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Chapter Nineteen
Marta was still staring at me and I remembered what Midgerette used to tell me about people-people, how they were all about buying and selling. I sensed she was measuring me and gaging my worth at that moment but I was taken by surprise when she suddenly pulled out a syringe and stabbed me in the chest with it. I was instantly paralyzed. She plugged a vial into the thing and began to slowly extract some blue-green fluid from my body, the whole time fixing me with her eyes.
“Any questions?” she asked. I could not even shake my head.
“Well, I have some,” she said. “And you will answer each one immediately. Tell me the password.”
“Carnage88,” I promptly replied.
“How long did you stir the bunny dough?”
“Three minutes, seventeen seconds.”
“The seventh letter of the last name of the author of the book you read?”
“T.”
“How many books on the bottom shelf?”
“Nineteen.”
“Where was the window?”
“There,” I pointed to a section of cinder block wall.
“What do turtles talk about?”
“I've never met a turtle.”
“Photons in the lamp?”
“Per second? Three times ten to the twentieth more or less.”
“How many can you see?
“All of them.”
“What do you want?”
“Home,” I said, and with that she pulled out the syringe and I could breathe again. She stuck a plug in the capsule and put it back in her jacket pocket. Still holding the needle she pointed it at my face and said,
“You're lying to me, and I don't like it. Stan won't like it either. You'll want to be on Stan's good side, you know.”
“Who is Stan?” I asked, but she'd already turned away and was walking out of the room.
“You'll find out soon enough,” she said, “now come.”
I was glad to be leaving the garage, and snapped several mental images of the hallway outside the door, the way to the exit, the numbers nailed onto the house frame, the motions Marta made to open and close the doors, start the car, pull the center vertical stick to R and push the center horizontal stick down to go backward, then turn the stick to D and step on a metal shoe on the floor to go forward, turning the wheel with her hands to make the car change direction. Then I studied the street to see if I could find things to remember about it.
I sat in the back of the long gray car between June Lee and Josef, while Marta had the whole front to herself. This was not the fancy fast car we'd come from Mother's house in, but a dirtier, smellier thing. Nobody talked for a while, but I could feel the heat of their thoughts, Josef's especially. I was glad at that moment not to have Margaux's powers of foresight, because I'm sure I would have seen bad things in store for that boy, and I was glad not to have Lindley's mind-reading capabilities, because I didn't want to be inside June Lee's little brain. I was sure it was full of herself.
“I want ice cream for dinner,” she declared at one point, “mocha almond fudge,” but no one bothered to reply and she sulked for a bit at not having made as much of an impression as she'd hoped. It was already late in the day but still warm when we got to the beach parking lot. June Lee was first out of the car and led us single-file down a concrete sidewalk built right onto the sand alongside a rock-pile jetty. The ocean was calm there, lapping gently onto the shore with a quiet hushing sound. There were still a lot of people on the beach, all huddled into small groups with umbrellas and loud radios competing with each other for the most pseudo-heartfelt emotion.
June Lee seemed to know exactly where she was going. She stopped at an open spot in the sand about twenty yards from the water and stood there with her arms crossed and her eyes squeezed shut. Marta unfurled the blanket she'd been carrying and smoothed it out, and then June Lee plopped down right in the middle of it, leaving only the edges for the rest of the group. We all remained standing. It was ten minutes until five. There was no sign of Stan as yet, but there were a pair of seagulls not far away, chattering with each other about some plastic bags they'd recently inspected. They were talking about Doritos. The one on the left preferred the less salty kind, while the other one laughed and said there was no such thing.
“I'm not making it up,” the first one said. “It was in a blue bag, not the red one.”
“I've had the blue bag ones,” the other countered. “They're just as salty, but cheesier.”
“Less salty,” the other one insisted.
“Cheesier.”
“Much less salty.”
I found that I had taken several steps towards them without thinking about it, and as I approached they hopped back a few feet. I stopped, and then said out loud,
“Do either of you know a seagull named Midgerette?”
They stared at me, then at each other, then back at me again.
“Did it just say something?” the one on the left kind of talked out the side of its mouth to the other.
“Something about a midget,” the other one nodded.
“Not a midget,” I said, louder, “a seagull. Her name is Midgerette. I don't think she lives around here.”
“Then how would we know her?” the one on the left asked. “We're not exactly globe-trotters. You'd want to ask a pelican for your more international information.”
“She's not that far away,” I said. “At least I don't think so. We drove here.”
“Okay, I'll bite,” said the one on the right. “How long was the drive?”
“Not far, I think, but Marta drove really fast. Ten miles?” I guessed.
“North or south?”
“I don't know,” I said. He flapped his wings.
“You don't know? How can you not know?”
“I'm not good at directions,” I admitted.
“Really,” the gull sighed. “Well then let me ask you this. Did you happen to notice the cars going the other way?”
“Sure,” I nodded.
“And were they closer than you to the ocean or farther away?”
“Farther away,” I said.
“Then you were going south,” he told me. “So, okay. Your seagull friend lives pretty close and to the north. What about her?”
“I want to get her a message. I'm a prisoner,” I said. “I need her help.”
“Oh, I see,” the gull looked thoughtful. The other gull hopped closer to her friend and quietly chattered something into his ear. I barely made out what they were saying. They were talking about me.
“It's not a people-people,” he said. “It only kind of looks like one.”
“Weird,” she said, “maybe it's the thing everyone's been talking about”
“Where can this seagull find you?” he asked me, taking a step towards me. “If we can get a message to her, she'll want to know that.”
“Number thirty seven,” I said, proud that I'd noticed.
“Number thirty-seven what?” he asked, quickly deflating my pride.
“What what?”
“What street? Probably every street in Surf city has a number thirty-seven on it!”
I hadn't thought of that. I searched my brain for any other data I might have recorded, replaying in my mind the drive we'd just taken, and in the images I noticed that there were names on poles at the corners where roads met.
“I saw a sign that said 'Rainbow',” I told him, but that was all I could come up with.
“Candles!” Marta's loud voice in my ear startled me, and the seagulls as well, it seemed, because they took off right away.
“Stan's here,” she told me. She grabbed me by the shoulder and turned me around. There, standing in front of me, was a skinny little man in a flowery shirt, shorts and sandals, with long stringy brown hair, a pencil mustache, and a pair of thick round eyeglasses.
“So you're the thing,” he said, looking me up and down, “although they tell me don't even have one!” He laughed and then, quite unexpectedly, he slugged me right in the face and flat knocked me out.