Just After Sunset

  "There was a wolf, too," he said. "I clapped my hands and scared it off. I'm thinking of changing my name to Wolf Frightener."

  She stared at him for a moment with her mouth open, and David had time to think: I had to wait until we were dead to really surprise the woman I love. Then she dropped against the padded back of the booth, roaring with laughter. A waitress who happened to be passing dropped a full tray of beers with a crash and swore colorfully.

  "Wolf Frightener!" Willa cried. "I want to call you that in bed! 'Oh, oh, Wolf Frightener, you so big! You so hairy!'"

  The waitress was staring down at the foaming mess, still cursing like a sailor on shore leave. All the while keeping well away from that one empty booth.

  David said, "Do you think we still can? Make love, I mean?"

  Willa wiped at her streaming eyes and said, "Perception and expectation, remember? Together they can move mountains." She took his hand again. "I still love you, and you still love me. Don't you?"

  "Am I not Wolf Frightener?" he asked. He could joke, because his nerves didn't believe he was dead. He looked past her, into the mirror, and saw them. Then just himself, his hand holding nothing. Then they were both gone. And still...he breathed, he smelled beer and whiskey and perfume.

  A busboy had come from somewhere and was helping the waitress mop up the mess. "Felt like I stepped down," David heard her saying. Was that the kind of thing you heard in the afterlife?

  "I guess I'll go back with you," she said, "but I'm not staying in that boring station with those boring people when this place is around."

  "Okay," he said.

  "Who's Buck Owens?"

  "I'll tell you all about him," David said. "Roy Clark, too. But first tell me what else you know."

  "Most of them I don't even care about," she said, "but Henry Lander's nice. So's his wife."

  "Phil Palmer's not bad, either."

  She wrinkled her nose. "Phil the Pill."

  "What do you know, Willa?"

  "You'll see for yourself, if you really look."

  "Wouldn't it be simpler if you just--"

  Apparently not. She rose until her thighs pressed against the edge of the table, and pointed. "Look! The band is coming back!"

  The moon was high when he and Willa walked back to the road, holding hands. David didn't see how that could be--they had stayed for only the first two songs of the next set--but there it was, floating all the way up there in the spangled black. That was troubling, but something else troubled him even more.

  "Willa," he said, "what year is it?"

  She thought it over. The wind rippled her dress as it would the dress of any live woman. "I don't exactly remember," she said at last. "Isn't that odd?"

  "Considering I can't remember the last time I ate a meal or drank a glass of water? Not too odd. If you had to guess, what would you say? Quick, without thinking."

  "Nineteen...eighty-eight?"

  He nodded. He would have said 1987 himself. "There was a girl in there wearing a T-shirt that said CROWHEART SPRINGS HIGH SCHOOL, CLASS OF '03. And if she was old enough to be in a roadhouse--"

  "Then '03 must have been at least three years ago."

  "That's what I was thinking." He stopped. "It can't be 2006, Willa, can it? I mean, the twenty-first century?"

  Before she could reply, they heard the click-click-click of toenails on asphalt. This time more than just one set; this time there were four wolves behind them on the highway. The biggest, standing in front of the others, was the one that had come up behind David on his walk toward Crowheart Springs. He would have known that shaggy black pelt anywhere. Its eyes were brighter now. A half-moon floated in each like a drowned lamp.

  "They see us!" Willa cried in a kind of ecstasy. "David, they see us!" She dropped to one knee on a white dash of the broken passing line and held out her right hand. She made a clucking noise and said, "Here, boy! Come on!"

  "Willa, I don't think that's such a good idea."

  She paid no attention, a very Willa thing to do. Willa had her own ideas about things. It was she who had wanted to go from Chicago to San Francisco by rail--because, she said, she wanted to know what it felt like to fuck on a train. Especially one that was going fast and rocking a little.

  "Come on, big boy, come to your mama!"

  The big lobo came, trailed by its mate and their two...did you call them yearlings? As it stretched its muzzle (and all those shining teeth) toward the slim outstretched hand, the moon filled its eyes perfectly for a moment, turning them silver. Then, just before its long snout could touch her skin, the wolf uttered a series of piercing yips and flung itself backward so sharply that for a moment it rose on its rear legs, front paws boxing the air and the white plush on its belly exposed. The others scattered. The big lobo executed a midair twist and ran into the scrubland to the right of the road, still yipping, with his tail tucked. The rest followed.

