This was the first time he’d looked at it in sunlight. It was rectangular, but bumpy and wavy on its surfaces, and even when he held it up to the sun he couldn’t see anything in its cloudy depths. He ran a finger around its narrow side—and felt a seam. He peered at the side surfaces and saw that a tiny straight crack went all the way around, dividing the brick into two equal halves.
The two guys that had robbed him so long ago last night had taken his Swiss army knife, so he worked a fingernail into the groove and twisted, and only managed to tear off a strip of his nail. By holding the glass thing between his palms, though, with his fingers gripped tightly over the edges, he was able to pry hard enough to feel the two glass sections move against each other, and to be sure that the thing could be opened.
He pressed it firmly together again and took off his backpack to tuck the brick safely down among his tumbled clothes. He pulled the flap down over it all and then, since the plastic buckles had been broken last night, carefully tied the straps tight before putting the backpack on again. Maybe people wouldn’t be able to sense the glass thing so easily now.
Like a gun, he thought dully, or a grenade or blasting caps or something. It’s like they had a gun in the house and never told their kid even what a gun is. It’s their own fault I somehow accidentally got them killed by playing with it.
If I open it—what? A devil might come out. A devil might actually come out. It wouldn’t matter whether or not I believe in devils, or that my friends and the teachers in school don’t. People in 1900 didn’t think that radium could hurt you, just carrying a chip of it in your pocket like a lucky rock, and then one day their legs fell off and they died of cancer. Not believing something is no help if you turn out to be wrong.
He heard the short byoop of a motorcycle cop’s siren and looked up nervously—but the cop was stopping way out in the intersection, and, as Kootie watched, he climbed off the blue-flashing bike and put down the kickstand and began directing traffic with broad slow gestures. The traffic signals had gone completely out sometime during the last few minutes, weren’t even flashing red; and then even when the policeman waved for the southbound lanes to move forward, the cars and trucks and buses stayed backed up for another several minutes because nearly every driver had stalled and had to start up again.
As Kootie crossed Beverly, the sound of grinding starter motors was echoing among the lanes behind him like power saws.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Then you keep moving around, I suppose?” said Alice.
“Exactly so,” said the Hatter: “as the things get used up.”
“But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ash.
“Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupted…
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
ONE of them had finally been for real.
It had been two hours since the Greyhound bus had pulled out of the dawn-streaked yard of the Albuquerque station, subsequently finding the 1-40 highway and cranking its way up through the dry rock Zuni Mountains, downshifting to follow the twisting highway among the ancient lava beds, and booming down the western slope to roar right through Gallup without stopping; but when the bus finally swung off the 1-40 at the little town of Houck, just over the border into Arizona, Angelica Anthem Elizalde simply kept her seat while most of the other passengers shuffled past her down the aisle to catch some fresh morning air and maybe a quick cup of coffee during the fifteen-minute stop.
She looked out her window. Though it was now eight-thirty, the, bus was still casting a yards-long shadow, and the shadow pointed west. She shivered, but tucked her ladies’ magazine into the pocket of the seat in front of her.
She had hoped to distract herself with its colorful pages, but had run aground on an almost hysterically cheerful article about how to cook squash, with a sidebar that addressed “Twelve Important Squash Questions”; and then she had been forced out of the pages again by a multiple-choice “Creativity Test,” which gave high marks to the hypothetical housewife who, confronted with two mismatched socks after all the laundry had been put away, elected to (C) make hand puppets of them rather than (A) throw them away or (B) use them for dusting.
None of the listed answers had been anything like “burn them,” “eat them,” “bury them in the backyard,” or “save them in case one night you answer the door to a stranger with bare, mismatched feet.”
Elizalde managed a tight smile. She flexed her hands and wondered what work she would find to do in Los Angeles. Typist, again? Waitress, again? Panhandler, bag lady, prostitute, a patient in one of the county mental hospitals in which she’d done her residency—
—a felon locked up in the Sybil Brand Institute for Women—
She quickly fetched up the magazine out of the seat pocket and stared hard at a photograph of some happy family having fun around a swing set (—probably all of them models, really, who had never seen each other before lining up there for the picture—) and she thought again about turning back. Get off the bus at Flagstaff, she told herself, and catch the 474 bus, take it all the way back to Oklahoma City, be there by eight-thirty tonight. Go back to the big truck stop under the Petro water tower, tell the manager at the Iron Skillet that you were too sick to call in sick when you failed to show up for the waitress shift last night.
Get back on that old heartland merry-go-round.
For nearly two years she had been traveling, far from Los Angeles, working in restaurants and bars and small offices, along the Erie Canal from the Appalachians to Buffalo, and up and down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cairo, and, most recently, along the Canadian River in Oklahoma. She’d celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday with half a dozen of the Iron Skillet waitresses in the bar at O’Connell’s in Norman, twenty minutes south of Oklahoma City.
At least L.A. would be fairly warm even now, in October, four days before Halloween. The Mexican street vendors in the Boyle Heights area might already be selling El Dia de los Muertos candy, the white stylized skulls and skeletons—
(—Shut up!—)
Again she forced herself to stare at the family in the magazine photo, and she tried to believe that it really was a family, that they were genuinely enjoying some—
(—long-lost—)
(—Shut up!—)
weekend in the backyard, oblivious of this photographer—
…It didn’t work. The adults and kids in the photograph just looked like models, strangers to each other.
Elizalde remembered driving the L.A. Freeways at night, snatching an occasional glance to the side at some yellow-lit kitchen window in a passing apartment building, and always for one moment desperately envying the lives of whatever people lived there. She had always imagined hammered-copper roosters on the kitchen wall, a TV in the next room with “Cheers” getting innocent laughs, children sitting cross-legged on the carpet—