“Well,” she said, “the tribes have to be sure I’m really me and not some imposter, so that’ll take a few days, and then I’ll move out. I think it’s very exciting, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh,” he said.
She said, “Maybe you could show me around, when I move out there. Would you like to do that?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. Then he imagined all those creeps from high school who used to put him down all the time, and all those girls from high school who wouldn’t go to the movies with him, and he saw himself walking around the reservation, right in front of them all, with Little Feather Redcorn walking right next to him, smiling at him and talking to him. In the summer, maybe she’d wear a bikini.
“You’re smiling,” she said.
Oops. “Well,” he said, noticing that his hands were wet on the steering wheel, “I’m happy for you. Coming home and all.”
“Little Feather,” she said, her voice low. “You can say it, Benny, come on.”
He watched the road, as though it might at any second do something unexpected. He inhaled. “Little Feather,” he said.
“Hi, Benny,” said that low and honeyed voice.
He took another breath. “Hi, Little Feather,” he said.
“Now we’re friends,” she told him, “and here’s Whispering Pines. Just drive in and bear to the right. I’ll get money out of my wallet and—”
“You don’t have to pay me anything,” he said. “Not now that we’re friends.” He inhaled. “Little Feather,” he said.
“Why, thank you, Benny,” she said. “Bear to the right here. That’s where I live, down there. You see the motor home?”
“Is that yours?” he asked.
“Yes, I drove here in it from Nevada, all by myself,” she said. “Park here, right in front of it.”
He stopped the Subaru but left the engine running. “That’s a long way to drive, all by yourself,” he said.
“It got scary sometimes,” she admitted, “to be completely on my own like that, but I thought, I’m going home, going to my people, and that made it better.”
Gee, Benny thought, if only we could really be friends with Little Feather, if only Uncle Roger and my almost-uncle Frank could talk with her and see how really nice she is. Except, it wasn’t really her they wanted to keep out, they wanted to keep out anybody who could ask questions about how they were running the casino.
“Isn’t it funny,” she said, not opening her door, “how we got along right from the beginning? Maybe it’s because we’re almost from the same tribe, but here I am, and I don’t even really know you, and I’m telling you all about myself.”
“I like to hear you talk,” he said, which he knew was true and thought might be clever.
“I tell you what, Benny,” she said, “if you won’t take any money because we’re friends, at least come in so I can show you where I live. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“Well, uh . . .” he said, wondering what was best to do, thinking he’d already had more experiences today than he could entirely deal with and it might be best just to go home and lie down for a while.
She rested a hand on his forearm, with a touch like warm electricity. It tingled all the way up to his ear. Smiling at him, leaning closer to him so that a faint but powerful musk crept into his nostrils and his skull and his brain, she said, “Wouldn’t you like to come in, Benny?”
He swallowed. He inhaled. He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I would like to come in.”
26
East,” Tiny said.
Dortmunder had been half-asleep. Now he turned to look at Tiny, who was spread across the Jeep’s backseat, and said, “Tiny? You say something?”
“I said ‘East,’” Tiny said.
Dortmunder looked around at the night. It had already been full dark when they’d left the Tea Cosy after dinner for the four-hour drive south, and now it was nearly one in the morning and they’d just crossed the Triborough Bridge onto Grand Central Parkway, bypassing Manhattan, juking over from the Bronx to Queens. Late on a Friday night, but there were still a lot of drivers in passenger cars all around them, most of them likely to be drunk.
“East,” Dortmunder commented. “You mean we’re driving east,” he decided.
“Southeast,” Tiny said.
Kelp, at the wheel, had just turned off onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Dortmunder nodded. “You mean now we’re going southeast,” he said.
“That’s what the car says,” Tiny told him.
Dortmunder twisted around again to get a full double-O of Tiny back there. “Whadaya mean, ‘That’s what the car says’?”
Tiny pointed to where Dortmunder’s halo would be, if he had a halo, and said, “Right there.”
So Dortmunder faced front again, put his head way back, and saw, tucked under the Jeep roof, above the windshield, a kind of black box. It had bluish white numbers and letters on the side facing the rear seat, glowing in the dark:
S E 41
As Dortmunder looked, the S E changed to S. He looked out at the road, and it was curving to the right. “So now it’s south,” he said.
“You got it,” Tiny told him. “Comin down, that’s what I been doin back here. Watchin the letters. A whole lotta S. A little N there when Kelp got confused on the Sprain.”
“The signage stunk,” Kelp said.
Dortmunder looked at Kelp’s profile, gleaming like a Halloween mask in the dashboard lights. “Signage,” he said. “Is that a word?”
“Not for those pitiful markers they had back there,” Kelp said.
Dortmunder decided to go back to conversation number one, and said to Tiny, “And the numbers are the temperature, right? Outside the car.”
“You got it again,” Tiny told him.
Forgetting about signage, Dortmunder said to Kelp, “Did you know about that?”
“Did I know about what?”
“Southwest,” Tiny said.
“The car here,” Dortmunder explained to Kelp, “it tells you which way you’re going, south, east, whatever, and what the temperature is outside. It’s up there.”
Kelp looked up there.
“Back on the road!” Dortmunder yelled.
Kelp steered around the truck he’d been going to smash into and said, “That’s not bad, is it? The temperature outside, and which way you’re going.”
“Very useful,” Dortmunder suggested.
“A car like this,” Kelp said, “you could take this across deserts, jungles, trackless wastes.”
“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said. “How many of these things do you suppose have been across deserts and jungles and trackless wastes?”
“Oh, two or three,” Kelp said, and took the exit, and Tiny said, “South.”
They were coming at the cemeteries from a different highway this time, so they did get a little lost, despite everything the car could do to help. Still, eventually they found Sunnyside Street, and drove slowly down it in the darkness until they reached the broken part of the fence, where Kelp jounced them up over the curb.
Dortmunder found it was a lot easier to move the fence out of the way when Tiny was the other guy doing the lifting. Kelp drove through, they put the fence back to position one, and they walked along behind the Jeep, which from the rear still looked something like a Jeep. “It’s just a little ways along here,” Dortmunder said, moving his lips.
And there it was. Kelp angled the Jeep off the path, and its lights shone on the gravestone that was now, through no fault of its own, a liar.
Dortmunder said, “What we got to find is another one from that year or close to it.”