CHAPTER 44 He was cracking up—baby, don't you just know it?

CHAPTER 44

He was cracking up—baby, don't you just know it? That was a line from Huey "Piano" Smith, now that he thought of it. Went way back. A blast from the past. Huey "Piano" Smith, remember how that one went? Ahah-ah-ah, daaaay-o... gooba- gooba-gooba-gooba... ah-ah-ah-ah. Et cetera. The wit, wisdom, and social commentary of Huey "Piano" Smith. "Fuck the social commentary," he said. "Huey Piano Smith was before my time." Years later Johnny Rivers had recorded one of Huey's songs, "Rockin Pneumonia and the Boogie- Woogie Flu." Larry Underwood could remember that one very clearly, and he thought it very appropriate to the situation. Good old Johnny Rivers. Good old Huey "Piano" Smith. "Fuck it," Larry opined once again. He looked terriblea pale, frail phantom stumbling up a New England highway. "Gimme the sixties." Sure, the sixties, those were the days. Mid-sixties, late sixties. Flower Power. Getting clean for Gene. Andy Warhol with his pink-rimmed glasses and his fucking Brillo boxes. Velvet Underground. The Return of the Creature from Yorba Linda. Norman Spinrad, Norman Mailer, Norman Thomas, Norman Rockwell, and good old Norman Bates of the Bates Motel, heh-heh-heh. Dylan broke his neck. Barry McGuire croaked "The Eve of Destruction." Diana Ross raised the consciousness of every white kid in America. All those wonderful groups, Larry thought dazedly, give me the sixties and cram the eighties up your ass. When it came to rock and roll, the sixties had been the Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde. Cream. Rascals. Spoonful. Airplane with Grace Slick on vocals, Norman Mailer on lead guitar, and good old Norman Bates on drums. Beatles. Who. Dead He fell over and hit his head. The world swam away blackly and then came back in bright fragments. He wiped his hand across his temple and it came away with a thin foam of blood on it. Didn't even matter. Whafuck, as they used to say back in the bright and glorious mid-sixties. What was falling down and hitting your head when he had spent the last week unable to sleep without waking up from nightmares, and the good nights were the nights when the scream got no farther than the middle of his throat? If you screamed out loud and woke up to that, you scared yourself even worse. Dreams of being back in the Lincoln Tunnel. There was somebody behind him, only in the dreams it wasn't Rita. It was the devil, and he was stalking Larry with a lightless grin frozen on his face. The

200 black man wasn't the walking dead; he was worse than the walking dead. Larry ran with the slow sludgy panic of bad dreams, tripping over unseen corpses, knowing they were staring at him with the glassy eyes of stuffed trophies from the crypts of their cars, which had stalled inside the frozen traffic even though they had some other place to be, he ran, but what good was running when the black devil man, the black magic man, could see in the dark with eyes like snooperscopes? And after a while the dark man would begin to croon to him: Come on, Laarry, come on, we'll get it togeeeether Laaarry— He would feel the black man's breath on his very shoulder and that was when he would struggle up from sleep, escaping sleep, and the scream would be stuck in his throat like a hot bone or actually escaping his lips, loud enough to wake the dead. Daytimes, the vision of the dark man would recede. The dark man strictly worked the night shift. Daytimes, it was the Big Alone that went to work on him, gnawing its way into his brain with the sharp teeth of some tireless rodent-a rat, or a weasel, maybe. During the days, his thoughts would dwell on Rita. Lovely Rita, meter-maid. Over and over in his mind he would turn her over and over, seeing those slitted eyes, like the eyes of an animal which has died in surprise and pain, that mouth he had kissed now filled with stale green puke. She had died so easy, in the night, in the same fucking sleeping bag, and now he was... Well, cracking up. That was it, wasn't it? '. 'hat was what was happening to him. He was cracking up. "Cracking," he moaned. "Oh Jeez, I'm going out of my mind." A part of him that still retained a measure of rationality asserted that that might be true, but what he was suffering from right this minute was heat prostration. After what had happened to Rita, he hadn't been able to ride the motorcycle anymore. He just hadn't been able to; it was like a mental block. He kept seeing himself smeared all over the highway. So finally he had ditched it. Since then he had been walking-how many days? four? eight? nine? He didn't know. It had been in the nineties since ten this morning, it was now nearly four, the sun was right behind him, and he wasn't wearing a hat. He couldn't remember how many days ago he had ditched the motorcycle. Not yesterday, and probably not the day before (maybe, but probably not), and what did it matter? He had gotten off it, snapped it into gear, twisted the throttle, and let go of the clutch. It had torn itself out of his trembling, sick hands like a dervish and had gone plunging and rearing over the embankment of US 9 somewhere just east of Concord. He thought the name of the town in which he had murdered his motorcycle might have been Gossville, although that didn't matter much, either. The fact was, the bike had been no more good to him. He hadn't dared drive it over fifteen miles an hour, and even at fifteen he would have nightmare visions of being thrown over the handlebars and fracturing his skull or going around a blind corner and slamming into an overturned truck and going up in a fireball. And after a while the motherfucking overheat light had come on, of course it had, and it seemed he could almost read the word COWARD printed in small no-nonsense letters on the plastic housing over the little red bulb. Had there been a time when he had not only taken the cycle for granted but had actually enjoyed it, the sensation of speed as the wind rushed by on both sides of his face, the pavement blurring by six cold inches below the footposts? Yes. When Rita had been with him, before Rita had turned into nothing but a mouthful of green puke and a pair of slitted eyes, he had enjoyed it. So he'd sent the motorcycle crashing over the embankment and into a weedchoked gully and then he had peered at it with a kind of cautious terror, as if it could somehow rise up and smite him. Come on, he had thought, come on and stall out, ya sucker. But for a long time, the motorcycle wouldn't. For a long time it raved and bellowed down there in that gully, the rear wheel spinning fruitlessly, the hungry chain gobbling up last fall's leaves and spitting out clouds of brown, bitter- smelling dust. Blue smoke belched from the chromed exhaust-pipe. And even then he had been far enough gone to think there was something supernatural about it, that the cycle would right itself, rise out of its grave, and chew him up... either . that or he would look back one afternoon at the rising sound of an engine and see his cycle, this damned cycle which wouldn't just stall out and die decently, roaring straight down the highway at him, doing eighty, and bent over the handlebars would be that dark man, that hardcase, and riding pillion behind him, with her white silk deckpants rippling in the breeze, would be Rita Blakemoor, her face chalk white, her eyes slitted, her hair as dry and dead as a cornpatch in the wintertime. Then, at last, the cycle began to spit and chug and seizure and misfire, and when it finally stopped he had looked down at it and felt sad, as if it had been some part of himself he had killed. Without the cycle there was no way in which he could mount a serious assault on the silence, and the silence was, in a way, worse than his fears of dying or being seriously hurt in an accident. Since then he had been walking. He had gone through several small towns along Route 9 which had cycle shops, showroom models with the keys hanging right in them, but if he looked at them too long, the visions of himself lying beside the road in a pool of blood would rise up in vivid, unhealthy Technicolor, like something from one of those awful but

201 somehow fascinating Charles Band horror movies, the ones where people kept dying under the wheels of large trucks or as a consequence of large, nameless bugs which had bred and grown in their warm vitals and finally burst free in a gut-busting display of flying flesh, and he would pass by, enduring the silence, pallid, shivering. He would pass by with exquisite little clusters of perspiration growing on his upper lip and in the hollows of his temples. He had lost weight why not? He walked all day long, every day, from sunrise to sunset. He wasn't sleeping. The nightmares would wake him up by four and he would light his Coleman lamp and— crouch by it, waiting for the sun to come up enough so he dared to walk. And he would go on walking until it was almost too dark to see and then make camp with the sneaky, urgent speed of a chain-gang fugitive. With camp made he would lie awake late, feeling like a man with about two grams of cocaine chasing itself through his system. Oh baby, shake, rattle, and roll. Also like a heavy coke user, he wasn't eating much; he never felt hungry. Cocaine does not enhance the appetite, and neither does terror. Larry hadn't touched coke since the long-ago party in California, but he was terrified all the time. The squawk of a bird in the woods made him twitch. The deathcry of some small animal as a larger one took it made him almost jump out of his skin. He had passed through slimness and skinniness, had traveled through scrawniness. He was now poised on some metaphoric (or metabolic) fence between scrawniness and emaciation. He had grown a beard and it was actually rather striking, a tawny red-gold two shades lighter than his hair. His eyes were sunken deep in his face; they glittered out of their sockets like small, desperate animals that had been trapped in twin pit-snares. "Cracking up," he moaned again. The broken desperation in this splintery whine horrified him. Had it gotten that bad? Once there had been a Larry Underwood who'd had a moderate hit record, who had visions of becoming the Elton John of his time... oh my dear, how Jerry Garcia would laugh at that... and now that fellow had been transmuted into this broken thing crawling on the black hottop of Route 9 somewhere in southeastern New Hampshire, crawling, just a crawling kingsnake, that was him. That other Larry Underwood could surely bear no relation to this crawling cheapskate... this... He tried to get up and couldn't. "Oh this is so ridiculous," he said, half laughing and half weeping. Across the road on a hill two hundred yards away, glimmering like a beautiful mirage, was a white and rambling New England farmhouse. It had green siding, green trim, and a green shingled roof. Rolling down from it was a green lawn just beginning to look shaggy. At the foot of the lawn, a small rill of brook ran; he could hear it gurgling and chuckling, an entrancing sound. A rock wall meandered along beside it, probably marking the edge of the property, and leaning over the wall at spaced intervals were big, shady elms. He would just do his World-Famous Crawling Cheapskate Wriggle over there and sit in the shade for a while, that's what he would do. And when he felt a little better about... about things in general... he would make it to his feet and go down to the brook and have a drink and a wash-up. Probably he smelled bad. Who cared, though? Who was there to smell him now that Rita was dead? Was she still lying there in that tent? he wondered morbidly. Swelling up? Gathering flies? Looking more and more like the black sweet treat in the comfort station on Transverse Number One? Where the hell else would she be? Golfing at Palm Springs with Bob Hope? "Christ, that's horrible," he whispered, and crawled across the road. Once he was in the shade he felt sure he could get to his feet, but it seemed like too much effort. He did spare enough energy, however, to glance slyly back the way he had come to make sure his cycle wasn't bearing down on him. It was at least fifteen degrees cooler in the shade, and Larry let out his breath in a long sigh of pleasure and relief. He put a hand to the back of his neck where the sun had been beating most of the day and pulled it back with a little hiss of pain. Sunburn pain? Get Xylocaine. And all that good shit. Get these men out of the hot sun. Burn, baby, burn. Watts. Remember Watts? Another blast from the past. The whole human race, just one big heavy blast from the past, a great big golden gasser. "Man, you're sick," he said, and leaned his head against the rough trunk of the elm tree and closed his eyes. Sundappled shade made moving patterns of red and black on the inside of his eyelids. The sound of water, chuckling and gurgling, was sweet and soothing. In a minute he would go down there and get a drink of water and wash up. In just a minute. He dozed. The minutes flowed by and his doze deepened into his first deep and dreamless sleep in days. His hands rested limply in his lap. His thin chest rose and fell, and his beard made his face look even thinner, the troubled face of a lone refugee who had escaped from a terrible slaughter none would believe. Little by little, the lines carved in his sunbaked face began to smooth out. He spiraled down to the deepest levels of unconsciousness and rested there like a small river creature dreamily estivating the summer away in cool mud. The sun moved lower in the sky.

