Rain drove in through the screen and we all moved back from it except for Carl, who just sat there rocking.
—I don’t trust you no more’n you trust me, I said to Ava. We gonna have to work something else out.
Another lightning flash brought leached colors to the porch and fitted a long shadow beneath every object. Things looked to be tilted, as if the wind had knocked the lodge askew.
—Hang on, Ava said, and went off toward her bedroom.
Leeli caught my hand and said something I didn’t catch, but had the sound of an assurance, and then Ava came back out onto the porch and handed me a thick envelope.
—Fuck’s this? I asked.
—The rest of the money I promised Leeli. You can hold it while we’re gone.
Leeli’s eyes got stuck on the envelope as I inspected the contents. Hundred dollar bills and plenty of them.
—That guarantee enough for ya? Ava asked. ‘Tween Squire and the money, it’s ’bout the best I can do.
I stuffed the envelope into my hip pocket. Leeli unstuck her eyes. I could see it was a strain for her and that she didn’t love the idea of leaving the envelope behind. All right, I said. I started to deliver a warning, to pose consequences, but there didn’t seem much point to it. We all knew the lay of the land.
—All right, I repeated. Let’s get it rolling.
You know how it goes. Sometimes you’re so deep in the world, so mired in its trouble, you forget that you were born, you forget you were raised to be a dead man, you think you got where you’re standing all on your own and that you’re holding destiny in your hands, and when somebody passes you a golden ticket that’s stamped Freedom or Foreverafter, you don’t check to see if the ink’s dry or if there’s printing on the back, because you’re walking the road your daddy cut for you and stepping along in clothes your mama sewed, because it’s the tendency of your kind to believe the lottery can be won, great prizes are within your grasp, and though the only winning ticket ever came your parents’ way was an error in their favor made by a bartender or a grocery clerk, though you understand you’re their homemade fool, you just can’t accept that the rules of their life apply to you. That golden ticket is a guarantee all right, a twenty-four karat guaranteed loser. You know this in your heart, but you hang onto the bitch like it was a pass through the Gates of Glory or a voucher for an all-expenses-paid weekend at Casino World on the Redneck Riviera, whichever premium you prefer.
Thoughts such as these slammed my head as I dug through Rickey’s pockets, hunting for his keys. He was still unconscious, his face swollen from the beating I’d supplied him. Looked like he’d pissed off a swarm of bees. The keys were in the bib pocket of his overalls. I stood jingling them in my hand, holding a last debate over the wisdom of giving them to Ava. An old movie was playing on the TV. Japanese men in moonsuits were gazing awestruck at a fleet of flying saucers that soon began incinerating them with fiery beams. Watching them turn into bright wavering silhouettes and vanish somehow made my decision for me.
Things moved right smartly after that. Ava and Carl went for the car, Leeli gave me a pert little kiss and said, Be back soon, and ran off after them. I patted my hip pocket to make certain the money was still there. A minute later I was standing on the porch steps, watching a pair of red taillights, one patched with duct tape, jouncing along over the uneven ground toward the highway, shining up tracers of rain. I had a moment of dissatisfaction with my decision and I pulled Ava’s gun from the waist of my jeans with half a thought of shooting out a tire. The car stopped at the end of the drive. There wasn’t any traffic I could see and I wondered what was going on. A creep of paranoia stirred me from the steps and out in the rain. I imagined Ava and Leeli arguing over whether or not to betray me. Thunder mauled the sky. The car swung out onto the highway. I felt like six kinds of fool, with the rain running down my neck, alone as ever was, the gun cold and weighty in my hand.
The night grew wilder yet, the thunder continuous. A ring of fiery stick men a thousand feet tall jabbed and flashed on the horizons, penning me into their magic circle. There was such a confusion of light and sound, it rooted me to the spot. Behind the lodge a clump of palms bulked up solid, taking the shape of a black frowning Buddha in my mind, scrunched up and angry from having me in his sight. It seemed I could feel the wickedness of that place and time, the mortal separation from the flow of life that wickedness enforces. I was flying, stranded on a scrap of soggy marsh that had been chewed off from the planet and set to spinning loose in the void. The rain needled my cheeks and brow, spitting alternately dark and silver. The lodge looked to be changing shape, crouching like a beast one second, the next blurring into an emblem of negativity, a symbol on a rippling banner, then collapsing back into the ruinous thing it pretended to be. I had the idea this was my night, my big moment, that I was being showed a reflection of everything I’d said and thought and done, the chaos of my life given larger, windier form, and this was the only celebration of my useless days I’d likely get, this storm too small to have a name but big enough to damage the unprepared, the tore-down spaces, the vacant properties of the world. Then I glanced south to where Ava and Carl and Leeli had gone and saw a flash of green. Not a dazzling seam and not the dull flicker of heat lightning, but a dynamic burst of bright neon color like an enormous bug zapper taking a hit. The color hung in the air, draping its afterimages around the palm crowns, and I recalled Ava’s story about the green light coming from the UFO. I tried to think of something else it could have been. I expect there must have been a hundred possibilities, but I couldn’t come up with one. The rain slowed to a drizzle and as if the green flash had been a cue, the storm began to fade, flaring up now and again with a grumble and a distant snip of fire, then fading even more, its battery running low. Drips and plops succeeded the fury of the wind. Through scudding clouds you could glimpse a freckling of stars, and soon a slice of moon surfaced from the horizon. I knew Carl and Ava and Leeli were gone. It wasn’t the flash that told me so. Too many thoughts were flapping around in my attic for me to work that part of it out. The alignment of the world, the wrecked lodge and foundered cabins, the swaying grasses and the dark water slurping at the mucky bank, the stars and all the rest—it was like a sign saying Gone had been struck through every layer of creation.
Naturally I didn’t entirely believe this sign. Despite Ava’s anything-goes attitude toward screwing, I figured Squire must do something special for her, and I just knew Leeli wasn’t about to leave that money on the table. I patted my hip pocket again and this time I found nothing. No bulge, no envelope sticking out. I patted my other pockets and looked on the ground close by. Since I’d come out from the porch to watch them drive away, I hadn’t hardly moved a step, but there was no sign of the envelope. I told myself the wind must have took it. I searched along the edge of the water, near the porch, and as I was poking around in the grass, kicking scrap wood and fallen shingles aside, growing more desperate every second, because with or without Leeli I needed that money to get clear of Volusia County, it occurred to me there might never have been an envelope. Maybe Ava was that much of a witch. Maybe she’d handed me a parlor trick, an illusion, and made Leeli and me see what she wanted. Maybe Leeli had been in on the hustle and just pretended to be worried about the money. It was her, wasn’t it, led me to Ava in the first place? The missing envelope and the green flash and the stories Ava told, they all washed together into a stew of possibilities. I couldn’t separate out anything from it that sounded more than half true.