Chapter 8
   
On June 18, five hours after he had talked to his cousin Bill Hapscomb, Joe Bob Brentwood pulled down a speeder on Texas Highway 40 about twenty-five miles east of Arnette. The speeder was Harry Trent of Braintree, an insurance man. He had been doing sixty-five miles per in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. Joe Bob gave him a speeding ticket. Trent accepted it humbly and then amused Joe Bob by trying to sell him insurance on his house and his life. Joe Bob felt fine; dying was the last thing on his mind. Nevertheless, he was already a sick man. He had gotten more than gas at Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco. And he gave Harry Trent more than a speeding summons.
   Harry, a gregarious man who liked his job, passed the sickness to more than forty people during that day and the next. How many those forty passed it to is impossible to say—you might as well ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If you were to make a conservative estimate of five apiece, you’d have two hundred. Using the same conservative formula, one could say those two hundred went on to infect a thousand, the thousand five thousand, the five thousand twenty -five thousand.
   Under the California desert and subsidized by the taxpayers’ money, someone had finally invented a chain letter that really worked. A very lethal chain letter.
   On June 19, the day Larry Underwood came home to New York and the day that Frannie Goldsmith told her father about her impending Little Stranger, Harry Trent stopped at an East Texas café called Babe’s Kwik-Eat for lunch. He had the cheeseburger platter and a piece of Babe’s delicious strawberry pie for dessert. He had a slight cold, an allergy cold, maybe, and he kept sneezing and having to spit. In the course of the meal he infected Babe, the dishwasher, two truckers in a corner booth, the man who came in to deliver bread, and the man who came in to change the records on the juke. He left the sweet thang that waited his table a dollar tip that was crawling with death.
   On his way out, a station wagon pulled in. There was a roofrack on top, and the wagon was piled high with kids and luggage. The wagon had New York plates and the driver, who rolled down his window to ask Harry how to get to US 21 going north, had a New York accent. Harry gave the New York fellow very clear directions on how to get to Highway 21. He also served him and his entire family their death-warrants without even knowing it.
   The New Yorker was Edward M. Norris, lieutenant of police, detective squad, in the Big Apple’s 87th Precinct. This was his first real vacation in five years. He and his family had had a fine time. The kids had been in seventh heaven at Disney World in Orlando, and not knowing the whole family would be dead by the second of July, Norris planned to tell that sour sonofabitch Steve Carella that it was possible to take your wife and kids someplace by car and have a good time. Steve, he would say, you may be a fine detective, but a man who can’t police his own family ain’t worth a pisshole drilled in a snowbank.
   The Norris family had a kwik-eat at Babe’s, then followed Harry Trent’s admirable directions to Highway 21. Ed and his wife Trish marveled over southern hospitality while the three kids colored in the back seat. Christ only knew, Ed thought, what Carella’s pair of monsters would have been up to.
   That night they stayed in a Eustace, Oklahoma, travel court. Ed and Trish infected the clerk. The kids, Marsha, Stanley, and Hector, infected the kids they played with on the tourist court’s playground—kids bound for west Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Trish infected the two women who were washing clothes at the Laundromat two blocks away. Ed, on his way down the motel corridor to get some ice, infected a fellow he passed in the hallway. Everybody got into the act.
   Trish woke Ed up in the early morning hours to tell him that Heck, the baby, was sick. He had an ugly, rasping cough and was running a fever. It sounded to her like the croup. Ed Norris groaned and told her to give the kid some aspirin. If the kid’s goddam croup could only have held off another four or five days, he could have had it in his very own house and Ed would have been left with the memory of a perfect vacation (not to mention the anticipation of all that gloating he planned to do). He could hear the poor kid through the connecting door, hacking away like a hound dog.
   Trish expected that Hector’s symptoms would abate in the morning—croup was a lying-down sickness—but by noon of the twentieth, she admitted to herself that it wasn’t happening. The aspirin wasn’t controlling the fever; poor Heck was just glass-eyed with it. His cough had taken on a booming note she didn’t like, and his respiration sounded labored and phlegmy. Whatever it was, Marsha seemed to be coming down with it, too, and Trish had a nasty little tickle in the back of her own throat that was making her cough, although so far it was only a light cough she could smother in a small hankie.
   “We’ve got to get Heck to a doctor,” she said finally.
   Ed pulled into a service station and checked the map paperclipped to the station wagon’s sun-visor. They were in Hammer Crossing, Kansas. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we can at least find a doctor who’ll give us a referral.” He sighed and ran an aggravated hand through his hair. “Hammer Crossing, Kansas! Jesus! Why’d he have to get sick, enough to need a doctor at some goddam nothing place like this?”
   Marsha, who was looking at the map over her father’s shoulder, said: “It says Jesse James robbed the bank here, Daddy. Twice.”
   “Fuck Jesse James,” Ed grumped. “Ed!” Trish cried. “Sorry,” he said, not feeling sorry in the least. He drove on.
   After six calls, during each of which Ed Norris carefully held his temper with both hands, he finally found a doctor in Polliston who would look at Hector if they could get him there by three. Polliston was off their route, twenty miles west of Hammer Crossing, but now the important thing was Hector. Ed was getting very worried about him. He’d never seen the kid with so little oomph in him.
   They were waiting in the outer office of Dr. Brenden Sweeney by two in the afternoon. By then Ed was sneezing, too. Sweeney’s waiting room was full; they didn’t get in to see the doctor until nearly four o’clock. Trish couldn’t rouse Heck to more than a sludgy semiconsciousness, and she felt feverish herself. Only Stan Norris, age nine, still felt good enough to fidget.
   During their wait in Sweeney’s office they communicated the sickness which would soon be known across the disintegrating country as Captain Trips to more than twenty-five people, including a matronly woman who just came in to pay her bill before going on to pass the disease to her entire bridge club.
   This matronly woman was Mrs. Robert Bradford, Sarah Bradford to the bridge club, Cookie to her husband and close friends. Sarah played well that night, possibly because her partner was Angela Dupray, her best friend. They seemed to enjoy a happy kind of telepathy. They won all three rubbers resoundingly, making a grand slam during the last. For Sarah, the only fly in the ointment was that she seemed to be coming down with a slight cold. It wasn’t fair, arriving so soon on the heels of the last one.
   She and Angela went out for a quiet drink in a cocktail bar after the party broke up at ten. Angela was in no hurry to get home. It was David’s turn to have the weekly poker game at their house, and she just wouldn’t be able to sleep with all that noise going on… unless she had a little self-prescribed sedative first, which in her case would be two sloe gin fizzes.
   Sarah had a Ward 8 and the two women rehashed the bridge game. In the meantime they managed to infect everyone in the Polliston cocktail bar, including two young men drinking beer nearby. They were on their way to California—just as Larry Underwood and his friend Rudy Schwartz had once gone—to seek their fortunes. A friend of theirs had promised them jobs with a moving company. The next day they headed west, spreading the disease as they went.
   Chain letters don’t work. It’s a known fact. The million dollars or so you are promised if you’ll just send one single dollar to the name at the top of the list, add yours to the bottom, and then send the letter on to five friends never arrives. This one, the Captain Trips chain letter, worked very well. The pyramid was indeed being built, not from the bottom up but from the tip down—said tip being a deceased army security guard named Charles Campion. All the chickens were coming home to roost. Only instead of the mailman bringing each participant bale after bale of letters, each containing a single dollar bill, Captain Trips brought bales of bedrooms with a body or two in each one, and trenches, and dead-pits, and finally bodies slung into the oceans on each coast and into quarries and into the foundations of unfinished houses. And in the end, of course, the bodies would rot where they fell.
   Sarah Bradford and Angela Dupray walked back to their parked cars together (infecting four or five people they met on the street), then pecked cheeks and went their separate ways. Sarah went home to infect her husband and his five poker buddies and her teenaged daughter, Samantha. Unknown to her parents, Samantha was terribly afraid she had caught a dose of the clap from her boyfriend. As a matter of fact, she had. As a further matter of fact, she had nothing to worry about; next to what her mother had given her, a good working dose of the clap was every bit as serious as a little eczema of the eyebrows.
   The next day Samantha would go on to infect everybody in the swimming pool at the Polliston YWCA.
   And so on.

