“I have outside a truck full of chicken legs,” Bronislav answered. “I take them to a freezing—no, a frozen—warehouse in Los Angeles.” He raised an eyebrow. His were dark and thick, like all of his hair. They didn’t quite meet above his long, sharp nose, but they came close. “And you?”
“I’m heading for L.A., too.” Vanessa surprised herself with how glad she was to hear he was westbound. If he’d been going the other way, they would have been passing ships. Now . . . Well, who the hell knew about now? “I was born there. I lived there till a little before the eruption, so I’m heading home.”
“Born in Los Angeles.” He shook his head in slow wonder.
“People are, you know,” Vanessa said with a touch of irritation. Outsiders often assumed anyone who lived in California came from somewhere else. It never failed to annoy the genuine natives.
“I am sure it must be so,” Bronislav Nedic said, shaking his head again. “It still seems very strange to me.”
Experimentally, Vanessa gave a light touch to the tattoo on the back of his hand. His flesh seemed half a degree hotter than hers. That was a good sign. She didn’t know where attraction came from, or why. She recognized it when it did, though. To cover what she was thinking, what she was feeling, she asked, “Does this mean something, or is it just a design?”
She got more than she’d bargained for. “That is the Ocilima, the four Ss with the cross,” Bronislav answered, his voice as solemn as if he were intoning prayers in church. “They look like Cs to you, I know, but the Serb alphabet is like the Russian—its C is S in yours. They stand for Samo sloga Srbina spasava: only unity will save the Serbs.” His mouth twisted into a sour, wistful smile, which made him look more like Nicolas Cage than ever. Since Vanessa liked Nicolas Cage, that wasn’t so bad. He added, “I was not born in Los Angeles, you will figure out. I was born in Yugoslavia, a country that is not a country any more.”
“Oh,” Vanessa said, and not another word. She supposed she could have found Yugoslavia on a map—back in the days when Yugoslavia was on the map—but that was as much as she knew or cared about it.
Bronislav didn’t notice her indifference. His eyes were far away from the New Mexico Denny’s. He was seeing other mountains than the ones here, other times. “I fought for the Serbs against the terrorist Bosnians and the Nazi Croats. I fought, but we did not win. And so . . . I sit at this counter here, next to you, and my country is broken all in pieces.”
“Is that where you, uh, hurt your arm?” Vanessa didn’t want to touch the scar the way she’d touched the tat.
He nodded mournfully. “It is. And I was lucky, if you want to call it luck. The RPG caught the fellow standing beside me square. They never found enough of poor Vlade to bury.”
“Oh,” Vanessa said again, on a different note this time. Being her father’s daughter made her know from a very early age that human beings could do horrible things to one another. She’d seen more since the eruption. But . . . “You were in a war.” That, she hadn’t seen.
“I was in a war, yes. And now I have that truck full of chicken pieces to take to California. Life does strange things.” Bronislav set money on the counter. Then he said, “If you have a number where I can call you when I am in Los Angeles . . . Maybe we see what strange things life does to us.”
Or maybe I decide this was just a way to waste time in a nowhere Denny’s. But Vanessa gave him her cell number instead of making one up. He entered it in his own phone. And he gave her that number, which she took in turn—mating rituals of the twenty-first century.
She paid for her own lunch. Bronislav tipped better than she did. But then, chances were he would stop here again. She wouldn’t, not unless God had an even more twisted sense of humor than He’d already shown. Vanessa slid into her car. She half expected it to crap out right there, just to show her what kind of sense of humor God had. It started okay, though.
Back onto the Interstate. Into the fast lane. Past the trucks. Arizona ahead, then California. Home! Who woulda thunk it?
And if Bronislav called—no, when, because he would—she’d figure out what she wanted to do. Maybe she’d have other things that needed taking care of: shampooing her tortoise, or something. Maybe she wouldn’t, too. She hadn’t wanted anybody, even a little bit, for a long time. It made her feel more alive. She drove on toward L.A., happier than she remembered being since the eruption.
* * *
Louise Ferguson glumly studied her bank statement and her three credit-card bills, all of which had chosen the same day to arrive. If that didn’t prove misery loved company, she was damned if she knew what would.