CHAPTER 43
There was a dead man lying in the middle of Main Street in May, Oklahoma. Nick wasn't surprised. He had seen a lot of corpses since leaving Shoyo, and he suspected he hadn't seen a thousandth of all the dead people he must have passed. In places, the rich smell of death on the air was enough to make you feel like swooning. One more dead man, more or less, wasn't going to make any difference. But when the dead man sat up, such an explosion of terror rose in him that he again lost control of his bike. It wavered, then wobbled, then crashed, spilling Nick violently onto the pavement of Oklahoma Route 3. He cut his hands and scraped his forehead. "Holy gee, mister, but you took a tumble," the corpse said, coming toward Nick at a pace best described as an amiable stagger. "Didn't you just? My laws!" Nick got none of this. He was looking at a spot on the pavement between his hands where drops of blood from his cut forehead were falling, and wondering how badly he had been cut. When the hand touched him on the shoulder he remembered the corpse and scrambled away on the palms of his hands and the soles of his shoes, the eye not covered with the patch bright with terror. "Don't you take on so," the corpse said, and Nick saw he wasn't a corpse at all but a young man who was looking happily at him. He had most of a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and now Nick understood. Not a corpse but a man who had gotten drunk and had passed out in the middle of the road. Nick nodded at him and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Just then a drop of blood oozed warmly into the eye that Ray Booth had worked over, making it smart. He raised the eyepatch and swiped his forearm across it. He had a little more vision on that side today, but when he closed his good eye, the world still retreated to something which was little more than a colorful blur. He replaced the patch and then walked slowly to the curb and sat beside a Plymouth with Kansas plates which was slowly settling on its tires. He could see the gash on his forehead reflected in the Plymouth's bumper. It looked ugly but not deep. He would find the local drugstore, disinfect it, and slap a Band-Aid over it. He thought he still must have enough penicillin in his system to fight off almost anything, but his close call from the bullet-scrape on his leg had given him a horror of infection. He picked scraps of gravel out of his palms, wincing. The man with the bottle of whiskey had been watching all of this with no expression at all. If Nick had looked up, it would have struck him as queer immediately. When he had turned away to examine his wound in the bumper's reflection, the animation had leaked out of the man's face. It became empty and clean and unlined. He was wearing biballs that were clean but faded and heavy workshoes. He stood about five-nine, and his hair was so blond it was nearly white. His eyes were a bright, empty blue, and with the cornsilk hair, his Swedish or Norwegian descent was unmistakable. He looked no more than twentythree, but Nick found out later he had to be forty-five or close to it because he could remember the end of the Korean War, and how his daddy had come home in uniform a month later. There was no question that he might have made that up. Invention was not Tom Cullen's long suit. He stood there, empty of face, like a robot whose plug has been pulled. Then, little by little, animation seeped back into his face. His whiskey-reddened eyes began to twinkle. He smiled. He had remembered again what this situation called for. "Holy gee, mister, but you took a tumble. Didn't you just? My laws!" He blinked at the amount of blood on Nick's forehead. Nick had a pad of paper and a Bic in his shirt pocket; neither had been jarred loose by the fall. He wrote: "You just scared me. Thought you were dead until you sat up. I'm okay. Is there a drugstore in town?" He showed the pad to the man in the bib-alls. The man took it. Looked at what was written there. Handed it back. Smiling, he said, "I'm Tom Cullen. But I can't read. I only got to third grade but then I was sixteen and my daddy made me quit. He said I was too big." Retarded, Nick thought. I can't talk and he can't read. For a moment he was utterly nonplussed. "Holy gee, mister, but you took a tumble!" Tom Cullen exclaimed. In a way, it was the first time for both of them. "My laws, didn't you just!" Nick nodded. Replaced the pad and pen. Put a hand over his mouth again and shook his head. Cupped his hands over his ears and shook his head. Placed his left hand against his throat and shook his head. Cullen grinned, puzzled. "Got a toothache? I had one once. Gee, it hurt. Didn't it just? My laws!" Nick shook his head and went through his dumbshow again. Cullen guessed earache this time. Nick threw his hands up and went over to his bike. The paint, was scraped, but it didn't seem hurt.
186 He got on and pedaled a little way up the street. Yes, it was all right. Cullen jogged alongside, smiling happily. His eyes never left Nick. He hadn't seen anyone for most of a week. "Don't you feel like talkin?" he asked, but Nick didn't look around or appear to have heard. Tom tugged at his sleeve and repeated his question. The man on the bike put his hand over his mouth and shook his head. Tom frowned. Now the man had put his bike on its kickstand and was looking at the storefronts. He seemed to see what he wanted, because he went over to the sidewalk and then to Mr. Norton's drugstore. If he wanted to go in there it was just too bad, because the drug was locked up. Mr. Norton had left town. Just about everybody had locked up and left town, it seemed like, except for Mom and her friend Mrs. Blakely, and they were both dead. Now the no-talking-man was trying the door. Tom could have told him it was no use even though the OPEN sign was on the door. The OPEN sign was a liar. Too bad, because Tom would dearly have loved an ice cream soda. It was a lot better than the whiskey, which had made him feel good at first and then made him sleepy and then had made his head ache fit to split. He had gone to sleep to get away from the headache but he had had a lot of crazy dreams about a man in a black suit like the one that Revrunt Deiffenbaker always wore. The man in the black suit chased him through the dreams. He seemed like a very bad man to Tom. The only reason he had gone to drinking in the first place was because he wasn't supposed to, his daddy had told him that, and Mom too, but now everyone was gone, so what? He would if he wanted to. But what was the no-talking-man doing now? Picked up the litter basket from the sidewalk and he was going to... what? Break Mr. Norton's window? CRASH! By God and by damn if he didn't! And now he was reaching through, unlocking the door... "Hey, mister, you can't do that!" Tom cried, his voice throbbing with outrage and excitement. "That's illegal! M-O-O-N and that spells il-legal. Don't you know—" But the man was already inside and he never turned around. "What are you, anyway, deaf?" Tom called indignantly. "My laws! Are you..." He trailed off. The animation and excitement left his face. He was the robot with the pulled plug again. In May it had not been an, uncommon sight to see Feeble Tom like this. He would be walking along the street, looking into shop windows with that eternally happy expression on his slightly rounded Scandahoovian face, and all of a sudden he would stop dead and go blank. Someone might shout, "There goes Tom!" and there would be laughter. If Tom's daddy was with him he would scowl and elbow Tom, perhaps