Chapter 9
   
They set on him sometime after dusk, while he was walking up the shoulder of US Route 27, which was called Main Street a mile back, where it passed through town. A mile or two farther on, he had been planning to turn west on 63, which would have taken him to the turnpike and the start of his long trip north. His senses had been dulled, maybe, by the two beers he had just downed, but he had known something was wrong. He was just getting around to remembering the four or five heavyset townies down at the far end of the bar when they broke cover and ran at him.
   Nick put up the best fight he could, decking one of them and bloodying another’s nose—breaking it, too, by the sound. For one or two hopeful moments he thought there was actually a chance that he might win. The fact that he fought without making any sound at all was unnerving them a little. They were soft, maybe they had done this before with no trouble, and they certainly hadn’t expected a serious fight from this skinny kid with the knapsack.
   Then one of them caught him just over the chin, shredding his lower lip with some sort of a school ring, and the warm taste of blood gushed into his mouth. He stumbled backward and someone pinned his arms. He struggled wildly and got one hand free just as a fist looped down into his face like a runaway moon. Before it closed his right eye, he saw that ring again, glittering dully in the starlight. He saw stars and felt his consciousness start to diffuse, drifting away into parts unknown.
   Scared, he struggled harder. The man wearing the ring was back in front of him now and Nick, afraid of being cut again, kicked him in the belly. School Ring’s breath went out of him and he doubled over, making a series of breathless whoofing sounds, like a terrier with laryngitis.
   The others closed in. To Nick they were only shapes now, beefy men—good old boys, they called themselves—in gray shirts with the sleeves rolled up to show their big sunfreckled biceps. They wore blocky workshoes. Tangles of oily hair fell over their brows. In the last fading light of day all of this began to seem like a malign dream. Blood ran in his open eye. The knapsack was torn from his back. Blows rained down on him and he became a boneless, jittering puppet on a fraying string. Consciousness would not quite desert him. The only sounds were their out-of-breath gasps as they pistoned their fists into him and the liquid twitter of a nightjar in the deep stand of pine close by.
   School Ring had staggered to his feet. “Hold im,” he said. “Hold im by the har.”
   Hands grasped his arms. Somebody else twined both hands into Nick’s springy black hair.
   “Why don’t he yell out?” one of the others asked, agitated. “Why don’t he yell out, Ray?”
   “I tole you not to use any names,” Signet Ring said. “I don’t give a fuck why he don’t yell out. I’m gonna mess im up. Sucker kicked me. Goddam dirty-fighter, that’s what he is.”
   The fist looped down. Nick jerked his head aside and the ring furrowed his cheek.
   “Hold im, I tole you,” Ray said. “What are y’all? Bunch of pussies?”
   The fist looped down again and Nick’s nose became a squashed and dripping tomato. His breath clogged to a snuffle. Consciousness was down to a narrow pencil beam. His mouth dropped open and he scooped in night air. The nightjar sang again, sweet and solus. Nick heard it this time no more than he had the last.
   “Hold im,” Ray said. “Hold im, goddammit.”
   The fist looped down. Two of his front teeth shattered as the school ring snowplowed through them. It was an agony he couldn’t scream about. His legs unhinged and he sagged, held like a grainsack now by the hands behind him.
   “Ray, that’s enough! You wanna kill im?”
   “Hold im. Sucker kicked me. I’m gonna mess im up.” Then lights were splashing down the road, which was bordered here by underbrush and interlaced with huge old pines.
   “Oh, Jesus!”
   “Dump im, dump im!”
   That was Ray’s voice, but Ray was no longer in front of him. Nick was dimly grateful, but most of what little consciousness he had left was taken up with the agony in his mouth. He could taste flecks of his teeth on his tongue.
   Hands pushed him, propelling him out into the center of the road. Oncoming circles of light pinned him there like an actor on a stage. Brakes screamed. Nick pinwheeled his arms and tried to make his legs go but his legs wouldn’t oblige; they had given him up for dead. He collapsed on the composition surface and the screaming sound of brakes and tires filled the world as he waited numbly to be run over. At least it would put an end to the pain in his mouth.
   Then a splatter of pebbles struck his cheek and he was looking at a tire which had come to a stop less than a foot from his face. He could see a small white rock embedded between two of the treads like a coin held between a pair of knuckles.
   Piece of quartz, he thought disjointedly, and passed out.
   When Nick came to, he was lying on a bunk. It was a hard one, but in the last three years or so he had lain on harder. He struggled his eyes open with great effort. They seemed gummed shut and the right one, the one that had been hit by the runaway moon, would only come to halfmast.
   He was looking at a cracked gray cement ceiling. Pipes wrapped in insulation zigzagged beneath it. A large beetle was trundling busily along one of these pipes. Bisecting his field of vision was a chain. He raised his head slightly, sending a monstrous bolt of pain through it, and saw another chain running from the outside foot of the bunk to a bolt in the wall.
   He turned his head to the left (another bolt of pain, this one not so killing) and saw a rough concrete wall. Cracks ran through it. It had been extensively written on. Some of the writing was new, some old, most illiterate. THIS PLACE HAS BUGS. LOUIS DRAGONSKY, 1987. I LIKE IT IN MY ASSHOLE. DTS CAN BE FUN. GEORGE RAMPLING IS A JERK-OFF. I STILL LOVE YOU SUZANNE. THIS PLACE SUX, JERRY. CLYDE D. FRED 1981. There were pictures of large dangling penises, gigantic breasts, crudely drawn vaginas. It all gave Nick a sense of place. He was in a jail cell.
   Carefully, he propped himself on his elbows, let his feet (clad in paper slippers) drop over the edge of the cot, and then swung up to a sitting position. The large economy-size pain rocked his head again and his backbone gave out an alarming creak. His stomach rolled alarmingly in his gut, and a fainting kind of nausea seized him, the most dismaying and unmanning kind, the kind that makes you feel like crying out to God to make it stop.
   Instead of crying out—he couldn’t have done that—Nick leaned over his knees, one hand on each cheek, and waited for it to pass. After a while, it did. He could feel the Band-Aids that had been placed over the furrow on his cheek, and by wrinkling that side of his face a couple of times he decided that some sawbones had sunk a couple of stitches in there for good measure.
   He looked around. He was in a small cell shaped like a Saltine box stood on end. Beyond the end of the cot was a barred door. At the head of the cot was a lidless, ringless toilet. Behind and above him—he saw this by craning his stiff neck very, very carefully—was a small barred window.
   After he had sat on the edge of the cot long enough to feel sure he wasn’t going to pass out, he hooked the shapeless gray pajama pants he was wearing down around his knees, squatted on the can, and urinated for what seemed at least an hour. When he was finished he stood up, holding on to the edge of the cot like an old man. He looked apprehensively into the bowl for signs of blood, but his urine had been clear. He flushed it away.
   He walked carefully over to the barred door and looked out into a short corridor. To his left was the drunk tank. An old man was lying on one of its five bunks, a hand like driftwood dangling on the floor. To the right the corridor ended in a door that was chocked open. In the center of the corridor was a dangling green-shaded light like the kind he had seen in pool-halls.
   A shadow rose, danced on the propped-open door, and then a large man in khaki suntans walked into the corridor. He was wearing a Sam Browne belt and a big pistol. He hooked his thumbs into his pants pockets and looked at Nick for almost a full minute without speaking. Then he said, “When I was a boy we caught ourselves a mountain lion up in the hills and shot it and then drug it twenty mile back to town over dirt hardpan. What was left of that creature when we got home was the sorriest-lookin sight I ever saw. You the second-sorriest, boy.”
   Nick thought it had the feel of a prepared speech, care fully honed and treasured, saved for out-of-towners and vags that occupied the barred Saltine boxes from time to time.
   “You got a name, Babalugah?”
   Nick put a finger to his swelled and lacerated lips and shook his head. He put a hand over his mouth, then cut the air with it in a soft diagonal hashmark and shook his head again.
   “What? Cain’t talk? What’s this happy horseshit?” The words were amiable enough, but Nick couldn’t follow tones or inflections. He plucked an invisible pen from the air and wrote with it.
   “You want a pencil?”
   Nick nodded.
   “If you’re mute, how come you don’t have none of those cards?”
   Nick shrugged. He turned out his empty pockets. He balled his fists and shadowboxed the air, which sent another bolt of pain through his head and another wave of nausea through his stomach. He finished by tapping his own temples lightly with his fists, rolling his eyes up, and sagging on the bars. Then he pointed to his empty pockets.
   “You were robbed.”
   Nick nodded.
   The man in khaki turned away and went back into his office. A moment later he returned with a dull pencil and a notepad. He thrust them through the bars. Written across the top of each notesheet was MEMO and From The Desk Of Sheriff John Baker.
   Nick turned the pad around and tapped the pencil eraser at the name. He raised questioning eyebrows.
   “Yeah, that’s me. Who are you?”
   “Nick Andros,” he wrote. He put his hand through the bars.
   Baker shook his head. “I ain’t gonna shake with you. You deaf, too?”
   Nick nodded.
   “What happened to you tonight? Doc Soames and his wife almost ran you down like a woodchuck, boy.”
   “Beat up & robbed. A mile or so from a rdhouse on Main St. Zack’s Place.”
   “That hangout’s no place for a kid like you, Babalugah. You surely aren’t old enough to drink.”
   Nick shook his head indignantly. “I’m twenty-two,” he wrote. “I can have a couple of beers without getting beaten up & robbed for them, can’t I?”
   Baker read this with a sourly amused look on his face. “It don’t appear you can in Shoyo. What you doing here, kid?”
   Nick tore the first sheet off the memo pad, crumpled it in a ball, dropped it on the floor. Before he could begin to write his reply, an arm shot through the bars and a steel hand clutched his shoulder. Nick’s head jerked up.
   “My wife neatens these cells,” Baker said, “and I don’t see any need for you to litter yours up. Go throw that in the john.”
   Nick bent over, wincing at the pain in his back, and fished the ball of paper off the floor. He took it over to the toilet, tossed it in, and then looked up at Baker with his eyebrows raised. Baker nodded.
   Nick came back. This time he wrote longer, pencil flying over the paper. Baker reflected that teaching a deaf-mute kid to read and write was probably quite a trick, and this Nick Andros must have some pretty good equipment upstairs to have caught the hang of it. There were fellows here in Shoyo, Arkansas, who had never properly caught the hang of it, and more than a few of them hung out in Zack’s. But he supposed you couldn’t expect a kid who just blew into town to know that.
   Nick handed the pad through the bars.
   “I’ve been traveling around but I’m not a vag. Spent today working for a man named Rich Ellerton about 6 miles west of here. I cleaned his barn & put up a load of hay in his loft., Last week I was in Watts, Okla., running fence. The men who beat me up got my week’s pay.”
   “You sure it was Rich Ellerton you was working for? I can check that, you know.” Baker had torn off Nick’s explanation, folded it to wallet-photo size, and tucked it into his shirt pocket.
   Nick nodded.
   “You see his dog?”
   Nick nodded.
   “What kind was it?”
   Nick gestured for the pad. “Big Doberman,” he wrote. “But nice. Not mean.”
   Baker nodded, turned away, and went back into his office. Nick stood at the bars, watching anxiously. A moment later, Baker returned with a big keyring, unlocked the holding cell, and pushed it back on its track.
   “Come on in the office,” Baker said. “You want some breakfast?”
   Nick shook his head, then made pouring and drinking motions.
   “Coffee? Got that. You take cream and sugar?”
   Nick shook his head.
   “Take it like a man, huh?” Baker laughed. “Come on.”
   Baker started up the hallway, and although he was speaking, Nick was unable to hear what he was saying with his back turned and his lips hidden. “I don’t mind the company. I got insomnia. It’s got so I can’t sleep more’n three or four hours most nights. M’wife wants me to go see some big-shot doctor up in Pine Bluff. If it keeps on, I just might do it. I mean, looka this—here I am, five in the morning, not even light out, and there I sit eatin aigs and greazy home fries from the truck stop up the road.”
   He turned on the last phrase and Nick caught “… truck stop up the road.” He raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders to indicate his puzzlement.
   “Don’t matter,” Baker said. “Not to a young kid like you, anyway.”
   In the outer office, Baker poured him a cup of black coffee out of a huge thermos. The sheriff’s half-finished breakfast plate stood on his desk blotter, and he pulled it back to himself. Nick sipped the coffee. It hurt his mouth, but it was good.
   He tapped Baker on the shoulder, and when he looked up, Nick pointed to the coffee, rubbed his stomach, and winked soberly.
   Baker smiled. “You better say it’s good. My wife Jane puts it up.” He tucked half a hard-fried egg into his mouth, chewed, and then pointed at Nick with his fork. “You’re pretty good. Just like one of those pantomimers. Bet you don’t have much trouble makin yourself understood, huh?”
   Nick made a seesawing gesture with his hand in midair. Comme çi, comme ça.
   “I ain’t gonna hold you,” Baker said, mopping up grease with a slice of toasted Wonder Bread, “but I tell you what. If you stick around, maybe we can get the guys who did this to you. You game?”
   Nick nodded and wrote: “You think I can get my week’s pay back?”
   “Not a chance,” Baker said flatly. “I’m just a hick sheriff, boy. For somethin like that, you’d be wantin Oral Roberts.”
   Nick nodded and shrugged. Putting his hands together, he made a bird flying away.
   “Yeah, like that. How many were there?”
   Nick held up four fingers, shrugged, then held up five.
   “Think you could identify any of them?”
   Nick held up one finger and wrote: “Big & blond. Your size, maybe a little heavier. Gray shirt & pants. He was wearing a big ring. 3rd finger right hand. Purple stone. That’s what cut me.”
   As Baker read this, a change came over his face. First concern, then anger. Nick, thinking the anger was directed against him, became frightened again.
   “Oh Jesus Christ,” Baker said. “This here’s a full commode slopping over for sure. You sure?”
   Nick nodded reluctantly.
   “Anything else? You see anything else?”
   Nick thought hard, then wrote: “Small scar. On his forehead.”
   Baker looked at the words. “That’s Ray Booth,” he said. “My brother-in-law. Thanks, kid. Five in the morning and my day’s wrecked already.”
   Nick’s eyes opened a little wider, and he made a cautious gesture of commiseration.
   “Well, all right,” Baker said, more to himself than to Nick. “He’s a bad actor. Janey knows it. He beat her up enough times when they was kids together. Still, they’re brother n sister and I guess I can forget my lovin for this week.”
   Nick looked down, embarrassed. After a moment Baker shook his shoulder so—that Nick would see him speaking.
   “It probably won’t do any good anyway,” he said. “Ray ‘n his jerk-off buddies’ll just swear each other up. Your word against theirs. Did you get any licks in?”
   “Kicked this Ray in the guts,” Nick wrote. “Got another one in the nose. Might have broken it.”
   “Ray chums around with Vince Hogan, Billy Warner, and Mike Childress, mostly,” Baker said. “I might be able to get Vince alone and break him down. He’s got all the spine of a dyin jellyfish. If I could get him I could go after Mike and Billy. Ray got that ring in a fraternity at LSU. He flunked out his sophomore year.” He paused, drumming his fingers against the rim of his breakfast plate. “I guess we could give it a go, kid, if you wanted to. But I’ll warn you in advance, we probably won’t get them. They’re as vicious and cowardly as a dogpack, but they’re town boys and you’re just a deaf-mute drifter. And if they got off, they’d come after you.”
   Nick thought about it. In his mind he kept coming back to the image of himself, being shoved from one of them to the next like a bleeding scarecrow, and to Ray’s lips forming the words: I’m gonna mess im up. Sucker kicked me. To the feel of his knapsack, that old friend of the last two wandering years, being ripped from his back.
   On the memo pad he wrote and underlined two words: “Let’s try.”
   Baker sighed and nodded. “Okay. Vince Hogan works down to the sawmill… well, that ain’t just true. What he does mostly is fucks off down to the sawmill. We’ll take a ride down there about nine, if that’s fine with you. Maybe we can get him scared enough to spill the beans.”
   Nick nodded.
   “How’s your mouth? Doc Soames left some pills. He said it would probably be a misery to you.”
   Nick nodded ruefully.
   “I’ll get em. It…” He broke off, and in Nick’s silent movie world, he watched the sheriff explode several sneezes into his handkerchief. “That’s another thing,” he went on, but he had turned away now and Nick caught only the first word. “I’m comin down with a real good cold. Jesus Christ, ain’t life grand? Welcome to Arkansas, boy.”
   He got the pills and came back to where Nick sat. After he passed them and a glass of water to Nick, Baker rubbed gently under the angle of his jaw. There was a definite painful swelling there. Swollen glands, coughing, sneezing, a low fever, felt like. Yeah, it was shaping up to be a wonderful day.

