Made in China Chapter 26

           “Take off that ridiculous costume.” I said politely. Chloe smiled and slowly began to throw Charlie out the window, piece by piece—hat, glasses, overalls. When she was finally done she was clearly Chloe again. She wore only a dirty-white t-shirt and a pair of black work boots. I didn’t look closely enough to notice the presence or absence of underwear but I breathed through my nose in a way I had never before. She used a napkin and a bottle of water from one of my mother’s care packs in the backseat to clean her face. She was as beautiful as that night before the race began, with Sinatra and the bottle of wine from that glorious year that was 1995.

            By coincidence, Marty Martian was born in 1995.

            Bobby Bubonic graduated high school in 1995.

            It was six evening perpetually in Cali. They don’t call it California anymore because that isn’t cool and a generation raised on slang knew no better even if they cared to. Chloe took off her t-shirt but left her black boots on. She said she never felt so free besides for the night she was with me, when I plugged into her electrical outlet for a present lack of a better metaphor. I offered to stop at a motel or to go somewhere else but she said I needed to finish the race. I wanted to marry her. You have come so far, she said. Something told me I should not listen to her... I should have torn the eyeball camera from the dash and turned off onto a northern route and driven until we reached Canada, or at least Oregon. Things are relatively peaceful there, they say. I have heard a person can make a living up in those parts if he is willing to put in the work, logging, lumbering. What they call, beaver work.

            The beaver is the new national symbol of Merica. There are several unauthorized Merican flags with the beaver on them. “Fuck the Bald Eagle,” someone said in a stinging Op/Ed piece. “They don’t even exist anymore and beavers are plentiful and goddamn adorable.”

            We listened to the radio with the cool Cali air flowing through the window. I was doing a cautious 110 mph. The announcer was repeating the miraculous turn of events in the race in particular as far as my last twenty four hours went. I was in sixth place but barring a miracle I would finish in sixth.

            ....

            God and the Devil were in human form having drinks in an old bar in Vermont called The Grasshopper. He Devil was an attractive woman named Francesca, slender with brunette hair and dressed as slutty as one might expect the Devil to dress if it was to occupy a woman’s body. She had eyes like melted chocolate, cream skin and heart-shaped red lips. She was wickedly eyeing a man across the bar and flirting with everyone, teasing them cruelly the way only a beautiful woman can tease weak-willed men. God was an older man, presumably her father who was handsome, rather dapper in a camel-colored suit coat, a blue shirt, a maroon tie, and gray hair parted neatly, smelling of Bay Rum aftershave lotion and peppermint breath mints. He had periwinkle-colored eyes and a warm smile. She drank vodka and he had dry gin. They sat at a bar table under a mounted submarine light, an oil painting of a wicked black-tailed mermaid emerging from a stormy ocean, and a hand-painted sign that said 1500 miles to Cork with an arrow pointing that way.

            At the bar ravenous men were huddled together watching the race on the edge of their seats. It was soon to be over and some of them lost everything gambling, and some of them still had money to win. They were cheering for me, mostly. Chloe’s secret was out and I again was certainly everyone’s favorite, especially since I had a beautiful naked woman co-pilot. The old man said to his daughter, “I told you Francesca that Blatz had it in him.”

            “He is still sixth, Daddy,” she said contemptuously.

            “My dear, you have no faith.”

Francesca growled. “He should be dead already. You interrupted. The Priest?!”

“Only when you decided to pay him a visit did I decide to do the same. That was the deal.”

“Delicate,” she snapped.

The old man looked around at the dopes at the bar as though they were beautiful children, the biased way a mother looks at her own. “He is giving them hope...”

“No!” she said defiantly. “There is nothing redeemable on this Earth! Even if he wins he will rape her, or shoot her with that love gun of his. Her beauty will corrupt him, Father.” Men ogled her from all directions. They smiled sensing her falling out with her daddy.

“We aren’t all so terrible.”

“Seven deadly sins, Father.”

“My girl you have a lot to learn. He is a hero. And it doesn’t appear he is giving up.”

“We will see old man.” Francesca disappeared with a well-dressed young investment banker who would never be seen again. Her father finished his drink and reached up and ran his hand across the mermaid painting making it much more pleasant and beautiful. Clairvoyance 101...

