Agape

Agape

As in:

On the way down the hill, back toward the interstate and then toward Wallace, Beatrix sat up front with Dryan, while Page and Cosmo sat in the rear of the extended cab.

“Wanna’ play fish?” Cosmo asked Page, within seconds after the truck started rolling.

“In what sense?” Page asked.

“Ya know, with cards and all. Don’t you know fish?”

“Oh, that fish,” Page replied. “Yeah, I know that fish. Sure. Deal.”

“Just so you know,” Dryan announced. “Cosmo was his mom’s idea, not mine. I wouldn’t have done that to that boy on my own.”

“Done what?” Beatrix asked.

“Named him Cosmo.”

“What’s wrong with that?” she asked.

“It’s just peculiar is all, here and abouts. Kinda like a boy named Sue.”

“Well, I like it, don’t you like it Page?”

“Go fish,” said Page. “Yeah, I love it. Reminds me of that old Creedence album, you know, Cosmo’s Factory.”

“Well, he has to work though it,” Dryan said. “He gets to wear it every day.”

Dryan’s habit, they quickly learned, was to poke fun quickly and at everything and frequently make a “deh” sound, kind of like a game show buzzer, to punctuate his sarcasm.

He had a whole skit on what a “cow pie of a town” Spokane was, even to the point of asking Page if she just really didn’t prefer to just buy a new car and drive in the opposite direction, now that there was a Starbucks in Helena. “Deh”

“I believe in that gypsy curse thing,” Dryan said. “It’s almost scientifically provable. I mean think about it. I think the Indians were too nice when Spokane took their fishing grounds away. But then you had to mess with the gypsys. That done it. Deh.”

And it went on like this for a while, with Dryan suggesting the loss of the canopy at the former U.S. Pavilion was a symbolic form of civic leprosy and that Bloomsday was just an annual manifestation of mass hysteria, of people really trying to run off to Rearden but getting steered back, “like lemmings,” to downtown.

This had Beatrix laughing so hard she asked to smoke, but Dryan refused, on account of Cosmo’s asthma.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Beatrix said.

“Got to watch it, but it’s no big deal,” Dryan said. “Boy can sing too.”

“Really?” said Page. “He doesn’t look like he can carry a tune to me.”

“Oh, you’re asking for it now,” Dryan said. With that he pushed a CD into the stereo on the dashboard.

It was Wylie Gustafson, the famous yodeling cowboy from Dusty, Washington. And soaring right along with him was Cosmo, still looking down from beneath his cowboy hat at his fish cards, but hitting the high notes with ease.

Beatrix and Page could only look at each other with wide eyes and mouths agape.