Chapter 10
 
 Larry woke up with a hangover that was not too bad, a mouth that tasted as if a baby dragon had used it for a potty chair, and a feeling that he was somewhere he shouldn’t be.
   The bed was a single, but there were two pillows on it. He could smell frying bacon. He sat up, looked out the windows at another gray New York day, and his first thought was that they had done something horrible to Berkeley overnight: turned it dirty and sooty, had aged it. Then last night began coming back and he realized he was looking at Fordham, not Berkeley. He was in a second-floor flat on Tremont Avenue, not far from the Concourse, and his mother was going to wonder where he had been last night. Had he called her, given her any kind of excuse, no matter how thin?
   He swung his legs out of bed and found a crumpled pack of Winstons with one crazy cigarette left in it. He lit it with a green plastic Bic lighter. It tasted like dead horseshit. Out in the kitchen the sound of frying bacon went on and on, like radio static.
   The girl’s name was Maria and she had said she was a… what? Oral hygienist, was that it? Larry didn’t know how much she knew about hygiene, but she was great on oral. He vaguely remembered being gobbled like a Perdue drumstick. Crosby, Stills, and Nash on the crappy little stereo in the living room, singing about how much water had gone underneath the bridge, time we had wasted on the way. If his memory was correct, Maria sure hadn’t wasted much time. She had been a little overwhelmed to discover he was that Larry Underwood. At one point in the evening’s festivities, hadn’t they gone out reeling around looking for an open record store so they could buy a copy of “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”?
   He groaned very softly and tried to retrace yesterday from its innocuous beginnings to its frantic, gobbling finale.
   The Yankees weren’t in town, he remembered that. His mother had been gone to work when he woke up, but she had left a Yankees schedule on the kitchen table along with a note: “Larry. As you can see, the Yankees won’t be back until Jul 1. They are playing a doubleheader the 4th of July. If you’re not doing anything that day, why not take your mom to the ball park. I’ll buy the beer and hotdogs. There are eggs and sausage in the fridge or sweetrolls in the breadbox if you like them better. Take care of yourself kiddo.” There was a typical Alice Underwood PS: “Most of the kids you hung around with are gone now and good riddance to that bunch of hoods butt think Buddy Marx is working at that print shop on Stricker Avenue.”
   Just thinking of that note was enough to make him wince. No “Dear” before his name. No “Love” before her signature. She didn’t believe in phony stuff. The real stuff was in the refrigerator. Sometime while he had been sleeping off his drive across America, she had gone out and stocked up on every goddam thing in the world that he liked. Her memory was so perfect it was frightening. A Daisy canned ham. Two pounds of real butter—how the hell could she afford that on her salary? Two six-packs of Coke. Deli sausages. A roast of beef already marinating in Alice’s secret sauce, the contents of which she refused to divulge even to her son, and a gallon of Baskin-Robbins Peach Delight ice cream in the freezer. Along with a Sara Lee cheesecake. The kind with strawberries on top.
   On impulse, he had gone into the bathroom, not just to take care of his bladder but to check the medicine cabinet. A brand-new Pepsodent toothbrush was hanging in the old holder, where all of his childhood toothbrushes had hung, one after another. There was a package of disposable razors in the cabinet, a can of Barbaso shave cream, even a bottle of Old Spice cologne. Not fancy, she would have said—Larry could actually hear her—but smelly enough, for the money.
   He had stood looking at these things, then had taken the new tube of toothpaste out and held it in his hand. No “Dear,” no “Love, Mom.” Just a new toothbrush, new tube of toothpaste, new bottle of cologne. Sometimes, he thought, real love is silent as well as blind. He began brushing his teeth, wondering if there might not be a song in that someplace.
   The oral hygienist came in, wearing a pink nylon half-slip and nothing else. “Hi, Larry,” she said. She was short, pretty in a vague Sandra Dee sort of way, and her breasts pointed at him perkily without a sign of a sag. What was the old joke? That’s right, Loot—she had a pair of 38s and a real gun. Ha-ha, very funny. He had come three thousand miles to spend the night being eaten alive by Sandra Dee.
   “Hi,” he said, and got up. He was naked but his clothes were at the foot of the bed. He began to put them on.
   “I’ve got a robe you can wear if you want to. We’re having kippers and bacon.”
   Kippers and bacon? His stomach began to shrivel and fold in on itself.
   “No, honey, I’ve got to run. Someone I’ve got to see.”
   “Oh hey, you can’t just run out on me like that—”
   “Really, it’s important.”
   “Well, I’m impawtant, too!” She was becoming strident. It hurt Larry’s head. For no particular reason, he thought of Fred Flintstone bellowing “WIIILMAAA! ” at the top of his cartoon lungs.
   “Your Bronx is showing, luv,” he said.
   “What’s that supposed to mean?” She planted her hands on her hips, the greasy spatula sticking out of one closed fist like a steel flower. Her breasts jiggled fetchingly, but Larry wasn’t fetched. He stepped into his pants and buttoned them. “So I’m from the Bronx, does that make me black? What have you got against the Bronx? What are you, some kind of racist?”
   “Nothing and I don’t think so,” he said, and walked over to her in his bare feet. “Listen, the somebody I have to meet is my mother. I just got into town two days ago and I didn’t call her last night or anything… did I?” he added hopefully.
   “You didn’t call anybody,” she said sullenly. “I just bet it’s your mother.”
   He walked back to the bed and stuck his feet in his loafers. “It is. Really. She works in the Chemical Bank Building. She’s a housekeeper. Well, these days I guess she’s a floor supervisor.”
   “I bet you aren’t the Larry Underwood that has that record, either.”
   “You believe what you want. I have to run.”
   “You cheap prick!” she flashed at him. “What am I supposed to do with all the stuff I cooked?”
   “Throw it out the window?” he suggested.
   She uttered a high squawk of anger and hurled the spatula at him. On any other day of his life it would have missed. One of the first laws of physics was, to wit, a spatula will not fly a straight trajectory if hurled by an angry oral hygienist. Only this was the exception that proved the rule, flip-flop, up and over, smash, right into Larry’s forehead. It didn’t hurt much. Then he saw two drops of blood fall on the throw-rug as he bent over to pick the spatula up.
   He advanced two steps with the spatula in his hand. “I ought to paddle you with this!” he shouted at her.
   “Sure,” she said, cringing back and starting to cry. “Why not? Big star. Fuck and run. I thought you were a nice guy. You ain’t no nice guy.” Several tears ran down her cheeks, dropped from her jaw, and plopped onto her upper chest. Fascinated, he watched one of them roll down the slope of her right breast and perch on the nipple. It had a magnifying effect. He could see pores, and one black hair sprouting from the inner edge of the aureole. Jesus Christ, I’m going crazy, he thought wonderingly.
   “I have to go,” he said. His white cloth jacket was on the foot of the bed. He picked it up and slung it over his shoulder.
   “You ain’t no nice guy!” she cried at him as he went into the living room. “I only went with you because I thought you were a nice guy!”
   The sight of the living room made him feel like groaning. On the couch where he dimly remembered being gobbled were at least two dozen copies of “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” Three more were on the turntable of the dusty portable stereo. On the far wall was a huge poster of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw. Being gobbled means never having to say you’re sorry, ha-ha. Jesus, I am going crazy.
   She stood in the bedroom doorway, still crying, pathetic in her half-slip. He could see a nick on one of her shins where she had cut herself shaving.
   “Listen, give me a call,” she said. “I ain’t mad.”
   He should have said, “Sure,” and that would have been the end of it. Instead he heard his mouth utter a crazy laugh and then, “Your kippers are burning.”
   She screamed at him and started across the room, only to trip over a throw-pillow on the floor and go sprawling. One of her arms knocked over a half-empty bottle of milk and rocked the empty bottle of Scotch standing next to it. Holy God, Larry thought, were we mixing those?
   He got out quickly and pounded down the stairs. As he went down the last six steps to the front door, he heard her in the upstairs hall, yelling down: “You ain’t no nice guy! You ain’t no —”
   He slammed the door behind him and misty, humid warmth washed over him, carrying the aroma of spring trees and automobile exhaust. It was perfume after the smell of frying grease and stale cigarette smoke. He still had the crazy cigarette, now burned down to the filter, and he threw it into the gutter and took a deep breath of the fresh air. Wonderful to be out of that craziness. Return with us now to those wonderful days of normalcy as we—
   Above and behind him a window went up with a rattling bang and he knew what was coming next.
   “I hope you rot! ” she screamed down at him. The Compleat Bronx Fishwife. “I hope you fall in front of some fuckin subway train! You ain’t no singer! You’re shitty in bed! You louse! Pound this up your ass! Take this to ya mother, you louse! ”
   The milk bottle came zipping down from her second-floor bedroom window. Larry ducked. It went off in the gutter like a bomb, spraying the street with glass fragments. The Scotch bottle came next, twirling end over end, to crash nearly at his feet. Whatever else she was, her aim was terrifying. He broke into a run, holding one arm over his head. This madness was never going to end.
   From behind him came a final long braying cry, triumphant with juicy Bronx intonation: “KISS MY ASS, YOU CHEAP BAAASTARD! ” Then he was around the corner and on the expressway overpass, leaning over, laughing with a shaky intensity that was nearly hysteria, watching the cars pass below.
   “Couldn’t you have handled that better?” he said, totally unaware he was speaking out loud. “Oh man, you coulda done better than that. That was a bad scene. Crap on that, man.” He realized he was speaking aloud, and another burst of laughter escaped him. He suddenly felt a dizzy, spinning nausea in his stomach and squeezed his eyes tightly closed. A memory circuit in the Department of Masochism clicked open and he heard Wayne Stukey saying, There’s something in you that’s like biting on tinfoil.
   He had treated the girl like an old whore on the morning after the frathouse gangbang.
   You ain’t no nice guy.
   I am. I am.
   But when the people at the big party had protested his decision to cut them off, he had threatened to call the police, and he had meant it. Hadn’t he? Yes. Yes, he had. Most of them were strangers, true, he could care if they crapped on a landmine, but four or five of the protestors had gone back to the old days. And Wayne Stukey, that bastard, standing in the doorway with his arms folded like a hanging judge on the big day.
   Sal Doria going out, saying: If this is what it does to guys like you, Larry, I wish you were still playing sessions.
   He opened his eyes and turned away from the overpass, looking for a cab. Oh sure. The outraged friend bit. If Sal was such a big friend, what was he doing there sucking off him in the first place? I was stupid and nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up. That’s the real story.
   You ain’t no nice guy.
   “I am a nice guy,” he said sulkily. “And whose business is it, anyway?”
   A cab was coming and Larry flagged it. It seemed to hesitate a moment before pulling up to the curb, and Larry remembered the blood on his forehead. He opened the back door and climbed in before the guy could change his mind.
   “Manhattan. The Chemical Bank Building on Park,” he said.
   The cab pulled out into traffic. “You got a cut on your forehead, guy,” the cabbie said.
   “A girl threw a spatula at me,” Larry said absently.
   The cabbie offered him a strange false smile of commiseration and drove on, leaving Larry to settle back and try to imagine how he was going to explain his night out to his mother.

Capter 11
   
Larry found a tired-looking black woman on the lobby level who told him she thought Alice Underwood was up on the twenty-fourth floor, doing an inventory. He got an elevator and went up, aware that the other people in the car were stealing cautious glances at his forehead. The wound there was no longer bleeding, but it had caked over into an unsightly mess.
   The twenty-fourth floor was taken up by the executive offices of a Japanese camera company. Larry walked up and down the halls for almost twenty minutes, looking for his mother and feeling like a horse’s ass. There were plenty of Occidental executives, but enough of them were Japanese to make him feel, at six-feet-two, like a very tall horse’s ass. The small men and women with the upslanted eyes looked at his caked forehead and bloody jacket sleeve with unsettling Oriental blandness.
   He finally spotted a door with CUSTODIAN & HOUSEKEEPING on it behind a very large fern. He tried the knob. The door was unlocked and he peered inside. His mother was in there, dressed in her shapeless gray uniform, support hose, and crepe-soled shoes. Her hair was firmly caught under a black net. Her back was to him. She had a clipboard in one hand and seemed to be counting bottles of spray cleaner on a high shelf.
   Larry felt a strong and guilty impulse to just turn tail and run. Go back to the garage two blocks from her apartment building and get the Z. Fuck the two months’ rent he had just laid down on the space. Just get in and boogie. Boogie where? Anywhere. Bar Harbor, Maine. Tampa, Florida. Salt Lake City, Utah. Any place would be a good place, as long as it was comfortably over the horizon from Dewey the Deck and from this soap-smelling little closet. He didn’t know if it was the fluorescent lights or the cut on his forehead, but he was getting one fuck of a headache.
   Oh, quit whining, you goddam sissy.
   “Hi, Mom,” he said.
   She started a little but didn’t turn around. “So, Larry. You found your way uptown.”
   “Sure.” He shuffled his feet. “I wanted to apologize. I should have called you last night—”
   “Yeah. Good idea.”
   “I stayed with Buddy. We… uh… we went out steppin. Did the town.”
   “I figured it was that. That or something like it.” She hooked a small stool over with her foot, climbed up on it, and began to count the bottles of floor-wax on the top shelf, touching each one lightly with the tips of her right thumb and forefinger as she went. She had to reach, and when she did, her dress pulled up and he could see beyond the brown tops of her stockings to the waffled white flesh of her upper thighs and he turned his eyes away, suddenly and aimlessly recalling what had happened to Noah’s third son when he looked at his father as the old man lay drunk and naked on his pallet. Poor guy had ended up being a hewer of wood and fetcher of water ever after. Him and all his descendants. And that’s why we have race riots today, son. Praise God.
   “Is that all you came to tell me?” she asked, looking around at him for the first time.
   “Well, where I was and to apologize. It was crummy of me to forget.”
   “Yeah,” she said again. “But you got your crummy side to you, Larry. Did you think I forgot that?”
   He flushed. “Mom, listen—”
   “You’re bleeding. Some stripper hit you with a loaded G-string?” She turned back to the shelves, and after she had counted the whole row of bottles on the top one, she made a notation on her clipboard. “Someone has had themselves two bottles of floor-wax this past week,” she remarked. “Lucky them.”
   “I came to say I was sorry! ” Larry told her loudly. She didn’t jump, but he did. A little.
   “Yeah, so you said. Mr. Geoghan is gonna be on us like a ton of bricks if the damned floor-wax doesn’t stop going out.”
   “I didn’t get in a barroom fight and I wasn’t in a strip-joint. It wasn’t anything like that. It was just…” He trailed off.
   She turned around, eyebrows arched in that old sardonic way he remembered so well. “Was what?”
   “Well…” He couldn’t think of a convincing lie quick enough. “It was. A. Uh. Spatula.”
   “Someone mistook you for a fried egg? Must have been quite a night you and Buddy had out on the town.”
   He kept forgetting that she could run rings around him, had always been able to, probably always would.
   “It was a girl, Ma. She threw it at me.”
   “She must be a hell of a shot,” Alice Underwood said, and turned away again. “That dratted Consuela is hiding the requisition forms again. Not that they do much good; we never get all the stuff we need, but we get plenty I wouldn’t know what to do with if my life depended on it.”
   “Ma, are you mad at me?”
   Her hands suddenly dropped to her sides. Her shoulders slumped.
   “Don’t be mad at me,” he whispered. “Don’t be, okay? Huh?”
   She turned around and he saw an unnatural sparkle in her eyes—well, he supposed it was natural enough, but it sure wasn’t caused by the fluorescents in here, and he heard the oral hygienist say once more, with great finality: You ain’t no nice guy. Why had he ever bothered to come home if he was going to do stuff like this to her… and never mind what she was doing to him.
   “Larry,” she said gently. “Larry, Larry, Larry.”
   For a moment he thought she was going to say no more; even allowed himself to hope this was so.
   “Is that all you can say? ‘Don’t be mad at me, please, Ma, don’t be mad’? I hear you on the radio, and even though I don’t like that song you sing, I’m proud it’s you singing it. People ask me if that’s really my son and I say yes, that’s Larry. I tell them you could always sing, and that’s no lie, is it?”
   He shook his head miserably, not trusting himself to speak.
   “I tell them how you picked up Donny Roberts’s guitar when you were in junior high and how you were playing better than him in half an hour, even though he had lessons ever since second grade. You got talent, Larry, nobody ever had to tell me that, least of all you. I guess you knew it, too, because it’s the only thing I never heard you whine about. Then you went away, and am I beating you about the head and shoulders with that? No. Young men and young women, they go away. That’s the nature of the world. Sometimes it stinks, but it’s natural. Then you come back. Does somebody have to tell me why that is? No. You come back because, hit record or no hit record, you got in some kind of jam out there on the West Coast.”
   “I’m not in any trouble!” he said indignantly.
   “Yes you are. I know the signs. I’ve been your mother for a long time, and you can’t bullshit me, Larry. Trouble is something you have always looked around for when you couldn’t just turn your head and see it. Sometimes I think you’d cross the street to step in dogshit. God will forgive me for saying it, because God knows it’s true. Am I mad? No. Am I disappointed? Yes. I had hoped you would change out there. You didn’t. You went away a little boy in a man’s body and you came back the same way, except the man got his hair processed. You know why I think you came home?”
   He looked at her, wanting to speak, but knowing the only thing he would be able to say if he did would make them both mad: Don’t cry, Mom, huh?
   “I think you came home because you couldn’t think where else to go. You didn’t know who else would take you in. I never said a mean word about you to anyone else, Larry, not even to my own sister, but since you’ve pushed me to it, I’ll tell you exactly what I think of you. I think you’re a taker. You’ve always been one. It’s like God left some part of you out when He built you inside of me. You’re not bad, that’s not what I mean. Some of the places we had to live after your father died, you would have gone bad if there was bad in you, God knows. I think the worst thing I ever caught you doing was writing a nasty word in the downstairs hall of that place on Carstairs Avenue in Queens. You remember that?”
   He remembered. She had chalked that same word on his forehead and then made him walk around the block with her three times. He had never written that word or any other word on a building, wall, or stoop.
   “The worst part, Larry, is that you mean well. Sometimes I think it would almost be a mercy if you were broke worse. As it is, you seem to know what’s wrong but not how to fix it. And I don’t know how, either. I tried every way I knew when you were small. Writing that word on your forehead, that was only one of them… and by then I was getting desperate, or I never would have done such a mean thing to you. You’re a taker, that’s all. You came home to me because you knew that I have to give. Not to everybody, but to you.”
   “I’ll move out,” he said, and every word was like spitting out a dry ball of lint. “This afternoon.”
   Then it came to him that he probably couldn’t afford to move out, at least not until Wayne sent him his next royalty check—or whatever was left of it after he finished feeding the hungriest of the L.A. hounds—on to him. As for current out-of-pocket expenses, there was the rent on the parking slot for the Datsun Z, and a hefty payment he would have to send out by Friday, unless he wanted the friendly neighborhood repo man looking for him, and he didn’t. And after last night’s revel, which had begun so innocently with Buddy and his fiancée and this oral hygienist the fiancée knew, a nice girl from the Bronx, Larry, you’ll love her, great sense of humor, he was pretty low on cash. No. If you wanted to be accurate, he was busted to his heels. The thought made him panicky. If he left his mother’s now, where would he go? A hotel? The doorman at any hotel better than a fleabag would laugh his ass off and tell him to get lost. He was wearing good threads, but they knew. Somehow those bastards knew. They could smell an empty wallet.
   “Don’t go,” she said softly. “I wish you wouldn’t, Larry. I bought some food special. Maybe you saw it. And I was hoping maybe we could play some gin rummy tonight.”
   “Ma, you can’t play gin,” he said, smiling a little.
   “For a penny a point, I can beat the tailgate off a kid like you.”
   “Maybe if I gave you four hundred points—”
   “Listen to the kid,” she jeered softly. “Maybe if I gave you four hundred. Stick around, Larry. What do you say?”
   “All right,” he said. For the first time that day he felt good, really good. A small voice inside whispered he was taking again, same old Larry, riding for free, but he refused to listen. This was his mother, after all, and she had asked him. It was true that she had said some pretty hard things on the way to asking, but asking was asking, true or false? “Tell you what. I’ll pay for our tickets to the game on July fourth. I’ll just peel it off the top of whatever I skin you out of tonight.”
   “You couldn’t skin a tomato,” she said amiably, then turned back to the shelves. “There’s a men’s down the hall. Why don’t you go wash the blood off your forehead? Then take ten dollars out of my purse and go to a movie. There’s some good movie-houses over on Third Avenue, still. Just stay out of those scum-pits around Forty-ninth and Broadway.”
   “I’ll be giving money to you before long,” Larry said. “Record’s number eighteen on the Billboard chart this week. I checked it in Sam Goody’s coming over here.”
   “That’s wonderful. If you’re so loaded, why didn’t you buy a copy, instead of just looking?”
   Suddenly there was some kind of a blockage in his throat. He harrumphed, but it didn’t go away.
   “Well, never mind,” she said. “My tongue’s like a horse with a bad temper. Once it starts running, it just has to go on running until it’s tired out. You know that. Take fifteen, Larry. Call it a loan. I guess I will get it back, one way or the other.”
   “You will,” he said. He came over to her and tugged at the hem of her dress like a little boy. She looked down. He stood on tiptoe and kissed her cheek. “I love you, Ma.”
   She looked startled, not at the kiss but either at what he had said or the tone in which he had said it. “Why, I know that, Larry,” she said.
   “About what you said. About being in trouble. I am, a little, but it’s not—”
   Her voice was cold and stern at once. So cold, in fact, that it frightened him a little. “I don’t want to hear about that.”
   “Okay,” he said. “Listen, Ma—what’s the best theater around here?”
   “The Lux Twin,” she said, “but I don’t know what’s playing there.”
   “It doesn’t matter. You know what I think? There’s three things you can get everyplace in America, but you can only get them good in New York City.”
   “Yeah, Mr. New York Times critic? What are those?”
   “Movies, baseball, and hotdogs from Nedick’s.”
   She laughed. “You ain’t stupid, Larry—you never were.”
   So he went down to the men’s room. And washed the blood off his forehead. And went back and kissed his mother again. And got fifteen dollars from her scuffed black purse. And went to the movies at the Lux. And watched an insane, malignant revenant named Freddy Krueger suck a number of teenagers into the quicksand of their own dreams, where all but one of them—the heroine—died. Freddy Krueger also appeared to die at the end, but it was hard to tell, and since this movie had a Roman numeral after its name and seemed to be well attended, Larry thought the man with the razors on the tips of his fingers would be back, without knowing that the persistent sound in the row behind him signaled the end to all that: there would be no more sequels, and in a very short time, there would be no more movies at all.
   In the row behind Larry, a man was coughing.

