As his principal employer, kicking the monogrammed screen door open, came out on the back deck with bottles in his hands, Trevor, sporting his new black eyepatch, which had provoked considerable comment amongst the guests this afternoon, caught a one-eyed glimpse of his wife Marge standing in the kitchen in her business suit, looking drawn and defeated. No doubt John had been cruel to her once again. Yet she did seem always to bring it upon herself as though it were part of her exercise regimen, testing her virtue by stripping for a lecher, so to speak. Trevor tittered into his glass of iced gin, his third of the day, the doctor having told him a good snort now and then might be good for his circulation, preventive medicine against the sort of problem he was having. Traumatic neurosis was, Trevor believed, the technical term for it, but when he’d tried to explain to Alf what he now believed to be the true cause, heretofore repressed, of the first episode all those years ago, the doctor, harassed by a waiting room packed with distraught and clamorous patients—im-patients, more like it—had only half listened to his stammering confession, then had brushed it aside as poppycock, saying, as he wrote out a prescription, that as far as he was concerned all bodily disorders were ultimately electrochemical and should be treated as such, in kind. “As the main switching station of the central nervous system, the brain has too goddamned much to do to be able to handle all the incoming traffic and has to throw a lot of it out arbitrarily or shunt it off onto unused sidetracks. It makes mistakes, there are mixups, accidents, sometimes catastrophic wrecks, and then panic sets in. What we can try to do is correct the mistakes, clean up after the accidents, and by oiling the machinery, as we like to say, calm the panic. The rest, Trev, is just sentimental quackery.” After fitting him with his eyepatch today, Alf, grumbling that he was rusting up and suffering from catastrophic overload himself, had abruptly closed his office, shouting out over the protests of the other patients that if they didn’t leave now he’d lock them in until after the holidays, and then he’d offered Trevor a ride to the party. Party? The barbecue. Oh yes. So much had happened, he’d nearly forgotten. It was today, then? Before leaving downtown, Alf had stopped by the newspaper office to see if he could rouse the editor, but no luck. The editor had a life policy with Trevor and, having no heirs, had a complicated and whimsical list of beneficiaries (Trevor remembered the names and sums for each), including the library Literary Society, which no longer existed. He’d have to drop by soon and get the policy updated, at which time he would suggest a modest increase. This was the sort of knowledge Trevor carried around, the names and numbers that, boringly, filled his life and prevented him from living it. On the rest of the drive to John’s house, staring out the rolled-down car window with his one eye, Trevor had tried intently to see the town, to really see it, as perhaps the photographer saw it, without all the technicalities and computations and what in his business nowadays they called data processing that always blocked his view, concentrating now on its shapes (which were two-dimensional but somehow therefore more compelling as, flatly, they slid past one another), its summery hues and vivid midday contrasts of light and shade, the way most things flowed into everything else as though it was all of a piece, and yet the way certain objects stood apart, as though in a different dimension, displaying their peculiar contingency, a gleaming sky-blue tricycle in a shadowy front yard, for example, a porch swing rocking slightly in front of a broken window, a long-limbed dog sniffing at a dark wet trail that seemed smeared across Trevor’s flat framed view like an oil slick or gradeschool mucilage, a gleaming black funeral van parked incongruously in front of a gaily painted fire hydrant with a beer bottle perched on top. But it was no use. Even as he attempted, in effect, to control the incoming traffic and fill up the switchyard with enduring sensual evidence that he was here, in the world, that this was truly his life, his own singular and inimitable life, that was rolling by, never to roll by again, he realized he was still calculating, still beclouding his vision, halved as it now was (and if he wasn’t careful, he might lose the other one), with abstractions and doubts and sophistries, and that the life he was passing through would never really be lived, would never really be his own, he was not in the control tower but tied to the tracks, he hadn’t seen a thing, couldn’t recall it if he had. Even in his scrupulous surveillance of the photographer, which he now regretted, innocent as it was, or as he’d meant it to be, he had seen, and yet not seen. His wife’s friend Lorraine and her odious husband had arrived at the barbecue about the same time he had, he already drunk and noisy and slapping backsides (Trevor’s own got a swat in passing: “Hey, Triv, you ole pirate, bottoms up!”), she looking a bit more haggard than usual and, usually a beer drinker, moving straight in on the hard stuff, filling a tall beer glass with bourbon. Trevor had been, idly, wondering why as she went lumbering by on her way to the gazebo in the rose garden, evidently headed out there to get besotted all alone, and what she’d said, pointing to her head, was: “I’m trying to turn it off.” “That’s funny,” he’d replied without even thinking, “I’m trying to turn it on.” She’d paused for a moment to smile at that and he’d had the strange feeling that she understood him perfectly, might indeed be the only person in the world who did or ever could. And then she was gone, replaced by the banker and his wife, who wanted to know if he’d heard about the arrest of the photographer for exposing himself at the mall and about his wife who had left him and was said to be on some sort of wild crime spree. “They say she’s got big as a barn and has run off with the drugstore simpleton!” Trevor could add a pertinent tidbit or two, but it gave him a headache just thinking about what he’d done and what he’d seen, or thought he had (when was that?), and his good eye began to throb, so he tsk-tsked along with them, then excused himself (“Doctor’s orders, heh heh!”) to go fill up his gin glass again. When his wife Marge came out, she handed him a dollar bill and asked him to keep it for her but not to spend it, she had in mind making somebody eat it. She didn’t even seem to notice his eyepatch, she was in such a blind rage. And she looked drained, big wet patches in her armpits, her long face creased and sagging as though suddenly aged by a dozen years, fatigue attacking her like her appetites did, or like her enthusiasms did on better days, full frontally and without mercy. Lorraine came in from the rose garden and, after a moment during which she refilled her glass, she said: “But isn’t that blackmail, Marge?” “No, Lorraine,” Marge said grimly, “it’s politics.” Trevor didn’t know what they were talking about, but supposed it was bad news, and wondered if it was Lorraine who had put his wife up to this harebrained idea of running for mayor, but Lorraine glowered at him and said: “Are you kidding?” He topped up his glass, plunked in a cube, and went over to the grill where John, looking burly in his vest and jeans, his bronzed chest exhibiting a rich crop of curly white hair (Trevor was wondering about John’s wife: had no one else noticed?), was directing the caterers in broiling hamburgers, hotdogs, chops, and small steaks. Young Kevin, the burrheaded manager of the country club, had good-naturedly donned an oilcloth apron over his silvery blue golf shirt and lemon-colored pants to lend John a hand, and the busty gum-smacking blonde he’d brought (“Both she and the shirt are from our new line at the pro shop!” he’d grinned on introducing her) now turned to Trevor and said: “Hey! Cool! Eyepatches are so sexy! How did you lose it?” “Lose it?” “Your eye, silly!” “Ah, the first time?” “Sure, the first time. How many times can you lose an eye?” He hesitated. But she was gazing up at him with such sweet abandon, he found it was contagious. He smiled. “Oh, well, I killed someone.” “Yeah? No kidding! On purpose?” “Not exactly. Sort of. The possibility just presented itself and, not really thinking, I took it.” “Wow! That’s so romantic!” she sighed, and leaned against him, pulling a string of gum out from between her teeth and putting it back in again. Kevin, turning the meat on the grill with plastic-handled tongs, winked at him over his shoulder. Next, he thought, I will tell her about my career as a, well, a private eye. “Why is it always other people who have the groovy lives?”

Sweet abandon: perhaps it was contagious, certainly many of the crowd gathering in John’s backyard seemed to be catching it, or perhaps they were reaching for it as a defense against their doubts and trepidations, which mostly went unexpressed, Lorraine’s included, though it fell to her to be their reluctant collector and sorter, not easy, given the way people’s thoughts darted about so frivolously, especially when they’d had a couple. Or maybe it was the couple she’d had, and the couple after that, that had dimmed her cataloguing faculties, making it hard for her to screen out the static, which back in college was just a metaphor for academic bullshit, but now was real and made her head ache with its relentless buzz and crackle, worse when raw desire arose, as it always did at these come-and-get-it blowouts, and clotted the swarm of half-thoughts reaching her with its dense wet colors, making her head feel like it was filling up with hot soup as it all poured in. One disclosure that separated out was that, of those who’d noticed, none seemed surprised that John’s wife was not here, or was seemingly not here (there were two schools of thought, as in two schools of fish), nor for that matter was she herself surprised, though she could not account for this other than by way of the tautology that, were John’s wife here, things would be different, but they couldn’t be different because this was the real world and this was how things were, so she couldn’t be here. At the same time, none who’d noticed seemed to want to talk about it, or even to think about it, as though that tautology about the world might not hold if they did so, and instead they opted more or less unanimously for sweet abandon, or abandon certainly, sweet if could be. Similarly—but differently (what did John think? she didn’t know, she’d been steering clear of him after what Marge had asked of her)—there was the annual Pioneers Day parade and the local fair and soapbox oratory that traditionally followed on, which people were talking about, trading impressions of what they said they’d seen or heard, but which nobody was thinking about, or, rather, what thoughts they had came after what they said or what some other said. Lorraine heard so much of this chatter with all its visions and revisions that she, too, began to imagine the parade and fair, such that when the banker’s wife said she thought there were fewer pioneer costumes this year than last, Lorraine said, quite firmly: “No, there were more.” “Yes,” said the banker’s wife, “I think you are right.” Alf was standing there with them, his gray head bobbing out in front of him as though measuring a pulse rate, and what seemed most on his mind was a huge tumescence the size of a beach ball on the end of his finger or which his finger was palpating, though in fact the bony thing, twitching slightly as if with palsy, was encircling a sweating glass of cold whiskey. This seaside image gave way to something more like a ship in a bottle, though there was a slimy visceral quality about the squirming ship, as Beatrice, the preacher’s wife, waddled by in her red boots, looking like one of those bass drummers in a marching band, trying to keep her gargantuan belly from dragging through the grass. The loopy little pothead couldn’t put three words together in her noodle without getting one of them upside-down, but she did bring a little music into Lorraine’s own noise-bruised head as she passed, and for that she was grateful: a kind of sweet choral humming like a movie version of a band of angels. Sensuous, but not soupy: its ethereal tints more like light filtered through stained-glass windows. It was very nice, and Lorraine wondered if anyone here over fifteen had a joint, she could use a radical change of frequency. “We should get that poor girl a wheelbarrow,” she remarked after Trixie’d staggered on, and the banker’s wife said, “Yes, that’s a good idea, perhaps John has one,” and then went on to say, gazing dreamily about her (they were all standing there in a blazing sunlight, so ebullient it seemed almost unreal), how much she appreciated these long days of summer. Alf growled that this one seemed just a little longer than usual, and she agreed with that, too. “That’s how it is when you’re having a wonderful time.” Many thought as Alf did and as the banker’s wife said she did, but Lorraine overheard others marveling to themselves about how time flies and the way the day had just sort of rushed up on them, as though it couldn’t wait to get started, for fear of—what? No theories out there, though Lorraine’s own personal explanation for it was that she always collapsed into these timeless states when school was out, if it weren’t for Sundays and the midweekly newspaper she’d never know when anything was. And now the newspaper apparently was no more, maybe Sundays soon would follow, it might be bliss, if you could handle the surprises. At least she was luckier than poor Marge and had dressed appropriately for the day, her two boys having assisted her in this by heading out the door with some of her clean white linen in their grubby little paws. “Hey, where do you guys think you’re going with my sheets?” “To Mikey’s house. It’s for a play!” “To Mikey’s house?” She’d heard them thinking then about how slow and stupid she was: Really dumb, man, out of it! How did we get a mom like this? “Mo-om, you know! It’s the barbecue!” “Sure, I know that,” she’d lied. “But Mikey can provide his own props.” “He doesn’t want plops, Mom. He wants sheets!” Okay, okay, she’d let them go, she couldn’t stand to listen any longer to what the little buttbrains were thinking. So she’d changed into her backyard frolic rags and was just pulling the door shut when Waldo came back from the golf course looking baffled, an expression that suited him. “Nobody out there!” he’d exclaimed, shaking his corked head. “Even the bar was closed!” “They’re all over at John’s.” “John’s?” So she’d waited for him, and now he was over by the hotdog crematorium checking out Miss Sweet Abandon herself, pawing doggily at her dishabille, Trevor’s weak kidneys having temporarily lost him post position. Another half dozen gathering around the little gum-popper as well, admiring the rips in her cut-off cutoffs: Lorraine, drifting by on her way to the bourbon bottle, realized that the head-soup she’d been complaining about was really more like pooled drool. She poured and backstroked out of it, but more hormonic blushes invaded her head, now of a thinner bluish sort like ink and commingled with thesauric musings that brought back to mind her old freshman composition courses: she turned around and saw Beatrice’s husband Lennox with a big lump on his head, looking dazed, just stepping out on the deck behind her, and she knew at a glance his was another vote for the where-the-hell-did-this-day-come-from party.

Ecclesiastical sanctuary, a practice made famous in the Middle Ages but with roots deep in the pagan past, which is to say, in those preliterate times when all of man’s most sacred precepts were forged, was a principle in which Lennox (now blinking in the sunlight, feeling wistful and blue, on John’s back deck) had long had an academic interest—in fact, he’d once written a paper on the subject back in his college days, or at least had helped to write one with a fraternity brother, the theme being that the concept of a sacred place could survive only as an ineffectual metaphor in a free market economy where everything was up for sale, metaphors included—and a time-honored custom he had, moreover, in his own more dissolute and renegade era, vehemently espoused on the grounds of Christian charity and canon law (and also of Anarchy, yay! and Down with the pigs!), but until now he had never had to face the dilemma as a churchman of granting it or denying it in the real world. But there she was, camped in his church, a half-naked woman several times larger than himself, begging him to let her stay, at least until her boyfriend got back, and not to tell the police. And also did he have anything for her to eat, like for example a couple of turkeys, no need to cook them, just so long as they were defrosted? So what was he to do? Sure, providing sanctuary would be the Christian way to go, God’s love and all that, but on the other hand there were no, well, facilities for her here and his church was already a pigsty, full of garbage, dirty sheets, and other stuff he didn’t even want to look at too closely. Nevertheless, he was about to disregard all that and grant her request, when she reached up to loosen the beads around her upper torso and, with an explosive pop, put an elbow through a stained-glass window high over his head, whereupon he decided, God’s love be damned, she’d have to go. But then it occurred to him that with very few changes in his sermon-in-progress (the mother’s womb as the ultimate sanctuary, the notion of the high altar as a man-made center for a centerless world and thus a sacred refuge for all sufferers, and so on), he could make dramatic use of this creature, perhaps bring her on as a surprise boffo at the end, wake the congregation up with a kind of visual representation of the impossible paradox, or one of them anyway, he’d find an appropriate name for it, why not? Let it happen. But then her boyfriend came back, all out of breath, saying he’d found a real truck for her and they had to get out of here right away, she was coming! In the end, it was a good thing, because even the church’s big double doorway was already too small for her, it took a lot of pushing and squeezing (Lenny was reminded of the job he had back in high school, packing icecream into pint and quart boxes) to get her through it and she was in tears most of the time, especially when she snagged her beads and broke them all. Lenny was contemplating the deplorable state of his and God’s showcase and classroom after they’d gone, wondering who he could get to clean it up for him, maybe John could send some of his workers over or else order up a crew of garbage collectors from city hall, when the crippled lady from the downtown drugstore came thumping in, crunching scattered beads under her orthopedic boot, banging her metal walking stick on the floor and demanding to know where that jezebel was who had stolen her husband away. Lenny, foolishly, tried to explain the principle of sanctuary to a woman who was clearly not in the mood for a lecture of any kind, and, calling him a pimp and a home-wrecker and an accomplice of thieves and adulterers, she attacked him with the steel cane. The nurse who had followed her in tried to restrain her, but had to duck her slashing backswings, so Lenny, to defend himself, dove in under the weapon, throwing the startled woman to the floor where her glasses went flying, and proceeded to wrestle with her for possession of the walking stick. “How dare you strike a physically handicapped blind lady!” the nurse screamed and threw herself on him, biting and punching and kneeing him in the stomach. This freed up the crippled woman long enough for her to grab up her steel cudgel and, swinging blindly, to crack Lennox across the skull with it. When he came to he was in the arms of John’s wife, who was holding a cold compress to his forehead. She said she had just been passing by and wondered why all the doors were open and came in and found him here. She asked him how long he’d been lying here, but he didn’t know. He explained what had happened or what he thought had happened, and she said he was only doing his Christian duty and personally she was proud of him. Her hands were very soft and tender, and he lay there longer than he needed to. They got into a conversation about religion and sanctuary, which she asked him to explain to her, and then about life in general, what it all means, and so on, and meanwhile, with her help, he got to his feet and brushed himself off and offered to walk with her wherever she was going (she was going home) and to carry her packages, assuring her when she asked that, yes, he was going to have something of a lump there, but he was all right and he needed the fresh air. On the way to her house, he found himself telling her his life story with all its ups and downs, everything from his breeze through high school in the laps of his teachers, through his university days as a struggling religious studies major and chaplain of her husband’s fraternity, not excluding an account of the notorious Greek toga party at which Beatrice was introduced to the fraternity life, and then the rather unorthodox early years of their consequent marriage, leading to his abortive career as a college professor (he was made responsible for another person’s bad trip, a theme he had touched on in one of his sermons on the pastor’s burden, she recalled), and finally to his arrival in this town, all of it justifiably cast as rites of passage in his lifelong quest for meaning, by which time they had arrived at her house, and they walked on in. There seemed to be a lot of people toward the back of the house, but she ignored them, fascinated with his story, and asking him if now he was happy here, she started up the stairs. He admitted, following her with the packages, that he suffered a certain lingering discomfort, as he felt himself to be a free spirit entrapped in ever-narrowing circumstances and, moreover, there were things in a past shared with her husband and others that could not be erased, though he was certainly not a person to hold a grudge. Also he had to confess to a certain feeling of hypocrisy as a Christian pastor, for which he had few gifts and even less conviction, believing man’s condition to be more desperate than that assumed by the Christian faith, or any other faith for that matter; he’d once been a scholar, or a sort of scholar, of them all, and without exception they all offered consolations that were not such. By now they were in the master bedroom and she was taking off her linen jacket and her shoes, and she asked him if that was the meaning that he had found in his quest. He replied indirectly, setting her packages down meanwhile and unbuttoning his shirt, by saying that only shortly before she’d found him he’d been thinking about the terrible littleness and aloneness of man in the vast indifferent cosmos. Is there anyone else out there in the universe like us, he asked, as she reached under her linen dress to pull down her pantyhose, or are we, all of us, nature’s tragic freaks? His disquisition had excited him, almost unbearably, and it was a great relief to get his pants and shorts down, though he’d forgotten to take off his shoes and had to sit down on a chair to do that. In terms of cosmic time and space, after all, we are not even visible, he went on, kicking free of the entanglement at his feet and peeling off his socks, just ephemeral creatures rising from and fading into the dust of our insignificant planet. She was on the other side of the bed in her one-piece dress, removing her earrings. He’d tried to catch a glimpse of her legs when the pantyhose came off, but there had seemed to be nothing underneath them. Nothing at all. But she smiled at him, a smile full of admiration and of, yes, well, of faith in him, and emboldened, he said to her: Even history loses its meaning, you see, its consolations vanishing like those of religion. We don’t matter as individuals, as a community or a nation, or even as a life form. He stood, proudly yet humbly, in all his earthly glory. We are meaningful, he said gently, only in our nowness and to each other. Her face flushed with admiration and surrender and she lifted her dress up over her head and she was gone. John came in then and asked him what he was doing in his bedroom with his clothes off. “God knows,” was all that Lenny could think to say. John went over and picked up the puddle of clothes on the floor and tossed them in a hamper. “Well, you’re missing the party. Get dressed and come on down. And bring the resurrection and the life with you, Reverend,” he added, pointing. “There are plenty of desperate pioneers down there eager to receive the holy spirit.”

