He bent, and Mary saw him pick something up--a crate, it looked like. He put it on top of another one, then stepped up onto the makeshift platform with a wince. He was standing in front of a dirty frosted-glass window. He put his hands on this, the fingers spread like starfish, and pushed. The window slid up.
"It's the ladies'," he said. "Watch out. There's a little drop."
He turned around and slid through, looking like a large, wrinkled boy entering the Over-the-Hill Gang's club-house. David followed, then his father. Johnny Marinville went next, first almost falling off the crate platform as he turned around. He really was close to blind in the dark, she thought, and reminded herself never to ride in a car this man was driving. And a motorcycle? Had he really crossed the country on a motorcycle? If so, God must love him a lot more than she ever would.
She grabbed him by the back of the belt and steadied him. "Thanks," he said, and this time he did sound humble. Then he was wriggling through the window, puffing and grunting, his long hair hanging in his face.
Mary took one quick look around, and for a moment she heard ghost-voices in the wind.
Didn't you see it?
See what?
On that sign. That speed-limit sign.
What about it?
There was a dead cat on it.
Now, standing on the crate, she thought: The people who said those things really are ghosts, because they're dead. Me as much as him--certainly the Mary Jackson who left on this trip is gone. The person back here behind this old movie house, she's someone new.
She passed her gun and flashlight through the window to the hands held up to take them, then turned around and slid easily over the sill and into the ladies'.
Ralph caught her around the hips and eased her down. David was shining his flashlight around, holding one hand over the top of the lens in a kind of hood. The place had a smell that made her wrinkle her nose--damp, mildew, booze. There was a carton filled with empty liquor bottles in one corner. In one of the toilet-stalls there were two large plastic bins filled with beer-cans. These had been placed over a hole where, once upon a time, she supposed, there had been an actual toilet. Around the time James Dean died, from the look of the place, she thought. She realized she could use a toilet herself, and that no matter how the place smelled, she was hungry, as well. Why not? She hadn't had anything to eat for almost eight hours. She felt guilty about being hungry when Peter would never eat again, but she supposed the feeling would pass. That was the hell of it, when you thought it over. That was the exact hell of it.
"Holy shit," Marinville said, pulling his own flashlight out of his shirt and shining it into the beer-can repository. "You and your friends must party hearty, Thomas."
"We clean the whole place out once a month," Billingsley said, sounding defensive. "Not like the kids that used to run wild upstairs until the old fire escape finally fell down last winter. We don't pee in the comers, and we don't use drugs, either."
Marinville considered the carton of liquor empties. "On top of all that J. W. Dant, a few drugs and you'd probably explode. "
"Where do you pee, if you don't mind me asking?" Mary said. "Because I could use a little relief in that direction."
"There's a Port-A-Potty across the hall in the men's. The kind they have in sickrooms. We keep that clean, too." He gave Marinville a complex look, equal parts truculence and timidity. Mary supposed that Marinville was preparing to tee off on Billingsley. She had an idea Billingsley felt it coming, too. And why? Because guys like Marinville needed to establish a pecking order, and the veterinarian was clearly the most peckable person in attendance.
"Excuse me." she said. "Might I borrow your flashlight, Johnny?"
She held out her hand. He looked at it dubiously, then handed it over. She thanked him and headed for the door.
"Whoa--neat!" David said softly, and that stopped her.
The boy had focused his flashlight on one of the few sections of wall where the tiles were still mostly intact. On it someone had drawn a gloriously rococo fish in various Magic Marker colors. It was the sort of flippytailed, half-mythological beast that one sometimes found disporting atop the wavelets of very old sea-maps. Yet there was nothing fearsome or sea-monsterish about the fellow swimming on the wall above the broken Towl-Master dispenser; with its blue Betty Boop eyes and red gills and yellow dorsal fin, there was something sweet and exuberant about it--here in the fetid, booze-smelling dark, the fish was almost miraculous. Only one tile had fallen out of the drawing, eradicating the lower half of the tail.
"Mr. Billingsley, did you--"
"Yes, son, yes," he said, sounding both defiant and embarrassed. "I drew it." He looked at Marinville. "I was probably drunk at the time."
