s. I'm a deaf-mute. I'm traveling with a man named Tom Cullen, who is lightly retarded. He can't read or understand many of the things I can act out unless they're very simple. We're on our way to Nebraska because I think there might be people there. Come with us, if you want."
"Sure," she said immediately, and then, remembering that he was deaf and shaping her words very carefully, she asked, "Can you read lips?"
Nick nodded.
"Okay," she said. "I'm so glad to see someone, who cares if it's a deaf-mute and a retard. Spooky here. I can hardly sleep nights since the power went off." Her face set in martyred lines of grief more appropriate to a soap opera heroine than a real person. "My mom and dad died two weeks ago, you know. Everybody died but me. I've been so lonely." With a sob she threw herself into Nick's arms and began to undulate against him in an obscene parody of grief.
When she drew back from him, her eyes were dry and shiny.
"Hey, let's make it," she said. "You're sort of cute."
Nick gawped at her. I can't believe this, he thought.
But it was real enough. She was tugging at his belt. "Come on. I'm on the pill. It's safe." She paused for a moment. "You can, can't you? I mean, just because you can't talk, that doesn't mean you can't--"
He put his hands out, perhaps meaning to take her by the shoulders, but he found her breasts instead. That was the end of any resistance he might have had. Coherent thought left his mind as well. He lowered her to the floor and had her.
Afterward, he went to the door and looked out as he buckled his belt again, checking on Tom. He was still on the park bench, dead to the world. Julie joined him, fiddling with a fresh bottle of perfume.
"That the retard?" she asked.
Nick nodded, not liking the word. It seemed like a cruel word.
She began to talk about herself, and Nick discovered to his relief that she was seventeen, not much younger than he was. Her mamma and her friends had always called her Angel-Face or just Angel for short, she said, because she looked so young. She told him a great deal more in the following hour, and Nick found it next to impossible to separate the truth from the lies ... or the wish-fulfillment, if you preferred. She might have been waiting for someone like him, who could never interrupt the endless flow of her monologue, all her life. Nick's eyes got tired just watching her pink lips push out the shapes of words. But if his eyes wandered for more than just a moment, to check on Tom or to consider the crashed-out plate-glass window of the dress shop across the street, her hand would touch his cheek, bringing his eyes back to her mouth. She wanted him to "hear" everything, ignore nothing. He was annoyed with her at first, then bored with her. In the space of an hour, incredibly, he found himself wishing he hadn't found her in the first place, or that she would change her mind about coming with them.
She was "into" rock music and marijuana and had a taste for what she called "Colombian short rounds" and "fry-daddies." She'd had a boyfriend, but he'd gotten so pissed off at the "establishment system" running the local high school that he had quit to join the Marines last April. She hadn't seen him since then, but still wrote him every week. She and her two girlfriends, Ruth Honinger and Mary Beth Gooch, went to all the rock concerts in Wichita and had hitched all the way to Kansas City last September to see Van Halen and the Monsters of Heavy Metal in concert. She claimed to have "made it" with the Dokken bassist, and said it had been "the most bitchin-groovy experience of my life"; she had just "cried and cried" after the deaths of her mother and father within twenty-four hours of each other, even though her mother was a "bitchy prude" and her father "had a stick up his ass" about Ronnie, her boyfriend who had left town to join the Marines; she had plans to become either a beautician in Wichita when she graduated high school, or to "truck on out to Hollywood and get a job with one of those companies that do the homes of the stars, I'm bitchin-groovy at interior decoration, and Mary Beth said she'd come with me."
At this point she suddenly remembered Mary Beth Gooch was dead, and that her opportunity to become a beautician or an interior decorator to the stars had passed with her ... and everyone and everything else. This seemed to strike her with a more genuine sort of grief. It was not a storm, however, but only a brief squall.
When the flow of words had begun to dry up a little-at least for the time being--she wanted to "do it" (as she so coyly put it) again. Nick shook his head and she pouted briefly. "Maybe I don't want to go with you after all," she said.
Nick shrugged.
"Dummy-dummy-dummy," she said with sudden sharp viciousness. Her eyes shone with spite. Then she smiled. "I didn't mean that. I was just kidding."
