The alkali dust stung his bare shoulders and stomach. He began to wriggle his way into the coverall. It was going to be a little baggy in the gut, but better too big than too small, he supposed.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wincing and holding a hand to the side of her face as the wind gusted, driving a sheet of sand at them. “It’s just, spiders, ouug, so bad, I can’t… what kind.”
“You don’t want to know.” He zipped the coverall up the front, then put an arm around her. “Did you leave any thing in the truck.”
“My backpack, but I guess I can do without a change of underwear tonight,” she said, and smiled wanly. “What about your phone.”
He patted his left front jeans pocket through the cover-all. “Don’t leave home without it,”
he said. Something tickled across the back of his neck and be slapped at it madly, thinking of the brown recluses lined up so neatly along the edge of the desk, soldiers in some unknown cause out here in nowhere.
“What’s wrong.”
“I’m just a little freaked. Come on. Let’s go to the movies.”
“Oh,” she said in that prim little no-nonsense voice that just cracked him up. “A date.
Yes, thanks.”
As Tom Bittingsley led Mary, the Carvers, and America’s greatest living novelist (at least in the nov-elist’s opinion) down the alley between The American West and the Desperation Feed and Grain, the wind hooted above them like air blown across the mouth of a pop bottle.
“Don’t use the flashlights,” Ralph said.
“Right,” Billingsley said. “And watch out here. Gar-bage cans, and a pile of old crap.
Lumber, tin cans.”
They skirted around the huddle of cans and the pile of scrap lumber. Mary gasped as Marinville took her arm, at first not sure who it was. When she saw the long, somehow theatrical hair, she attempted to pull free. “Spare me the chivalry. I’m doing fine.”
“I’m not,” he said, holding on. “I don’t see for shit at night anymore. It’s like being blind.” He sounded dif-ferent. Not humble, exactly-she had an idea that John Marinville could no more be humble than some people could sing middle C off a pitch-pipe-but at least human. She let him hold on.
“Do you see any coyotes.” Ralph asked her in a low voice.
She restrained an urge to make a smart come-back-at least he hadn’t called her “ma’am.”
“No. But I can barely see my own hand in front of my face.”
“They’re gone,” David said. He sounded completely sure of himself. “At least for now.”
“How do you know.” Marinville asked.
David shrugged in the gloom. “Just do.”
And Mary thought they could probably trust him on it. That was how crazy things had gotten.
Billingsley led them around the corner. A rickety board fence ran along the backside of the movie theater, leaving a gap of about four feet. The old man walked slowly along this path with his hands held out. The others fol-lowed in single file; there was no room to double up. Mary was just starting to think Billingsley had gotten them down here on some sort of wild-goose chase when he stopped.
“Here we are.”
He bent, and Mary saw him pick something up-a crate, it looked like. He put it on top of another one, then stepped up onto the makeshift platform with a wince. He was standing in front of a dirty frosted-glass window. He put his hands on this, the fingers spread like starfish, and pushed. The window slid up.
“It’s the ladies’,” he said. “Watch out. There’s a little drop.”
He turned around and slid through, looking like a large, wrinkled boy entering the Over—the-Hill Gang’s club-house. David followed, then his father. Johnny Marinville went next, first almost falling off the crate platform as he turned around. He really was close to blind in the dark, she thought, and reminded herself never to ride in a car this man was driving. And a motorcycle. Had he really crossed the country on a motorcycle. If so, God must love him a lot more than she ever would.
She grabbed him by the back of the belt and steadied him. “Thanks,” he said, and this time he did sound humble. Then he was wriggling through the window, puffing and grunting, his long hair hanging in his face.
Mary took one quick look around, and for a moment she heard ghost-voices in the wind.
Didn’t you see it.
See what.
On that sign. That speed-limit sign.
What about it.
There was a dead cat on it.
Now, standing on the crate, she thought: The people who said those things really are ghosts, because they ’re dead. Me as much as him-certainly the Mary Jackson who left on this trip is gone. The person back here behind this old movie house, she’s someone new.
She passed her gun and flashlight through the window to the hands held up to take them, then turned around and slid easily over the sill and into the ladies”.
Ralph caught her around the hips and eased her down. David was shining his flashlight around, holding one hand over the top of the lens in a kind of hood. The place had a smell that made her wrinkle her nose-damp, mildew, booze. There was a carton filled with empty liquor bottles in one corner. In one of the toilet-stalls there were two large plastic bins filled with beer-cans. These had been placed over a hole where, once upon a time, she supposed, there had been an actual toilet. Around the time James Dean died, from the look of the place, she thought. She realized she could use a toilet herself, and that no matter how the place smelled, she was hungry, as well. Why not. She hadn’t had anything to eat for almost eight hours. She felt guilty about being hungry when Peter would never eat again, but she supposed the feeling would pass. That was the hell of it, when you thought it over. That was the exact hell of it.
“Holy shit,” Marinville said, pulling his own flashlight out of his shirt and shining it into the beer-can repository. “You and your friends must party hearty, Thomas.”
“We clean the whole place out once a month,” Bill-ingsley said, sounding defensive.
“Not like the kids that used to run wild upstairs until the old fire escape finally fell down last winter. We don’t pee in the corners, and we don’t use drugs, either.”
Marinville considered the carton of liquor empties. “On top of all that J. W. Dant, a few drugs and you’d probably explode.”
“Where do you pee, if you don’t mind me asking.” Mary said. “Because I could use a little relief in that direction.”
“There’s a Port-A-Potty across the hail in the men’s. The kind they have in sickrooms.
We keep that clean, too.” He gave Marinville a complex look, equal parts truculence and timidity. Mary supposed that Marinville was preparing to tee off on Billingsley. She had an idea Billingsley felt it coming, too. And why. Because guys like Marinville needed to establish a pecking order, and the veterinarian was clearly the most peckable person in attendance.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Might I borrow your flashlight Johnny.”
She held out her hand. He looked at it dubiously, then handed it over. She thanked him and headed for the door “Whoa-neat!” David said softly, and that stopped her The boy had focused his flashlight on one of the few sections of wall where the tiles were still mostly intact On it someone had drawn a gloriously rococo fish in various Magic Marker colors. It was the sort of flippy tailed, half-mythological beast that one sometimes found disporting atop the waveiets of very old sea-maps. Yet there was nothing fearsome or sea-monsterish about the fellow swimming on the wall above the broken Towl Master dispenser; with its blue Betty Boop eyes and red gills and yellow dorsal fin, there was something sweet and exuberant about it-here in the fetid, booze-smelling dark, the fish was almost miraculous.
Only one tile had fallen out of the drawing, eradicating the lower half of the tail.
“Mr. Billingsley. did you-”
“Yes, son, yes,” he said, sounding both defiant and embarrassed. “I drew it.” He looked at Marinville. “I was probably drunk at the time.”