Chapter 12
   
There was a grandfather clock standing in the far corner of the parlor. Frannie Goldsmith had been listening to its measured ticks and tocks all of her life. It summed up the room, which she had never liked and, on days like today, actively hated.
   Her favorite room in the place was her father’s workshop. It was in the shed that connected house and barn. You got there through a small door which was barely five feet high and nearly hidden behind the old kitchen woodstove. The door was good to begin with: small and almost hidden, it was deliciously like the sort of door one encountered in fairy-tales and fantasies. When she grew older and taller, she had to duck through it just as her father did—her mother never went out into the workshop unless she absolutely had to. It was an Alice in Wonderland door, and for a while her pretend game, secret even from her father, was that one day when she opened it, she would not find Peter Goldsmith’s workshop at all. Instead she would find an underground passageway leading somehow from Wonderland to Hobbiton, a low but somehow cozy tunnel with rounded earthen sides and an earthen ceiling interlaced with sturdy roots that would give your head a good bump if you knocked it against any of them. A tunnel that smelled not of wet soil and damp and nasty bugs and worms, but one which smelled of cinnamon and baking apple pies, one which ended somewhere up ahead in the pantry of Bag End, where Mr. Bilbo Baggins was celebrating his eleventy-first birthday party…
   Well, that cozy tunnel never turned out to be there, but to the Frannie Goldsmith who had grown up in this house, the workshop (sometimes called “the toolshop” by her father and “that dirty place where your dad goes to drink beer” by her mother) had been enough. Strange, tools and odd gadgets. A huge chest with a thousand drawers, each of the thousand crammed full. Nails, screws, bits, sandpaper (of three kinds: rough, rougher, and roughest), planes, levels, and all the other things she’d had no name for then and still had no name for. It was dark in the workshop except for the cobwebby forty-watt bulb that hung down by its cord and the bright circle of light from the Tensor lamp that was always focused where her father was working. There were the smells of dust and oil and pipesmoke, and it seemed to her now that there should be a rule: every father must smoke. Pipe cigar, cigarette, marijuana, hash, lettuce leaves, something. Because the smell of smoke seemed an integral part of her own childhood.
   “Hand me that wrench, Frannie. No—the little one. What did you do at school today?… She did?… Well why would Ruthie Sears want to push you down?… Yes, it is nasty: Very nasty scrape. But it goes good with the color of your dress, don’t you think? Now if you could only find Ruthie Sears and get her to push you down again and scrape the other leg. Then you’d have a pair. Hand me that big screwdriver, would you?… No, the one with the yellow handle.”
   “Frannie Goldsmith! You come out of that nasty place right now and change your schoolclothes! RIGHT… NOW! You’ll be filthy! ”
   Even now, at twenty-one, she could duck through that doorway and stand between his worktable and the old Ben Franklin stove that gave out such stuperous heat in the wintertime and catch some of what it had felt like to be such a small Frannie Goldsmith growing up in this house. It was an illusory feeling, almost always intermingled with sadness for her barely remembered brother Fred, whose own growing-up had been so rudely and finally interrupted. She could stand and smell the oil that was rubbed into everything, the must, the faint odor of her father’s pipe. She could rarely remember what it had been like to be so small, so strangely small, but out there she sometimes could, and it was a glad way to feel.
   But the parlor, now.
   The parlor.
   If the workshop was the goodness of childhood, symbolized by the phantom smell of her father’s pipe (he sometimes puffed smoke gently into her ear when she had an earache, always after extracting a promise that she wouldn’t tell Carla, who would have had a fit), then the parlor was everything in childhood you wished you could forget. Speak when spoken to! Easier to break it than to fix it! Go right upstairs this minute and change your clothes, don’t you know that isn’t suitable? Don’t you ever think? Frannie, don’t pick at your clothes, people will think you have fleas. What must your Uncle Andrew and Aunt Carlene think? You embarrassed me half to death! The parlor was where you were tongue-tied, the parlor was where you itched and couldn’t scratch, the parlor was dictatorial commands, boring conversation, relatives pinching cheeks, aches, sneezes that couldn’t be sneezed, coughs that couldn’t be coughed, and above all, yawns that must not be yawned.
   At the center of this room where her mother’s spirit dwelt was the clock. It had been built in 1889 by Carla’s grandfather, Tobias Downes, and it had ascended to family heirloom status almost immediately, shifting down through the years, carefully packed and insured for moves from one part of the country to another (it had originally come into being in the Buffalo, New York, workshop of Tobias, a place which had undoubtedly been every bit as smoky and nasty as Peter’s workshop, although such a comment would have struck Carla as completely irrelevant), sometimes shifting from one section of the family to another when cancer, heart attack, or accident pinched off some branch of the family tree. The clock had been in this parlor since Peter and Carla Goldsmith moved into the house some thirty-six years ago. Here it had been placed and here it had stayed, ticking and tocking, marking off segments of time in a dry age. Someday the clock would be hers, if she wanted, Frannie reflected as she looked into her mother’s white, shocked face. But I don’t want it! Don’t want it and won’t have it!
   In this room there were dried flowers under glass bells. There was in this room a dove gray carpet with dusky pink roses figured into the nap. There was a graceful bow window that looked down the hill to Route 1, with a big privet hedge between the road and the grounds. Carla had nagged her husband with a grim fervor until he planted that hedge right after the Exxon station on the corner went up. Once it was in, she nagged her husband to make it grow faster. Even radioactive fertilizer, Frannie thought, would have been acceptable to her if it had served that end. The stridency of her remonstrations concerning the privet had lessened as the hedge grew taller, and she supposed it would stop altogether in another two years or so, when the hedge finally grew tall enough to blot out the offending gas station completely and the parlor was inviolate again.
   It would stop on that subject, at least.
   Stencils on the wallpaper, large green leaves and pink flowers almost the same shade as the roses in the carpet. Early American furniture and a dark mahogany set of double doors. A fireplace which was just for show where a birch log sat eternally on a hearth of red brick which was eternally immaculate and untouched by even a speck of soot. Frannie guessed that by now that log was so dry that it would burn like newspaper if lit. Above the log was a pot almost big enough for a child to bathe in. It had been handed down from Frannie’s great-grandmother, and it hung eternally suspended over the eternal log. Above the mantel, finishing that part of the picture, was The Eternal Flintlock Rifle.
   Segments of time in a dry age.
   One of her earliest memories was of peeing on the dove gray rug with the dusky pink roses figured into the nap. She might have been three, not trained for very long, and probably not allowed in the parlor save for special occasions because of the chance of accidents. But somehow she had gotten in, and seeing her mother not just running but sprinting to grab her up before the unthinkable could happen had brought the unthinkable on. Her bladder let go, and the spreading stain as the dove gray rug turned to a darker slate gray around her bottom had caused her mother to actually shriek. The stain had finally come out, but after how many patient shampooings? The Lord might know; Frannie Goldsmith did not.
   It was in the parlor that her mother had talked to her, grimly, explicitly, and at length, after she caught Frannie and Norman Burstein examining each other in the barn, their clothes piled in one amicable heap on a haybale to one side. How would she like it, Carla asked as the grandfather clock solemnly ticked off segments of time in a dry age, if she took Frannie out for a walk up and down US Route 1 without any clothes on? How would that be? Frannie, then six, had cried, but had somehow managed to avoid the hysterics which impended at this prospect.
   When she was ten she had ridden her bike into the mailbox post while looking back over her shoulder to yell something to Georgette McGuire. She cut her head, bloodied her nose, lacerated both knees, and had actually grayed out for a few moments with shock. When she came around she had stumbled up the driveway to the house, weeping and horrified at the sight of so much blood coming out of herself. She would have gone to her father, but since her father was at work, she had stumbled into the parlor where her mother was serving tea to Mrs. Venner and Mrs. Prynne. Get out! her mother had screamed, and the next moment she was running to Frannie, embracing her, crying Oh Frannie, oh dear, what happened, oh your poor nose! But she was leading Frannie back into the kitchen, where the floor could safely be bled upon, even as she was comforting her, and Frannie never forgot that her first two words that day hadn’t been Oh, Frannie! but Get out! Her first concern had been for the parlor, where that dry age went on and on and blood was not allowed. Perhaps Mrs. Prynne never forgot, either, because even through her tears Frannie had seen a shocked, slapped expression cross the woman’s face. After that day, Mrs. Prynne had become something of a seldom caller.
   In her first year of junior high she had gotten a bad conduct mark on her report card, and of course she was invited into the parlor to discuss this mark with her mother. In her final year of senior high school, she had received three detention periods for passing notes, and that had likewise been discussed with her mother in the parlor. It was there that they discussed Frannie’s ambitions, which always ended up seeming a trifle shallow; it was there that they discussed Frannie’s hopes, which always ended up seeming a trifle unworthy; it was there that they discussed Frannie’s complaints, which always ended up seeming very much unwarranted, not to mention puling, whining, and ungrateful.
   It was in the parlor that her brother’s coffin had stood on a trestle bedecked with roses, chrysanthemums, and lilies of the valley, their dry perfume filling the room while in the corner the poker-faced clock kept its place, ticking and tocking off segments of time in a dry age.
   “You’re pregnant,” Carla Goldsmith repeated for the second time.
   “Yes, Mother.” Her voice was very, dry but she would not allow herself to wet her lips. She pressed them together instead. She thought: In my father’s workshop there is a little girl in a red dress and she will always be there, laughing and hiding under the table with the vise clamped to one edge or all bundled up with her scabby knees clasped against her chest behind the big toolbox with its thousand drawers. That girl is a very happy girl. But in my mother’s parlor there is a much smaller girl who can’t help piddling on the rug like a bad dog. Like a bad little bitch puppy. And she will always be there, too, no matter how much I wish she would be gone.
   “Oh-Frannie,” her mother said, her words coming very quick. She laid a hand against the side of her cheek like an offended maiden aunt. “How-did-it-happen?”
   It was Jesse’s question. That was what really pissed her off; it was the same question he had asked.
   “Since you had two kids yourself, Mother, I think you know how it happened.”
   “Don’t be smart!” Carla cried. Her eyes opened wide and flashed the hot fire that had always terrified Frannie as a child. She was on her feet in the quick way she had (and that had also terrified her as a child), a tall woman with graying hair which was nicely upswept and tipped and generally beauty-shopped, a tall woman in a smart green dress and faultless beige hose. She went to the mantelpiece, where she always went in moments of distress. Resting there, below the flintlock, was a large scrapbook. Carla was something of an amateur genealogist, and her entire family was in that book… at least, as far back as 1638, when its earliest traceable progenitor had risen out of the nameless crowd of Londoners long enough to be recorded in some very old church records as Merton Downs, Freemason. Her family tree had been published four years ago in The New England Genealogist, with Carla herself the compiler of record.
   Now she fingered that book of painstakingly amassed names, a safe ground where none could trespass. Were there no thieves in there anyplace? Frannie wondered. No alcoholics? No unwed mothers?
   “How could you do something like this to your father and me?” she asked finally. “Was it that boy Jesse?”
   “It was Jesse. Jesse’s the father.”
   Carla flinched at the word.
   “How could you do it?” Carla repeated. “We did our best to bring you up in the right way. This is just—just—”
   She put her hands to her face and began to weep.
   “How could you do it?” she cried. “After all we’ve done for you, this is the thanks we get? For you to go out and… and… rut with a boy like a bitch in heat? You bad girl! You bad girl!”
   She dissolved into sobs, leaning against the mantelpiece for support, one hand over her eyes, the other continuing to slip back and forth over the green cloth cover of the scrapbook. Meantime, the grandfather clock went on ticking.
   “Mother—”
   “Don’t talk to me! You’ve said enough!”
   Frannie stood up stiffly. Her legs felt like wood but must not be, because they were trembling. Tears were beginning to leak out of her own eyes, but let them; she would not let this room defeat her again. “I’ll be going now.”
   “You ate at our table!” Carla cried at her suddenly. “We loved you… and supported you… and this is what we get for it! Bad girl! Bad girl!”
   Frannie, blinded by tears, stumbled. Her right foot struck her left ankle. She lost her balance and fell down with her hands splayed out. She knocked the side of her head against the coffee table and one hand sent a vase of flowers pitching onto the rug. It didn’t break but water gurgled out, turning dove gray to slate gray.
   “Look at that!” Carla screamed, almost in triumph. The tears had put black hollows under her eyes and cut courses through her makeup. She looked haggard and half-mad. “Look at that, you’ve spoiled the rug, your grandmother’s rug—”
   She sat on the floor, dazedly rubbing her head, still crying, wanting to tell her mother that it was only water, but she was completely unnerved now, and not really sure. Was it only water? Or was it urine? Which?
   Again moving with that spooky quickness, Carla Goldsmith snatched the vase up and brandished it at Frannie. “What’s your next move, miss? Are you planning to stay right here? Are you expecting us to feed you and board you while you sport yourself all around town? That’s it, I suppose. Well, no! No! I won’t have it. I will not have it! ”
   “I don’t want to stay here,” Frannie muttered. “Did you think I would?”
   “Where are you going to go? With him? I doubt it.”
   “Bobbi Rengarten in Dorchester or Debbie Smith in Somersworth, I suppose.” Frannie slowly gathered herself together and got up. She was still crying but she was beginning to be mad, as well. “Not that it’s any business of yours.”
   “No business of mine?” Carla echoed, still holding the vase. Her face was parchment white. “No business of mine? What you do when you’re under my roof is no business of mine? You ungrateful little bitch!”
   She slapped Frannie, and slapped her hard. Frannie’s head rocked back. She stopped rubbing her head and started rubbing her cheek, looking unbelievingly at her mother.
   “This is the thanks we get for seeing you into a nice school,” Carla said, showing her teeth in a merciless and frightful grin. “Now you’ll never finish. After you marry him—”
   “I’m not going to marry him. And I’m not going to quit school.”
   Carla’s eyes widened. She stared at Frannie as if Frannie had lost her mind. “What are you talking about? An abortion? Having an abortion? You want to be a murderer as well as a tramp?”
   “I’m going to have the child. I’ll have to take the spring semester off, but I can finish next summer.”
   “What do you think you’re going to finish on? My money? If that’s it, you’ve got a lot more thinking to do. A modern girl like you hardly needs support from her parents, does she?”
   “Support I could use,” Frannie said softly. “The money… well, I’ll get by.”
   “There’s not a bit of shame in you! Not a single thought for anyone but yourself!” Carla shouted. “My God, what this is going to do to your father and me! But you don’t care a bit! It will break your father’s heart, and—”
   “It don’t feel so broken.” Peter Goldsmith’s calm voice came from the doorway, and they both swung around. In the doorway he was, but far back in it; the toes of his workboots stopped just short of the place where the parlor carpet took over from the shabbier one in the hallway. Frannie realized suddenly that it was a place she had seen him in a great many times before. When had he last actually been in the parlor? She couldn’t remember.
   “What are you doing here?” Carla snapped, suddenly unmindful of any structural damage her husband’s heart might have sustained. “I thought you were working late this afternoon.”
   “I switched off with Harry Masters,” Peter said. “Fran’s already told me, Carla. We are going to be grandparents.”
   “Grandparents! ” she shrieked. An ugly, confused sort of laughter jarred out of her. “You leave this to me. She told you first and you kept it from me. All right. It’s what I’ve come to expect of you. But now I’m going to close the door and the two of us are going to thrash this out.”
   She smiled with glittery bitterness at Frannie.
   “Just… we ‘girls.’”
   She put her hand on the knob of the parlor door and began to swing it closed. Frannie watched, still dazed, hardly able to comprehend her mother’s sudden gush of fury and vitriol.
   Peter put his hand out slowly, reluctantly, and stopped the door halfway through its swing.
   “Peter, I want you to leave this to me.”
   “I know you do. I have in the past. But not this time, Carla.”
   “This is not your province.”
   Calmly, he replied: “It is.”
   “Daddy—”
   Carla turned on her, the parchment white of her face now tattooed red over the cheekbones. “Don’t you speak to him! ” she screamed. “He’s not the one you’re dealing with! I know you could always wheedle him around to any crazy idea you had or sweet-talk him into taking your side no matter what you did, but he is not the one you’re dealing with today, miss! ”
   “Stop it, Carla.”
   “Get out! ”
   “I’m not in. You can see th—”
   “Don’t you make fun of me! Get out of my parlor! ”
   And with that she began to push the door, lowering her head and getting her shoulders into it until she looked like some strange bull, both human and female. He held her back easily at first, then with more effort. At last the cords stood out on his neck, although she was a woman and seventy pounds lighter than he.
   Frannie wanted to scream at them to stop it, to tell her father to go away so the two of them wouldn’t have to look at Carla like this, at the sudden and irrational bitterness that had always seemed to threaten but which had now swept her up. But her mouth was frozen, its hinges seemingly rusted shut.
   “Get out! Get out of my parlor! Out! Out! Out! You bastard, let go of the goddamned door and GET OUT! ”
   That was when he slapped her.
   It was a flat, almost unimportant sound. The grandfather clock did not fly into outraged dust at the sound, but went on ticking just as it had ever since it was set going. The furniture did not groan. But Carla’s raging words were cut off as if amputated with a scalpel. She fell on her knees and the door swung all the way open to bang softly against a high-backed Victorian chair with a hand-embroidered slipcover.
   “No, oh no,” Frannie said in a hurt little voice.
   Carla pressed a hand to her cheek and stared up at her husband.
   “You have had that coming for ten years or better,” Peter remarked. His voice had a slight unsteadiness in it. “I always told myself I didn’t do it because I don’t hold with hitting women. I still don’t. But when a person—man or woman—turns into a dog and begins to bite, someone has to shy it off. I only wish, Carla, I’d had the guts to do it sooner. ‘Twould have hurt us both less.”
   “Daddy—”
   “Hush, Frannie,” he said with absent sternness, and she hushed.
   “You say she’s being selfish,” Peter said, still looking down into his wife’s still, shocked face. “You’re the one doing that. You stopped caring about Frannie when Fred died. That was when you decided caring hurt too much and decided it’d be safer just to live for yourself. And this is where you came to do that, time and time and time again. This room. You doted on your dead family and forgot the part of it still living. And when she came in here and told you she was in trouble, asked for your help, I bet the first thing that crossed your mind was to wonder what the ladies in the Flower and Garden Club would say, or if it meant you’d have to stay away from Amy Lauder’s weddin. Hurt’s a reason to change, but all the hurt in the world don’t change facts. You have been selfish.”
   He reached down and helped her up. She came to her feet like a sleepwalker. Her expression didn’t change; her eyes were still wide and unbelieving. Relentlessness hadn’t yet come back into them, but Frannie dully thought that in time it would.
   It would.
   “It’s my fault for letting you go on. For not wanting any unpleasantness. For not wanting to rock the boat. I was selfish, too, you see. And when Fran went off to school I thought, Well, now Carla can have what she wants and it won’t hurt nobody but herself, and if a person doesn’t know they’re hurting, why, maybe they’re not. I was wrong. I’ve been wrong before, but never as bad as this.” Gently, but with great force, he reached out and grasped Carla’s shoulders. “Now: I am telling you this as your husband. If Frannie needs a place to stay, this can be the place—same as it always was. If she needs money, she can have it from my purse—same as she always could. And if she decides to keep her baby, you will see that she has a proper baby shower, and you may think no one will come, but she has friends, good ones, and they will. I’ll tell you one more thing, too. If she wants it christened, it will be done right here. Right here in this goddamned parlor.”
   Carla’s mouth had dropped open, and now a sound began to come from it. At first it sounded uncannily like the whistle of a teakettle on a hot burner. Then it became a keening wail.
   “Peter, your own son lay in his coffin in this room! ”
   “Yes. And that’s why I can’t think of a better place to christen a new life,” he said. “Fred’s blood. Live blood. Fred himself, he’s been dead a lot of years, Carla. He was worm-food long since.”
   She screamed at that and put her hands to her ears. He bent down and pulled them away.
   “But the worms haven’t got your daughter and your daughter’s baby. It don’t matter how it was got; it’s alive. You act like you want to drive her off, Carla. What will you have if you do? Nothing but this room and a husband who’ll hate you for what you did. If you do that, why, it might just as well have been all three of us that day—me and Frannie as well as Fred.”
   “I want to go upstairs and lie down,” Carla said. “I feel nauseated. I think I’d better lie down.”
   “I’ll help you,” Frannie said.
   “Don’t you touch me. Stay with your father. You and he seem to have this all worked out. How you are going to destroy me in this town. Why don’t you just settle into my parlor, Frannie? Throw mud on the carpet, take ashes from the stove and throw them into my clock? Why not? Why not?”
   She began to laugh and pushed past Peter, into the hall. She was listing like a drunken woman. Peter tried to put an arm around her shoulders. She bared her teeth and hissed at him like a cat.
   Her laughter turned to sobs as she went slowly up the stairs, leaning on the mahogany banister for support; those sobs had a ripping, helpless quality that made Frannie want to scream and throw up at the same time. Her father’s face was the color of dirty linen. At the top, Carla turned and swayed so alarmingly that for a moment Frannie believed she would tumble all the way back down to the bottom. She looked at them, seemingly about to speak, then turned away again. A moment later, the closing of her bedroom door muted the stormy sound of her grief and hurt.
   Frannie and Peter stared at each other, appalled, and the grandfather clock ticked calmly on.
   “This will work itself out,” Peter said calmly. “She’ll come around.”
   “Will she?” Frannie asked. She walked slowly to her father, leaned against him, and he put his arm around her. “I don’t think so.”
   “Never mind. We won’t think about it for now.”
   “I ought to go. She doesn’t want me here.”
   “You ought to stay. You ought to be here when—if—she comes to and finds out she still needs you to stay.” He paused. “Me, I already do, Fran.”
   “Daddy,” she said, and put her head against his chest. “Oh, Daddy, I’m so sorry, lust so goddam sorry—”
   “Shhh,” he said, and stroked her hair. Over her head he could see the afternoon sunlight streaming duskily in through the bow windows, as it had always done, golden and still, the way sunlight falls into museums and the halls of the dead. “Shhh, Frannie; I love you. I love you.”

