“You know what this fuckin’ means?” Pilate asked, back in the car again. “That bitch is gonna tell them what we look like. They’re gonna make those drawings of us, and plaster them all over the fuckin’ state.”
“We gotta get out of here,” said Richie. “Like way gone.”
“We gotta do something,” Pilate said, toying with one of his beard braids. “But they don’t know we’re at the Gathering. We put on some clown makeup, nobody’ll recognize us and we’ll be good for a while. Move the rest of that cocaine and we’ll have the bucks to get on up to the Michigan Gathering, that’s a long way from here. Put on the clown faces again, and by the time that’s over, nobody’ll remember us.”
“I don’t know—I think they’ll remember, at least around here,” Chet said.
“If I could get my hands on that bitch Skye, I’d skin her alive,” Pilate said. And, “Who’s got the Cheetos? Pass them up here.”
“What are we going to do about Bony?” Raleigh asked.
“Nothin’. He’s dead,” Pilate said. “He’s outa here. No point in doing anything.”
“It seems like—”
“Nothin’,” Pilate said. “Dead gotta take care of themselves.”
“I was thinking some kind of . . . words,” Raleigh said.
“Leave the thinking to me, dickwad,” Pilate said. Then he nodded. “But yeah. That’s a good idea. Words is good. I’ll talk tonight.”
That night they did almost half of the remaining cocaine, getting high with Bony, and Pilate said his Words.
“Bony was our friend. He was an outlaw. Y’all remember the time he got that .22 and went up Malibu Road shooting cats out the window of his car, and about fifty cops came and how he didn’t give a shit, he just turned right around and did it again? Remember how he rolled that guy’s antique Porsche down that boat ramp into the ocean? We were sitting up there laughing our asses off and the guy was down there crying tears about his fuckin’ Porsche?”
And so on.
They were up late that night and got up late the next morning, and the first thing Pilate saw when he climbed out of the new RV was an enormous fat man riding past in the back of a John Deere Gator.
He was shirtless, with black rings painted around his tiny pink nipples, and was wearing a black, white, and red clown face, and was throwing bottles of Faygo to bystanders. Another clown was driving the cart.
The Juggalos were coming in.
• • •
THE JUGGALO GATHERING was on a run-down farm east of Hayward, off Highway 77. Roughly the size of a football field, the site had until recently been used to grow alfalfa. At one end, Juggalos were unloading cardboard boxes full of firewood from a flatbed trailer, to be used to construct a huge bonfire. At the other end, more Juggalos were setting up a stage, for music groups. Between them, but closer to the fire, a carny crew was setting up a low-rent Ferris wheel beside the Tilt-A-Whirl.
Designated parking areas were set up on both sides of the field, marked with red plastic tape stretched between poles; and rows of blue fiberglass porta-potties were set up on the far sides of both parking lots.
Pilate and his disciples had set themselves apart, in a circle at the far end of one of the parking areas—the end zone of the field, to the left and slightly behind the stage.
Skye got to the campground at ten o’clock. She’d ridden up with her friend Carl and two guys, named Siggy and Ivan, both Russians. The Russians had been cool guys, and had face paint that they were happy to pass around. Carl helped make up Skye’s face as a sad clown and she did his as a happy face, but when they got out of the car and collected their packs, Carl said, “We don’t look like Juggalos. We look like travelers with clown faces.”
Skye nodded. “Let’s see if we can find some guys and ditch the bags.”
“Get something to eat,” Carl said. “You got money?”
“Yeah. We’re good.”
There were already a couple of hundred people at the Gathering, with more coming in. A white TV truck rolled past them, toward the stage, and a fat guy in a John Deere Gator went by and tossed them bottles of Faygo.
Skye had never heard of it and gave hers to Carl as they made a quick loop around the field. As they walked, they passed through invisible clouds of marijuana smoke, like old autumn leaves being burned. Halfway around, they found a cluster of travelers, sitting under a tree. Skye knew two of the women, and trusted one of them, who was named Lucy, and who agreed to watch her pack while Skye scouted the field.
