The Road Narrows As You Go (2 page)

Ah, so it
does
exist, said one Disney man to another, his palm out. You owe me five bucks.

Running the full length of the manor was the reason for their bet: the longtable, a forty-two-foot-long drawing table juryrigged from scrap wood that started in the breakfast nook in the kitchen and ended at the bay window in Hick's master bedroom. Fifty cartoonists could pack the longtable with room to spare. All kinds of drawing supplies and tools cluttered the surface. The hardwood floor underneath was scuffed bonewhite and stained with ink splatter. If you had to get around to the other side of it there were hinged pieces at intervals that lifted.

Here's where he sat. Biz brought Disney's men towards the window. In that canewood chair, overlooking the whole city. Damn what a view. You can't see anything now for the fog but just imagine. And behold all his drawings, shelf after shelf of portfolio stuffed to the max. What you see is what you get. That blue exercise mat was his only bed. Poor pitiable saint. Never barely went out. Everybody came to him. I loved him like a diamond engagement ring. I guess you know Hick was just about to start work on a Christmas special when he died? There's storyboards lying around to gaze at and wonder.

We'd like to see
those
, said Disney's men, sniffing around.

We eyed that laundry hamper and its telltale reek.

Hick told me his Christmas special was going to be bigger than
acid
—going to put Peter Pan up there with Santa and Jesus, Biz Aziz told them angrily as if she was lashing out at these strangers for somehow causing the death of her friend, as if somehow Disney caused his death.—He even bought a stop-motion camera rig. He was going to get
us
, everyone at the longtable to help him. Instead of you all at Disney's studio mucking … —Hick was going to make his Christmas special
right here
at home. Well, here's
his
spot. He always got this chair by the window because check it out, this is also his bedroom. It's too foggy to see right now but you can imagine the view. Like some coffee?

Disney's men said they would. As they riffled through the sheaves of paper, Biz went to the kitchen. Busying themselves as such in Hick's bedroom, no one paid too close attention to Disney's men, for it had been a long and solemn night of boozing and everyone was at rest. It was only eight or nine in the morning.

At some point in their digging around one of the men came out holding a stack of Crowley and
Creepy
comics he seemed highly suspicious of and asked us whose collection of the devil's work was
this
. We decided on a lark to claim the offending books were ours, ha! He dropped the whole stack that instant. If they weren't Hick's, he was not required to touch them, he explained. Shouldn't read stuff like this, he told us, rots your brain, turns you into a puppet, that's all these words are doing to ya. Do you want to be the devil's puppets, is that it?

Something like that, we said.

Thanks for the coffee, Disney's men said an hour later as they came out of the master bedroom after packing the contents of Hick's life and livelihood into wood boxes, cardboard boxes, and plastic crates. Don't worry about us. We have a dolly in the van …

Say now where you going with all of Hick's stuff? Biz got up once
more from her chair at the longtable where she'd been drawing, and with a joint smoking in her hand, she went over and blocked the men from getting out the door. Put that shit down right now. You can't take that. What are you, thieves? Come in here out of trust and goodwill, man's not even in the ground
…

At that moment, the other roommate walked in. Wendy Ashbubble at last.

Excuse me, pardon me, she said shyly, trying to budge past. Biz, you're in my way.

Wendy Ashbubble, you are home so late it is morning, said Biz. Guess what you just stepped into. A full-on
tragedy
.

Wendy's blouse was on inside out—how could she not notice? Her hair was a flustered mess she tried to contain within a headband on top of her pale, peanut-shaped head with those big adorably squirrellike cheeks and twinkling sarcastic eyes. We fell in love with her that instant, all four of us. Was it that she stood with a rolled shoulder slouch as if about to go straight into drawing, or that instead of using a finger to lift up her comically big eyeglasses when they slid down her nose she twitched like one of the rodents she drew? We fell for her, seeing her look so frazzled and dissociated from our scene, glossy and pale from lack of sleep, lost in her own experience. That totally goggle-eyed look on her face was that of a girl badly in need of some privacy but who knew she was not going to get it.

I need to shower— Hey, what's— Why are all these … Oh my god, look at all these
cartoonists
… is that … Chester Gould? she whispered.

You got to listen to me, carefully, okay, Wendy? Listen. These are Disney's men, okay?
Walt
Disney. The hospital called. Hick, he
died
yesterday. Hick is dead.