even sock him repeatedly on the shoulder or the back until Tom came to life. But Tom's daddy had been around less and less over the first half of 1985 because he was stepping out with a redheaded waitress who worked at Boomer's Bar & Grille. Her name was DeeDee Packalotte (and weren't there some jokes about that name), and about a year ago she and Don Cullen run off together. They had been seen just once, in a cheap fleabag motel not far away, in Slapout, Oklahoma, and that had been the last of them. Most folks took Tom's sudden blankouts as a further sign of retardation, but they were actually instances of nearly normal thinking. The human thinking process is based (or so the psychologists tell us) on deduction and induction, and the retarded person is incapable of making these deductive and inductive leaps. There are lines down somewhere inside, circuits shorted out, fouled switches. Tom Cullen was not severely retarded, and he was capable of making simple connections. Every now and then-during his blankouts-he would be capable of making a more sophisticated inductive or deductive connection. He would feel the possibility of making such a connection the way a normal person will sometimes feel a name dancing "right on the tip of his tongue." When it happened, Tom would dismiss his real world, which was nothing more or less than an instant-by-instant flow of sensory input, and go into his mind. He would be like a man in a darkened unfamiliar room who holds the plug-end of a lampcord in one hand and who goes crawling around on the floor, bumping into things and feeling with his free hand for the electrical socket. And if he found it he didn't always-there would be a burst of illumination and he would see the room (or the idea) plain. Tom was a sensory creature. A list of his favorite things would have included the taste of an ice cream soda at Mr. Norton's fountain, watching a pretty girl in a short dress waiting on the corner to cross the street, the smell of lilac, the feel of silk. But more than any of these things he loved the intangible, he loved that moment when the connection would be made, the switch cleared (at least momentarily), the light would go on in the dark room. It didn't always happen; often the connection eluded him. This time it didn't. He had said, What are you, anyway, deaf? The man hadn't acted like he heard what Tom was saying except for those times he had been looking right at him. And the man hadn't said anything to him, not even hi. Sometimes people didn't answer Tom when he asked questions because something in his face told them he was soft upstairs. But when that happened, the person who wouldn't answer looked mad or sad or kind of blushy. This man didn't act like that-he had given Tom a circle made of his thumb and forefinger and Tom knew that meant Okey Dokey... but still he didn't talk.
187 Hands over his ears and a shake of his head. Hands over his mouth and the same. Hands over his neck and the same again. The room lit up: connection made. "My laws!" Tom said, and the animation came back into his face. His bloodshot eyes glowed. He rushed into Norton's Drugstore, forgetting that it was illegal to do so. The no-talking-man was squirting something that smelled like Bactine onto cotton and was then wiping the cotton on his forehead. "Hey mister!" Tom said, rushing up. The no-talking-man didn't turn around. Tom was momentarily puzzled, and then he remembered. He tapped Nick on the shoulder and Nick turned. "You're deaf n dumb, right? Can't hear! Can't talkl Right?" Nick nodded. And to him, Tom's reaction was nothing short of amazing. He jumped into the air and clapped his hands wildly. "I thought of it! Hooray for me! I thought of it myself! Hooray for Tom Cullen!" Nick had to grin. He couldn't remember when his disability had brought someone so much pleasure.
There was a small town square fronting on the courthouse, and in this square was a statue of a Marine tricked out in World War II kit and weaponry. The plaque beneath announced that this monument was dedicated to the boys from Harper County who had made the ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR THEIR COUNTRY. In the shade of this monument Nick Andros and Tom Cullen sat, eating Underwood Deviled Ham and Underwood Deviled Chicken on potato chips. Nick had an x of Band- Aids on his forehead above his left eye. He was reading Tom's lips (which was a little tough, because Tom kept stuffing food through what he was saying) and reflecting to himself that he was getting damned tired of eating stuff which came out of cans. What he would really like was a big steak with all the trimmings. Tom hadn't stopped talking since they sat down. It was pretty repetitious stuff, with many ejaculations of My laws! and Wasn't it just? thrown in for seasoning. Nick didn't mind. He hadn't really known how much he missed other people until he met Tom, or how much he had been secretly afraid that he was the only one left, out of all the earth. It had even crossed his mind at one point that maybe the disease had killed everyone in the world but deaf-mutes. Now, he thought with an interior smile, he could speculate on the possibility that it had killed everyone in the world but deaf-mutes and the mentally retarded. That thought, which seemed amusing in the two o'clock light of a summer's afternoon, would come back to haunt him that night and not seem funny at all. He wondered where Tom thought all the people had gone. He had already heard about Tom's daddy, who had run off a couple of years before with a waitress, and about Tom's job as a handyman out on the Norbutt farm and how, two years ago, Mr. Norbutt had decided Tom was "getting on well enough" to be trusted handling an axe, and about the "big boys" who had jumped Tom one night and how Tom had "fought em all off 'til they was just about dead, and I put one of 'em in the hospital with ruptures, M-O-O-N, that spells ruptures, that's what Tom Cullen did," and he had heard about how Tom had found his mother at Mrs. Blakely's house and they were both dead in the living room and so Tom had stolen away. Jesus wouldn't come and take dead people up to heaven if anyone was watching, Tom said (Nick reflected that Tom's Jesus was a kind of Santa Claus in reverse, taking dead people up the chimney instead of bringing presents down). But he had said nothing at all about May's total emptiness, or the road arrowing in and out of town on which nothing moved. He put his hands lightly on Tom's chest, stopping the flow of words. "What?" Tom asked. Nick waved his arm in a large circle at the buildings of the downtown area. He put a burlesque expression of puzzlement on his face, wrinkling his brow, cocking his head, scratching the back of his skull. Then he made walking motions with his fingers on the grass and finished by looking up at Tom questioningly. What he saw was alarming. Tom might have died sitting up for all the animation on his face. His eyes, which had been sparkling a moment before with all the things he wanted to tell, were now cloudy blue marbles. His mouth hung ajar so Nick could see the soggy potto chip crumbs lying on his tongue. His hands were lax in his lap. Concerned, Nick reached out to touch him. Before he could, Tom's body gave a jerk. His eyelids fluttered, and the animation flowed back into his eyes like water filling a pail. He began to grin. If a balloon containing the word EUREKA had appeared over his head, what had happened would not have been more plain. "You want to know where all the people went!" Tom exclaimed. Nick nodded his head strongly.
