“Old Vertue.”

“What kind of dog’s name is that? Vertue! Come here, boy.”

It didn’t move. Now it was drooling. Drooling and clock-clocking. Its gums were showing. They were shiny bubble-gum pink.

“We gotta get out of here. We gotta get over to George’s and see what’s going on with him.”

“Well, we ain’t got no stilts or a hot air balloon.” He put a hand in a shading position over his eyes and pretended to look toward the horizon. “No ladder in sight. It’d be nice if there was a tightrope, but there isn’t.”

“Thank you for sharing that with me.”

“You’re welcome. You know what that dog is? It’s a FUDD.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning most dogs are just dogs, you know? Not one thing special about them. Dog-dogs. But that one—that is a fucked-up-dog-dog. A FUDD.”

Clock-clock. I looked down into Vertue’s bubble-gum mouth and noticed for the first time that its teeth were tobacco-brown. Pink and brown and shiny. Clock-clock.

“Hey, Uncle Fran?”

“What?”

“I got an idea.”

Straightening up, I looked over at him. “Yes?”

“We fly.”

“That’s brilliant. In what?”

“We just fly, man. Everything else around here is crazy, right? So why can’t we fly? Why can’t we just jump off these roofs and fly? Who says it won’t happen if we try?”

“Gravity.”

“Look, Zio, since I got here, this whole experience has been like sitting in the electric chair getting five thousand volts through your head all day long. It’s fried everything, but ‘specially our brains. So I say we just try it and see what happens. We’ve seen again and again anything’s possible. So now we start using that. This whole world around us is nuts: Me and you are here together at the same time. Isn’t that crazy? We’ve been time traveling, that dead dog rose up out of its grave, birds disappear in plain sight ... so why not flying? We want to fly, we try. If it don’t work, then it don’t work. Why not?”

It was me talking, but a me I hadn’t known for years. The me who believed in why not? Rather than no way / no can do / no exit or no, period. Middle-aged, this-idea-is-ridiculous me started to get up and leave the movie theater. But the rest of me shouted at him to sit down again and watch the rest of the show.

Why not fly? Why not?

“Let’s go.”

Gee-Gee grinned like a carved pumpkin and clapped twice. “Excellent.” Without a moment’s hesitation he extended his arms as if he was preparing to dive into water. Then he jumped off the roof of the Audi. And hit the ground a second later, hollering in pain. Old Vertue looked at him and back up at me just as I sailed off the roof of the VW bus—and flew.

Could I describe to you what it was like to fly? Certainly. Will I? Never in a million years. I will tell you this: Remember the best kiss you ever had? How suddenly all sound, all life, all matter, disappeared? How for that holy while all of your life was only on your lips? That’s some of what it was like in that first moment when I realized it was happening, that it was real.

I flew like an astronaut on the moon. The leap off the car roof drifted me forward at ten feet off the ground. Slowly I began to descend. Touching down, I pushed off with one foot and at once rose up again up up and back to the height I’d been. Floating gently forward, flying... sort of.

“You bastard, you bastard, you’re up there! It’s working! I told you. I knew it would work. Get the hell away from me, dog!”

Gee-Gee ran along below me, waving his hands excitedly.

For a few moments my shadow actually passed over him and the earth, as if I were a plane casting its dark image down. He shouted when Old Vertue ran into his leg and made him stumble. As I was coming down for my first landing, fifty feet from where I’d started, I saw the kid kick the dog full-bang in the head. Orange cowboy boot on dog skull. Result? A draw. Vertue stopped and gave his head a couple of shakes. Which made enough time for me to push off again and for Gee-Gee to start running.

“You got it now, Uncle. You are definitely airborne!”

I turned halfway around in midair to check on Vertue. It was keeping its distance now but wasn’t about to give up the pursuit. As I was turning again, I felt my body beginning to descend. But now I had the hang of it and when I touched ground it was only that—a touch. A push off and I was gone again.

“This is the coolest thing! You-are flying.”

“It’s your doing, Gee-Gee. If you hadn’t said try, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Who cares how it happened? It’s just so damned cool.”

This was true, but what was I going to do when I got to George’s house, besides land? Floon was there, George was there, Vertue was here trying to bite me while I tried to get there—

As if he’d read my mind, down below Gee-Gee asked, “What are we going to do when we get to Dalemwood’s house?”

Before I could answer, I saw a jogger coming down the sidewalk toward us. I started to smile. How would he react to: a man floating overhead like a kite, a boy in thirty-year-old clothes and a bad Elvis haircut following below, and a dog with three legs, one eye, and a jaw going clock-clockl This was going to be rich.

He wore one of those ridiculous-looking jogging suits that no real jogger ever wears. It was a traffic jam of clashing colors, all of them made more ugly because they were on top of each other. What kind of person would actually buy clothes like that? I’d seen something like it recently, but didn’t register or remember that until later. When I had a chance to think about the details.

I was so tickled that another person was seeing the three of us now like this. I was so eager to see how they’d react to the absurdity of our picture. I didn’t pay attention to anything but the fact a man in a jogging suit was coming toward us and what would he think?

He shot the boy first. The man shot Gee-Gee.

Ten feet from us he casually reached into his pink-on-yellow pocket and pulled out a pistol. I saw it, realized it, took the image into my slow brain. Ten feet above the ground I was powerless to do anything. I shouted out, “A gun! Look out, he has a gun.”

Blank-faced, Caz de Floon pointed it at Gee-Gee and shot him in the throat, the chest, the stomach. The boy collapsed, dead before he hit the sidewalk. Floon then turned to Old Vertue and shot it in the head.

Bang Bang Bang. 

I’m sure I fell from the sky the moment Gee-Gee’s heart stopped beating. Because when he died, so did the “why not?” and renewed sense of wonder in me he had brought back. I don’t remember dropping or even hitting the ground because I was so horrified by what had happened.

Arms at his sides, Caz de Floon, looking exactly the same as I’d seen him in Vienna, stared indifferently at the two bodies. I got off the ground but stayed where I was. I had no idea what he’d do next. Maybe I was going to die too.

“Why? Why did you do it, Floon?”

“I don’t like the future I was living in, Frannie. I want a different one. Had to make a few changes. You had an unfair advantage with those two. I know who the boy was.” He pointed at the dead dog. “Now it will be different.”

“How did you get back here?”

“I don’t know. Divine intervention—manus e nubibus–a hand from the clouds; I suppose someone powerful wants me here. In the same way they brought the boy back to help you.”

I remembered Gee-Gee saying Astopel had made a mistake by manipulating my life. Because the result of that was anything could happen now. Floon here with a gun in his hand was immediate proof of it.

“But you killed them. What for? Do you know who they were?”

“Yes, George explained. I just told you why, McCabe. You’d better be careful too. From now on I’m going to be as close to you as the vein in your neck. Or the eye in your socket.”