Birds of America: Stories by Lorrie Moore

Author:Lorrie Moore [Moore, Lorrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307816887
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-07T08:00:00+00:00

Now it is two and a half years since Annie left, and here Mack is with Quilty, traveling: their plan is to head through Chicago and St. Louis and then south along the Mississippi. They will check into bed-and-breakfasts, tour the historic sights, like spouses. They have decided on this trip now in October in part because Mack is recuperating from a small procedure. He has had a small benign cyst razored from “an intimate place.”

“The bathroom?” asked Quilty that first day after the surgery, and reached to feel Mack’s thick black stitches, then sighed. “What’s the unsexiest thing we can do for the next two weeks?”

“Go on a trip,” Mack suggested.

Quilty hummed contentedly. He found the insides of Mack’s wrists, where the veins were stiff cords, and caressed them with his thumbs. “Married men are always the best,” he said. “They’re so grateful and butch.”

“Give me a break,” said Mack.

The next day, they bought quart bottles of mineral water and packets of saltines, and drove out of town, out the speedway, with the Resurrection Park cemetery on one side and the Sunset Memories Park cemetery on the other—a route the cabbies called “the Bone Zone.” When he’d first arrived in Tapston, Mack drove a cab for a week, and he’d gotten to know the layout of the town fast. “I’m in the Bone Zone,” he used to have to say into the radio mouthpiece. “I’m in the Bone Zone.” But he’d hated that damn phrase and hated waiting at the airport, all the lousy tips and heavy suitcases. And the names of things in Tapston—apartment buildings called Crestview Manor, treeless subdivisions called Arbor Valley, the cemeteries undisguised as Sunset Memories and Resurrection Park—all gave him the creeps. Resurrection Park! Jesus Christ. Every damn Hoosier twisted words right to death.

But cruising out the Bone Zone for a road trip in Quilty’s car jazzed them both. They could once again escape all the unfortunateness of this town and its alarming resting places. “Farewell, you ole stiffs,” Mack said.

“Good-bye, all my clients,” cried Quilty when they passed the county jail. “Good-bye, good-bye!” Then he sank back blissfully in his seat as Mack sped the car toward the interstate, out into farm country, silver-topped silos gleaming like spaceships, the air grassy and thick with hog.

“I’d like to make a reservation for a double room, if possible,” Mack now shouts over the noise of the interstate traffic. He looks and sees Quilty getting out of the car, leaving Guapo, feeling and tapping his way with his cane, toward the entrance to McDonald’s.

“Yes, a double room,” says Mack. He looks over his shoulder, keeping an eye on Quilty. “American Express? Yes.” He fumbles through Quilty’s wallet, reads the number out loud. He turns again and sees Quilty ordering a soda but not finding his wallet, since he’d given it to Mack for the call. Mack sees Quilty tuck his cane under his arm and pat all his pockets, finding nothing there but a red Howe Caverns handker-chief.

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