Mary paused in the doorway, bracing for Marinville's reply. He surprised her. "I've been known to draw a few drunkfish myself," he said. "With words rather than coloring pens, but I imagine the principle is the same. Not bad, Billingsley. But why here? Of all places, why here?"
"Because I like this place," he said with considerable dignity. "Especially since the kids cleared out. Not that they ever bothered us much back here; they liked the balcony, mostly. I suppose that sounds crazy to you, but I don't much care. It's where I come to be with my friends since I retired and quit the Town Committee. I look forward to the nights I spend with them. It's just an old movie theater, there's rats and the seats are full of mildew, but so what? It's our business, ain't it? Our own business. Only now I suppose they're all dead. Dick Onslo, Tom Kincaid, Cash Lancaster. My old pals." He uttered a harsh, startling cry, like the caw of a raven. It made her jump.
"Mr. Billingsley?" It was David. The old man looked at him. "Do you think he killed everyone in town?"
"That's crazy!" Marinville said.
Ralph yanked his arm as if it were the stop-cord on a bus. "Quiet."
Billingsley was still looking at David and rubbing at the flesh beneath his eyes with his long, crooked fingers. "I think he may have," he said, and glanced at Marinville again for a moment. "I think he may have at least tried."
"How many people are we talking about?" Ralph asked.
"In Desperation? Hundred and ninety, maybe two hundred. With the new mine people starting to trickle in, maybe fifty or sixty more. Although it's hard to tell how many of em would've been here and how many up to the pit."
"The pit?" Mary asked.
"China Pit. The one they're reopening. For the copper."
"Don't tell me one man, even a moose like that, went around town and killed two hundred people," Marinville said, "because, excuse me very much, I don't believe it. I mean, I believe in American enterprise as much as anyone, but that's just nuts."
"Well, he might have missed a few on the first pass," Mary said. "Didn't you say he ran over a guy when he was bringing you in? Ran him over and killed him?"
Marinville turned and favored her with a weighty frown. "I thought you had to take a leak."
"I've got good kidneys. He did, didn't he? He ran someone down in the street. You said so."
"All right, yeah. Rancourt, he called him. Billy Rancourt."
"Oh Jesus." Billingsley closed his eyes.
"You knew him?" Ralph asked.
"Mister, in a town the size of this one, everybody knows everybody. Billy worked at the feed store, cut some hair in his spare time."
"All right, yeah, Entragian ran this Rancourt down in the street--ran him down like a dog." Marinville sounded upset, querulous. "I'm willing to accept the idea that Entragian may have killed a lot of people. I know what he's capable of."
"Do you?" David asked softly, and they all looked at him. David looked away, at the colorful fish floating on the wall.
"For one guy to kill hundreds of people ..." Marinville said, and then quit for a moment, as if he'd temporarily lost his train of thought. "Even if he did it at night... I mean, guys . . ."
"Maybe it wasn't just him," Mary said. "Maybe the buzzards and the coyotes helped."
Mar
inville tried to push this away--even in the gloom she could see him trying--and then gave up. He sighed and rubbed at one temple, as if it hurt. "Okay, maybe they did. The ugliest bird in the universe tried to scalp me when he told it to, that I know happened. But still--"
"It's like the story of the Angel of Death in Exodus," David said. "The Israelites were supposed to put blood on their door-tops to show they were the good guys, you know? Only here, he's the Angel of Death. So why did he pass over us? He could have killed us all just as easy as he killed Pie, or your husband, Mary." He turned to the old man. "Why didn't he kill you, Mr. Billingsley? If he killed everyone else in town, why didn't he kill you?"
Billingsley shrugged. "Dunno. I was laying home drunk. He came in the new cruiser--same one I helped pick out, by God--and got me. Stuck me in the back and hauled me off to the calabozo. I asked him why, what I'd done, but he wouldn't tell me. I begged him. I cried. I didn't know he was crazy, not then, how could I? He was quiet, but he didn't give any signs that he was crazy. I started to get that idea later, but at first I was just convinced I'd done something bad in a blackout. That I'd been out driving, maybe, and hurt someone. I ... I did something like that once before."