202 Near the creek's edge, the luxuriant screen of bushes rattled a little as something moved stealthily through them, paused, moved again. After a time, a boy emerged. He was perhaps thirteen, perhaps ten and tall for his age. He was naked except for Fruit of the Loom shorts. His body was tanned an even mahogany, except for the startling white band that began just above the waistband of his shorts. His skin was covered with the bumps of mosquito and chigger bites, some new, mostly old. In his right hand he held a butcher knife. The blade was a foot long, the edge serrated. It glittered hotly in the sun. Softly, bent forward slightly at the waist, he approached the elm and the rock wall until he stood right behind Larry. His eyes were greenish blue, a seawater color, slightly turned up at the corners, giving him a Chinese look. They were expressionless eyes, mildly savage. He raised the knife. A woman's voice, soft but firm, said: "No." He turned to her, head cocked and listening, the knife still raised. His attitude was both questioning and disappointed. "We'll watch and see," the woman's voice said. The boy paused, looking from the knife to Larry and then back to the knife again with a clear expression of longing, and then he retreated back the way he had come. Larry slept on.

When he woke up, the first thing Larry was aware of was that he felt good. The second thing was that he felt hungry. The third thing was that the sun was wrong-it seemed to have traveled backward across the sky. The fourth thing was that he had to, you should pardon the expression, piss like a racehorse. Standing and listening to the delicious crackle of his tendons as he stretched, he realized that he had not just napped; he had slept all night. He looked down at his watch and saw why the sun was wrong. It was nine-twenty in the morning. Hungry. There would be food in the big white house. Canned soup, maybe corned beef. His stomach rumbled. Before going up he knelt by the stream with his clothes off and splashed water all over himself. He noticed how scrawny he was getting that was no way to run a railroad. He stood up, dried himself with his shirt, and pulled his trousers back on. A couple of stones poked their wet black backs out of the stream and he used them to cross. On the far side he suddenly froze and gazed toward the thick stand of bushes. The fear, which had been dormant in him ever since waking up, suddenly blazed up like an exploding pine knot and then subsided just as quickly. It had been a squirrel or a wood chuck that he had heard, possibly a fox. Nothing else. He turned away indifferently and began to walk up the lawn toward the big white house. Halfway there a thought rose to the surface of his mind like a bubble and popped. It happened casually, with no fanfare, but the implications brought him to a dead halt. The thought was: Why haven't you been riding a bicycle? He stood in the middle of the lawn, equidistant from the stream and the house, flabbergasted by the simplicity of it. He had been walking ever since he had ditched the Harley. Walking, wearing himself out, finally collapsing with sunstroke or something so close to it that it made no difference. And he could have been pedaling along, doing no more than a fast run if that's what he felt like, and he would probably be on the coast now, picking out his summer house and stocking it. He began to laugh, gently at first, a little bit spooked by the sound of it in all the quiet. Laughing when there was no one else around to laugh with was just another sign that you were taking a one- way trip to that fabled land of bananas. But the laughter sounded so real and hearty, so goddamned healthy, and so much like the old Larry Underwood that he just let it come. He stood with his hands on his hips and cocked his head back to the sky and just bellowed with laughter at his own amazing foolishness. Behind him, where the screening bushes by the creek were thickest, greenishblue eyes watched all of this, and they watched as Larry at last continued up the lawn to the house, still laughing a little and shaking his head. They watched as he climbed the porch and tried the front door, and found it open. They watched as he disappeared inside. Then the bushes began to shake and make the rattling sound that Larry had heard and dismissed. The boy forced his way through, still naked except for his shorts, brandishing the butcher knife. Another hand appeared and caressed his shoulder. The boy stopped immediately. The woman came out-she was tall and imposing, but seemed not to move the bushes at all. Her hair was a thick, luxuriant black streaked with thick blazes of purest white; attractive, startling hair. It was twisted into a cable that hung over one shoulder and trailed away only as it reached the swell of her breast. When you looked at this woman you first noticed how tall she was, and then your eyes would be dragged away to that hair and you would consider it, you would think how you could almost feel its rough yet oily texture with your eyes. And if you were a man, you would find yourself wondering what she would look like with that hair unpinned, freed, spread over a pillow in a spill of moonlight. You would wonder what she would be like in bed. But she had never taken a man into herself. She

203 was pure. She was waiting. There had been dreams. Once, in college, there had been the Ouija board. And she wondered again if this man might be the one. "Wait," she told the boy. She turned his agonized face up to her calm one. She knew what the trouble was. "The house will be all right. Why would he hurt the house, Joe?" He turned back and looked at the house, longingly, worriedly. "When he goes, we'll follow him." He shook his head viciously. "Yes; we have to. I have to." And she felt that strongly. He was not the one, perhaps, but even if he was not, he was a link in a chain she had followed for years, a chain that was now nearing its end. Joe—that was not really his name—raised the knife wildly, as if to plunge it into her. She made no move to protect herself or to flee, and he lowered it slowly. He turned toward the house and jabbed the knife at it. "No, you won't," she said. "Because he's a human being, and he'll lead us to..." She fell silent. Other human beings, she had meant to finish. He's a human being, and he'll lead us to other human beings. But she was not sure that was what she meant, or even if it was, that it was all she meant. Already she felt pulled two ways at once, and she began to wish they had never seen Larry. She tried to caress the boy again but he jerked away angrily. He looked up at the big white house and his eyes were burning and jealous. After a while he slipped back into the bushes, glaring at her reproachfully. She followed him to make sure he would be all right. He lay down and curled up in a fetal position, cradling the knife to his chest. He put his thumb in his mouth and closed his eyes. Nadine went back to where the brook had made a small pool and knelt down. She drank from cupped hands, then settled in to watch the house. Her eyes were calm, her face very nearly that of a Raphael Madonna.

Late that afternoon, as Larry biked along a treelined section of Route 9, a green reflectorized sign loomed ahead and he stopped to read it, slightly amazed. The sign said he was entering MAINE, VACATIONLAND. He could hardly believe it; he must have walked an incredible distance in his semidaze of fear. Either that or he had lost a couple of days somewhere. He was about to start riding again when something-a noise in the woods or perhaps only in his headmade him look sharply back over his shoulder. There was nothing, only Route 9 running back into New Hampshire, deserted. Since the big white house, where he had breakfasted on dry cereal and cheese spread from an aerosol can squeezed onto slightly stale Ritz crackers, he had several times had the strong feeling that he was being watched and followed. He was hearing things, perhaps even seeing things out of the corners of his eyes. His powers of observation, just starting to come fully to life in this strange situation, kept triggering at stimuli so slight as to be subliminal, nagging his nerveendings with things so small that even in the aggregate they only formed a vague hunch, a feeling of "watched- ness." This feeling didn't frighten him as the others had. It had no feeling of hallucination or delirium about it. If someone was watching him and just lying back, it was probably because they were scared of him. And if they were scared of poor old skinny Larry Underwood, who was now too chicken even to go putting along on a motorcycle at twenty-five miles an hour, they were probably nothing to worry about. Now, standing astride the bike he had taken from a sporting goods shop some four miles east of the big white house, he called out clearly: "If someone's there, why don't you come on out? I won't hurt you." There was no answer. He stood on the road by the sign marking the border, watching and waiting. A bird twittered and then swooped across the sky. Nothing else moved. After a while he pushed on.

By six o'clock that evening he had reached the little town of North Berwick, at the junction of Routes 9 and 4. He decided to camp there and push on to the seacoast in the morning. There was a small store at the North Berwick crossroads of 9 and 4, and inside he took a six-pack of beer from the dead cooler. It was Black Label, a brand he had never tried before-a regional beer, presumably. He also took a large bag of Humpty Dumpty Salt 'n Vinegar potato chips, and two cans of Dinty Moore Beef. Stew. He put these goods in his pack and went back out the door. Across the street was a restaurant, and for just a moment he thought he saw two long shadows trailing back behind it and out of sight. It might have been his eyes playing him tricks, but he didn't think so. He considered running across the highway and seeing if he could surprise them out of hiding: Alleeallee-in-free, game's over, kids. He decided not to. He knew what fear was. He walked a little way down the highway instead, pushing his bike with the loaded knapsack swinging from the handlebars. He saw a large brick school with a stand of trees behind it. He

204 gathered enough wood from the grove to make a fire of decent size and built it in the middle of the school's asphalt-paved playground. There was a creek nearby, flowing past a textile mill and under the highway. He cooled his beer in the water and cooked one of the cans of beef stew in its tin. He ate it from his Boy Scout messkit, sitting on one of the playground swings and rocking slowly back and forth with his shadow trailing out long across the faded lines of the basketball court. It occurred to him to wonder why he was so little afraid of the people who were following him- because he was sure now that there were people following him, at least two, maybe more. As a corollary, it occurred to him to wonder why he had felt so good all day long, as if some black poison had leaked out of his system during his long sleep the previous afternoon. Was it just that he had needed rest? That, and nothing more? It seemed too simple. He supposed, looking at it logically, that if the followers had meant to do him harm, they would have already tried to do it. They would have shot at him from ambush or at least covered him with their weapons and forced him to surrender his. They would have taken what they wanted... but again thinking logically (it was good to think logically, too, because for the last few days all the thinking he had done had been etched in a corrosive acid-bath of terror), what could he possibly have that anybody would want? As far as worldly goods went, there was now plenty for everybody, because there were precious few everybodies left. Why go to the trouble of stealing and killing and risking your life when everything you'd ever dreamed of having as you sat in the shithouse with the Sears catalogue in your lap was now available behind every shop window in America? Just break the glass, walk in, and take it. Everything, that was, except the companionship of your fellows. That was at a premium, as Larry knew very well. And the real reason he didn't feel afraid was because he thought that was what these people must want. Sooner or later their desire would overcome their fear. He would wait until it did. He wasn't going to flush them out like a covey of quail; that would only make things worse. Two days ago, he would probably have done a fade himself if he had seen someone. Just too freaked to do anything else. So he could wait. But, man, he really wanted to see somebody again. He really did. He walked back to the stream and rinsed out his messkit. He fished the sixpack out of the water and went back to his swing. He snapped the top on the first one and held the can up in the direction of the restaurant where he had seen the shadows. Your very good health," Larry said, and drank half the can at a draught. Talk about going down smooth! By the time he had finished the six-pack it was after seven o'clock and the sun was getting ready to go down. He kicked the last few embers of the campfire apart and gathered his stuff together. Then, half-drunk and feeling pleasant, he rode up Route 9 a quarter of a mile and found a house with a screened-in porch. He parked the bike on the lawn, took his sleeping bag, and forced the porch door with a screwdriver. He looked around once more, hoping to see him or her or them-they were still keeping up with him, he felt it-but the street was quiet and empty. He went inside with a shrug. It was still early and he expected to lie restless for a while at least, but apparently he still had some sleep to catch up on. Fifteen minutes after lying down he was out, breathing slowly and evenly, his rifle close by his right hand.