188 "Well, I guess they went to Kansas City," Tom said. "My laws, yes. Everybody's always talkin about what a little town this is. Nothin happens. No fun. Even the roller-skating place went bust. Now there's nothin but the drive-in, and that doesn't show anything but those diddly-daddly pitchers. My mom always says people leaves but no people comes back. Just like my dad, he run off with a waitress from Boomer's Cafe, her name was M-O-O-N, that spells DeeDee Packalotte. So I guess everybody just got fed up and went at the same time. To Kansas City it must have been, my laws, didn't they just? That's where they must have gone. Except for Mrs. Blakely and my mom. Jesus is going to take them up to heaven up above and rock them in the everlasting harms." Tom's monologue recommenced. Gone to Kansas City, Nick thought. For all I know, that could be it, too. Everybody left on the poor sad planet picked up by the Hand of God and either rocked in the everlasting harms of Same or set down again in Kansas City. He leaned back and his eyelids fluttered so that Tom's words broke up into the visual equivalent of a modern poem, sans caps, like a work by e. e. cummings:
mother said ain't got no but i said to them i said you better not mess with
The dreams had been bad the night before, which he had spent in a barn, and now, with his belly full, all he wanted was...
my laws M-O-O-N that spells sure do wish
Nick fell asleep.
Waking up, he first wondered in that dazed way you have when you sleep heavily in the middle of the day why he was sweating so much. Sitting up, he understood. It was quarter to five in the afternoon; he had slept over two and a half hours and the sun had moved out from behind the war memorial. But that was not all. Tom Cullen, in a perfect orgy of solicitude, had covered him so he would not take a chill. With two blankets and a quilt. He threw them aside, stood up, stretched. Tom was not in sight. Nick walked slowly toward the main entrance to the square, wondering what-if anything-he was going to do about Tom... or with him. The retarded fellow had been feeding himself from the A&P on the far side of the town square. He had felt no compunction about going in there and picking out what he wanted to eat by the pictures on the labels of the cans because, Tom said, the supermarket door had been unlocked. Nick wondered idly what Tom would have done if it hadn't been. He supposed that, when he'd gotten hungry enough, he would have forgotten his scruples, or laid them aside for the nonce. But what would become of him when the food was gone? But that wasn't what really bothered him about Tom. It was the pathetic eagerness with which the man had greeted him. Retarded he might be, Nick thought, but he was not too retarded to feel loneliness. Both his mother and the woman who had served as his commonlaw aunt were dead. His dad had run off long before. His employer, Mr. Norbutt, and everyone else in May had stolen off to Kansas City one night while Tom slept, leaving him behind to wander up and down Main Street like a gently unhinged ghost. And he was getting into things he had no business getting into-like the whiskey. If he got drunk again, he might hurt himself. And if he got hurt with no one to take care of him, it would probably mean the end of him. But... a deaf-mute and a man who was mentally retarded? Of what possible use could they be to each other? Here you got one guy who can't talk and another guy who can't think. Well, that wasn't fair. Tom could think at least a little, but he couldn't read, and Nick had no illusions about how long it would take him to get tired of playing charades with Tom Cullen. Not that Tom would get tired of it. Laws, no. He stopped on the sidewalk just outside the park's entrance, hands stuffed in his pockets. Well, he decided, I can spend the night here with him. One night won't matter. I can cook him a decent meal at the very least. Cheered a little by this, he went to find Tom.
Nick slept in the park that night. He didn't know where Tom slept, but when he woke up the next morning, slightly dewy but feeling pretty good otherwise, the first thing he saw when he crossed the town square was Tom, crouched over a fleet of toy Corgi cars and a large plastic Texaco station.
189 Tom must have decided that if it was all right to break into Norton's Drugstore, it was all right to break into another place. He was sitting on the curb of the five-and-ten, his back to Nick. About forty model cars were lined up along the edge of the sidewalk. Next to them was the screwdriver Tom had used to jimmy the display case open. There were Jaguars, Mercedes-Benzes, Rolls-Royces, a scale-model Bentley with a long, lime-green cowling, a Lamborghini, a Cord, a four-inch-long customized Pontiac Bonneville, a Corvette, a Maserati, and, God watch over us and protect us, a 1933 Moon. Tom was hunched over these studiously, driving them in and out of the garage, gassing them up at the toy pump. One of the lifts in the repair bay worked, Nick saw, and from time to time Tom would raise one of the cars up on it and, pretend to do something underneath. If he had been able to hear, he would have heard, in the nearly perfect silence, the sound of Tom Cullen's imagination at work-the lip-vibrating brrrrrr as he drove the cars onto the Fisher-Price tarmac, the chk-chk-chk-ding! of the gas-pump at work, the ssshhhhhhh as the lift inside went up and down. As it was, he could catch some of the conversation between the station proprietor and the little people in the little cars: Fill that up, sir? Regular? You bet! Just let me get that windshield, ma'am. I think it's your carb. Let's put her up in the air and take a look at the bass-tud. Restrooms? You bet! Right around the side there! And over this, arching for miles in every direction, the sky God had allocated to this little bit of Oklahoma. Nick thought: I can't leave him. I can't do that. And he was suddenly swept by a bitter and totally unexpected sadness, a feeling so deep he thought for a moment he would weep. They've gone to Kansas City, he thought. That's what's happened. They've all gone to Kansas City. Nick walked across the street and tapped Tom on the arm. Tom jumped and looked over his shoulder. A large and guilty smile stretched his lips, and a blush climbed out of his shirt collar. "I know it's for little boys and not for grown men," he said. "I know that, laws yes, Daddy tole me." Nick shrugged, smiled, spread his hands. Tom looked relieved. "It's mine now. Mine if I want it. If you could go in the drug and get something, I could go into the five-and-dime and get something. My laws, couldn't I just? I don't have to put it back, do I?" "Mine," Tom said happily, and turned back to the garage. Nick tapped him again and Tom looked back. "What?" Nick tugged his sleeve and Tom stood up willingly enough. Nick led him down the street to where his bike leaned on its kickstand. He pointed to himself. Then at the bike. Tom nodded. "Sure. That bike is yours. That Texaco garage is mine. I won't