“Gotta need for weed,” Lucy said.
“Got ya covered,” Skye said. “We’ll spark up when I get back.”
“Then hurry back,” Lucy said.
• • •
FIFTY OR SIXTY CARS dotted the two parking areas, along with a few campers and RVs, but a cluster of vehicles that seemed to be parked together caught her eye, and she went that way. Not much was moving around the cluster; freshly burned log remnants were still sputtering in a fire ring. She moved closer, trying to shelter behind groups of Juggalos and the random cars in the parking lot.
She was thirty or forty yards away, standing behind an aging Volkswagen van, when a woman staggered out of the RV. She was wearing cut-off jean shorts and nothing else, though she was carrying what looked like a T-shirt, and one of the nearby Juggalos yelled, “Yay, tits,” and the woman laughed and gave him the finger, and a minute later, wiggled the shirt over her head.
Skye didn’t know her, but she looked like a disciple. Skye edged closer as the woman went to one of the cars in the cluster, opened the door and emerged with a pair of sunglasses, a pack of Marlboros, and a Zippo lighter.
Skye called over, “Hey: tell Pilate that Carly said hi!”
The woman finished lighting a cigarette, blew smoke, and called back, “I think he’s still asleep.”
“I’ll talk to him later,” Skye called. She waved and walked away. Back with the travelers, she recovered her pack, took out the Gerber survival knife, and slipped it into the leg pocket on her cargo pants. Across the field, another carnival ride was pulling in. She’d lie around with her friends, Skye thought, until dark.
Then she’d spot Pilate and she’d stick him.
She had no qualms about it: thought about Letty, and her feelings about killing. Ridding the world of Pilate was a public service, Skye thought, and would probably save a lot of lives. Still: the cops would call it murder, and if she went to prison, there’d be no more traveling. She could feel the tension growing in her gut, and let it build, not trying to deny it. She was talking to Lucy, passing a joint back and forth, watching more and more Juggalos pulling in, when she spotted Letty: “Gotta go,” she said, getting to her feet. “Gotta run.”
• • •
LUCAS’S CABIN WAS less than twenty miles from the Juggalo campground and Letty knew the route well. She’d started north an hour or so behind Skye and closed the gap on the way up, arriving forty-five minutes after Skye had.
When she pulled the Benz into the campground, she gave a guy standing next to a barrel five dollars to park, got a date-stamped ticket, put it on the dashboard, and said, “Thanks,” when the guy said, “Nice ride.”
When she’d parked and got out, a tough-looking, bare-faced guy in work clothes, who was probably a cop, walked by and muttered, “Not a place for college girls.”
Letty winced: the ticket seller and the cop, if he was a cop, had picked her out in seconds. She made a quick circuit of the field, looking for Skye, then drove back to Hayward, found a yoga place, bought a pair of black yoga tights and a bright red crop top and black jacket, went over to the Walmart for a pair of high-top hunting boots and cotton socks.
She changed out of her Neiman Marcus jeans, blouse, and wedge sandals in the car, into the new stuff, drove back to the campground, reparked, got out, and decided she more or less fit, except for her hairdo and bare face. When she walked onto the field, where the crowd was still a little sparse, a short, thin, balding man with a box said, “Y
ou need a face. I’ll paint your face for free if you show your tits.”
Letty grabbed the front of his shirt and said, “You’ll paint my face for free or I’ll beat the shit out of you.”
“Violence. That’s so hot,” the guy said. “Gives me a little woody.”
“‘Little’ being the key word,” Letty said. “Now, you gonna paint or get beat up?”
“Can we do both?” he asked.
• • •
DESPITE THE PAINT—a dog face with a droopy red tongue—Skye picked Letty out instantly.
Had nothing to do with the way Letty dressed, or the face paint: had something to do with the way she walked, like she owned the place. She said to Lucy, “Watch my bag again, okay? You see that girl over there? The one with the red nose in the black tights? I gotta stay away from her. She’s gonna come here and she’ll see my pack. Tell her that I went to Hayward with a friend.”
“Whatever,” Lucy said, in a voice that sounded like a gravel road. “Gimme a last good hit.”