Nadine was tired. This now seemed like the longest day of her life. Twice she felt sure they had been spotted, once near Strafford, and again at the Maine-New Hampshire state line, when he had looked back over his shoulder and called out. For herself, she didn't care if they were spotted or not. This man wasn't crazy, like the man who had passed by the big white house ten days ago. That man had been a soldier loaded down with guns and grenades and bandoliers of ammunition. He had been laughing and crying and threatening to blow the balls off someone named Lieutenant Morton. Lieutenant Morton had been nowhere in sight, which was probably a good thing for him, if he was still alive. Joe had been frightened of the soldier, too, and in that case it was probably a very good thing. "Joe?" She looked around. Joe was gone. And she had been on the edge of sleep and slipping over. She pushed the single blanket back and stood up, wincing at a hundred different aches. How long had it been since she had spent so much time on a bicycle? Never, probably. And then there was the constant, nerve-wracking effort to find the golden mean. If they got too close, he would see them and that would upset Joe. If they dropped back too far, he might leave Route 9 for another road and they would lose him. That would upset her. It had never occurred to her that Larry might circle back and get behind them. Luckily (for Joe, at least), it had never occurred to Larry, either.

205 She kept telling herself that Joe would get used to the idea that they needed him... and not just him. They could not be alone. If they stayed alone, they would die alone. Joe would get used to the idea; he had not lived his previous life in a vacuum any more than she had. Other people got to be a habit. "Joe," she called again, softly. He could be as quiet as a Viet Cong guerrilla creeping through the bush, but her ears had gotten attuned to him over the last three weeks, and tonight, as a bonus, there was a moon. She heard a faint scrape and clatter of gravel, and she knew where he was going. Ignoring her aches, she followed. It was quarter after ten. They had made camp (if you wanted to call two blankets in the grass "camp") behind the North Berwick Grille across from the general store, storing the bikes in a shed behind the restaurant. The man they were following had eaten in the school playground across the street ("If we went over there, I'll bet he would give us some of his supper, Joe," she had said tactfully. "It's hot... and doesn't it smell nice? I'll bet it's lots nicer than this bologna." Joe's eyes had gone wide, showing a lot of the white, and he shook his knife balefully in Larry's direction) and then he had gone up the road to a house with a screenedin porch. She thought from the way he was steering his bike that he was maybe a little drunk. He was now asleep on the porch of the house he had chosen. She went faster, wincing as random pebbles bit into the balls of her feet. There were houses on the left and she crossed to their lawns, which were now growing into fields. The grass, heavy with dew and smelling sweet, came all the way to her bare shins. It made her think of a time she had run with a boy through grass like this, under a moon that had been full, instead of waning like this one was. There had been a hot sweet ball of excitement in her lower belly, and she had been very conscious of her breasts as sexual things, full and ripe and standing out from her chest. The moon had made her feel drunk, and so had the grass, wetting her legs with its night moisture. She had known that if the boy caught her she would let the boy have her maidenhead. She had run like an Indian through the corn. Had he caught her? What did it matter now? She ran faster, leaping a cement driveway that glimmered like ice in the darkness. And there was Joe, standing at the edge of the screened porch where the man slept. His white underpants were the brightest thing in the darkness; in fact, the boy's skin was so dark that at first glance you almost thought the underpants were there alone, suspended in space, or else worn by H. G. Wells's invisible man. Joe was from Epsom, she knew that, because that was where she had found him. Nadine was from South Barnstead, a town fifteen miles northeast of Epsom. She had been searching methodically for other healthy people, reluctant to leave her own house in her own hometown. She worked in concentric circles which grew larger and larger. She had found only Joe, delirious and fevered from some sort of animal bite... rat or squirrel, from the size of it. He had been sitting on the lawn of a house in Epsom naked except for his underpants, butcher knife clutched in his hand like an old Stone Age savage or a dying but still vicious pygmy. She had had experience with infections before. She had carried him into the house. Had it been his own? She thought it likely, but would never be sure unless Joe told her. There had been dead people in the house, a lot of them: mother, father, three other children, the oldest about fifteen. She had found a doctor's office where there was disinfectant and antibiotics and bandages. She was not sure which antibiotics would be right, and she knew she might kill him if she chose wrongly, but if she did nothing he would die anyway. The bite was on the ankle, which had puffed to the size of an innertube. Fortune was with her. In three days the ankle was down to normal size and the fever was gone. The boy trusted her. No one else, apparently, but her. She would wake up mornings and he would be clinging to her. They had gone to the big white house. She called him Joe. It wasn't his name, but in her life as a teacher, any little girl whose name she hadn't known had always been a Jane, any little boy a Joe. The soldier had come by, laughing and crying and cursing Lieutenant Morton. Joe had wanted to rush out and kill him with the knife. Now this man. She was afraid to take the knife away from him, because it was Joe's talisman. Attempting to do that might be the one thing that could make him turn on her. He slept with it clutched in his hand, and the one night she had attempted to pull it free, more to see if it could actually be done than to actually remove it for good, he had been awake instantly, with no movement. One moment fast asleep. The next, those unsettling blue-gray eyes with their Chinese shape had been staring at her with mild savagery. He had pulled the knife back with a low growl. He didn't talk. Now he was raising the knife, lowering it, raising it again. Making those low growling noises in his throat and jabbing the knife at the screen. Working himself up to actually rushing in the door, perhaps. She came up behind him, not making any special effort to be quiet, but he didn't hear her; Joe was lost in his own world. In an instant, unaware that she was going to do it, she clapped her hand over his wrist and twisted it violently in an anticlockwise direction.

206 Joe uttered a hissing gasp and Larry Underwood stirred a little in his sleep, turned over, and was quiet again. The knife fell to the grass between them, its serrated blade holding splintered reflections of the silver moon. They looked like luminous snowflakes. He stared at her with angry, reproachful, and distrusting eyes. Nadine stared back uncompromisingly. She pointed back the way they had come. Joe shook his head viciously. He pointed at the screen and the dark lump in the sleeping bag beyond the screen. He made a horribly explicit gesture, drawing his thumb across his throat at the Adam's apple. Then he grinned. Nadine had never seen him grin before and it chilled her. It could not have been more savage if those gleaming white teeth had been filed to points. "No" she said softly. "Or I'll wake him up now." Joe looked alarmed. He shook his head rapidly. "Then come back with me. Sleep." He looked down at the knife, then up at her again. The savagery, for now at least, was gone. He was only a lost little boy who wanted his teddy, or the scratchy blanket which had graduated with him from the crib. Nadine recognized vaguely that this might be the time to make him leave the knife, to just shake her head firmly "No." But then what? Would he scream? He had screamed after the lunatic soldier had passed out of sight. Screamed and screamed, huge, inarticulate sounds of terror and rage. Did she want to meet the man in the sleeping bag at night, and with such screams ringing in her ears and his? "Will you come back with me?" Joe nodded. "All right," she said quietly. He bent quickly and picked it up. They went back together, and he crawled next to her trustingly, the interloper forgotten, at least temporarily. Wrapped his arms around her and went to sleep. She felt the old familiar ache in her belly, the one so much deeper and allpervading than those caused by the exercise. It was a womanache, and nothing could be done about it. She fell asleep.

She woke up sometime in the early hours of the morningshe wore no watch—cold and stiff and terrified, afraid suddenly that Joe had cunningly waited until she was asleep to creep back to the house and cut the man's throat in his sleep. Joe's arms were no longer around her. She felt responsible for the boy, she had always felt responsible for the little ones who had not asked to be in the world, but if he had done that, she would cut him adrift. To take life when so much had been lost was the one unpardonable sin. And she could not be alone with Joe much longer without help; being with him was like being in a cage with a temperamental lion. Like a lion, Joe could not (or would not) speak; he could only roar in his lost little boy's voice. She sat up and saw that the boy was still with her. In his sleep he had drawn away from her a little, that was all. He had curled up like a fetus, his thumb in his mouth, his hand wrapped around the shaft of the knife. Mostly asleep again already, she walked to the grass, urinated, and went back to her blanket. The next morning she was not sure if she had really awakened in the night or only dreamed she had.

If I dreamed, Larry thought, they must have been good dreams. He couldn't remember any of them. He felt like his old self, and he thought today would be a good day. He would see the ocean today. He rolled up his sleeping bag, tied it to the bike-carrier, went back to get his pack... and stopped. A cement path led up to the porch steps, and on both sides the grass was long and violently green. To the right, close by the porch itself, the dewy grass was beaten down. When the dew evaporated, the grass would spring back up, but now it held the shape of footprints. He was a city boy and no kind of woodsman (he had been more into Hunter Thompson than James Fenimore Cooper), but you would have to be blind, he thought, not to see by the tracks that there had been two of them: a big one and a small one. Sometime during the night they had come up to the screen and looked in at him. It gave him a chill. It was the stealth he didn't like, and he liked the first touch of returning fear even less. If they don't show themselves pretty quick, he thought, I'm going to try and flush them out. Just the thought that he could do that brought most of his selfconfidence back. ' He slipped into his pack and got going. By noon he had reached US 1 in Wells. He flipped a coin and it came up tails. He turned south on 1, leaving the coin to gleam indifferently up from the dust. Joe found it twenty minutes later and stared at it as if it were a hypnotist's crystal. He put it in his mouth and Nadine made him spit it out. Two miles down the road Larry saw it for the first time, the huge blue animal, lazy and slow this day. It was completely different from the Pacific or the Atlantic that lay off Long Island. That part of the ocean looked complacent, somehow, almost tame. This water was a darker blue, nearly cobalt, and it came up to the land in one rushing swell after another and bit at the rocks. Spume as thick as