take your bike and you won't take my garage. Laws, no!" Nick shook his head. He pointed at himself. At the bike. Then down Main Street. He waved his fingers: byebye. Tom became very still. Nick waited. Tom said hesitantly: "You movin on, mister?" "I don't want you to!" Tom burst out. His eyes were wide and very blue, sparkling with tears. "I like you! I don't want you to go to Kansas City, too!" Nick pulled Tom next to him and put an arm around him. Pointed to himself. To Tom. To the bike. Out of town. "I don't getcha," Tom said. Patiently, Nick went through it again. This time he added the byebye wave, and in a burst of inspiration he lifted Tom's hand and made it wave byebye, too. "Want me to go with you?" Tom asked. A smile of disbelieving delight lit up his face. Relieved, Nick nodded. "Sure!" Tom shouted. "Tom Cullen's gonna go! Tom's—" He halted, some of the happiness dying out of his face, and looked at Nick cautiously. "Can I take my garage?" Nick thought about it a moment and then nodded his head yes. "Okay!" Tom's grin reappeared like the sun from behind a cloud. "Tom Cullen's going!" Nick led him to the bike. He pointed at Tom, then at the bike. "I never rode one like that," Tom said doubtfully, eyeing the bike's gearshift and the high, narrow seat. "I guess I better not. Tom Cullen would fall off a fancy bike like that." But Nick was provisionally encouraged. I never rode one like that meant that he had ridden some sort of bike. It was only a question of finding a nice simple one. Tom was going to slow him down, that was inevitable, but perhaps not too much after all. And what was the hurry, anyway? Dreams were only dreams. But he did feel an inner urge to hurry, something so strong yet indefinable that it amounted to a subconscious command. He led Tom back to his filling station. He pointed at it, then smiled and nodded at Tom. Tom squatted down eagerly, and then his hands paused in the act of reaching for a couple of cars. He
190 looked up at Nick, his face troubled and transparently suspicious. "You ain't gonna go without Tom Cullen, are you?" Nick shook his head firmly. "Okay," Tom said, and turned confidently to his toys. Before he could stop himself, Nick had ruffled the man's hair. Tom looked up and smiles shyly at him. Nick smiled back. No, he couldn't just leave him. That was sure.
It was almost noon before he found a bike which he thought would suit Tom. He hadn't expected it to take anywhere near as long as it did, but a surprising majority of people had locked their houses, garages, and outbuildings. In most cases he was reduced to peering into shadowy garages through dirty, cobwebby windows, hoping to spot the right bike. He spent a good three hours trudging from street to street with the sweat pouring off him and the sun pounding steadily against the back of his neck. At one point he had gone back to recheck the Western Auto, but that was no good; the two bikes in the show window were his-and-hers three-speeds and everything else was unassembled. In the end he found what he was looking for in a small detached garage at the southern end of town. The garage was locked, but—it had one window big enough to crawl through. Nick broke the glass with a rock and carefully picked the remaining slivers out of the old, crumbling putty. Inside, the garage was explosively hot and furry with a thick oil-and-dust smell. The bike, an oldfashioned boy's Schwinn, stood next to a ten-year-old Merc station wagon with balding tires and flaking rocker panels. The way my luck's running the damn bike'll be busted, Nick thought. No chain, flat tires, something. But this time his luck was in. The bike rolled easily. The tires were up and had good tread;, all the bolts and sprockets seemed tight. There was no bike basket, he would have to remedy that, but there was a chainguard and hung neatly on the wall between a rake and a snowshovel was an unexpected bonus: a nearly new Briggs hand-pump. He hunted further and found a can of 3-in-One Oil on a shelf. Nick sat down on the cracked cement floor, now unmindful of the heat, and carefully oiled the chain and both sprockets. That done, he recapped the 3-in-One and carefully put it in his pants pocket. He tied the bike-pump to the package carrier on the Schwinn's back fender with a hank of hayrope, then unlocked the garage door and ran it up. Fresh air had never smelled so sweet. He closed his eyes, inhaled it deeply, wheeled the bike out to the road, got on, and pedaled slowly down Main Street. The bike rode fine. It would be just the ticket for Tom... assuming he really could ride it. He parked it beside his Raleigh and went into the five-and-dime. He found a good-sized wire bike basket in a jumble of sporting goods near the back of the store and was turning to leave with it under his arm when something else caught his eye: a Klaxon horn with a chrome bell and a large red rubber bulb. Grinning, Nick put the horn in the basket and then went over to the hardware section for a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench. He went back outside. Tom was sprawled peacefully in the shade of the old World War II Marine in the town square, napping. Nick put the basket on the Schwinn's handlebars and attached the Klaxon horn beside it. He went back into the five-and-dime and came out with a good-sized tote bag. He took it up to the A&P and filled it with canned meat, fruit, and vegetables. He was pausing over some canned chili beans when he saw a shadow flit by on the aisle facing him. If he had been able to hear, he would already have been aware that Tom had discovered his bike. The Klaxon's hoarse and drawnout cry of Howww-OOO-Gah! floated up and down the street, punctuated by Tom Cullen's giggles. Nick pushed out through the supermarket's doors and saw Tom speeding grandly down Main, his blond hair and his shirttail whipping out behind him, squeezing the bulb of the Klaxon horn for all it was worth. At the Arco station that marked the end of the business section he whirled around and pedaled back. There was a huge and triumphant grin on his face. The Fisher-Price garage sat in the bikes basket. His pants pockets and the flap pockets of his khaki shirt bulged with scale-model Corgi cars. The sun flashed bright, revolving circles in the wheelspokes. A little wistfully Nick wished he could hear the sound of the horn, just to see if it pleased him as much as it was pleasing to Tom. Tom waved to him and continued on up the street. At the far end of the business section he swerved around again and rode back, still squeezing the horn. Nick held his hand out, a policeman's order to stop. Tom brought the bike to a skidding halt in front of him. Sweat stood out on his face in great beads. The bike pump's rubber hose flopped. Tom was panting and grinning. Nick pointed out of town and waved byebye. "Can I still take my garage?" Nick nodded and slipped the strap of the tote bag over Tom's bull neck. "We going right now?" Nick nodded again. Made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.