  Willa rose and looked at David with an expression of hard grief that was too much to bear. He dropped his eyes to his feet instead. "Is this why you brought me out into the dark when I was listening to music?" she asked. "To show me what I am now? As if I didn't know!"

  "Willa, I'm sorry."

  "Not yet, but you will be." She took his hand again. "Come on, David."

  Now he risked a glance. "You're not mad at me?"

  "Oh, a little--but you're all I've got now, and I'm not letting you go."

  Shortly after seeing the wolves, David spied a Budweiser can lying on the shoulder of the road. He was almost positive it was the one he had kicked along ahead of him until he'd kicked it crooked, out into the sage. Here it was again, in its original position...because he had never kicked it at all, of course. Perception isn't everything, Willa had said, but perception and expectation together? Put them together and you had a Reese's peanut butter cup of the mind.

  He kicked the can out into the scrubland, and when they were past that spot, he looked back and there it lay, right where it had been since some cowboy--maybe on his way to 26--had chucked it from the window of his pickup truck. He remembered that on Hee Haw--that old show starring Buck Owens and Roy Clark--they used to call pickup trucks cowboy Cadillacs.

  "What are you smiling about?" Willa asked him.

  "Tell you later. Looks like we're going to have plenty of time."

  They stood outside the Crowheart Springs railway station, holding hands in the moonlight like Hansel and Gretel outside the candy house. To David the long building's green paint looked ashy gray in the moonlight, and although he knew WYOMING and "THE EQUALITY STATE" were printed in red, white, and blue, they could have been any colors at all. He noticed a sheet of paper, protected from the elements by plastic, stapled to one of the posts flanking the wide steps leading up to the double doors. Phil Palmer still leaned there.

  "Hey, mutt!" Palmer called down. "Got a butt?"

  "Sorry, Mr. Palmer," David said.

  "Thought you were going to bring me back a pack."

  "I didn't pass a store," David said.

  "They didn't sell cigarettes where you were, doll?" Palmer asked. He was the kind of man who called all women of a certain age doll; you knew that just looking at him, as you knew that if you happened to pass the time of day with him on a steamy August afternoon, he'd tip his hat back on his head to wipe his brow and tell you it wasn't the heat, it was the humidity.

  "I'm sure they did," Willa said, "but I would have had trouble buying them."

  "Want to tell me why, sugarpie?"

  "Why do you think?"

  But Palmer crossed his arms over his narrow chest and said nothing. From somewhere inside, his wife cried, "We got fish for supper! First one t'ing an' den anudder! I hate the smell of this place! Crackers!"

  "We're dead, Phil," David said. "That's why. Ghosts can't buy cigarettes."

  Palmer looked at him for several seconds, and before he laughed, David saw that Palmer more than believed him: Palmer had known all along. "I've heard plenty of reasons for not bringing s
omeone what he asked for," he said, "but I have to think that takes the prize."

  "Phil--"

  From inside: "Fish for supper! Oh, gah-dammit!"

  "Excuse me, kiddies," Palmer said. "Duty calls." And he was gone. David turned to Willa, thinking she'd ask him what else he had expected, but Willa was looking at the notice posted beside the stairs.

  "Look at that," she said. "Tell me what you see."

  At first he saw nothing, because the moon was shining on the protective plastic. He took a step closer, then one to the left, moving Willa aside to do it.

  "At the top it says NO SOLICITING BY ORDER OF SUBLETTE COUNTY SHERIFF, then some fine print--blah-blah-blah--and at the bottom--"

  She gave him an elbow. Not gently, either. "Stop shitting around and look at it, David. I don't want to be here all night."

  You don't see what's right in front of your eyes.

  He turned away from the station and stared at the railroad tracks shining in the moonlight. Beyond them was a thick white neck of stone with a flat top--that thar's a mesa, pardner, jest like in them old John Ford movies.