The Reverend’s oldest son Philip, often called Fish, and known also, to a certain beloved but unloving party, as the Creep, the possible—no, probable—circumstances of whose conception his father had just detailed during the recounting of his life story, was badly in need of a pal. His father’s narrative had been loosely based upon the heroic quest motif, and this motif, had he known of it, might have served his son as well as a way of understanding his own present ordeal, since being the butt of a popular joke was something he shared with many of those household names of the ancient past, most of whom were at least granted the company of a boon companion upon whom they could unload their woes when fate was knocking them around. But Fish’s best buddy had run away and, really, there was no one else, the only other person to whom he might turn for sympathy holding him in withering and unremitting contempt. She would be at the barbecue of course, it was at her house, but he was afraid to go there and take the heat. “Aw, go on, superstar!” his sister Jen had taunted. “You’re famous! Or anyhow your ugly duff is! You can open up a booth out in the gazebo: cut a flap in the seat of your pants and charge a buck a peek, two bucks to pop a pimple, you’ll make a fortune!” Of course, Jennifer was trying to keep him at home, she didn’t want him to see Clarissa today, she was afraid he’d tell. What he’d overheard. On the extension phone. And he would. Rejected as a lover, maybe he could at least become a trusted friend, and if that meant ratting on his sister, hey, easiest thing in the world. It would be less easy to explain to Clarissa what had really happened in the car dealer’s house, but Fish wanted to talk about that, too. With somebody. He could see what everybody was laughing about, but they didn’t know the real story, it wasn’t just a joke. He’d finally decided to call up the police and tell them what he knew, but when he’d refused to tell them who he was, the policeman had shouted at him, “We’ve had enough of this crap! Get off the line, sonny, or we’ll trace this call and have you arrested!” When he hung up, he felt he had to get out of the manse. Just in case they did trace the call. Not much hope, but he went over to Turtle’s house anyway. Turtle’s mom peeked out at him when he rang the bell, her eyes buggy like she was watching a horror movie, then she whipped the door open and yanked him inside by his shirt collar. She was always very nervous and bossy, but today she was out of control. She was still in her housecoat, her face was pale and wrinkled without any makeup on, and her hair was sticking out in all directions like something had scared her and made it all stand on end. “I really can’t stay,” Fish apologized, his voice squeaking a bit. “I was just wondering if maybe your son came back, but—” “He’s behind the refrigerator again!” she cried, sounding more like a squawking bird. “He is—?” “You’ve got to help me!” She dragged him toward the kitchen. He tried to hold back, but she really had her claws in him. “Maybe I could just come back a little later—” She pushed him in ahead of her, then shrank back, chewing her nails in the doorway, waiting to see what he’d do. The kitchen was a crazy scene, the floor smeared all over with some kind of sticky gunk, pots and pans flung everywhere, and half the furniture in the house piled up against the space between the refrigerator and the wall. “He’s back there! Please! Get him out of here!” “Uh, I don’t know, maybe your husband—” “My husband? My husband? He’d kill me if he knew!” Fish had no idea why this might be so, but certainly Turtle’s dad could be pretty nasty if his dander was up, which it often was. A man on a short fuse. “If I only knew where his father was!” “Who?” “It’s his fault! He should have to get rid of it!” All this talk about husbands and fathers seemed pretty mixed up, but Fish agreed with her: “Yes’m, that’s right. He’s probably at the barbecue.” “Barbecue—?” “You know, Pioneers Day, over at—” “Oh my God! Is that today—?!” And she was out of there, the front door banging open and her feet, still in bedroom slippers, slapping down off the porch. The house was suddenly very quiet. Fish hesitated. He could hear something moving behind the barricade, or thought he could. “Turtle? Is that you?” Nothing. “Turtle—?” Just a kind of squishy sound. Whoo. Time to go, man. He unstuck his shoes from the floor and took off, and as he reached the street a truck pulled up and the driver leaned out and asked: “Anybody home here?” “Nah. Everybody in this house is out to lunch!” He saw that the guy, that video games freak from the drugstore, was going in anyway, so he turned around and shouted: “Hey, while you’re in there, take the pet for a walk! Behind the fridge!” Fish longed to see Clarissa more than ever now and, determined to tough it out, he headed toward her house, come on, chicken, let it happen, but he lost his nerve a block later and turned homeward. Life was a bummer, it really was, no pun intended. You are what you get born with. Period. You don’t like it? Tough titty. And as for women, well, they weren’t at all like he’d thought they were, his father’s books didn’t show half of it. The manse was empty when he got back, everyone else at the barbecue. Except Jen, away on plans of her own. Nothing to do but beat off, Fish thought glumly, heading for his father’s library. The phone rang. A hollow unsettling sound in the echoey manse, but he let it ring. Then he thought it might be Clarissa trying to find out where Jen was, so he picked it up. “Hello, Philip?” Not Clarissa, but he knew who. He’d heard her voice earlier: silky yet firm with just a touch of a soft chummy twang. He figured it belonged to the woman he’d seen sitting with Jen and Clarissa sometimes at the mall. “Hey, this is a friend of your sister’s.” “I know.” “Your sister’s in a bit of trouble, Philip, and I need your help.” “I don’t think so,” he said. No more older women, that was one of his new rules, not even to say hello and goodbye. “Clarissa needs your help, too, Philip. Believe me.” “Well, but, I was just about to, uh—” “Are you alone?” “Sure, everybody’s gone to the—” “Stay right there, Philip. This is important. I’m coming over.”

Turtle’s father, the nasty man with the short fuse, who Fish supposed must be at John’s barbecue like everybody else in town except himself, was in fact back in Settler’s Woods again, pawing frantically through the weeds and litter, in fruitless search for that which, now lost, he held—except for the leg it came from—most dear in the world, his dander up all right, but directed wholly against his own criminally negligent self: how could he possibly have let it, when for almost twenty years it had never been, out of his grasp? He’d awakened in the hospital, not knowing where he was at first, plugged up to various devices, remembering only a kind of dream he’d had about walking in the woods and seeing John’s wife bicycling by in her tennis clothes. Had she fallen? Or had he fallen? Had he used the frayed garter as a bandage of sorts? He couldn’t recall, but (he was off the cot and searching desperately through his pants pockets) he definitely no longer had his most precious possession. But where—?! How—?! In a panic (he’d felt like screaming!) he’d hauled on the pinstripe suit pants, tucked in his golf shirt, pulled his tennis shoes on over bare feet, and, head ducked, had bulled his way down the pale corridors and out of the building, responding to no one when they shouted at him: let the sonuvabitches try to stop him, it was his fucking heart, he had his rights! The hospital was on the edge of town, not far from the highway and the woods (it was not a dream, he’d been there, he was sure of it), it was a doable walk, or jog, rather, he was on the move, piecing together, as he galumphed along, what remained in his loss-stunned memory of his earlier trek out here: the ravine, right, he’d been taking a piss at the fucking ravine! So he started there, kicking through the thorny underbrush, poking around in the damp leaves and suffering all over again the terrible chagrin he’d felt when, all aglow, she cycled by. It had to be here! But it wasn’t. He retraced his steps, working his way inch by inch from the ravine back to the first place he could remember being and then again back to the ravine. Nothing. Nothing at all. Oh shit. It was gone. Gone—! But what the hell had he been doing out here in the first place? That’s right, he’d been hunting for his truant son, he’d nearly forgotten about him, the irresponsible little sonuvabitch, it was his fault this had happened. He was furious with him, but at the same time he loved him of course and he realized that, down deep, he’d been missing his boy sorely all the while. It was what had been keeping him up nights. That and, well, some other things. He wanted to blister the kid’s backside for running off, bringing this catastrophe upon him, but he wanted to hug him, too, and be hugged by him, and to teach him what the world was like (goddamn it, you don’t just go running off into it, son) and to protect him from the worst of it, his only child, next of the Maynards. Well, maybe he was right to go. Escape the fucking curse. Which he, Maynard II, could not, could never. With an aching heart (yes, it was damaged all right, irreparably), he sank to his knees near where he’d peed, or had started to before she passed by, and began turning the leaves over one by one, tugging away the thornier plants, tossing aside the sticks and twigs, the beer cans and cigarette butts, scratching at the ground around, feeling (pinstriped trousers notwithstanding) like some sort of prehistoric man squatting miserably in the dawn of time, trying to understand by touch alone who and what the unfathomable Other was. And what he touched was hard and stony but smooth in the way that bone was smooth and was indeed bone, and as he dug the earth away around it, he saw that it was a skull. His son’s? He shuddered and tears came to his eyes and he forgave the boy with all his heart and he dug deeper and discovered that there was a big hole in the middle where the nose should be, as though … He really didn’t want to know any more. He covered it up hastily and stood, looking around him, his hand scrabbling about in his empty pocket. He thought he saw something moving and the heavy silence was broken suddenly by some violent thrashing about deep in the woods like some huge wild animal was loose—and it sounded like it was coming closer!

Mitch, driving in from the airport in one of John’s cars, picked him up on the road out there as he came stumbling breathlessly out of the trees just past the humpback bridge, looking more like beast than man, teeth bared, eyes beady, and jowls dark, and dressed up like a circus animal. John’s punishment had been hard on the poor fellow. Mitch was glad it was over, for his nephew’s sake. In truth, Mitch had rather admired the daring of Barnaby’s and Maynard’s attempted raid, and he supposed that John, who always relished a bruising battle, especially when he won, probably did, too, though he couldn’t say so. When Mitch pulled over and shoved the door open, Maynard shrank back in terror and threw his hands up in front of his face. Whew, the sonuvabitch was really in bad shape. “It’s all right, son,” Mitch said, leaning across the passenger seat toward him and extending his hand. “It’s just me, your uncle Mitch. Come on, get in.” Maynard hesitated, then seemed to collect himself. “Sorry,” he said, the glittery panic in his eyes fading to a dull stare. “I’m—I’ve not been feeling well.” He shook Mitch’s hand briefly (no more than a second or two, but Mitch could feel the trembling) and, head ducked, dropped heavily into the seat, pulled the door to, and after a nervous glance over his shoulders into the woods, sat slumped there, stubbly fat chin on his chest, gloomily contemplating his muddy knees. When Mitch, relighting his cigar from the car lighter, asked him if he’d spoken to John lately, he got a barked “No!,” making it clear John had not yet sprung his surprise on him. Maybe his son had changed his mind. More likely he’d just been too busy. “It’s high time you did,” Mitch said, but got no response. Probably he had taken too many hits and was wary. Or maybe there was something else. As they rolled on into town, Mitch asked him if everything was all right at home. “I mean, you know, your wife’s been a bit funny lately.” Completely off her trolley, more like it, the crazy twat. “She been giving you trouble?” “No, it’s not that.” Maynard seemed to be struggling for some way to talk about it, whatever it was. His clothes were a mess and he smelled pretty funky but he could clean up at John’s. A full and immediate rehab was in order and, by the looks of it, it shouldn’t wait another day. “It’s just that I lost something. Something important. And—” “Oh yeah. Your son, you mean.” “What?” His nephew peered dimly up at him for a moment, then looked back down at his filthy hands, dangling limply between his knees, turning them palms up as though there might be messages scrawled there. Christ, he was an ugly bastard. “That’s right. We haven’t heard a thing.” “That’s tough,” Mitch said. “Only son and all, I know how you feel.” He knew better than to ask about his brother-in-law, Maynard’s old man, who was going gaga. Pretty depressing. All of us headed that way. Don’t think about it. So instead Mitch told him about the hippies who’d camped out in the old hangar out at the airport. “Left a helluva mess. Fucking garbage everywhere. The crews out there never saw them, just some kid in a truck the manager took a pop at as he tore out of there, but they must have been a whole damn gypsy caravan. Where in God’s name do these people come from?” When he’d asked the mechanic who’d shown him into the hangar where the manager was now and what he was doing about it, he’d replied: “You mean Snuffy? I don’t know, ain’t he the mayor now?” So now Mitch asked: “What do you think of the new mayor?” Maynard didn’t know there was one. His nephew was silent for a time, reading his hands, and then he raised his head and looked around him and said: “How long has this day been going on?” Jesus, no answer to that one. Mitch, chewing his cigar, shook his head and said: “Looks like the whole damned town’s here.” The street outside John’s house was parked bumper-to-bumper and the drive was full too, so Mitch pulled into the space in front of the drive, leaving the keys in the ignition. Maynard seemed alarmed that Mitch wanted him to join the party, but Mitch insisted that he and his wife had been invited, his son had told him so personally, and that in fact John, he knew, had a surprise in store for him, something great, let’s go see him now. “You know John. A rough customer in a brawl, but never one to hold a grudge, and in the end he always sticks with family.” When Maynard held back, Mitch bit down on his cigar and told him this was his chance to get his life back in order and he shouldn’t fuck it up. He should also pay more attention in the future to his dress and to his personal hygiene, goddamn it, but today it didn’t much matter, this was an informal party, so let’s hit the head for a quick wash and shave and get with the pioneer spirit. Or spirits. “God knows I could use a stiff one and so could you. So, come on, son! Move your butt!”

Needing a stiff one was but one of many such remarks that passed for wit or wisdom at John’s annual Pioneers Day barbecues, that particular mot (as Ellsworth, absent today, would say) repeated at this one, with a wink and a wistful grin, by Waldo, the paint-and-wallpaper man, in cordial conversation with the gum-snapper his wife called Sweet Abandon, and no doubt employed by others this day as well; there were only so many such lines in town and they had to be shared around. “I know what you mean,” most would say, returning the wink, though Sweet Abandon, perhaps, so young, still not adept at what Kate the late lamented librarian used to call the community codes, did not. What she said, popping a bubble, was: “No shit. Listen, you got any blow on you?” Waldo’s grin vanished for a moment, then spread easily across his flexible jowls again. “I can get some,” he said. This willingness to be of service to one another, for whatever reason, was characteristic of most of the guests in John’s congested backyard: this was a friendly town, and for all that it had grown in the last decade or two, still a town, just as in the days of the pioneers, where most people knew each other and even knew what their jobs and hobbies were and where they went to church, and where common courtesy, without frills, was the daily norm. “Can I help?” “Let me refresh that for you. What’s your poison?” “Drop by the shop tomorrow, I’ve got just what you need.” “Listen, what I need, nobody’s got.” “I know what you mean.” Humor, courteous neighborliness, now and then a gentle ribbing, these were forms of local discourse that were at the same time declarations of affection and togetherness. Thus, there was no malice intended, or at least very little, when Maynard stepped out on the deck in the smiling company of John’s cigar-chewing father, indicating that his long painful exile was over, and was applauded by everybody in the backyard for having the best costume at the party: a golf shirt tucked in tailor-made business pants with muddy knees, the pioneer’s dream. When the preacher’s wife passed by the barbecue grill, holding her tummy up in front of her with both hands, one of her husband’s parishioners, wielding tongs like forceps, called out: “I’ve heard of a bun in the oven, Beatrice, but that one takes the cake!” and others, playing joke-tag, one of the town’s favorite pastimes, especially at parties and during happy hour (what old Stu, also not yet here today, liked to call “Can You Tup This?”), added: “Maybe somebody forgot to set the timer,” and “If it’s the pastor’s wife, it must be a hot cross bun,” and “Looks more like a baker’s dozen!”—“Or else a dozen bakers!” someone laughed—and none of these remarks were meant in any disparaging or disrespectful way, or to call into question the Reverend’s paternity or to suggest inadequate precautions taken, not seriously anyway, but all were at heart expressions of sympathy and sodality, and were taken as such by those at whom they were directed, except for this or that individual with a fragile ego or an underdeveloped sense of humor. These persons, whose lives, though proud, were lonelier than most, set apart as they were even at amiable gatherings like John’s backyard barbecues, were often as not dubbed by the townsfolk with accordant nicknames—and though they did not always appreciate them as such, these were also a form of inclusion and friendship, a kind of community embrace of its unembraceables—like the Nerd or Old Hoot or Mad Marge. Who now, having abandoned her mayoral campaign (the general opinion seemed to be that John’s flunky was already the mayor, she must have missed something), and being overdressed for this vacuous lawn party which mocked the day it supposedly celebrated (pioneers didn’t have lawns!), decided it was time to butt out and cool off with a round of golf. But she lacked both car and partner. She knew where her car was, parked many blocks away where she’d been canvassing with her clubs in the back, but where the hell, now that she needed her, was Lollie? The banker’s wife explained, in what was probably an expurgated quote, that Lorraine had left in somewhat of a tizzy, saying that when she came back, look out, there’d be the dickens to pay. Marge’s husband Trevor, sporting his new black eyepatch like a codpiece (Lorraine had used the image earlier and, annoyingly enough, it was true) and tipsier than Marge had ever seen him, also refused to leave with her when she asked, wanting to know why she always tried to spoil it whenever he was having a little fun. “What—?! You call this fun—?!” Feeling betrayed and furious with them both, Marge stormed away, shouting out her disapproval of the ecological insanity of all this wasteful suburban sprawl and arrogant overconsumption as she went (“Happy Profiteers Day!” she yelled), no doubt eliciting, somewhere amongst the revelers, yet another repetition of “There’s someone who could use a stiff one.” “I know what you mean.”

Mad Marge may have needed a bad-humor cure on this day, the Nerd as well, but not the man they called Old Hoot, the former hardware store manager, now managing director-elect of John’s new nationwide trucking and air cargo operations, who was in such a euphoric state he looked like he might explode. The broad smile on his craggy face was almost scarier than his scowl, so unfamiliar was it (there were two teeth missing, one on each side, that no one in town had ever noticed before), but certainly none could match him for the heartfelt fervor and spirit of joyful thanksgiving with which he was celebrating this traditional day of the pioneers; he was everyone else’s therapy, a stiff one personified, and most, when they saw him, broke into broad smiles, too. A rough customer, old Floyd, folks generally thought, but hardworking and loyal, and John was now repaying that loyalty. As he always did. So no one, or almost no one, begrudged him his sudden good luck. Spiffily dressed in a new summer suit with two-toned shoes, checked shirt, and silver bootlace tie, a new moustache shadowing his lip, Floyd was himself feeling very much like a pioneer, having breached some impossible frontier and finding himself moving now into exciting new unexplored territory (genuine respectability, for starters), and he did not hesitate to let people know that he was, by the grace of God, a man reborn, his mind cleansed of all impure thoughts and his repentant heart forever devoted to this town which had raised him up from the depths of hell. When John passed by, bare-chested in his cowboy duds, Floyd raised a toast to his benefactor, thanking him for having faith in him, unworthy as he was, when most of the world did not, and asking God’s blessings upon him and all his enterprises, and John, with a faint smile, raised his can of beer in return and said simply that he considered Floyd the right man for the job. Floyd flushed and smiled and tears sprang to the corners of his eyes. “And God bless your good wife!” he added, somewhat stifling the general cheer, though no one could say exactly why. Perhaps it was because Floyd’s own wife Edna had not yet arrived, arousing some curiosity, and perplexing Floyd, too, as he said when asked. “She went buying for the new house, as I recollect. Probably just got carried away.” Not like Edna, of course, a cautious shopper to say the least, but the astonishing news had made her a bit giddy and it was true that she had gone buying, as Floyd said, and with the promised new house in mind: one, she imagined, with old trees in the yard and a big picture window and carpet on the stairs instead of rubber mats and a toilet that really worked proper, or maybe even more than one. “I cain’t believe it, Floyd,” she’d said, steadying herself against the kitchen sink when he told her, “but I do, I sincerely do believe it!” Because she could see it in his face. And so, she had gone out to the big mall on the highway where she rarely ventured so as to look for something sufficient to mark this mighty change in their lives (she could almost hear her stepmother telling her: “Edna, go fetch me a sign!”) and what she’d finally chosen, it being too early to pick out curtains or wallpapers, carpets or cabinets, since they hadn’t even gone house hunting yet, was a beautiful table lamp with a porcelain dog for a base, all curled up like it was asleep, and a red shade above it with a pretty silver border around the top and bottom, plus a red velvet cloth, the same color as the shade, for it to rest on. She’d deliberated for a long time because it was so expensive, and when she finally plunked down her credit card she felt a twinge of guilt, but she was sure in her heart that it was just the right thing and that she would love that dog for all her life. As she was wheeling it out to her car in a shopping basket, she ran into John’s wife, dressed in a lovely pioneer costume with bonnet, full skirts, and apron, who paused to admire Edna’s purchase. How nice, she said, the way the lampshade matched the little cloth, and she showed Edna the throw rug she had just bought which also had some of the same red in it, as well as colors which were similar to the silver stripe and the porcelain dog, especially the painted collar with golden studs around the dog’s neck. It was just amazing how they went together, she said, and she insisted Edna must have it. Edna protested of course, it was strictly something she never did, but John’s wife said Edna would be doing her a favor to take it, she’d picked it up by mistake but didn’t really want it, honest, and it would go so well with Edna’s new house when she had one, and certainly it was very beautiful and it really did go perfectly with the lamp and when John’s wife told her it was a prayer rug and that she wanted her to have it as a housewarming gift, how could she refuse? It seemed like God’s will. So Edna rolled it up and put it in her shopping basket with the lamp and the cloth, telling John’s wife she didn’t know how to thank her, John’s wife saying there was really no need to, it was truly a pleasure, have a good day, and then she was gone. Edna pushed her shopping basket out into the parking lot, still very happy but worrying already about how she was going to explain all this seeming extravagance to Floyd, and, as she opened up her car trunk, she was arrested for shoplifting.

