Paw and Order Read Free

humans the way they really are from the side. Actually, I’d never thought that before and wished I hadn’t now. I mean, what comes next? All I knew was I really liked Bernie’s face from the side; and the front, of course, goes without mentioning. As for what I could see? First, Bernie was real tired, his face pale except for dark patches under his eyes. Second, the eyes themselves were intense, like Bernie was wired about something. I sat right up. When Bernie’s wired, I’m wired.
    He glanced over at me. “Sleeve of care all knitted back up, big guy?” he said, pretty much losing me from the get-go. I checked the sleeves of his shirt, saw nothing unusual. He was wearing the same Hawaiian shirt he’d had on the day before, the one with the drinking fish pattern—all these fish bellied up to a bar, smoking and drinking, not my favorite when it comes to Bernie’s Hawaiian shirts. I looked out instead, saw we were on a freeway with lots of lanes, all those lanes clogged in both directions.
    â€œOur government on the way to work,” Bernie said. “Kinda wish they wouldn’t bother.”
    Uh-oh. What could we do about that? There were so many of them. We climbed a long hill, and on the other side a big city appeared, maybe not as big as the Valley, but the river in this city had water in it and ours didn’t. “Foggy Bottom,” Bernie said. “Where they keep the levers of power. Wouldn’t mind seeing one of those levers someday, let alone getting my hands on it.”
    Kind of a puzzler: what about that time we got stuck in a ditch and Bernie said, “I’ll just use this branch to lever us out.” He had his hands on a lever that day, no doubt about it, and the fact that the branch had snapped in two and we ended up calling in the wrecker and giving him all our cash and the dude was still grumbling didn’t change that. Also, there was no fog I could see now; the sky had turned nice and blue. I made a mental note to drag the very next fallen branch that came along over to Bernie. Then he’d say, “Levers of power, just what I’ve been looking for. Thanks, big guy!” The day was off to a good start. We crossed a bridge over the river, a white-domed building on the far side. “Jefferson Memorial,” Bernie said, and then surprised me by leaning out his window toward the white-domed building and calling, “Come back to life!”
    We’ve had this type of long road trip before, a long road trip where Bernie gets a bit hard to follow after a while. Those road trips always ended well in my memory, just like everything with Bernie. My mind moved on to thoughts of breakfast. But no one ever comes back to life, practically the first thing you learn in a job like mine; although I can think of an exception, which maybe we’ll get to later. But all the other times a new smell starts up right away and no matter what the EMTs do—and I’ve seen them try and try—there’s no going back. Turned out I had a hope after all: I hoped Bernie wouldn’t be too disappointed when whoever he wanted to come back to life did not.
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    We drove into one of those neighborhoods that was all about nice houses with space between them and no one around but landscapers. Bernie patted his pockets, reached under the seat, fumbled with some scraps of paper, squinted at a torn envelope. “Two forty-three? Is that what it says? Can’t read my own damn . . .” He checked the passing houses, slowed down, pulled over in the shade of a big tree. A taxi came by the other way, the driver pulling over on his side of the street and parking in the shade of his own big tree. The driver—a slicked-back hair dude—took a long look at a blue minivan parked farther up our side of the street and then glanced over at us. His face, not happy at the moment, looked like it was made of a few hard