“We could do that,” Ariel said. Then, to George, “Couldn’t we?”
“Absolutely,” he answered. “I’ll run that by Ash first thing.”
Nomad returned the notebook to Berke. Welcome, Mike had said last night in the Dallas backyard. Good place to start. Nomad didn’t see any destination in those words, but Ariel and Terry might take them somewhere. Right now, all he wanted to do was go home to his own futon on the floor, curl up and leave the world until he either had to eat or had to…
It was going to be a bad night, in this motel with the lariat-twirling cowboy outside. They would probably all wind up in one room, piled around like ferrets in a cage, breathing and jumping and gasping in their ferret-like slumber. If anyone could sleep.
He did, well after midnight. Among his last thoughts before he went under was that somehow—for some reason—that girl at the well had gotten into Mike’s mind. Had planted a seed in it. Just as she’d been trying to get into his own. Making him believe he had a fucking brain tumor, when he didn’t let her in.
Oh no, he vowed. Not me.
Only he wasn’t quite sure what he was vowing against. And, really, he didn’t want to know. Whatever it was, he was too small for it.
About two o’clock, Ariel got up from her hour or so of sleep, put on her shoes, quietly unlocked the door, went outside and closed the door behind her. The neon sign had been turned off. East Broadway was silent, and stars covered the sky in a breathtaking panorama. By the yellow bulbs she saw that several more guests had checked in: along with the Scumbucket and trailer there was a white SUV, a silver or light gray Subaru and a black or dark blue pickup truck. The SUV had a New Mexico tag, the other two were from Texas. She noted on the pickup’s rear bumper a metallic sticker that said Semper Fi. She wanted to walk, to breathe the night air, to feel the soft breeze on her cheek like a lover’s touch. She started toward the swimming pool, and as she neared it she heard the quiet sound of movement in water.
Someone was in there, alone in the dark. Swimming back and forth, it sounded like. Not kicking, just pulling the water past them in a slow crawl. It seemed to her like a lonely thing, to be swimming back and forth in dark water under the canopy of night. She hesitated for a moment, listening, and then she decided to wander over that way, maybe to speak or maybe not, because she knew very, terribly well what it was like to be lonely.
THREE
Ballad of the Greek Potatoes
NINE.
When the sun was an hour old Berke was lacing up her running shoes, the black New Balances that had already taken her more than two hundred miles. Her oufit was spartan, meant to get sweaty. She tugged a black sweatband over the obstacle of her hair and got it positioned on her forehead. The streamers of sun coming between the blinds already carried a bite. This was going to be the hottest day yet, in a long summer of hot days.
The last time someone had died in her life, someone she’d cared about deeply, she’d gotten up from her bed the following morning, laced her shoes and gritted her teeth and gone out for a six-mile run. She didn’t know if she could do that today, but she was going to try. Everyone else was still asleep. She couldn’t believe that Mike wasn’t here this morning, stretched out on his back with his hands behind his head because he hated the feel of a pillow. She’d never asked him why, thinking it must’ve had something to do with the number of hicktown jails he’d been hosted in, and lice or ticks or bedbugs or something like that. She couldn’t believe she would never hear the rusty rumble of his voice again, and maybe that was the worst thing. He was really gone. He really, really was.
It looked to her as if she hadn’t been the only one whose night was tortured. The guys had wound themselves up in their sheets, and George had nearly worked himself off the baby bed. And Ariel? Ariel wasn’t in either room, or in either bathroom. She must’ve gone out walking, before the sun had even started to come up. Wherever she was, she wasn’t here.
Okay, Berke said to herself. Let’s get to it.
Out in the parking lot, she saw the three new arrivals: white SUV, silver Subaru, dark blue pickup. The air was still, and smelled of hot metal. There were a few cars on East Broadway, but only a few. Monday morning here wasn’t quite like Austin. She stopped next to the U-Haul trailer for about five minutes to do a few stretches—Hang Tens, Lunges and Flamingoes, holding each one for thirty seconds—and noted the movement of a windowblind, in the room the pickup truck was parked in front of. Somebody else was an early riser, or else they wanted to be first up for the Cattleman’s breakfast. She decided to go to her left and follow East Broadway toward the northeast. She would walk a little while first, work her pace up to running speed, and so she passed by the swimming pool beyond the white fence, and there was Ariel.
Ariel was lying beside the pool on a blue lounge chair. She was on her right side, facing away from Berke. Her knees were bent, her legs curled up beneath her. One shoe was on, the other lay on the cement beside the chair. Berke thought that Ariel’s neck was going to be stiff today, the way her head was turned and her shoulders hunched up. That couldn’t be comfortable. She thought briefly of going over and waking Ariel up, but she decided no, she wouldn’t; Ariel might have had a tough time getting to sleep, and maybe had found some peace out here alone in the dark. So Berke walked on, picking up her pace, faster and faster. About two hundred yards along the street she started her run, heading away from the Lariat at a steady clip.
The detective with the cowboy hat had called last night at ten o’clock sharp. George had spoken to him. Any word on who did it? They can’t say much right now, George had reported back. But they’re going to come talk to us in the morning. And that had been the extent of it.
Berke ran on, her breathing measured, everything easy. The red fireball was sitting two hands above the horizon, aimed between her jawline and her right shoulder. She passed the usual sights of any small town, in any American state: small businesses, parking lots, churches and strip malls. She passed the Subway they’d eaten at last night, and a half mile further on there was a Dairy Queen which she wished she’d known about because she did like ice cream. Then she came upon an area of small houses, and past that some car lots and places where cars and trucks were serviced, a litter of car hulks and tires and the like. In this area was where a man in a passing white pickup truck shouted, “Hey, muchacha caliente!” but she kept her head down and her pace unchanged. She was hot, that was true enough; she was sweating pretty good now, the sun searing her right side. A few cars and trucks passed by in both directions, and somebody else honked at her but she looked neither right nor left. She stared only at the cracked brown concrete one stride ahead, and that was how you got through any demanding run.
She was thinking of Mike, and how senseless it had been, and how much she was going to miss him. It was still unbelieveable to her, something from someone else’s bad dream. But so too had been the death of her running and rock-climbing bud, Melissa Cavanaugh, six years ago when Berke was living in Seattle and playing with the short-lived band Time Keeps Secrets. She had met Melissa at a coffee shop, a friend of a friend, and they’d immediately hit it off. Melissa had been a basketball player in college way down in Georgia, had been all-everything, an A-student, track star, student newspaper reporter, environmental activist, volunteer at a homeless shelter, lover of stray dogs and Kona coffee and The Clash’s Sandinista. So why was it that Melissa Cavanaugh, twenty-two years old and with a great future ahead of her in graphic design in the Emerald City, had tied a cord around a support in her closet of stylish but tasteful clothes and with the other end of the cord around her neck strangled herself to death on a Sunday evening?