“No, I know after all the fights he’s got into up there he ain’t due for parole till the other side of doomsday,” Otis was barking into the phone as they brought Edna in for booking, “but I got me a goddamn crisis here, Bert, and if that hellacious butthole can help me I gotta get him down here and toot sweet, you hear?” He clapped his hand over the mouthpiece, leaned toward the hardware man’s sad dowdy wife. He saw she’d been crying. “Just set down there a minute, ma’am. We’ll try to figure out what happened, soon as I get off this call.” He glanced at the Oriental carpet his officer was showing him. Didn’t see too many of those around here. “Don’t worry, Bert, I’ll keep the sonuvabitch collared, you’ll get him back in one piece, mean as when you mailed him. Okay, call me back. But don’t let me down!” What a day. Seemed like a week. Crazy things happening. Those two on the run, tearing up jack. People lost in front of their own houses. Or acting weird, like the photographer. Or the lawyer’s wife. Picked her up in her nightgown, running around on the streets, absolutely out of her onion. She’d bashed her car into a downtown parking meter and abandoned it and was now about as coherent as a headless chicken. Wouldn’t go home. “No, no, that thing’s there!” she’d screamed. But he’d shipped her back in a squad car anyway and called the hospital where her husband was a patient. He’d checked himself out. So to speak. Anyway he was gone, nobody knew where. This restlessness: it was what most bugged Otis. He wanted to yell at everyone to stop where they were and just hold it for five minutes. And now this lady, who’d never given anybody any trouble in all her life, trying to steal a damned rug, which didn’t even look all that new, it just didn’t make sense. When he asked her why she did it, she said: “I can only say I never stole it, nor nothing else, in my whole born life. It was, well, give to me by a certain person.” Otis didn’t believe her, but something about the way she said it made the back of his neck tingle. He rang up the merchant in question and turned to one of his officers who was on the same bowling team with the woman’s husband: “See if you can find Old Hoot.” “He’s prob’ly over to John’s, Otis.” “John’s?” “You know, at the barbecue.” Otis, phone tucked between chin and shoulder, shuffled through the papers piled up on his desk, but he couldn’t find his calendar. “How come that’s going on when I got all these other problems?” The merchant, having heard John’s name mentioned, said he’d call back, and Otis told the woman to make herself comfortable until her husband got here, and did she want a cup of coffee? No answer, she was crying again. Meanwhile, phonecalls were stacked up dozens deep. A lot of them about Pauline: “Otis, I just seen something you won’t believe!” “I know, it’s a bit unusual, but we got it under control.” Sure we do. Like hell. She and the drugstore loony were on a wild crime spree and it seemed like there was nothing Otis could do to stop it. Reports would come in, Otis would chase them, see the filthy remains of their passage, but they’d be long gone. Sometimes he’d run into Cornell’s wife and sister out there and they’d berate him or get in his way or trample over the evidence; he warned them he’d book them both as accessories, but the drugstore lady had a way with her steel crutch that made it hard to reason with her. And a lot of the calls and what he found when he got there were clearly Corny’s own diversionary tactics—he was crazy maybe, but he was wily. Like those jungle weasels who’d earned Otis his Purple Heart. Sometimes it seemed almost like there were two of him. Some of the complaints were real: the stolen truck from the Ford lot, their temporary encampment out in the old airport hangar, thefts from motels and restaurants and private homes. But they didn’t add up to anything that helped him track them down. Which was why he had his call in upstate. Maybe he should be asking for the National Guard instead of Duwayne, but Otis hated to have any truck with outsiders: the town should solve its own problems, he believed that. His officers phoned in from the lawyer’s house: “Hey, Otis, this place has been ransacked. Big mess in the kitchen. Really ugly. That broad took off screaming as soon as she seen it. Should we pick her up again?” “Naw, let her go and get back down here soon as you can, we got more urgent things to worry us!” And he wasn’t talking about shoplifting, which was frankly the least of his problems. The suspect’s husband arrived in a blurred fit of rage, bewilderment, indignation, and sheer panic, spouting Biblical bombast, but Otis told him to calm down, there was probably a simple explanation, and by the way, congratulations on the new promotion, he’d heard about it from John. That helped. Floyd wiped his brow with a blue bandanna and said, thanks, he was real pleased, God be praised, and asked his wife whatever did she want such an ugly rug for anyway, she knew how he hated things with patterns on them in the house. “I didn’t want it, Floyd. It just, well, sort of turned up in my basket.” Floyd started ranting to her about the slippery road to perdition and made her get down on her knees to pray with him, which she meekly did, but then the merchant out at the mall called and said, given the parties involved, he’d just take the rug back and wouldn’t press charges, so Otis told them both to get up and go back to the party and try not to let it happen again. “God bless you, we won’t,” said Floyd solemnly, adjusting his silver bolo and buttoning his suit jacket as he rose. He was not a big man, but he was standing tall today, radiant and full of himself. He took his wife’s arm. “For as Jesus says, we must enter by the narrow gate, though the way be hard and those what find it is few. And if a person will not stop sinning, he is better out of the world than in it.” He drew himself up, stroked the fresh fuzz on his lip, and with a smug, almost beatific smile (Otis was reminded of paintings of martyred saints in his old catechism manual), turned to leave. “Say, hold on a minute, Floyd, that reminds me,” Otis called out just as he reached the door. He fumbled through the loose stacks of phone messages. “Was you ever in Santa Fe?” Floyd looked like somebody had suddenly stuck him with a pin, just between the eyebrows, and he shrank about half a foot. “Santa Fe—?” he rasped. “Santa Fe what?” “No, that’s okay, I didn’t think you was.” “But—!” “Go on now, I’ll see you directly over to the barbecue.” “Otis? Call from upstate. They’re sendin’ Duwayne down here in a prison van with a coupla escorts. And Bert says to tell you, if you lose the vicious cock-sucker, you’ll be takin’ his damned place!”

Yea, though those who find it are few, entering through the narrow gate the hard way (never let him down yet) was Waldo’s most sacred intention and imminent prospect. As soon as he cleared out the tinhorn competition: going off to get the goods had lost him his place in line. No hurry, this make was a lock, enjoy a bit of the day’s festivities. He already had a buzz on, having sampled the merchandise, and felt very much in control of his own destiny. And hers. He chatted with Kevin at the grill while munching a steak-burger and admiring, over Kev’s shoulder, the cheeks of her little pink ass, plumped out under the ragged hems of her cutoff shorts and dazzlingly aglow in the sunshine like painted fruit. A few clumsy greenhorns around her, a teller and a shopclerk or two, the poor kid looked bored out of her gourd, seemingly amused most by old gin-soaked one-eyed Trivial Trev who could hardly keep his balance, drunk as Waldo’d ever seen him. Kevin, wearing one of the new line of pro shop shirts today as advertisement, said he was surprised that old Floyd had gotten the big transport job instead of Waldo, and Waldo said he was surprised, too, and for a minute the buzz faded and his prick went limp, but then he laughed and said that interior decorating was more in his line, if you know what I mean. Kevin laughed and said he did, leaning in to turn the dogs and burgers, and just then the little bimbo with the juicy bumbo glanced up: Waldo patted his pocket and winked, and she smiled, lifting tittering red-faced Trev’s hand off her overflowing bubby where it seemed to have fallen from out of the sky as if by accident. Waldo wiped the mustard off his mouth, asked Kevin to hold back one of those new shirts for him—“A big red one, stud!”—and walked over to ask Trevor if it was true that it was a hen that had pecked his eye out. Trev’s mood darkened and he tried to reply in kind, probably meaning to ask if Waldo’s ears had got that big because his wife was always pulling him around by them, as Waldo himself would have done, but what came out in a wet loose-lipped slur was ‘“Syour ear big ‘ike ‘at f’m getting it pulled off alla time?” “Well,” Waldo was able to drawl, staggering Triv with a clap to the shoulder, “pulling it off is one way to make it bigger, old son, but when you grow up I’ll show you a better one,” and Sassy Buns grinned and popped a bubble and said: “Why can’t you old guys talk like normal people? Come on, really, how did you lose it?” “Y’wood’n b’lieve me’f I tole you,” Trevor said, lifting his chin, his good eye rolling about haphazardly in its socket. He spread his arms out as far as he could reach, pitching gin at passersby. “It wuzzat big!” “What was?” He flushed and burped, wiped the drool. “You know.” He might have been trying to grin wickedly or he might have been about to throw up, it was hard to tell. “That!” he squeaked and reached round and grabbed the girl’s fanny, then keeled straight over on his face, dragging her shorts partway down as he fell. Those around her whistled and laughed and she said, snapping her rags back in place and pulling her feet out from under the fallen body: “I thought this was where the nice people were!” Waldo patted his pocket. “Some are nicer than others, pet. Ready for a cee-break?” “Yeah,” she said, with a gum-cracking glance Kev’s way. She blew a kiss at his back. “Let’s go get it on.” He’d called Dutch, it was all set, but one problem: his old beat-up wagon was gone. Lollie must have taken it. But hadn’t he just seen her a few minutes ago? Damn. Waldo figured he’d have to hit up John, risk losing momentum, maybe worse, but then he spied one of his good brother’s chariots—his famous blazing saddle—blocking the driveway, checked: the keys were inside. This was indeed a beautiful day. Even if he hadn’t gotten the promotion he so richly deserved. “Here we are,” he said, popping the doors open with a slow triumphant wink. “Wow! Cool!” He could tell the kid was really impressed by the way her unharnessed tits bounced when she hopped in and stroked the leather seats. “Okay, baby,” he growled, “get ready to fly!”

Clarissa had been ready all afternoon. Hadn’t he promised? All she had on was a cut-off tee shirt, sandals, and her thinnest shorts, no underpants, just in case she got back on his lap again. No, not in case, but when. She’d told him she really got off on flying with the world above her head and she wanted to do that on her own and he’d smiled that tragic smile that made her feel so creamy and said next time she could. Sometimes, she’d said, she felt like she wanted to fly straight into the sun, and he said sometimes he felt that way, too. She remembered his hand lingering on her bottom as he lifted her off his lap: it was like a delicious dream and made her want to put her own hands between her legs. And his. But so far no Uncle Bruce. What was more ominous: no Jen either. When she’d asked Jen’s father, he’d said he didn’t know where she was, he’d thought she’d come here with her mom. But he was very vague and tried to change the subject and asked about her own mother and Clarissa was pretty sure he knew more than he was telling her. Jen’s mother, of course, was not merely vague, she was completely out of the human loop, and when Clarissa asked her where Jen was, she hiked up her disgustingly huge tummy with both hands and replied in her little singsong voice that we are all in the universe and the universe is in all of us. Great, thanks a lot. The Creep had not shown up, but after what had happened, no one expected him to. As for his little sister Zoe, she was as big a help as her mother. She said she’d heard Jennifer talking on the telephone to a girl. “That was me, dummy, I was talking to her on the telephone, but then what?” “I dunno. I think she took a bath.” Clarissa got angry and tried to press Zoe for something serious, but the little crybaby just puckered up and ran to her mother. It was very frustrating. When, in a casual way, she asked about Uncle Bruce while helping her father carry food and stuff out to the backyard, he’d paused to glance, unsmiling, at her costume (she was wearing as much as he was, wasn’t she?), then had said that as far as he knew Bruce was in town so he’d probably turn up sooner or later, here, princess, take this pepper mill and cold six-pack out to the guys at the grill. Out there, they were emptying the water from an ice bucket on the face of an old man with an eyepatch lying on the ground, her daddy’s spooky accountant. They were all laughing so he probably wasn’t dead. Old Hoot ‘n’ Holler, her Sunday School teacher, was praying over him just the same, while his wife stood by in her usual pathetic daze, looking like she’d swallowed something she shouldn’t have. Then her Aunt Ronnie, who wasn’t exactly her aunt, turned up in nothing but her wrinkled nightgown, completely wigged out, and when her husband tried to reason with her she started screaming bloody murder like he was trying to kill her or something. Boy, marriage, it was really great. Clarissa’s dad took charge, as he always did, and led the crazy woman upstairs, but why, she wondered, did he even have goony friends like these? Clarissa turned around and bumped into her granddad who gave her a boozy hug before she could duck it and asked her if she knew where her granny was. Clarissa said if she wasn’t here she was probably visiting Grampa Barn at the rest home. A plane flew over but it wasn’t his, it wasn’t even a jet. She was so mad she felt like hitting something, so when the banker’s wife asked her if she had enjoyed the parade today, she snapped back that parades were for little kids and mental retards. “You may be right,” the lady smiled. “Certainly they do have a lot of fun at them.” It was hopeless. She went inside and called the manse again but nobody answered. Her stupid little brother was wrapping a couple of his nerdy buddies up in sheets, no doubt for one of his sicko plays. They looked like cocoons with their heads hooded and just their hands and feet sticking out. She gave one of them a kick with the side of her sandaled foot and asked him if he could feel it. He could. He was bawling. The other one asked her not to kick him, but she did anyway. “Gotta be fair,” she said. Then her Aunt Ronnie came down the stairs on her father’s arm, dressed in one of her mom’s linen dresses, which didn’t quite fit, and looking trembly and wild-eyed, and when she saw the boys in their sheets she freaked out again. “Now there’s two of them!” she screamed and went running out through the kitchen, where there was suddenly a very loud clatter. Her father scowled darkly at all of them on his way through, and Clarissa said: “Now see what you’ve done, Mikey, you little idiot!” But he didn’t care, he never did. Still no answer at the manse. She listened to it burping away for a long time, her rage rising with every ring. If Jen had betrayed her, she’d kill her. She suddenly felt terribly lonely, her chest tight like she was about to have a heart attack. She wished she could find Nevada, but she didn’t know how, had never asked. She was the only person besides her dad she could still trust. She hated to have people see her cry, but if she was going to start, Nevada was the person she wanted to be with. She was the only one who’d understand.

Clarissa’s understanding friend could hear the phone ringing when she arrived at the manse, but she told Philip, gripping his arm, not to answer it. He flushed and said he didn’t mean to. Without letting go of his arm, Nevada said: “Your sister’s gone, Philip.” “Yeah, I know, she’s up in the air with Clarissa’s Uncle Bruce.” She gazed at him gravely and, somewhat sheepishly, he looked away. She could see how Rex must have had fun with him, but he wasn’t an ugly kid, just scrawny and awkward with a bit of an overbite a beard would hide and a pimply complexion he’d probably outgrow. If he bulked up a bit, he might almost pass for cute, and later she would tell him that and change his life. For now, she said: “It’s worse than that, Philip. Listen, do you have anything to drink around here?” “Uh, well, my dad … in his library …” “Okay,” and still clinging to his bony arm while that damned phone kept ringing, she shrank toward him as though needing his support, letting her hand tremble just a little, and his body quivered in return. He reminded her of somebody, something in his brow or eyes, an old adolescent boyfriend maybe, or some guy who’d kissed her at church camp. She’d taken this on as a job she had to do, but she began to think she might have fun as well. It had been a while since she’d had one of these to play with. “Let’s go there. We can talk.” Once, when she was young and her parents were still trying to get it together, she’d been sent to live for a while with grandparents who were very religious in a gospelly oldtimey way, and for a time Nevada had been taken in, hook, line, and sinker, by the whole Jesus scene, down the aisle, soul to Christ, and all that, so it gave her a special kick now, even though his dad’s study looked more like a prof’s than a preacher’s, to be seducing a green-ass kid in a place like this. Before she let go of him so he could get the drinks, she pulled him close and whispered in his ear: “I don’t think she’s coming back, Philip. Ever.” She pressed her cheek against his scraggy pecs to hear his heart banging away as if he’d just been through a massive workout, and Philip, clumsily, put his hand on her back, then took it away. She withdrew, turning her face aside as though she might be crying, and went over to examine his father’s books while he got the bottles out. “There’s some brandy and, uh—” “Great. Just a couple of fingers. No ice.” Keep it simple. “I feel so shaky.” Jen had told her about the sex manuals, so she looked for them, all the while telling Philip how much she cared for his sister and how upset she was about what might be happening, dropping hints that Bruce was her lover and had made her do this (Philip had overheard their conversation, after all, something she had to worm her way past), and so she also felt betrayed and vulnerable and, well, just a bit heartbroken. When Jennifer had told her about her brother listening in, Nevada had asked in barely concealed alarm if he was going to tell her parents: “No, he’s going to tell Clarissa.” And of course Clarissa would be pissed off and probably run to her father and then they’d all be up shit creek. So, yes, she’d assured Jennifer, shepherding her to her tryst, she’d figure out some way to keep Philip home from the party. “Trust me.” Though now she had different ideas. The poor boy, she knew, had an unrequited crush on John’s snotty daughter and she’d have to get around to Clarissa sooner or later, that was after all why she’d said she was coming over here, and anyway she’d be useful: Nevada had a note in her purse that Philip would have to deliver soon, and Clarissa would be the bait. But not yet. There was still some time to kill. And a novice dong to blitz: she might as well enjoy this. “I’ve been so worried,” she said softly. She’d found the book she wanted, picked out a good page. “I feel somehow calmer … with you, Philip … in a place like this.” Philip was pouring brandy out self-consciously, his back to her, so she stepped up behind him and laid the book open in front of him, wrapped her arms tenderly around his chest, and murmured, her jaw gently massaging his meager traps and dorsals: “This is some kind of church, Philip! I think I’ve, you know, seen the light! How do I join, lover?” She let her hand slide down over his fly, while the other crawled under his shirt. “Like they say,” she whispered, stretching up to lick at his ear while unzipping him, “if you can’t save the soul, at least bless the body.”

While Philip, on this annual Pioneers Day, was finding adventure, not by leaving home, but by returning to it, an ironic experience that must have been shared by many of those forgotten stay-at-homes the oldtime pioneers left behind in the glorious past, his missing sister Jennifer had, earlier in the day, embarked upon the more traditional course to fresh discovery, launching herself irrevocably (Nevada was right, she would never return) into the unknown, feeling herself literally uprooted as she rose into the air inside the magic chariot (as she thought of it, for it did all feel like a fairytale, thrilling and enchanting, but not quite real) that was taking her, princess of the moment, to the royal ball. Though she had no clear idea as to what that ball might be like, Jennifer was not afraid and chose to let herself be surprised, letting her thoughts drift instead to what it was she was leaving behind—willingly of course, but sadly, too, and with nothing but an overnight bag—even as it shrank away below her. Her parents had come here when she was not even five years old and the only thing she remembered from that seemingly infinite time before then was a sudden happiness after great unhappiness, like when (like now!) an impossible wish comes true. And also a favorite Red Riding Hood doll she once had with all its clothes gone except for the hood (whatever happened to it?) and holding Zoe as a newborn baby. All the rest of her remembered life had transpired in that little town down below which now looked like a model village for a train set or a Christmas department store toy town. She could see the shopping mall where she and Clarissa had spent so many funny and exciting times together, and, silly as it looked from up here (it was like an ant farm she’d once had—she’d always called it her “ant theater”—which she’d spent long hours staring at and which had led her to write a line in her diary that said: “If you can’t help doing it, then you might as well make a show out of it!”), she knew she was going to miss it, just as she’d miss her family and especially her dad and her new brother or sister she’d never know and also school and the swimming pool (she could see that, too, like a bright blue postage stamp on her little postcard town) and her own bedroom and her father’s church and Sunday School, and above all her friend Clarissa, who would be hurt and would absolutely hate her for what she was doing, but hopefully not forever, because she just couldn’t help it, and she thought that Clarissa, more than anyone in the world, would understand, since it was Clarissa who had first talked to her about how when you wanted something badly enough nothing else made sense, no matter how crazy your wanting was, back when Jennifer had never known that kind of wanting nor could even quite imagine it, though she’d tried, since Clarissa had made it sound so interesting. The title of an X-rated movie at the mall which they never saw had finally summed it up for them: “Helpless Victims of Desire.” That’s what she now was, one of those. “I’ll never go to my senior prom,” she said out loud, and then she asked to circle the town once again before they flew away forever. As she picked out the places she knew, she realized that they were all associated with some memory or other, such that her life, which was lived in time, and so was here and then, as quickly, not here (when had they taken off? it seemed like a century ago! no, more like: once upon a time …), had somehow got imbedded in all those places down there, so that the town was, well, not her life itself, but a kind of map of her life, and of course the lives of everybody who lived there, all laid on top of each other. And so, though from up here it looked like something you might see in a geography book, a fixed and geometrical something you could pinpoint in space and anchor yourself by, it was not a real place at all, you couldn’t have pinpoints in infinity, after all, didn’t one of her teachers tell her that? That was just an illusion, the sort of illusion she was now leaving behind, escaping, in her fairytale fashion, the fairytale of her childhood. The only thing real was right now. And then again (her heart was banging away like crazy): right now. “Okay,” she said, feeling a bit woozy from staring down at the turning town (it was like being on a fairground ride, and it reminded her of those magical fairs they used to have down there in the city park when they first moved to town, and how excited she always was before they all went, the whole family was, her mom and dad, too, and how one night she got sick on a scary ride that whipped and spun her about like suddenly the world was broken and wouldn’t stop no matter how much she screamed); she leaned back in her seat with her eyes closed, searching for the right words for saying goodbye, which, when found, she spoke, calmed by them, with a dreamy smile: “Let it happen.”

Oldtimers would argue that the Pioneers Day fairs that so excited Jennifer were merely dim imitations of the great fairs before the war, back when Pioneers Day was the town’s most wonderful event of the year after Christmas, and even better in some ways, because Christmas was a family holiday spent in wintry weather behind closed doors, whereas Pioneers Day was a sunny celebration of civic pride during which everyone in town got together: at the parade, at the political rallies where candidates outdid one another with promises of even greater Pioneers Days in the future, at picnics and ball games and swimming parties, and above all at the great fairs which ran all day for three days and three nights, and which had everything from livestock judging and church raffles and booths selling local home-canned and home-baked foods, caramel apples and cotton candy, through the usual penny arcades, funhouses, and freak exhibits, to awe-inspiring carnival rides straight from the World’s Fair and famous musical acts down from the big city. The austerity of the war years reduced all that to a local fair, highlighted by the occasional visiting movie or radio star selling war bonds, and after the war they never really recovered their old glory, though so long as the city park existed they continued to be held and the townsfolk, especially the young, continued to enjoy them when they weren’t off on vacation. Pauline, who was forbidden by Daddy Duwayne to attend them, sinks of iniquity that they were, never missed a one and in time even had a booth of her own, so to speak, sometimes back of the carnival company trucks, sometimes under the wooden bandstand, sometimes just behind a bush, it didn’t take long, and she almost always got a present. One night she was lingering near a shooting gallery where the boys always gathered, when John showed up with his pretty young wife, and she watched, fascinated, while he shot at the little mechanical ducks wobbling creakily on a rotating chain at the back of the gallery. He never missed and once two ducks fell over at the same time, though maybe the gallery operator was just being friendly and made it happen. He won a beautiful stuffed teddy bear with bright button eyes and a big red ribbon around its neck and he gave it to his wife, who already had an armful of such prizes. She turned and saw Pauline staring and, with that lovely smile for which she’d been famous since her Homecoming Queen days, she gave it to her. Pauline glanced up at John to see if it was okay, and for a fleeting moment she saw that magical prince with hair alight of a year before, but then as quickly he was just the handsome young man who owned the hardware store and he had turned away with his wife and they were gone. Pauline, still clutching the teddy bear, saw then that some moments transcended ordinary time and could not be sustained or repeated or even in any way approximated again, though that was obviously what all these holidays were trying to do; they could only be experienced at the moment they happened or not at all, and then, afterwards, they might be remembered or they might not, but it didn’t matter, they just were what they were. Nevertheless, though it really didn’t matter, she was feeling happy in a sad but peaceful sort of way, so she decided to close shop for the evening and, hugging her teddy bear, to go home to the trailer. Where she was met by a red-eyed ranting Daddy Duwayne, who made her crawl around naked on her hands and knees like the animal he said she was, whipping her as she circled round him for going to the fair and doing whatever it was she did to get the teddy bear. Then he nailed the bear up over the old TV from the junkyard and, while assaulting the gates of hell from behind with his rod of wrath, he blasted it to smithereens with his shotgun. Afterwards, he cut off the shredded body and left the eyeless head nailed up like a hunting trophy. It was still up there when she and Otis visited the trailer and it was one of her daddy’s crimes she reenacted for him, or that they acted out together, several times in fact, it was one of his favorites, though Otis only pretended to shoot his pistol, instead shouting out “Bang! Bang! Bang!” in his funny wheezing voice, which she always thought was because he buttoned his shirt collar too tight around his throat. Dear Otis. They’d been such good friends, and for so long. Not anymore. He’d been chasing them all over town, blocking their escape routes with patrol cars, putting armed guards up around restaurant kitchens and collecting the garbage bags before they could get to them, it was a desperate situation. They couldn’t sneak out of town unseen in that big circussy truck Corny had borrowed, and everywhere they’d gone they’d been recognized and teased or chased away and even shot at. Finally, there was no place left except Settler’s Woods, where they’d come after first leaving a trail of false clues leading out of town on a back road. Corny could not hide the truck, and she didn’t really fit in it anymore anyway, so he’d decided to unload their supplies in the woods and return the truck to the Ford garage and try to trade it back in for his old van, which was all he needed for picking up groceries. So now Pauline was all alone and, big as she was, a bit scared. The trees were too close together, she couldn’t move without bringing down limbs and branches and making huge crashing noises, and now that her red cloak barely reached her armpits and didn’t cover her front at all, she was getting scratched all over. Corny had told her to keep out of sight, but, even when she scrunched down, she could see over most of the scrubby trees out here, and so, she supposed, she could just as easily, if anybody wanted to look, be seen. And there was another thing. Why she needed Corny. She’d never been a great thinker. But now (as if her head were imitating her bowels) she was becoming less of one.

