Page 7

7

Baltimore No More

Having provided needed atmosphere and a sense of threat when the story required those things, the storm with its fierce display of lightning quickly passed, and the jet carrying Bobby the Sham flew into good weather once more. None of the tattooed passengers wearing T-shirts with satanic images tried to hijack the airliner. However, when they opened their snacks, those with teeth filed to points and with tongues surgically split proved to be noisy eaters.

When he deplaned in Indianapolis, obtained a rental car with the voice of an officious woman issuing insistent directions from the navigation system, and set out across state lines for distant Maple Grove, the deep sea of his imagination floated disastrous possibilities to him for consideration. He let them wash through him without effect and instead focused on the name Wayne Louis Hornfly, which had crackled into his mind with the lightning and thunder high above western Pennsylvania.

In the Indianapolis airport, waiting for his luggage to appear on the carousel, he had googled the name without success. If Wayne Louis Hornfly still walked the Earth—or had ever existed—the man lived far off the grid, utterly without contacts or accomplishments. He was less than a ghost; he was as immaterial as the ghost of a man who had never been born.

Nevertheless, during the drive to Maple Grove, the name haunted Robert Shamrock. He could imagine a shadowy form hulking in the mist of the past, formidable though without detail, and he could almost see a face. Almost ... almost ... But almost having money in your pocket doesn’t buy beans for dinner.

Even those portions of the Middle West that are largely flat, which is to say most of it, can provide beautiful vistas to enchant a driver. Broad, deep plains have a majesty about them, seem to roll on forever, reminding the soul of the eternity that is its destiny, stippled with trees standing in silhouette like symbols of broken hopes. Stark, discrete structures far out on the horizon—a barn with a big silo, an isolate church—when detached from other human purposes, project a minimalist beauty both elegant and intolerably sad. However, sadness can be an appropriate and satisfying emotion when you’re journeying to see a friend in a coma, when you’re going home but really can’t because it’s not home anymore.

If that sadness was inescapable—and it was—it did not crowd other emotions and considerations out of Bobby’s heart. Like fear and Wayne Louis Hornfly.

In addition to immense plains of wild grass, there were crops thriving across thousand-acre plots. In a lush cornfield, a tall, shadowy figure moved through the rows with an intensity and purpose that had nothing to do with corn. A few miles later, Bobby passed a breeze-riffled field of wheat where in the distance another tall, shadowy presence carried an enormous scythe as if he farmed by the methods of an earlier century, though the man paid no attention to the grain and seemed eager to get some place where he intended to harvest a more exciting crop. Bobby passed a lonely dirt road that led nowhere apparent, yet a dark figure with a sack slung over one shoulder was walking toward the horizon with grim purpose.

None of those presences was Wayne Louis Hornfly. Bobby the Sham knew perfectly well that none was Hornfly. He also knew it was not likely such a person could exist yet escape detection by the all-knowing Google search engine. Nevertheless, with each sighting of a tall and shadowy figure, he flexed his novelistic imagination with greater effort, striving to imagine how they could all be Wayne Louis Hornfly. Often a ludicrous and impossible story premise that seemed as dead as a cluster of rotten tulip bulbs could suddenly put forth green shoots and then stems and then glorious flowers, becoming a shining novel of a hundred thousand or even two hundred thousand words.

Twenty miles from Maple Grove, as he passed a wind farm of two-hundred-foot-tall towers, a great flock of birds winged with foolish confidence where their kind had flown for millennia. The massive whirling blades introduced the concept of mortality to their small brains, reducing 90 percent of them to a shower of feathers, blood, chopped flesh, and bone bits.

That horrific sight crossed two wires in Bobby’s head. Light came into his darkness, and he knew . He didn’t know who Wayne Louis Hornfly was or what the man looked like or where he could be found. The light was dim, just bright enough to assure him there had been such a person and that the purpose Hornfly embraced, the passion that motivated the man, was cruel and mindless slaughter.

The fine hairs stood up on the nape of Bobby’s neck, and an icy chill descended his spine with the swiftness of a centipede, and his heart skipped a beat before abruptly racing, and his breath caught in his throat, and his testicles tried to retract. It was a full-body fear reaction straight out of a 1930s pulp magazine, except community standards in those days would not have included crawling testicles in his list of symptoms.

His first impulse was to turn the car around, head back to the airport in Indianapolis, fly to California, take a flight from there to Tokyo, and then decide on a destination that was comfortably far away from Maple Grove. If he were to make a list of what he thought were his best qualities, heroism would not have been in the top ten.

No, no, no. He couldn’t run out on his amigos. They were the best friends he’d ever had. They had been through too much together to abandon one another, even if they couldn’t entirely remember what it was they had been through.

Anyway, by the time Bobby got to Maple Grove, maybe Ernie would have come out of his coma. Once reunited in their hometown, maybe the four of them would remember everything, fill the gaps in their memories. Maybe what had been erased from their minds would turn out to have been nothing of grave consequence. Maybe they would go to Adorno’s Pizzeria this evening just like they did so often when they were kids, if Adorno’s was still in business. This time they could have beer or wine instead of Cokes. They could have a lot of laughs, talk about old times, all of them successful now, none of them a nerd any longer. It could happen. You could write your life as you would a work of upbeat fiction, shape your future. It happened. It really did. Yeah, well, it could never happen as neatly as that, but he drove on to Maple Grove anyhow, arriving at the hospital at 4:22, hoping not to be cruelly slaughtered.