....

            Chloe was beautiful naked in the passenger seat. The sky was blood red and smoke from fires that raged in the distance rolled with the wind. Debris and ash was blown and looked like black snowflakes. Chloe leaned forward and marveled at the beauty of it but all I saw was death. All that seemed to remain of Hollywood was part of the famous Hollywood sign—just the WOOD. HOLLY was long gone. The radio frizzed in and out as we reached the address in Malibu. I had my love gun tucked in my waist band and I figured that if Zula Zane wasn’t taken with me I would simply zap her and take her away. What to do with Chloe...certainly she would understand and perhaps the three of us could live happily ever after like Hansel and Gretel and Gretel. One of the drivers ahead of me had recently driven off the road. I could see the guard rail split wide-open and there was black smoke billowing from the depths below. The radio confirmed it and I was now officially in fifth. The road was abandoned. I had no idea about the other four drivers but I kept going. I owed it to Zula not to give up. The race may well be over but I was intent on going to the address and finding out.

The GPS, which I programmed to sound like an Irish woman, guided us there. “In 1.4 miles turn left on Ridgeview Drive Northeast.” It was as soon as I made this turn that I saw three of the other cars. They were riddled with bullets and immobilized. One was overturned and another was on fire. No sign of the drivers at first but as I weaved through the wreckage doing my utmost to maintain speed, I saw blood on the driver’s side window of the first car and bullet holes through the glass. The bright side (no tribute to the detestable Billy Brightside I assure you) was that I clearly was in second place; the downside was for how long? Was this all a dead end?  The large luxurious house sat high on the cliff up a long-twisted drive adorned by groomed pine trees that looked too elegant to be simply pine trees. It was truly a remarkable house and it lay just before us. “I should stop!” I said to Chloe. “We should turn back.”

“No!” she insisted. “Don’t stop. Zula is all you ever wanted, Blatz. I think stopping is what they tried to do. Go! Go! Go!” I kept my foot on the gas as we approached another few heaps of mutilated metal and wreckage. I spun out in the drive and kicked up gravel trying to maintain my grip on the wheel. I shifted to third and then I heard the fateful rattling of machine guns and the patter of bullets across Ruby’s starboard side. But Ruby made it through and we got to the top of the drive and to the house in one piece. The garage door opened automatically as we approached. The last MIC car was in the garage but the driver was still inside. He apparently had been shot and somehow managed to at least drive his car up the rest of the way dying where he parked. Steam rolled from his radiator and I could see clearly that he had crashed into the back wall.

“Looks like I am in first!” I smiled. I stopped in front and looked at Chloe and noticed that she was bleeding from her mouth and slouched over in her seat. I shut the engine off and she tried desperately to reach for the keys as though to tell me to leave it on. I held her in my arms for a long while before she pushed me away so she could talk. I’ve never felt such a loss. The wounds were severe and there would be no fixing her. Tears overcame me for the first time since I can remember and the pain of my heartache I cursed.

“No, no, no,” she smiled. “No tears from the American hero. We knew it, Blatz. We knew it. Whether we had been born in this time or another, we knew it. In this insane world, insanely we knew it.” Before she could define “it,” she gasped softly and passed. But I knew what it was. “It” was that which science cannot substitute or plagues could never kill. It was truth. It was love. The two are synonymous while everything else is a sham, put on like a terrible game show, subject to capriciousness, research and development, substitution, and gone with the wind, fleeting, on and on. It was as though Chloe drifted to sleep, never mind the bullets that had ripped through her insides; she showed no sign of being in pain. Everyone should be so brave in the cold cradle of death.

Ho hum.

I kept my love gun in my waistband and pulled my two colt dragoons and entered the luxurious house that quickly revealed itself to be a fantastic labyrinth of modern art and design. There were a lot of mirrors and sculptures that looked like distorted people and body parts designed by drug addicts and lunatics with blow torches and a ton of scrap metal. The lights were dimmed and there was no sound but there was an ear-piercing silence that made me uneasy, my palms sweat and the butts of my pistols felt like they were slipping out of my hands the harder I squeezed them. I left Chloe peacefully in the passenger seat for lack of a better place to put her. I could think of no place she would rather be.