“Finish it,” Skye said, passing the joint. “Tell her I won’t be back until after dark.”
• • •
LETTY SPOTTED THE TRAVELERS, but nobody shaped like Skye. She went that way, and asked for her, and Lucy said, “She’s gone off to that . . . that town, I can’t remember it. She went off with Carl, they’re not coming back until night.”
“Hayward? She went to Hayward?”
“Who?” Lucy was confused. “Man, that shit just crawled right over me.”
“Skye. Skye went to Hayward?”
“Who?”
Letty knew that Skye would be back, because she’d left her pack, and all her gear, with her friend. It was a matter of waiting, but the waiting nearly drove her to distraction: nothing to do. Even the Juggalos seemed uninteresting, after she’d seen a few dozen of them. A really bad rap band got going on the stage and a guy ran past wearing nothing but a jockstrap. She began to feel stupid in the face paint. The hours crawled by, until dinnertime; she got two hot dogs with lots of onions.
Then Weather called: “I don’t want to pry, but are you in Hayward?”
“Not exactly,” Letty said.
She heard her mother turn and tell Lucas, “She says, ‘Not exactly.’”
Lucas said, “Goddamnit, she is. That Juggalo thing is east of town, that’s why it’s ‘not exactly.’”
Weather asked, “At this Juggalo thing, right? Looking for Skye?”
“Maybe,” Letty said.
Weather said, “Your father is seriously annoyed.”
“I believe it,” Letty said. “Not for the first time, though. He’ll get over it.”
“Yeah, well . . . he just went steaming out of here. I think he’ll be telling you how annoyed he is, personally, in about two hours.”
“He doesn’t have to—”
“He thinks he does,” Weather said.
When Letty got off the phone, something in her spine relaxed. Lucas was on the way up: that was a good thing. A Juggalo went by, looking for volunteers: “We’re putting up the fire and we need somebody to help. Could you help?”
She was doing nothing else, so she went to help. The Juggalos were building a fire stack out of cardboard boxes stuffed with stove-length pine logs. From the fire site, Letty could keep an eye on the travelers, and Skye’s backpack.
• • •
LUCAS WAS BOTH furious and frightened. Letty thought she was tougher than she actually was, and she didn’t know enough about crazy. He changed clothes, got his gun, climbed into the Porsche and took off. He drove the route so many times during the year that he could almost do it with his eyes closed. He stopped once to pee and stuff the footwell cooler with Diet Cokes, and flew on into the evening.
• • •
SKYE GOT BACK to the campground just after dark, looked for Letty, didn’t see her in the milling mass of bodies. When she’d left that morning, there might have been dozens of people. Now there were hundreds, and at the far end of the field, a moderately good rap group was performing, the music pounding over the heads of the crowd. The organizers had strung long lines of Christmas lights down the length of the field, on both sides. A dozen campfires were going on the edges of the field, and the smell of roasting meat mixed with the odor of marijuana.
Lucy was lying on her sleeping bag, staring at the stars. Skye crouched next to her and asked, “That chick show up? Letty?”
“Who? Oh . . . yeah. Just for a minute.”
At that moment, Letty walked up: “Skye.”
And Skye looked up and said, “Ah, shit.”
Letty: “What are you doing? Are you looking for Pilate? And if you find him, then what?”
“I’ll figure that out when I find him,” Skye said. She didn’t look toward Pilate’s encampment. She squared off with Letty, and added, “Letty, I owe you, I appreciate the help, but you’re not my mom.”
“I know I’m not your mom, but if you try to go up against Pilate and those guys who had you . . . I mean, Skye, that’s crazy,” Letty said. “You can’t do that. You’ll get hurt. My dad’s coming up here. If you can spot Pilate, he’ll bring in the cops—”
“Yeah, yeah, and then what’ll happen? There’ll be some kind of bullshit legal stuff and Pilate will blame everybody else and he’ll walk. You watch, you’ll see. He’s the devil.”
“He’s just an asshole,” Letty began. “My dad’s handled a lot worse than him.”