It was Pioneers Day and the Ford-Mercury garage that was Cornell’s destination was officially closed, but by chance—or perhaps not by chance, more by quizzical design, the sort of design, for example, that governs the formal structure of a joke—its venerable owner and his young mechanic, the latter chauf-feuring at his own insistence, were also headed out there in the old tow truck, though by the main road which Cornell was no longer free to travel. The ostensible purpose, being duly acted out by both as if it were the real one, was the theft of the very truck which Cornell, though they didn’t know this nor would much have cared if they had known, was now returning. Along the route, which was a sunny well-used thoroughfare, Stu spied several people, some clients, mostly fellow duffers and elbow-benders—whom he might have hollered out to, but they’d have only smiled and hollered back and gone their way, even if he’d have shouted something like “Help, police!” or “I’m being murdered!” which everybody would have supposed was just a punchline to another of his dumb jokes. Which, truth to tell, it would have been, dumbest of the lot. He and Daphne had just been staggering blindly toward the door with John’s annual barbecue vaguely in mind when Rex appeared there as if out of nowhere. Stu was momentarily startled but he was not surprised. He’d been expecting this moment ever since Winnie started turning up at the foot of the bed at night, and today his little darlin’, uncommonly sober of late, had been uncommonly drunk since breakfast. Which, in shared apprehension, had sent Stu to the pump, and so both their engines were pretty well flooded by the time Rex made his sudden appearance at the door, dressed in his sweatsuit, to tell Stu they had to go out to the lot because a truck had been stolen, Daphne would have to go on to the party alone. It don’t matter, Stu declared magnanimously, waving his hand about, plenty more where that one came from. Rex protested that it did matter and they’d have to get going right now. They played out this no-it-don’t, yes-it-does routine for a turn or two, and it reminded Stu of a famous old wedding-night joke, but Rex didn’t want to hear it and Daphne complained she already had. Stu said, all right, go ahead on out, son, I’ll drop Daph off at the barbecue and meet you out there. Why are you always patronizing me, I can get there by myself, said his little peach among the lemons, hitting the doorjamb with the side of her face as she tried to lurch out past Rex. The blow seemed to have turned her around because she marched away straight into the dining room and hit something else, then came hack into the hallway, yowling and cussing like the old girl who got her tit caught in a wringer and wanting to know why the hell he was being such an irresponsible asshole, my god, this young fellow, who was only trying to be of help, was more interested in his business than he was, and of course that was genuinely true, as Stu had to admit, and did. Stu asked Rex then if he’d heard the one about the old boy who goes to the doctor because his dingus has gone soft and he can’t get it up anymore and he wants the doc to do something about it. The doc takes one look and tells him—goddamn you, you old fart, turn it off and get outa here! Daphne screamed, you’re driving me crazy!—tells him that his job is to cure the sick, not—oh stop it! stop it!—raise the dead. Rex grinned at that and said that’s a good one all right, come on now, let’s haul ass, and meanwhile, as though by accident, flashed a handgun from his sweatshirt pocket which he’d probably stolen from the garage. It seemed to Stu like there could be other things he might be doing on behalf of his own well-being, but he wasn’t doing them, he was walking a docile path toward the tow truck, Rex just behind him, pointing him aright when, like a leashed hounddog sniffing the flower patches, he tended to stray. He aimed for the driver’s seat, but Rex pushed him roughly away and said he was too fucking drunk, he’d drive. Stu couldn’t get up on the high seat by himself, Rex had to help, pitching him up there like he was made of straw. That boy had a bit of gristle on him. Also he had a rifle. Stu had glimpsed it in the back while getting tossed in. Plan on doin’ some shootin’, do you? Stu asked when they started up. His young mechanic grinned a wicked grin and said he thought maybe together they’d go after that guy who stole the truck. That got a hollow cackle out of old Winnie, ever the backseat driver, who was now hovering, Stu felt, just behind his shoulder, her fiery eyes all lit up with diabolical delight, even though this wrecker didn’t have a backseat. Stu told her to can it and Rex said can what? and Stu, running on automatic, crooned: Can it be true / that you / have someone new / left me alone / and feelin’ blue, and Rex growled: Jesus, nothing I hate worse than somebody wrecking a good song, Winnie’s hot laughter all the time singeing Stu’s ear. Stu kept thinking, all the way out to the car lot, about jumping out of the car or twisting the wheel out of Rex’s hands or grabbing the handgun or in some other way escaping his fate, but like that old boy who wanted his sex drive lowered, thinking about it was about all he could do about it.

Meanwhile, Stu’s little darlin’ was staggering out onto John’s back deck, one of the last to arrive, telling everyone she saw, whether they asked or not, what Rex had told her to say: that Stu had something he had to do out at the car lot before coming, one of his trucks had been stolen or something, he’d follow soon. Sounded rehearsed because it was rehearsed, people didn’t seem convinced, she was getting nervous or else was already nervous, hard as she was trying not to be, trying not to appear plastered, too, with even less success, though a courtesy call paid to the host’s gin bottle helped. Hair of the dug, as old Stu called it. “Why in God’s name doesn’t somebody stop it?” she asked out loud, but no one paid her the least attention, nor did she really want them to, her cold feet outvoted by her hot—what? One of that old rube’s worst and truest jokes. She could use a friend, though, dammit, but when she asked, John said he didn’t know, she was probably inside somewhere. Someone said: “She was beautiful in the parade today.” “Parade?” John was duded out like a cowtown sheriff which made Daphne feel uneasy, so, as appealing as his naked armpits were, she moved away. Her face hurt, must have hit something with it, though when people asked if she’d fallen off a barstool again, Daphne said she didn’t fall, she was pushed. That was funny enough but it might not have been the right thing to say, so she added that Stu had something he had to do out at the car lot, one of his trucks was stolen or something, he’d follow soon. No shit, some guy with big ears said flatly, staring right through her, though it was hard to tell whether he saw too much or nothing at all, wasted as she was. Daphne had driven here in a fog, mostly down the middle of the street, pinching herself to keep from passing out altogether. She’d wanted to call the whole thing off somehow, but she no longer knew exactly what the whole thing was, it was all very weird—like she was in a bubble and the rest of the world wasn’t happening anymore. She’d creased a few car doors and crunched a fender or two trying to park in the crowded street out front, but never mind, insurance would pay for it. More business for the lot. Which was where Stu was, she said. One of his trucks. What? Stolen, he’d follow soon. Or something. Really? a woman asked. Daphne tried to focus on her, couldn’t. It might have been the banker’s wife: the lady was worried about the rising crime rate. What was happening? she wanted to know, but Daphne couldn’t tell her. Couldn’t tell her her own goddamned name, if she’d been asked, luckily wasn’t. The preacher’s wife, who was rolling by just then, holding her stupendous belly up with both hands, said what she was worried about was the depletion of the ozone level and also that she might have her baby any minute now. Her husband smiled vaguely and said things aren’t always what they seem. He was gazing at Ronnie who, eyes popping, was crowbarred into a dress that fit her about as well as her old cheerleading costume used to, the bony cunt. She was even jitterier than Daphne was, and when John’s little boy came out of the house wearing one of his father’s white shirts like a jacket, its tails trailing in the grass, and with a homemade stethoscope around his neck, she screamed out: “That nasty little twerp, what does he know about human suffering—?!” Normally, her husband, Daphne’s ex, would have popped her one at that point, but the Mange, wearing dirty suit pants belted high over a golf shirt, seemed somewhat out of touch, one hand in his pocket, playing with himself, his eyes focused on his feet. Mikey came over and stuck a felt heart on Daphne’s ribs, just below her breast, and stabbed it with his stethoscope. Yipes! Everyone was watching and laughing, so Daphne, sweating, told him her heart was full, honey, but her bladder was even fuller, she’d go get him a sample, and she wobbled away, feeling her backside severely scrutinized, but confident she was giving nothing away. Inside, however, she nearly lost it: there was Winnie’s ghost! Oh my god! No, two of them! “Get out of here, you crabby old bitch!” she’d screamed. But it wasn’t her, neither of them were, it was just Lollie’s brats tangled up in sheets. She wanted to strangle the little jerks, but they were already crying and Daphne was determined to remain cool and unruffled, a sober friend of the family whose husband would be along soon, something he had to do before coming. A truck had been stolen. She told the two boys that and it seemed to settle them down. Didn’t do much for her, she was still feeling haunted and oppressed by a nameless dread, but she had a long relaxing pee and felt better. But when, after peeling off the felt heart (it was black), she stepped out of the toilet, there was the preacher’s kid staring at her in horror as though he’d been watching her through the door, the expression on his bloodless face exactly the same as when Rex grabbed him by the scruff and carried him out of her bedroom. Big booted John came striding in from the kitchen, handsome and hairy, read a note that the boy, never taking his eyes off Daphne, handed him, then gave the poor kid a sudden sock in the snoot that sent him crashing into the next room if not into the next world, and charged up the stairs, taking them three at a time. Oddly, this bit of action cheered Daphne up. She felt less exposed somehow, this boy had taken the punch that might have been thrown at her, so, pumped up with motherly gratitude or whatever, she reeled in there with a damp washrag to console the little sweetie and wipe up the blood and snot.

Philip, however (he was Philip now, and a man, after the convulsive revelations in the manse), was not consoled nor was to be consoled, nor could he, in spite of his newly achieved maturity and all his manly will, turn off the blubbering while that murderous old bag swabbed at his face, which seemed to have a big aching hole right in the middle where his nose should be, and asked him what was in the note that made John so mad. “I don’t know!” he sobbed (he couldn’t stop sobbing, it was humiliating). “It was only about my sister!” She wanted to know what about his sister and who had sent the note, but he wouldn’t tell her, he’d never tell anybody. But then Clarissa came storming in and kicked him in the ribs and demanded to know what awful thing he’d done that made her dad hit him and where was his damned sister anyway? “She’s gone. With your uncle Bruce.” That made her kick him and hit him all the harder—“I don’t believe you, asshole!” she screamed—she even landed blows between his legs and on his face where her dad had punched him, even though people were trying to hold her back. “I didn’t do it!” he whined, curled up on the floor, too stunned to stand. “Nevada did!” That at least brought a momentary end to her frenzy, though he felt he’d betrayed a sacred and intimate trust. “Nevada—? How do you know Nevada?” “She gave me the note,” he said, leaving out the details. Which were the best part. “She wanted me to lie to you about it!” “Hey, isn’t that the kid who mooned the world off old Stu’s roof?” someone laughed. “Aha! Is that why Daphne beat it outa here?” “She the one who popped him?” “No, John’s daughter done it.” Clarissa said again that she didn’t believe him, but he could tell, looking up at her through his tears past the throbbing mass between them (“Whew, he’s got him a honker now like our new mayor,” someone said, and someone else suggested they’d better get the doctor), that she did. Her face looked as punched in as his own. She was straddling him like a warrior, and Philip saw that she was naked under her shorts and she was beautiful inside there, and he knew that, though he’d thought he’d outgrown her with all that had happened to him today, he was mistaken, he still had the hots for her something awesome. “I didn’t want to come here. I only did it for you,” he confessed. “Shut up, Creep! You make me sick,” she snarled bitterly, and she might have started kicking him again, she was really steamed, but then her dad came in with his flight jacket pulled on over his leather vest and said: “I don’t see Mom right now, Clarissa. Take over here until she turns up.” “Is it Jen, Dad? Is she—?” He nodded briefly, looked down at Philip and said to stay away from that sleazy little shit, and was gone. She looked suddenly soft and vulnerable, terribly hurt, trying not to cry, and Philip wanted desperately to reach up and pat her neat little butt, just in sympathy, as a loving friend, but he knew she’d probably break his arm if he tried. Especially after what her dad said. Anyway, it hurt too much to move. The baggy-eyed old doctor shuffled in with a drink in his hand and squatted down creakily beside him, poking about in a perfunctory way. “Hey, maybe you oughta let John’s boy fix him up, Alf! He looks more like you than you do!” “Lemme tell ya, the kid’s got the same touchy-feely ways, too!” “He’s hilarious!” “Yeah, I loved it when he pulled his rectal thermometer gag on Old Hoot! That dumb cracker jumped a mile!” “Careful! Floyd’s a big man now!” “Looks like it’s broken, son,” the doctor declared wearily, and hauled himself to his feet. “I’ll go get my bag.” Clarissa’s dad was in the room again, very riled up, something about all his missing cars. “Where the hell’s the Porsch?” “Grampa Mitch must have taken it,” Clarissa said. “He went to pick up Granny Opal.” “But the Lincoln’s gone, too!” “I don’t know, Dad.” “Damn it, I’ve got to get out to the airport!” The doctor dragged some keys out of a pocket which seemed to reach to his knee and tossed them to him. “It’s the old—” “I know it. Thanks, Alf. I’ll have someone run it back in.” So, what was in that note? Philip could tell by the way Clarissa’s dad was acting that it must have been important, but why did he hit him like that? His mind blown by all the things Nevada was doing, dazzlingly naked there in his father’s dusty library, Philip hadn’t been paying enough attention to what she was saying. She’d given him a hickey on his neck to remember her by, thanks a lot, but now he had this broken nose as well. Grown-ups were really weird. And also a little scary. Zoe came in wearing a white shirt that reached to her shoes and a folded paper hat with a red cross felt-tipped on it, and he told her to go get Mom or Dad, he had something to tell them about Jenny. “Mommy’s not feeling good right now, she’s got a bad tummy and she’s lying down on a picnic table, and Daddy’s writing his sermon, and I’m not Zoe anyway, I’m a midwipe.”

Philip’s friend Turtle, who perhaps would once more have to be called Maynard III now that Philip was no longer Fish, was also learning something about suffering as a sequel to celestial bliss. His amazing adventures, begun in some long ago time now forgotten, were, he realized, coming to an end in the very immediate present. And it wasn’t the happy end that he’d imagined. No, forget bliss, boy, forget beatitude, forget the land of glory, Little was back in hell again: his dimensionless paradise now had very serious dimensions, the Christmas tree lights were going out, the hidden angel choirs were screaming bloody murder, and what the sensuous writing of all those tidal floods of color, now mostly a horrible red, were saying was: get your butt outa here, man! And that was what he was trying to do, kicking and punching, but it was getting too cramped to swing and there seemed to be less and less of any place to go! All those vibrant new constellations in all of heaven’s hues which his exploding weenie had helped to make had suddenly started to clot together like they were magnetized and they were bulking up and closing in on him, crowding him for space. Once intimately stroked by all those chromatic ebbs and flows, he now felt intimately pummeled by them. It was awful. The kaleidoscopic colors were burning his flesh, especially the tender bits, a stench like tangible fog was suffocating him through all his orifices, and his malleable body, once majestically stretched out over the whole ecstatic universe, was now getting squashed down into a miserable wet lump. He struck out with all his might at the rubbery walls contracting around him, but it was like punching an old beanbag chair. It was getting dark and hot, he could hardly breathe, and he was afraid that this might be the terrible apocalypse, sinners beware, that Old Hoot ‘n’ Holler was always on about. Our Father which art in heaven, Little began to pray, but he couldn’t remember the next line, he was too choked up, all he could think of was forgive us this day our hallowed bread which didn’t sound right, so he just shouted out: “Please, God! Mom! Dad! Help!” Couldn’t even hear himself. It was like he was underwater or something. It was pitch-dark now, he couldn’t see his knees in front of his nose, which was where it felt like they were, but he had the definite impression, as a clammy hand clawed at his face, then snatched him by the hair, that he wasn’t alone. There was somebody else in here with him!

Mikey’s grand rabbit-from-the-hat finale was, by general consensus, the best act he’d ever done, though for many present it was the first they’d ever seen, for, as Oxford had noted, this sunny backyard pack-up was dense with strangers, strangers to him at any rate, most of whom when asked had said they worked for John. Of course, Oxford had been out of touch with the town since Gretchen took over the drugstore, the community had grown up around him while he’d been fascinated with the growth of his own little family, eight of whom were with him today. Somewhere. They had learned early how to escape the narrow circle of their grandfather’s myopia, finding him again only when they needed him, and in principle, if sometimes with a doubting heart, he approved of this independence. The three who stayed closest to him were the ones who, alas, had inherited his and their mother’s disability, one fate his own four children had escaped, if other fates had, also alas, ensnared them. It was the curiosity of these three, their little hands tugging at his, that had drawn them all close to Mikey’s, well, hat, so to speak: the lady on the table. She had something between her legs, they wanted to see it, could he lift them up? Mikey meanwhile was being rewarded with well-earned applause and laughter for his uncanny imitation of Oxford’s old friend Alf with his bent-backed slouch and his drooping lower lip where a cigarette always used to hang until Harriet’s cancer when he gave the habit up, and capturing exactly the way Alf’s bony gray head seemed to fall forward off his shoulders as though spring-loaded, bobbing to a heartlike beat. Not everyone here knew Alf, but fingers pointed and smiles broke out when he shambled out onto the back deck with some fellow peeking out past a faceful of bandage, Lennox and Beatrice’s boy maybe, hard to tell from here. Earlier, Alf had talked with Oxford briefly about Beatrice’s interesting condition, saying it seemed premature but he thought she was about ready to pop, if in fact she was really pregnant, then went on, in the confidential manner they’d fallen into over their decades together as doctor and druggist, to describe other recent cases that were puzzling him (“Trevor seems to be under the strange delusion, you know, that somewhere in the past he might have killed somebody …”), foremost his own sensation of something like a soft insistent pressure at the tip of his finger—he’d lifted his finger, the one, Oxford knew, that Alf used to palpate the inner recesses, to let Oxford examine it through his thick spectacles and certainly the pad was spread flat, but, as he was a spatulate-fingered man, they all looked much the same—which Alf believed to be the physical manifestation of a half-remembered missed diagnosis: “A tumor, I think. But the sonuvabitch keeps growing.” He stared at it in some wonderment. “It’s bigger than a goddamned melon now, Oxford, that blimp of a belly over there couldn’t contain it.” “Give Eric a call, see what he thinks.” “He’d think I was senile.” Mikey had also picked up on Alf’s obsession with his finger in his own ingenuous way, miming the frantic effort to get something off it that wouldn’t go away, scrubbing it on his clothes, on other people’s clothes, shaking it, sucking it and spitting, shooting it with a toy pistol, finally pretending to hack it off, put the severed bit on a skewer, cook it over the coals until it caught on fire, douse it in Alf’s own glass of whiskey, then, with a beaming smile of success, head still bobbing like an old turkey’s, put it back on again, holding it up, only a bit smudged, for all to see. Then, with Beatrice’s little daughter Zoe trailing along as a nurse with a pillowed tummy (no doubt Oxford’s own daughter Columbia was this parody’s target, she out on some wild-goose chase after her mindless brother this afternoon, best Oxford could tell from her weepy telephone calls from all over town), Mikey slouched over to the minister’s wife, twisting and groaning on the picnic table, and threw a wrinkled sheet over her, Oxford pulling his grandchild out from between her legs just before the tenting fell. Beatrice was beginning to pitch and yell as the spasms hit and Oxford wondered if he should interfere, but he supposed that Alf, nearby, knew best—“No, let him go ahead,” Alf laughed, “he’s doing a good job!”—and instead allowed the woman to grab his hand and squeeze it, his grandchildren clambering up on the bench for a closer look, the other five by now having joined them, along with dozens of other children pressing round, adults, too, drawn by the spectacle and Beatrice’s wild yelps. Mikey pulled on a pair of yellow rubber dishwashing gloves and, lower lip adroop, probed beneath the bouncing sheet. Beatrice reared up off the table suddenly, crying out in alarm, and—schluuu-POP!—out came Maynard and Veronica’s long-lost runaway son, yanked by his hair, wet and naked and sputtering helplessly as one rescued from drowning. Everyone whooped and cheered. “That was really cute,” someone behind Oxford giggled. “How’d he do that?” Little Maynard gulped, blinked, looked at the crowds around him, and crawled back under the sheet to look for something. While his sparkling bare behind was in the air, Mikey gave it a newborn’s smack and then all the other children, shrieking with laughter and fighting each other for position, had a turn. The grown-ups would probably have joined in, but the boy was already out of there and down off the table, frantically hauling on the soggy clothes he had just retrieved, while everyone laughed and applauded John’s comical son. Everyone except little Maynard’s parents. His father strode over and boxed his boy’s ears soundly—“Jeez, Dad, what did I do—?!” the child whimpered as his father swatted him again, then dragged him away, still pulling his pants up, Beatrice letting go of Oxford’s hand at last and rising up on one elbow to gasp: “He didn’t mean any harm!”—while his mother Veronica, hysterical until now, just collapsed wearily into a lawn chair, splitting either the chair or the zipper on her dress or both, and said: “Oh, hell, I don’t care.” Beatrice cried out and arched her back again, and her daughter Zoe, her nurse’s cap hanging down over one eye now and tummy pillow fallen between her knees, waddled anxiously over to grab Alf’s hand and pull him back to the table, where Lennox was also waiting now, and that was how Adam was born, but not before Oxford, his memory triggered perhaps by the sudden descent of twilight (time to get the grandchildren home and into bed), recalled something Kate had once written for Ellsworth’s newspaper on the theme of the imagination vis-à-vis the real world, which was always changing, she observed, while the imagination, our defense against the abyssal truth of the subconscious, tried to hold it still. In real life, which she called “crepuscular” (“We are born into a dying of the light…”), everything we try to grasp is already something else; art, she wrote, floods itself with light, or with darkness, which is another kind of light, so as to shield us from the dusky terrors of the flux and feed the appetite for hope. She was speaking about the movies actually, especially the black-and-white ones—this was around the time when films “in living color” were coming to dominate the Palace Theater programs—and how, with their “real” yet chiaroscuro images, they confused art and reality, absorbing them into one another, each, in consequence, destroying each, which, she said, was what made them “beautiful.” Ellsworth added a disclaimer, saying that the views expressed by the author were not necessarily those of the editor, and that he himself believed the only terror that life held was its enduring dullness, which art and the imagination gratefully relieved.

