His smile faded a little and he turned to look at them: Audrey, standing on the edge of the rug in her gawky—sexy dress; David, squatting by the TV; Steve and Cyn-thia, now sitting on the arms of an overstuffed easy chair that looked like it might also have come from the old Circle Ranch; Mary, standing by the screen and looking schoolteacherly with her arms folded under her breasts; Tom Billingsley, now inspecting the open upper cabinet of the bar, with his hands tightly clasped behind his back; Ralph in the wing-chair at the edge of the light, with his left eye now puffed almost completely shut. The Collie Entragian Survival Society, all present and accounted for What a crew, Johnny thought. Manhattan Transfer in the desert.
“There’s another reason we have to talk,” he said. He glanced at their shadows bobbing on the curtainless movie screen. For a moment they all looked to him like the shadows of giant birds. He thought of Entragian, telling him buzzards farted, they were the only birds that did. Of Entragian saying Oh shit, we’re all beyond why you know that. Johnny thought that might well be the scariest thing anyone had said to him in his whole life Mostly because it rang true.
Johnny nodded slowly, as if in agreement with some interior speaker, then went on.
“I’ve seen some extraordinary things in my life, but I’ve never had what I could in any way characterize as a supernatural experience. Until-maybe-today. And what scares me the most about it is that the experience may be ongoing. I don’t know. All I can say for sure is that things have happened to me in the last few hours that I can explain.”
“What are you talking about.” Audrey sounded close to tears. “Isn’t what’s happening bad enough without turning it into some kind of a… a campfire story.”
“Yes,” Johnny said, speaking in a low, compassionate voice that he hardly recognized.
“But that doesn’t change things.”
“I listen and talk better when I’m not starving to death, Mary remarked. “I don’t suppose there’s anything to eat in this place, is there.”
Tom Billingsley shuffled his feet and looked embar rassed. “Well, no, not a whole lot, ma’am. Mostly we came here in the evenings to drink and talk over the old days.”
She sighed. “That’s what I thought.”
He pointed vaguely across toward the stage-right en trance. “Marty Ives brought in a little bag of somethin a r couple of nights ago. Probably sardines. Marty loves sar-dines and crackers.”
“Yuck,” Mary said, but she looked interested almost in spite of herself. Johnny supposed that in another two or three hours even anchovies would look good to her.
“I’ll take a peek, maybe he brought in something else,” Billingsley said. He didn’t sound hopeful.
David got up. “I’ll do it, if you want.”
Billingsley shrugged. He was looking at Audrey again and seemed to have lost interest in Marty Ives’s sardines. “There’s a light-switch to the left just as you get offstage. Straight ahead you’ll see some shelves. Anything people brought to eat, they most generally put it on those. You might find some Oreos, too.”
“You guys might’ve drunk a tad too much, but at least you kept the minimum nutrition needs in mind,” Johnny said. “I like that.” The vet gave him a glance, shrugged, and went back to Audrey Wyler’s legs. She seemed not to notice his interest in them. Or to care.
David started across the stage, then went back and picked up the.45. He glanced at his father, but Ralph was staring vacantly out into the house again, at red plush seats which faded back into the gloom. The boy put the gun carefully into the pocket of his jeans so that only the handle stuck out, then started offstage. As he passed Billingsley he said, “Is there running water.”
“This is the desert, son. When a building goes vacant, they turn the water off.”
“Crud. I’ve still got soap all over me. It itches.”
He left them, crossed the stage, and leaned into the opening over there. A moment later the light came on. Johnny relaxed slightly-only realizing as he did that part of his mind had expected something to jump the boy—and realized Billingsley was looking at him.
“What that kid did back there-the way he got out of that cell-that was impossible,”
Billingsley said.
“Then we must still be back there, locked up,” Johnny said. He thought he sounded all right-pretty much like himself-but what the old veterinarian was saying had already occurred to him. Even a phrase to describe it had occurred to him-unobtrusive miracles.
He would have written it down in his notebook, if he hadn’t dropped it beside Highway 50. “Is that what you think.”
“No, we’re here, and we saw him do what he did,” Billingsley said. “Greased himself up with soap and squeezed out through the bars like a watermelon seed.
Looked like it made sense, didn’t it. But I tell you, friend not even Houdini could have done it that way. Because of the head. He shoulda stuck at the head, but he didn’t.” He looked them over, one by one, finishing with Ralph Ralph was looking at Billingsley now instead of at the seats, but Johnny wasn’t sure he understood what the old guy was saying. And maybe that was for the best.
“What are you driving at.” Mary asked.
“I’m not sure,” Billingsley replied. “But I think we d do well to kind of gather ‘round young Master Carver He hesitated, then added: “The oldtimers say that any campfire does on a cold night.”
It picked the dead coyote up and examined it. “Soma dies; pneuma departs; only sarx remains,” it said in a voice that was a paradox: both sonorous and entirely without tone.
“So it has always been; so shall it always be; life sucks, then you die.”
It carried the animal downstairs, paws and shattered head dangling, body swaying like a bloody fur stole. The creature holding it stood for a moment inside the main doors of the Municipal Building, looking out into the blowy dark, listening to the wind. “So cah set!”
it exclaimed, then turned away and took the animal into the Town Office. It looked at the coathooks to the right of the door and saw immediately that the girl-Pie, to her brother—had been taken down and wrapped in a drape.
Its pale face twisted in anger as it looked at the child s covered form.
“Took her down!” it told the dead coyote in its arms “Rotten boy took her down! Stupid, troublemaking boy’ Yes. Feckless boy. Rude boy. Foolish boy. In some ways that last was the best, wasn’t it.
The truest. Foolish prayboy trying to make at least some part of it come right as if any part of a thing like this ever could be, as if death were an obscenity that could be scrubbed off life’s wall by a strong arm. As if the closed book could be reopened and read again, with a different ending.
Yet its anger was twisted through with fear, like a yellow stitch through red cloth, because the boy was not giving up, and so the rest of them were not giving up. They should not have dared to run from (Entragian her it them) even if their cell doors had been standing wide open. Yet they had. Because of the boy, the wretched over-blown prideful praying boy, who had had the insolence to take down his little cunt of a sister and try to give her something approximating a decent burial—A kind of dull warmth on its fingers and palms. It looked down and saw that it had plunged Ellen’s hands into the coyote’s belly all the way to the wrists.
It had intended to hang the coyote on one of the hooks, simply because that was what it had done with some of the others, but now another idea occurred. It carried the coyote across to the green bundle on the floor, knelt, and pulled the drape open. It looked down with a silent snarling mouth at the dead girl who had grown inside this present body.
That he should have covered her!
It pulled Ellen’s hands, now dressed in lukewarm blood-gloves, out of the coyote and laid the animal down on top of Kirsten. It opened the coyote’s jaws and placed them around the child’s neck. There was something both grisly and fantastic about this tableau de Ia mort; it was like a woodcut illustration from a black fairy-tale.