Chapter 13
   
The red light went on. The pump hissed. The door opened. The man who stepped through was not wearing one of the white all-over suits, but a small shiny nose-filter that looked a little bit like a two-pronged silver fork, the kind the hostess leaves on the canape table to get the olives out of the bottle.
   “Hi, Mr. Redman,” he said, strolling across the room. He stuck out his hand, clad in a thin transparent rubber glove, and Stu, surprised into the defensive, shook it. “I’m Dick Deitz. Denninger said you wouldn’t play ball anymore unless somebody told you what the score was.”
   Stu nodded.
   “Good.” Deitz sat on the edge of the bed. He was a small brown man, and sitting there with his elbows cocked just above his knees, he looked like a gnome in a Disney picture. “So what do you want to know?”
   “First, I guess I want to know why you’re not wearing one of those spacesuits.”
   “Because Geraldo there says you’re not catching.” Deitz pointed to a guinea pig behind the double-paned window. The guinea pig was in a cage, and standing behind the cage was Denninger himself, his face expressionless.
   “Geraldo, huh?”
   “Geraldo’s been breathing your air for the last three days, via convector. This disease that your friends have passes easily from humans to guinea pigs and vice versa. If you were catching, we figure Geraldo would be dead by now.”
   “But you’re not taking any chances,” Stu said dryly, and cocked a thumb at the nose-filter.
   “That,” Deitz said with a cynical smile, “is not in my contract.”
   “What have I got?”
   Smoothly, as if rehearsed, Deitz said, “Black hair, blue eyes, one hell of a suntan…” He looked closely at Stu. “Not funny, huh?”
   Stu said nothing.
   “Want to hit me?”
   “I don’t believe it would do any good.”
   Deitz sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose as if the plugs going up the nostrils hurt. “Listen,” he said. “When things look serious, I do jokes. Some people smoke or chew gum. It’s the way I keep my shit together, that’s all. I don’t doubt there are lots of people who have better ways. As to what sort of disease you’ve got, well, so far as Denninger and his colleagues have been able to ascertain, you don’t have any at all.”
   Stu nodded impassively. Yet somehow he had an idea this little gnome of a man had seen past his poker face to his sudden and deep relief.
   “What have the others got?”
   “I’m sorry, that’s classified.”
   “How did that fellow Campion get it?”
   “That’s classified, too.”
   “My guess is that he was in the army. And there was an accident someplace. Like what happened to those sheep in Utah thirty years ago, only a lot worse.”
   “Mr. Redman, I could go to jail just for telling you you were hot or cold.”
   Stu rubbed a hand thoughtfully over his new scrub of beard.
   “You should be glad we’re not telling you more than we are,” Deitz said. “You know that, don’t you?”
   “So I can serve my country better,” Stu said dryly.
   “No, that’s strictly Denninger’s thing,” Deitz said. “In the scheme of things both Denninger and I are little men, but Denninger is even littler than I am. He’s a servomotor, nothing more. There’s a more pragmatic reason for you to be glad. You’re classified, too, you know. You’ve disappeared from the face of the earth. If you knew enough, the big guys might decide that the safest thing would be for you to disappear forever.”
   Stu said nothing. He was stunned.
   “But I didn’t come here to threaten you. We want your cooperation very badly, Mr. Redman. We need it.”
   “Where are the other people I came in here with?”
   Deitz brought a paper out of an inside pocket. “Victor Palfrey, deceased. Norman Bruett, Robert Bruett, deceased. Thomas Wannamaker, deceased. Ralph Hodges, Bert Hodges, Cheryl Hodges, deceased. Christian Ortega, deceased. Anthony Leominster, deceased.”
   The names reeled in Stu’s head. Chris the bartender. He’d always kept a sawed-off, lead-loaded Louisville Slugger under the bar, and the trucker who thought Chris was just kidding about using it was apt to get a big surprise. Tony Leominster, who drove that big International with the Cobra CB under the dash. Sometimes hung around Hap’s station, but hadn’t been there the night Campion took out the pumps. Vic Palfrey… Christ, he had known Vic his whole life. How could Vic be dead? But the thing that hit him the hardest was the Hodges family.
   “All of them?” he heard himself ask. “Ralph’s whole family?”
   Deitz turned the paper over. “No, there’s a little girl. Eva. Four years old. She’s alive.”
   “Well, how is she?”
   “I’m sorry, that’s classified.”
   Rage struck him with all the unexpectedness of a sweet surprise. He was up, and then he had hold of Deitz’s lapels, and he was shaking him back and forth. From the corner of his eye he saw startled movement behind the double-paned glass. Dimly, muffled by distance and soundproofed walls, he heard a hooter go off.
   “What did you people do?” he shouted. “What did you do? What in Christ’s name did you do?”
   “Mr. Redman—”
   “Huh? What the fuck did you people do?”
   The door hissed open. Three large men in olive-drab uniforms stepped in. They were all wearing nose-filters.
   Deitz looked over at them and snapped, “Get the hell out of here!”
   The three men looked uncertain.
   “Our orders—”
   “Get out of here and that’s an order!”
   They retreated. Deitz sat calmly on the bed. His lapels were rumpled and his hair had tumbled over his forehead. That was all. He was looking at Stu calmly, even compassionately. For a wild moment Stu considered ripping his nose-filter out, and then he remembered Geraldo, what a stupid name for a guinea pig. Dull despair struck him like cold water. He sat down.
   “Christ in a sidecar,” he muttered.
   “Listen to me,” Deitz said. “I’m not responsible for you being here. Neither is Denninger, or the nurses who come in to take your blood pressure. If there was a responsible party it was Campion, but you can’t lay it all on him, either. He ran, but under the circumstances, you or I might have run, too. It was a technical slipup that allowed him to run. The situation exists. We are trying to cope with it, all of us. But that doesn’t make us responsible.”
   “Then who is?”
   “Nobody,” Deitz said, and smiled. “On this one the responsibility spreads in so many directions that it’s invisible. It was an accident. It could have happened in any number of other ways.”
   “Some accident,” Stu said, his voice nearly a whisper. “What about the others? Hap and Hank Carmichael and Lila Bruett? Their boy Luke? Monty Sullivan—”
   “Classified,” Deitz said. “Going to shake me some more? If it will make you feel better, shake away.”
   Stu said nothing, but the way he was looking at Deitz made Deitz suddenly look down and begin to fiddle with the creases of his pants.
   “They’re alive,” he said, “and you may see them in time.”
   “What about Arnette?”
   “Quarantined.”
   “Who’s dead there?”
   “Nobody.”
   “You’re lying.”
   “Sorry you think so.”
   “When do I get out of here?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “Classified?” Stu asked bitterly.
   “No, just unknown. You don’t seem to have this disease. We want to know why you don’t have it. Then we’re home free.”
   “Can I get a shave? I itch.”
   Deitz smiled. “If you’ll allow Denninger to start running his tests again, I’ll get an orderly in to shave you right now.”
   “I can handle it. I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen.”
   Deitz shook his head firmly. “I think not.”
   Stu smiled dryly at him. “Afraid I might cut my own throat?”
   “Let’s just say—”
   Stu interrupted him with a series of harsh, dry coughs. He bent over with the force of them.
   The effect on Deitz was galvanic. He was up off the bed like a shot and across to the airlock with his feet seeming not to touch the floor at all. Then he was fumbling in his pocket for the square key and ramming it into the slot.
   “Don’t bother,” Stu said mildly. “I was faking.”
   Deitz turned to him slowly. Now his face had changed. His lips were thinned with anger, his eyes staring. “You were what?”
   “Faking,” Stu said. His smile broadened.
   Deitz took two uncertain steps toward him. His fists closed, opened, then closed again. “But why? Why would you want to do something like that?”
   “Sorry,” Stu said, smiling. “That’s classified.”
   “You shit sonofabitch,” Deitz said with soft wonder.
   “Go on. Go on out and tell them they can do their tests.”
   He slept better that night than he had since they had brought him here. And he had an extremely vivid dream. He had always dreamed a great deal—his wife had complained about him thrashing and muttering in his sleep—but he had never had a dream like this.
   He was standing on a country road, at the precise place where the black hottop gave up to bone-white dirt. A blazing summer sun shone down. On both sides of the road there was green corn, and it stretched away endlessly. There was a sign, but it was dusty and he couldn’t read it. There was the sound of crows, harsh and far away. Closer by, someone was playing an acoustic guitar, fingerpicking it. Vic Palfrey had been a picker, and it was a fine sound.
   This is where I ought to get to, Stu thought dimly. Yeah, this is the place, all right.
   What was that tune? “Beautiful Zion”? “The Fields of My Father’s Home”? “Sweet Bye and Bye”? Some hymn he remembered from his childhood, something he associated with full immersion and picnic lunches. But he couldn’t remember which one.
   Then the music stopped. A cloud came over the sun. He began to be afraid. He began to feel that there was something terrible, something worse than plague, fire, or earthquake. Something was in the corn and it was watching him. Something dark was in the corn.
   He looked, and saw two burning red eyes far back in the shadows, far back in the corn. Those eyes filled him with the paralyzed, hopeless horror that the hen feels for the weasel. Him, he thought. The man with no face. Oh dear God. Oh dear God no.
   Then the dream was fading and he awoke with feelings of disquiet, dislocation, and relief. He went to the bathroom and then to his window. He looked out at the moon. He went back to bed but it was an hour before he got back to sleep. All that corn, he thought sleepily. Must have been Iowa or Nebraska, maybe northern Kansas. But he had never been in any of those places in his life.