The Stalker has returned but without the Model. The Artist has not foreseen this, no one has. There is an inadmissible question that seems to rise like mist around the Artist’s ankles, and then, pulling his heart down with it, to sink again. The forest has not been burned, but it has been charred here and there, as though scarred by the Artist’s pain. It is not resignation he feels so much as emotional exhaustion. The jaded expression on the Stalker’s face suggests that he has depleted himself with cruel pleasures, a suggestion he does nothing to deny. “Ah yes,” he sighs, touching a dirty fingertip to the nipple of a childish breast in a drawing lying at the Artist’s feet, then tracing a sinuous line down across her navel, over her pale little belly, twisted in anguish, and into the hidden crevice between her clenched thighs, “a pure delight!” The Artist wishes, not merely to smash his face in for this vile profanation, but utterly to destroy him, to eradicate the depraved monster from the face of the earth, but grief has sapped his strength and will, and he feels that it is he who is being slowly but inexorably erased. Like the rock beside the river-bank on which she once had knelt: vanished now, as though dissolved into the stream, itself diminished to a trickle like drying tears, ever more diminishing. “I know what you have done,” he says bitterly, indicating with disdain all the drawings scattered loosely on the barren ground about him. “You see, I have imagined it all.” The Stalker studies the drawings with an undisguised admiration that borders upon awe. “An extraordinary likeness!” he exclaims, picking up a drawing of himself, reared high in wild-eyed revel behind the Model’s upraised buttocks, his hands tightening the studded chains around her throat as he slakes his savage appetite, and he holds the drawing up before his face as though gazing into a mirror. “It is as though you have violated the border between art and reality!” “Art neither contemplates nor intrudes upon the real,” the Artist replies dispiritedly. “It is the real, upon which all else intrudes.” The Stalker shuffles through the drawings, spreading them about, selecting this one, then that one, for closer scrutiny. “Yes, you have seen everything,” he acknowledges, stroking the Model’s outflung thigh in a particularly barbarous sketch as though to ease her terrible pain, or to recall it. He tosses the drawing aside. “And you have seen nothing.” The Artist has feared just this rebuke. He is a sensitive and decent man, he knows, and no doubt there are depths of depravity his imagination, which in his pride he likes to think of as boundless, cannot plumb. “In truth,” sighs the Stalker, “I do not know where she is, nor have I seen her since she left you.” “But you both disappeared at the same—!” “I was searching for her. Perhaps to do with her as you have fancied. But to no avail. She’s gone.” The Artist, stunned by this revelation, if it is one and not just another cruel deception, stares down at his drawings, which he believed to be passionate and intransigent pursuits of imaginative truth when he made them, but which now seem little more than feverish bunglings of a corrupt and pornographic soul, cartoons from hell. “All I found was this,” the Stalker says, reaching into a ragged shirt pocket and handing the Artist a scrap of paper which he recognizes as a corner torn from one of his own drawings. On it is written: “Art’s true source is not in the seen, but in the longing for the not-seen.” In her handwriting, of course, the naive evenly looped script of an innocent child. The Artist’s hands are trembling. “Do you think she might come back?” “It seems like a farewell message,” says the Stalker. “It is, I suppose, her way of continuing as your Model.” He smiles wistfully. “A lot less fun, though, isn’t it?” The Artist stands, feeling a bit shaky. How much time has passed? When he looks around, the Stalker has gone. He is alone in his darkening forest. He leaves his materials and drawings behind and steps into it, as a way of stepping out of it: what has a center must somewhere have an edge.

What makes a man step out of himself and into some no-man’s-land of the spirit? What is it that turns the healthy courting of danger within the rules of the game—games like mountain climbing, say, or skydiving or war—into a self-annihilating urge to dissolve the borders of the game itself and defy its rules as one might defy gravity or number or the passage of time? John did not understand this urge but he knew what it felt like, having found himself, more than once in his life and often as not in Bruce’s company, poised on that frontier and tugged toward its fatal breaching. It had the aura of a joke, a final joke shared between friends, and as that larger self they created between them laughingly dared to assail the edges, so they each dared, too, feeling a part of something that compelled them to deny their lesser mortal selves. Admittedly, he got a passing buzz out of it. But John, unlike his city friend, had played too many team sports to be seduced by these commonplace delusions of the almighty group self, nor did he suppose that concerted derring-do would give them any sort of magical freedom from the inexorable laws of the game, as Bruce in his restless transgressions sometimes seemed to. In fact, John loved the rules, for he was, as always, team captain, and the rules empowered him and defined the limits by which he tested himself and moved and judged others. John’s game was life, Bruce’s death, but he understood that Bruce therefore lived closer to the truth than he did, was in reality another side of himself, one he could not finally bring himself to embrace, except by proxy in the person of his nihilistic friend. And now, as though to taunt John for his pussyfooting ways in the face of the Great Fucking Mystery, as Bruce would say, the walls that Bruce had assaulted with his abduction of Knucksie’s little girl were in effect the very ones between them, or at least those built by John: his community and (if Nevada was to be trusted, as of course she wasn’t) his own family. Nevada’s note had said that Bruce, who seemed “very violent, very suicidal,” had apparently used the girl’s big brother Philip as go-between to lure both Jennifer and Clarissa to the airport. She thought he was headed up to the cabin and that he had something “very ugly” in mind. “I think he’s checking out and trying to take the world with him.” She’d found out about the plot too late to save Jennifer, but she’d managed to “distract” (her quotes) the kid from his Clarissa mission and get false word to Bruce that the boy had chickened out so that he’d leave with only half his prey. The meaning of that wistful high five that Bruce had given him during their two-on-three the last time they were together up at the cabin was transparent to him now: So long, buddy. Catch me if you can. The dark-souled sonuvabitch. John loved him, but he wasn’t sure, as he rolled down the runway and lifted up into the gathering twilight, a rifle in the seat beside him (not the one he wanted, which for some reason seemed to be missing), if he was headed up there to rescue Bruce from himself or to kill him. Light filled the plane as he rose into it, but the land below, as he banked to the north, was cast in shadow and the unlit town looked small and vulnerable, lost on the vast prairie, diminishing, as though it might not be there when he returned.

It had been a beautiful day, one that, it seemed, could go on forever, so it was almost a surprise when all of a sudden the light began to fade and twilight fell. Out at the edge of town, Mitch popped the Lincoln’s lights on as he pulled into the parking lot at the retirement home (didn’t want to hit one of these old dodderers wandering around, they’d sue your ass off), thinking about retirement himself, but not here, one reason being he wouldn’t mind getting away from some of the old ladies in town who once were not so old. Aging with your wife was one thing, seeing what your old loves turned into really took the starch out, something his son didn’t seem to mind so much, having perhaps more starch to start with. Other car lights were coming on around town as well: Lorraine’s on her way back to the party, for example; Nevada’s as, disappointed, she pulled away from the airport; Cornell’s on the back road to the Ford-Mercury garage. Stu wanted to turn the light on in the office out there, but Rex said no. Waldo, snuggled into his lovenest, as he liked to call it, also preferred the lights off, the invading dimness adding a kind of melancholy beauty to this simple little room where he felt more at home than in his own home. Sassy Buns said it was like nowhere, man, like some piece of sterile shit they’d sent into orbit and then forgot about, but her shoes and shirt were off and her sudden anger when he’d made the mistake of calling her Sassy Buns to her face (“You got some kinda sick buttocks fetish, old man?” she’d snapped, and Waldo had had to admit: “Yeah, haw! I sure do …”) had subsided and he had the impression she was enjoying the luxury nose powder he’d procured for her. Until she said: “Phew, what’s this shit been cut with, bathroom cleanser?” Waldo had paid top dollar and was sure of his source, she was just giving him a hard time. As he would do for her, sweet thing, in turn. Dutch was not behind the two-way mirror watching them for once: to hell with all that. In fact he was thinking of closing down the Back Room, his days and nights were getting too mixed up. He’d woken up in his office when the staff came in to tell him about the thefts of food and linens. He didn’t remember having fallen asleep in the office, but he was glad he was there instead of someplace else. He’d checked out the losses, called Otis. He’d thought that was this morning, just a little while ago, but now the sun had suddenly gone down and Otis and a couple of his cops were in his front office, taking down the numbers. He decided he’d also lay off the beer for a few days. After he finished the one in his hand. Otis was trying to recruit him for some kind of posse he was getting up, but Dutch said he planned to stay right here, stand guard over what was left. Otis gave him a two-way radio to use in case the two thieves showed up again and asked him who brought John’s Porsche out here? Dutch didn’t know. “Has it been parked out there awhile?” “Can’t say.” Otis was used to running John’s cars home of late and he had to go there anyway. As usual, the keys were in the ignition, so he sent the others to pick up Duwayne at the jail and meet him at John’s while he checked out the golf course and the airport in the Porsche, following other leads. He was not happy about the onset of darkness. Made the hunt harder. But he couldn’t wait until tomorrow, Corny and Pauline had become a serious threat to the community and they had to be stopped now. The country club looked shut down and empty as he swung by, enjoying the machine he was in, though in fact Marge was out there on her own, caught out by the sudden twilight while cutting through a dogleg on the back nine and unable to find her ball on the other side of it for a moment even though it was in the middle of the fairway. She knew she should quit, but she was still blowing off steam, running her aborted mayoral campaign from hole to hole as if from issue to issue. Her golf shoes had been in the car trunk with her clubs, but with the clubhouse closed, she’d been forced to play in her business suit, which made her feel like she was clapped in irons and greatly stifled her drives. She could sense the terrible weariness of the long day overtaking her and felt about to drop, but there were only a couple of holes to go and she had to walk them to reach her car anyway. There was no one else out here, so she unbuttoned her blouse and rolled her skirt up around her waist and, loosened up now, took her frustrations out on her approach shot. Which was a beauty. Lofted up out of sight, then falling down through the dusk onto the middle of the green and rolling backwards toward the hole. Seemed to disappear. Hey! Had she holed out? Beautiful!

Meanwhile, back at the center of the dying day’s doings in John’s backyard, where the garden lights were coming on, the guests were reluctantly preparing to make their farewells, lingering for a last drink or maybe a couple, perhaps one more of those juicy quarter-pounders, said to have been ground from the flanks of blue-ribbon winners at the last 4-H Fair upstate, or else a final handful of crunchy liqueur-filled chocolates, imported direct from Switzerland, or even both at the same time, in the same bun, why not—any macaroni salad left?—Pioneers Day only happens once a year. This was what Lorraine saw when she returned with Waldo’s shotgun, loaded with buckshot, in her fist: a lot of drunks falling goofily about in the gathering dark with their jaws snapping. How long had she been gone? Off-key party songs were erupting here and there, yips and shouts, loose laughter like belches, the birds and crickets, slow off the mark, now making up for lost time in raucous chorus behind it all. Reverend Lenny and a deflated Trixie were cradling a newborn, still red in the face, under a bug light on the back deck, surrounded by oohers and ahers, Daphne among them, telling everyone Stu had something to do at the garage, he’d be here soon; Lorraine heard the same thing twice like an echo: it was a recital, the woman desperately clinging to the only thing she could remember, her mind otherwise murky as a sump pit. The shotgun got a certain amount of attention as she passed through the crowds, but as far as Lorraine could tell not many people even knew who she was. Out in the pot-scented rose garden, where children were chasing lightning bugs, John’s daughter, in a seething rage, was snorting something through a straw; the girl’s furious thoughts were incoherent, but Lorraine empathized with their import: insult, betrayal, murder on her mind. “Sure, be glad to give you a lift,” some guy standing in the flower beds said as Lorraine drifted past, “how’s this?” “Woops! There went my drink!” “Ha ha! Wait here, I’ll bring you a new one.” “Just a little one!” “Don’t worry, honey, it’s all he’s got!” No one tending the glowing barbecue pit, where meat burned quietly. Caterers were collecting empty pans and dishes, picking up some of the rubbish in black plastic bags. Lorraine found an abandoned whiskey glass and downed its contents. Yeuck. Stale and watery with a butt at the bottom. Still a shot or two at the bottom of one of the bottles: she finished that off, too, sucking from the neck. Nearby, Veronica sat slumped in a lawnchair, still as a stone. The image in her head was fetal and slimy and its name was Second John. The image seemed locked there like a fixed exhibit in an empty room, and Lorraine understood that head was badly damaged. Takes one to know one, she said with a shudder, and rubbed her aching brow with her free hand. She climbed up past the Holy Family, kicking a couple of beercans aside (Daphne was saying: “Something he had to do out at the car lot…”), and went into the kitchen, where Marge’s one-eyed Trevor was huddled miserably over a hot cup of coffee, his sick hangover making Lorraine’s hurt head hurt the more. Kevin was in the hallway, leaning against the john door, hustling a bank teller with a sad story. No Sweet Abandon, all tattered and torn. No Waldo either. Lorraine didn’t need to tune in to get the rest of the story. She knew where they were.

Thus, John’s annual Pioneers Day barbecue drew, somewhat abruptly, toward a close, for some a pleasure, others not, some lives changed by it, most merely in some small wise spent, a few wishing it could go on forever, others that it had never happened, or, having happened, that it could be forgotten, of all wishes wished, the one most likely to be granted; but first, while many were still finishing their last, or nearly last, drink, police chief Otis arrived, raised his bullhorn, and addressed the remaining guests in John’s backyard.

He said: “Folks, sorry to butt in here when you’re having a good time, but this town’s got a serious problem and I need your help!” There was applause, and Edna clapped, too, because Floyd did. But were the others applauding the police officer or the problem? It seemed a touch wild out here and she wished she was back home, just her old simple home with the running toilet, forget grand ambitions. Like her stepmother always said: Edna, sometimes the worse thing can happen to you is getting your dreams come true. “If you haven’t been home today,” the burly police officer hollered through his bullhorn, “you probably been robbed!” Oh dear. That got everybody’s attention. At least the new porcelain lamp was safe in the trunk of the car, though she didn’t know if she ever really wanted to see it again. The officer went on to tot up all the crimes that the giant lady and the mental boy from the drugstore had committed, and she could see by the tall list why he hadn’t wanted to bother about a mix-up with one little secondhand rug. His voice, which sounded like an old radio broadcast, seemed to be coming out of the night sky. It had got dark almost as soon as he’d begun to talk and now you couldn’t hardly see his face, it was like a curtain had dropped. “People around town are reporting dented cars and broke doors and windows and shingles knocked off roofs,” his voice said. “They’ve used a airport hangar like a latrine, there’s a church been desecrated and busted up, she’s almost completely indecent and scaring little kids, and everywhere she goes she’s leaving a filthy trail of slime and garbage!” “If I was completely indecent,” some lady squawked in a high voice, “I’d scare everybody!” The people around her laughed and said “I know what you mean,” but if it was a joke, Edna didn’t get it. But then she was not in a humorous mood. She felt ashamed and confused and responsible for the change that had come over Floyd ever since leaving the police station. She and Floyd were standing talking to the bank president and his wife, he having taken a sudden new interest in Floyd what with his promotion, and what his wife said now was: “You work so hard to make a decent life for yourself and then these irresponsible ruffians come along and try to take it away from you, it just doesn’t seem fair!” “No,” said Edna, “it don’t rightly,” and the policeman with the bullhorn said: “And now she’s got so big she’s disrupting traffic and bringing down phone lines and TV antennas!” Fortunately the lady’s husband was so drunk he didn’t notice how Floyd, who’d been so friendly and fairly popping his britches with big money talk before, had pretty much shrunk back into his old squint-eyed meanness, untrusting and shutmouth, except when he had something to recite from the Bible, and moresoever since the police turned up. The sour old Floyd was not so good at impressing bankers maybe, but Edna knew how to talk to the old one better than the new smiley one who scared her with his noisy swoll-up ways, and so she told him now plain out that she never took that rug, that John’s wife give it to her and just went away and left her stuck in all that trouble, and where was she anyhow, and Floyd, finally listening to her, said what the hell are these buggers trying to do to us, you think? The police chief meanwhile was introducing the new mayor who got up and declared that this was a tough ballgame, but they all had to hunker down and dig in and get ready for a butt-kicking bone-crunching free fight. “We gotta get our back off the mat!” he shouted through the bullhorn. “That’s one big piece a meat out there and she’s playin’ hardball with us, so now it’s our job to team up and take her out! Together, neighbors, we can do it!” Floyd said: “We’ll be goin’ now.” “We should oughta say goodbye and thank you,” Edna said, but she wasn’t sure who to, except maybe the little boy. “It don’t matter,” Floyd said. “Come on.”

While his old coach and math teacher, who was now the mayor, however that had happened, was winding up the crowd in his punchy lockerroom style, telling them about the shoot-out at the old airport hangar and how the bandits nearly ran him down, Otis, given the first moment he’d had in what seemed like weeks just to catch his breath and think, posed the question to himself: What had he set in motion here? What was the final objective of these troops he was lining up? Would Pauline, as Snuffy’s rhetoric and even his own as he thought back on it seemed to imply, have to be, well, taken out? This had not been his original game plan. He’d set out just to bring Pauline home and turn her over to people who knew more about how to deal with her problem. If only she hadn’t broke out and teamed up with that dimwit from the drugstore. Of course she had to get out, she was hungry: Otis remembered how she had demolished that bag of doughnuts and wished now he’d brought her a couple hundred bags more. Though that wouldn’t have been enough either, she was one ravenous lady. Her husband should have done something, damn it, all of this could have been prevented. But, that’s right, he had been under arrest. Or, rather, he’d been a temporary guest of the police department. So things happened. Too many things, really, for Otis to be able to manage them all, one crisis piling up on another, civic order collapsing around his ears, and then all those crimes they committed, seemed like he was getting a call a minute, they were running him ragged, and so, next thing he knew, here he was in John’s backyard forming up an armed posse to go out and hunt both of them down. He glanced over toward the cruiser in the drive where Pauline’s daddy sat, manacled, in the backseat, grinning out at him under his ballcap. He spat through the gap in his teeth, dirtying the inside of the cruiser window. The incorrigible bastard. A menace to society. And not just mean and crazy but no doubt a cold-blooded murderer as well. If he were genuinely serious about justice, Otis should’ve tried to find out years ago about that “dead sister” Pauline had chillingly described during their investigative sessions out at the trailer, and whatever it was had happened to her missing momma. So he was taking a big risk getting Duwayne released to him like this, the sonuvabitch was dangerous even when locked up in a padded cell and he still harbored a homicidal grudge against Otis, blew a gob straight in his face first time he saw him today, then just grinned when Otis cocked his arm to throw the punch he couldn’t throw. But Pauline had often told Otis about all the times she’d tried to run away and how Daddy Duwayne always tracked her down and dragged her home to the trailer again, and Otis was running out of options. She had to be stopped, whatever that meant, and wherever she was. Still, he was having his doubts. Otis desperately wished John hadn’t taken off. He’d know what to do, as he always did. Otis had come here, not just because this was where most everyone in town he could count on could be found, but more because he needed John to lead this thing and see that it came out right. But no John, no anyone except the two kids, even John’s parents had checked out. Otis had brought the abandoned Porsche here and had had to give John’s daughter the keys, uneasy as that made him feel, and what she’d said was that her father had got called away on an emergency. A friend of hers was in trouble. A former friend, she’d added and turned away. And now he didn’t see her anywhere or the little boy either. A lot of people had left, even while he and Snuffy were speaking to them, and he found himself feeling a bit like a sheriff in one of those old oaters, come here like a fool to appeal to the cowardly cabbageheads in the town saloon. Of course he would not, like those forsaken sheriffs, have to face Pauline all alone, Otis knew that; on the contrary, the problem would be to keep the drunks, zanies, curiosity seekers, and hell-raisers away, which was mostly what he saw out there in the darkness now. Maybe he ought to postpone all this until morning when John got back. Hell, he didn’t even know where he was going to take his squad once he’d picked them. But then he got a call on his cellular phone from the Country Tavern out by Settler’s Woods: “They’s some humungous animal out here, Otis, looks a lot like a nekkid woman, and she just stomped the bejesus outa old Shag, he’s flatter’n a day-old pancake! And I can’t even find Chester, she musta et him!” Now it was murder. And he knew where they had to go. He took the bullhorn back.