"When did he come for you?" Mary asked.
Billingsley had to think about it in order to be sure. "Day before yesterday. Just before sundown. I was in bed, my head hurting, thinking about getting something for my hangover. An aspirin, and a little hair of the dog that bit me. He came and got me right out of bed. I didn't have anything on but my underwear shorts. He let me dress. Helped me. But he wouldn't let me take a drink even though I was shaking all over, and he wouldn't tell me why he was taking me in." He paused, still rubbing the flesh beneath his eyes. Mary wished he would stop doing that, it was making her nervous. "Later on, after he had me in a cell, he brought me a hot dinner. He sat at the desk for a little while and said some stuff. That's when I started to think he must be crazy, because none of it made sense."
"'I see holes like eyes,' " Mary said.
Billingsley nodded. "Yeah, like that. 'My head is full of blackbirds,' that's another one I remember. And a lot more I don't. They were like Thoughts for the Day out of a book written by a crazy person."
"Except for being in town to start with, you're just like us," David said. "And you don't know why he let you live any more than we do."
"I guess that's right."
"What happened to you, Mr. Marinville?"
Marinville told them about how the cop had pulled up behind his bike while he had been whizzing and contemplating the scenery north of the road, and how he had seemed nice at first. "We talked about my books," he said. "I thought he was a fan. I was going to give him a fuckin autograph. Pardon my French, David."
"Sure. Did cars go by while you were talking? I bet they did."
"A few, I guess, and a couple of semis. I didn't really notice."
"But he didn't bother any of them."
"No."
"Just you."
Marinville looked at the boy thoughtfully.
"He picked you out, " David persisted.
"Well ... maybe. I can't say for sure. Everything seemed jake until he found the dope."
Mary held her hands up. "Whoa, whoa, time out."
Marinville looked at her.
"This dope you had--"
"It wasn't mine, don't go getting that idea. You think I'd try driving cross-country on a Harley with half a pound of grass in my saddlebag? My brains may be fried, but not that fried."
Mary began to giggle. It made her need to pee worse, but she couldn't help it. It was all just too perfect, too wonderfully round. "Did it have a smile-sticker on it?" she asked, giggling harder than ever. She didn't really need an answer to this question, but she wanted it, just the same. "Mr. Smiley-Smile?"
"How did you know that?" Marinville looked astounded. He also looked remarkably like Arlo Guthrie, at least in the glow of the flashlights, and Mary's giggles became little screams of laughter. She realized that if she didn't get to the bathroom soon, she was going to wet her pants.
"B-Because it came from our t-t-Trunk," she said, holding her stomach. "It b-belonged to my sih-sih-sister-in-law. She's a total ding dong. Entragian may be c-c-crazy, but at least he r-r-recycles ... excuse me, I'm about to h-have an accident."
She hurried across the hall. What she saw when she opened the men's-room door made her laugh even harder. Set up like some comic-opera throne in the center of the floor was a portable toilet with a canvas bag suspended below the seat in a steel frame. On the wall across from it was another Magic Marker drawing, obviously from the same hand which had created the fish. This one was a horse at full gallop. There was orange smoke jetting from its nostrils and a baleful rose-madder glint in its eyes. It appeared to be headed out into an expanse of prairie somewhere east of the sun and west of the washbasins. None of the tiles had fallen out of this wall, but most had buckled, giving the stallion a warped and dreamish look.
Outside, the wind howled. As Mary unsnapped her pants and sat down on the cold toilet seat, she suddenly thought of how Peter sometimes put his hand up to his mouth when he laughed--his thumb touching one corner, his first finger touching the other, as if laughter somehow made him vulnerable--and all at once, with no break at all, at least none she could detect, she was crying. How stupid all this was, to be a widow at thirty-five, to be a fugitive in a town full of dead people, to be sitting in the men's room of an abandoned movie theater on a canvas Port-A-Potty, peeing and crying at the same time, pissing and moaning, you might say, and looking at a dim beast on a wall so warped that it seemed to be running underwater, how stupid to be so frightened, and to have grief all but stolen away by her mind's brute determination to survive at any cost ... as if Peter had never meant anything anyway, as if he had just been a footnote.
