Billy breaks our tableau, stepping forward one step, and I retreat one step, aim the SIG at his face. He squints and pulls his head away, mild annoyance, like a lion ducking back from a mosquito.
“Here’s the story, brother man,” he says. “I got the beer and I got the gun, you can see that, right? You can take the beer and hang out for a bit, we’ll even feed you somethin’ before you shove off. We got a chicken on the cooker right now, since it’s coming up on suppertime. It’s a big one, right, baby?”
“Right,” she says. “Claudius.” She grins. For a confusing half second I think she’s calling me Claudius and then I realize that’s the chicken. “Three birds a day,” she says. “It’s how we keep track of the countdown.”
Billy nods, “That’s right.” Then he sniffs, tosses his hard-rock hair. “Or, option B, you do anything hilarious, you try and fox one of our chickens, and Sandy’ll shoot you dead.”
“Me?” she says, laughing with astonishment.
“Yeah, you.” Billy smiles at me, like we’re in on this together. “Sandy’s a better shot’n me, especially when it gets later and I got a buzz on.”
“Shit, Billy,” she says. “You always got a buzz on.”
“Like you don’t.”
This woman looks nothing at all like Alison Koechner, it is clear to me now. The resemblance has receded like a tide.
“Well, brother?” says Billy. “A beer or a bullet?”
I lower my gun. Sandy lowers her gun, and then at last Billy lowers his and hands me the beer, which is warm and bitter and delicious. “Thank you,” I say, as the two of them step back and gesture me into the courtyard. “My name is Henry Palace.” The dog shuffles in behind me, staring warily at the fat feathery strangeness of the chickens.
A new tune is blaring from the speakers, something heavy metal, something I don’t recognize. There are two hammocks suspended on ropes between the restaurant and the RV, swaying above paper plates littered with old chicken bones. Chinese lanterns are hung from the trees around the edges. The speakers are mounted on the outside of the vehicle; the engine is on and idling, powering the tunes, the lights, the world.
I wonder in passing how Trish McConnell is doing, back at Police House. Dr. Fenton, at Concord Hospital. Detective Culverson; Detective McGully, wherever he ended up. Ruth-Ann, my favorite waitress at my favorite restaurant. Everyone back somewhere in time, doing something else.
“Serious, though, man,” says Sandy, laying a hand on the small of my back. “You fuck with our chickens, and we blow your mopey face off.”
The chicken is delicious. I eat a polite portion, but Billy and Sandy tell me to take more so I take more and feed a bunch to Houdini, who eats with vigor, which is nice to see. I offer up three bags of honey-roasted peanuts as a side dish, which my hosts accept with delight, raising a series of enthusiastic toasts to my generosity.
They’ve been living here, “at this particular location,” for about a month, maybe six weeks, they don’t know for sure. It’s their third site, though. “Third,” says Billy, “and you gotta figure last, right?” The chickens they rustled up from their second site, a farmhouse between here and Hamlin, the next town down the highway coming up from the south. They’re snug on the hammock and I’m on the ground beneath them, sitting with my back against the vehicle while we enjoy the last of the peanuts. The chickens, Sandy says with a happy shake of her hair, were “a goddamn gift from the gods, man.”
“We got sixteen of the little emperors left, at this point,” she says. “Three chickens a day times five days equals fifteen.”
“Plus a bonus chicken,” puts in Billy.
“Oh, yeah, right, bonus chicken.” Sandy squeezes his arm.
They’re nice to listen to, these two; they’re like a little show, a mild comedy. Their pleasure in each other combines with the twilight and the misting rain to create a kind of anesthetizing fog, and I lean my head back and exhale, just listening to them talk, finishing each other’s sentences and laughing like kids. They hang out all day, they tell me, smoke cigarettes, fool around, drink beer, eat chicken. They both grew up here, as it happens, right here in Rotary, Ohio, went to prom together at Cross-County High School, but they hadn’t resided here as adults. Billy had lived “just about everywhere,” he’d done a little time, was out on parole—“still on it, officially,” he says, and snorts. Sandy for her part had gone to a two-year college in Cincinnati, married a “world-class dingleberry,” got divorced, ended up waitressing at some diner outside Lexington.
They got back in touch in the early days of the threat, back in late spring or early summer of last year, when the odds of impact were low but rising fast; low but high enough to start looking up lost loves and missed opportunities. “We found each other,” says Billy. “Facebook and that shit.” Summer burned away into fall, the odds inching up and up and up. The world started to slip and tremble, Billy and Sandy wrote each other funny e-mails about hooking up again, seeing the world out together.
“But by the time the damn thing got to be a hundred percent, the stupid Internet was gone.” Billy tosses his hair. “And I had never gotten her damn phone number—what a bonehead, right?”
“Yep,” says Sandy. “Course, I never got his, either.”
He grins at her, and she grins back, tilts her head, drinks her beer. He’s telling the story and she’s popping in now and then, adding detail, gently correcting, stroking his sweaty biceps. I am aware of an insistent internal voice telling me to keep moving on, stay on target, find a sledgehammer and get back to that garage—but I find I’m rooted in place, my back planted against the RV, my knees drawn up, slow-drinking that same first beer, watching the sunset color the tops of the trees. Houdini’s head a furry white teddy bear in my lap.
“So basically I said, screw it,” Billy says. “I fired up the Pirate and drove down to find her. And can I tell you something—sorry, man, what…”
“Henry,” I say. “Or—Hank.”
“Hank,” says Sandy, as if she was the one who asked. “I like that. Crazy part is, I was all packed. I was waiting for him.”
“You fucking believe it? She was waiting for me. Says she knew I’d be coming to find her.”
“I did,” she says, nods firmly, a mild drunk smile in her eyes. “I just knew.”
They shake their heads at their mutual good fortune, clink the long glass necks of their beers. I watch their small movements, Billy making a little ashtray out of tinfoil and tapping his cigarette into it, Sandy doing a modified, seated version of the Robot to some old-school beatbox hip-hop number coming from the speakers on the RV.
I close my eyes for a minute and drift in and out of a doze. On some level, of course, I am aware that my illogical insistence on certain ideas regarding my sister—in particular my dogged belief not only that she is alive, but that I will find her and bring her home to a city that doesn’t even exist anymore—that all of this magical thinking has extended itself, grown outward like the halo of light around a candle. If Nico has managed to stay alive by clinging to her crazy idea that the asteroid crisis is avertable, that the threat can be eliminated, then maybe she’s right. Maybe the whole thing isn’t going to happen.
Nico’s fine. Everything is going to be fine.
I blink awake after a minute or two, shake a crick out of my neck, and get out my notebook and get to work.
No, Billy and Sandy have no sledgehammer. No gas-powered jackhammer or drill. What they’ve got is fuel, enough to keep the RV running another couple days, just for the tunes; they’ve got beer and they’ve got chicken and that’s about it.