Nick looked at her, expressionless. He had been called worse names, but there was something in her that he very much did not like. Some restless instability. If she got angry with you, she wouldn't yell or slap your face; not this one. This one would claw you. It came to him with sudden surety that she had lied about her age. She wasn't seventeen, or fourteen, or twenty-one. She was any age you wanted her to be ... as long as you wanted her more than she wanted you, needed her more than she needed you. She came across as a sexual creature, but Nick thought that her sexuality was only a manifestation of something else in her personality ... a symptom. Symptom was a word you used for someone who was sick, though, wasn't it? Did he think she was sick? In a way he did, and he was suddenly afraid of the effect she might have on Tom.
"Hey, your friend's waking up!" Julie said.
Nick looked around. Yes--Tom was now sitting on the park bench, scratching his crow's nest hair and goggling around pallidly. Nick suddenly remembered the Pepto-Bismol.
"Hi, y'all!" Julie trilled, and ran down the street toward Tom, her breasts bouncing sweetly under her tight middy top. Tom's goggle had been big to begin with; now it grew bigger still.
"Hi?" he said-asked slowly, and looked at Nick for confirmation and/or explanation.
Masking his own unease, Nick shrugged and nodded.
"I'm Julie," she said. "How you doin, cutie-pie?"
Deep in thought--and unease--Nick went back into the drugstore to get what Tom needed.
"Uh-uh," Tom said, shaking his head and backing away. "Uh-uh, I ain't gonna. Tom Cullen doesn't like medicine, laws no, tastes bad."
Nick looked at him with frustration and disgust, holding the three-sided bottle of Pepto-Bismol in one hand. He looked to Julie and she caught his gaze, but in it he saw that same teasing light as when she had called him dummy--it was not a twinkle but a hard mirthless shine. It is the look that a person with no essential sense of humor gets in his or her eye when he or she is getting ready to tease.
"That's right, Tom," she said. "Don't drink it, it's poison."
Nick gaped at her. She grinned back, hands on hips, challenging him to convince Tom otherwise. This was her petty revenge, perhaps, for having her second offer of sex turned down.
He looked back at Tom and swigged from the Pepto-Bismol bottle himself. He could feel the dull pressure of anger at his temples. He held the bottle out to Tom, but Tom was not convinced.
"No, uh-uh, Tom Cullen doesn't drink poison," he said, and with rising fury at the girl Nick saw that Tom was terrified. "Daddy said don't. Daddy said if it'll kill the rats in the barn, it'll kill Tom! No poison!"
Nick suddenly half turned to Julie, unable to bear her smug grin. He hit her open-handed, hit her hard. Tom stared, eyes wide and scared.
"You ..." she began, and for a moment she couldn't find the words. Her face flushed thinly, and she suddenly looked scrawny and spoiled and vicious. "You dummy freak bastard! It was just a joke, you shithead! You can't hit me! You can't hit me, goddam you!"
She lunged at him and he pushed her backward. She fell on the seat of her denim shorts and stared up at him, lips pulled back in a snarl. "I'll tear your balls off," she breathed. "You can't do that."
Hands trembling, head pounding now, Nick took his pen out and scrawled a note out in large, jagged letters. He tore it off and held it out to her. Eyes glaring and furious, she batted it aside. He picked it up, grabbed the back of her neck, and shoved the note into her face. Tom had withdrawn, whimpering.
She screamed: "All right! I'll read it! I'll read your crappy note!"
It was four words: "We don't need you."
"Fuck you!" she cried, tearing herself out of his grasp. She backed several steps down the sidewalk. Her eyes were as wide and blue as they had been in the drugstore when he almost literally stumbled over her, but now they were spitting with hate. Nick felt tired. Of all the possible people, why her?
"I'm not staying here," Julie Lawry said. "I'm coming. And you can't stop me.
But he could. Didn't she realize that yet? No, Nick thought, she didn't. To her all of this was some sort of Hollywood scenario, a living disaster movie in which she had the starring part. It was a movie where Julie Lawry, also known as Angel-Face, always got what she wanted.
He drew the revolver from its holster and pointed it at her feet. She became very still, and the flush evaporated from her face. Her eyes changed, and she looked very different, somehow real for the first time. Something had entered her world that she could not, at least in her own mind, manipulate to her advantage. A gun. Nick suddenly felt sick as well as tired.