207 eggwhite jumped into the air and then splattered back. The waves made a constant growling boom against the shore. Larry parked his bike and walked toward the ocean, feeling a deep excitement that he couldn't explain. He was here, he had made it to the place where the sea took over. This was the end of east. This was land's end. He crossed a marshy field, his shoes squishing through water standing around hummocks and clumps of reeds. There was a rich and fecund tidal smell. As he, drew closer to the headland, the thin skin of earth was peeled away and the naked bone of granite poked through-granite, Maine's final truth. Gulls rose, clean white against the blue sky, crying and wailing. He had never seen so many birds in one place before. It occurred to him that, despite their white beauty, gulls were carrion,eaters. The thought that followed was nearly unspeakable, but it had formed fully in his mind before he could push it away: The pickings must be real good just lately. He began to walk again, his shoes now clicking and scraping on sun-dried rock which would always be wet in its many seams from the spray. There were barnacles growing in those cracks, and scattered here and there like shrapnel bursts of bone were the shells the gulls had dropped to get at the soft meat inside. A moment later he stood upon the naked headland. The seawind struck him full force, lifting his heavy growth of hair back from his forehead. He lifted his face into it, into the harsh-clean salt-smell of the blue animal. The combers, glassy blue-green, moved slowly in, their slopes becoming more pronounced as the bottom shallowed up beneath them, their peaks gaining first a curl of foam, then a curdly topping. Then they crashed suicidally against the rocks as they had since the beginning of time, destroying themselves, destroying an infinitesimal bit of the land at the same time. There was a ramming, coughing boom as water was forced deep into some half-submerged channel of rock that had been carved out over the millennia. He turned first left, then right, and saw the same thing happening in each direction, as far as he could see... combers, waves, spray, most of all an endless glut of color that took his breath away. He was at land's end. He sat down with his feet dangling over the edge, feeling a little overcome. He sat there for half an hour or better. The seabreeze honed his appetite and he rummaged in his pack for lunch. He ate heartily. Thrown spray had turned the legs of his bluejeans black. He felt cleaned out, fresh. He walked back across the marsh, still so full of his own thoughts that he first supposed the rising scream to be the gulls again. He had even started to look up at the sky before he realized with a nasty jolt of fear that it was a human scream. A warcry. His eyes jerked downward again and he saw a young boy running across the road toward him, muscular legs pumping. In one hand he held a long butcher knife. He was naked except for underpants and his legs were crisscrossed with bramble welts. Behind him, just coming out of the brush and nettles on the far side of the highway, was a woman. She looked pale, and there were circles of weariness under her eyes. "Joe!" she called, and then began to run as if it hurt her to do so. Joe came on, never heeding, his bare feet splashing up thin sheets of marsh water. His entire face was drawn back in a tight and murderous grin. The butcher knife was high over his head, catching the sun. He's coming to kill me, Larry thought, entirely poleaxed by the idea. This boy... what did I ever do to him? "Joe!" the woman screamed, this time in a high, weary, despairing voice. Joe ran on, closing the distance. Larry had time to realize he had left his rifle with his bike, and then the screaming boy was upon him. As he brought the butcher knife down in a long, sweeping arc, Larry's paralysis broke. He stepped aside and, not even thinking, brought his right foot up and sent the wet yellow workboot it was wearing into the boy's midriff. And what he felt was pity: there was nothing to the kid-he went over like a candlepin. He looked fierce but was no heavyweight. "Joe!" Nadine called. She tripped over a hummock and fell to her knees, splashing her white blouse with brown mud. "Don't hurt him! He's only a little boy! Please, don't hurt him!" She got to her feet and struggled on. Joe had fallen flat on his back. He was splayed out like an x, his arms making a v, his open legs making a second, inverted v. Larry took a step forward and tromped on his right wrist, pinning the hand holding the knife to the muddy ground. "Let go of the sticker, kid." The boy hissed and then made a grunting, gobbling sound like a turkey. His upper lip drew back from his teeth. His Chinese eyes glared into Larry's. Keeping his foot on the boy's wrist was like standing on a wounded but still vicious snake. He could feel the boy trying to yank his hand free, and never mind if it was at the expense of skin, flesh, or even a broken bone. He jerked into a half-

208 sitting position and tried to bite Larry's leg through the heavy wet denim of his jeans. Larry stepped down even harder on the thin wrist and Joe uttered a cry—not of pain but defiance. "Let it go, kid." Joe continued to struggle. The stalemate would have continued until Joe got the knife free or until Larry broke his wrist if Nadine had not finally arrived, muddy, breathless, and staggering with weariness. Without looking at Larry she dropped to her knees. "Let it go!" she said quietly but with great firmness. Her face was sweaty but calm. She held it only inches above Joe's contorted, twisting features. He snapped at her like a dog and continued to struggle. Grimly, Larry strove to keep his balance. If the boy got free now, he would probably strike at the woman first. Let... it... go!" Nadine said. The boy growled. Spit leaked between his clenched teeth. There was a smear of mud in the shape of a question mark on his right cheek. "We'll leave you, Joe. I'll leave you. I'll go with him. Unless you're good." Larry felt a further tensing of the arm under his foot, then a loosening. But the boy was looking at her grievingly, accusingly, reproachfully. When he shifted his gaze slightly to look at Larry, Larry could read the hot jealousy in those eyes. Even with the sweat running off him in buckets, Larry felt cold under that stare. She continued to speak calmly. No one would hurt him. No one would leave him. If he let go of the knife, everyone could be friends. Gradually Larry became aware that the hand under his shoe had relaxed and let go. The boy lay dormant, staring up at the sky. He had opted out. Larry took his foot off Joe's wrist, bent quickly, and picked up the knife. He turned and scaled it up and out toward the headland. The blade whirled and whirled, throwing off spears of sunlight. Joe's strange eyes followed its course and he gave one long, hooting wail of pain. The knife bounced on the rocks with a thin clatter and skittered over the edge. Larry turned back and regarded them. The woman was looking at Joe's right forearm where the waffled shape of Larry's boot was deeply embedded and turning an angry, exclamatory red. Her dark eyes looked up from that to Larry's face. They were full of sorrow. Larry felt the old defensive and self-serving words rise-I had to do it, it wasn't my fault, listen lady, he wanted to kill me-because he thought he could read the judgment in those sorrowing eyes: You ain't no nice guy. But in the end he said nothing. The situation was what the situation was, and his actions had been forced by the kid's. Looking at the boy, who had now curled himself up desolately over his own knees and put a thumb in his mouth, he doubted if the boy himself had initiated the situation. And it could have ended in a worse way, with one of them cut or even killed. So he said nothing, and he met the woman's soft gaze and thought: I think I've changed. Somehow. I don't know how much. He found himself thinking of something Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L. A., a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called Sparx, a group everybody seemed to think that year's Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and a monkey on his back. He progressed from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After a while he was just another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but he was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. He didn't talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had disappeared. And Barry Grieg had said: He's come out the other side. That was all. No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just... come out the other side. Or you don't. I've changed somehow, Larry thought dimly. I've come out the other side, too. She said: "I'm Nadine Cross. This is Joe. I'm happy to meet you." "Larry Underwood." They shook hands, both smiling faintly at the absurdity. "Let's walk back to the road," Nadine said. They started off side by side, and after a few steps Larry looked back over his shoulder at Joe, who was still sitting over his knees and sucking his thumb, apparently unaware they were gone.

209 "He'll come," she said quietly. "Are you sure?" "Quite sure." As they came to the highway's gravel shoulder she stumbled and Larry took her arm. She looked at him gratefully. "Can we sit down?" she asked. "Sure." So they sat down on the pavement, facing each other. After a little bit Joe got up and plodded toward them, looking down at his bare feet. He sat a little way apart from them. Larry looked at him warily, then back at Nadine Cross. "You were the two following me." "You knew? Yes. I thought you did." "How long?" "Two days now," Nadine said. "We were staying in the big house at Epsom." Seeing his puzzled expression she added: "By the creek. You fell asleep by the rock wall." He nodded. "And last night the two of you came to peek at me while I was sleeping on that porch. Maybe to see if I had horns or a long red tail." "That was Joe," she said quietly. "I came after him when I found he was gone. How did you know?" "You left tracks in the dew." "Oh." She looked at him closely, examining him, and although he wanted to, Larry didn't drop his eyes. "I don't want you to be angry with us. I suppose that sounds ridiculous after Joe just tried to kill you, but Joe isn't responsible." "Is that his real name?" "No, just what I call him." "He's like a savage in a National Geographic TV show." "Yes, just like that. I found him on the lawn of a househis house, maybe, the name was Rockway- sick from a bite. A rat bite, maybe. He doesn't talk. He growls and grunts. Until this morning I've been able to control him. But I... I'm tired, you see... and..." She shrugged. Marsh-mud was drying on her blouse in what could have been a series of Chinese ideograms. "I dressed him at first. He took everything off but his underpants. Eventually I got tired of trying. The minges and mosquitoes don't seem to bother him." She paused. "I want us to come with you. I guess there is no way to be coy about it, under the circumstances." Larry wondered what she would think if he told her about the last woman who had wanted to come with him. Not that he ever would; that episode was deeply buried, even if the woman in question was not. He was no more anxious to bring up Rita than a murderer would be to drag his victim's name into parlor conversation. "I don't know where I'm going," he said. "I came up from New York City, the long way around, I guess. The plan was to find a nice house on the coast and just lie up there until October or so. But the longer I go, the more I want other people. The longer I go, the more all of this seems to hit me." He was expressing himself badly and didn't seem to be able to do better without bringing up Rita or his bad dreams about the dark man. "I've been scared a lot of the time," he said carefully, "because I'm on my own. Pretty paranoid. It's like I expected Indians to just swoop down and scalp me." "In other words, you've stopped looking for houses and started looking for people." "Yes, maybe." "You've found us. That's a start." "I do believe you found me. And that boy worries me, Nadine. I have to be up front about that. His knife's gone, but the world is full of knives just lying around waiting to be picked up." "Yes." "I don't want to sound brutal..." He trailed off, hoping she would say it for him, but she said nothing at all, only looked at him with those dark eyes. "Would you consider leaving him?" There it was, spat out like a lump of rock, and he still didn't sound like much of a nice guy... but was it right, was it fair to either of them, to make a bad situation worse by burdening themselves with a ten-year-old psychopath? He had told her he was going to sound brutal, and he supposed he had. But they were in a brutal world now. Meanwhile, Joe's odd seawater-colored eyes bored into him. "I couldn't do that," Nadine said calmly. "I understand the danger, and I understand that the danger would be primarily to you. He's jealous. He's afraid that you might become more important to me than he is. He might very well try to... try to get at you again unless you can make friends with him or at least convince him you don't mean to . " She trailed off, leaving that part vague. "But

210 if I left him, that would be the same as murder. And I won't be a party to that. Too many have died to kill more." "If he cuts my throat in the middle of the night, you'll be a party to that." She bowed her head. Speaking so quietly that only she could hear (he didn't know if Joe, who was watching them, understood what they were talking about or not), Larry said, "He probably would have done it last night if you hadn't come after him. Isn't that the truth?" Softly she replied: "Those are things that might be." Larry laughed. "The Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come?" She looked up. "I want to come with you, Larry, but I can't leave Joe. You will have to decide." "You don't make it easy." "These days it's no easy life." He thought about it. Joe sat on the soft shoulder of the road, watching them with his seawater eyes. Behind them, the real sea moved restlessly against the rocks, booming in its secret channels where it had infiltrated the land. "All right," he said. "I think you're being dangerously softhearted, but... all right." "Thank you," Nadine said. "I will be responsible for his actions." "That will be a great comfort if he kills me." "That would be on my heart for the rest of my life," Nadine said, and a sudden certainty that all her words about the sanctity of life would someday not too distant rise up to mock her swept her like a cold wind, and she shuddered. No, she told herself. I'll not kill. Not that. Never that.