191 "To Kansas City?" "To anywhere we want?" Nick nodded. Yes. Anywhere they wanted, he thought, but anywhere would most likely turn out to be somewhere in Nebraska. "Wow!" Tom said happily. "Okay! Yeah! Wow!"
They got on Route 283 going north and had ridden only two and a half hours when thunderheads began to build up in the west. The storm came at them quickly, riding on a gauzy caul of rain. Nick couldn't hear the thunderclaps, but he could see forks of lightning stabbing down from the clouds. They were bright enough to dazzle the eyes with bluish-purple afterimages. As they approached the outskirts of Rosston, where Nick meant to turn east on Route 64, the veil of rain under the clouds disappeared and the sky turned a still and queerly ominous shade of yellow. The wind, which had been freshening against his left cheek, died away altogether. He began to feel extremely nervous without knowing why, and oddly clumsy. No one had ever told him that one of the few instincts man still shares with the lower animals is exactly that response to a sudden and radical drop in the air pressure. Then Tom was tugging at his sleeve, tugging him frantically. Nick looked over at him. He was startled to see that all the color had gone out of Tom's face. His eyes were huge, floating saucers. "Tornado!" Tom screamed. "There's a tornado coming!" Nick looked for a funnel and saw none. He turned back to Tom, trying to think of a way to reassure him. But Tom was gone. He was riding his bike into the field at the right of the road, beating a twisted, flattened path through the high grass. Goddamned fool, Nick thought angrily. You're going to break your fucking axle! Tom was making for a barn with an attached silo which stood at the end of a dirt road about a quarter of a mile long. Nick, still feeling nervous, pedaled his own bike up the highway, lifted it over the cattlegate, and then pedaled up the dirt feeder road to the barn. Tom's bike lay on the dirt fill outside. He hadn't even bothered to put the kickstand down. Nick would have chalked this up to simple forgetfulness if he hadn't seen Tom use the kickstand several times before. He's scared right out of what little mind he has, Nick thought. His own uneasiness made him take one last look over his shoulder, and what he saw coming froze him coldly in his tracks. A horrible darkness was coming out of the west. It was not a cloud; it was more like a total absence of light. It was in the shape of a funnel, and at first glance it looked a thousand feet high. It was wider at the top than at the bottom; the bottom was not quite touching the earth. At its summit, the very clouds seemed to be fleeing from it, as if it possessed some mysterious power of repulsion. As Nick watched, it touched down about three quarters of a mile away and a long blue building with a roof made of corrugated metal-an auto supply place, or perhaps a lumber storage shed- exploded with a loud bang. He could not hear this, of course, but the vibration struck him, rocking him back on his feet. And the building seemed to explode inward, as if the funnel had sucked all the air out of it. The next moment the tin roof broke in two. The sections whirled upward, spinning and spinning like a top gone insane. Fascinated, Nick craned his neck to follow their progress. I am looking at whatever it is in my worst dreams, Nick thought, and it is not a man at all, although it may sometimes look like a man. What it really is is a tornado. One almighty big black twister ripping out of the west, sucking up anything and everything unlucky enough to be in its path. It's— Then he was grabbed by both arms and literally jerked off his feet and into the barn. He looked around at Tom Cullen and was momentarily surprised to see him. In his fascination with the storm, he had quite forgotten that Tom Cullen existed. "Downstairs!" Tom panted. "Quick! Quick! Oh my laws, yes! Tornado! Tornado!" At last Nick was fully, consciously afraid, ripped out of the half-entranced state he had been in and aware again of where he was and who he was with. As he let Tom lead him to the stairs going down into the barn's storm cellar, he became aware of a strange, thrumming vibration. It was the closest thing to sound he had ever experienced. It was like a nagging ache in the center of his brain. Then, as he went down the stairs behind Tom, he saw something he would never forget: the plank siding of the barn being pulled out board by board, pulled out and whirled up into the cloudy air, like rotted brown teeth being pulled out by invisible forceps. The hay littered on the floor began to rise and whirl in a dozen miniature tornado funnels, nodding and dipping and skipping. That thrumming vibration grew ever more persistent. Then Tom was pushing open a heavy wooden door, thrusting him through. Nick smelled wet mold and decay. In the last instant of light he saw they were sharing the storm cellar with a family of rat-
192 gnawed corpses. Then Tom slammed the door shut and they were in perfect darkness. The vibration lessened but did not cease completely even then. Panic crept up on him with its cloak open and gathered him in. The blackness reduced his senses to touch and smell, and neither of them sent messages which were comforting. He could feel the constant vibration of the boards beneath his feet, and the smell was death. Tom clutched his hand blindly and Nick drew the retarded man next to him. He could feel Tom trembling, and he wondered if Tom was crying, or perhaps trying to speak to him. The thought eased some of his own fear and he slung an arm about Tom's shoulders. Tom reciprocated and they stood bolt upright in the dark, clinging to each other. The vibration grew stronger under Nick's feet; even the air seemed to be trembling lightly against his face. Tom held him more tightly still. Blind and deaf, he waited for what might happen next and reflected that if Ray Booth had gotten his other eye, all of life would be like this. If