"I didn't mean it," she said rapidly. "I'll do anything you want, honest to God."
He motioned her away with the gun.
She turned and began to walk, looking back over her shoulder. She walked faster and faster, then broke into a run. She turned the corner a block up and was gone. Nick holstered the gun. He was trembling. He felt soiled and depressed, as if Julie Lawry had been something inhuman, more kin to the trundling and coldblooded beetles you find under dead trees than to other human beings.
He turned around, looking for Tom, but Tom wasn't in sight.
He trotted back down the sunstruck street, his head pounding monstrously, the eye Ray Booth had gouged throbbing. It took him almost twenty minutes to find Tom. He was crouched on a back porch two streets down from the business section. He was sitting on a rusty porch glider, his Fisher-Price garage cradled to his chest. When he saw Nick he began to cry.
"Please don't make me drink it, please don't make Tom Cullen drink poison, laws no, Daddy said if it would kill the rats it would kill me ... pleeease!"
Nick saw that he was still holding the bottle of Pepto-Bismol. He threw it away and spread his empty hands in front of Tom. His diarrhea would just have to run its course. Thanks a lot, Julie.
Tom came down the porch steps, blubbering. "I'm sorry," he said over and over. "I'm sorry, Tom Cullen's sorry."
They walked back to Main Street together . . . and came to a halt, staring. Both bikes were overturned. The tires had been slashed. The contents of their packs had been strewn from one side of the street to the other.
Just then something passed at high speed close to Nick's face--he felt it--and Tom shrieked and began to run. Nick stood puzzled for a moment, looking around, and happened to be looking in the right direction to see the muzzleflash of the second shot. It came from a second-story window of the Pratt Hotel. Something like a high-speed darning needle tugged at the fabric of his shirt collar.
He turned and ran after Tom.
He had no way of knowing if Julie fired again; all he knew for sure when he caught up to Tom was that neither of them had been shot. At least we're shut of that hellion, he thought, but that turned out to be only half-true.
They slept in a barn three miles north of Pratt that evening, and Tom kept waking up with nightmares and then waking Nick to be reassured. They reached Iuka the next morning around eleven, and found two good bicycles in a shop called Sport and Cycle World. Nick, who was beginning to recover at last from the encounter with Julie, thought they could finish re-outfitting themselves in Great Bend, which they should reach by the fourteenth at the latest.
But at just about quarter to three on the afternoon of July 12, he saw a twinkle in the rearview mirror mounted near his left handgrip. He stopped (Tom, who was riding behind him and woolgathering, ran over his foot but Nick barely noticed) and looked back over his shoulder. The twinkle that had risen over the hill directly behind them like a daystar pleased and dazzled his eye--he could hardly believe it. It was a Chevy pickup of an ancient vintage, good old Detroit rolling iron, picking its way slowly, slaloming from one lane of US 281 to the other, avoiding a scatter of stalled vehicles.
It pulled up beside them (Tom was waving wildly, but Nick could only stand with his legs apart and his bike's crossbar between them, frozen) and came to a stop. Nick's last thought before the driver's head appeared was that it would be Julie Lawry, smiling her vicious, triumphant smile. She would have the gun with which she had tried to kill them before, and at a range this close, there would be no chance she would miss. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
But the face that appeared belonged to a fortyish man wearing a straw hat with a feather cocked into the blue velvet band at a rakish angle, and when he grinned, his face became a drywash of agreeable sunwrinkles.
And what he said was: "Holy Christ on a carousel, am I glad to see you boys? I guess I am. Climb on up here and let's see where we're going."
That was how Nick and Tom met Ralph Brentner.
CHAPTER 44
He was cracking up--baby, don't you just know it?
That was a line from Huey "Piano" Smith, now that he thought of it. Went way back. A blast from the past. Huey "Piano" Smith, remember how that one went? Ah-ah-ah-ah, daaaay-o ... gooba-gooba-gooba-gooba ... ah-ah-ah-ah. Et cetera. The wit, wisdom, and social commentary of Huey "Piano" Smith.
"Fuck the social commentary," he said. "Huey Piano Smith was before my time."