  He looked back at the posted notice, and wondered how he ever could have mistaken TRESPASSING for SOLICITING, a big bad investment banker like Wolf Frightener Sanderson.

  "It says NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF SUBLETTE COUNTY SHERIFF," he said.

  "Very good. And under the blah-blah-blah, what about there?"

  At first he couldn't read the two lines at the bottom at all; at first those two lines were just incomprehensible symbols, possibly because his mind, which wanted to believe none of this, could find no innocuous translation. So he looked away to the railroad tracks once more and wasn't exactly surprised to see that they no longer gleamed in the moonlight; now the steel was rusty, and weeds were growing between the ties. When he looked back again, the railway station was a slumped derelict with its windows boarded up and most of the shingles on its roof gone. NO PARKING TAXI ZONE had disappeared from the asphalt, which was crumbling and full of potholes. He could still read WYOMING and "THE EQUALITY STATE" on the side of the building, but now the words were ghosts. Like us, he thought.

  "Go on," Willa said--Willa, who had her own ideas about things, Willa who saw what was in front of her eyes and wanted you to see too, even when seeing was cruel. "That's your final exam. Read those two lines at the bottom and then we can get this show on the road."

  He sighed. "It says THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED. And then DEMOLITION SCHEDULED IN JUNE 2007."

  "You get an A. Now let's go see if anyone else wants to go to town and hear The Derailers. I'll tell Palmer to look on the bright side--we can't buy cigarettes, but for people like us there's never a cover charge."

  Only nobody wanted to go to town.

  "What does she mean, we're dead? Why does she want to say an awful thing like that?" Ruth Lander asked David, and what killed him (so to speak) wasn't the reproach in her voice but the look in her eyes before she pressed her face against the shoulder of Henry's corduroy jacket. Because she knew too.

  "Ruth," he said, "I'm not telling you this to upset you--"

  "Then stop!" she cried, her voice muffled.

  David saw that all of them but Helen Palmer were looking at him with anger and hostility. Helen was nodding and muttering between her husband and the Rhinehart woman, whose first name was probably Sally. They were standing under the fluorescents in little groups...only when he blinked, the fluorescents were gone. Then the stranded passengers were just dim figures standing in the shattered moonlight that managed to find its way in through the boarded-up windows. The Landers weren't sitting on a bench; they were sitting on a dusty floor near a little cluster of empty crack vials--yes, it seemed that crack had managed to find its way even out here to John Ford country--and there was a faded circle on one wall not far from the corner where Helen Palmer squatted and muttered. Then David blinked again and the fluorescents were back. So was the big clock, hiding that faded circle.

  Henry Lander said, "Think you better go along now, David."

  "Listen a minute, Henry," Willa said.

  Henry switched his gaze to her, and David had no trouble reading the distaste that was there. Any liking Henry might once have had for Willa Stuart was gone now.

  "I don't want to listen," Henry said. "You're upsetting my wife."

  "Yeah," a fat young man in a Seattle Mariners cap said. David thought his name was O'Casey. Something Irish with an apostrophe in it, anyway. "Zip it, baby girl!"

  Willa bent toward Henry, and Henry recoiled from her slightly, as if her breath were bad. "The only reason I let David drag me back here is because they are going to demolish this place! Can you say wrecking ball, Henry? Surely you're bright enough to get your head around that concept."

  "Make her stop!" Ruth cried, her voice muffled.

  Willa leaned even closer, eyes bright in her narrow, pretty face. "And when the wrecking ball leaves and the dump trucks haul away the crap that used to be this railway station--this old railway station--where will you be?"

  "Leave us alone, please," Henry said.

  "Henry--as the chorus girl said to the archbishop, denial is not a river in Egypt."

  Ursula Davis, who had disliked Willa from the first, stepped forward, leading with her chin. "Fuck off, you troublesome bitch."

  Willa swung around. "Don't any of you get it? You're dead, we're all dead, and the longer you stay in one place, the harder it's going to be to ever go anywhere else!"

  "She's right," David said.

  "Yeah, and if she said the moon was cheese, you'd say provolone," Ursula said. She was a tall, forbiddingly handsome woman of about forty. "Pardon my French, but she's got you so pussy-whipped it isn't funny."