They camped that night on the soft white sand of the Wells public beach. Larry built a large fire above the strand of kelp that marked the last high tide and Joe sat on the other side, away from him and Nadine, feeding small sticks into the blaze. Occasionally he would hold a bigger stick into the flames until it caught like a torch and then tear away down the sand, holding it aloft like a single flaming birthday candle. They were able to see him until he was beyond the thirty-foot glow of the fire and then only his moving torch, drawn back in the wind manufactured by his wild sprinting. The seabreeze had come up a little, and it was cooler than it had been for days. Vaguely, Larry remembered the spell of rain that had occurred the afternoon he had found his mother dying, just before the superflu had hit New York like a highballing freight train. Remembered the thunderstorm and the white curtains blowing wildly into the apartment. He shivered a little, and the wind danced a spiral of fire out of the fire and up toward the black starshot sky. Embers cycloned up even higher and flickered out. Hethought of fall, still distant but not so far as it had been on that day in June when he had discovered his mother lying on the floor, delirious. He shivered a little. North, far down on the beach, Joe's torch bobbed up and down. It made him feel lonely and all the colder-that single light flickering in the large and silent darkness. The surf rolled and boomed. "Do you play?" He jumped a little at her voice and looked at the guitar case lying beside them on the sand. It had been leaning against a Steinway piano in the music room of the big house they had broken into to get their supper. He had loaded his pack with enough cans to replace what they had eaten this day, and had taken the guitar on impulse, not even looking inside the case to see what it was- coming from a house like that, it was probably a good un. He hadn't played since that crazy Malibu party, and that had been six weeks ago. In another life. "Yeah, I do," he said, and discovered that he wanted to play, not for her but because sometimes it felt good to play, it eased your mind. And when you had a bonfire on the beach, someone was supposed to play the guitar. That was practically graven in stone. "Let's see what we got here," he said, and unsnapped the catches. He had expected something good, but what lay inside the case was still a happy surprise. It was a Gibson twelve-string, a beautiful instrument, perhaps even custom-made. Larry wasn't enough of a judge of guitars to be sure. He did know that the fretboard inlays were real mother-of-pearl, catching reddish-orange glints from the fire and waxing them into prisms of light. "It's beautiful," she said. "It sure is." He strummed it and liked the sound it made, even open and not quite in tune. The sound was fuller and richer than the sound you got from a six-string. A harmonic sound, but tough. That was the good thing about a steel-string guitar, you got a nice tough sound. And. the strings were Black Diamonds, wrapped and a little hokey, but you got an honest sound, a trifle rough when you changed chords-zing! He smiled a little, remembering Barry Grieg's contempt for the smooth flat guitar strings. He had always called them "dollar slicks." Good old Barry, who wanted to be Steve Miller when he grew up. "What are you smiling about?" Nadine asked. "Old times," he said, and felt a little sad.

211 He tuned by ear, getting it just right, still thinking about Barry and Johnny McCall and Wayne Stukey. As he was finishing she tapped him lightly on the shoulder and he looked up. Joe was standing by the fire, a burned-out stick held forgotten in one hand. Those strange eyes were staring at him with frank fascination, and his mouth was open. Very quietly, so quietly that it might have been a thought in his own head, Nadine said: "Music hath charms..." Larry began to pick out a rough melody on the guitar, an old blues he had picked up off an Elektra folk album as a teenager. Something originally done by Koerner, Ray, and Glover, he thought. When he thought he had the melody right, he let it walk off down the beach and then sang... his singing was always going to be better than his playing.

The boy was grinning now, grinning in the amazed way of someone who has discovered a glad secret. Larry thought he looked like someone who had been suffering from an unreachable itch between his shoulderblades for a long, long time and had finally found someone who knew exactly where to scratch. He scruffed through long-unused archives of memory, hunting a second verse, and found one.

The boy's open, delighted grin lit those eyes up, made them into something, Larry realized, that would be apt to make the muscles in any young girl's thighs loosen a little. He reached for an instrumental bridge and fumbled through it, not too badly, either. His fingers wrung the right sounds out of the guitar: hard, flashy, a little bit tawdry, like a display of junk jewelry, probably stolen, sold out of a paper bag on a street corner. He made it swagger a little and then retreated quickly to a good old three-finger E before he could fuck it all up. He couldn't remember all of the last verse, something about a railroad track, so he repeated the first verse again and quit. When the silence hit again, Nadine laughed and clapped her hands. Joe threw his stick away and jumped up and down on the sand, making fierce hooting sounds of joy. Larry couldn't believe the change in the kid, and had to caution himself not to make too much of it. To do so would be to risk disappointment. Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast. He found himself wondering with unwilling distrust if it could be something as simple as that. Joe was gesturing at him and Nadine said: "He wants you to play something else. Would you? That was wonderful. It makes me feel better. So much better." So he played Geoff Muldaur's "Goin Downtown" and his own "Sally's Fresno Blues"; he played "The Springhill Mine Disaster" and Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right, Mamma." He switched to primitive rock and roll-"Milk Cow Blues," "Jim Dandy," "Twenty Flight Rock" (doing the boogiewoogie rhythm of the chorus as well as he could, although his fingers were getting slow and numb and painful by now), and finally a song he had always liked, "Endless Sleep," originally done by Jody Reynolds. "I can't play anymore," he said to Joe, who had stood without moving through this entire recital. "My fingers." He held them out, showing the deep grooves the strings had made in his fingers, and the chips in his nails. The boy held out his own hands. Larry paused for a moment, then shrugged inside. He handed the guitar to the boy neck first. "It takes a lot of practice," he said. But what followed was the most amazing thing he had ever heard in his life. The boy struck up "Jim Dandy" almost flawlessly, hooting at the words rather than singing them, as if his tongue was plastered to the roof of his mouth. At the same time it was perfectly obvious that he had never played a guitar in his life before; he couldn't bear down hard enough on the strings to make them ring out properly and his chord changes were slurred and sloppy. The sound that came out was

212 muted and ghostly-as if Joe was playing a guitar stuffed full of cottonbut otherwise it was a perfect carbon copy of the way Larry had played the tune. When he had finished, Joe looked curiously down at his own fingers, as if trying to understand why they could make the substance of the music Larry had played but not the sharp sounds themselves. Numbly, as if from a distance, Larry heard himself say: "You're not bearing down hard enough, that's all. You have to build up calluses-hard spots-on the ends of your fingers. And the muscles in your left hand, too." Joe looked at him closely as he spoke, but Larry didn't know if the boy really understood or not. He turned to Nadine. "Did you know he could do that?" "No. I'm as surprised as you are. It's as if he is a prodigy or something, isn't it?"

Larry nodded. The boy ran through "That's All Right, Mamma," again getting almost every nuance of the way Larry had played it. But the strings sometimes thudded like wood as Joe's fingers blocked the vibration of the strings rather than making it come true. "Let me show you," Larry said, and held out his hands for the guitar. Joe's eyes immediately slanted down with distrust. Larry thought he was remembering the knife going down into the sea. He backed away, holding the guitar tightly. "All right," Larry said. "All yours. When you want a lesson, come see me." The boy made a hooting sound and ran off along the beach, holding the guitar high over his head like a sacrificial offering. "He's going to smash it to hell," Larry said. "No," Nadine answered, "I don't think he is." Larry woke up sometime in the night and propped himself up on one elbow. Nadine was only a vaguely female shape wrapped up in three blankets a quarter of the way around the dead fire. Directly across from Larry was Joe. He was also under several blankets, but his head stuck out. His thumb was corked securely in his mouth. His legs were drawn up and between them was the body of the Gibson twelve-string. His free hand was wrapped loosely around the guitar's neck. Larry stared at him, fascinated. He had taken the boy's knife and thrown it away; the boy had adopted the guitar. Fine. Let him have it. You couldn't stab anybody to death with a guitar, although, Larry supposed, it would make a pretty fair blunt instrument. He dropped off to sleep again.

When he woke up the next morning, Joe was sitting on a rock with the guitar on his lap and his bare feet in the run of the surf, playing "Sally's Fresno Blues." He had gotten better. Nadine woke up twenty minutes later, and smiled at him radiantly. It occurred to Larry that she was a lovely woman, and a snatch of song occurred to him, something by Chuck Berry: Nadine, honey is that you? Aloud, he said: "Let's see what we've got for breakfast." He built up the fire and the three of them sat close to it, working the nightchill out of their bones. Nadine made oatmeal with powdered milk and they drank strong tea brewed in a can, hobo fashion. Joe ate with the Gibson across his lap. And twice Larry found himself smiling at the boy and thinking you couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.

They cycled south on US 1. Joe rode his bike straight down the white line, sometimes ranging as far as a mile ahead. Once they caught up to him placidly walking his bike along the verge of the road and eating blackberries in an amusing way-he would toss each berry into the air, unerringly catching them in his mouth as they came down. An hour after that, they found him seated on a historic Revolutionary War marker and playing "Jim Dandy" on the guitar. Just before eleven o'clock they came to a bizarre roadblock at the town line of a place called Ogunquit. Three bright orange town dump trucks were driven across the road, blocking it from shoulder to shoulder. Sprawled in the back of one of the dump-bins was the crow-picked body of what had once been a man. The last ten days of solid heat had done their work. Where the body was not clothed, a fever of maggots boiled. Nadine turned away. "Where's Joe?" she asked. "I don't know. Somewhere up ahead." "I wish he hadn't seen that. Do you think he did?" "Probably," Larry said. He had been thinking that, for a main artery, Route 1 had been awfully deserted ever since they left Wells, with no more than two dozen stalled cars along the way. Now he understood why. They had blocked the road. There would probably be hundreds, maybe thousands, of cars stacked up on the far side of this town. He knew how she felt about Joe. It would have been good to spare the boy this. "Why did they block the road?" she asked him. "Why would they do that?" "They must have tried to quarantine their town. I imagine we'll find another roadblock on the other end."

213 "Are there other bodies?" Larry put his bike on its stand and looked. "Three," he said. "All right. I'm not going to look at them." He nodded. They wheeled their bikes past the trucks and then rode on. The highway had turned close to the sea again and it was cooler. Summer cottages were jammed together in long and sordid rows. People took their vacations in those tenements? Larry wondered. Why not just go to Harlem and let your kids play under the hydrant spray? "Not very pretty, are they?" Nadine asked. On either side of them the essence of honky-tonk beach resort had now enclosed them: gas stations, fried clam stands, Dairy Treets, motels painted in feverish pastel colors, mini-golf. Larry was drawn two painful ways by these things. Part of him clamored at their sad and blatant ugliness and at the ugliness of the minds that had turned this section of a magnificent, savage coastline into one long highway amusement park for families in station wagons. But there was a more subtle, deeper part of him that whispered of the people who had filled these places and this road during other summers. Ladies in sunhats and shorts too tight for their large behinds. College boys in red-and-black-striped rugby shirts. Girls in beach shifts and thong sandals. Small screaming children with ice cream spread over their faces. They were American people and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups-never mind if the group was in an Aspen ski lodge or performing their prosaic-arcane rites of summer along US 1 in Maine. And now all those Americans were gone. A thunderstorm had ripped a branch from a tree and it had knocked the gigantic plastic Dairy Treet sign into the ice cream stand's parking lot, where it lay on its side like a pallid duncecap. The grass was starting to get long on the mini-golf course. This stretch of highway between Portland and Portsmouth had once been a seventy-mile amusement park and now it was only a haunted funhouse where all the clockwork had run down. "Not very pretty, no," he said, "but once it was ours, Nadine. Once it was ours, even though we were never here before. Now it's gone." "But not forever," she said calmly, and he looked at her, her clean and shining face. Her forehead, from which her amazing white-streaked hair was drawn back, glowed like a lamp. "I am not a religious person, but if I was I would call what has happened a judgment of God. In a hundred years, maybe two hundred, it will be ours again." "Those trucks won't be gone in two hundred years." "No, but the road will be. The trucks will be standing in the middle of a field or a forest, and there will be lousewort and ladies' slipper growing where their tires used to be. They won't really be trucks anymore. They will be artifacts." "I think you're wrong." "How can I be wrong?" "Because we're looking for other people," Larry said. "Now why do you think we're doing that?" She gazed at him, troubled. "Well... because it's the right thing to do," she said. "People need other people. Didn't you feel that? When you were alone?" "Yes," Larry said. "If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness. When we get together we build miles of summer cottages and kill each other in the bars on Saturday night." He laughed. It was a cold and unhappy sound with no humor in it at all. It hung on the deserted air for a long time. "There's no answer. It's like being stuck inside an egg. Come on-Joe'll be way ahead of us." She stood astride her bike a moment longer, her troubled gaze on Larry's back as it pulled away. Then she rode after him. He couldn't be right. Couldn't be. If such a monstrous thing as this had happened for no good reason at all, what sense did anything make? Why were they even still alive?