She didn’t mean to. It was a dark moonless night and she was hungry and that boy with the automatic zinger had not come back and she could not remember where he had hid their food. She saw lights and heard music and crept over there. Well, crept. It felt to her like creeping but she did break a few trees and accidentally tipped a car into the ditch. She could smell cooked meat and beer and so she went poking around in the garbage cans at the back and that was where she stepped on something. Just made a little squeak. She figured it was better not to look. There wasn’t much to eat but what there was she quickly put away, eating straight from the tipped-up cans. Everything tasted pretty good, even the plastic bags, though she cut her mouth when she bit into the bottles. There was something else sniffing around back there so she ate that, too. Then some people came out and started making a fuss and she remembered that she was supposed to keep out of sight so nobody would know where they were. It was probably too late, but it was dark so she thought she might be able to slip away unnoticed, and she might have, too, if they hadn’t had all those cars and trucks in her way. They made quite a racket so it was obvious to everyone which way she was going. Still, no one seemed to want to follow her, and in fact most of them were running to their cars and going home, if their cars still worked, so while they were busy at that she burrowed deeper into the woods and found a dark place that was scratchy but warm where she could snuggle down and wait for her friend to return. But no sooner had she got settled than she realized she had to go to the bathroom again, that was the trouble with all this eating, so she crawled over to the big ditch she’d used before and did her business there, then found her way back into her secret place, keeping her head down all the while, scuffing up the brush behind her so they couldn’t follow her tracks. She didn’t know why she had to do this, but she knew it was important. Her friend, whose name she could not quite remember, had said so. Why had he not come back? She did not know that either, but she never doubted that he would. Unless he’d had an accident or had got caught himself by whoever it was that was chasing them. It was mostly her fault they were being chased, because of how big she was. There were many things she did not remember now, but she knew she had not always been this big. Exactly why it bothered everybody so much, she couldn’t be sure, but she guessed it was just something they weren’t used to and that got on their nerves. She could appreciate how they felt because she wasn’t used to it either, and didn’t know if she ever would be. She missed things like beds and those white things—bathtubs—too much. But maybe, after she’d forgotten them, like everything else, she’d stop missing them and things would be all right. She curled up in a nest of wrinkled sheets she’d earlier worn like someone in her old life used to call, as he tore them off her, her “seventh veil,” and there half dozed with one eye open, her ears and nose alert, listening for footfalls or men talking, her empty stomach gnawing at her again, and wishing her friend would come back soon and show her where their hidden food was. It was awfully late. Where was he anyway?

At the door. And through it. Found at last, when least expected, nor where he’d have thought to look. All the way out here, slipping through back streets and unmarked roads in the borrowed truck, Cornell had been thinking about his escape from Yale’s girlfriend’s apartment after, well, after what had happened to her, and how his whole life since then seemed like a single thread: through those scary streets, down into the ground below, then through that dark stinking maze of tunnels and sewers, up the metal stairs, out the door at the top, into a life with that clubfooted lady that was, somehow, already underway, then out again to find the one true friend he had in the world, and now once more on the run, but aboveground and with something important to do and no longer all alone. That thread of his life, he sensed (he remembered Marie-Claire’s horrible final message: maybe what she’d meant to say was THINK!), was now being knotted, he didn’t know how, but it was all coming round full circle, and he was suddenly sure he would find at last the door that he’d been looking for, solving the mystery of his life and freeing himself from the sensation of there being not just one of him but two. That second Corny, the mixed-up married one, shaken off for awhile, was back with him now, not so much riding in the seat beside him or in the truckbed behind as actually sharing the driver’s seat and interfering with his moves, even if he was trying to help, as he sometimes did on hairy turns or in heavy traffic with his video games reflexes, but more often determined, it seemed, to lead him astray in some random rerouting of his intentions: he had to be single-minded about this business and simply could not. What he had to do now, if the other Corny would only let him, was return this cumbrous truck and pick up his old van, make a quick grocery run, then meet his friend in the woods, which was where he now imagined he might discover that elusive door (something about the smell of the place had stirred a faded memory and excited that imagining) through which they could make their escape before the crazy people in this town caught up with them. The last place they’d tried to hide was an unused hangar out at the airport and that had worked for a little while, poor Pauline could even stand up and walk around a little, but they’d hardly settled in when they’d been surprised by four or five very mean guys, including one of Corny’s former high school teachers, who’d actually shot at them with a gun. Holy cow! Corny had had to floorboard it out of there, right through the lot of them and crashing out the half-opened door, and, with all the roads out of town cut off by police cars, there was nowhere big enough left to go but Settler’s Woods. Not perfect. Once inside there was no easy exit, and it was risky to be so near the highway and strip, though the motel was useful for food and clean sheets, which Pauline wore like diapers now that her red cloak hardly came below her armpits. The Country Tavern was close by as well, and there was a mall Corny could reach by foot. So, after finding a safe place to hide Pauline and the truckload of food (it didn’t look like a place where a door might be, but that was where the sensation struck him, gazing up at his friend as she squatted to offer him her finger between his legs—zowie!—that he was at least getting warm), he left a few false garbage clues to send the police chasing and then took the back roads to the Ford garage, skirting danger as best he could whenever the second Corny wasn’t making him take wrong turns—as he did too often, turning the trip out into a maze. Corny was worried, hopping down out of the truck at the car lot, about all the time he’d lost: he’d left Pauline in the woods in blazing midday sunshine, and already it was pitch-dark! He found the old van, but locked up: the keys must be in the office. Which, fortunately, though everything appeared closed down for the night, was unlocked. He turned the handle and crossed the threshold and that was when it came to him that the door he’d been looking for all this time was the one he’d just stepped through.

Across town in the retirement home built by John, Barnaby stepped through his bathroom door, dragging his leaden leg behind him, staggered over to the laundry basket, and tipped it over. “God, Barnaby!” Audrey snapped, from her seat on the toilet, “can’t you give a woman a little privacy?” “Too old for that, Aud. I just thought of something.” “Well, that’s a novelty,” she said sarcastically, but she seemed uneasy, watching him as he struggled to tip the hamper upside down. Not a simple trick for a crippled puddinghead. But he managed it and, sure enough, the old handgun he’d been looking for all this time clattered out onto the tiled floor. She leapt up off the pot, but she was hobbled by her lacy drawers (Audrey always was one for fancy underthings), so for once he was able to beat her to it simply by falling on top of it. Not sure how he was going to get up again, but he had the gun and it was pointed, however unsteadily, from under his chin, up at her. “Now sit back down there,” he said. “We’re gonna have a little talk about that rewrote will.” She plopped back in place looking a bit deflated as he pushed up onto his elbows and knees, waving the gun more or less in her direction and reminding her that he was a mite shaky so she shouldn’t get adventurous. “I thought I’d moved it from there,” she sighed, staring at all the dirty laundry scattered across the floor. “I must have forgotten.” Using the tub and lavatory, he was able to haul himself to his feet, but not without the gun going off, sending a bullet ricocheting out of the washbasin, off the medicine cabinet mirror, and into the ceiling, and provoking a squawk from Audrey, who jumped a foot off the stool, then snapped: “You damned fool! You want to kill somebody? You can’t undo what’s already been done!” In some remote subdivision of his devastated brain he knew that was true, but in the front war-room lobes behind his eyes, from which heavily fortified enclosure he was organizing this do-or-die operation, there remained a stubborn hope for victory. “We can try,” he said heroically, and accidentally fired off a shot through the window. Audrey winced and ducked but stoically kept her seat. “You’re a crazy old buzzard who ought to be locked up,” she said. She was really boiling. “It’s a good thing John’s running the company, or we’d all be ruined. I’m glad I changed that will!” “Why do you favor that coldhearted boy, Aud?” he asked, trading anger for anger. “On account of he reminds you of your old beau?” “Oh brother! Why don’t you stick that peashooter up your backside, lamebrain, and leave us all in peace?” “Hey, tell me, love of my life, I’ve always wondered, did you ever have a tumble with that ruthless whoremonger?” “Well, what can I say, Barn? Mitch was once a handsome man, and he had a charming way with the ladies. Which is more than can be said for present company!” The doorbell rang. “That’s likely the police,” Audrey said, reaching for the toilet paper. “They probably want to know why you’ve been shooting at the neighbors.” The bell rang again and someone banged on the door with his fist. “All right! All right! I’m coming!” he shouted, though he knew that was not what it sounded like to others. Audrey was the only one who understood him now, so it was just as well he hadn’t knocked her off, he might need her to get him out of trouble. He limped out, trying unsuccessfully to holster his weapon in the sock sewn into the armpit of his robe, and as he opened the door, shot the carpet. There was Mitch with a dead wet cigar in his mouth. “Don’t shoot, Sheriff, I’ll marry your daughter!” Mitch said, and took the gun away from him, looked it over skeptically. He glanced past Barnaby’s shoulder and added: “You all right, hon?” She came running over and fell into Mitch’s arms, and he gave her a big hug. “I’ve been so frightened, Mitch!” Mitch backed out with that two-timing woman under his arm, the little silver gun pointed at Barnaby’s kneecaps. The sonuvabitch was stealing his damned wife, right from under his nose, but Barnaby wasn’t surprised, they’d taken everything else. Wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d shot him either. Wished he had. He was really all alone now. Couldn’t even do himself in. He shut down the war room and his daughter came in and closed the door. “Where have you been?” he croaked. “I’ve needed you!” He was crying, he couldn’t help it. She put her finger to her lips and shushed him and led him over to his bed to tuck him in. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m here now.”

Wife theft of course was an old joke, as old as wives, but as Stu would say if he had any spit left to say with, it’s not the theft but how you steal it. Rex, now tucking his old boss and rival in for the long night out at the Ford-Mercury car lot, using methods more direct, less consoling than those Barnaby presently enjoyed, had figured all the angles and knew nothing could go wrong now from here to the tagline. Rex had had a lot of jobs in his life—stockboy, fridge and TV repairman, taxi driver, deliveryman, mechanic, gigolo—but for this gig he’d cut his chops killing pigs for bacon-makers. Probably the spot in his life, short though the run was, that had given him the most satisfaction. Not all that easy on the old olfactories, but at least at the end of the day you felt you’d accomplished something. Which was how he felt now, cooled out at last after an edgy time. Rex had been noodling along without direction for too long, trying to think his way through every move, every bar, like a goddamned greenhorn, but now that he was onstage at last he found himself relaxing into his own sense of time, on top of the beat and ready for his break when it came, knowing that it would all happen as it had to happen so long as he kept to the score. At the same time, he was able to let in a lot more space, to stretch it out just for the pleasure of it, to enjoy, in a word, the telling, and for openers, there was Stu’s record collection which the old jughead beamed out over the lot most days and which sorely offended Rex, twangy whining country and western shit for the most part. He ordered Stu to take them out of their jackets and hold them for him while, one by one, he dug deep raw X’s into them with a screwdriver. The old shitkicker, sneezing explosively, gave it his best attention, probably hoping that was the worst that was going to happen to him, and when Rex spared a couple of classic rockabilly discs Stu’s eyes lit up there in the dimness and a grin twitched on his loose lips. “Reminds me of the one about the old boy,” he wheezed, “who was chawin’ tobacca in church one day when the preacher’s missus come in and—” Rex poked the barrel of the rifle into his flapping jaws, chipping a couple of crooked teeth, told the dumbfuck to chaw on that awhile, and then laid out for him his plans for a long creamy set with his own fat missus, now waiting for him back at Stu’s crib. Not too long a set: he loathed the boozy bitch and her big spongy ass, but he didn’t say so. One lick at a time. He emptied the chamber of the garage handgun and gave it to Stu to hold while he still sweated fingerprints, planning to reload it afterwards and fire off a couple of rounds, turn the old yuck into a heroic defender of the fort, if a dead one. Okay, time for the main theme: stay inside, follow the chart, and take it out. At the last second, the old used-car shark tried to pull the cornball someone-behind-you dodge—“Winnie—?” he gasped—but Rex only grinned and, straightahead, no frills, completed his closing rip. But when he turned around, there in the shadows: there was someone! He panicked for a moment, thinking: setup! But wait: wasn’t that the thin streak of piss who stole the truck? Perfect! He eased up, feeling the beat again. Not the tag expected, but he could play it. You’re all right, my man, if you just keep listening.

There was something very big lurking at the shadowy edge of the woods out back and the reformed motelkeeper, holding down the fort but still far too sober to play the hero, heaved his beercan at it, then ducked inside and locked all the doors and windows and pulled the blinds and, rubbing his sore arm (used to be able to throw a ball as far as most guys could hit one—now he probably couldn’t get it back to the pitcher), went back to the bar for another beer. Or more than one, some resolutions would have to wait. “Otis? Are you there? Can you hear me? Otis?” Nothing but static. At first he’d thought it might just be squirrels or raccoons rooting around in the garbage and he’d gone out back to shoo them away. But then he’d heard a branch come down and could swear he saw something peeking out at him over the treetops, and what might have been a flexed knee sticking out, catching the parking lot light, at least ten feet off the ground. Shit. “Otis, do you read me? This is Dutch! I got a major problem here!” Fucking useless. The fat-necked sonuvabitch was probably home in bed. Or playing poker somewhere with Dutch’s bartender and the rest of the staff that he’d volunteered away, leaving Dutch alone on the front line and the whole damned motel to run. Luckily it was all but empty tonight, most of John’s barbecue guests staying out at their new hotel on the interstate, the barbecue itself having sucked up the Getaway’s ordinary evening trade, but that was no real consolation, Dutch could use some company. He thought about rousting out Waldo and his milky-breasted bimbo, but supposed they’d both be bombed out of their minds by now and more trouble to him than help. He turned on the TV over the bar and watched a baseball game for a while and, after an inning or two and a few more beers, began to doubt what he thought he’d seen and was even glad he hadn’t got ahold of Otis and his boys after all and dragged them over here, they might have thought he was off his rocker, and what was worse, they might have been right. Dutch had not been sleeping well and sometimes it felt like he wasn’t sleeping at all, even in the middle of what had to be nightmares. He knew what his problem was. Oh, not too much pud pulling: hell, if anything, keeping his hand on his rod and his mind on both kept all three out of worse, an old sportsman’s dictum. No, it was that mirror. That dicked him. It was living too close for too long to that borderline between what was real and what, like a movie, for example, even if made out of real stuff, wasn’t. And it wasn’t really a line so much as a kind of thin film, and when it dissolved: well, you were fucked, buddy. “I got the bad, bad Back Room Blues!” he growled to the tune of an advertising jingle between innings on the TV, and poured himself another beer. So he was closing it down. He should probably dismantle it altogether, but he thought he might need it again some day more desperate than this one, or John might for other ends. Dutch was tempted, feeling so lonely, to take in one last farewell performance, but beefy old Waldo looked out of his depth tonight so it could be a pretty depressing show. Like watching sick carp in an oily pond. Stick with the baseball. That’s what he was thinking (top of the eighth, tying run on first, nobody out) when Waldo’s harpy of a spouse came rocketing in, stuck a shotgun up his nose, and demanded the key to her husband’s room. Dutch gave it to her, figuring on maybe giving Waldo a warning call, but she spun around at the door, swinging the gun his way, and yelled: “Don’t even think about it, fatso!” Whereupon Dutch decided this drear night might have something to offer after all and went back to his old movie seat to watch the action.

Thanks to the daylong rumors and sightings, Otis’s stirring twilight speech in John’s backyard, and the fleeing Country Tavern patrons surging back into town, news about the big thing in the woods was getting around. In fact, as always happened, people were seeing big things everywhere, and Otis had to field a lot of nuisance calls, as when someone called to say the big thing had got into their basement and blown all the fuses, please help for god’s sake, while others claimed to have seen it hiding behind the darkened mall or in the deep end of the civic center swimming pool or under the humpback bridge, and everywhere it went, people said, it was leaving a mucky smear. There was even a report that the stolen truck had been seen heading north out of town without a driver and with two big feet sticking out the back. Shackled in the backseat of the patrol car, Duwayne cackled at all these calls coming in and said it sounded like the great Whore of Babylon had this fiendish sinkhole of iniquity by its diabolicals and wouldn’t let go till the Day of Rupture come to kick ass and send them all to hell and perdition, praise the Rod of Wrath and His Holy Spirits, go git me a drink, Otis. In spite of Duwayne’s crazed running commentary, Otis took all the callers seriously and had their stories checked out, as he always did, but he had his own sights set now on Settler’s Woods. He’d been narrowing their escape options all day and he knew that was where they’d have to go. Before leaving the barbecue, he got the doctors present to put the hospital on alert, deputized a dozen or so of the younger fellows, sending those without weapons of their own to the airport with Mayor Snuffy who had the keys to John’s gun cabinet, and told the others to meet up out at the Country Tavern in an hour’s time. He talked with old Oxford about his simple son’s shenanigans and the deep trouble he was in right now, and then fended off as best he could Oxford’s clubfooted daughter-in-law, who came bobbing violently out of the night and attacked him again with her steel crutch, this time for partying it up instead of keeping the public order as he was paid to do. When she found out he was recruiting for an armed posse to try to capture the two bandits, she insisted on being deputized in spite of her obvious disabilities, which included being blind as a bat. He told her it was against the law to use relatives of the accused, though he didn’t know whether it was or not, but in any case it didn’t snuff her wick, she got more fired up than ever. He figured, for her own safety, he ought to lock her up for the night, but he didn’t know which of his men would be willing to take her on and he was not keen to. Finally, Oxford’s heavyset daughter, who had the most influence on her, was able to persuade her to back off, though Otis supposed he’d see them both again before the night was over. He tried to reach the motelkeeper out on the highway next to the woods to warn him that the two they were looking for might be in his neighborhood, but he got no answer. The Country Tavern, having taken casualties, seemed to have shut down as well. This was it then. He could feel it, like atmosphere: Last quarter. Last big play, game on the line. Before he could break away to join Mayor Snuffy and the boys at the airport, though, old Stu’s wife grabbed his arm. She said she thought Stu was about to get hurt, hurt really bad, he should get out to the car lot as soon as possible and try to stop it, but when he impatiently asked, stop what? she couldn’t say. Almost too drunk to stand. “Hell, I don’t know, honey, just something he, you know, had to do before coming.”

Well, she’d tried. She could do no more. One story ending, another revving up. Her life seemed full of them. She used to be the nice girl next door, back when the idea of excitement was a school field trip to a dairy farm; now she was not so nice but it was more interesting. So was she. Obviously. She ached to be home in bed, but not alone. Had to time it right. Alibi and all that. So she lingered, killing time and bottle dregs, keeping up her hellos and excuses, so all could say: I remember Daphne. More and more, not hellos but goodbyes: the joint was emptying out. The fuzz had wrecked the party. She watched as the preacher and his otherworldly wife packed up their new baby and cuddled it off into the night, thinking that, hell, she wasn’t too old to get one of those things. That hunk could make her a beauty that’d knock the pants off all the other babies in town. But what would she do with it after she got it? Hard to imagine. Reverend Lenny’s older boy, with his nose broken and face in plaster, had not seemed all that ecstatic about the new arrival. Or arrivals: that act was pretty funny, even if young what’s-his-name, pencil-peter, he of his father’s Our Fathering vocation, didn’t think so. He’d fled the scene his mommy’d made, either in chagrin or else to go gawk at the famous desperados with the rest of the tourists. Maynard’s repopped brat, star of Mikey’s magic show, had seemingly taken off, too, though his parents were still here. Twat of Twit and Twat was sleeping with her eyes open down by the barbecue pit (poor thing, she’d got so ugly it was heartbreaking); Twit, as Daphne discovered when she went for a pee, was in the master bedroom fondling someone’s panties. Guess whose. The Mange still had the hots for her after all these years. Daphne might have gone in there and taunted the snarfing sleazebag, as was her wont, but she saw that he was crying and figured the shitheel had suffered enough humiliation for one night, let him be, especially since she was in such a celebrative mood, or should be. Wasn’t she? What was wrong? Why these flashes of the blues? Well. She was at heart a good woman who wished everyone could live forever. She didn’t want one story to have to cancel another. Something like that. And also, give him credit, she’d miss the jokes. Of course, there were compensations, one big one in particular, but she’d been without it for a while, would be at least a night longer, and badly hooked, she was hurting: didn’t junkies get the blues? So she wanted her steady fix but she wanted it to be painless. Had it already happened? It was a pity one had to live all these stories in tandem instead of all at the same time. Why couldn’t life be spread out like memory was, with past and present all interwoven and dissolving into one another, so you could drift from story to story whenever the mood struck and no one really hurt by it? Instead: out of the old and into the new. Get ready to gasp and cry. Could she do it? Could and would. She looked around but found no one who belonged here to say goodnight to except little Mikey, who was busy rehearsing a new number with a little girl who looked like the youngest of Lenny and Trixie. They must have forgot her. Mikey was staggering around clumsily with his hand in the underpants of a Raggedy Ann doll, and the little girl was coming after him with some kind of plastic space cannon, firing table tennis balls. Who was that supposed to be?