that had happened, he believed he would have shot himself in the head days ago and had done with it. Later he would be almost unable to believe his watch, which insisted that they had spent only fifteen minutes in the darkness of the storm cellar, although logic told him that since the watch was still running, it must be so. Never before in his life had he understood how subjective, how plastic, time really is. It seemed that it must have been at least an hour, probably two or three. And as the time passed, he became convinced that he and Tom were not alone in the storm cellar. Oh, there were the bodies-some poor guy had brought his family down here near the end, perhaps on the fevered assumption that, since they had weathered other natural disasters down here, they could weather this here one, too-but it wasn't the bodies that he meant. To Nick's mind, a corpse was just a thing, no different than a chair or a typewriter or a rug. A corpse was just an inanimate thing which filled space. What he felt was the presence of another being, and he became more and more convinced who—or what-it was. It was the dark man, the man who came to life in his dreams, the creature whose spirit he had sensed in the black heart of the cyclone. Somewhere... over in the corner or perhaps right behind them... he was watching them. And waiting. At the right moment he would touch them and they would both... what? Go mad with fear, of course. Just that. He could see them. Nick was sure he could see them. He had eyes which could see in the dark like a cat's eyes, or those of some weird alien creature. Like the one in that movie, Predator, perhaps. Yes-like that. The dark man could see tones of the spectrum that human eyes could never attain to, and to him everything would look slow and red, as if the whole world had been tie-dyed in a vat of gore. At first Nick was able to divide this fantasy from reality, but as time passed, he became more and more sure that the fantasy was reality. He fancied he could feel the dark man's breath on the back of his neck. He was about to make a lunge at the door, open it and flee upstairs no matter what, when Tom did it for him. The arm around Nick's shoulders was suddenly gone. The next instant the door of the storm cellar banged open, letting in a flood of dazzling white light that made Nick raise a hand to shield his good eye. He caught just a ghostly, wavering glimpse of Tom Cullen staggering and stumbling up the stairs, and then he followed, groping his way in the dazzle. By the time he got to the top, his eye had adjusted. He thought that the light hadn't been so bright when they went down, and saw why immediately. The roof had been torn off the barn. It seemed to have been almost surgically removed; the job was so clean that there were no splinters and hardly any litter lying on the floor it had once sheltered. Three roofbeams hung down from the sides of the loft, and almost all the boards had been stripped off the sides. Standing here was like standing inside the picked skeleton of a prehistoric monster. Tom had not stopped to inventory the damage. He was fleeing the barn as if the devil himself was at his heels. He looked back just once, his eyes huge and almost comically terrified. Nick could not resist a look back over his shoulder and into the storm cellar. The stairs pitched and yawed downward into shadow, old wood, splintered and sunken in the center of each riser. He could see littered straw on the floor and two sets of hands protruding from the shadow. The fingers had been stripped down to the bone by rats. If there was anyone else down there, Nick did not see him. Nor did he want to. He followed Tom outside.
Tom was standing by his bicycle, shivering. Nick was momentarily bemused by the freaky choosiness of the tornado, which had taken most of the barn but had disdained their bikes, when he saw that Tom was weeping. Nick went over to him and put an arm about his shoulders. Tom was staring, wide-eyed, at the sagging double doors of the barn. Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle. Tom's eyes dropped to this briefly, but the smile Nick had hoped for did not surface on Tom's
193 face. He simply went back to staring at the barn. His eyes had a vacant, fixated cast Nick didn't like at all. "Someone was in there," Tom said abruptly. Nick smiled, but the smile felt cold on his lips. He had no idea how good the imitation looked, but it felt crappy. He pointed to Tom, to himself, and then made a sharp cutting gesture through-the air with the side of his hand. "No," Tom said. "Not just us. Someone else. Someone who came out of the twister." Nick shrugged. "Can we go now? Please?" They trundled their bicycles back to the highway, using the path of uprooted grass and torn soil that the tornado had made. It had touched down on the west side of Rosston, had cut across US 283 on a west-to-east course, throwing guardrails and connecting cable into the air like piano wire, had skirted the barn to their left and ploughed directly through the house which stood-had stood-in front of it. Four hundred yards farther along, its track through the field abruptly ceased. Now the clouds had begun to break up (although it was still showering, lightly and refreshingly) and birds were singing unconcernedly. Nick watched the hefty muscles under Tom's shirt work as he lifted his bike over the jumble of guardrail cable on the verge of the highway. That guy saved my life, he thought. I never saw a twister in my life before today. If I'd left him behind back there in May like I thought about doing, I'd be as dead as a doornail right about now. He lifted his bike over the frayed cables and clapped Tom on the back and smiled at him. We've got to find somebody else, Nick thought. We've got to, just so I can tell him thanks. And my name. He doesn't even know my name, because he can't read. He stood there for a moment, bemused by this, and then they mounted their bikes and rode away.
