The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (59 page)

“
Well, guess what, Mr. Parker? You just got yourself a new set of partners.”

“
Oh. Just like Vietnam, huh?”

“
Exactly.”

“
Well, shit. Suppose I don’t got no fucking choice. Uh, lissen, Baby Joe, I gotta take a leak. I’ll be right back.”

“
Oh, okay. I’ll just wait here then, shall I? Fucking dream on, pal. From now on, if you have to go, I’m holding it for you.”

They stood and walked out. The sunlight was dazzling after the cool gloom of the tent. The path to the head took them past the parade circle, where the horses for the next race were showing off their paces. Baby Joe had Monsoon boxed in against the rail, in case he tried to make a dash for the anonymity of the crowd.

Monsoon suddenly ducked under the rail into the path of a prancing horse. Racehorses are not known for their equilibrium of temperament, and when Monsoon waved his hands in its face and screamed, the horse—which, by a delicious coincidence, happened to be called Escape Plan—went Looney Tunes. Escape Plan reared up, dumping the jockey on the seat of his silks, and then leapt the rail and galloped into the panicked crowd. As flying Frenchmen went ass-over-tit trying to dive out of the way, Baby Joe was caught up in the melee and pushed over.

As he was falling, he just managed to catch a glimpse Monsoon flipping him the bird as he ducked under the opposite rail and crawled between the legs of the pressing mob.

***

The laws of possibility will accommodate any circumstance. The laws of probability only dictate how often the laws of possibility get to run the show. It’s only a question of time, and the only defining parameter is if time runs out, which, according to certain astrophysicists, it either won’t or can’t or both. They also talk about parallel universes, where everything that can happen is happening all the time, to someone, or billions of someones, who look exactly like you, and in fact think they are you. Or maybe you think that you are them. So, one day, sooner or later, a Tyrannosaurus rex will be elected president of the United States and accompany itself on a dobro while it sings “The Yellow Rose of Texas” every Saturday afternoon on the White House lawn.

Plus, on the subject of probability and possibility, your average Parisian is pretty much like your average New Yorker insofar as he or she believes that they have seen it all, so nobody should have been really surprised when a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound naked gay piano player came hurtling through the ether like a screaming pink meteor and landed on top of a hot air balloon at a thousand feet, give or take, or when he became entangled in the netting at the top; nor when his weight, counterbalanced by the enormity of one of the passengers, sent the balloon into equilibrium spaz mode, and the whole contraption went into a strangely sedate and balletic death spiral, like a giant whirligig seed spinning down, before gently settling onto the rippled surface of the River Seine and slowly deflating as it drifted downstream toward Clichy-sous-Bois, pursued by a pack of enraged Citroens with their blue lights flashing.

***

Some things you just can’t pay for. The passengers on the
Îles du Salut
, mostly Americans, were expecting a pleasant cruise, a wonderful dinner, a magnificent view of Notre Dame, some twat with an accordion warbling on in a nasal tone about not regretting anything, and a glass of bubbly or three.

They weren’t expecting to see a hot air balloon ditch into the drink right in front of their boat, so that the skipper was compelled to do an emergency portside swerve to the bank, nor to see a fat guy, naked as the day he was born and wailing just as righteously, get twanged off the top of it and into the river. Nor two other guys, one who looked like he’d just walked out of the gate of Bergen-Belsen, and the other who looked like he did stand-in work for the Goodyear Blimp, leap out of the basket just before it got deep-sixed, and start splashing frantically for the shore.

The guys in the photo lab departments at Walmart were going to be working overtime when the folks got back home, because the cameras were going off as if ET had just pulled over to fix a flat tire on his bike. The people were loving it, clapping and cheering and wolf whistling, and down at the stern a Mexican Wave got started.

Only one passenger seemed detached. It wasn’t that he wasn’t enjoying the spectacle as much as everybody else, it was just that Wally was busy being bonce-boggled and bewildered, and his conceivable-occurrence receptor had just blown a gasket.

It turned out his plane had been delayed for twenty-four hours, and Qantas put him up in a hotel, and he’d had the whole livelong day on his hands. So he decided to take a sail down the Seine, see the sights, and suck back a few.

He was standing in the bow when the balloon came down, so he was in the forefront of the action, and the fat guy was only about fifty yards in front of him as he did a double backflip, exposed his centrifugally distended asshole to half the inhabitants of the Left Bank, and swan-dived into the current. It happened pretty fast, but Wally still had his eyes. And he was sure. It was an event horizon of black hole inconceiva-fucking-bility, but that fat pink bastard flying through the Parisian sky was Crispin Capricorn.

As he jumped over the rail, Wally was still harboring the suspicion that the plunge into the chill water would dispel the illusion of what he believed he had just witnessed, but as he clambered up the cobbles onto the grassy bank, and saw Crispin wallowing and gasping like an inept hippo, the only illusion that was dispelled was the illusion that, at his age, there was nothing he could possibly see that could surprise him.

Asia had screamed herself into silence by the time she reached the edge of the basket. She watched in fascinated horror as she saw Crispin and Lord Lundi tumble end-over-end, still clasped together, locked like lovers in a suicide pact. Seconds turned to hours; time congealed and flowed like honey in November. And then they suddenly parted, burst asunder as if they were flung apart by polarity, or torque, or had thrust each other away as if each believed the other to be the weight that dragged him down, or as if each had suddenly determined that they did not care to die in such company. She heard the distant, thin wail from Crispin, but from Lundi there came not a sound. And then she saw a sight more astounding than anything she had ever witnessed.

