The next thing I know I am coming to, and there is a cloud of terrible stale coffee air around my head. I’m enveloped in a coffee cloud, and there’s no oxygen. I can’t breathe. I don’t want to breathe.
I open my eyes, and World’s Worst Coffee Breath is looming over me. “Look! She’s awake! She’s going to be just fine, everybody!” He leans down and looks into my eyes. “Are you okay? Can you get up?” he asks cheerfully.
I wince and shake my head, my helmet scratching against the asphalt.
“Sure is a hot one today. Gee, I’m so sorry. What can I do?”
Stop breathing! Eat a Tic Tac! “I have to get to the hospital,” I say.
“Really? You’re that badly hurt?” Coffee Breath is starting to look very nervous.
“Yes,” I say. “But mostly I need to meet my mother there; she’s in labor; I have to help.” I try to move, and my right side tells me not to.
I gaze up at the people standing over me like I’m a freak show. I can’t believe it, but Kamikaze Driver is here. He’s talking with Coffee Breath and gesturing wildly. What did he do, abandon his bus? Why isn’t this traffic moving, anyway—is it me?
Then I remember—the parade is going on, and the highway is blocked until the parade finishes passing down Main Street.
I’m hoping Kamikaze won’t give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, just to give me germs, just to share bacteria. I’m hoping Coffee Breath won’t come close enough to even attempt mouth-to-mouth.
Above me, I hear the two of them saying things like “hospital” and “ambulance” and “parade traffic” and “never make it.” My body feels cold and clammy, and at the same time the hot black asphalt feels like it’s burning through my clothes. I wonder if I’m on my way out. I can’t believe I ran into a car door, I can’t believe I just did that. Did I really just do that?
Is this horrible air—car exhaust being blown on my face, intense heat, feedlot smell—the last breath I’m going to take? That’s not fair—none of this is. I’m supposed to be there to help my mother. Maybe she knows how to do everything, but I’m her rock, she said during our last childbirth class—I’m her stationary front. She needs me. Who else will remind her to pee?
“Can we get going?” I mumble from my prone position on the street.
Coffee Breath and Kamikaze gather me up gingerly. I think I scream a little when they lift me. They carefully put me in the backseat of the silver Lexus and try to prop me in the least painful position. I ask them to take off my helmet, but they refuse, saying we’d better wait until we get to the hospital. Then they both get into the front, and Coffee Breath starts to inch forward in traffic.
“What about . . . the bus?” I ask Kamikaze.
“I told everyone to get off and then I locked it up. Don’t worry, nobody’s going anywhere in this traffic,” Kamikaze says.
“That’s the problem!” Coffee Breath says, sounding very tense.
Kamikaze keeps giving him advice, telling him to pass cars, to drive in the wrong direction, against traffic, to drive on the shoulder. Coffee Breath stays in the right lane, hardly moving. They start arguing, louder and louder.
“You think you can do better? You think you can do better?” Coffee Breath asks. “Okay, let’s see. Let’s switch.” He gets out of the car and starts to walk around the back.
Kamikaze slides over to the driver’s seat and takes off without him. I hear Coffee Breath screaming behind us as we make an abrupt left and cut between two cars, and it’s so tight that the driver’s side mirror gets ripped off the car.
I’m not sure if I’m still conscious or not, but I think we’re now driving down the wrong side of the street. We’re flying, and horns are honking all around us. For a second it feels just like we’re cruising on a weekend night because of all the noise.
I try to sit up a little more, and I see that we’ve reached the roadblock. A mime is standing on top of a sawhorse, walking across the top as if it’s a balance beam, trying to amuse all the people in the cars that are backed up for miles.
I glance at Kamikaze. He doesn’t look amused.
“There’s only one way to get you to the hospital. And you know what it is,” he says. I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or to himself.
First he jumps out and tries to talk to the mime. The mime makes fun of him, imitates the way he walks.
Kamikaze gets back into the Lexus and nearly runs him over. He pulls past the sawhorse and slyly enters the parade.
I haven’t been in the Rodeo Roundup Days parade since fifth grade, when I appeared as a figure skater on the Lindville’s Athletes of Tomorrow float. I probably looked better then than I do now. I’m getting blood on the leather upholstery from my cuts.
We weave around the edge of the marching bands, scoot past the square dancers dancing on a truck bed, pass some slowly parading llamas, who get spooked by us and start spitting. Kamikaze finds an open space and blows past some twirlers and jugglers. Then we get stuck, hung up behind a small herd of Longhorn cattle, completely stalled.
“Just one more block and we can cut through the alley to the hospital,” Kamikaze tells me. “Just hang in there. What’s your name?”
“Coffee Wench,” I tell him.
“Pardon?”
“Peggy,” I say, and my ribs hurt when I talk. “Fleming.”
“Peggy Fleming?” he says, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Farrell,” I add.
He looks confused and stares at me in the rearview mirror. “What’s your name again?”
That’s when I hear a motorcycle roar behind us.
“Well, holy cow, would you take a look at this!” Kamikaze cries.
I try to look out the back window. I see Denny on a motorcycle, with a naked girl who’s wearing blue-tinted sunglasses and a white cowboy hat. Her long red hair streams out behind her as they zip around us.
Then I black out again.