Farewell Navigator by Leni Zumas Page B

from one end (the stitches, still intact), and looking closer I noticed that the hewn sheaths of skin on either side had not grown together, instead relying wholly on the black thread to secure them.
    Don’t be scared, Squinch said.
    But.
    It doesn’t hurt me.
    But.
    It’s cool if you touch it. I’d like you to touch it. He held my fingertip and moved it lightly over the fibrous bumps. Just whatever you do, love. . . . I sat unbreathing. Never, ever pull the thread. Promise not to?
    Yes.
    Say it.
    I promise.
    Good girl.
    Then he found his way into me and stayed there for aminute or two. I stared at the sooty green tiles on the opposite wall, waiting for what would happen, not feeling anything beyond a cautious pressure. He withdrew and whispered, Good girl and buttoned his shirt.
    I kept track of our coordinates in the notebook. The name of each town we passed through was entered into my ledger, the villages of Missouri and Arkansas and Tennessee and Mississippi inscribed in back-slanted lettering. I would wake up before the others and make a map of the day before. We would be bunched up in the van or splayed across couches in a fourteen-year-old’s parents’ basement, and it would be late in the morning when regular people have already arrived at their regular jobs and are following the dreary mandate of proper living. The boys, like good invalids, slept their choked sleeps well into the afternoon and allowed me time to commit our journey to paper. With colored pencils I sketched the scenery. Drought-cooked riverbeds littered with birds’ skeletons; three tiny sisters on a Memphis sidewalk rigged up in Elvis costumes lip-synching to a tape of “Blue Suede Shoes”; a road of roofless houses, acting as if nothing had happened to them, their backyards fluttering with clean laundry.
    During the final stretch through Louisiana, a warm rain fell. We drove along in it, all of us twisted up in unnatural positions to prevent our moist calves from touching one another, until without warning Squinch pulled over into the mud, flung the door open, and bowed his blue head. Raindrops sprayed against his thighs. He drew ragged breaths, mimicking the death-rattle, held his hands to his ears and rocked back and forth.
    These theatrics persisted until Rabb nudged me, hissing, Somebody else’s got to drive.
    Crawling out from the piles of backpacks and drum shells I caught my dress on the door ashtray; at the sound of its ripping they all laughed gleefully. Squinch stretched out in the passenger seat, his fit subsiding as suddenly as it had begun.
    The rain had cleared by the time we crossed the swamps into New Orleans. Through the gloom I steered, teeth chattering with fatigue, past crumbling balustrades, sunken lawns, glittering vines that crawled up the walls of ornate and dismal houses lying still under the heat. The boys, accustomed to milder mid-Atlantic summers, sweated madly in their vintage jackets but were too vain to remove them. I had come to fear their vanity, the relish with which these pirates fondled their silken trousers as they slid them on and the hours spent oiling the thorns of their hair and examining themselves in the rearview mirror, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. I knew that when Squinch gave me his sunglasses to wear, it was in order to see his reflection in them when he bent to kiss me.
    On a street that frothed with palm trees and pink flowers, we pulled up to the Mausoleum, home of Bill Bones—renowned on tour circuits, said the boys, for his excellent parties and encyclopedic knowledge of musical history. Opening the door was a pale, red-eyed stick in sweatpants who trembled as he whispered, What time is it?
    Uh. . . .
    Don’t receive callers before three. Come back later.
    But we’re the band.
    Did you nawt hear me? Back at three! And the door closed resolutely, shuddering on its hinges.
    We found a café on a street of gas stations. The waiter stood in martyrdom while the boys complained there