Another balloon loomed into view, and Crispin smacked onto the top of the canopy, momentarily collapsing it. As it was in a temporary state of flaccidity, Crispin’s legs slid under the netting. His nuts came to rest against a knot in the web. The balloon began to recover from the impact. It re-inflated itself.

Asia started to laugh. She couldn’t help it. She was heartbroken and hysterical and fractured in mind and soul, but God help her she could not help herself. Crispin was trapped, his bollocks entangled in the net, being carried away and down like Ahab affixed to Moby Dick. A fat, pink, screeching, struggling Ahab, enmeshed to a red and green candy-striped inflatable whale by his gonads. Asia howled. She couldn’t help it. It was the funniest thing she had ever seen.

***

Michael Montcalm Robinson looked into his mother’s eyes. They were deep tender pools of hot chocolate that you could plunge into, and they would envelop you in their viscous, sweet warmth and keep you safe forever. His father walked into the room and patted him on the head. He could see the veins standing out on his father’s muscles, and he heard the deep reassuring rumble of his voice. He felt the calloused palms on his cheek and knew that nothing could hurt him.

Michael went outside to play ball and the kid tossed the ball toward him and it came
so slowly
as if he had all the time in the world, and he swung his bat in a lazy arc, and he heard the satisfying thwack as the hickory smacked the leather and the ball sailed out of sight and the crowd went wild and the girl in the red dress with the pigtails and the lollipop stood up and jumped up and down and shouted his name, and he saw her big brown eyes gazing at him, and even though he was only twelve he knew what it meant, and later her panties smelled of urine and detergent as he pulled them off and he did not know what to do but she did, and she took his rigidness in her hand and guided him inside and kissed him and her breath smelled of bubblegum and cigarettes, and he knew then that his life had changed forever.

And when he graduated his papa bought him a Chevrolet convertible, and even though it was secondhand and old he thought it was the best car that ever there was, and he took his girlfriend riding, and he played music by James Brown and the Detroit Emeralds and the Pointer Sisters really loud, and all the other kids thought he was so cool, and all the other kids’ girlfriends wished that they could be his girlfriend.

And then he got a job at a dealership in Key Largo and he sold so many cars that after six months they gave him his own gig in Key West, and he made a shitload of money and bought a condo on the beach, and when his company booked a cruise ship for two weeks as an incentive for the top men, he was on the team, and that’s where he met his wife.

She was tall and black and so beautiful that birds fell dead from the trees when she walked past and young men spontaneously ejaculated into their Calvin Kleins and Tom Cruise had once asked her to marry him but she told Tom Cruise to fuck off.

On his honeymoon Michael took his wife to Bermuda and they ate ceviche from seashells and drank daiquiris from coconuts shells and they made love on a pink beach at sunrise as white birds flew past, and he knew in that moment that she was pregnant and that it was a boy and he would also be called Michael, and he would go to Harvard and one day would win a Grammy, and at his acceptance speech he would say that he owed it all to his father, and Michael would stand up and the cameras would be on him and all the people would be clapping and cheering and tears of joy and pride would drip down onto his white tuxedo and…

But that was all the dreaming that Michael Montcalm Robinson had time for, and if he wanted his life to flash before his eyes for a bit longer he should have gotten himself thrown out of a higher balloon, because the rate of acceleration of a falling body is 32 feet per second squared, and the fall only took eight seconds. In any case, it was not his life that was flashing before him, but the one that he wished he would have had, because the one that he’d really had was so desolate and unfair that it was not even worth eight seconds to think about it, but at least when Michael Montcalm Robinson impacted the Parisian pavement and was splattered so far and wide that it took the Parisian police two days to scrape him together and a team of divers had to dredge the Seine to find his left leg, for one split second in all eternity, he was a happy and contented man.

***

The standard expressions, in such cases are: “Oh my God, I didn’t think we were going to make it;” “Thank you, Jesus, thank you, Lord;” “I swear I will never get into another fucking balloon as long as I live;” “It’s a miracle;” etcetera etcetera.

Nonstandard expressions include: “I’m gonna kill that fat motherfucker;” “I woulda been fuckin’ famous;” “That slimebag cost me my place in history;” “Where did that fat crud go?” Etcetera etcetera.

Low Roll and Hard D struggled up the cobbled embankment and onto the grass. A crowd had gathered. In the river, Crispin was being lifted into a rowing boat. Unbelievably, he was singing.

Even a layman could see that he had lost his marbles, but a trained psychiatrist would have quickly realized that he was away with the fairies in the land of endless delight, where the rivers ran with Chardonnay and piano keys were made of sugar candy and caramel, and nymphs tripped the light fandango over silk carpets with roses behind their ears and solar-powered vibrators up their asses. And he wasn’t coming back anytime soon.

As the boat pulled up to the bank, an ambulance screamed to a halt. The driver leapt out and the paramedic did likewise. Actually, “leapt out” was too dramatic a description—ambled out was what they did. They were not only insouciant; they were
laissez faire
,
savoir-faire
, and fucking Vanity Fair. Big fucking deal—another balloon-crash-naked-fat-guy deal, huh? And then? Twenty-odd years as a Parisian paramedic and it took a lot more than plummeting pork chops to surprise you.

They were surprised, however, when, after they had stretchered Crispin into the back of the ambulance and were closing the doors, an immense fat guy loomed up behind them and banged their heads together, leaving them sleeping among
les étoiles
, while a skinny guy jumped into the driver’s seat and hit the ignition.