"Wait," Virginia said as the two figures disappeared through the door. "Earl! I want to hear what happened."
"No you don't," Gyer told her.
"Oh yes she does," said Sadie very quietly, studying the look on Virginia's face. "You'd really like to know, wouldn't you, Ginnie?"
For a moment pregnant with possibilities, Virginia looked away from the outside door and stared straight through into Room Eight, her eyes seeming to rest on Sadie. The look was so direct it could almost have been one of recognition. The ice in her glass tinkled. She frowned.
"What's wrong?" Gyer asked her.
Virginia shook her head.
"I asked you what was wrong," Gyer insisted.
Virginia put down her glass on the bedside table. After a moment she said very simply: "There's somebody here, John."
"What do you mean?"
"There's somebody in the room with us. I heard voices before. Raised voices."
"Next door," Gyer said.
"No, from Earl's room.
"It's empty. It must have been next door."
Virginia was not to be silenced with logic. "I heard voices, I tell you. And I saw something at the end of the bed. Something in the air."
"Oh my Jesus," said Sadie, under her breath. "The goddamn woman's psychic."
Buck stood up. He was naked now but for his shorts. He wandered over to the interconnecting door to look at Virginia with new appreciation.
"Are you sure?" he said.
"Hush," Sadie told him, moving out of Virginia's line of vision. She said she could see us.
"You're not well, Virginia," Gyer was saying in the next room. "It's those pills he fed you..
"No," Virginia replied, her voice rising. "When will you stop talking about the pills? They were just to calm me down, help me sleep."
She certainly wasn't calm now, thought Buck. He liked the way she trembled as she tried to hold back her tears. She looked in need of some of the old jazz, did poor Virginia. Now that would help her sleep.
"I tell you I can see things," she was telling her husband.
"That I can't?" Gyer replied incredulously. "Is that what you're saying? That you can see visions the rest of us are blind to?"
"I'm not proud of it, damn you," she yelled at him, incensed by this inversion.
"Come away, Buck," Sadie said. "We're upsetting her. She knows we're here."
"So what?" Buck responded. "Her prick of a husband doesn't believe her. Look at him. He thinks she's crazy."
"Well we'll make her crazy if we parade around," said Sadie. "At least let's keep our voices down, huh?"
Buck looked around at Sadie and offered up a dirty rag of a smile. "Want to make it worth my while?" he said sleazily. "I'll keep out of the way if you and me can have some fun."
Sadie hesitated a moment before replying. It was probably perverse to reject Buck's advances. The man was an emotional infant and always had been. Sex was one of the few ways he could express himself. "All right, Buck," she said, "just let me freshen up and fix my hair."
An uneasy truce had apparently been declared in Room Seven.
"I'm going to take a shower, Virginia," Gyer said. "I suggest you lie down and stop making a fool of yourself. You go talking like that in front of people and you'll jeopardize the crusade, you hear me?"
Virginia looked at her husband with clearer sight than she'd ever enjoyed before. "Oh yes," she said, without a trace of feeling in her voice, "I hear you."
He seemed satisfied. He slipped off his jacket and went into the bathroom, taking his Bible with him. She heard the door lock, and then exhaled a long, queasy sigh. There would be recriminations aplenty for the exchange they'd just had. He would squeeze every last drop of contrition from her in the days to come. She glanced around at the interconnecting door. There was no longer any sign of those shadows in the air; not the least whisper of lost voices. Perhaps, just perhaps, she had imagined it. She opened her bag and rummaged for the bottles of pills hidden there. One eye on the bathroom door, she selected a cocktail of three varieties and downed them with a gulp of ice water. In fact, the ice in the jug had long since melted. The water she drank down was tepid, like the rain that fell relentlessly outside. By morning, perhaps the whole world would have been washed away. If it had, she mused, she wouldn't grieve.
"I asked you not to mention the killing," Earl told Laura May. "Mrs. Gyer can't take that kind of talk."
"People are getting killed all the time," Laura May replied, unfazed. "Can't go around with her head in a bucket."
Earl said nothing. They had just gotten to the end of the walkway. The return sprint across the lot to the other building was ahead. Laura May turned to face him. She was several inches' the shorter of the two. Her eyes, turned up to his, were large and luminous. Angry as he was, he couldn't help but notice how full her mouth was, how her lips glistened.
"I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to get you into trouble."
"Sure I know. I'm lust edgy."
"It's the heat," she returned. "Like I said, puts thoughts into people's heads. You know." Her look wavered for a moment; a hint of uncertainty crossed her face. Earl could feel the back of his neck tingle. This was his cue, wasn't it? She'd offered it unequivocally. But the words failed him. Finally, it was she who said: "Do you have to go back there right now?"
He swallowed; his throat was dry. "Don't see why," he said. "I mean, I don't want to get between them when they're having words with each other."
"Bad blood?" she asked.
"I think so. I'm best leaving them to sort it out in peace. They don't want me."
Laura May looked down from Earl's face. "Well I do," she breathed, the words scarcely audible above the thump of the rain.
He put a cautious hand to her face and touched the down of her cheek. She trembled, ever so slightly. Then he bent his head to kiss her. She let him brush her lips with his.
"Why don't we go to my room?" she said against his mouth. "I don't like it out here."
"What about your Papa?"
"He'll be dead drunk, by now. It's the same routine every night. Just take it quietly. He'll never know."
Earl wasn't very happy with this game plan. It was more than his job was worth to be found in bed with Laura May. He was a married man, even if he hadn't seen Barbara in three months. Laura May sensed his trepidation.
"Don't come if you don't want to," she said.
"It's not that," he replied.
As he looked down at her she licked her lips. It was a completely unconscious motion, he felt sure, but it was enough to decide him. In a sense, though he couldn't know it at the time, all that lay ahead-the farce, the bloodletting, the inevitable tragedy-pivoted on Laura May wetting her lower lip with such casual sensuality. "Ah shit," he said, "you're too much, you know that?"
He bent to her and kissed her again, while somewhere over toward Skellytown the clouds gave out a loud roll of thunder, like a circus drummer before some particularly elaborate acrobatics.
IN Room Seven Virginia was having bad dreams. The pills had not secured her a safe harbor in sleep. Instead she'd been pitched into a howling tempest. In her dreams she was clinging to a crippled tree-a pitiful anchor in such a maelstrom-while the wind threw cattle and automobiles into the air, sucking half the world up into the pitch black clouds that boiled above her head. Just as she thought she must die here, utterly alone, she saw two figures a few yards from her, appearing and disappearing in the blinding veils of dust the wind was stirring up. She couldn't see their faces, so she called to them.