Something to Eat
(Still a little behind, but Jeff's kindly offered to let me extend my stay through the weekend. On what Jeff just said: Ditto.)
*
3. Something to Eat
...the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures...
From Benton, Dizzy and Ahab head east. In Detroit, Dizzy puts Ontario plates on the Buick, as a precaution, but he hasn't had any trouble across eight states and he's not expecting any now.
And there isn't any trouble in Detroit. There isn't any in Toronto. There isn't any till Montréal, and the closed ward at the Macdonald College Institute of Parasitology, where the individual that gave Dizzy the job is nowhere to be found but some other individuals are. When Dizzy and Ahab cross the border again, it's not in the Buick but in a stolen Studebaker, because the Buick has three bulletholes in its driver's-side door, and any customs officer or Vermont state trooper that started asking questions about those would eventually get around to asking questions about the thing in the trunk.
Dizzy feels bad about that. Not as bad as he does about the hole in his side, a match for one of the holes in the Buick, but bad enough.
"Nothing you could have done," says Doc Gardner, the old vet in Middlebury who pulls the bullet from between Dizzy's ribs. Dizzy's known Doc Gardner a long time, since he used to work the dog track down on Staten Island, but even so he never would have told Doc the whole story if he hadn't lost the better part of two pints of blood.
"It was trying to help," says Dizzy.
"Sure it was," Doc says. "Now quit your chattering."
"I guess most of your patients don't talk much." Dizzy smiles.
"You'd be surprised," says Doc, darkly. "But I mean it. You need rest, not talk."
"It couldn't talk," says Dizzy, his eyes closing.
The Doc looks at Ahab, lying on the floor next to the operating table, chin on the floor between his paws. There's blood on the dog's muzzle. Better get some penicillin in both of you, Doc thinks. No telling what you've been biting.
*
On the table, Dizzy dreams of Copan. In the dream the city is alive and bustling, the carved hieroglyphs on the stelae sharp and clear. The thing from the Institute of Parasitology, its voice like a Peruvian flute, is asking Dizzy questions about the hieroglyphs, and Dizzy is answering them. He has one arm around his little boy's shoulders, and the other around the boy's mother's waist, and the three of them are happy, which is how Dizzy knows this is a dream.
*
Dizzy stays with Doc Gardner for the better part of a month. Summer's ending, and he takes Ahab on long walks through red-gold forests, crunching through brittle leaves, hunting squirrels and collecting mushrooms. Doc Gardner's nephew, a biology teacher at the College, sorts out the edible ones, and his wife slices them and fries them in butter, served alongside roast ham, white rolls, Jell-O salad.
One evening Doc finds Dizzy checking the oil in the Studebaker.
"Where are you going?" Doc asks.
Dizzy eyes the viscous fluid clinging to the dipstick and slides it back into place.
"I've still got the papers," he says. "Somebody's got to know something, somewhere. Maybe in Boston."
"New York," says Doc Gardner authoritatively. "The Metropolitan Museum. That's where you need to go."
"Okey," says Dizzy. "I guess I'm going to New York."