Chapter 15

To do the job right, you take one sheet of the goldenrod paper and fold it around a sheet of the white paper. Slip a coupon inside the folded papers. Hold a sheet of merchandise stamps alongside the folded papers. Then fold a sheet of the letterhead paper around all of it, and stuff this into an envelope. Stick the corresponding address label on the envelope, and you’ve earned three cents. Do this thirty-three times, and you’ve earned almost a dollar. Where we’re at tonight is Adam Branson’s idea. The letter I’m folding starts:

Is the water that comes into the WILSON house bringing with it dangerous parasites? Where we’re at is supposed to be safe. The goldenrod around the white, the coupon inside, the sheet of stamps, the letterhead paper, it all goes inside the envelope, and I’m three cents closer to escaped. Is the water that comes into the CAMERON house bringing with it dangerous parasites? The three of us sit around the dining-room table, Adam and Fertility and me, stuffing these envelopes. At ten o’clock, the housemother locks the front door of the house and stops on her walk back to the kitchen to ask if our daughter is doing any better. Have the doctors upgraded her condition? Will she live? Fertility with rice still in her hair says, “We’re not out of the woods, not yet.” Of course, we don’t have a daughter. Us having a daughter was Adam Branson’s idea. Around us is the combination of three or four families, kids and parents talking about cancer and chemotherapy, burns and skin grafts. Staph infections. The housemother asks what we call our little girl. Adam and Fertility and I look at each other, Fertility with her tongue stuck out to lick an envelope flap. Me looking at Adam is the same as looking at a picture of who I used to be. All together, we say three different names. Fertility says, “Amanda.” Adam says, “Patty.” I say, Laura. Only the three names all overlap. Our daughter. The housemother looks at me in the burned-up remains of my white tuxedo and asks, why is our little daughter in the hospital for treatment? All together, we say three different problems. Fertility says, “Scoliosis.” Adam says, “Polio.” I say, Tuberculosis. The housemother watches us folding, the yellow in the white, the coupon, the stamps, the letterhead, her eyes coming back to the handcuffs snapped around one of my wrists. Is the water that comes into the DIXON house bringing with it dangerous parasites? It was Adam who brought us here. Just for one night, he says. It’s safe here. Now that I’m a mass murderer, Adam knows how we can start north in the morning, north until we get to Canada, but for tonight we needed a place to hide. We needed food. We needed to earn a little cash, so he brought us here. This is after the stadium and after the crowds were tearing to shreds the line of police crowd control. This is right after my sham marriage, when the agent was dead and the police were fighting to keep me alive so they could execute me for murder. The contents of the entire Superdome emptied down onto the field the minute I announced the Colts would win. One half of the handcuffs already clicked around my one wrist, the police were nothing against the running tide of drunks that rolled toward us from the sidelines. The band was somewhere playing the national anthem. Out of every direction, people are dropping onto the field from the bottom of the stands. People are running with their hands in fists out across the grass toward us. There are the Arizona Cardinals in their uniforms. There are the Indianapolis Colts still at their bench, slapping ass and giving each other high fives. The moment the police get to the edge of the wedding platform, I kick the switch and five thousand white doves fly up in a solid wall around me. The doves drive the police back long enough for the football mob to reach center field. The police fight back the mob, and I grab the bride’s bouquet. Sitting here stuffing envelopes, I want to tell everybody how I made my great escape. How the crowd control cylinders of tear gas jet-trailed back and forth overhead. How the crowd roar echoed under the dome. How I grabbed the poly-silk white armload of silk flowers from the bride, tears streaming down her face. How I just touched the hair-sprayed bouquet to a burning candle and I had a torch to hold back any attacker. Holding the torch of gladioli and whipping hot wires of fake honeysuckle out in front of me, I jumped off the wedding platform and fought my way down the football field. The fifty-yard line. The forty-yard line. The thirty. Me in my white tuxedo, I dodged and quarterbacked my way, sprinting and pivoting. The twenty-yard line. To keep from being tackled, I whipped the burning dahlias side-to-side in