“I don’t see it,” he said. The bites itched on his chest and shoulders.
“I could tell from the highway,” his wife answered. “There weren’t any signs.”
Though not stopped by barrier — fence, rock or ravine — the automobile was sucked close to the loose and dibbled earth, slowed by the invisible roots of parasite plants stretched like strings across its path, exhausted of speed and air. Camper felt a harsh and lazy magnetism that, foot by foot, might crack its windows, strip it of paint and draw the stuffing from the seats. He watched for something to steer by.
“You can’t expect to find a town just anywhere,” said his wife.
And at that moment they were attacked for the second time during the night by snakes. They ran over it. Flat and elongated, driven upon in sleep, it wheeled, rattling from fangs to tail, chased them, caught up with the car, slithered beneath it, raced ahead into the light and reared. The snake tottered, seemed to bounce when it became blind, and, as Camper touched the brake, lunged so that it appeared to have shoulders, smashed its flat pear skull against the solid, curved glass of one headlamp, piercing, thrusting to put out the light.
“Go back and kill it! Go on, get out of this car!”
Quickly he drove ahead, reaching one hand through the darkness to quiet her, and saw, hardly above the sands, the railless, short rotten planks of an abandoned sidewalk starting from the desert.
“I told you, I knew she was still here!”
Lou put her forehead against the glass.
She lifted the boy into his left arm, piled his right with towels. In a free hand he clutched the cowhide suitcase.
“There’s nobody here,” she hissed as they climbed the boot smooth dormitory steps. The rooms, down segregated corridors, were dark, not a light nor single man appeared in the foyer on the walls of which hung pictures — a girl, a horse’s head — torn from magazines. Standing together for a moment on the cold linoleum floor, Camper imagined forty bearded shovelers and forty china mugs stretched along the bare planks of a makeshift table: a silent, before dawn meal.
The soft, fibreboard walls of the corridor sagged, split at the bottoms. Sand swept across the floor. Camper padded forward, stopped, moved again in his extra wide, sea rotted sandals; behind him the red high heels of the woman cracked.
“Try that one, Lou,” he whispered, and in a narrow room, screen half ripped from the window, they looked upon a tousled iron bed, a body that slept beneath a raincoat.
“Here,” he said, “try ‘22’.” The number was splashed on the door in peeling whitewash.
“Open it yourself!”
Camper squeezed the rattling glass knob between his fingers, pushed, shielded by all he carried, leaned into the dust and mold. “No,” he whispered, staring a moment, “not this one, either.”
The lamp, beside a card table with a hole ripped in its center, worked, but the lock catch dangled from the door jamb.
“Keep the shades down,” he told her after each trip to the car, “there’s no sense letting everyone know we’re here.”
“Everyone! You got a nerve.” She sat on a campstool, stretched herself, blew down the front of her blouse. As soon as Camper had set up the cots and slipped the small revolver under one pillow, settled the boy in his mother’s bed and untangled the mosquito netting, he stooped and plied quickly, methodically, through his own valise. He removed the delicate rod, the clock-like reel, the green and yellow dun flies.
“The best fishing in the world is right here, Lou,” he mumbled and collected the bright and pointed gear.
She stood up, wet with silk. “You think I’ll swallow that? You got eyes, you’ve driven across it as well as me. After five hundred miles they wouldn’t dump garbage on and not a spot to get a drink in, you think I’m going to believe there’s water in this place? Let alone a fish!” She watched him pin the flies to his flowing collar, stick the collapsed rod in a pocket above his wide and boneless hip. She considered the smile on his face, the flipping hands.
Suddenly she rose still higher, spit, shouted after him down the rank and hollow halclass="underline" “You dirty little dog,” laughing, trembling at her own intuition, “you been here before!”
She was alone. She listened, pulled the sheet across the boy, went immediately to the window and raised the shade. And, breasts half thrust, half fallen against the screen, she found herself unable to move as she stared into a watchful, silent figure pressed close to the other side.
The creature continued to watch. It was made of leather. Straps, black buckles and breathing hose filled out a face as small as hers, stripped of hair and bound tightly in alligator skin. It was constructed as a baseball, bound about a small core of rubber. The driving goggles poked up from the shiny cork top and a pair of smoked glasses fastened in the leather gave it malevolent and overflowing eyes. There was a snapped flap on one side that hid an orifice drilled for earphones. Its snout was pressed against the screen, pushing a small bulge into the room.
The snout began to move. It poked without sight toward the flattened slippery flesh of Camper’s wife. And with that first sound of scraping she turned her back, swayed, stepped quickly from the room.
There were men, perhaps women, in the building who, thought Camper’s wife, still confiscated fatback and a few blunt tools from local ordinance and who, despite buck tooth, caved chin, lockjaw and blisters still existed, warped and blackened in the wake of the caterpillar and dusty mare. As she walked away from her own door left ajar, she heard the wriggling of their toes, put her ear against the walls, softly knocked. She sniffed for the spot where Camper himself, years before, had squinted through the screens or rolled asleep. With crimping fingers she tucked the bottom of her blouse into the slacks.
“He won’t catch anything,” she thought.
A light burned in the kitchen. She stood on the threshold and watched as an old woman, after setting a pie tin before one of two men at the table and opening the stove on the coals, grunted, smiled, lifted heavy blue skirts and tucked a dollar bill, closely folded, into the top of a fattened snow white stocking.
“Sit down,” said Harry Bohn to the Finn, “I ain’t done dinner.”
“I’m going home.”
“Sit down.” Bohn began the pie and the crippled Finn, knocking a chair free of the table with one of his fluttering canes, sat on the edge of it, braces grinding, and watched him chew. Lou saw that the cook, Norwegian, fat, expected the whole pie to be eaten, saw that the small man, fidgeting, wore no clothes except his airy overalls. He was slight, wrapped around by the thinness tight upon a body that had lost weight never to regain it. His white canes tapped constantly, he drummed them as another might his fingertips.
“You wouldn’t run off on me, would you, Finn?”
“I got things. Lots of things to do, Bohn.” The top of his overalls flared stiffly from the middle of his back, one broad strap and brass button slipped from a shoulder, pinched, transparent. “So I can’t sit around with you,” snapped the lightweight ex-bronc rider, who in the beginning had ridden from many chutes with spurs entangled high on an animal’s withers.
“Tonight,” Bohn leaned back, his lips bubbled, “you’re going to.”
He saw the woman in the doorway. His mouth fell open — blue mash, blue gums and teeth — he saw her stare, he frowned and put his hands on the table as if to rise. “Yes, sir,” fingers sprung without thought into a fist, eyes back to the Finn, “we don’t get around it. You ain’t going to move, unless I say.” And the cook behind him, leaning between his needs, his body, and the fire, licking her lips as he, nodding before he spoke, looked at the same time toward the doorway and shook her silver braids, spoke to Camper’s wife.