“There is no worse than him,” Skye said. “That’s what nobody gets.”
She turned and looked out at the growing crowd and then asked, “You bring your car? Could you lock up my pack?”
“Yeah, sure. I’m just down the field.”
Skye picked up her pack, said, “Thanks,” to Lucy, and to Letty, “Let’s go. This stuff is too good to get ripped off.”
They dropped the pack at the car and Letty asked, “So you’ll wait for Dad?”
Skye shrugged. “Might as well. What are they doing over there? Building a teepee?”
“Fire stack. They’re going to torch it off at midnight,” Letty said.
“Jeez, you’ll be able to see that from outer space,” Skye said.
“Not done yet. Once they get it built up to the point, they start another ring of boxes and build that up. They got a lot of boxes left. I was over helping to build it.”
“Then let’s go help . . . at least until your dad gets here.”
• • •
THEY WORKED STACKING fire boxes for ten minutes, then Letty turned away, caught up in the construction, and when she turned back, Skye was gone. She looked around, like a mother for a lost child, then stepped outside the ring of workers, still didn’t see her. Stepped farther outside and looked down the field, and caught a flash of Skye’s face, forty yards away, looking back at her. Their eyes touched, then Skye juked and disappeared into the crowd.
“Goddamnit.” Letty jogged after her. When she got to where Skye had been, she couldn’t see her. She wandered through the crowd, turning, but the lights, the painted faces, were like something out of a nightmare. The Juggalos were dancing to the rap music now, long chains of them . . .
• • •
THE DISCIPLES HAD BUILT a fire in the middle of their camp circle. They were all sitting around or lying around, talking, smoking, but nobody was singing “Kumbaya.” Most of them were wearing clown faces, including Pilate: Laine had painted a half dozen faces on him, wiping them away and redoing the work, until he was satisfied. The white paint was fluorescent, and she’d outlined his face with it, and put a dab on the tip of his nose. He was wearing a Catholic priest’s black clerical suit, including the white collar, which, he thought, made a proper Juggalo statement.
Raleigh, Bell, and Chet were also in costume, and were moving the last of the cocaine. They’d already figured out that there wasn’t much around, and they stepped on it again with dry baby formula, and still got premium prices. They wouldn’t get rich, but they’d have enough cash to get b
ack to L.A.
• • •
SKYE SAW A PRIEST with a clown face, but didn’t recognize him as Pilate because of the costume and face paint. She stood in a clump of trees behind the circle of cars, in the dark, waiting for him, handling the knife, calm, quiet as a hunting cat. Thinking about Henry. About Henry’s baby face, and how he’d always go off somewhere to pee, so Skye couldn’t see him, even though they’d been together for months.
At eight, a decent rap band broke out on the stage, and the crowd got tighter; several people in Pilate’s campground moved out toward the stage, and the new band set off a series of powerful strobes that flashed red, white, and blue at the crowd.
From her stand in the clump of trees, Skye saw the clown-face priest amble off toward the bonfire structure. She fumbled a joint out of her breast pocket, lit it, and with most of the disciples gone, she went looking for Pilate, moving into the circle where three remaining disciples were sprawled on blankets.
She said, “Dudes.”
One of them said, “Whatcha got there?”
“This shit from Oregon.” She lifted her chin and blew a smoke ring.
“Pass it?” asked one of the disciples, a woman in a phosphorescent green Hulk mask. Skye passed it and the woman took a hit and handed it down to one of the guys on the ground. They were standing behind the fire ring, and Skye asked, “Anybody seen Pilate?”
“Think he’s out at the show,” said one of the men.
“Naw, he went down to the fire thing,” said the other man.
The woman pointed down to the end of the field and said, “That’s Pilate, you can just see him, the guy in the dark suit, he’s dressed like a priest.”
Skye turned to look, and the woman stooped and picked up one of the logs next to the fire ring and hit Skye in the back of the head. Skye dropped as though she’d been hit by an ax and the woman said, “C’mon, we got to hide her.” She stooped and got Skye by the wrists and started dragging her between a car and the RV.