She burst into the room, shotgun at her shoulder, slapped the lights on, and shouted: “Okay, asshole, say your prayers!” But the room was empty. Should have known better than to read a corkhead’s mind. Or maybe Dutch tipped them off after all. Probably. Room looked used. But the bed, though indented here and there, was still made. Lorraine sniffed the air. A certain sweaty aura maybe, but no clues. Had she really intended to shoot him? Or just scare the pants off him? Most likely, if his pants had already been off, to shoot him. She looked under the pillows and found a packet of fancy imported rubbers. Unopened. She pocketed them as evidence. Evidence of what? Thwarted intentions. Ditto, the girlie magazine in the wastebasket, the toothbrush in the bathroom. Though she didn’t recognize it. The tub was dry, but one of the hand-towels had been used and tossed on the floor. There was a glass that had had whiskey in it. What kind? No idea. In the little plastic wastebasket by the stool, there was a thick wad of chewed gum. She left it. Some evidence she didn’t need. The inside bathroom wall, she saw, could be rolled back, half of it sliding into the other half, making the bathroom in effect part of the bedroom. Cute. This was a real little lovenest. Overheads with dimmers, adult video channel on the TV, an abundance of directional lamps, mirrors, speakers, soft polymorphous furniture, odd suggestive knickknacks. Maybe there were always condoms under the pillows, porno mags “left” in the bins. But, wait. What did she mean, “suggestive”? Well, just that: objects that at first glance meant nothing to her at all, when looked at individually, seemed, almost literally, to suggest another use, inevitably sexy. For example, a little twist of silken cords with knots at the ends, like something cut from old-fashioned curtains and sprayed on a tabletop as a decoration: pretty, she thought, until another thought reached her, as though from the cords themselves: a whip. A chest of drawers drew her attention next, the bottom drawer: in it she found a vibrator. She’d never had one, never even seen one, but she knew, as if it were telling her so, that was what it was. She turned it on (she knew where to turn it on!), just to check the batteries. Well, why not? She kicked off her shoes, hauled down her slacks and panties, then thought it might be a good idea to wash it first. While she was soaping it up in the bathroom, she had the peculiar sensation of observing her own broad sagging backside; not used to bathrooms with open walls, made her self-conscious, she clearly wasn’t meant for the erotic life. You’re an ugly old cow, she heard herself saying, but what the hell, live it up! She had a sudden hunch, opened the medicine cabinet, found a jar of skin lotion, and understood its purpose immediately, took it back to the bed with her, where the shotgun lay like a discarded lover. She lathered the vibrator with the lotion and watched herself in the mirror as she inserted it and turned it on. Wow! Pretty good! She lay back on the bed, raised her feet, and let her rip. It was weird, but the whole room seemed to be encouraging her, and what she was thinking as she came was, yeah, terrific, the power of visual metaphor! When it was over, it wasn’t over. She still felt restless. She washed the vibrator and put it back, but she didn’t feel like putting her pants on. It was weird, but it was like the room was talking to her. And what it seemed to be saying was: how about the shotgun? That would be something different. It had a little ridge at the top of the barrel for sighting and it felt good to rub that against her clitoris. It was already pretty oily, but she applied a little more lotion and worked it in. How deep can it go? she seemed to be asking herself. How big a one can you handle? She pushed it in, watching herself in the mirror, inch in, half inch out; inch in, imagining the stud who would be hung with something like this. Whoo, this was even better than the vibrator, slower but reaching deeper, just the madness of it was turning her on, and she could feel an orgasm coming unlike any she’d ever known, oh fuck, she whimpered, and the whole room seemed to be feeling it, too, it was like she was fucking the room as she shoved the shotgun in, or the room was fucking her, deeper and deeper, it was savage and delicious, and the thought came to her as though out of nowhere, this is it, it’s never going to get any better, go for it, take all of it you can, then blast away! Yes, yes, she was gasping, and she reached for the trigger, but as she did so she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and, even as she was coming, what she saw instead of a scene of pure ecstasy was her own ugly puss, puffy with rut, her fat misshapen ass and flabby thighs, and something very alien stabbing her vagina. She whipped it out, mortified and angry, and blasted away her mirrored image, registering, just before she pulled the trigger, a sudden wild panic in her image she didn’t feel in herself.

Was that Waldo’s toothbrush that Lorraine found in the motel bathroom? It was. Also the traces of whiskey in the water glass, the half-full (always the optimist) flask from which it came now tucked in his back pocket. But had Dutch called to warn him? He had not. Their decampment in the old station wagon parked out front had been the bright idea of the gum-smacking charmer in the raggedy cutoffs whom his shotgun-toting spouse had nicknamed Sweet Abandon and whom Waldo, but only to himself, called Sassy Buns. She it was who’d lured him out here to the darkened country club this moonless night because she said her biggest fantasy was to get balled on one of those velvety golf greens, or maybe on all eighteen, a hole at a time, how many corks you got to pop, Pop? Haw. He wasn’t sure yet he’d get to pop one. She was something of a mystery, hard to figure. When he’d poked his finger in one of the gaps in her shorts back at the motel, making some good-natured crack about holing out with a clean stroke, she’d leapt off the bed, yelling: “Hey, I came for the high, man! What are you, some kind of sex maniac?” “Naw, only when I’m awake,” he’d said with a sad grin, and she’d laughed at that and snapped her gum and picked her shirt up off the floor, her handsome bare tits, dusted with spilled coke which he’d hoped to snort directly therefrom, bouncing freely, and said: “This dump sucks, come on, let’s split!” When he’d told her he was disappointed, he’d sort of hoped to get laid, she’d said, all right, no problem, and told him about her fantasy which had to do with an early sex experience with a caddy. Or did she say, her daddy? Never mind, here they were, approaching the first green, and he felt in good form even if wick dipping in the wild was not his wont. “What’s par for this hole?” she asked. “Four,” he said. “With a good drive and a bit of luck you can be on the green in two.” As a rule, he counted himself lucky if he was on in five with nothing worse than a pair of putts to go. But if he was going to have to go the round, he wanted to keep his strokes to a minimum. “Have you ever noticed,” she said, “how the first holes on golf courses are always the easiest and most inviting? It’s like the first stages of puberty when it’s all just a lark. Only after you’ve left the clubhouse far behind do you realize, led on by the easy openers, what you’ve got yourself into.” Waldo paused and unscrewed the cap of his hip flask, took a hit, and contemplated this pale half-naked waif skipping down the fairway in the darkness before him. She wasn’t exactly what she’d seemed. “Do you sometimes wish you’d stayed back in the clubhouse?” he called out. She turned around. He could just barely see her nipples, black pinpoints on her narrow chest. He couldn’t tell if she was smiling or not. “Oh no. But sometimes I wish the people I was out on the course with had a better sense of how the game was played.” He supposed that was a dig, like many he’d heard before, but what he said, trying to revive her fantasy and his plainer hopes (he hadn’t been around one of this sort in a long while and he wasn’t sure he could handle it), was, “I know what you mean, baby, a big driver might separate the pro from the duffer, but the game’s won or lost around the greens.” “What separates the pro from the duffer,” she said, “is knowing how to change your stroke when the old stroke fails. And how to find your balls again when they’re lost in the rough.” She laughed, sounding more like her old sassy self, and added: “Drop your pants.” “Hunh?” “Come on, old man, you wanted it so bad, let’s get to it!” She stripped off her own shorts, kicked them away. “Your lie!” She was beautiful but he couldn’t see much: a kind of ghostly cartoon cutout with two dots on the chest and a black patch down in the middle. Instead of green and hole, though, he was thinking sandtrap. Nevertheless, he worked his shoes off, moved the flask to his breast pocket, lowered his pants and drawers, and stepped out of them. He didn’t know if she could see how things stood with him, but if she could she had to be impressed. “Okay,” she laughed, “catch me if you can!” And she turned those saucy cheeks by which he’d christened her and was off and running down the open fairway. Not too fast. More like a glowing hop, skip, and, if he ever caught her, a jump. She looked like a flitting moth, rare and tender and just aching to be pinned, as they used to say back in the old chapter room, and with his trusty one-eyed scout pointing the way, Brother Waldo, yawhawing boldly in the hollow night, went galumphing after.

One-eyed Trevor, home alone and still monstrously hungover, his bloodshot good eye nearly as blind as his bad, sat huddled over his actuarial charts, searching for some sort of reassuring pattern, a set of probabilities he could count on, but it was like trying to read underwater. Nothing stood still, everything flowed into everything else, it was making him nauseated, or rather, more nauseated than he already was. When Alf dropped him off on his way to the hospital, the first thing he’d done was wolf down half a box of brown sugar, he didn’t know why, it just tasted good. Then he’d swallowed some aspirin and antacids with cold coffee and rinsed out with mouthwash and sat down with his volatile actuarial charts to wait for Marge to come home. That image of the fluttering moth that had occurred to Waldo would have applied as well to Trevor’s headachy experience of the points on his charts: not only John’s wife’s now (he couldn’t even find hers), they were all dancing capriciously all over the charts, sometimes flying right off the page, other times sinking like stones or bloating like spilled ink. He tried to trace his way, step-by-step, back to the source of his despair, and though it hurt him to think at all, never mind in any systematic way, it seemed to him that the root cause of it all was his clandestine pursuit of the photographer’s clandestine pursuit of John’s wife. A whimsical and innocent game at first, it had become an unconscionable obsession, having little to do with pursued or pursuer, but all to do with himself. The buried treasure he had sought to uncover was his own sick soul. It was horrible. He could hardly bear to sit in the same room with himself. Where was Marge now that he needed her? Marge—? The question finally penetrated his miserable self-absorption. She’d left the barbecue early, begged him to go with her, he’d been in no mood to caddy for her while she worked off her temper, had scornfully refused. She was obviously in pain. How could he have been so insensitive? And where was she now? It was the middle of the night! Good heavens! Something must have happened! He was suddenly on his feet, wobbly as he was, and out the door. Trevor hated driving by night even more than by day, but he had no choice, he had to find Marge. His sudden anxiety made him tremble so, he could hardly get the key into the ignition, but at the same time he felt energized, strong (maybe it was the brown sugar), and ready for come what may. He headed straight for the country club, hunched over the wheel, to see if her car was still there, and come what did, before he reached the turn-in, was that girl from the barbecue who’d been excited by his eyepatch. She was standing on the road that ran alongside the course with her shirt over her shoulder, a bundle under her arm, and her thumb out, radiantly aglow in the beams of his headlamps. The excitement her excitement had engendered had long since left him along with his barbecue supper, but she was, as he was, alone in the night, so what could he do? Though it gave him a strange feeling, as if he were being willed by his action, not willing it, he swerved to a stop to let her in. “Hey, look who’s here!” she laughed. “My knight in the shining eyepatch!” She kissed him on his cheek, her bare breast brushing his arm, and the car stalled, then he flooded it. “So what’re you doing out here, big time? I was afraid for a minute you were going to run me down! Have you been following me?” “Oh no, no! I, uh—my wife! She hasn’t come home and—!” “Your wife? You didn’t tell me you were married—well, but what does it matter, right?” She popped her gum and gave his thigh a squeeze. “Anyway, you won’t find anybody in their right mind out here, man. Nothing but chiggers and spiders and gross crawly things. It’s the pits!” She brushed off her breasts, her legs, peered inside the waistband of her raggedy shorts, an expression on her face of mild annoyance, or else (it was familiar somehow) of placid consent. “Some old drunk dragged me out here and tried to rape me—you know, the make-out-or-get-out kind—I had to run away. It was awful! I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t come along!” She snuggled closer, stuck her gum under the dashboard, laid her head on his shoulder. “Hey, I don’t mind if you were following me,” she murmured. “Really. I’m flattered that a cool guy like you would even be interested.” She reached up and nibbled at his ear. He had the strange sensation that she was reminding him of something he’d forgotten. Or that she was correcting a flaw in his computations: something certainly was shifting. “I’ve got the key to a motel room in this bozo’s pants,” she whispered. “Wanna go?” “Well, I, uh, never…” “You don’t like me—?” “Oh no, I do! But—” “Don’t worry, then. I know how to show a guy a good time, honest, just give me a chance.” Her tongue was in his ear and her hand inside his shirt. Her bare leg crossed his thighs and nudged between them like an eraser scrubbing away an error. “But what?” she breathed. “Tell me, killer. You never what?” He hesitated, closing his good eye. “I have never,” he confessed softly, feeling everything come round for him at last (perhaps he had followed her out here!), “I have never … known delight…”

As for John’s erstwhile troubleshooter, who had so known but who had always, successful businesswoman that she was, given more than she had received, the gumpopping hitchhiker’s disparaging judgment upon the local country club applied equally to this whole pig’s ear of a town, Nevada having come round to Bruce’s bitter take on his friend’s backwater fiefdom: a living nightmare. It was, the pits, a house of horrors. Where the hideous crawly things were the deadbeats who lived here. Nobody in their right mind, like the lady said. Nevada rolled along through the creepy half-lit streets, empty but for a stray dog or two, a car crossing several blocks up, a distant siren. She felt like she was touring the land of the dead or a wax museum after hours. Remote shimmerings of heat lightning stirred memories of her white-whiskered granddad’s apocalyptic fantasies. It was time for her to blow this sick scene once and for all before it fucked her mind completely, which was what she was going to tell Rex when she saw him. She’d like him to come along, meal ticket on her, but if not, not. She’d gone out to his motel, nobody in, though his car was there. Out jogging maybe. She’d made herself at home, put on some music to beat back the silence, worked out a bit with his weights, but in the end the emptiness had spooked her, so she’d hit the road again, looking for lights. Downtown was dead, she cruised the strips, feeling oddly panicky whenever the darkness welled up around her. Her hotel out on the interstate was full of John’s friends, down for the holiday, even her own suite was being used, couldn’t go there without getting sucked into bad shit. She drifted past the malls, where the young were buzzing around restlessly like flies on dung, having no one to take their anger out on except each other. There were a few cars dragracing in the mostly empty parking lots, tires squealing. She heard a bottle break hollowly: the sound of her own empty fantasies gone bust, she thought. But what could she have done? She’d got caught between two old pals, playing rough. She’d grabbed what she could while she could and now it was time to turn the page. She had met John out at the airport after sending him the note, supposing she’d be invited along, but after he’d got out of her what he wanted, he’d told her in effect to go fuck herself, looking down his broken nose at her like a lord at his dirty kitchenmaid. Something he had to do himself, he’d said. He’d seemed suspicious: did he know about the signed agreements Bruce was leaving behind for her? Well, what if he did, fuck-all he could do about it, they’d be partners now in effect, and if he didn’t like it he could shove it up his royal wazoo. That was how Nevada had put it to herself, glaring at his back as he’d crawled up into the cabin, but she’d been crying when he took off without her. Like that old bluesy song Rex so loved: Goodbye, good times… The tears had dried now but she was still feeling wasted and strung out, so she decided to make a pit stop at an all-night drugstore where she had a friendly connection. Just as she was pulling in, though, that steely black Porsche she knew so well went rocketing past, horn blaring and brights ablaze, announcing: look out, buttheads! this is an emergency! John? He’d found them? Her heart was in her throat as she leapt back in her car. What now—?!

No, Clarissa: going nowhere, anywhere, ready for come what may, as she’d been ready all day, or so she’d thought, for come what didn’t. Betrayed! Not just by two-faced Jennifer, but by Bruce and Nevada, too! Those shits! She could never forgive either of them. Her only real friends! Or so they’d seemed: she’d been suckered yet again by her infantile trust of others. When was she going to grow up? She spun up onto the interstate and, burning rubber as she accelerated, went barreling down the open highway in her daddy’s blazing saddle, as he called it, daring anyone or anything to get in her way. She watched the speedometer rise past 140, but she felt like she was sitting still, not moving at all. Signs, cars and trucks, light poles whipped past as though under their own power: it was the sensation she used to get on merry-go-rounds and rollercoasters, the world going into a wild spin while she sat anchored at the center of stillness. She slowed and a sense of her own motion came back to her. A bird caromed off the windshield, startling her, and she cut her speed even more, took the next exit ramp, looped around, and headed back toward town, see who’s hanging at the mall, a rock station at full blast, fanfaring her coming. She wanted to hit somebody or rape them or tear their eyes out or something, she didn’t know what she wanted. She found the usual crowd. More of them outside than in, that kind of night. The Porsche impressed them. They passed around some grass cut with angel dust or smack or both, a vague blend of pass-me-downs, that did nothing to soften the implacable fury that gripped her mortified heart. A couple of the girls had stripped off their tops, and Clarissa did, too. A guy with his shirt off said, “Let’s walk through the mall like this and see if they throw us out,” and she told him to fuck off. Kid stuff. Mall-rat Mickey Mouse. She’d always loved this mall, ever since her dad brought her here on her seventh birthday, just after he’d built it. A day in her memory when the sun shone as though for her alone. It was magic and it was hers. Now the magic had suddenly left it, like when somebody dies and leaves nothing but a cold clammy body. These scuzzy candy-butts were spoiling it. When a girl asked where Jen was, Clarissa snapped: “She’s dead, man. Gone. Forget her.” “Really—?!” They wanted to know more, but Clarissa had nothing to add. These assholes were getting on her nerves. She felt surrounded by flesh-eating aliens and it was making her want to throw up. Even the light was weird. As often in moments like this, when she felt completely alone in a scumbag world, Clarissa asked herself, what would Marie-Claire do next? Her destiny: whatever it was, let it come. The guys started pressing her to give them a ride, suggesting in their dork-brained way that they wanted more than one kind, so she said: “Okay, show me what you got, I only go with the biggest.” “Got?” “In your pants, stupid. Haul it out. Let’s measure up.” The girls were giggling with their heads down like they’d just seen someone poop themselves. “Lay them out on the hood there, if you can find them. The longest gets a ride he won’t forget.” A couple of the bigger boys unzipped, but the others started backing off, the wimps. One of them asked if she even had her license yet, and she heard someone say she was so ripped a ride with her was like a one-way ticket to nowhere. The class nerd mooned her, his mashed-potato ass being the only joke he knew, but not close enough for her to stub her roach out on it. So she flicked it in its general direction, gave them all the finger, and gunned it out of there, tires screaming in her behalf.

The class nerd was not alone in assisting the heavens on this moonless night, others including Clarissa’s father’s Assistant Vice President in Charge of Sales and his clairaudient but troubled helpmeet, as well as the motelkeeper, her father’s old battery mate, who’d caught it (his destiny) but good, and at this moment lay mooning the indifferent world in the very room serially occupied so recently by the other two, though now it was his alone. He had just knocked the telephone over and was groping for it with his left hand, finding it oddly elusive even though he knew just where it was. As he knew where everything was, it was all quite clear to him, Dutch felt perfectly sound, composed and carefree, a bit bored if anything, and he seriously considered simply locking up for the night and sorting things out in the morning. At the same time he knew he was dying. He could see himself lying there in the shattered glass, fatally wounded, fumbling for a fallen phone which, when dragged to his ear, turned out to be dead. Poor bastard, he mused. Pity he had to check out in such undignified circumstances. Of course, Dutch thought (always thinking), he could still use the two-way radio the police chief had given him. If—big if—he could reach his back pocket, now somewhere down around his ankles. Which were miles away in some other room. He could hear someone frantically rattling the door. Probably Waldo’s old lady wanting back in to get her pants back. Could he go over and open it up for her? He couldn’t, right though he was about it being under-clad Lorraine. She’d fled the room in abject terror (her impression was of someone exploding bloodily right through the mirror), then had thought better of it, but the door had snapped shut behind her and locked her out. She shook it and shouldered it and kicked it, but no dice. And no help from within. She raced for her car, tugging her shirt down as she ran, feeling dreadfully exposed, but the old wagon wasn’t there! Someone must have stolen it! Oh my God! She ducked into the scraggly bushes at the edge of the lot; her thighs were wet and it felt like someone with icy breath was breathing on them. No one around, though, or she’d know it. She did pick up something like a fuzzy overview as if from a low-flying plane (she glanced up into the empty sky), but it didn’t seem quite human, whatever it was, her own imagination maybe, all atingle as it was, as was her bare ass also. She was crouched there, drying her thighs and tears with her shirttails and meditating on the awesome vicissitudes of death, wisdom, and paradox (her destined lot), when it occurred to her that there might be a spare room key at the reception desk. So she crept around to the front, braced herself, leapt into full view from the highway, and threw herself at the double glass doors. But they were locked, too. The scurrilous sonuvabitch must have shut up shop before waddling off to his peepshow. She tried to force them, but felt her backside light up from the passing traffic like a billboard, heard sirens not far away, had to beat a quick retreat. Thus, on opposite edges of the town, both Lorraine and her maiden-chasing spouse found themselves this night in paired plight, let loose in the wild without prospects and in nothing but their shirts, her corkhead hubby, all forlorn, now slashing around in the rough somewhere on the back nine at the country club. He’d been taken in. Not for the first time. He had a gift for it. She whom his wife called one thing, he another, having lured him out here and in here, had, sassily, abandoned him, her pale will-o’-the-wisp buns dancing elusively through the underbrush ahead of him the last sweet glimpse he’d had of light itself. All dark since. Couldn’t see his hand in front of his nose before. Where was he? No idea. Hopelessly lost and getting eaten alive by mosquitos, Waldo was consoled only by his pocket flask, which, though drained dry, he sucked on like a pacifier, in the same way that his wife, when distressed, as now, found solace in nibbling the polish off her nails, or their friend the motelkeeper, who had so recently hosted them both, in scratching his balls. When he, like Adam, had ‘em.