Years later Johnny Rivers had recorded one of Huey's songs, "Rockin Pneumonia and the Boogie-Woogie Flu." Larry Underwood could remember that one very clearly, and he thought it very appropriate to the situation. Good old Johnny Rivers. Good old Huey "Piano" Smith.
"Fuck it," Larry opined once again. He looked terrible-- a pale, frail phantom stumbling up a New England highway. "Gimme the sixties."
Sure, the sixties, those were the days. Mid-sixties, late sixties. Flower Power. Getting clean for Gene. Andy Warhol with his pink-rimmed glasses and his fucking Brillo boxes. Velvet Underground. The Return of the Creature from Yorba Linda. Norman Spinrad, Norman Mailer, Norman Thomas, Norman Rockwell, and good old Norman Bates of the Bates Motel, heh-heh-heh. Dylan broke his neck. Barry McGuire croaked "The Eve of Destruction." Diana Ross raised the consciousness of every white kid in America. All those wonderful groups, Larry thought dazedly, give me the sixties and cram the eighties up your ass. When it came to rock and roll, the sixties had been the Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde. Cream. Rascals. Spoonful. Airplane with Grace Slick on vocals, Norman Mailer on lead guitar, and good old Norman Bates on drums. Beatles. Who. Dead--
He fell over and hit his head.
The world swam away blackly and then came back in bright fragments. He wiped his hand across his temple and it came away with a thin foam of blood on it. Didn't even matter. Whafuck, as they used to say back in the bright and glorious mid-sixties. What was falling down and hitting your head when he had spent the last week unable to sleep without waking up from nightmares, and the good nights were the nights when the scream got no farther than the middle of his throat? If you screamed out loud and woke up to that, you scared yourself even worse.
Dreams of being back in the Lincoln Tunnel. There was somebody behind him, only in the dreams it wasn't Rita. It was the devil, and he was stalking Larry with a lightless grin frozen on his face. The black man wasn't the walking dead; he was worse than the walking dead. Larry ran with the slow sludgy panic of bad dreams, tripping over unseen corpses, knowing they were staring at him with the glassy eyes of stuffed trophies from the crypts of their cars, which had stalled inside the frozen traffic even though they had some other place to be, he ran, but what good was running when the black devil man, the black magic man, could see in the dark with eyes like snooperscopes? And after a while the dark man would begin to croon to him: Come on, Laarry, come on, we'll get it togeeeether Laaarry--
He would feel the black man's breath on his very shoulder and that was when he would struggle up from sleep, escaping sleep, and the scream would be stuck in his throat like a hot bone or actually escaping his lips, loud enough to wake the dead.
Daytimes, the vision of the dark man would recede. The dark man strictly worked the night shift. Daytimes, it was the Big Alone that went to work on him, gnawing its way into his brain with the sharp teeth of some tireless rodent--a rat, or a weasel, maybe. During the days, his thoughts would dwell on Rita. Lovely Rita, meter-maid. Over and over in his mind he would turn her over and over, seeing those slitted eyes, like the eyes of an animal which has died in surprise and pain, that mouth he had kissed now filled with stale green puke. She had died so easy, in the night, in the same fucking sleeping bag, and now he was . . .
Well, cracking up. That was it, wasn't it? That was what was happening to him. He was cracking up.
"Cracking," he moaned. "Oh Jeez, I'm going out of my mind."
A part of him that still retained a measure of rationality asserted that that might be true, but what he was suffering from right this minute was heat prostration. After what had happened to Rita, he hadn't been able to ride the motorcycle anymore. He just hadn't been able to; it was like a mental block. He kept seeing himself smeared all over the highway. So finally he had ditched it. Since then he had been walking--how many days? four? eight? nine? He didn't know. It had been in the nineties since ten this morning, it was now nearly four, the sun was right behind him, and he wasn't wearing a hat.
He couldn't remember how many days ago he had ditched the motorcycle. Not yesterday, and probably not the day before (maybe, but probably not), and what did it matter? He had gotten off it, snapped it into gear, twisted the throttle, and let go of the clutch. It had torn itself out of his trembling, sick hands like a dervish and had gone plunging and rearing over the embankment of US 9 somewhere just east of Concord. He thought the name of the town in which he had murdered his