Joe wasn't so far ahead after all. They came upon him sitting on the back bumper of a blue Ford parked in a driveway. He was looking at a girlie magazine he had found somewhere, and Larry observed uncomfortably that the boy had an erection. He shot a glance at Nadine, but she was looking elsewhere-perhaps on purpose. When they reached the driveway Larry asked, "Coming?" Joe put the magazine aside and instead of standing up made a guttural interrogative sound and pointed up in the air. Larry glanced up wildly, for a moment thinking the boy had seen an airplane. Then Nadine cried: "Not the sky, the barn!" Her voice was close and tight with excitement. "On the barn! Thank God for you, Joe! We never would have seen it!" She went to Joe, put her arms around him, and hugged him. Larry turned to the barn, where white letters stood out clearly on the faded shingle roof:

HAVE GONE TO STOVINGTON, VT. PLAGUE CENTER

Below that were a series of road directions. And at the bottom:

214

LEAVING OGUNQUIT JULY 2, 1990 HAROLD EMERY LAUDER FRANCES GOLDSMITH

215 Nadine said she was too excited to sleep but she would lie down with Joe until he was under. Larry rode into Ogunquit to look for a motorcycle dealership. There was none, but he thought that he had seen a cycle shop on their way out of Wells. He went back to tell Nadine and found them both asleep in the shade of the blue Ford where Joe had been perusing Gallery. He lay down a little way from them but couldn't sleep. At last he crossed the highway and made his way through the knee-high timothy grass to the barn where the sign was painted. Thousands of grasshoppers jumped wildly to get out of his way as he walked toward them, and Larry thought: I'm their plague. I'm their dark man. Near the barn's wide double doors he spotted two empty Pepsi cans and a crust of sandwich. In more normal times the gulls would have had the remains of sandwich long ago, but times had changed and the gulls were no doubt used to richer food. He toed the crust, then one of the cans. Get these right down to the crime lab, Sergeant Briggs. I think our killer has finally made a mistake. Right-o, Inspector Underwood. The day Scotland Yard decided to send you was a lucky day for Squinchly-on-the-Green. Don't mention it, Sergeant. All part of the job. Larry went inside-it was dark, hot, and alive with the softly whirring wings of the barnswallows. The smell of hay was sweet. There were no animals in the stalls; the owner must have let them out to live or die with the superflu rather than face certain starvation. Mark that down for the coroner's inquest, Sergeant. I will indeed, Inspector Underwood. He glanced down at the floor and saw a candy wrapper. He picked it up. A chocolate Payday candy bar had once been stowed inside it. The signpainter had had guts, maybe. Good taste, no. Anyone with a taste for chocolate Paydays had been spending too much time in the hot sun. Steps leading to the loft were nailed to one of the loft's supporting beams. Greasy with sweat already, not even knowing why he was here, Larry climbed up. In the center of the loft (he was walking slowly and keeping an eye out for rats), a more conventional flight of stairs went up to the cupola, and these stairs were splattered with drips of white paint. We've stumbled on another find, I believe, Sergeant. Inspector, I stand amazed-your deductive acumen is exceeded only by your good looks and the extraordinary length of your reproductive organ. Don't mention it, Sergeant. He went up to the cupola. It was even hotter up here, explosively so, and Larry reflected that if Frances and Harold had left their paint up here when the job was done, the barn would have burned merrily to the ground a week ago. The windows were dusty and festooned with decaying cobwebs which had no doubt been freshly spun when Gerald Ford was President. One of these windows had been forced up, and when Larry leaned out, he had a breathtaking view of the country for miles around. This side of the barn faced east, and he was high enough for the roadside concessions, which seemed so monstrously ugly when seen at ground level, to look as inconsequential as a little strewing of roadside litter. Beyond the highway, magnificent, was the ocean, with the incoming waves neatly broken in two by the breakwater stretching out from the northern side of the harbor. The land was an oil painting depicting high summer, all green and gold, wrapped in a still haze of afternoon. He could smell salt and brine. And looking down along the slope of the roof, he could read Harold's sign, upside down. Just the thought of crawling around on that roof, so high above the ground, made Larry's guts feel dauncy. And he really must have hung his legs right over the raingutter to get the girl's name on. Why did he go to the trouble, Sergeant? That, I think, is one of the questions to which we must address ourselves. If you say so, Inspector Underwood. He went back down the stairs, going slowly and watching his footing. This was no time for a broken leg. At the bottom, something else caught his eye, something carved into one of the support beams, startlingly white and fresh and in direct contrast to all the rest of the barn's old dusty darkness. He went over to the beam and peered at the carving, then ran the ball of his thumb over it, part in amusement, part in wonder that another human being had done it on the day he and Rita had been trekking north. He ran his nail along the carved letters again.

In a heart. With an arrow. I believe, Sergeant, that the bloke must have been in love. "Good for you, Harold," Larry said, and left the barn.

216 The cycle shop in Wells was a Honda dealership, and from the way the showroom bikes were lined up, Larry deduced that two of them were missing. He was more proud of a second find-a crumpled candy wrapper near one of the wastebaskets. A chocolate Payday. It looked as if someonelovesick Harold Lauder probably-had finished his candy bar while deciding which bikes he and his inamorata would be happiest with. He had balled up his wrapper and shot it at the wastebasket. And missed. Nadine thought his deductions were good, but she was not as fetched by them as Larry was. She was eyeing the remaining bikes, in a fever to be off. Joe sat on the showroom's front step, playing the Gibson twelve-string and hooting contentedly. "Listen, Larry said, "it's five o'clock now, Nadine. There's absolutely no way to get going until tomorrow." "But there's three hours of daylight left! We can't just sit around! We might miss them!" "If we miss them, that's that," he said. "Harold Lauder left instructions once, right down to the roads they were going to take. If they move on, he'll probably do it again." "But—" "I know you're anxious," he said, and put his hands on her shoulders. He could feel the old impatience building up and forced himself to control it. "But you've never been on a motorcycle before." "I can ride a bike, though. And I know how to use a clutch, I told you that. Please, Larry. If we don't waste time we can camp in New Hampshire tonight and be halfway there by tomorrow night. We—' "It's not like a bike, goddammit!" he burst out, and the guitar came to a jangling stop behind him. He could see Joe looking back at them over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed and instantly distrustful. Gee, I sure do have a way with people, Larry thought. That made him even angrier. Nadine said mildly: "You're hurting me." He looked and saw that his fingers were buried in the soft flesh of her shoulders, and his anger collapsed into dull shame. "I'm sorry," he said. Joe was still looking at him, and Larry recognized that he had just lost half the ground he had gained with the boy. Maybe more. Nadine had said something. "What?" "I said, tell me why it's not like a bike." His first impulse was to shout at her, If you know so much, go on and try it. See how you like looking at the world with your head on backward. He controlled that, thinking it wasn't only the boy he had lost ground with. He'd lost some with himself. Maybe he had come out the other side, but some of the old childish Larry had come out with him, tagging along at his heels like a shadow which has shrunk in the noonday sun but has not entirely disappeared. "They're heavier," he said. "If you overbalance, you can't get rebalanced as easily as you can with a bicycle. One of these 360s goes three hundred and fifty pounds. You get used to controlling that extra weight very quickly, but it does take some getting used to. In a standard shift car, you operate the gearshift with your hand and the throttle with your foot. On a cycle it's reversed: the gearshift is footoperated, the throttle hand-operated, and that takes a lot of getting used to. There are two brakes instead of one. Your right foot brakes the rear wheel, your right hand brakes the front wheel. If you forget and just use the handbrake, you're apt to fly right over the handlebars. And you're going to have to get used to your passenger." "Joe? But I thought he'd ride with you!" "I'd be glad to. take him," Larry said. "But right now I don't think he'd have me. Do you?" Nadine looked at Joe for a long, troubled time. "No," she said, and then sighed. "He may not even want to ride with me. It may scare him." "If he does, you're going to be responsible for him. And I'm responsible for both of you. I don't want to see you spill." "Did that happen to you, Larry? Were you with someone?" "I was," Larry said, "and I took a spill. But by then the lady I was with was already dead." "She crashed her motorcycle?" Nadine's face was very still. "No. What happened, I'd say it was seventy percent accident and thirty percent suicide. Whatever she needed from me... friendship, understanding, help, I don't know... she wasn't getting enough." He was upset now, his temples pounding thickly, his throat tight, the tears close. "Her name was Rita. Rita Blakemoor. I'd like to do better by you that's all. You and Joe." "Larry, why didn't you tell me before?" "Because it hurts to talk about it," he said simply. "It hurts a lot." That was the truth, but not the whole truth. There were the dreams. He found himself wondering if Nadine had bad dreams-last night he had awakened briefly and she had been tossing restlessly and muttering. But she had said nothing today. And Joe. Did Joe have bad dreams? Well, he didn't know about them, but fearless

217 Inspector Underwood of Scotland Yard was afraid of the dreams... and if Nadine took a spill on the motorcycle, they might come back. "We'll go tomorrow, then," she said. "Teach me how tonight."

But first there was the matter of getting the two small bikes Larry had picked out gassed up. The dealership had a pump, but without electricity it wouldn't run. He found another candy wrapper by the plate covering the underground tank and deduced that it had recently been pried up by the ever-resourceful Harold Lauder. Lovesick or no, Payday freak or not, Larry had gained a lot of respect for Harold, almost a liking in advance. He had already developed his own mental picture of Harold. Probably in his mid-thirties, a farmer maybe, tall and suntanned, skinny, not too bright in the book sense, maybe, but plenty canny. He grinned. Building up a mental picture of someone you had never seen was a fool's game, because they were-never the way you had imagined. Everybody knows the one about the three-hundred-pound disc jockey with the whipcord-thin voice. While Nadine got a cold supper together, Larry prowled around the side of the dealership. There he found a large steel wastecan. Leaning against it was a crowbar and curling over the top was a piece of rubber tubing. I've found you again, Harold! Take a look at this, Sergeant Briggs. Our man siphoned some gas from the underground tank to get going. I'm surprised he didn't take his hose with him. Perhaps he cut off a piece and that's what's left, Inspector Underwood-begging your pardon, but it is in the wastecan. By jove, Sergeant, you're right. I'm going to write you up for a promotion. He took the crowbar and rubber hose back around to the plate covering the tank. "Joe, can you come here for a minute and help me?" The boy looked up from the cheese and crackers he was eating and gazed distrustfully at Larry. "Go on, now, that's all right," Nadine said quietly. Joe came over, his feet dragging a little. Larry slipped the crowbar into the plate's slot. "Throw your weight on that and let's see if we can get it up," he said. For a moment he thought the boy either didn't understand him or didn't want to do it. Then he grasped the far end of the crowbar and pushed on it. His arms were thin but belted with a scrawny sort of muscle, the kind of muscle that working men from poor families always seem to have. The plate tilted a little but didn't come up enough for Larry to get his fingers under. "Lay over it," he said. Those half-savage, uptilted eyes studied him coolly for a moment and then Joe—balanced on the crowbar, his feet coming off the ground as his whole weight was thrown onto the lever. The plate came up a little farther than before, enough so that Larry could squirm his fingers under it. While he was struggling for purchase he happened to think that if the boy still didn't like him, this was the best chance he could have to show it. If Joe took his weight off the crowbar the plate would come down with a crash and he'd lose everything on his hands but the thumbs. Nadine had realized this, Larry saw. She had been peering at one of the bikes but now had turned to watch, her body angled into a posture of tension. Her dark eyes went from Larry, down on one knee, to Joe, who was watching Larry as he leaned his weight on the bar. Those seawater eyes were inscrutable. And still Larry couldn't find purchase. "Need help?" Nadine asked, her normally calm voice now just a little highpitched. Sweat ran into one eye and he blinked it away. Still no joy. He could smell gasoline. "I think we can handle it," Larry said, looking directly at her. A moment later his fingers slipped into a short groove on the underside of the plate. He threw his shoulders into it and the plate came up and crashed over on the tarmac with a dull clang. He heard Nadine sigh, and the crowbar fall to the pavement. He wiped his perspiring brow and looked back at the boy. "That's good work, Joe," he said. "If you'd let that thing slip, I would've spent the rest of my life zipping my fly with my teeth. Thank you." He expected no response (except perhaps an uninterpretable hoot as Joe walked back to inspect the motorcycles again), but Joe said in a rusty, struggling voice: "Weck-come." Larry flashed a glance at Nadine, who stared back at him and then at Joe. Her face was surprised and pleased, yet somehow she looked-he couldn't have said just how-as if she had expected this. It was an expression he had seen before, but not one he could put his finger on right away. "Joe," he said, "did you say `welcome'?" Joe nodded vigorously. "Weck-come. You weck-come." Nadine was holding her arms out, smiling. "That's good, Joe. Very, very good." Joe trotted to her and allowed himself to be hugged for a moment or two. Then he began to peer at the bikes again, hooting and chuckling to himself. "He can talk," Larry said.

