

            “I dunno,” I told her. “I dreamt that I was doing things.” A mist developed on the windshield, but I figured out how to keep it off with the wipers.

            “Tasks?” Connie asked.

            “Perhaps. If you do something, that’s a task.”

            “That’s one definition. I think we’re starting to have trances in our sleep. It may keep us out of deep sleep. So we should be careful.”

            “Noted.”

            Then, Connie began to hum. Try as I did to ignore it, I found myself trying to make out the tune.

            “Landslide.”

            “There’s a landslide?”

            “No. What you were humming.”

            “I wasn’t humming.”

            “Maybe you didn’t realize it.”

            “I wasn’t humming!”

            “You were humming ‘Landslide’, you Tenger hippie.”

            “Haww! I wasn’t humming at all. Listen.”

            I listened. There was a faint wail.

            “‘Misty’, then.  But I get three guesses.” I considered something by Johnny Mathis for my turn. If she was going a century and a half back, I, too, would go deep.

            “I’m not humming…”

            “That’s not fair. Either you’re playing the game, or you’re not…” I looked over. The wail continued, but she wasn’t humming. Instead, she asked,

            “Do you have sirens here?”

            “We... Oh. Jesus!” We were heading into a cloud. I looked to either side. There was no escape.

            “Tornado?”

            I gritted my teeth and accelerated. “Either that or we’re at war with each other again.”

            Connie stiffened in her seat, but her eyes belied relish.

            “Wouldn’t that be something. Where ya takin’ us, Merle?”

            “Right angle!” I cried over the increasing roar. “We need to take a right angle to it!”

            “We don’t even know where it is, though!”

            I spotted a tree, and a fence, ahead, to the left.

            “Into the ditch, then!” Connie cried.

            “May not be nec-es-sary…”

            Still gritting my teeth, and with both of us gritting our entire bodies, I slid us into a driveway the other side of the oncoming lane. There was a thump from a washed-up culvert pipe, and I brought us to a crunchy halt, nearly grazing a man who was racing up the drive with a bin on wheels.

            “What now?” Connie asked, all breathy.

            “Scaredy hole!”

            We bailed and followed the man.

            “I hope that refers to something good that we dive into…” Connie narrated as she ran beside me. “I don’t understand all the homey terms you have down here…”

            The man trotted with one hand dragging the bin, and the other precautiously holding onto the belt of his pants. Connie kept up with us step by step.

            “Scaredy Hole: Noun. A hole where Imnans go when they’re scared. I should start an Imnan glossary. I’ve never been in a tornado.”

             The man beat us up the drive with the bin. He came to a bemused halt next to a lawn mower he’d set up to service. He let go of the bin and adjusted his Wisconsin baseball cap. Without need. Now it was calm.

            “You have a scaredy hole?” I asked.

            “Something like,” he told me. “I don’t know why I grabbed this.” He nodded to the bin. “Nowhere to put it. But now it won’t wind up on the highway, though. Hey!”

            “Hey what,” Connie said.

            “The police want to talk to you. Something about a picket fence?”

            “That’s ok,” I told him. “We are the police.” I rattled my laminated badge on its lanyard for him to see.

            “Never mind, then.” He hiked his belt up, a bit self-conscious. He had a nice set-up there. A small, well kept house with a garden in the back, and ‘something like’ a scaredy hole for times like this. He looked calmly upward, then back down to Connie.

            “Hey.”

            “Hey, what?” Connie responded. Then to me, “I’m getting used to this Imno thing.”

            “I heard you say that you’ve never seen a tornado.”

            “That’s right.”

            “Look up.”

            Connie and I both did. There was this huge, I guess you’d call it, eyebrow in the sky. Or a curly, thickly-based whip, a near halo, framed in two dimensions against the clouds. But things were nearly calm. Just a breeze and a sprinkle. All three of us breathed to the sky.

            “Where’s your scaredy hole?” Connie asked.

            “If there’s a need,” the man told the sky, “you can follow me there.”

            I looked at him.

            “It’s going east.”

            He nodded back.

            “Aw. I’d never been in a scaredy hole, either.”

            “There’s a time for everything,” the man told Connie. Her eyes flicked north. “Then what’s that, then.”

            I looked and saw, there in the clear just west of the tornado, a slow jet plane.

            “What’s that riddle?” Connie asked, and as she did, the plane barely moved. I muttered-

            “What’s that riddle?”

            “What’s that riddle?” the squirrely, gaunt man asked. Then to Connie.

            “Your turn.”

            The plane had no wings. It was black and lozenge shaped. I asked the man if he’d seen one before.

            “Sorry,” he shrugged. “You’re a cop. I’m playing dumb.”

            Connie pulsed beside me.

            “Gotta go!” She took off her dollar pin and pressed it into the man’s hand. “Dollar for your thoughts. Thanks!”

            I followed her.

            “Never been decorated by a cop before…” The man muttered as we left.

            “We’re not cops, we’re UFO chasers!” Connie shouted back.

            And the car, with the doors left open through our bailout, went: ‘ding! ding! ding!’ Already, although I made it in the passenger side of the car somehow, I was sizing up the task of covering the shelves of a kitchen cupboard with polka-dot contact paper. But how to do it and not leave even one bubble?

            “I guess I’m on my own!” Connie sang. “But when you’re done, can you tell me more about this extraterrestrial angle? I’m thinking that there might be something to your theory.”