They camped that night in left field of the Rosston Jaycees' Little League ballfield. The evening was cloudless and starry. Nick's sleep came quickly and was dreamless. He woke up at dawn the next morning, thinking how good it was to be with someone again, what a difference it made. There really was a Polk County, Nebraska. At first that had given him a start, but he had traveled all over the last few years. He must have talked to somebody who mentioned Polk County, or who had come from Polk County, and his conscious mind had just forgotten it. There was a Route 30, too. But he couldn't really believe, at least not in the bright day of this early morning, that they were actually going to find an old Negro woman sitting on her porch in the middle of a field of corn and accompanying herself on a guitar while she sang hymns. He didn't believe in precognition or in visions. But it seemed important to go somewhere, to look for people. In a way he shared Fran Goldsmith's and Stu Redman's urge to regroup. Until that could be done, everything would remain alien and out of joint. There was danger everywhere. You couldn't see it but you could feel it, the way he thought he had felt the presence of the dark man in that cellar yesterday. You felt that danger was everywhere, inside the houses, around the next bend in the highway, maybe even hiding beneath the cars and trucks littered all over the main roads. And if it wasn't there, it was in the calendar, hidden just two or three leaves down. Danger, every particle of his being seemed to whisper it. BRIDGE OUT. FORTY MILES OF BAD ROAD. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR PERSONS PROCEEDING BEYOND THIS POINT. Part of it was the tremendous, walloping psychological shock of the empty countryside. As long as he had been in Shoyo, he had been partially protected from it. It didn't matter if Shoyo was empty, at least not too much, because Shoyo was so small in the scheme of things. But when you got moving, it was as if... well, he remembered a Walt Disney movie he had seen as a kid, a nature thing. Filling the screen was this tulip, this one tulip, so beautiful it just made you want to hold your breath. Then the camera pulled back with dizzying suddenness and you saw a whole field filled with tulips. It knocked you flat. It produced total sensory overload and some internal circuit breaker fell with a sizzle, cutting off the input. It was too much. And that was how this trip had been. Shoyo was empty and he could adjust to that. But McNab was empty, too, and Texarkana, and Spencerville; Ardmore had burned right to the ground. He had come north on Highway 81 and had only seen deer. Twice he had seen what were probably signs of living people: a campfire perhaps two days old, and a deer that had been shot and neatly cleaned out. But no people. It was enough to screw you all up, because the enormity of it was steadily creeping up on you. It wasn't just Shoyo or McNab or Texarkana; it was America, lying here like a huge discarded tin can with a few forgotten peas rolling around in the bottom. And beyond America was the whole world, and thinking of that made Nick feel so dizzy and sick that he had to give up. He bent over the atlas instead. If they kept rolling, maybe they would be like a snowball going downhill, getting bigger. With any luck they would pick up a few more people between here and
194 Nebraska (or be picked up themselves, if they met a larger group). After Nebraska he supposed they would go somewhere else. It was like a quest with no object in view at the end of it-no Grail, no sword plunged into an anvil. We'll cut northeast, he thought, up into Kansas. Highway 35 would take them to another version of 81, and 81 would take them all the way to Swedeholm, Nebraska, where it intersected Nebraska Route 92 at a perfect right angle. Another highway, Route 30, connected the two, the hypotenuse of a right triangle. And somewhere in that triangle was the country of his dream. Thinking about it gave him a queer, anticipatory thrill. Movement at the top of his vision made him look up. Tom was sitting, both fists screwed into his eyes. A cavernous yawn seemed to make the whole bottom half of his face disappear. Nick grinned at him and Tom grinned back. "We gonna ride some more today?" Tom asked, and Nick nodded. "Gee, that's good. I like to ride my bike: Laws, yes! I hope we never stop!" Putting the atlas away Nick thought: And who knows? You may get your wish.
They turned east that morning and ate their lunch at a crossroads not far from the Oklahoma- Kansas border. It was July 7, and hot. Shortly before they stopped to eat, Tom brought his bike to its customary skidding halt. He was staring at a signpost which had been sunk into a cement plug half-buried in the soft shoulder at the side of the road. Nick looked at it. The sign said: YOU ARE LEAVING HARPER COUNTY, OKLAHOMAYOU ARE ENTERING WOODS COUNTY, OKLAHOMA. "I can read that," Tom said, and if Nick had been able to hear, he would have been partly amused and partly touched by the way Tom's voice climbed into a high, reedy, and declamatory register: "You are now going out of Harper County. You are now going into Woods County. " He turned to Nick. "You know what, mister?" "I never been out of Harper County in my life, laws, no, not Tom Cullen. But once my daddy took me out here and showed me this sign. He told me if he ever caught me t'other side of it, he'd whale the tar out of me. I sure hope he don't catch-us over there in Woods County. You think he will?" Nick shook his head emphatically. "Is Kansas City in Woods County?" Nick shook his head again. "But we're going into Woods County before we go anyplace else, ain't we?" Tom's eyes gleamed. "Is it the world?" Nick didn't understand. He frowned... raised his eyebrows... shrugged. "The world is the place I mean," Tom said. "Are we going into the world, mister?" Tom hesitated and then asked with hesitant gravity: "Is Woods the word for world?" Slowly, Nick nodded his head. "Okay," Tom said. He looked at the sign for a moment, then wiped his right eye, from which a single tear had trickled. Then he hopped back onto his bike. "Okay, let's go." He biked over the county line without another word, and Nick followed.
They crossed into Kansas just before it got too dark to ride any farther. Tom had turned sulky and tired after supper; he wanted to play with his,garage. He wanted to watch TV. He didn't want to ride anymore because his bum hurt from the seat. He had no conception of state lines and felt none of the lift Nick did when they passed another sign, this one saying YOU ARE NOW ENTERING KANSAS. By then the dusk was so thick that the white letters seemed to float inches above the brown sign, like spirits. They camped a quarter of a mile over the line, beneath a water tower standing on tall steel legs like an H. G. Wells Martian. Tom was asleep as soon as he crawled into his sleeping bag. Nick sat awhile, watching the stars come out. The land was utterly dark, and for him, utterly still. Shortly before crawling in himself, a crow fluttered down to a fencepost nearby and seemed to be watching him. Its small black eyes were rimmed with half-circles of blood-reflection from a bloated orange summer moon that had risen silently. There was something about the crow Nick didn't like; it made him uneasy. He found a big dirt-clod and pegged it at the crow. It fluttered its wings, seemed to fix him with a baleful glare, and was gone into the night. That night he dreamed of the man with no face standing on the high roof, his hands stretched out to the east, and then of the corn-corn higher than his headand the sound of the music. Only this time he knew it was music and this time he knew it was a guitar. He awoke near dawn with a painfully full bladder and her words ringing in his ears: Mother Abagail is what they call me... you come see me anytime.
195 Late that afternoon, moving east through Comanche County on Highway 160, they sat astride their bikes in amazement, watching a small herd of buffalo-a dozen in all, perhapswalking calmly back and forth across the road in search of good graze. There had been a barbed wire fence on the north side of the road, but it appeared the buffalo had butted it down. "What are they?" Tom asked fearfully. "Those ain't cows!" And because Nick couldn't talk and Tom couldn't read, Nick couldn't tell him. That day was July 8, 1990, and they slept that night in flat open farm country forty miles west of Deerhead.