218 "I knew he wasn't mute," Nadine answered. "But it's wonderful to know he can recover. I think he needed two of us. Two halves. He... oh, I don't know." He saw that she was blushing and thought he knew why. He began to slip the length of rubber hose into the hole in the cement, and suddenly realized that what he was doing could easily be interpreted as a symbolic (and rather crude) bit of dumbshow. He looked up at her, sharply. She turned away quickly, but not before he had seen how intently she was watching what he was doing, and the high color in her cheeks. The nasty fear rose in his chest and he called: "For Chrissake, Nadine, look out!" She was concentrating on the hand controls, not looking where she was going, and she was going to drive the Honda directly into a pine tree at a wobbling five miles an hour. She looked up and he heard her say "Oh!" in a startled voice. Then she swerved, much too sharply, and fell off the bike. The Honda stalled. He ran to her, his heart in his throat. "Are you all right? Nadine? Are you—" Then she was picking herself up shakily, looking at her scraped hands. "Yes, I'm fine. Stupid me, not looking where I was going. Did I hurt the motorcycle?" "Never mind the goddam motorcycle, let me take a look at your hands." She held them out and he took a plastic bottle of Bactine from his pants pocket and sprayed them. "You're shaking," she said. "Never mind that either," Larry answered, more roughly than he had intended. "Listen, maybe we had better just stick to the bicycles. This is dangerous—" "So is breathing," she answered calmly. "And I think Joe should ride with you, at least at first." "He won't—" "I think he will," Nadine said, looking into his face. "And so do you." "Well, let's stop for tonight. It's almost too dark to see." "Once more. Haven't I read that if your horse throws you, you should get right back on?" Joe strolled by, munching blueberries from a motorcycle helmet. He had found a number of wild blueberry bushes behind the dealership and had been picking them while Nadine had her first lesson. "I guess so," Larry said, defeated. "But will you please watch where you're going?" "Yes, sir. Right, sir." She saluted and then smiled at him. She had a beautiful slow smile that lit up her whole face. Larry smiled back; there was nothing else to do. When Nadine smiled, even Joe smiled back. This time she putted around the lot twice and then turned out into the road, swinging over too sharply, bringing Larry's heart into his mouth again. But she brought her foot down smartly as he had shown her, and went up the hill and out of sight. He saw her switch carefully up to second gear, and heard her switch to third as she dropped behind the first rise. Then the bike's engine faded to a drone that melted away to nothing. He stood anxiously in the twilight, absently slapping at an occasional mosquito. Joe strolled by again, his mouth blue. "Weck-come," he said, and grinned. Larry managed a strained smile in return. If she didn't come back soon, he would go after her. Visions of finding her lying in a ditch with a broken neck danced blackly in his head. He was just walking over to the other cycle, debating whether or not to take Joe with him, when the droning hum came to his ears again and swelled to the sound of the Honda's engine, clocking smoothly along in fourth. He relaxed... a little. Dismally he realized he would never be able to relax completely while she was riding that thing. She came back into sight, the cycle's headlamp now on, and pulled up beside him. "Pretty good, huh?" She switched off. "I was getting ready to come after you. I thought you'd had an accident." "I sort of did." She saw the way he stiffened and added, "I went too slow turning around and forgot to push the clutch in. I stalled." "Oh. Enough for tonight, huh?" "Yes," she said. "My tailbone hurts."

He lay in his blankets that night wondering if she might come to him when Joe was asleep, or if he should go to her He wanted her and thought, from the way she had looked at the absurd little pantomime with the rubber hose earlier, that she wanted him. At last he fell asleep. He dreamed he was in a field of corn, lost there. But there was music, guitar music. Joe playing the guitar. If he found Joe he would be all right. So he followed the sound, breaking through one row of corn to the next when he had to, at last coming out in a ragged clearing. There was a small house there, more of a shack really, the porch held up with rusty old jacklifters. It wasn't Joe playing the guitar, how could it have been? Joe was holding his left hand and Nadine his right. They were with him. An old woman was playing the guitar, a jazzy sort of spiritual that had Joe smiling.

219 The old woman was black, and she was sitting on the porch, and Larry guessed she was just about the oldest woman he had ever seen in his life. But there was something about her that made him feel good... good in the way his mother had once made him feel good when he was very little and she would suddenly hug him and say, Here's the best boy, here's Alice Underwood's all-time best boy. The old woman stopped playing and looked up at them. Well say, I got me comp'ny. Step on out where I can see you, my peepers ain't what they once was. So they came closer, the three of them hand in hand, and Joe reached out and set a bald old tire swing to slow pendulum movement as they passed it. The tire's doughnut-shaped shadow slipped back and forth on the weedy ground. They were in a small clearing, an island in a sea of corn. To the north, a dirt road stretched away to a point. You like to have a swing on this old box o mine? she asked Joe, and Joe came forward eagerly and took the old guitar from her gnarled hands. He began to play the tune they had followed through the corn, but better and faster than the old woman. Bless im, he plays good. Me, I'm too old. Cain't make my fingers go that fast now. It's the rheumatiz. But in 1902 I played at the County Hall. I was the first Negro to ever play there, the very first. Nadine asked who she was. They were in a kind of forever place where the sun seemed to stand still one hour from darkness and the shadow of the swing Joe had set in motion would always travel back and forth across the weedy yard. Larry wished he could stay here forever, he and his family. This was a good place. The man with no face could never get him here, or Joe, or Nadine. Mother Abagail is what they call me. I'm the oldest woman in eastern Nebraska, I guess, and I still make my own biscuits. You come see me as quick as you can. We got to go before he gets wind of us. A cloud came over the sun. The swing's arc had decreased to nothing. Joe stopped playing with a jangling rattle of strings, and Larry felt the hackles rise on the back of his neck. The old woman seemed not to notice. Before who gets wind of us? Nadine asked, and Larry wished he could speak, cry out for her to take the question back before it could leap free and hurt them. That black man. That servant of the devil. We got the Rockies between us n him, praise God, but they won't keep him black. That's why we got to knit together. In Colorado. God come to me in a dream and showed me where. But we got to be quick, quick as we can, anyway. So you come see me. There's others coming, too. No, Nadine said in a cold and fearful voice. We're going to Vermont, that's all. Only to Vermont just a short trip. Your trip will be longer than ours, if n you don't fight off his power, the old woman in Larry's dream replied. She was looking at Nadine with great sadness. This could be a good man you got here, woman. He wants to make something out of himself. Why don't you cleave to him instead of using him? No! We're going to Vermont, to VERMONT! The old woman looked at Nadine pityingly. You'll go straight to hell if you don't watch close, daughter of Eve. And when you get there, you are gonna find that hell is cold. The dream broke up then, splitting into cracks of darkness that swallowed him. But something in that darkness was stalking him. It was cold and merciless, and soon he would see its grinning teeth. But before that could happen he was awake. It was half an hour after dawn, and the world was swaddled in a thick white ground fog that would burn off when the sun got up a little more. Now the motorcycle dealership rose out of it like some strange ship's prow constructed of cinderblock instead of wood. Someone was next to him, and he saw that it wasn't Nadine who had joined him in the night, but Joe. The boy lay next to him, thumb corked in his mouth, shivering in his sleep, as if his own nightmare had gripped him. Larry wondered if Joe's dreams were so different from his own... and he lay on his back, staring up into the white fog and thinking about that until the others woke up an hour later.

The fog had burned off enough to travel by the time they had finished breakfast and packed their things on the cycles. As Nadine had said, Joe showed no qualms about riding behind Larry; in fact, he climbed on Larry's cycle without having to be asked. "Slow," Larry said for the fourth time. "We're not going to hurry and have an accident." "Fine," Nadine said. "I'm really excited. It's like being on a quest!" She smiled at him, but Larry could not smile back. Rita Blakemoor had said something very much like that when they were leaving New York City. Two days before she died, she had said it.

220 They stopped for Lunch in Epsom, eating fried ham from a can and drinking orange soda under the tree where Larry had fallen asleep and Joe had stood over him with the knife. Larry was relieved to find that riding the motorcycles wasn't as bad as he had thought it would be; in most of the places they could make fairly decent time, and even going through the villages it was only necessary to putt along the sidewalks at walking speed. Nadine was being extremely careful about slowing down on blind curves, and even on the open road she did not urge Larry to go any faster than the steady thirty-five-miles-anhour pace he was setting. He thought that, barring bad weather, they could be in Stovington by the nineteenth. They stopped for supper west of Concord, where Nadine said they could save time on Lauder and Goldsmith's route by going directly northwest on the thruway, I-89. "There will be a lot of stalled traffic," Larry said doubtfully. "We can weave in and out," she said with confidence, "and use the breakdown lane when we have to. The worst that can happen is we'll have to backtrack to an exit and go around on a secondary road." They tried it for two hours after supper, and did indeed come upon a blockage from one side of the northbound lanes to the other. Just beyond Warner a carand-housetrailer combo had jackknifed; the driver and his wife, weeks dead, lay like grainsacks in the front seat of their Electra. The three of them, working together, were able to hoist the bikes over the buckled hitch between the car and the trailer. Afterward they were too tired to go any farther, and that night Larry didn't ponder whether or not to go to Nadine, who had taken her blankets ten feet farther down from where he had spread his (the boy was between them). That night he was too tired to do anything but fall asleep.

