He started to slide down the side of the cylinder. Things were getting dark, blurry. He wiped at his eyes, and for a moment he thought he saw Elwood shoving the loathsome claw back into the outer darkness, thought he saw the cylinder begin to rotate again. Thought he felt Elwood's arms around him, cradling him, telling him it was going to be all right.
But that couldn't be true. How would Elwood get in here?
It was his last thought for some time.
Dodger woke to the smell of freshly washed sheets and the sound of a mockingbird's song. He didn't open his eyes for a while, fearing it was all too good to be true. That smell was one he associated with good times: high-class hotels he and his father lived in when the money was good. The sound was one he associated with Texas. And that couldn't be.
But it was. He opened his eyes and sat up. He was tucked into a bed in a small room made entirely of wood. Beside the bed was an open window that looked out on an oak tree only a few feet away. The mockingbird was perched on a branch until he saw Dodger. Then he chirped a few more notes and flew away.
Dodger lay back down. He'd been here before, and if he was here then everything must be all right.
He was on the second floor of an authentic wooden building on the dusty main street of New Austin, in the middle of the Texas disneyland. These were the medical offices of Drs. Henry Wauk, M.D., and Heinrich Wohl, D.D.S, "Quick and Relatively Painless Dentistry," according to the shingle hanging outside. He'd never met Dr. Wohl, but he'd seen Henry Wauk several times. His father had brought him in from time to time for what he thought of as "good, old-fashioned doctoring." But even John Valentine, with his ingrained suspicion of all things modern, had not subjected himself or his son to the sort of butchery that had been practiced in places like this in the 1800s. The archaic medical equipment in this room, the colorful jars of powders and elixirs, and the instruments of torture surrounding the dental chair in the other room were merely for show, as was pretty much everything in Texas. Valentine came here for checkups and physical repairs, when needed, because Henry Wauk was an old friend of his, and because Henry would do the work off the books. The Central Computer and its various legal minions held little sway in Texas, a fact that endeared the place and all the other disneylands to John Valentine. They were virtually independent states, immune to many of the intrusive regulations of the larger civilization.
"Social experiments, they call them," Valentine had said to his son, one day while they were out riding horses—real horses! Dodger had been in heaven—in the sagebrush country west of New Austin. "Living museums. They teach school the old-fashioned way in here, son. Back to basics. All the children learn to read, if you can believe that. They grow their own food, right in the dirt. They live in here, hold down jobs in here. Old jobs, like blacksmithing, and cooperage, and... and plenty of other things I don't pretend to know much about. They hold their own elections, and they don't pay taxes to Mama Luna. Misfits in here, most of them. People who weren't happy on the outside."
Dodger had thought it was odd to call the corridors of Luna "the outside," but he knew what his father meant. Here, there was the illusion of endless space, just like out on the surface. And Texas was pretty large: miles and miles, his father said.
"Doctor" Wauk was one of the misfits. His was no general anomie or existential despair, however. Wauk was what would have been called, in early Texas, a dipsomaniac. He had a fondness for the bottle that he was not willing to be cured of. It had made a disaster of his acting career, and he had finally accepted a part that was to be lived, instead of performed: that of the alcoholic sawbones beloved of old black-and-white westerns.
While Wauk did dispense patent remedies and salves and powders for a few ailments, all the real medical care was accomplished by a perfectly ordinary Medico machine concealed in a closet. More complex work was referred to a normal facility outside the disneyland. Wauk had been given the bare minimum of training to operate the Medico. "After all," as he'd told John Valentine, "it ain't like doctorin' is rocket science, or anything."
Dodger thought he could hear voices from the next room. He rolled out of bed and crept carefully to the door, pressed his ear against it. If he held his breath he could hear his father and Dr. Wauk talking, but he could only get every other word. He looked around and found an antique stethoscope in a drawer. He put the rubber tips in his ears and pressed the metal disk on the end to the wooden door, and the sounds became as clear as a telephone.
"Look, Henry," his father said. "We're rolling in cash. I want you to take this. Please. It would make me feel better."
"Just my normal fee will be sufficient, John," said the doctor.
"Come on. As a favor to me."
"Right at this moment, my old friend, I'm not inclined to do any favors for you beyond the one I just done. No, sir, and I don't think I have much interest in makin' you feel any better, either. In fact, I think I just done you the last favor I'm ever goin' to do you."
There was a long silence. Dodger held his breath. He heard the sound of a chair scraping across a wooden floor, then a creaking sound. Someone just sat down in the chair, Dodger guessed.
"What you just done to that boy is a crime, John. You don't need me to tell you that, you know it already. But knowin' how you feel about laws, and the power of the state, and such, I'm going to tell you something else. What you done to that boy is a sin."
There was an even longer pause, then a sound that Dodger at first didn't recognize but which still froze his heart. It came again, and suddenly Dodger knew his father was weeping.
"Ah, shit, John. Let me try to drop the cornpone, here. I've been living here so long now the accent's hardly an act anymore. But you remember me. It's Henry Wauk talking to you, John. The guy who used to understudy you in half the stuff you ever acted in. I'm the fellow who would have given anything to be half as good as you are, and if I couldn't do that, at least I could hang around you and hope some of the brilliance would rub off. It never did. All we really had in common was a propensity for the bottle. I don't know if you ever thought of me as a friend—"
"I did," John Valentine sobbed. "I still do."
"...well, that may be. I don't know if it's really friendship when one admires the other as much as I admired you. I owe you a lot. I still do owe you a lot, but I'm telling you now, I don't owe you this. This is the third time you've brought that little boy in to me so I could fix him up. I didn't really think much about it the first time. Fixed his busted eardrum, dived back into the bottle. But after the second time I couldn't seem to get it out of my mind. Not what you'd done to his body, John, but what you were doing to his... I don't even know what the word is. His soul, maybe. There's a part of him's always going to be frightened. Scared of you, maybe. Scared of everything."
Dodger bit his lip and frowned. What the hell was the damn quack talking about? He wasn't afraid of his father. He loved his father.
"I don't know why I do these things," Valentine said, miserably.
"That's something I don't even want to think about. I don't care why. What I'm telling you now is, it ends here. You bring him back to me all bloody and swollen up like that again, I'm going straight to the cops."
"That's exactly what you should do," Valentine said.
"I ought to call 'em right now," Wauk went on. "Shit, John, that poor kid was... well, you know how he was."
Dodger almost missed his father's next words, which were barely above a whisper.
"It was an accident. Oh, god, don't look at me like that, Henry, I know it's my responsibility. I know if he'd died it would have been exactly like I'd murdered him. Killed by my stupidity. I'm just trying to tell you... it didn't happen like I thought it would."