Chapter 14
   
It was quarter of twelve. Outside the small pillbox window, dark pressed evenly against the glass. Deitz sat alone in the office cubicle, tie pulled down, collar button undone. His feet were up on the anonymous metal desk, and he was holding a microphone. On top of the desk, the reels of an old-fashioned Wollensak tape recorder turned and turned.
   “This is Colonel Deitz,” he said. “Located Atlanta facility code PB-2. This is Report 16, subject file Project Blue, subfile Princess/Prince. This report, file, and subfile are Top Secret, classification 2-2-3, eyes only. If you are not classified to receive this material, fuck off, Jack.”
   He stopped and let his eyes fall closed for a moment. The tape reels ran on smoothly, undergoing all the correct electrical and magnetic changes.
   “Prince gave me one helluva scare tonight,” he said at last. “I won’t go into it; it’ll be in Denninger’s report. That guy will be more than willing to quote chapter and verse. Plus, of course, a transcription of my conversation with Prince will be on the telecommunications disc which also contains the transcription of this tape, which is being made at 2345 hours. I was almost pissed enough to hit him, because he scared the living Jesus out of me. I am not pissed anymore, however. The man put me into his shoes, and for just a second there I knew exactly how it feels to shake in them. He’s a fairly bright man once you get past the Gary Cooper exterior, and one independent sonofabitch. If it suits him, he’ll find all sorts of novel monkey-wrenches to throw into the gears. He has no close family in Arnette or anyplace else, so we can’t put much of a hammerlock on him. Denninger has volunteers—or says he does—who’ll be happy to go in and muscle him into a more cooperative frame of mind, and it may come to that, but if I may be pardoned another personal observation, I believe it would take more muscle than Denninger thinks. Maybe a whole lot more. For the record, I am still against it. My mother used to say you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar, and I guess I still believe it.
   “Again, for the record, he still tests virus-clean. You figure it out.”
   He paused again, fighting the urge to doze off. He had managed only four hours of sleep in the last seventy-two.
   “Records as of twenty-two-hundred hours,” he said formally, and picked a sheaf of reports off the desk. “Henry Carmichael died while I was talking with Prince. The cop, Joseph Robert Brentwood, died half an hour ago. This won’t be in Dr. D’s report, but he was all but shitting green apples over that one. Brentwood showed a sudden positive response to the vaccine type… uh…” He shuffled papers. “Here it is. 63-A-3. See subfile, if you like. Brentwood’s fever broke, the characteristic swellings in the glands of the neck went down, he reported hunger, and ate a poached egg and a slice of unbuttered toast. Spoke rationally, wanted to know where he was, and so on and so on and scooby-dooby-do. Then, around twenty-hundred hours, the fever came back with a bang. Delirious. He broke the restraints on his bed and went reeling around the room, yelling, coughing, blowing snot, the whole bit. Then he fell over and died. Kaboom. The opinion of the team is that the vaccine killed him. It made him better for a while, but he was getting sick again even before it killed him. So, it’s back to the old drawing boards.”
   He paused.
   “I saved the worst for last. We can declassify Princess back to plain old Eva Hodges, female, age four, Caucasian. Her coach-and-four turned back into a pumpkin and a bunch of mice late this afternoon. To look at her, you’d think she was perfectly normal, not even a sniffle. She’s down-hearted, of course; she misses her mom. Other than that, she appears perfectly normal. She’s got it, though. Her post-lunch BP first showed a drop, then a rise, which is the only halfway decent diagnostic tool Denninger’s got so far. Before supper Denninger showed me her sputum slides—as an incentive to diet, sputum slides are really primo, believe me—and they’re lousy with those wagon-wheel germs he says aren’t really germs at all, but incubators. I can’t understand how he can know where this thing is and what it looks like and still not be able to stop it. He gives me a lot of jargon, but I don’t think he understands it, either.”
   Deitz lit a cigarette.
   “So where are we tonight? We’ve got a disease that’s got several well-defined stages… but some people may skip a stage. Some people may backtrack a stage. Some people may do both. Some people stay in one stage for a relatively long time and others zoom through all four as if they were on a rocket-sled. One of our two ‘clean’ subjects is no longer clean. The other is a thirty-year-old redneck who seems to be as healthy as I am. Denninger has done about thirty million tests on him and has succeeded in isolating only four abnormalities: Redman appears to have a great many moles on his body. He has a slight hypertensive condition, too slight to medicate right now. He develops a mild tic under his left eye when he’s under stress. And Denninger says he dreams a great deal more than average—almost all night, every night. They got that from the standard EEG series they ran before he went on strike. And that’s it. I can’t make anything out of it, neither can Dr. Denninger, and neither can the people who check Dr. Demento’s Work.
   “This scares me, Starkey. It scares me because nobody but a very smart doctor with all the facts is going to be able to diagnose anything but a common cold in the people who are out there carrying this. Christ, nobody goes to the doctor anymore unless they’ve got pneumonia or a suspicious lump on the tit or a bad case of the dancing hives. Too hard to get one to look at you. So they’re going to stay home, drink fluids and get plenty of bedrest, and then they’re going to die. Before they do, they’re going to infect everyone who comes into the same room with them. All of us are still expecting the Prince—I think I used his real name here someplace, but at this juncture I don’t really give a fuck—to come down with it tonight or tomorrow or the day after, at the latest. And so far, no one who’s come down with it has gotten better. Those sonsofbitches out in California did this job a little too well for my taste.
   “Deitz, Atlanta PB facility 2, this report ends.”
   He turned off the recorder and stared at it for a long time. Then he lit another cigarette.

Chapter 15
 
   It was two minutes to midnight.
 
   Patty Greer, the nurse who had been trying to take Stu’s blood pressure when he went on strike was leafing through the current issue of McCall’s at the nurses’ station and waiting to go in and check Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Hapscomb. Hap would still be awake watching Johnny Carson and would be no problem. He liked to josh her about how hard it would be to pinch her bottom through her white all-over suit. Mr. Hapscomb was scared, but he was being cooperative, not like that dreadful Stuart Redman, who only looked at you and wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Mr. Hapscomb was what Patty Greer thought of as a “good sport.” As far as she was concerned, all patients could be divided into two categories: “good sports” and “old poops.” Patty, who had broken a leg roller skating when she was seven and had never spent a day in bed since, had very little patience with the “old poops.” You were either really sick and being a “good sport” or you were a hypochondriac “old poop” making trouble for a poor working girl.
   Mr. Sullivan would be asleep, and he would wake up ugly. It wasn’t her fault that she had to wake him up, and she would think Mr. Sullivan would understand that. He should just be grateful that he was getting the best care the government could provide, and all free at that. And she would just tell him so if he started being an “old poop” again tonight.
   The clock touched midnight; time to get going.
   She left the nurses’ station and walked down the hallway toward the white room where she would first be sprayed and then helped into her suit. Halfway there, her nose began to tickle. She got her hankie out of her pocket and sneezed lightly three times. She replaced the handkerchief.
   Intent on dealing with cranky Mr. Sullivan, she attached no significance to her sneezes. It was probably a touch of hay fever. The directive in the nurses’ station which said in big red letters, REPORT ANY COLD SYMPTOMS NO MATTER HOW MINOR TO YOUR SUPERVISOR AT ONCE , never even crossed her mind. They were worried that whatever those poor people from Texas had might spread outside the sealed rooms, but she also knew it was impossible for even a tiny virus to get inside the self-contained environment of the white-suits. Nevertheless, on her way down to the white room she infected an orderly, a doctor who was just getting ready to leave, and another nurse on her way to do her midnight rounds.
   A new day had begun.