  Dudley let out that startling donkey bray again, and the Rhinehart woman began to sniffle.

  "You're upsetting the passengers, you two." This was Rattner, the little conductor with the apologetic face. He hardly ever spoke. David blinked, the station lensed dark and moonlit again for another moment, and he saw that half of Rattner's head was gone. The rest of his face had been burned black.

  "They're going to demolish this place and you'll have nowhere to go!" Willa cried. "Fucking...nowhere!" She dashed angry tears from her cheeks with both fists. "Why don't you come to town with us? We'll show you the way. At least there are people...and lights...and music."

  "Mumma, I want to hear some music," Pammy Andreeson said.

  "Hush," her mother said.

  "If we were dead, we'd know it," Biggers said.

  "He's got you there, son," Dudley said, and dropped David a wink. "What happened to us? How did we get dead?"

  "I...don't know," David said. He looked at Willa. Willa shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.

  "You see?" Rattner said. "It was a derailment. Happens...well, I was going to say all the time, but that's not true, even out here where the rail system needs a fair amount of work, but every now and then, at one of the junction points--"

  "We faw down," Pammy Andreeson said. David looked at her, really looked, and for a moment saw a corpse, burned bald, in a rotting rag of a dress. "Down and down and down. Then--" She made a growling, rattling sound in her throat, put her small, grimy hands together, and tossed them apart: every child's sign language for explosion.

  She seemed about to say something more, but before she could, her mother suddenly slapped her across the face hard enough to expose her teeth in a momentary sneer and drive spit from the corner of her mouth. Pammy stared up for a moment in shocked disbelief, then broke into a strident, one-note wail even more painful than her hopscotch chant.

  "What do we know about lying, Pamela?" Georgia Andreeson yelled, grabbing the child by her upper arm. Her fingers sank in almost out of sight.

  "She's not lying!" Willa said. "We went off the tracks and into the gorge! Now I remember, and you do too! Don't you? Don't you? It's on your face! It's on your fucking face!"

  Without looking in her direction, Georgia Andreeson flipped
Willa the bird. Her other hand shook Pammy back and forth. David saw a child flop in one direction, a charred corpse in the other. What had caught fire? Now he remembered the drop, but what had caught fire? He didn't remember, perhaps because he didn't want to remember.

  "What do we know about lying?" Georgia Andreeson shouted.

  "It's wrong, Mama!" the child blubbered.

  The woman dragged her off into the darkness, the child still screaming that one monotonous note.

  There was a moment of silence in their wake--all of them listening to Pammy being dragged into exile--and then Willa turned to David. "Had enough?"

  "Yes," he said. "Let's go."

  "Don't let the doorknob hitcha where the good Lord splitcha!" Biggers advised, madly exuberant, and Dudley yodeled laughter.

  David let Willa lead him toward the double doors, where Phil was leaning just inside, his arms still crossed on his chest. Then David pulled free of Willa's hand and went to Helen Palmer sitting in the corner, rocking back and forth. She looked up at him with dark, bewildered eyes. "We got fish for supper," she said in what was little more than a whisper.

  "I don't know about that," he said, "but you were right about the smell of the place. Old dirty crackers." He looked back and saw the rest of them staring at him and Willa in the moonlit dimness that could be fluorescent light if you wanted it to be badly enough. "It's the smell places get when they've been closed up a long time, I guess," he said.

  "Better buzz, cuz," Phil Palmer said. "No one wants to buy what you're selling."

  "Don't I know it," David said, and followed Willa into the moonlit dark. Behind him, like a rueful whisper of wind, he heard Helen Palmer say, "First one t'ing an' den anudder."

  The miles back to 26 made their score nine for the night, but David wasn't a bit tired. He supposed ghosts didn't get tired, just as they didn't get hungry or thirsty. Besides, it was a different night. The moon was full now, shining like a silver dollar high in the sky, and 26's front parking lot was empty. In the gravel lot around to the side, a few semis stood silent, and one rumbled sleepily with its running lights glowing. The marquee sign now read: COMING THIS WEEKEND THE NIGHTHAWKS BRING YOUR HONEY SPEND YOUR MONEY.