The next afternoon they came upon a block they couldn't get around. A trailer truck had overturned and half a dozen cars had crashed behind it. Luckily, they were only two miles beyond the Enfield exit. They went back, took the exit ramp, and then, feeling tired and discouraged, stopped in the Enfield town park for a twenty-minute rest. "What did you do before, Nadine?" Larry asked. He had been thinking about the expression in her eyes when Joe had finally spoken (the boy had added "Larry, Nadine, fanks," and "Go baffroom" to his working vocabulary), and now he made a guess based on that. "Were you a teacher?" She looked at him with surprise. "Yes. That's a good guess." "Little kids?" "That's right. First and second graders." That explained something about her complete unwillingness to leave Joe behind. In mind at least, the boy had regressed to a seven-year-old age level. "How did you guess?" "A long time ago I used to date a speech therapist from Long Island," Larry said. "I know that sounds like the start of one of those involved New York jokes, but it's the truth. She worked for the Ocean View school system. Younger grades. Kids with speech impediments, cleft palates, harelips, deaf kids. She used to say that correcting speech defects in children was just showing them an alternative way of getting the right sounds. Show them, say the word. Show them, say the word. Over and over until something in the kid's head clicked. And when she talked about that click happening, she looked the way you did when Joe said `You're welcome. '" "Did I?" She smiled a little wistfully. "I loved the little ones. Some of them were bruised, but none of them at that age are irrevocably spoiled. The little ones are the only good human beings." "Kind of a romantic idea, isn't it?" She shrugged. "Children are good. And if you work with them, you get to be a romantic. That's not so bad. Wasn't your speech therapist friend happy in her work?" "Yeah, she liked it," Larry agreed. "Were you married? Before?" There it was again-that simple, ubiquitous word. Before. It was only two syllables, but it had become all-encompassing. "Married? No. Never married." She began to look nervous again. "I'm the original old maid schoolteacher, younger than I look but older than I feel. Thirty-seven." His eyes had moved to her hair before he could stop them and she nodded as if he had spoken out loud. "It's premature," she said matter-offactly. "My grandmother's hair was totally white by the time she was forty. I think I'm going to last at least five years longer." "Where did you teach?" "A small private school in Pittsfield. Very exclusive. Ivycovered walls, all the newest playground equipment. Damn the recession, full speed ahead. The car pool consisted of two Thunderbirds, three Mercedes-Benzes, a couple of Lincolns, and a Chrysler Imperial." "You must have been very good." "Yes, I think I was," she said artlessly, then smiled. "Doesn't matter much now." He put an arm around her. She started a little and he felt her stiffen. Her hand and shoulder were warm.

221 "I wish you wouldn't," she said uncomfortably. "You don't want me to?" "No. I don't." He drew his arm back, baffled. She did want him to that was the thing; he could feel her wanting coming off her in mild but clearly receivable waves. Her color was very high now, and she was looking desperately down at her hands, which were fiddling together in her lap like a couple of hurt spiders. Her eyes were shiny, as if she might be on the verge of tears. "Nadine—" (honey, is that you?) She looked up at him and he saw she was past the verge of tears. She was about to speak when Joe strolled up, carrying his guitar case in one hand. They looked at him guiltily, as if he had found them doing something rather more personal than talking. "Lady," Joe said conversationally. "What?" Larry asked, startled and not tracking very well. "Lady!" Joe said again, and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. Larry and Nadine looked at each other. Suddenly there was a fourth voice, highpitched and choking with emotion, as startling as the voice of God. "Thank heaven!" it cried. "Oh thank heaven!" They stood up and looked at the woman who was now half running up the street toward them. She was smiling and crying at the same time. "Glad to see you," she said. "I'm so glad to see you, thank heaven—" She swayed and might have fainted if Larry hadn't been there to steady her until her dizziness passed. He guessed her age at about twenty-five. She was dressed in bluejeans and a plain white cotton blouse. Her face was pale, her blue eyes unnaturally fixed. Those eyes stared at Larry as if trying to convince the brain behind them that this was not a hallucination, that the three people she saw were really here. "I'm Larry Underwood," he said. "The lady is Nadine Cross. The boy is Joe. We're very happy to meet you." The woman continued to stare at him wordlessly for a moment, and then walked slowly away from him and toward Nadine. "I'm so pleased..." she began, "... so pleased to meet you." She stumbled a little. "Oh my God, are you really people?" "Yes," Nadine said. The woman put her arms around Nadine and sobbed. Nadine held her. Joe stood in the street by a stalled pickup truck, his guitar case in one hand, his free thumb in his mouth. At last he went to Larry and looked up at him. Larry held his hand. The two of them stood that way and watched the women solemnly. And that was how they met Lucy Swann.

She was eager to go with them when they told her where they were headed, and that they had reason to believe there were at least two other people there, and possibly more. Larry found a medium-sized knapsack for her in the Enfield Sporting Goods, arid Nadine went down to her house on the outskirts of town to help her pack... two changes of clothes, some underwear, an extra pair of shoes, a raincoat. And pictures of her late husband and daughter. They camped that night in a town called Quechee, now over the state line and into Vermont. Lucy Swann told a tale which was short and simple and not much different from the others they would hear. The grief came built-in, and the shock, which had driven her at least within hailing distance of madness. Her husband had sickened on the twenty-fifth of June, her daughter the next day. She had nursed them as well as she had been able, fully expecting to come down with the rales, as they were calling the sickness in her corner of New England, herself. By the twenty-seventh, when her husband had gone into a coma, Enfield was pretty much cut off from the outside world. Television reception had become spotty and queer. People were dying like flies. During the previous week they had seen extraordinary movements of army troops along the turnpike, but none of them had business in such a little place as Enfield, New Hampshire. In the early morning hours of June twenty-eighth, her husband had died. Her daughter had seemed a little bit better for a while on the twenty-ninth, and then had taken an abrupt turn for the worst that evening. She had died around eleven o'clock. By July 3, everyone in Enfield except her and an old man named Bill Dadds had died. Bill had been sick, Lucy said, but he seemed to have thrown it off entirely. Then, on the morning of Independence Day, she had found Bill dead on Main Street, swollen up and black, like everyone else. "So I buried my people, and Bill too," she said as they sat around the crackling fire. "It took all of one day, but I put them to rest. And then I thought that I better go on down to Concord, where my

222 mother and father live. But I just... never got around to it." She looked at them appealingly. "Was it so wrong? Do you think they would have been alive?" "No," Larry said. "The immunity sure wasn't hereditary in any direct way. My mother..." He looked into the fire. "Wes and me, we had to get married," Lucy said. "That was the summer after I graduated high school-1984. My mom and dad didn't want me to marry him. They wanted me to go away to have the baby and just give her up. But I wouldn't. My mom said it would end in divorce. My dad said Wes was a no-account man and he'd always be shiftless. I just said, `That may be, but we'll see what happens. ' I just wanted to take the chance. You know?" "Yes," Nadine said. She was sitting next to Lucy, looking at her with great compassion. "We had a nice little home, and I sure never thought it would end like this," Lucy said with a sigh that was half a sob. "We settled down real good, the three of us. It was more Marcy than me that settled Wes down. He thought the sun rose and set on that baby. He thought..." "Don't," Nadine said. "All that was before." That word again, Larry thought. That little two-syllable word. "Yes. It's gone now. And I guess I could have gotten along. I was, anyway, until I started to have all those bad dreams." Larry's head jerked up. "Dreams?" Nadine was looking at Joe. A moment before, the boy had been nodding out in front of the fire. Now he was staring at Lucy, his eyes gleaming. "Bad dreams, nightmares," Lucy said. "They're not always the same. Mostly it's a man chasing me, and I can never see exactly what he looks like because he's all wrapped up in a, what do you call it, a cloak. And he stays in the shadows and alleys." She shivered. "I got so I was afraid to go to sleep. But now maybe I'll—" "Brrr-ack man!" Joe cried suddenly, so fiercely they all jumped. He leaped to his feet and held his arms out like a miniature Bela Lugosi, his fingers hooked into claws. "Brrack man! Bad dreams! Chases! Chases me! 'Cares me!" And he shrank against Nadine and stared untrustingly into the darkness. A little silence fell among them. "This is crazy," Larry said, and then stopped. They were all looking at him. Suddenly the darkness seemed very dark indeed, and Lucy looked frightened again. He forced himself to go on. "Lacy, do you ever dream about... well, about a place in Nebraska?" "I had a dream one night about an old Negro woman," Lucy said, "but it didn't last very long. She said something like, `You come see me. ' Then I was back in Enfield and that... that scary guy was chasing me. Then I woke UP." Larry looked at her so long that she colored and dropped her eyes. He looked at Joe. "Joe, do you ever dream about... uh, corn? An old woman? A guitar?" Joe only looked at him from Nadine's encircling arm. "Leave him alone, you'll upset him more," Nadine said, but she was the one who sounded upset. Larry thought. "A house, Joe? A little house with a porch up on jacks?" He thought he saw a gleam in Joe's eyes. "Stop it, Larry!" Nadine said. "A swing, Joe? A swing made out of a tire?" Joe suddenly jerked in Nadine's arms. His thumb came out of his mouth. Nadine tried to hold him, but Joe broke through. "The swing!" Joe said exultantly. "The swing! The swing!" He whirled away from them and pointed first at Nadine, then at Larry. "Her! You! Lots!" "Lots?" Larry asked, but Joe had subsided again. Lucy Swann looked stunned. "The swing," she said. "I remember that, too." She looked at Larry. "Why are we all having the same dreams? Is somebody using a ray on us?" "I don't know." He looked at Nadine. "Have you had them, too?" "I don't dream," she said sharply, and immediately dropped her eyes. He thought: You're lying. But why? "Nadine, if you—" he began. "I told you I don't dream!" Nadine cried sharply, almost hysterically. "Can't you just leave me alone? Do you have to badger me?" She stood up and left the fire, almost running. Lucy looked after her uncertainly for a moment and then stood up. "I'll go after her." "Yes, you better. Joe, stay with me, okay?" "Kay," Joe said, and began to unsnap the guitar case.

Lucy came back with Nadine ten minutes later. They had both been crying, Larry saw, but they seemed to be on good terms now.

223 "I'm sorry," Nadine said to Larry. "It's just that I'm always upset. It comes out in funny ways." "Its all right." The subject did not come up again. They sat and listened to Joe run through his repertoire. He was getting very good indeed now, and in with the hootings and grunts, fragments of the lyrics were coming through. At last they slept, Larry on one end, Nadine on the other, Joe and Lucy between. Larry dreamed first of the black man on the high place, and then of the old black woman sitting on her porch. Only in this dream he knew the black man was coming, striding through the corn, knocking his own twisted swathe through the corn, his terrible hot grin spot-welded to his face, coming toward them, closer and closer. Larry woke up in the middle of the night out of breath, his chest constricted with terror. The others slept like stones. Somehow, in that dream he had known. The black man had not been coming empty-handed. In his arms, borne like an offering as he strode through the corn, he held the decaying body of Rita Blakemore, now stiff and swollen, the flesh ripped by woodchucks and weasels. A mute accusation to be thrown at his feet to scream his guilt at the others, to silently proclaim that he wasn't no nice guy, that something had been left out of him, that he was a loser, that he was a taker. At last he slept again, and until he woke up the next morning at seven, stiff, cold, hungry, and needing to go to the bathroom, his sleep was dreamless.

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