Inconsolable Floyd had also been had, he knew that, no matter what his hopes. The former hardware store manager, recently promoted, though no golfer, had spent most of his life in the rough and, after being granted a glimpse of the green, was getting kicked back into it as sure as candy turned to shit. Far from mooning the world (Floyd was a private man whom even Edna rarely saw in a state of nature), he was still wearing his fancy new beige business suit, checked shirt, and two-toned shoes, though the knees and elbows of the suit were stained, the shirt unbuttoned, bootlace tie hanging loose, shoes caked with beery mud. He knew he’d overprided himself and, first thing he’d got home, in penance for his sins of vanity and presumption, he’d shaved the fuzz off his upper lip, and then he’d knelt to pray; but no prayer came out, a curse more like. It was all gone. He was still clutching at the impossible dream John had put in his battered old head, thinking it might somehow still come out all right, but he knew in his gut it wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Which just wasn’t rightful. He’d sincerely tried, Floyd had. He’d spent a dozen years as a rich man’s ass-kissing flunky, treated no better than a blesséd pinboy, teaching God’s word to the spoiled brats of the town, playing all the stupid games they played, and now, with the sudden resurfacing of a past he no longer recognized as his own (his eye was on eternal salvation, the Risen Son, God’s grace and bounty, not some hairless tattooed pussy in Santa Fe, for Christ’s sake), it was as though these dozen years had never happened, or had happened in a dream. Predestination: you had to take it seriously. He packed a couple of bags and told Edna, who sat slumped on the old sofa looking like something found at the back of the fridge, an unwrapped porcelain lamp in a box at her feet, not to worry none but he might have to go off on a business trip soon, though he didn’t know how soon or for how long. Meanwhile, though, he did require a new car, and maybe right away, so he rang up old Stu, hoping it wasn’t too late; but it was his fat profligate wife who answered, mumbling boozily over and over that Stu had something he had to do out at the garage, one of his trucks had been stole or something, he’d be here soon. Finally nothing for it but to shoot out there, just in case, though Floyd figured Stu was probably shacked up somewheres, for which, though on principle he disapproved, Floyd couldn’t blame him. No big surprise, then, to find the place dark. Completely. Even the all-night floods over the car lot were out, the only light coming from the distant flickering of heat lightning on the western horizon. Under the circumstances, Floyd reckoned, borrowing a car might be better than buying one, Stu would understand, and if everything worked out okay he’d bring it back later in the week. So he tried the office door, found it open, pushed on in, and stove his toe on something that turned out to be old Stu hisself. Uh-oh. Just rolled a gutter ball. No time to look for keys to a new model—he could hear the distant wail of approaching sirens—but Stu did have a handgun in his fist that he no longer needed, so Floyd took that and tore ass out of there.

All this business with guns. Columbia disapproved. Guns were important to the nation, you never saw a pioneer without one, but, though it was almost unpatriotic to say so, those wild romantic days were over. You didn’t have to shoot Indians anymore, if they did bad things you could just electrocute them. It was one thing she’d learned from her father: people kill, not guns, granted, but guns make it too easy, maybe even too much fun. If it weren’t for guns, poor Yale would be with them still, though that was war and maybe it wasn’t a fair argument. She used it, though, just the same, in her desperate effort to dissuade her overheated sister-in-law from arming herself and taking the law into her own hands. Lumby was exhausted and just couldn’t take much more. It had been a very long day, or week, or whatever it was, she’d lost all track. Her white uniform was filthy and patchy with sweat, her hair damp and stringy, her feet were sore, and she couldn’t remember when she’d bathed last, or even washed properly. And all because of her cretinous little brother, who definitely wasn’t worth it, but you couldn’t tell Gretchen that. How could she love such a dumb jerk so? Well, maybe she didn’t, but she loved something, and Corny stood for it, so it was the same as loving him. For Lumby it was much easier, she loved Gretchen plain and simple, and so stuck by her no matter what craziness her jealousy got her into, though there had been times in this punishing odyssey when her mind, dragged down by a protesting body, had loved less than her heart did. The pattern had been the same, over and over: her strenuous attempts to restrain her sister-in-law thwarted sooner or later by Gretchen throwing herself, blind and lame, into the fray, leaving Lumby to extricate her and defend her from counterattacks, often at great hazard to her own vulnerable person. None of which Gretchen, in her madness, seemed to appreciate. She probably couldn’t even see the blows that Lumby took on her behalf, but even if she did or could infer them, it didn’t seem to matter to her: all she cared about was getting Corny back. And, clearly, she would kill to do that. So, when Gretchen had been rejected as a volunteer for the police posse (what a relief!) and had decided therefore to arm herself (oh no!) with Harvie’s old hunting rifle and/or Yale’s army revolver, both kept in the pharmacy storeroom because her father refused to have them in the house where the children were, Lumby had feared the worst: Gretchen, myopic and rabid as she was, might shoot at anything that moved, including the mayor and the police chief, and Corny was too stupid to stay out of the crossfire, all those children would be left fatherless, whether or not they noticed the change, and once the bullets started to fly they might all get killed. Guns were like that. It was almost too terrible to contemplate. Since Gretchen wouldn’t listen to her and she had run out of arguments, Lumby’s only recourse was somehow—though she hadn’t the least idea how the wicked gizmos worked—to sabotage them, even if that made Gretchen mad at her for a time. So, though ready to drop, Columbia dogged Gretchen’s heels, prepared to do whatever she had to do to save all their lives, or at least the life of the one she loved. But as they approached the drugstore, Columbia saw that there were lights on and told Gretchen so: a break-in! She tried to hold Gretchen back but that woman, once set on a course, could not be stayed: she clumped heavily right on down the street, through the door, and up to the video game machine where Cornell was hunched forward, nose to the screen, his head looking a bit squashed in but otherwise her useless dimwit brother, same as ever (to collapsing Columbia he was a beautiful sight), slapped him fiercely about the ears and shoulders, and hauled him away, asking Lumby to close up the store for her, she was taking her wayward husband home and locking him in his room for a week as punishment for all the grief he’d caused them, chasing after a shameless jezebel like that. He didn’t resist, though he seemed to have no idea what she was talking about, which was to say, numskull Corny as usual. Columbia pushed the door shut behind them, double-locked, turned off the lights, and, finger still on the switch, fell asleep in her tracks there where she stood.

Columbia’s view of guns as wicked gizmos was not shared by the town police chief, but he did not romanticize them either, nor did he even use them for sport, and he wished, as Oxford and his daughter did, that there were fewer of them around. For Otis, guns were merely tools of his trade, deterrents against disorder, protectors of life, liberty, and property, and necessary weapons in the eternal struggle between Good and Evil. When he thought of the Good, he thought of the Virgin and her terrible vulnerability, the image that had made a soldier and lawman of him, and on his way out to the airport to meet with Mayor Snuffy and the boys, Otis had the officer behind the wheel stop by the church so he could drop in to ask the Virgin for strength and guidance. She told him he had a long hard night ahead of him (he already knew that) and asked him if his heart was pure. He said he thought it was but those photographs bothered him somewhat. She reminded him that he had taken them as material evidence and that examining them was therefore part of his sworn duty, but that if he was improperly aroused by them he should think of her and her great suffering and of her loneliness. Otis was kneeling before her and she seemed to place her soft hand on the back of his neck for a healing moment, which he understood without understanding, likewise this whole tender conversation with something made of—what? plaster of Paris probably, or the stuff they made dolls out of. The cold shiny feet of which he reverentially kissed, and then, Pauline’s monumental thighs crowding into his thoughts like a kind of mental avalanche, he hastily crossed himself and withdrew. Back in the squad car, Pauline’s Daddy Duwayne, manacled in the backseat beside him, cackled wheezily and asked what it felt like to give communion to all seven scarlet-tongued heads of the Great Whore of Babylon at once, and Otis whacked him up the head with the flat side of his revolver, knocking his baseball hat off as his ugly nut bounced against the window, which was another use of his occupational tool. It was the providing of such tools to those members of the newly deputized posse who had no weapons of their own that was the purpose of meeting at the airport before the general rendezvous at the Country Tavern: the mayor, who until recently had worked there, had the keys to John’s gun cabinet and permission to use the arms at any time for the defense of the municipal air facility, of which the hunting down of the two bandits, who for a time had trespassed illegally on airport property, was considered an extension. When they pulled in, they found the young mechanic from the Ford-Mercury garage already there, though in the dark, fumbling with the locked door and startled by their arrival, as though he thought they might be the bandits catching him from behind. A case of mistaken identity, everybody was a bit jumpy, they laughed it off. “Ah, there it is, I been looking for it,” Snuffy said, taking the mechanic’s rifle, then handing it back. “You might as well keep it, son. You’re gonna need it. Now, let’s get this goddamned ballgame underway.” The mayor led the way in with his key ring; passed out the weapons; then, cranking up into his old half-time mode, said that nobody’d ever handed nothing on a platter to this town, they didn’t have no mountains or oceans, lakes or gold mines or rivers, everything that was here had got made by oldtime hustle and grit and teamwork, and the job this team had to do tonight was take out a couple of dangerous elements that threatened a quality of life here which had required more than a century to knock into shape. So everybody should stay on their toes and knuckle down and brace up for a long, hard, and bruising night. We gotta dig in and pop them suckers, boys, he said, before they pop us! There ain’t no runners-up when it’s do or die! Otis informed them that the two killers were holed out in Settler’s Woods back of the motel and they were all going to join up now with the others at the Country Tavern, where he’d lay out the strategy for the rest of the search. Some of them wanted to know just how big Pauline really was, so Otis asked the young golf pro, who’d had a good look, to give them all a description of what he’d seen, but since it had to do with Pauline taking a stupendous crap and that fellow was something of a joker who liked to act out his stories, Otis had to turn him off (he was just lowering his pansy-yellow pants) before his hunting party turned into some other kind. His recruits were a bunch of cockeyed goofballs for the most part, Otis knew that, he shouldn’t be putting guns in the hands of any of them, except for his own boys, his old coach, the garage mechanic maybe (he sure as hell wished John was here), but what could he do? Like his old commanding officer used to say: A man can’t choose his own emergencies.

A lesson that Trevor the accountant was learning, for though he had no one to blame but himself for where he was (this irrational pursuit of a phantom called delight, he must be mad!), what he discovered there was not of his doing, nor could he have foreseen it. His emergency was this: finding himself, a respected middle-aged accountant, married, alone in a motel room with a young girl in raggedy shorts whose name he didn’t even know and, lying on the floor in his own blood, a wounded man, more or less naked and possibly dead, a gun on the bed and clothing scattered about, ambulance and police cars pulling up outside, sirens screaming. “Gosh, I’m so scared!” gasped the girl, dropping what she was carrying and throwing herself into Trevor’s arms, the bare arms around his neck frightening him nearly as much as the body on the floor or the red and blue lights flashing against the window blinds. “Thank goodness I’m with someone who knows what to do in situations like this!” Trevor’s knees had turned to butter, his brains too, and he had to bite his cheeks to keep from crying. “You’re so cool, man! Just grinning like that!” The police were hammering on the door. “Hey! Who’s in there? What’s going on? Open up!” “Don’t let them know I’m here!” the girl cried, and grabbing up an armful of clothing again, she ducked into the bathroom, blowing him a last-second kiss, just as the door exploded inward and men in white jackets, others in gray and blue, some with their pistols drawn, came crashing into the room. “There he is!” The butter melted and he sank to the floor, but was soon hauled, roughly, to his feet again. “Shoot him if he moves!” “That your shotgun, killer?” “No!” he whimpered, as something hard and pointy bruised his ribs. “Ow!” His bladder gave way and a wet warmth spread to his knees. “It’s—it’s all a mistake! She—!” “She—? She, who?” “Wait a minute. Ain’t that John’s business manager?” “Trevor—?! What the hell are you doing here?” “I-I’m not, I don’t, it’s not what it—a client!” he gasped, churning up the head butter. “What—?!” “He, you know, a p-policy! Insurance! I, uh, I had to—!” “You’re tellin’ me you’re here to service a fucking insurance policy—?!” “I hope for old Dutch’s sake it’s a good one,” grunted one of the ambulance men lifting the motelkeeper onto a stretcher. “The poor bastard’s had the best part of him blown clean away!” “Yeah, pretty much tore his right hand off, too!” “Is he alive?” “Barely. He’s lost buckets.” “Lucky he had that two-way radio Otis give him, what with all the phonelines around here took out.” “Hey, this broken glass is weird! Look! One side’s like a mirror, but the other—” “Hold on, whose purple pants are these? These fruitbags yours, buddy?” “No!” “Anything in the pockets?” “Some golf tees. Keys. A pack of rubbers. No, wait! A billfold! Well, I’ll be goddamned!” “Who is it?” “These here are old Waldo’s pants!” “Jesus, you think he left without them?” “If he did, he shouldn’t be hard to find.” “Shit, John’s not gonna like this!” “No, but just the same we’ll have to get a warrant out.” “Yeah, well, later. We’re due over at the Tavern. Otis will be pissed if we don’t hustle our butts over there.” “What about all this shit?” “Grab it up and bring it along!” “Trevor, we oughta lock you up but we don’t have time. So, you go home and stay outa trouble now, goddamn it, and we’ll talk to you tomorrow, you hear?” He nodded bleakly, feeling the nausea rise again, and then he was alone in his wet pants on a bloodstained floor littered with broken mirror fragments, staring into the messy darkness of the little room beyond, which seemed to be reflecting his own dark messiness within. Alone, but not for long. Marge’s friend Lorraine poked her head around the door, then jumped inside and slapped the door shut with her hips. “Don’t look!” she shrieked, and only then did it register on him that she was wearing nothing but a shirt, tails tugged down between her thighs with both hands. She glanced around wildly, then loped leggily into the bathroom, high-stepping through the broken glass. “No! Stop!” he cried, but too late. Would this folly never end? He stumbled over, abashed, to explain what was beyond explanation, but when he looked there was no one in there but red-faced Lorraine, tying a towel on and screaming at him that he was a sick voyeuristic pervert, get the hell out! What was worse, she was right. She threw a toilet plunger at him and everything went black. Had he gone blind in the other eye as well? If so, so be it. Trevor had seen about all he ever wanted to see.

The Artist? The Model? Both gone, like vision itself: mere memories, and so illusions. His desire to see has cost him his sight. Blind in both eyes, and so pitiable, he gropes, utterly alone, through the pitch-black night in a forest he cannot even be sure is a forest, only his memory and his reason suggest this to him. That ever-deceptive memory. That foolish reason that led him into this doomed project in the first place. Who was he to use another to try to see into himself? Who was he to intrude upon Art’s sacred domain? Of course, if Art, as the Model suggested, is not the contemplation of beauty, but the encounter with its absence, then he should, encountering absence in its utmost purity, be in ecstasy, but he is not. Black on black is a metaphor, perhaps even a beautiful one, but it is not Art. But why blind? You may well ask. Probably it’s an allegorical blindness, curable only by allegorical means. No, I’m sick of all that. Then my fate is sealed, and your commitment to allegory is complete. Nonsense. Why can’t I simply restore your sight? There, you see? you have it back. No, sadly, I do not. Some things you can do, some you cannot. I don’t understand. Nor I: we are both intruders here. Tell me, then, what you in your blindness see. I see the fire raging through the forest. I thought I knew what it meant, but now I don’t. There was a fire, then? There might have been. If so, I think it expressed the terror of a world devoid of Art. Or of the void of Art? Who can say? What vanished was the Real. No, its mere Model: the Real remains, as you yourself, blind within it, must surely know. All I know is the unseen fire’s power to consume all in its path. In that respect it’s much like time, and so may represent a simpler terror. Against which Art stands. So you say; show me it. Alas, I lack the gift to do so, though I believe it to be so, and have had a glimpse, I think: There was a stone once, in the stream … But now it too is gone, the stream as well perhaps. What then can you do for me, left sightless and alone in this bleak forest, torched by your own uncertainties? Can you lead me out? Of course: give me your hand. Here: it is your own. Ah. Yes. As I feared. We cannot leave here then. No. The endless night to which you are condemned is mine as well? It is.

Waldo, so condemned, or so it seemed, and as blind as Ellsworth’s Stalker (couldn’t see a fucking thing), crashed ponderously through the thorny undergrowth, not in hopes of escaping it, but in desperate flight from the mosquitos that swarmed upon him whenever he stood still. “When the going gets tough,” he cried out into the empty black night, as he staggered through what felt like the gnarled claws of old hags, grasping vindictively at the offending flesh he now so liberally offered them, “the roughs get rougher!” But was Waldo, thus clawed and bit, repentant? No, if those radiant buns should reappear, he’d chase them all over again, but not to do them harm, oh no, prince of a fellow that he was, his heart was big and full of love, and life, so short, was sweet or else was wasted. Waldo paused to suck at the empty flask and the mosquitos whined around him. Had he heard something? Yes, a distant growling roar, not unlike a power mower. Hah! Kevin always said he liked to do the fairways at night! Rescue was at hand! Waldo plunged toward the sound like a castaway striding through heavy surf toward an unseen shore, and in due time stepped out upon a fairway. Ah! His bare toes reveled in the grassy carpet, giving him a pleasure comparable to a good massage, or the relief one’s buttocks felt when a paddling ended, fond memory of the fraternal past. He followed the sound of the motor down the fairway, toward which green he had no idea, nor had he any preference, confident old Kev would have a bottle out here with him, good scout that he was, and wondering only why he saw no light. Naught but a remote flicker of heat lightning in the west like a reminder that not all lands were lightless. But then was Kevin mowing in the dark? He was not, nor was it Kevin. It was (Waldo padded softly upon the spongy green, leaned close to make out the horsey bare-legged creature sprawled athwart the hole) old Mad Marge snoring! Christ, what a cannonade! Poor Triv had to live with that? Marge lay upon her back, limbs outflung, still clutching a seven-iron in one fist, jaw slack and vibrating with her resounding snores, her blouse open and skirt rolled up around her waist, flag tossed aside, the ball in the hole between her powerful thighs as though she’d shat it there. Imagining remarks to some such effect that he might mockingly make (and others that she might make to mock in turn his unadorned and inert condition, but what the hell, company was company), he gave her a firm barefooted kick in the side of her rump, but she didn’t even lose a beat in her steady drum-fire barrage, nor did successive kicks do the trick: Sleeping Beauty was utterly elsewhere, her big-boned bod abandoned. Well, well. He drew a putter out of her dropped bag, a pair of balls as well, which he tossed down at the edge of the green, facing her open fork, faintly illumined by the occasional glimmerings from the west. “Fore!” he hollered into the hollow night and crisply stroked the first: he could hear it as it whispered across the green, rattled around in her thighs like a roulette ball, and dropped—k-plunk!—into the hole. The second made a clocking sound, then bounced back out again like a pinball ejected from a scoring dimple. He went over to pick it up and to pluck the two from out the hole. His hand brushed her pantied crotch while reaching in and felt something rippling behind the cloth like a scurrying mouse. Curious, he pushed to one side the narrow strip of reinforced fabric and lost his fingers to wet fleshy lips that hotly sucked them in. Hey! Wow! Everything was on the move in there! That sucker was alive! And still she thundered on, lost to this world and to all others, her sonorous concert interrupted only when, with effort, he popped his ruminated fingers out. “John—?” she gasped. Waldo, reprising his famous Long John impersonation, rumbled: “Yeah, baby, I love ya,” and his Sarge Marge phobia momentarily overcome and putter cast aside, he leaned forward to work his wedgie in where his trailblazing fingers had gone before. Her raking snores returned as though to sanction his—yowee!—brave endeavors. From which no quick retreat: her limbs snapped round him and—woops!—clapped him to his task! Love: oh shit, it’s—hang on!—a real adventure!

Love as an adventure was not one of the subtopics of Reverend Lenny’s sermon-in-progress, but perhaps only because he had not yet thought of it, for love in the larger sense, he’d decided, watching his wife Trixie feed the new baby by candlelight (the power had gone out, not just in the manse, the whole block seemed dark), was to be its central theme. The love of one’s fellows and maternal and marital love and love as the ultimate sanctuary and love as a miracle and as the true source of all meaning, or at least such as we’re granted in this paradox-ridden universe of ours, bereft of certainties as it was. In the expression “I love you,” neither subject nor object could be identified or be proven to exist, only the verb was beyond dispute, the only indispensable verb in the language perhaps, centering all others. The event that had brought all his scattered thoughts to focus was the birth, in a spectacle of birth, of his spectacular son. Were there comic aspects to his abrupt arrival on this lonely planet? Well, so much the better, for such was the nature of the human condition within which it participated, Lenny’s theme embracing as well the cosmic joke of love. “But where, then, is the center?” Beatrice had mysteriously asked earlier (she did not now remember this and he but barely did; fortunately, as he was doing now, he’d taken notes), and the answer was: in love as incarnated in their little Adam, so named by Beatrice in awe, not shared by Lennox, of his conception, which she associated with a fugue by Bach. “It was like all the organ pipes had got stuffed up inside me, one by one,” she said, “each one resonating with its own special pitch and tone, filling me up with such ecstatic music I almost couldn’t stand it!” Mind, spirit, and body as a musical instrument, love as the well-struck chord: he took a note by the flickering candle (it felt like the world had emptied itself out, even his other children had been swallowed up by the night, and only they three remained, huddled around the last of the light like the nucleus of a new adventure: yes, he was thinking now about the adventure of love), while Beatrice, giving breast, quietly chatted away. “Look at his pretty little mouth, Lenny, how it curls around my nipple, he’s not just sucking at it, he’s licking it, nosing it, playing with it, such a sexy little baby! All the time I was carrying him I had the feeling inside me, not of a baby, but of a passionate lover, one who’d found all the places that made me hot but from the inside out: my nipples would suddenly get hard, my throat would flush, my thighs would drip, and all my senses would turn inward and I wouldn’t know where I was! Once he got the hiccups, and I nearly died from pleasure! Where did he come from, Lenny, this strange little boy?” Lenny didn’t know, didn’t care. Things happened. That was not what mattered. What mattered was the message that was being transmitted, a message that was always the same and never the same message twice, easily read, yet impossible to decipher, though the attempt to do so was his life’s work and privilege. “Maybe,” he said, “he came from the desire to resist the indifference of the universe. Maybe we still haven’t settled down, Trixie. Maybe we’re still on the run, still rebelling.” “Oh dear,” she sighed, and hugged the baby. “I hope not.”