No indeed, thought Estelle, I shan’t say a word. Two can play the same game. So she proceeded to load her laundry into a machine without addressing a single word to the girl. When that was done she sat down on the orange couch and pretended to read one of the tabloids, but all the while it was as if she were waiting for something to happen. When it did, she seemed to know it without lifting her eyes from the print; she could sense the girl’s distress and, though she struggled not to respond to it, she looked up.
The girl’s machine had stopped before its cycle had hardly begun and the wretched child stood looking at it in a state of hopeless confusion.
Well, too bad, thought Estelle. That was my first mistake and I’m not about to repeat it.
Yet her heart was not made of stone and she was constitutionally incapable of ignoring someone in trouble? She tossed the paper aside and got up.
“For goodness sake, child, take them out and put them in another machine. That’s all you have to do. This one’s given up the ghost. Here, I’ll help you unload it.”
Not until she had pulled several wet garments from the machine — dungarees and T-shirts mostly — did she notice something odd. With a violent shudder, she dropped what she was holding. It was spattered with bloodstains.
She looked sharply into the girl’s face and found it still as remote as the dark side of the moon. In a faint voice she said, “Put them in another machine,” adding, almost automatically, “you’d better use more detergent.”
Estelle would have fled from the place at once had her own laundry not been thrashing away inside another machine. As it was, she went to the door and stood looking out into the ill-lit parking lot. How far away the nearest houses looked; they might have been on another planet. Her heart was working like a bad engine, racing, then sputtering as if about to stop, then recovering with ugly throbbing pulsations.
Never in her life had she been so relieved as when she saw a pair of headlights coming toward her across the parking lot, even though the vehicle itself when it came into view was hardly prepossessing — a battered van, its peeling green paint enlivened with wildly-painted flowers, stars, and symbolic designs she couldn’t interpret.
The driver, an even less prepossessing sight, jumped down and strode cockily into the laundromat. He was black-bearded, young, wearing sandals, dungarees, and a blue tunic open upon his hairy bare chest where a silver medallion glittered under the fluorescent lights.
What happened next brought on a seizure of giddiness worse than any Estelle had yet suffered, for the man walked straight up to the girl and whispered something to her. The girl started making hand signals in that language of mutes which had always fascinated Estelle but which now merely sharpened her anxiety.
The man turned and looked at Estelle.
When he came toward her, she backed against the plate-glass window, one hand sliding up to her throat. He smiled as he approached, raising his hand in what was obviously some sort of occult gesture of greeting.
“I am Dominus,” he said, as if confirming something he assumed Estelle already knew.
Her eyes flitted toward the machine, knowing it hadn’t completed its cycle. She tried to appear unperturbed.
“Sorry about the pictures.” His voice was as compelling as those wild dark eyes.
“Pictures?”
He laughed. “Pictures she crooked from your bag.”
“Oh. Those pictures. Yes. Well...” Then, refusing to be cowed by a pair of hippies, she straightened her shoulders. “She said you have them.”
He caressed his beard. “The myth of property causes all our hassles.”
“But they’re nothing to you. Didn’t she tell you? They’re all I’ve got left of my little boy. Every picture I had of him. Every likeness.” She tried without success to keep the emotion out of her voice. “Please. May I have them back?”
He shrugged. “Okay by me. But she’s the one. Listen, Estelle — okay if I call you Estelle? — this kid’s got a real bummer of a hang-up. Well, you know that.” He leaned toward her, so close the touch of his beard on her cheek felt like a tiny electrical shock. His tone was archly seductive. “She’s got this weird thing about photographs. Collects ’em. Thousands. Crooks ’em, buys ’em, anything. It’s freaky, Estelle. They’re more real to her than people. You know why?”
She shook her head.
“Because they can’t talk. They’re like her. Mute.”
Estelle remembered the look on the girl’s face in the penny arcade, the anguish, the way her fingers pawed at the photos behind the glass. Sick, sick...
“But if she has so many, what would those few matter?”
“They all matter. Every one of ’em. She feels safe when she’s with ’em.” His hand, dry and warm, and hairy like an animal’s, pressed hers. “Would you swap?”
“Swap?”
“She might do that, you know. You got another photo?”
“Another? No.”
“Aw, come on, Estelle. You must have one of your husband.”
“No.” It was the truth, she didn’t. “Not a one.”
“That’s tough.” He deliberated. “Hey, listen. I’ve got an idea. My camera’s in the van. A picture of you in exchange for the others. Okay?”
His manner was so playful she couldn’t be afraid of him. She even giggled. “Ransom?”
His eyes flickered; he gave her a mock villainous scowl. Guy would never believe all this. “Your pictures are at the farm. We’ll take you back with us.”
“Oh, no. Don’t bother. You can send them.”
He wouldn’t listen to her arguments, and when her laundry was ready he insisted on putting it in the dryer for her. “We’ll have you back here by the time it’s done.”
“But I can’t just go off and leave it. Someone might steal it.”
He gave her a coaxing smile. “Chance it, Estelle. For the pictures.”
When they were ready to go she made one last attempt to assert herself. “I’ll follow in my car. I certainly can’t leave it here.”
“It’ll never get through them back roads, Estelle. Look at the gook on this crate of ours. Up to the windows. Come on, baby, be a sport. Quicker we get started, quicker you’ll be back.”
Insane, to leave her laundry and her car and go off into the night with these weird creatures, and it was awful being shut up in the back of the van on a campstool, no idea where she was, no idea where she was going. She kept telling herself not to worry. They were just kids, really; wild, maybe, and the girl was a bad case, no doubt about that, but nothing actually bad could happen. Not this close to home.
Presently she felt the van lurch off the road; branches scraped the sides.
When they stopped, Dominus turned and spoke to her for the first time since they’d started. “You can get out here, Estelle. It’s a good place to take the picture,” he said.
“Is this the farm?”
“Almost.”
“Can’t we wait till we’re there?”
“Now, do like I say, Estelle.” He got out and opened the side door and reached for her hand.
When she saw that he was holding an honest-to-goodness camera she relaxed somewhat, but they were in the wilderness, not a light to be seen, nothing but underbrush and overhanging trees and croaking frogs. It smelled dank and the ground was oozy like a swamp. She stepped gingerly as he drew her away from the van and deeper into the trees. She began to cry, at first soundlessly, then with bursting, frantic sobs.
“Now, cut that out, Estelle, baby. You want your picture taken blubbering like an idiot? Course not. You stand right there, okay? Right up against that big ole tree.”