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She finished her eggs and noticed that Walter, perched on a stool that had disappeared beneath him, was leafing very slowly, very seriously, through a coffee-table book on the art of PINOCCHIO. He was humming softly to himself, a tune she recognized after a second – "Hi-diddle-de-dee, an actor's life for me." She propped her elbows on the counter, lit a cigarette, and smoked through a faint smile. For a minute it seemed the most normal thing in the world, to be sitting here at the IHOP, two o'clock in the morning, with a long-haired drifter and a giant black Disney enthusiast, considering a proposal for your own abduction. She tapped ash into her coffee saucer and turned to Billy.
"And what makes you think you're the best possible applicants for this position?" she asked. "Do you have references? What would you say are your three greatest strengths as a kidnapper?"
He stared at her very intently. His eyes were blue, with shifting shadows inside, like light at the bottom of a swimming pool.She wanted to ask him about the significance of the thorn tattoos, but figured it was none of her business. "Just keep an open mind," he said. "It's very simple. It's so simple that absolutely nothing can even possibly go wrong. We fake a kidnapping, we send a ransom note, we collect the money."
"The money?" she laughed. "From who? I hate to rain on your parade, but there's no one in the continental United States who would pay to get me back. There's no one in the continental United States, actually, who'd even notice I'd been kidnapped, which let me tell you is a really pleasant thought to consider." The roof of her mouth itched and she wished she had some snow, some good old snow, just a taste.
"Disney will," Billy said. He had a narrow angular shape to his face, like a wedge, and a way of leaning a little bit forward all the time, as if he was always in the middle of squeezing through a tight place. "They don't give a shit about you now, I know. But once the word gets out that Snow White has been kidnapped do you know what kind of media coverage that will get? What's Disney going to do then, when every afternoon Oprah's eyes are tearing up because you're still missing? Picture it: Day 17 – the Snow White Crisis. They'll pay a million dollars. Two million. That's ashtray change for a company like that. And you'll be famous Suzanne Bailey. Ten minutes after it's all over you'll be curled up on a sofa across from Katie Couric, telling the tale of how you survived your terrifying ordeal."
"In Florida, you see, Walt learned from his mistakes and anticipated urban development," Walter said. He reached across Billy and touched her wrist. "He bought up forty square miles of virgin orange grove. At Walt Disney World in Florida, you can avoid the real world altogether."
Billy snorted, but Suzanne had to admit that she wasn't particularly pro-reality herself. There was something to be said for clean streets and plenty of toilet paper and no cockroaches sifting through the Grape Nuts and no neighbors above who, seriously, once dragged a goat up the stairs for some sort of Santeria thing. Once in a while, riding in the Electrical Parade, she'd stare so hard at some girl's smiling face that she'd fall into it; she'd daydream herself down into a life that seemed so happy (she wasn't dumb enough to think it actually was) she'd stop pelting the crowd with posies.
"Forget it," she told Billy. "You've got to be kidding. Do I look that stupid and pathetic that I'd go for something like that? Tell me, OK, because if I do? I might as well kill myself right now."
"We'll be the ones who rescue you," he said. "Picture this. An old abandoned warehouse. A couple of guys driving along and a flat tire, or a belt goes flapping, and then through the flap of the fan belt they hear a muffled cry for help."
"Forget it," she said.
"We'll make the place look like some real sickos been living there. Empty water jugs, cookie wrappers, duct tape with your blonde hairs stuck to it. Our two heroes creep inside and there she is, Suzanne Bailey. The nation rejoices."
"You're whacked," she said. She watched the line cook scrap grease off the grill with a plastic spatula. "No way. Don't you think they're going to know it's a scam?"
"How?" he demanded. Those spooky blue eyes – it was a good thing, she supposed, her head wasn't made of flammable materials. "Who's going to call Snow White a liar, after her ordeal, this sweet weepy-eyed Disney Channel blonde girl? It's foolproof."
"No," she said. "Forget it."
No.
No.
And then, finally:
"OK."
She sighed a smoky sigh that could have been the last long sigh on earth, winding out to the outer eternal reaches of the universe. OK.
"Hey, Suzanne," Billy said, "I know it's a crazy thing I'm asking you to do, but —"
"I've done crazier," she said with a shrug, which shut him up, a miracle. "Believe it or not."
