is in Maui with no one else around, and piss against the rear wheel of the car. He wishes he weren’t so utterly pee-shy, and he thinks maybe he can hold it in for longer but he finds himself remembering a newspaper clipping that someone had tacked up in the lounge in his frat house, thirty years before: the cautionary tale of an old man who had been on a long bus ride with a busted rest-room, who had held it in, and, at the end of his journey, needed to be catheterized in order ever to piss again…
That was ridiculous. He isn’t that old. He is going to celebrate his fiftieth birthday in April, and his waterworks work just fine. Everything works just fine.
He pulls out his telephone, touches the menu, pages down, and finds the address entry marked “Laundry” which had amused him so much when he typed it in—a reference to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and as he looks at it he realizes that it’s not from that at all, that was a tailor’s, he’s thinking of Get Smart, and he still feels weird and slightly embarrassed after all these years about not realizing it was a comedy when he was a kid, and just wanting a shoephone…
A woman’s voice on the phone. “Yes?”
“This is Mister Town, for Mister World.”
“Hold please. I’ll see if he’s available.”
There is silence. Town crosses his legs, tugs his belt higher on his belly—got to lose these last ten pounds—and away from his bladder. Then an urbane voice says, “Hello, Mister Town.”
“We lost them,” says Town. He feels a knot of frustration in his gut: these were the bastards, the lousy dirty sons of bitches who killed Woody and Stone, for Chrissakes. Good men. Good men. He badly wants to fuck Mrs. Wood, but knows it’s still too soon after Woody’s death to make a move, so he is taking her out for dinner every couple of weeks, an investment in the future, she’s just grateful for the attention…
“How?”
“I don’t know. We set up a roadblock, there was nowhere they could have gone and they went there anyway.”
“Just another one of life’s little mysteries. Not to worry. Have you calmed the locals?”
“Told ’em it was an optical illusion.”
“They buy it?”
“Probably.”
There was something very familiar about Mr. World’s voice—which was a strange thing to think, he’d been working for him directly for two years now, spoken to him every day, of course there was something familiar about his voice.
“They’ll be far away by now.”
“Should we send people down to the rez to intercept them?”
“Not worth the aggravation. Too many jurisdictional issues, and there are only so many strings we can pull in a morning. We have plenty of time. Just get back here. I’ve got my hands full at this end trying to organize the policy meeting.”
“Trouble?”
“It’s a pissing contest. I’ve proposed that we have it out here. The techies want it in Austin, or maybe San Jose, the players want it in Hollywood, the intangibles want it on Wall Street. Everybody wants it in their own back yard. Nobody’s going to give.”
“You need me to do anything?”
“Not yet. I’ll growl at some of them, stroke others. You know the routine.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Carry on, Town.”
The connection is broken.
Town thinks he should have had a SWAT team to pick off that fucking Winnebago, or land-mines on the road, or a tactical friggin’ nukuler device, that would have showed those bastards they meant business. It was like Mr. World had once said to him, We are writing the future in Letters of Fire, and Mr. Town thinks that Jesus Christ if he doesn’t piss now he’ll lose a kidney, it’ll just burst, and it was like his pop had said when they were on long journeys, when Town was a kid, out on the interstate, his pop would always say, “My back teeth are afloat,” and Mr. Town could hear that voice even now, that sharp Yankee accent saying, “I got to take a leak soon. My back teeth are afloat”…
…and it was then that Shadow felt a hand opening his own hand, prising it open one finger at a time, off the thighbone it was clutching. He no longer needed to urinate; that was someone else. He was standing under the stars on a glassy rock plain, and the bone was down on the ground beside the other bones.
Wednesday made the signal for silence again. Then he began to walk, and Shadow followed.
There was a