of it as being on stakeout, as a job you’ve done a thousand times before. If you can think of it just that way, everything will be fine. Tell you what you do, Normie: forget it’s Rose you’re looking for. Forget it’s Rose until you actually see her.
He tried. It helped that things were pretty much as he had expected; Hump Peterson had been accepted as a valid part of the scene. Two dykes wearing tee-shirts cut off to display their overbuilt arms included him briefly in their Frisbee game, and an older woman with white hair on top and really ugly varicose veins down below brought him a Yogurt Pop because, she said, he looked really hot and uncomfortable, stuck in that chair. “Hump” thanked her gratefully and said yes, he was a little hot. But you’re not, sweetie, he thought as the woman with the graying hair started away No wonder you’re with these lesbo queens—you couldn’t get a man if your life depended on it. The Yogurt Pop was good, though—cool—and he ate it down greedily.
The trick was never to stay in one place for too long. He moved from the picnic area to the horseshoe pit, where two inept men were playing doubles against two equally inept women. To Norman it looked as if the game might go on until the sun went down. He rolled past the cook-tent, where the first hamburgers were coming off the grill and potato salad was being dished into serving bowls. Finally he headed for the midway and the rides, wheeling along with his head down, sneaking little peeks at the women who were now heading for the picnic tables, some pushing strollers, some carrying trumpery prizes under their arms. Rose was not among them.
She did not seem to be anywhere.
7
Norman was too busy looking for Rose to see that the black woman who had noticed him earlier was noticing him again. This was an extremely large woman, one who actually did bear a slight resemblance to William “Refrigerator” Perry.
Gert was in the playground, pushing a little boy on a swing. Now she stopped and shook her head, as if to clear it. She was still looking at the cripple in the motorcycle jacket, although now she could only see him from behind. There was a bumper sticker on the back-support of his wheelchair. I AM A MAN WHO RESPECTS WOMEN, it said.
You’re also a man who looks familiar, Gert thought. Or is it just that you look like some movie actor?
“Come on, Gert!” Melanie Huggins’s little boy commanded. “Push! I wanna go high! I wanna loop the loop!”
Gert pushed higher, although little Stanley wasn’t going to get anywhere near looping the loop—not in this litigious age, thank you very much. Still, his laughter was a kick; it made her grin herself. She pushed him a little higher, dismissing the man in the wheelchair from her mind. From the front of her mind.
“I, wanna loop the loop, Gert! Please! Come on, pleeeese!”
Well, Gert thought, maybe once wouldn’t hurt.
“Hold on tight, hero,” she said. “Here we go.”
8
Norman kept rolling even after he knew he’d gone by the last incoming picnickers. He felt it wise to make himself scarce while the women from Daughters and Sisters and their friends were eating. Also, his sense of panic had continued to grow, and he was afraid someone might notice something wrong with him if he stuck around. Rose should be here, and he should have seen her by now, but he hadn’t. He didn’t think she was here, and that made no sense. She was a mouse, for Christ’s sake, a mouse, and if she wasn’t here with her fellow Mouska-Cunts, where was she? Where did she have to go, if not here?
He wheeled beneath an arch reading WELCOME TO THE MIDWAY and traveled along the broad paved way, not paying much attention to where he was going. The best thing about riding in a wheelchair, he was discovering, was people watched out for you.
The park was filling up, and he supposed that was good, but nothing else was good. His head was throbbing again, and the hurrying crowds made him feel strange, like an alien inside his own skin. Why were so many of them laughing, for instance? What in God’s name did they have to laugh about? Didn’t they understand what the world was like? Didn’t they see that everything—everything!—was on the verge of going down the tubes? He realized with dismay