I turned and went back into the garage. Templeton was all typed out and said he was ready to be a bat. I caught him around the waist and lifted him and hung him upside down from the bicycle rack. He dangled above the filthy stained mattress that was there to catch him if he slipped.
“Hey, kiddo,” I began.
“I heard it all,” he said. “I heard you talking.”
“I don’t want you to worry about me any. If it rains, I’ll get under cover. I’ll be fine. You stay in the house or the garage while I’m gone.”
“Mom wouldn’t let me out anyway.”
“No, and good for her. Your days of flying around as a bat are over. Come to think of it, I might have to drop in on the FAA while I’m in Denver and tell them what you’ve been up to. Let them know you’ve been flapping around at night without a license. See if they won’t clip your wings once and for all.”
“You better not,” he said.
“Try and stop me.”
He hissed like a snake and showed me his plastic fangs. I tousled his hair and told him I’d see him soon.
“Don’t worry about Yolanda and her mother,” he said to me solemnly. “If you don’t come back, my mom will figure out what to do with them. She’ll probably plant them in the garden.”
“Good. I hope she grows something nice out of them. Yolanda would probably enjoy the idea of coming back as a batch of tomatoes.”
“Mom doesn’t like to hug people,” Templeton said, still dangling upside down, his cape hanging almost to the floor. “Will you hug me?”
“You bet,” I said, and I did.
ALL I HAD TO DO was stroll across the street to get a sense for just how hard hiking down to Denver might be. The road was covered in a carpet of steely needles, a half inch deep. One came through the soft rubber sole of my sneaker and jabbed me in the arch of my right foot. I sat down on the curb to tug it out and yelped and jumped back up with three more nails sticking out of my stupid butt.
I climbed the exterior staircase to my crib on the second floor. Below me Andropov’s apartment was full of racket. He had a music player going, blaring operatic Russian music. Toward the rear of the building, there was a TV on, blasting just as loud. I could hear Hugh Grant saying witty things in a sly voice about as loud as God’s. Remember, the electric was out all over Boulder; all his equipment had to be running off batteries.
I had swept and mopped the entire apartment in preparation for Yolanda’s arrival. I had opened a bottle of sandalwood-and-sage oil, and the whole space had been kissed with the sweet fragrance of the high country.
We had only four rooms. The living room flowed into a small kitchen. There were a bedroom and a small office in the rear. The floor was old pine, the long-ago varnish yellowing to a shade of amber. We had hardly any furniture, aside from the bed and a cheap futon below a poster of Eric Church. It didn’t look like much. But we had cuddled on that futon, had watched TV there, and sometimes kissed and held each other. Yolanda had kept her favorite pillow in my apartment, and when I looked in the bedroom, I could see it, long and flat in a faded purple pillowcase, neatly lined up at the top of the bed. At the sight of it, just about all the energy for expeditioning went right out of me, and I started feeling heartbroke all over again.
I lay down for a while and had a good snuggle with her pillow squeezed against me. I could smell her on it. When I closed my eyes, I could almost make myself believe she was there in bed with me, that we had only just taken a pause in one of the long, sleepy conversations we often had first thing in the morning. We could make a happy argument out of just about anything: which of us looked better in a cowboy hat, if it was too late for us to learn to be ninjas, if horses had souls.
But I couldn’t make my lonesome feelbad last. It was too goddamn noisy downstairs. I didn’t know how they could do it—listen to a Russian aria in one room and Hugh Grant in another, all of it turned up to a medium-size roar. They had to be fighting, I thought, trying to drive each other mad. It wouldn’t be the first time the downstairs was full of furious clatter: crashing pans, slamming doors.
I leapt out of bed and stomped on the floor to tell them to shut up, and right away one of them replied by kicking the wall. He kicked so long and so hard it shook the whole house. I stomped even more furiously, to let him know I wasn’t scared of him, and Andropov kicked back harder still, and suddenly I realized I was getting pulled into their childish game and quit.
I threw some water bottles into a backpack, some cheese and bread, my phone charger in case I found a place to use it, a multitool, and some other junk I thought I might want. I kicked off my Top-Siders and yanked on my cowboy boots, black with silver stitching and steel toes. When I went out, I left the place unlocked behind me. Didn’t see the point. The rain had smashed in the windows on the exterior landing. The cops were no doubt too busy to worry about a little looting here and there. If someone came along and wanted my stuff, they could have it.
The noise from Andropov’s shook my fillings and buzzed in my head and was more than any reasonable person ought to have to stand. On a last irritable impulse, I turned on my heel and clomped onto the porch and hammered on the door, meaning to ask him what was the big idea. But no one answered, even though I stood there pounding until my fist was sore. It was loud, but it wasn’t that loud. I was sure they could hear me.
It nettled me, the both of them in there ignoring me. I went to one window, then the other, but both were boarded over on the inside. The glass wasn’t even broken, not there in the shelter of the front porch.
I went back down the front steps and circled to the eastern face of the house. The nails had come in at a slant from the west, so the windows were intact on that side of the building as well. Andropov had nailed planks across the inside of the glass here, too. The first had been completely blocked up, but when I reached the second, there was an uneven space, about an inch wide, between two planks. When I stood on my tiptoes, I could just peer through the gap.
I saw a dark hallway and an open door looking into a dingy bathroom. Plastic tubing curled up out of the tub and into the sink. A glass beaker sat on the toilet, next to a gallon jug of some kind of fluid, what might’ve been water but which seemed more likely to be ammonia or some other clear chemical.
I rose a little higher on my toes, trying to see what was on the floor of the bathroom. My forehead bumped the glass. An instant later Andropov’s eyes appeared in the crack, bulging and bloodshot and wild with fury or terror. The thickets of his eyebrows were black and overgrown. I could see the pores in his bulging nose. He belted something out in raging, sputtering Russian, and pulled a black curtain over the glass.