How stupid to still feel so hungry ... but she was.
"Why is this happening? Why does it have to be me?" she whispered, and put her face into her hands.
3
If either Steve or Cynthia had had a gun, they probably would have shot her.
They were passing Bud's Suds (the neon sign in the window read ENJOY OUR SLOTSPITALITY) when the door of the next business up--the laundrymat--opened and a woman sprang out. Steve, seeing only a dark shape, drew back the tire iron to hit her.
"No!" Cynthia said, grabbing at his wrist and holding it. "Don't do that!"
The woman--she had a lot of dark hair and very white skin, but that was all Cynthia could tell at first--grabbed Steve by the shoulders and shoved her face up into his. Cynthia didn't think the laundrymat woman ever saw the upraised tire iron at all. She's gonna ask him if he's found Jeeeesus, Cynthia thought. It's never Jesus when they grab you like that, it's always Jeeeesus.
But of course that was not what she said.
"We have to get out." Her voice was low, hoarse. "Right now." She snatched a glance over her shoulder, flicked a look at Cynthia, then seemed to dismiss her entirely as she focussed on Steve again. Cynthia had seen this before and wasn't offended by it. When it got to be crunch-time, a certain kind of woman could only see the guy. Sometimes it was the way they had been raised; more often it seemed actually hard-wired into their cunning little Barbie Doll circuits.
Cynthia was getting a better look at her now, in spite of the dark and the blowing dust. An older woman (thirty, at least), intelligent-looking, not unsexy. Long legs poking out of a short dress that looked somehow gawky, as if the chick inside it wasn't accustomed to wearing dresses. Yet she was far from clumsy, judging from the way she moved with Steve when he moved, as if they were dancing. "Do you have a car?" she rapped.
"That's no good," Steve said. "The road out of town is blocked."
"Blocked? Blocked how?"
"A couple of house trailers," he said.
"Where?"
"Near the mining company," Cynthia said, "but that's not the only problem. There are a lot of dead people--"
"Tell me about it,"
she said, and laughed shrilly. "Collie's gone nuts. I saw him kill half a dozen myself. He drove after them in his cruiser and shot them down in the street. Like they were cattle and Main Street was the killing-floor." She was still holding onto Steve, shaking him as she spoke, as if scolding him, but her eyes were everywhere. "We have to get off the street. If he catches us ... come in here. It's safe. I've been in here since yesterday forenoon. He came in once. I hid under the desk in the office. I thought he'd follow the smell of my perfume and find me ... come around the desk and find me ... but he didn't. Maybe he had a stuffy nose!"
She began to laugh hysterically, then abruptly slapped her own face to make herself stop. It was funny, in a shocking way; the sort of thing the characters in old Warner Brothers cartoons sometimes did.
Cynthia shook her head. "Not the laundrymat. The movie theater. There are other people there."
"I saw his shadow," the woman said. She was still holding Steve by the shoulders and her face was still turned confidentially up to his, as if she thought he was Humphrey Bogart and she was Ingrid Bergman and there was a soft filter on the camera. "I saw his shadow, it fell across the desk and I was sure ... but he didn't, and I think we'll be safe in the office while we think about what to do next--"
Cynthia reached out, took the woman's chin in her hand, and turned it toward her.
"What are you doing?" the dark-haired woman asked angrily. "Just what in the hell do you think you're doing?"
"Getting your attention, I hope."
Cynthia let go of the woman's face, and be damned if she didn't immediately turn back to Steve, every bit as brainless as a flower turning on its stalk to follow the sun, and resume her speed-rap.
"I was under the desk ... and ... and ... we have to ... listen, we have to ..."
Cynthia reached out again, grasped the woman's lower face again, turned it back in her direction again.
"Hon, read my lips. The theater. There are other people there."
The woman looked at her, frowning as if she were trying to get the sense of this. Then she looked past Cynthia's shoulder at the chain-hung marquee of The American West.
"The old movieshow?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure? I tried the door last night, after it got dark. It's locked."
"We're supposed to go around to the back," Steve said. "I have a friend, that's where he told me to go."