She hurried across the hail. What she saw when she opened the men’s-room door made her laugh even harder. Set up like some comic-opera throne in the center of the floor was a portable toilet with a canvas bag suspended below the seat in a steel frame. On the wall across from it was another Magic Marker drawing, obviously from the same hand which had created the fish. This one was a horse at full gallop. There was orange smoke jetting from its nostrils and a baleful rose-madder glint in its eyes. It appeared to be headed out into an expanse of prairie somewhere east of the sun and west of the washbasins. None Gf the tiles had fallen out of this wall, but most had buckled, giving the stallion a warped and dreamish look.
Outside, the wind howled. As Mary unsnapped her pants and sat down on the cold toilet seat, she suddenly thought of how Peter sometimes put his hand up to his mouth when he laughed-his thumb touching one corner, his first finger touching the other, as if laughter somehow made him vulnerable-and all at once, with no break at all, at least none she could detect, she was crying. How stupid all this was, to be a widow at thirty-five, to be a fugitive in a town full of dead people, to be sitting in the men’s room of an abandoned movie theater on a canvas Port-A-Potty, peeing and crying at the same time, pissing and moaning, you might say, and looking at a dim beast on a wall so warped that it seemed to be running under-water, how stupid to be so frightened, and to have grief all but stolen away by her mind’s brute determination to sur-vive at any cost… as if Peter had never meant anything anyway, as if he had just been a footnote.
How stupid to still feel so hungry… but she was.
“Why is this happening. Why does it have to be me.” she whispered, and put her face into her hands.
If either Steve or Cynthia had had a gun, they probably would have shot her.
They were passing Bud’s Suds (the neon sign in the window read ENJOY OUR sLOTSPITALITY) when the door of the next business up-the laundrymat-opened and a woman sprang out. Steve, seeing only a dark shape, drew back the tire iron to hit her.
“No!” Cynthia said, grabbing at his wrist and holding it. “Don’t do that!”
The woman-she had a lot of dark hair and very white skin, but that was all Cynthia could tell at first-grabbed Steve by the shoulders and shoved her face up into his. Cynthia didn’t think the laundrymat woman ever saw the upraised tire iron at all. She’s gonna ask him if he’s found Jeeeesus, Cynthia thought. It’s never Jesus when they grab you like that, it’s always Jeeeesus.
But of course that was not what she said.
“We have to get out.” Her voice was low, hoarse. “Right now.” She snatched a glance over her shoulder, flicked a look at Cynthia, then seemed to dismiss her entirely as she focussed on Steve again. Cynthia had seen this before and wasn’t offended by it. When it got to be crunch-time, a certain kind of woman could only see the guy. Sometimes it was the way they had been raised; more often it seemed actually hard-wired into their cun-ning little Barbie Doll circuits.
Cynthia was getting a better look at her now, in spite of the dark and the blowing dust.
An older woman (thirty, at least), intelligent-looking, not unsexy. Long legs poking out of a short dress that looked somehow gawky, as if the chick inside it wasn’t accustomed to wearing dresses Yet she was far from clumsy, judging from the way she moved with Steve when he moved, as if they were danc ing. “Do you have a car.” she rapped.
“That’s no good,” Steve said. “The road out of town is blocked.”
“Blocked. Blocked how.”
“A couple of house trailers,” he said.
“Where.”
“Near the mining company,” Cynthia said, “but that s not the only problem. There are a lot of dead people-”
“Tell me about it,” she said, and laughed shrilly “Collie’s gone nuts. I saw him kill half a dozen myself He drove after them in his cruiser and shot them down in the street. Like they were cattle and Main Street was the killing-floor.” She was still holding onto Steve, shaking him as she spoke, as if scolding him, but her eyes were everywhere. “We have to get off the street. If he catches us… come in here. It’s safe. I’ve been in here since yesterday forenoon. He came in once. I hid under the desk in the office. I thought he’d follow the smell of my per fume and find me… come around the desk and find me but he didn’t. Maybe he had a stuffy nose!”
She began to laugh hysterically, then abruptly slapped her own face to make herself stop.
It was funny, in a shocking way; the sort of thing the characters in old Warner Brothers cartoons sometimes did.
Cynthia shook her head. “Not the laundrymat. The movie theater. There are other people there.”
“I saw his shadow,” the woman said. She was still hold ing Steve by the shoulders and her face was still turned confidentially up to his, as if she thought he was Hum phrey Bogart and she was Ingrid Bergman and there was a soft filter on the camera. “I saw his shadow, it fell across the desk and I was sure… but he didn’t, and I think we 11 be safe in the office while we think about what to do next-”
Cynthia reached out, took the woman’s chin in her hand, and turned it toward her.
“What are you doing.” the dark-haired woman asked angrily. “Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing.
“Getting your attention, I hope.”
Cynthia let go of the woman’s face, and be damned if she didn’t immediately turn back to Steve, every bit as brainless as a flower turning on its stalk to follow the sun, and resume her speed-rap.
“I was under the desk… and… and… we have to listen, we have to…
Cynthia reached out again, grasped the woman’s lower face again, turned it back in her direction again.
“Hon, read my lips. The theater. There are other people there.”
The woman looked at her, frowning as if she were trying to get the sense of this. Then she looked past Cyn-thia’s shoulder at the chain-hung marquee of The Ameri-can West.
“The old movieshow.”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure. I tried the door last night, after it got dark. It’s locked.”
“We’re supposed to go around to the back,” Steve said. “I have a friend, that’s where he told me to go.”
“How’d he do that.” the dark-haired woman asked sus-piciously, but when Steve started walking in that direc-tion, she went along. Cynthia fell in next to her, walking on the outside. “How could he do that.”
“Cellular phone,” Steve said.
“They don’t work very well around here as a rule,” the dark-haired woman said. “Too many mineral deposits.”
They walked under the theater’s marquee (a tumble-weed caught in an angle between the glassed-in ticket—booth and the lefthand door rattled like a maraca) and stopped on the far side. “There’s the alley,” Cynthia said. She started forward but the woman stayed where she was, frowning from Steve to Cynthia and then back to Steve again.
“What friend, what other people.” she asked. “How did they get here. How come that fuck Collie didn’t kill them.”
“Let’s save all that for later.” Steve took her ann.
She resisted his tug, and when she spoke this time, there was a catch in her voice.
“You’re taking me to him, aren’t you.”
“Lady, we don’t even know who you’re talking about Cynthia said. “Just for Christ’s sake will you come on!
“I hear a motor,” Steve said. His head was cocked to one side. “Coming from the south, I think. Coming in this direction for sure.”
The woman’s eyes widened. “Him,” she whispered.
“Him.” She looked over her shoulder, as if longing for the safety of the laundrymat, and then made her decision and bolted down the alley. By the time they got to the board fence running along the back of the theater, Cynthia and Steve were hurrying just to keep up.
“Are you sure… ” the woman began, and then a flashlight flicked, once, from farther down the building They were in single-file, Steve between the women, the one from the laundrymat ahead of him. He took her hand (very cold) in his right and reached back to Cynthia s (marginally warmer) with his left. The dark-haired woman led them slowly down the path. The flashlight blinked on again, this time pointed down at two stacked crates.