It would have been impolite to break away while Jack was meeting the love of his life (not to mention bad narrative business), so we didn't. Now, however, let us slip through the thin walls of the hospital tent. Outside is a dry but not unpleasant landscape of red rocks, broom sage, desert flowers that look a bit like sego lilies, stunted pines, and a few barrel cacti. Somewhere not too far distant is the steady cool sigh of a river. The hospital pavilion rustles and flaps as dreamily as the sails of a ship riding down the sweet chute of the trade winds. As we float along the great ruined tent's east side in our effortless and peculiarly pleasant way, we notice a strew of litter. There are more rocks with drawings etched on them, there is a beautifully made copper rose that has been twisted out of shape as if by some great heat, there is a small rag rug that looks as if it has been chopped in two by a meat cleaver. There's other stuff as well, stuff that has resisted any change in its cyclonic passage from one world to the other. We see the blackened husk of a television picture tube lying in a scatter of broken glass, several Duracell AA batteries, a comb, and — perhaps oddest — a pair of white nylon panties with the word Sunday written on one side in demure pink script. There has been a collision of worlds; here, along the east side of the hospital pavilion, is an intermingled detritus that attests to how hard that collision was.
At the end of that littery plume of exhaust — the head of the comet, we might say — sits a man we recognize. We're not used to seeing him in such an ugly brown robe (and he clearly doesn't know how to wear such a garment, because if we look at him from the wrong angle, we can see much more than we want to), or wearing sandals instead of wing tips, or with his hair pulled back into a rough horsetail and secured with a hank of rawhide, but this is undoubtedly Wendell Green. He is muttering to himself. Drool drizzles from the corners of his mouth. He is looking fixedly at an untidy crumple of foolscap in his right hand. He ignores all the more cataclysmic changes that have occurred around him and focuses on just this one. If he can figure out how his Panasonic minicorder turned into a little pile of ancient paper, perhaps he'll move on to the other stuff. Not until then.
Wendell (we'll continue to call him Wendell, shall we, and not worry about any name he might or might not have in this little corner of existence, since he doesn't know it or want to) spies the Duracell AA batteries. He crawls to them, picks them up, and begins trying to stick them into the little pile of foolscap. It doesn't work, of course, but that doesn't keep Wendell from trying. As George Rathbun might say, "Give that boy a flyswatter and he'd try to catch dinner with it."
"Geh," says the Coulee Country's favorite investigative reporter, repeatedly poking the batteries at the foolscap. "Geh . . . in. Geh . . . in! Gah-damnit, geh in th — "
A sound — the approaching jingle of what can only be, God help us, spurs — breaks into Wendell's concentration, and he looks up with wide, bulging eyes. His sanity may not be gone forever, but it's certainly taken the wife and kids and gone to Disney World. Nor is the current vision before his eyes apt to coax it back anytime soon.
Once in our world there was a fine black actor named Woody Strode. (Lily knew him; acted with him, as a matter of fact, in a late-sixties American International stinkeroo called Execution Express.) The man now approaching the place where Wendell Green crouches with his batteries and his handful of foolscap looks remarkably like that actor. He is wearing faded jeans, a blue chambray shirt, a neck scarf, and a heavy revolver on a wide leather gun belt in which four dozen or so shells twinkle. His head is bald, his eyes deep-set. Slung over one shoulder by a strap of intricate design is a guitar. Sitting on the other is what appears to be a parrot. The parrot has two heads.
"No, no," says Wendell in a mildly scolding voice. "Don't. Don't see. Don't see. That." He lowers his head and once more begins trying to cram the batteries into the handful of paper.
The shadow of the newcomer falls over Wendell, who resolutely refuses to look up.
"Howdy, stranger," says the newcomer.
Wendell carries on not looking up.
"My name's Parkus. I'm the law 'round these parts. What's your handle?"
Wendell refuses to respond, unless we can call the low grunts issuing from his drool-slicked mouth a response.
"I asked your name."
"Wen," says our old acquaintance (we can't really call him a friend) without looking up. "Wen. Dell. Gree . . . Green. I . . . I . . . I . . ."
"Take your time," Parkus says (not without sympathy). "I can wait till your branding iron gets hot."
"I . . . news hawk!"
"Oh? That what you are?" Parkus hunkers; Wendell cringes back against the fragile wall of the pavilion. "Well, don't that just beat the bass drum at the front of the parade? Tell you what, I've seen fish hawks, and I've seen red hawks, and I've seen goshawks, but you're my first news hawk."
Wendell looks up, blinking rapidly.
On Parkus's left shoulder, one head of the parrot says: "God is love."
"Go f**k your mother," replies the other head.
"All must seek the river of life," says the first head.
"Suck my tool," says the second.
"We grow toward God," responds the first.
"Piss up a rope," invites the second.
Although both heads speak equably — even in tones of reasonable discourse — Wendell cringes backward even farther, then looks down and furiously resumes his futile work with the batteries and the handful of paper, which is now disappearing into the sweat-grimy tube of his fist.
"Don't mind 'em," Parkus says. "I sure don't. Hardly hear 'em anymore, and that's the truth. Shut up, boys."
The parrot falls silent.
"One head's Sacred, the other's Profane," Parkus says. "I keep 'em around just to remind me that — "
He is interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps, and stands up again in a single lithe and easy movement. Jack and Sophie are approaching, holding hands with the perfect unconsciousness of children on their way to school.
"Speedy!" Jack cries, his face breaking into a grin.