Single: Miss Tennessee b/w The Cryerer | Page 5

I realized the little man had not met me at the door, jumping at my knees or running around the room -- up on the furniture, down on the floor -- in ever- tightening circles.
I went into the living room, expecting to see him asleep on the couch. I looked in the kitchen and in the bedroom. The bed was unmade and Miss Tennessee's smocks hung over the door of the wardrobe. I even looked in the backyard to see if Steve had been left out to squint into the sun. He was nowhere to be found and there were no signs of astronauts. No Tang stains or envelopes from Cape Canaveral. I fished around in a kitchen drawer for a piece of string and fished around in my pocket for all of Miss Tennessee's keys; keys to the front door and the screen door and the shed where she kept the lawnmower. I threaded them onto the string and opened the front door to drop them into the mailbox.
I didn't notice the little man until I reached back inside for the cardboard box, but I almost tripped over him when I turned around. He stared up at me with his huge, marble eyes, making out what I knew could be little more than a blur. He slowly squinted, almost closing his eyes before opening them again, like he was trying to hypnotize me. "You are wanting to feed the puppy dog," I always said in my best fortune-teller accent whenever he did this. "You are wanting to feed the puppy." And everyone would laugh.
He was calm, just sitting and squinting. His tan fur was dark brown in places, like he'd been rolling in dirt, and he had an enormous bluejay pressed beneath his paws. It was nearly as big as he was and its feathers were dirty and bent but still brilliantly blue in places. It occurred to me to take the keys out of the mailbox and go get the shovel. Steve looked at me expectantly, his tiny ribs heaving in and out, but I knew he'd want her to be there. As I crouched down and gently smoothed his matted fur, I winced at the thought of the vicious, eye-pecking struggle.

THE CRYERER
When his Agent called, the Cryerer was sleeping in the Valley. The sun, already up for hours, had long over-powered the air conditioning unit that hummed in his ear, and he woke as always, pasty and flush; moist in a malarial way that felt like, but was not, a fever. He lurched out of bed and patted around for his cell phone. He patted pants and coats and towels and magazines and all over the bedspread, wiping sweat from his face with a damp forearm, before locating the phone on the floor between the bed and the ash- covered nightstand.
"Where in God's Dark Universe are you," his Agent said. "I've been hitting you with 911's all morning."
"I've been running errands," he lied. "My batteries are dying." He unbuckled his belt and wiggled out of his pants. He wandered into the bathroom, surprised to find himself alone. He opened the door gently.
It wasn't working, his Agent explained. The network wanted to write him in.
"They need your pathetic quality," she said.
"I wish you wouldn't call it that," he said, easing the shower curtain aside with two fingers.
"What? Pathetic? Quality of pathos. It's from the Greek."
"But the connotations."
"Put those out of your mind."
"Is it bad?" he asked, changing the subject.
"Of course it's bad. It's terrible. It's worse than church. Worse than prison. That's why they want your pathetic quality."
"I will be who?"
"The Brother."
"Of who?"
"Of the Sister," she said. "Of the Mother of the Baby."
"And the Baby is?"
"Gone," she said.
The Cryerer wrote down the time and location on an envelope he found hanging out of the nightstand, then fell back onto the bed.
"Don't forget the Mall," his Agent reminded him.
"Yes," he said, mashing a pillow into his eye sockets.
"You're the best," she said.
The Cryerer lay on the bed, trying to find a position. The fever was bad this morning and he smelled sulfur. Rather, he had the sensation of smelling sulfur. There was no sulfur. This much he had learned.
Where had the Brazil Nut gone? He rolled over, expecting her to be there, as if he had missed her before. He mumbled her name; then shouted it.
They had met on a movie of the week. He had been the Brother and she had played the girlfriend of a Columbian drug lord. They'd gone for drinks and she had told him everything. He hadn't told her anything, but she had worked up a warm feeling telling all without interruption -- save long pauses she spent, he realized later, snorting cocaine in the ladies room -- and she had associated this feeling