Dead? No. What? No. No. Not possible. Wendy turned a shade of green. Oh no. She fell to her knees, then all the muscles in her face spasmed and her neck and face broke out in shiny hives. I saw him yesterday. No,
this can't be. I'm not prepared.
That's
why you're all here. I didn't know. I was out. I was with my editor, I was with— Oh.

It looked for a moment as though Wendy was about to vomit, so Disney's men sensed an opportunity to budge their way past her kneeling in the doorway. We're just doing the job that Mr. Disney asked of us.

Put those boxes down, Wendy said. Her colour returned. That sparkle in her eye. Let me give you my perspective. Look, just
look
at how many guests are here and not one of them would dare remove a single dirty sock from this premises without Hick's personal permission, that's how much he was loved, as you can see. People come here to give, not take. Here you submit, you don't abscond. The only stealing going on around here is of ideas, said Wendy.

Isn't that right, said Biz.

These boxes are filled with property of Disney, said one of the men. It's in his contract.

Are you in his contract, too? Wendy said and scratched a hive. How are we supposed to trust you? You could be faking the whole spiel.

You stand away from his work, sweethearts, Biz Aziz told them with a fist held out. Or I'll fuckin'
lay you out cold
, believe me.

Understand how very hard this is for us personally, said the slimmest of Disney's men, with the biggest head, though, like a breadloaf. We are just crushed to bits by this news. Disney owns
Pan.
And so you know, Disney can get pretty darn ugly legally when it comes to stuff like his property.

Biz then bent over, grabbed up and overhanded a sharp bangle of costume jewellery and hit one of Disney's men upside the eyebrow. Deep enough to draw blood. Come back with a lawyer, judge, and jury next time, you squares, she barked.

Disney's men had had enough. Biz ducked and dodged their fists, whooping and roundhousing in return. Wendy took a bop to the nose. We joined in with at least two dozen local cartoonists to overwhelm Disney's
men and force them to let go of the boxes in their hands. The melee lasted all of ten seconds. Wendy, screaming Graverobber! Graverobber!, was in a tug-of-war over a portfolio with one of the men from Disney. Suddenly her grip gave out, she fell hard on her ass, and Disney's man ran out the door with the portfolio.

The other three men saw their chance and grabbed whatever they could while a hundred or more cartoonists chased them down the block to their white Cinderella van, but not fast enough to stop them. Disney's men sped off down the hill as we threw kitchen utensils and curses.

As soon as Hick pressed ink to paper—in fact whatever he touched on duty—that was Disney's property. This seemed strange to us, that someone so well off could be in our situation, i.e., own nothing.

Wendy said, I need to call the hospital and we need to collect him. His body. We need a wicker basket. A big wicker basket.

Where were you all night? Biz asked her.

I'll tell you the story, she said and stared at us. Who are these ones?

We introduced ourselves thus:

Twyla Noon. Twenty-one years old. Insomniac lapsed Catholic with a fast hand, fast memory. Oreo eater. Boy chaser. Photogenic from the left side. Rather lissome for someone with such a runny nose. Previous experience: obsession with Ivan Bilibin and Kay Nielsen, high school expulsion, Freudian doodles, a dream diary maintained since age nine.

Mark Bread. Smoker's cough. Twenty years. Incomprehensible mutterer of Looney Tunes phrases or psychologically adept poet of the nonce. Hotdog aficionado. Habitual
Psilocybe
ingestor. Drawing from that place in the mind occupied by more epithets and rabble than morality. Previous experience: house painting, caricatures of teachers, high school expulsion.

Patrick Poedouce. Sexual caterer. People pleaser. Single-minded about many things at the expense of a lot more. Jealous of everyone. Borrower who did not return or repay. Annually twenty-two years old. Snappy dresser
(pinched). Bridge burner (exes
and
friends). Boston-born (Florence, AZ, juvie-raised). Previous experience: a stack of letters full of advice from Bill Blackbeard, a huge collection of his own juvenilia, correspondence art school dropout, total certainty in his own greatness.

Rachael Wertmüller. Aka Aluminum Uvula. Orphan. Twenty-four. Self-loathing as lifestyle, the grotesque expression on a beautiful face. Born in Salem, Washington, where there's still an old bylaw in effect that says you can't have sex within city limits. Previous experience: sonic assailant and audio experimenter, doodler, collagist turned airbrush painter turned silkscreen genius, high school expulsion.