Chapter 16
   
A day later, on June 23, a big white Connie was roaring north on US 180, in another part of the country. It was doing somewhere between ninety and one hundred, its Corinthian white paint job glittering in the sun, the chrome winking. The opera windows in the rear also gave back the sun, heliographing it viciously.
   The trail that Connie had left behind itself since Poke and Lloyd killed its owner and stole it somewhere just south of Hachita was wandering and pretty much senseless. Up 81 to US 80, the turnpike, until Poke and Lloyd began to feel nervous. They had killed six people in the last six days, including the owner of the Continental, his wife, and his smarmy daughter. But it was not the six murders that made them feel antsy about being on the interstate. It was the dope and the guns. Five grams of hash, a little tin snuffbox filled with God knew how much coke, and sixteen pounds of marijuana. Also two .38s, three .45s, a .357 Mag that Poke called his Pokerizer, six shotguns—two of them sawed-off pumps—and a Schmeisser submachine gun. Murder was a trifle beyond their intellectual reach, but they both understood the trouble they were going to be in if the Arizona State Police picked them up in a stolen car full of blow and shootin irons. On top of everything else, they were interstate fugitives. Had been ever since they crossed the Nevada border.
   Interstate fugitives. Lloyd Henreid liked the sound of that. Gangbusters. Take that, you dirty rat. Have a lead sandwich, ya lousy copper.
   So they had turned north at Deming, now on 180; had gone through Hurley and Bayard and the slightly larger town of Silver City, where Lloyd had bought a bag of burgers and eight milkshakes (why in the name of Christ had he bought eight of the motherfuckers? they would soon be pissing chocolate), grinning at the waitress in an empty yet hilarious way that made her nervous for hours afterward. I believe that man would just as soon killed me as looked at me, she told her boss that afternoon.
   Past Silver City and roaring through Cliff, the road now bending west again, just the direction they didn’t want to go. Through Buckhorn and then they were back in the country God forgot, two-lane blacktop running through sagebrush and sand, buttes and mesas in the background, all that same old same old made you want to just rare back and puke at it.
   “We’re gettin low on gas,” Poke said.
   “Wouldn’t be if you didn’t drive so fuckin fast,” Lloyd said. He took a sip of his third milkshake, gagged on it, powered down the window, and threw out all the leftover crap, including the three milkshakes neither of them had touched.
   “Whoop! Whoop!” Poke cried. He began to goose the gas pedal. The Connie lurched forward, dropped back, lurched forward.
   “Ride em cowboy!” Lloyd yelled.
   “Whoop! Whoop!”
   “You want to smoke?”
   “Smoke em if you got em,” Poke said. “Whoop! Whoop!”
   There was a large green Hefty bag on the floor between Lloyd’s feet. It held the sixteen pounds of marijuana. He reached in, got a handful, and began to roll a bomber joint.
   “Whoop! Whoop!” The Connie cruised back and forth over the white line.
   “Cut the shit!” Lloyd shouted. “I’m spillin it everywhere!”
   “Plenty more where that came from… whoop!”
   “Come on, we gotta deal this stuff, man. We gotta deal this stuff or we’re gonna get caught and wind up in somebody’s trunk.”
   “Okay, sport.” Poke began to drive smoothly again, but his expression was sulky. “It was your idea, your fuckin idea.”
   “You thought it was a good idea.”
   “Yeah, but I didn’t know we’d end up drivin all over fuckin Arizona. How we ever gonna get to New York this way?”
   “We’re throwin off pursuit, man,” Lloyd said. In his mind he saw police garage doors opening and thousands of 1940s radio cars issuing forth into the night. Spotlights crawling over brick walls. Come on out, Canarsie, we know you’re in there.
   “Good fuckin luck,” Poke said, still sulking. “We’re doin a helluva job. You know what we got, besides that dope and the guns? We got sixteen bucks and three hundred fuckin credit cards we don’t dare use. What the fuck, we don’t even have enough cash to fill this hog’s gas tank.”
   “God will provide,” Lloyd said, and spit-sealed the bomber. He lit it with the Connie’s dashboard lighter. “Happy fuckin days.”
   “And if you want to sell it, what are we doing smokin it?” Poke went on, not much mollified by the thought of God providing.
   “So we sell a few short ounces. Come on, Poke. Have a smoke.”
   This never failed to break Poke up. He brayed laughter and took the joint. Between them, standing on its wire stock, was the Schmeisser, fully loaded. The Connie blazed on up the road, its gas gauge standing at an eighth.
   Poke and Lloyd had met a year before in the Brownsville Minimum Security Station, a Nevada work farm. Brownsville was ninety acres of irrigated farmland and a prison compound of Quonset huts about sixty miles north of Tonopah and eighty northeast of Gabbs. It was a mean place to do short time. Although Brownsville Station was supposed to be a farm, nothing much grew there. Carrots and lettuce got one taste of that blaring sun, chuckled weakly, and died. Legumes—and weeds would grow, and the state legislature was fanatically dedicated to the idea that someday soybeans would grow. But the kindest thing that could be said about Brownsville’s ostensible purpose was that the desert was taking a Christless long time to bloom. The warden (who preferred to be called “the boss”) prided himself on being a hardass, and he hired only men he considered to be fellow hardasses. And, as he was fond of telling the new fish, Brownsville was mostly minimum security because when it came to escape, it was like the song said: noplace to run to, baby, noplace to hide. Some gave it a shot anyway, but most were brought back in two or three days, sunburned, glareblind, and eager to sell the boss their shriveled raisin souls for a drink of water. Some of them cackled madly, and one young man who was out for three days claimed he saw a large castle some miles south of Gabbs, a castle with a moat. The moat, he said, was guarded by trolls riding big black horses. Some months later when a Colorado revival preacher did a show at Brownsville, this same young man got Jesus in a big way.
   Andrew “Poke” Freeman, in for simple assault, was released in April 1989. He had occupied a bed next to Lloyd Henreid, and had told him that if Lloyd was interested in a big score, he knew about something interesting in Vegas. Lloyd was willing.
   Lloyd was released on June 1. His crime, committed in Reno, had been attempted rape. The lady was a showgirl on her way home, and she had shot a load of teargas into Lloyd’s eyes. He felt lucky to get only two to four, plus time served, plus time off for good behavior. At Brownsville it was just too fuckin hot to misbehave.
   He caught a bus to Las Vegas, and Poke met him at the terminal: This is the deal, Poke told him. He knew this guy, “one-time business associate” might describe him best, and this guy was known in certain circles as Gorgeous George. He did some piecework for a group of people with mostly Italian and Sicilian names. George was strictly part-time help. What he did mostly for these Sicilian-type people was to take things and bring things. Sometimes he took things from Vegas to L.A.; sometimes he brought other things from L.A. to Vegas. Small-time dope mostly, freebies for big-time customers. Sometimes guns. The guns were always a bring, never a take. As Poke understood it (and Poke’s understanding never got much beyond what the movie people call “soft focus”), these Sicilian-type people sometimes sold iron to independent thieves. Well, Poke said, Gorgeous George was willing to tell them the time and place when a fairly good haul of these items would be in the offing. George was asking twenty-five percent of what they realized. Poke and Lloyd would crash in on George, tie him and gag him, take the stuff, and maybe give him a couple of biffs and baffs for good measure. It had to look good, George had cautioned, because these Sicilian-type people were no one to fool around with.
   “Well,” Lloyd said, “it sounds good.”
   The next day Poke and Lloyd went to see Gorgeous George, a mild-mannered six-footer with a small head which sat incongruously above his roofbeam shoulders on a neck which did not seem to exist. He had a full head of waved blond hair, which made him look a bit like the famed wrestler.
   Lloyd had had second thoughts about the deal, but Poke had changed his mind again. Poke was good at that. George told them to come around to his house the following Friday evening around six. “Wear masks, for God’s sake,” he said. “And you bloody my nose and black my eye, too. Jesus, I wish I’d never gotten into this.”
   The big night came. Poke and Lloyd took a bus to the corner of George’s street and put on ski-masks at the foot of his walk. The door was locked, but as George had promised, not too tightly locked. There was a rumpus room downstairs, and there was George, standing in front of a Hefty bag full of pot. The Ping-Pong table was loaded down with guns. George was scared.
   “Jesus, oh Jesus, I wish I’d never gotten into this,” he kept saying as Lloyd tied his feet with clothesrope and Poke bound his hands with Scotch brand filament tape.
   Then Lloyd biffed George in the nose, bloodying it, and Poke baffed him in the eye, blacking it as per request.
   “Jeez!” George cried. “Did you have to do it so hard?”
   “You were the one wanted to make sure it looked good,” Lloyd pointed out. Poke plastered a piece of adhesive tape across George’s mouth. The two of them had begun to gather up the swag.
   “You know something, old buddy?” Poke said, pausing.
   “Nope,” Lloyd said, giggling nervously. “Not a thing.”
   “I wonder if ole George there can keep a secret.”
   For Lloyd, this was a brand-new consideration. He stared thoughtfully at Gorgeous George for a long hard minute. George’s eyes bugged back at him in sudden terror.
   Then Lloyd said, “Sure. It’s his ass too.” But he sounded as uneasy as he felt. When certain seeds are planted, they nearly always grow.
   Poke smiled. “Oh, he could just say, ‘Hey guys. I met this old friend and his buddy. We shot the shit for a while, had a few beers, and what do you think, the sonsofbitches came over to the house and took me off. Sure hope you catch em. Lemme tell you what they look like.’”
   George was shaking his head wildly, his eyes capital Os of terror.
   The guns were by then in a heavy canvas laundry sack they had found in the downstairs bathroom. Now Lloyd hefted the bag nervously and said, “Well, what do you think we ought to do?”
   “I think we ought to pokerize him, ole buddy,” Poke said regretfully. “Only thing we can do.”
   Lloyd said, “That seems awful hard, after he put us onto this.”
   “Hard old world, buddy.”
   “Yeah,” Lloyd sighed, and they walked over to George.
   “Mph,” George said, shaking his head wildly. “Mmmmmnh! Mmmmph! ”
   “I know,” Poke soothed him. “Bitch, ain’t it? I’m sorry, George, no shit. It ain’t a bit personal. Want you to ‘member that. Catch on his head, Lloyd.”
   That was easier said than done. Gorgeous George was whipping his head wildly from side to side. He was sitting in the corner of his rumpus room and the walls were cinderblock and he kept rapping his head against them. Didn’t even seem to feel it.
   “Catch him,” Poke said serenely, and ripped another piece of tape from the roll.
   Lloyd at last got him by the hair and managed to hold him still long enough for Poke to slap the second strip of adhesive neatly across George’s nose, thereby sealing all of his tubes. George went purely crazy. He rolled out of the corner, bellywhopped, and then lay there, humping the floor and making muffled sounds which Lloyd supposed were supposed to be screams. Poor old fellow. It went on for almost five minutes before George was completely still. He bucked and scrabbled and thumped. His face got as red as the side of old Dad’s barn. The last thing he did was to lift both legs eight or ten inches straight up off the floor and bring them down with a crash. It reminded Lloyd of something he had seen in a Bugs Bunny cartoon or something, and he chuckled a little, feeling a bit cheered up. Up until then it had been sort of gruesome to see.
   Poke squatted beside George and felt for his pulse.
   “Well?” Lloyd said.
   “Nothin tickin but his watch, ole buddy,” Poke said. “Speakin of which…” He lifted George’s meaty arm and looked at his wrist. “Naw, just a Timex. I was thinkin it might be a Casio, somethin like that.” He let George’s arm drop.
   George’s car keys were in his front pants pocket. And in an upstairs cupboard they found a Skippy peanut butter jar half filled with dimes, and they took those, too. There was twenty dollars and sixty cents in dimes.
   George’s car was a wheezy old Mustang with a four on the floor and lousy shocks and tires that were as bald as Telly Savalas. They left Vegas on US 93 and went southeast into Arizona. By noon of the next day, day before yesterday, they had skirted Phoenix on the back roads. Yesterday around nine they had stopped at a dusty old general store two miles beyond Sheldon on Arizona Highway 75. They knocked over the store and pokerized the proprietor, an elderly gentleman with mail-order false teeth. They got sixty-three dollars and the old dudemar’s pickup truck.
   The pickup truck had blown two tires this morning. Two tires at the same time, and neither of them could find any tacks or nails on the road at all, although they spent nearly half an hour looking, swapping a bomber joint back and forth as they did so. Poke finally said it must have been a coincidence. Lloyd said he had heard of stranger things, by God. Then along came the white Connie, like an answer to their prayers. They had crossed the state line from Arizona into New Mexico earlier on, although neither of them knew it, and so they had become meat for the FBI.
   The Connie’s driver had pulled over, leaned out, and said: “Need any help?”
   “Sure do,” Poke had said, and pokerized the guy right on the spot. Got him dead-bang between the eyes with the .357 Mag. Poor sucker probably never even knew what had hit him.
   “Why don’t you turn here?” Lloyd said, pointing to the junction coming up. He was pleasantly stoned.
   “Sure could,” Poke said cheerfully. He let the Connie’s speed drop from eighty to sixty. Drifted it to the left, right wheels barely leaving the ground, and then a new piece of road was unrolling in front of them. Route 78, due west. And so, not knowing they had ever left it or that they were now the perpetrators of what the newspapers were calling a TRI-STATE KILL-SPREE, they reentered Arizona.
   About an hour later a sign came up on their right: BURRACK 6.
   “Burlap?” Lloyd said foggily.
   “Burrack,” Poke said, and began twisting the Connie’s wheel so that the car made big graceful loops back and forth across the road. “Whoop! Whoop!”
   “You want to stop there? I’m hungry, man.”
   “You’re always hungry.”
   “Fuck you. When I get stoned, I get the munchies.”
   “You can munch my nine-inch hogleg, how’s that? Whoop! Whoop!”
   “Seriously, Poke. Let’s stop.”
   “Okay. Got to get some cash, too. We’ve thrown off enough fuckin pursuit for a while. We got to get some money and shag ass north. This desert shit makes no sense to me.”
   “Okay,” Lloyd said. He didn’t know if it was the dope working on him or what, but all of a sudden he felt paranoid as hell, even worse than when they had been on the turnpike. Poke was right. Stop outside this Burrack and pull a score like they had outside of Sheldon. Get some money and some gas station maps, ditch this fuckin Connie for something that would blend into the scenery, then head north and east by the secondary roads. Get the fuck out of Arizona.
   “I’ll tell you the truth, man,” Poke said. “All of a sudden I feel as nervous as a longtail cat in a room fulla rockin chairs.”
   “I know what you mean, jellybean,” Lloyd said gravely, and then it hit them both funny and they broke up.
   Burrack was a wide place in the road. They shot through it and on the other side was a combination café, store, and gas station. There was an old Ford wagon and a dust-streaked Olds with a horse trailer behind it in the dirt parking lot. The horse stared out at them as Poke wheeled the Connie in.
   “This looks like just the ticket,” Lloyd said.
   Poke agreed. He reached into the back for the .357 and checked the loads. “You ready?”
   “I guess so,” Lloyd said, and took hold of the Schmeisser.
   They walked across the baked parking lot. The police had known who they were for four days now; they had left their fingerprints all over Gorgeous George’s house, and in the store where the old man with the mail-order dentures had been pokerized. The old man’s pickup had been found within fifty feet of the bodies of the three people who belonged with the Continental, and it seemed reasonable to assume that the men who had killed Gorgeous George and the store owner had also killed these three. If they had been listening to the Connie’s radio instead of the tape-player, they would have known that Arizona and New Mexico police were coordinating the largest manhunt in forty years, all for a couple of small-time grifters who could not quite comprehend what they might have done to start such a fuss.
   The gas was self-service; the clerk had to turn on the pump. So they went up the steps and inside. Three aisles of canned goods went up the room toward the counter. At the counter a man in cowboy clothes was paying for a pack of smokes and half a dozen Slim Jims. Halfway down the middle aisle a tired-looking woman with coarse black hair was trying to decide between two brands of spaghetti sauce. The place smelled of stale licorice and sun and tobacco and age. The proprietor was a freckled man in a gray shirt. He was wearing a company cap that said SHELL in red letters against a white field. He looked up as the screen door slapped shut and his eyes widened.
   Lloyd put the wire stock of the Schmeisser against his shoulder and fired a burst at the ceiling. The two hanging lightbulbs shattered like bombs. The man in the cowboy clothes began to turn around.
   “Just hold still and nobody’ll get hurt!” Lloyd shouted, and Poke immediately made him a liar by blowing a hole through the woman looking at the sauces. She flew out of her shoes.
   “Holy gee, Poke!” Lloyd hollered. “You didn’t have to—”
   “Pokerized her, ole buddy!” Poke yelled. “She’ll never watch Jerry Falwell again! Whoop! Whoop!”
   The man in the cowboy clothes kept turning. He was holding his smokes in his left hand. The harsh light falling through the show window and the screen door pricked out bright stars on the dark lenses of his sunglasses. There was a .45 revolver tucked into his belt, and now he plucked it out unhurriedly as Lloyd and Poke were staring at the dead woman. He aimed, fired, and the left side of Poke’s face suddenly disappeared in a spray of blood and tissue and teeth.
   “Shot! ” Poke screamed, dropping the .357 and flailing backward. His flailing hands raked potato chips and taco chips and Cheez Doodles onto the splintery wooden floor. “Shot me, Lloyd! Look out! Shot me! Shot me! ” He hit the screen door and it slammed open and Poke sat down hard on the porch outside, pulling one of the aged door hinges loose.
   Lloyd, stunned, fired more in reflex than in self-defense. The Schmeisser’s roar filled the room. Cans flew. Bottles crashed, spilling catsup, pickles, olives. The glass front of the Pepsi cooler jingled inward. Bottles of Dr. Pepper and Jolt and Orange Crush exploded like clay pigeons. Foam ran everywhere. The man in the cowboy clothes, cool, calm, and collected, fired his piece again. Lloyd felt rather than heard the bullet as it droned by nearly close enough to part hair. He raked the Schmeisser across the room, from left to right.
   The man in the SHELL cap dropped behind the counter with such suddenness that an observer might have thought a trapdoor had been sprung on him. A gumball machine disintegrated. Red, blue, and green chews rolled everywhere. The glass bottles on the counter exploded. One of them had contained pickled eggs; another, pickled pigs’ feet. Immediately the room was filled with the sharp odor of vinegar.
   The Schmeisser put three bullet holes in the cowboy’s khaki shirt and most of his innards exited from the back to splatter all over Spuds MacKenzie. The cowboy went down, still clutching his .45 in one hand and his deck of Luckies in the other.
   Lloyd, bullshit with fear, continued to fire. The machine pistol was growing hot in his hands. A box filled with returnable soda bottles tinkled and fell over. A calendar girl wearing hotpants took a bullet hole in one magical peach-colored thigh. A rack of paperbacks with no covers crashed over. Then the Schmeisser was empty, and the new silence was deafening. The smell of gunpowder was heavy and rank.
   “Holy gee,” Lloyd said. He looked cautiously at the cowboy. It didn’t look like the cowboy was going to be a problem in either the near or distant future.
   “Shot me! ” Poke brayed, and staggered back inside. He clawed the screen door out of his way with such force that the other hinge popped and the door slapped onto the porch. “Shot me, Lloyd, look out! ”
   “I got him, Poke,” Lloyd soothed, but Poke seemed not to hear. He was a mess. His right eye blazed like a baleful sapphire. The left was gone. His left cheek had been vaporized; you could watch his jaw work on that side as he talked. Most of his teeth were gone over there, too. His shirt was soaked with blood. When you got right down to it, Poke was sort of a mess.
   “Stupid fuck blew me up! ” Poke screamed. He bent over and got the .357 Mag. “I’ll teach you to shoot me, you dumb fuck.”
   He advanced on the cowboy, a rural Dr. Sardonicus. He put one foot on the cowboy’s butt like a hunter posing for a picture with the bear which would soon be decorating the wall of his den, and prepared to empty the .357 into his head. Lloyd stood watching, gape-mouthed, the smoking machine pistol dangling from one hand, still trying to figure out how all of this had happened.
   At that moment the man in the SHELL cap popped back up from behind the counter like Jack from his box, his face screwed up in an expression of desperate intent, a double-barreled shotgun clutched in both hands.
   “Huh?” Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels. He went down, his face a worse mess than ever and not caring a bit.
   Lloyd decided it was time to leave. Fuck the money. There was money everywhere. The time to throw off a little more pursuit had clearly come. He wheeled and exited the store in large shambling strides, his boots barely touching the boards.
   He was halfway down the steps when an Arizona State Police cruiser wheeled into the yard. A trooper got out on the passenger side and pulled his pistol. “Hold it right there! What’s going on in there?”
   “Three people dead!” Lloyd cried. “Hell of a mess! Guy that did it went out the back! I’m gettin the fuck out!”
   He ran to the Connie, had actually slipped behind the wheel, and was just remembering that the keys were in Poke’s pocket when the trooper yelled: “Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!”
   Lloyd halted. After examining the radical surgery on Poke’s face, it didn’t take a long time to decide he’d just as soon pass.
   “Holy gee,” he said miserably as a second trooper laid a big horse pistol upside his head. The first one cuffed him.
   “In the back of the cruiser, Sunny Jim.”
   The man in the SHELL cap had come out onto the porch, still clutching his shotgun. “He shot Bill Markson!” he yelled in a high, queer voice. “T’other one shot Missus Storm! Hell of a note! I shot t’other one! He’s deader’n a shitbug! Like to shoot this one too, iff’n you boys’ll stand away!”
   “Calm down, Pop,” one of the troopers said. “Fun’s over.”
   “I’ll shoot him where he stands!” the old guy yelled. “I’ll lay him low!” Then he leaned forward like an English butler making a bow and threw up on his shoes.
   “You boys get me away from that guy, would you?” Lloyd said. “I believe he’s crazy.”
   “You got this comin outta the store, Sunny Jim,” the trooper who had thrown down on him in the first place said. The barrel of his pistol looped up and up, catching the sun, and then it crashed down on Lloyd Henreid’s head and he never woke up until that evening in the Apache County Jail’s infirmary.