It was July 9, and they were eating their lunch in the shade of an old, graceful elm in the front yard of a farmhouse which had partially burned down. Tom was eating sausages from a tin with one hand and driving a car in and out of his service station with the other. And singing the refrain of a popular song over and over again. Nick knew the shape it made on Tom's lips by heart: "Baby, can you dig your man-he's a raht-eous ma-yun-baby, can you dig your man?" Nick was depressed and slightly overawed by the size of the country; never before had he realized how easy it was to stick out your thumb, knowing that sooner or later the law of averages was going to favor you. A car was going to stop, usually with a man driving, and with a can of beer resting comfortably in the fork of his crotch more often than not. He would want to know how far you were going and you would hand him a slip of paper which you'd kept handy in your breast pocket, a slip of paper which read: "Hello, my name is Nick Andros. I'm a deaf-mute. Sorry about that. I'm going to . Thanks very much for the ride. I can read lips." And that would be that. Unless the guy had a thing about deaf-mutes (and some people did, although they were a minority), you hopped in and the car took you where you wanted to go, or a good piece in that direction. The car ate road and blew miles out its tailpipe. The car was a form of teleportation. The car defeated the map. But now there was no car, although on many of these roads a car would have been a practical mode of transportation for seventy or eighty miles at a stretch, if you were careful. And when you were finally blocked, you would only have to abandon your vehicle, walk for a while, and then take another. With no car, they were like ants crawling across the chest of a fallen giant, ants trundling endlessly from one nipple to the other. And so Nick half wished, half daydreamed, that when they finally did meet someone else (always assuming that would happen), it Would be as it had been in those mostly carefree days of hitchhiking: there would be that familiar twinkle of chrome rising over the top of the next hill, that sunflare which simultaneously dazzled and pleased the eye. It would be some perfectly ordinary American car, a Chevy Biscayne or a Pontiac Tempest, sweet old Detroit rolling iron. In his dreams it was never a Honda or Mazda or Yugo. That American beauty would pull over and he would see a man behind the wheel, a man with a sunburned elbow cocked cockily out the window. This man would be smiling and he would say, "Holy Joe, boys! Ain't I some glad sumbitch to see you guys! Hop in here! Hop in and let's us see where we're goin!" But they saw no one that day, and on the tenth it was Julie Lawry they ran across.
The day was another scorcher. They had pedaled most of the afternoon with their shirts tied around their waists, and both of them were getting brown as Indians. They hadn't been making very good time, not today, because of the apples. The green apples. They had found them growing on an old apple tree in a farmyard, green and small and sour, but they had both been deprived of fresh fruit for a long time, and they tasted ambrosial. Nick made himself stop after two, but Tom ate six, greedily, one after the other, right down to the cores. He had ignored Nick's motions that he should stop; when he got an idea in his head, Tom Cullen could be every bit as attractive as a wayward child of four. So, beginning around eleven in the morning and continuing through the rest of the afternoon, Tom had the squats. Sweat ran off him in small creeks. He groaned. He had to get off his bike and walk it up even shallow hills. Despite his irritation at the poor time they were making, Nick couldn't help a certain rueful amusement. When they reached the town of Pratt around 4 P. m., Nick decided that was it for the day. Tom collapsed gratefully on a bus-stop bench in the shade and dozed off at once. Nick left him there and went along the deserted business section in search of a drugstore. He would get some Pepto-Bismol and force Tom to drink it when he woke up, whether Tom wanted to or not. If it took a whole bottle to cork Tom up, so be it. Nick wanted to make up some time tomorrow. He found a Rexall between the Pratt Theater and the local Norge. He slipped in through the open door, and stood for a moment smelling the familiar hot, unaired, stale smell. There were other odors mixed in, strong and cloying. Perfume was the strongest. Perhaps some of the bottles had burst in the heat. Nick glanced around, looking for the stomach medicines, trying to remember if Pepto-Bismol went over in the heat. Well, the label would say. His eyes slipped past a mannequin and two rows to the right he saw what he wanted. He had taken two steps that way when he realized that he had never before seen a mannequin in a drugstore.
196 He looked back and what he saw was Julie Lawry. She was standing perfectly still, a bottle of perfume in one hand, the small glass wand you used to daub the stuff on in the other. Her china-blue eyes were wide in stunned, disbelieving surprise. Her brown hair was drawn back and tied with a brilliant silk scarf that hung halfway down her back. She was wearing a pink middy sweater and bluejeans shorts that were almost abbreviated enough to be mistaken for panties. There was a rash of pimples on her forehead and a hell of a good one right in the middle of her chin. She and Nick stared at each other across half the length of the deserted drugstore, both frozen now. Then the bottle of perfume dropped from her fingers, shattered like a bomb, and a hothouse reek filled the store, making it smell like a funeral parlor. "Jesus, are you real?" she asked in a trembling voice. Nick's heart had begun to race, and he could feel his blood thudding crazily in his temples. Even his eyesight had begun to wham in and out a little, making dots of light race across his field of vision. He nodded. "You ain't a ghost?" He shook his head. "Then say somethin. If you ain't a ghost, say somethin." Nick put a hand across his mouth, then on his throat. "What's that s'posed to mean?" Her voice had taken on a slightly hysterical tone. Nick couldn't hear it... but he could sense it, see it on her face. He was afraid to step toward her, because if he did, she would run. He didn't think she was afraid of seeing another person; what she was afraid of was that she was seeing a hallucination, and she was cracking up. Again, he felt that wave of frustration. If he could only talk Instead, he went through his pantomime again. It was, after all, the only thing he could do. This time understanding dawned. "You can't talk? You're a mute?" She gave a high laugh that was mostly frustration. "You mean somebody finally showed up and it's a mute guy?" Nick shrugged and gave a slanting smile. "Well," she said, coming down the aisle to him, "you ain't bad-looking. That's something." She put a hand on his arm, and the swell of her breasts almost touched his arm. He could smell at least three different kinds of perfume, and under all of them the unlovely aroma of her sweat. "My name's Julie," she said. "Julie Lawry. What's yours?" She giggled a little. "You can't tell me, can you? Poor you." She leaned a little closer, and her breasts brushed him. He began to feel very warm. What the hell, he thought uneasily, she's only a kid. He broke away from her, took the pad from his pocket, and began to write. A line or so into his message she leaned over his shoulder to see what he was writing. No bra. Jesus. She had sure gotten over her scare quick. His writing became a little uneven. "Oh, wow," she said as he wrote-it was as if he was a monkey capable of doing a particularly sophisticated trick. Nick was looking down at his pad and didn't "read" her words, but he could feel the tickling warmth of her breath. "I'm Nick Andros. 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?" "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—"
197 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 "frydaddies." 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.
198 "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
199 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.