Going Bovine

Page 117

The bag comes down, and Dulcie pops a green jelly bean in her mouth.
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“Technically speaking, it is the future.”
“Look, you got me out here, on some crazy mission, and I never know what’s going to happen from one minute to the next. I don’t even know if I’m going to live. The least you can do is tell me a few meaningless things—”
Her head snaps up. “Nothing’s meaningless, Cameron.”
“Tell me the future! Their futures. I want the real deal. Long-term stuff.”
“Okay,” Dulcie says, but she won’t look at me. “He—Left Guy—is going to end up running his uncle’s restaurant. He’ll have a serious alcohol problem and be divorced twice before he’s forty. He’ll think he’s all chummy with the twenty-somethings who work for him, but behind his back, they’ll comp all their friends and call him Chimp Brain.”
I laugh. “Ha! That’s amazing! Chimp Brain. What about the others?”
“Dave—Right Guy—is going to get married, have two kids, work as a computer programmer, and collect toy trains. He’ll build this elaborate model train set in his basement and work on it on weekends.”
Dave, Right Guy, is currently eating beans and franks out of a can with his fingers. The tomato sauce dribbles down his chin and onto his shirt.
“Sounds boring.”
Dulcie watches him. “He loves it. It’s his life.”
“Whatever,” I say, holding out my hand. Dulcie pours some jelly beans into it. I get a lime and a chocolate together. It tastes strangely good, tart and sweet at the same time. “What about Middle Guy?”
Middle Guy’s singing a song about a guy named Louie while strumming his air guitar with real feeling. His goofiness is winning me over. Dulcie’s gaze finds him briefly.
“Keith …” She stops.
“Yeah?”
“Keith—Middle Guy—is going to drop out of college next year, enlist in the army and go overseas.” She picks out the green jelly beans and puts them methodically into her palm.
“And?” I say, downing the last of my candy. “That’s it?”
“He’ll tell everybody in his platoon about the day these guys gave him a ride to the Party House and he met Marisol and how she gave him a kiss and how it was the most rockingest time ever and that was the day he decided to quit school, which led to his joining the army. He’ll be telling that story when he steps on a land mine hidden in the desert sand and gets blown to bits.”
It’s like the earth gives way underneath me and I have to jump up to make sure it’s still there. “Whoa,” I say, nearly falling over a rock behind me. “Whoa. God, Dulcie. Why the hell did you tell me that?”
“You asked. I told you it wasn’t a good idea.”
Middle Guy, Keith, hops around doing this goofy dance and singing loud. He’s about as alive as you can get.
“That sucked, Dulcie. How do you expect me to drive this guy around knowing that?”
“Welcome to my life, cowboy.”
I walk away from her, reeling, but come back. “If you know all this stuff about us … if you can see what’s going to happen and it’s already in motion, why bother? Why should we try to do anything? We can’t change it.”
She hops up, opens her arms wide. “Did I say that you couldn’t change it?”
“No, but …”
“What I see is the course as it stands now. Today. At 10:27:07 p.m. Relatively Standard Time. Tomorrow, Keith could pick up a book, read a sentence there that completely alters the course of his life, and decide he wants to become an English professor and that’s it. New ball game. Destiny isn’t fixed, Cameron.”
“A butterfly flaps his wings in South America and they get snow in Chicago,” I say, repeating something I learned from my dad.
“Right. Exactly. The snow comes down in Chicago, and a seventeen-year-old kid’s mom tells him to shovel the walk. He’s in the front yard just as this new girl walks by. She slips on a patch of ice, but he catches her, and that’s how they start dating. And on and on, a revolving door of action-reaction, of interconnection. Things can change, Cameron. It’s the one constant of this universe.”
“So now, just by randomly picking Keith up on the side of the road, I’ve altered the course of his life?”
“And he’s altered yours.”
“But which way?”