front of me. The ten-yard line. Ten thousand tackles are out to sack me. Some of them drunk, some of them professionals, none of them are jacked on the quality chemicals I’m riding. Hands grab at my white tails. Men dive for my legs. It’s the steroids that saved my life. Then, touchdown. I cross under the goalpost, still headed for the steel doors that will get me off the field. My torch is burned down to just some tiny silk trilliums when I toss it back over my shoulder. I jam through the steel double doors and turn the deadbolt from the other side. With the Super Bowl crowd pounding the locked doors, I’m safe here for a few minutes alone with the catered food and the makeup artist. The agent’s dead body is under a white sheet on a gurney next to the buffet. The buffet is mostly just turkey sandwiches and bottled water, fresh fruit. Pasta salad. Wedding cake. The makeup artist is eating a sandwich. She cocks her head sideways at the dead agent and says, “Good job.” She says she always hated him too. She’s wearing the agent’s heavy gold Rolex. The makeup artist says, “You want a sandwich?” I ask, Is it just turkey or do they have another kind? The makeup artist hands me a bottle of mineral water and says my tuxedo is on fire in the back. I ask, Where’s the outside? Take that door over there, the makeup artist says. The steel doors behind me are buckling in their frame. Go down the long hall, the makeup artist says. Turn right at the end. Go out the door marked Exit. I say thanks. She says there’s a meat loaf sandwich left if I want it. The sandwich in my one hand, I go out the door she said, go down the hall, go out the exit. Outside in the parking lot is a red car, a red car with an automatic transmission, Fertility behind the wheel and Adam sitting next to her. I get in the backseat and lock the door. To Fertility in the front seat, I tell her to roll up her window. Fertility fiddles with the controls for the radio. Behind me, the crowd is pouring out the exits, running to surround us. Their faces are getting close enough for me to feel spit on. Then out of the sky comes the biggest miracle. It starts raining. A rain of white. Manna from Heaven. I swear. A rain comes down so slick and heavy the mob is falling, slipping and falling, fallen and sprawled. White bits of rain bounce in the car windows, into the carpet, into our hair. Adam looks out in wonder at the miracle of this white rain that’s helping us get away. Adam says, “It’s a miracle.” The back wheels spin, skid sideways, and then leave black as we escape. “No,” Fertility says and hits the gas, “it’s rice.” The blimp circling the stadium says CONGRATULATIONS and HAPPY HONEYMOON. “I wish they wouldn’t do that,” Fertility says. “That rice kills birds.” I tell her that rice that kills birds saved our lives. We were on the street. Then we were on a freeway. Adam twisted around in the front seat to ask me, “Are you going to eat all that sandwich?” I say, It’s meat loaf. We needed a ride north, Adam said. He knew about a ride, but it wasn’t leaving New Orleans until the next morning. He had almost ten years of doing this, traveling back and forth across the country with no money in secret. Killing people, I say. “Delivering people to God,” he says. Fertility says, “Shut up.” We need some cash, Adam tells us. We need some sleep. Food. And he knew where we could find some. He knew a place where people would have bigger problems than we did. We only had to lie a little. “From now on,” Adam tells us, “you two have a child.” We do not. “Your child is deathly ill,” Adam says. Our child is not. “You’re in New Orleans so your child can go to a hospital,” Adam says. “That’s all you need to say.” Adam says he’ll handle the rest. Adam tells Fertility, “Turn here.” He says, “Now turn right here.” He says, “Go up two more blocks and turn left.” Where he’s taking us, we can stay overnight for free. We can get food donated for us to eat. We can do some piecework, collating documents or stuffing envelopes, to earn a little cash. We can get showered. Watch ourselves on television, making our escape on the evening news. Adam tells me I’m too much of a mess to be recognized as an escaped mass murderer who ruined the Super Bowl. Where we’re going, he says, people will have their own big problems to worry about. Fertility says, “Like, how many people do you have to kill to make the jump from serial killer to mass murderer?” Adam tells us, “Sit tight in the car, and I’ll go inside to grease the skids. Just remember, your child is very sick.” Then he says, “We’re here.” Fertility looks at the house and at Adam and says, “You’re the one who’s very sick.” Adams says, “I’m your poor child’s godfather.” The sign in the front yard says, Ronald McDonald House.