2

Say goodbye to the cartoonist.

No, I won't, I won't let you go, she told him. After Disney's men left the manor with their arms full of Hick's drawings and his possessions, Wendy Ashbubble broke down and confided in us where she'd been. She talked as if it didn't matter who was there, Biz or any other friend who would listen as she recounted her last visit with Hick, and how she reached over the chrome rail of the hospital bed and held his hand, the hand with a pen and untouched pad of paper beneath it, the hand with the two red welts. His face, his whole body was ravaged by more of them, as if someone had cruelly stubbed out lit cigarettes on his skin.

Did you bring me a treat? Hick Elmdales asked under his breath because he didn't want to alert his ward mates.

She pulled a sandwich from her shoulder bag, wrapped in wax paper and tied with a string, and slipped it to him. Between the slices of his favourite white bread were two Caramilk chocolate bars side by side.

I brought more strips if you … Wendy motioned for her bag that had his portfolio of daily and Sunday colour
Pan
comics sticking out of it,
ones he'd saved over the years drawing the strip. He used to call them his retirement fund. Now they covered bills.

Leave them, Hick said. I got a new medical care plan.

How so?

Urk … Feels like a leopard's sitting on my chest feasting on my intestines, he told her as he ate the candybar sandwich. Like enough's enough. He didn't know how much more of this
being sick
he could take. In frustration he started to wheeze and cough and when his fit was over she watched him take another deep bite out of the chocolate sandwich, lean back in his bed, convulse in a rush of sugar ecstasy. He said the night nurses morphined him so heavily, he could
see
his pain. Pain was a man the size of a cow made entirely of barbed wire who used you as his bedsheet. Pain was a starved leopard. Hick knew goodbye when he saw it, and he needed to tell her something.

You're not going anywhere, Hick. You're right here.

No, I'm not.

In an unprepossessing room in ward 5D at San Francisco General Hospital, writer and cartoonist Hick Elmdales lay surrounded by portable equipment, pulse-emitting heart monitors, liver, kidney, and oxygen monitors gasping with mechanical regularity, daytime soap operas transmitted wavily through a three-channel television bolted to the wall, and the kind of central ventilation in the ceiling that comes to life in noisy cycles that begin to resemble the faint call of an air-raid siren. And all while bags of clear fluid dripped into his arm from a reticulated IV line on wheels, and the same or different fluids into the arms of two other men—an arthritic flight attendant dehydrated by Marlow syndrome and a rundown screenwriter suffering through radiation treatment—three men who until this summer had nothing much in common with one another now shared a long list of woes that included sudden onsets of shigellosis and amoebiasis, severe hepatitis A and B, the frequent flyer, the unionized screenwriter, and Disney's cartoonist each saw sudden flareups
of syphilis, herpes, gonorrhea, and climatic bubo that all needed massive penicillin injections, and somehow, all three men had also contracted an impossibly foreign form of skin cancer never before seen bar not on old Mediterranean men.

Still, Hick Elmdales was not the worst off in 5D. That sadly happened to be the irradiated seventy-eight-pound screenwriter who went into a coma for an hour one day and woke up complaining of apocolocyntosis. But the cartoonist was the most recent to occupy a bed in this
room of exceptional cases
(Dr. Dritz's words), and at twenty-seven also the youngest of the three. Pale and oily curls of hair lay on his shoulders and lap, showing off the threadwork of blue and red veins that pressed up from under bare patches on his scalp, his grey-green eyes wept yellow-green mucus, his swollen nose was a florid throbbing red from a runny cold, his lips were cracked and bleeding from bruised cold sores, he trembled under his layers of blankets with a fever and flu he could not shake, the reason his voice sounded so raw. Couldn't keep a thing down last night, not that this hospital's kitchen made it easy. Thanks for candybars. Hick had lost so much weight in two weeks it made Wendy wonder what the screenwriter or the flight attendant had looked like a month ago. The Hick Wendy knew was a big bouncing fleshpot of a boy, she called him a snack-loving self-entertaining redhead. He had inkstained fingertips and a big heart, and this bedridden shrunken-down version too weak to get out of bed was an ominous image of what could be and what would never be. She saw a pale poetic child simultaneously a very old man.