Aunt Gen, in pajamas and slippers, stood in her backyard. She had found the goodbye roses.
Micky ran to her.
While untying the knot in a length of green ribbon, freeing one of the white blooms, Geneva had been pricked repeatedly by brambles. Her hands were liberally spotted with blood. She appeared to be oblivious of her wounds, however, and the glaze on her face was inspired not by thorns, but by the farewell message that she, too, had read in the roses.
When their eyes met, they had to look at once away, Aunt Gen to the perfect rose, Micky to the section of fallen fence between this property and the next, then to the slip of discarded ribbon, green on the green grass, and finally to her own palsied hands.
She was able to speak sooner than she had expected: “What was the name of that town?”
“What town?” Aunt Gen asked.
“In Idaho. Where the guy claimed to have been healed by aliens.”
“Nun’s Lake,” Aunt Gen replied without hesitation. “Leilani said he was up there in Nun’s Lake, Idaho.”
Chapter 49
Hula girls, hula girls, hips rotating, swished their skirts of polyester grass. Ever smiling, black eyes shining, arms extended in perpetual invitation, they would dance their hip joints to dust if bone were the issue; however, their femurs and acetabulums were made not of bone, but of extremely durable, high-impact plastic.
The word acetabulum appealed to Leilani not merely because of its magical resonance, but because it didn’t sound like what it was. You might expect acetabulum to be a substance that old Sinsemilla smoked, sniffed, popped in pill form, shot into her veins with huge veterinary hypodermic needles, baked into brownies and ate by the dozen, or ingested by more exotic means and through orifices best left unmentioned. The acetabulum was instead the rounded concavity in the innominate bone that formed the hip joint in conjunction with the femur, which sounded like a jungle cat but was another bone. Since Leilani had no intention of becoming a medical doctor, this information was largely useless to her. But her head had long ago been filled with useless information, anyway, which she believed helped to keep out more useful but depressing and scary information that would otherwise preoccupy her.
The dinette table, at which she sat reading a paperback fantasy novel, provided a dance floor to three plastic hula girls that ranged between four and six inches in height. They wore similar skirts, but their tube tops were different colors and patterns. Two had modest breasts, but the third was a busty little wahine with the proportions that Leilani intended to acquire by the age of sixteen, through the power of positive thinking. All three were constructed and weighted in such a fashion that even the most subtle road vibrations passing through the motor home were sufficient to keep them gyrating.
Two more hula girls danced on the small table between the two armchairs in the lounge, another three on the table beside the sofa-bed that faced the chairs. Counter space in the kitchen was at a premium, but ten additional figurines danced there, as well. Still others were performing in the bathroom and bedroom.
Although simple counterweight systems kept many of the dancers moving, others operated on batteries to ensure that when the motor home stopped to refuel or when it dropped anchor for the night, the hula-hula celebration would continue unabated. Sinsemilla believed that these ever-swiveling dolls generated beneficial electromagnetic waves, and that these waves protected their vehicle from collisions, breakdowns, hijackings, and from being sucked into another dimension in an open-highway version of the Bermuda Triangle. She insisted that never fewer than two dancers be in motion in every room at all times.
On the sofabed in the lounge at night, Leilani was occasionally lulled to sleep by the faint rhythmic whisper of hula hips and tiny swirling skirts. But as often as not, she clamped a pillow around her ears to block out the sound and to resist the urge to jam the little dancers into a pot, put the pot on the cooktop, and smelt them down in a dramatic production that she’d already written in her head and had tided Dangerous Young Mutant Hawaiian Volcano Goddess.
On those not infrequent occasions when the incessant sound of hula dolls in the night irritated Leilani, the seven-foot-diameter face painted on the ceiling of the lounge, over her fold-out bed, sometimes soothed her to sleep. This kindly countenance of the Hawaiian sun god, faintly phosphorescent in the dark, gazed down with a sleepy-eyed, stone-temple smile.
Their motor home, which featured other Hawaiian motifs in its interior design, was a high-end luxury custom coach converted from a Prevost bus. Old Sinsemilla christened it Makani ‘olu’olu — Hawaiian for “fair wind”—which seemed no more appropriate for a vehicle with a gross weight of over fifty-two thousand pounds than would have been the right name for an elephant. With slide-out bedroom and galley-lounge extensions, it reliably proved to be the biggest vehicle in any campground, so large that children gaped in awe. Retiree vagabonds of a certain age, already worried about turning radiuses and tricky angles of approach to their campsite hookups, turned as pale as Milk of Magnesia if they were unfortunate enough to be required to slot-park their humbler Winnebagos and Air-streams in this beast’s shadow, and most regarded the leviathan with resentment or paranoid terror.
It sure rode well, however, as stable and solid as a bank vault on wheels. The motion-triggered hula dolls danced steadily, but in pleasantly lazy swivels, never with spasmodic abandon. And while in transit, Leilani could read her novel about evil pigmen from another dimension with no risk of motion sickness.
She was so accustomed to the dolls that they didn’t distract her from her book, and the same could be said of the colorful Hawaiian-shirt fabrics in which the dinette chairs were upholstered. Plenty of distraction was continually provided, however, by old Sinsemilla and Dr. Doom, who occupied the pilot’s and co-pilot’s chairs.
They were up to something. Of course, being up to something was the natural condition of these two, as sure as bees were born to make honey and beavers to build dams.
Conspiratorial, they kept their voices low. Since Leilani was the only other person aboard Fair Wind, she was inclined to suspect that they were conspiring against her.
They wouldn’t be scheming up a simple game of find-the-brace or its equivalent. Such mean fun was impromptu by nature, dependent on opportunity and on what chemicals dear Mater had recently ingested. Besides, petty cruelties had no appeal for Dr. Doom, whose interest was excited only by cruelty on an operatic scale.
From time to time, Sinsemilla looked sneakily over her shoulder at Leilani or peeked around the wing of the co-pilot’s chair. Leilani pretended to be unaware of this surreptitious monitoring. Her mother might interpret even fleeting eye contact as an invitation to wreak a little torment.
More than anything else, the giggling unnerved her. Sinsemilla was a frequent giggler, and perhaps seventy or eighty percent of the time, this indicated that she was in an effervescent girls-just-want-to-have-fun frame of mind, but sometimes it served the same purpose as a rattlesnake’s rattle, warning of a strike. Worse, more than once during this long conversation, between whispers and murmurs, Dr. Doom giggled, as well, which was a first; his giggle had the artery-icing effect of Charles Manson merry-eyed and tittering with delight.
They were eastbound on Interstate 15, nearing the Nevada border, deep in the blazing Mojave Desert, when Sinsemilla left the cockpit and joined Leilani at the dinette table.
“What’re you reading, baby?”
“A fantasy thing,” she replied without looking up from the page.