Believe it or not. The fact of that matter made her want to giggle and cry at the same time, so she just lit another cigarette and watched the shreds of tobacco redden, crumble.
"MONSTERS, INC.," Walter said, out of the blue, shaking his head and chuckling again, "was animated by people with computers."
* * * * *
She lay with her head tilted back, so that when she opened her eyes she stared up at the torn cloth ceiling and the tuft of stripped wires where the overhead light should have been. She'd always meant to get it fixed. Billy was driving, just his fingertips on the wheel because the plastic was so hot; Walter was in the backseat, humming "Whistle While You Work" and flipping through the pages of his PINOCCHIO book. Every time he shifted on his monster haunches she thought they'd had a blow-out.
She'd been dozing. The sun had finally rolled over the horizon behind them, like an egg off a table, but it was still hot. A hundred and twenty degrees, Billy said, and he was probably exaggerating only a little. She thought her nostrils were going to melt every time she tried to inhale.
"I hate the fucking desert," she said. The heat made the macadam squiggle. "Hate it, hate it, hate it."
Billy concentrated on the road ahead, didn't answer. He was convinced the desert was the place to go. He'd already figured out a place to hole up – the abandoned silver mines high in the hills above the Colorado River, just across the border into Arizona. He'd been there years ago, though she wasn't exactly clear why. It was critical they get off the beaten track, he said, and those old, high-desert silver mines were as far off the beaten track as you could get.
"It'll be like hiding on the moon," he'd said. "The whole world could be looking for you, the whole world could be holding hands and looking for you, and they'd never find you out here."
She counted the cigar-stub stumps of organ-pipe cactus, watched the telephone lines, barbed with desert birds, go spinning past. Billy was prepared – she'd give him that much. He had details worked out that she wouldn't have thought of in a million years. The photos, for example; he was going to take pictures of her to go with the ransom note, once they got to the hideout. He was high if he really thought the scam was foolproof, but there was a chance they could pull it off. Stranger shit had happened. When the police questioned her afterwards? She'd be the fucking ice queen; she wouldn't give an inch. "Three Mexicans...bound and gagged...frightened for her life." Et cetera. She'd stick to her story and they could hammer at her morning and night, for all the good it would do them.
She reached over and touched one of Billy's tattoos, traced the curve of thorns with the tip of her finger. "Are they religious?" she asked him.
He glanced at her, blinked. "What?"
"Are they supposed to be religious?" She was thinking of the crucifix her grandmother had hung on the wall above her bed, the summer Suzanne had stayed there, the foot-long Jesus carved from dark, oily wood, the crown of thorns. He was one ripped Jesus, she remembered, all knotted muscles and tendons and just the skimpiest scrap of loin cloth, which she'd actually peeked under once.
Billy thought about the question. "Yeah," he said finally.
"Hey," she said. "How did you and Mr. Disney back there end up together?"
Billy was staring hard at the road again, looking for the turn-off. "Shit," he said. "Don't ask."
Greasewood spurs, a few clumps of prickly pear, dry shallow washes scored east to west across the desert floor. Along the highway shoulder there were occasional smears of blood, pin-feathers, single scattered reptile scales that caught the light and blinked like sequins.
Maybe it was the dusk, the soft toasted orange of it, or maybe it was the half a lude Billy had scored for her back at a gas station in Twenty-Nine Palms, to show his good faith, but for the moment she felt rosy as hell; she was so hopeful her heart felt pinched, like a green olive squeezed until out comes shooting an exclamation-point pimento. This was the absolute last time, she promised herself, she'd do something this nutty.
They were off the state highway now and onto a dirt road that branched out from it. After a few minutes Billy turned off and angled across the desert floor.
"I thought we were going to cross the river first," she said.
He checked the gas gauge, gave it a thump with his knuckle. She turned to watch their dust, drifting off toward the empty road, and noticed that Walter, in the backseat, was weeping. Very quietly, with just the slightest pucker of his lips, the slightest shiver to his shoulders. There was a spot of wet shine on each dark cheek.
Billy glanced into the rear-view mirror. "Shut up," he told Walter softly. "Shut up, goddamnit."
Suzanne turned back around, stretched our her legs and kicked her feet up onto the dashboard. "What's wrong with HIM?" she asked Billy.
He flipped on the headlights, gave her a wink.
"Almost there," he said.
The End.
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