Chapter 17
   
Starkey was standing in front of monitor 2, keeping a close eye on Tech 2nd Class Frank D. Bruce. When we last saw Bruce, he was facedown in a bowl of Chunky Sirloin Soup. No change except for the positive ID. Situation normal, all fucked up.
   Thoughtfully, hands locked behind his back like a general reviewing troops, like General Black Jack Pershing, his boyhood idol, Starkey moved down to monitor 4, where the situation had changed for the better. Dr. Emmanual Ezwick still lay dead on the floor, but the centrifuge had stopped. At 1940 hours last night, the centrifuge had begun to emit fine tendrils of smoke. At 1995 hours the sound pickups in Ezwick’s lab had transmitted a whunga-whunga-whunga sort of sound that deepened into a fuller, richer, and more satisfying ronk! ronk! ronk! At 2107 hours the centrifuge had ronked its last ronk and had slowly come to rest. Was it Newton who had said that somewhere, beyond the farthest star, there may be a body perfectly at rest? Newton had been right about everything but the distance, Starkey thought. You didn’t have to go far at all. Project Blue was perfectly at rest. Starkey was very glad. The centrifuge had been the last illusion of life, and the problem he’d had Steffens run through the main computer bank (Steffens had looked at him as though he were crazy, and yes, Starkey thought he might be) was: How long could that centrifuge be expected to run? The answer, which had come back in 6.6 seconds, was: ± 3 YEARS PROBABLE MALFUNCTION NEXT TWO WEEKS .009% AREAS OF PROBABLE MALFUNCTION BEARINGS 38% MAIN MOTOR 16% ALL OTHER 54%. That was a smart computer. Starkey had gotten Steffens to query it again after the actual burnout of Ezwick’s centrifuge. The computer communed with the Engineering Systems data bank and confirmed that the centrifuge had indeed burned out its bearings.
   Remember that, Starkey thought as his caller began to beep urgently behind him. The sound of burning bearings in the final stages of collapse is ronk-ronk-ronk.
   He went to the caller and pushed the button that snapped off the beeper. “Yes, Len.”
   “Billy, I’ve got an urgent from one of our teams in a town called Sipe Springs, Texas. Almost four hundred miles from Arnette. They say they have to talk to you; it’s a command decision.”
   “What is it, Len?” he asked calmly. He had taken over sixteen “downers” in the last ten hours, and was, generally speaking, feeling fine. Not a sign of a ronk.
   “Press.”
   “Oh Jesus,” Starkey said mildly. “Patch them through.”
   There was a muffled roar of static with a voice talking unintelligibly behind it.
   “Wait a minute,” Len said.
   The static slowly cleared.
   “—Lion, Team Lion, do you read, Blue Base? Can you read? One… two… three… four… this is Team Lion—”
   “I’ve got you, Team Lion,” Starkey said. “This is Blue Base One.”
   “Problem is coded Flowerpot in the Contingency Book,” the tinny voice said. “Repeat, Flowerpot.”
   “I know what the fuck Flowerpot is,” Starkey said. “What’s the situation?”
   The tinny voice coming from Sipe Springs talked uninterrupted for almost five minutes. The situation itself was unimportant, Starkey thought, because the computer had informed him two days ago that just this sort of situation (in some shape or form) was apt to occur before the end of June. 88% probability. The specifics didn’t matter. If it had two legs and belt-loops, it was a pair of pants. Never mind the color.
   A doctor in Sipe Springs had made some good guesses, and a pair of reporters for a Houston daily had linked what was happening in Sipe Springs with what had already happened in Arnette, Verona, Commerce City, and a town called Polliston, Kansas. Those were the towns where the problem had gotten so bad so fast that the army had been sent in to quarantine. The computer had a list of twenty-five other towns in ten states where traces of Blue were beginning to show up.
   The Sipe Springs situation wasn’t important because it wasn’t unique. They’d had their chance at unique in Arnette—well, maybe—and flubbed it. What was important was that the “situation” was finally going to see print on something besides yellow military flimsy; was, anyway, unless Starkey took steps. He hadn’t decided whether to do that or not. But when the tinny voice stopped talking, Starkey realized that he had made the decision after all. He had perhaps made it as long as twenty years ago.
   It came down to what was important. And what was important wasn’t the fact of the disease; it wasn’t the fact that Atlanta’s integrity had somehow been breached and they were going to have to switch the whole preventative operation to much less satisfactory facilities in Stovington, Vermont; it wasn’t the fact that Blue spread in such sneaky common-cold disguise.
   “What is important—”
   “Say again, Blue Base One,” the voice said anxiously. “We did not copy.”
   What was important was that a regrettable incident had occurred. Starkey flashed back in time twenty-two years to 1968. He had been in the officers’ club in San Diego when the news came about Calley and what had happened at Mei Lai Four. Starkey had been playing poker with four other men, two of whom now sat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The poker game had been forgotten, utterly forgotten, in a discussion of exactly what this was going to do to the military—not any one branch but the entire military—in the witch-hunt atmosphere of Washington’s fourth estate. And one of their number, a man who could now dial directly to the miserable worm who had been masquerading as a Chief Executive since January 20, 1959, had laid his cards carefully down on the green felt table and he had said: Gentlemen, a regrettable incident has occurred. And when a regrettable incident occurs which involves any branch of the United States Military, we don’t question the roots of that incident but rather how the branches may best be pruned. The service is mother and father to us. And if you find your mother raped or your father beaten and robbed, before you call the police or begin an investigation, you cover their nakedness. Because you love them.
   Starkey had never heard anyone talk so well before or since.
   Now he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and fumbled out a thin blue folder bound with red tape. The legend written on the cover read: IF TAPE IS BROKEN NOTIFY ALL SECURITY DIVISIONS AT ONCE. Starkey broke the tape.
   “Are you there, Blue Base One?” the voice was asking. “We do not copy you. Repeat, do not copy.”
   “I’m here, Lion,” Starkey said. He had flipped to the last page of the book and now ran his finger down a column labeled EXTREME COVERT COUNTERMEASURES.
   “Lion, do you read?”
   “We read five-by, Blue Base One.”
   “Troy,” Starkey said deliberately. “I repeat, Lion: Troy. Repeat back, please. Over to you.”
   Silence. A faraway mumble of static. Starkey was fleetingly reminded of the walkie-talkies they made as kids, two tin Del Monte cans and twenty yards of waxed string.
   “I say again—”
   “Oh Jesus!” a very young voice in Sipe Springs gulped.
   “Repeat back, son,” Starkey said.
   “T-Troy,” the voice said. Then, more strongly: “Troy.”
   “Very good,” Starkey said calmly. “God bless you, son. Over and out.”
   “And you, sir. Over and out.”
   A click, followed by heavy static, followed by another click, silence, and Len Creighton’s voice. “Billy?”
   “Yes, Len.”
   “I copied the whole thing.”
   “That’s fine, Len,” Starkey said tiredly. “You make your report as you see fit. Of course.”
   “You don’t understand, Billy,” Len said. “You did the right thing. Don’t you think I know that?”
   Starkey let his eyes slip closed. For a moment all the sweet downers deserted him. “God bless you, too, Len,” he said, and his voice was close to breaking. He switched off and went back to stand in front of monitor 2. He put his hands behind his back like a Black Jack Pershing reviewing troops. He regarded Frank D. Bruce and his final resting place. In a little while he felt calm again.
   Going southeast out of Sipe Springs, if you get on US 36, you are headed in the general direction of Houston, a day’s drive away. The car burning up the road was a three-year-old Pontiac Bonneville, doing eighty, and when it came over the rise and saw the nondescript Ford blocking the road, there was nearly an accident.
   The driver, a thirty-six-year-old stringer for a large Houston daily, tromped on the power brake and the tires began to screech, the Pontiac’s nose first dipping down toward the road and then beginning to break to the left.
   “Holy Gawd!” the photographer in the shotgun seat cried. He dropped his camera to the floor and began to scramble his seat belt across his middle.
   The driver let up on the brake, skirted the Ford on the shoulder, and then felt his left wheels start to drag in the soft dirt. He matted the gas pedal and the Bonneville responded with more traction, dragging back onto the blacktop. Blue smoke squirted from beneath the tires. The radio blared on and on:
   Baby, can you dig your man,
   He’s a righteous man,
   Baby, can you dig your man?
   He tromped the brake again, and the Bonneville slued to a stop in the middle of the hot and deserted afternoon. He drew in a ragged, terrified breath and then coughed it out in a series of bursts. He began to be angry. He threw the Pontiac into reverse and backed toward the Ford and the two men standing behind it.
   “Listen,” the photographer said nervously. He was fat and hadn’t been in a fight since the ninth grade. “Listen, maybe we just better—”
   He was thrown forward with a grunt as the stringer brought the Pontiac to another screeching halt, threw the transmission lever into park with one hard thrust of his hand, and got out.
   He began to walk toward the two young men behind the Ford, his hands doubled into fists.
   “All right, motherfuckers!” he shouted. “You almost got us fucking killed and I want—”
   He had been in the service, four years in the army. Volunteer. He had just time to identify the rifles as the new M-3A’s when they brought them up from below the rear deck of the Ford. He stood shocked in the hot Texas sunshine and made water in his pants.
   He began to scream and in his mind he was turning to run back to the Bonneville but his feet never moved. They opened up on him, and slugs blew out his chest and groin. As he dropped to his knees, holding both hands out mutely for mercy, a slug struck him an inch over his left eye and tore off the top of his head.
   The photographer, who had been twisted over the back seat, found it impossible to comprehend exactly what had happened until the two young men stepped over the stringer’s body and began to walk toward him, rifles raised.
   He slid across the Pontiac’s seat, warm bubbles of saliva collecting at the corners of his mouth. The keys were still in the ignition. He turned the car on and screamed out just as they began shooting. He felt the car lurch to the right as if a giant had kicked the left rear, and the wheel began to shimmy wildly in his hands. The photographer bounced up and down as the Bonneville pogoed up the road on the flat tire. A second later the giant kicked the other side of the car. The shimmy got worse. Sparks flew off the blacktop. The photographer was whining. The Pontiac’s rear tires shimmied and flapped like black rags. The two young men ran back to their Ford, whose serial number was listed among the multitude in the Army Vehicles division at the Pentagon, and one of them drove it around in a tight, swaying circle. The nose bounced wildly as it came off the shoulder and drove over the body of the stringer. The sergeant in the passenger seat sprayed a startled sneeze onto the windshield.
   Ahead of them, the Pontiac washing-machined along on its two flat rear tires, the nose bouncing up and down. Behind the wheel the fat photographer had begun to weep at the sight of the dark Ford growing in the rearview mirror. He had the accelerator pressed to the floor but the Pontiac would do no more than forty and it was all over the road. On the radio Larry Underwood had been replaced by Madonna. Madonna was asserting that she was a material girl.
   The Ford swung around the Bonneville and for one second of crystal hope the photographer thought it was going to keep right on going, to just disappear over the desolate horizon and let him alone.
   Then it pulled back in, and the Pontiac’s wildly jittering nose caught its mudguard. There was a scream of pulling metal. The photographer’s head flew forward into the wheel and blood sprayed from his nose.
   Throwing terrified, creaky-necked glances back over his shoulder, he slid across the warm plastic seat as if it were grease and got out on the passenger’s side. He ran down the shoulder. There was a barbed wire fence and he leaped over it, sailing up and up like a blimp, and he thought: I’m going to make it, I can run forever —
   He fell down on the other side with his leg caught in the barbs. Screaming at the sky, he was still trying to free his pants and dimpled white flesh when the two young men came down the shoulder with their guns in their hands.
   Why, he tried to ask them, but all that came out of him was a low and helpless squawk and then his brains exited the back of his head.
   There was no published report of disease or any other trouble in Sipe Springs, Texas, that day.