"He took some comp time, sir. The Lindstroms have evidently been held up in traffic. I'm sure he will check in the moment he gets to town."
"That's all. You're dismissed—but I want to see Lind-strom when he shows up."
"Thank you sir." Sam moved out of the doorway, and then leaned in quickly, catching Fewell picking his nose. "And have a good evening, sir."
He called Fletch so many times during the shift, checking to see if Danny had checked in, that even Fletch got exasperated. "If he calls, dammit, I'll let you know. Now get off the air and earn your salary."
15
She woke slowly, surfacing through layers of tension, and when she broke through the top of her sleep, her terror was as bright as the sun that stabbed into her eyes. She knew now that Danny was truly gone, and that there was no going back to save him. That tomorrow and next month and Christmas and next year, and all the years of her life lay ahead without him. The knowledge was more than she could bear.
She turned her face into the crushed grass and tried to shut the world out. She was alone.
She was not alone.
He crouched above her, pulling at her shoulder. She moaned and burrowed herself more deeply into the carpet of grass, deep enough to feel the grave-cold earth beneath it. There was no comfort there; there was no comfort left
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anywhere. She stood and began to pace with tight little steps, wringing her hands. That spot of meadow seemed safer. No, this spot. No, the terror was inside of her; there was no place to run to.
"What time is it? What time is it? Time? Time—" Her voice was a chant.
"Almost five."
"Morning five? Night five? We have to go. I have to get away from here. Hurry. Hurry. Show me which way."
"It's afternoon. You slept a long time. I let you sleep because you were worn out. The meadow is soft, isn't it?"
"It's cold. The ground is cold. We have to leave. We have to go down the mountain and tell someone to come and get Danny and take care of him."
"He's dead."
"I know—I know—I know. But he has to be in a clean room, a place where—oh my God—nothing can get at him. We have to tell someone."
"We can't go tonight. It's too late and the forest is too dark. Things in the woods—at night—they follow you and find you and you don't see them. You don't have any warning. They come for you."
"You did, didn't you? You came in the night and you crept up on us and you changed everything. You killed everything."
"No. I warned you. I came and warned you of the danger. God put me there so that I could save you. You believe in God, don't you?"
"I did." She had forgotten God the moment He failed her.
"You still do. Nothing happens without a reason."
"What reason?" She was screaming at him. "What reason for my husband to die instead of you?"
"I don't know. I only know that I'm here for you, and that you must trust me."
"Why?"
"Because you don't have anyone else."
He was mixing her up. He was not God's emissary; he was
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Lucifer, using God's name to confuse her. But what if she was wrong?
He hadn't killed her yet, and she had expected that he would. He was probably crazy but she was not sure now if he was bad-crazy or good-crazy. She was quite sure that he had raped her, but whenever one memory segment became clearly defined, other recollections blurred. Was she remembering sex with Danny or with him?
She watched him bend over the fire to stir something, and she smelled food.
He smiled at her. "You have to eat. You must be strong because I've found the trail. It was right there behind those deadfalls; I found it while you were sleeping. In the morning, after you've eaten and slept, we will follow the way out. I promise you."
"Why did you rape me?"
He smiled at her again. "Is that the way you remember it?"
"Of course that's the way I remember it."
But in fact she only remembered their bodies moving together and the moon above or the sun—and then his face. No, that was with Danny. What did she remember?
"Do you read the Bible?"
"I used to read it a lot."
"Then you know that a man is responsible for his dead brother's wife; it is given to him to care for her and to hold her in love because his brother cannot."
"It was too soon ..."
"The time is not important. It was inevitable that we should be together in love."
She was so frightened of him. He spun words around and around her so rapidly that she had no point of balance. He was capable of killing her in so many ways. She could not argue with his madness. Perhaps she was crazy too. That thought made her dizzy again.
"Look around us." His voice was low and steady. There was something wrong with her heart. Too fast. Staggered beats that dragged and then tumbled out of sync.
"We are in paradise. We have been through hell, and we
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have been rewarded with paradise. God created the world in six days—the whole world. Were those six days of our time or six days that each lasted a century? Do we know what time it is? Can we believe absolutely that there is still a world beyond what we know now, today, this minute, this place? Is there anything on the other side of those trees and behind those hills? Maybe there's nothing more—maybe the rest of the world has died."
"But you said you'd take me out tomorrow. You promised me."
"I did, and I will. But you must not grieve for anything or anyone while we still have all this. We can only know that we have been blessed."
"I can't be certain of anything. It is very, very difficult for me to think."
"I will think for you."
"I have no choice, have I?"
"You can leave me at any time."
She did not believe him, but she had no strength to argue. She was so tired. She could not form long sentences and her thoughts fragmented before they came together.
"You can leave me. But it isn't going to happen. You would die without me. We've come through the worst of it. Eat this."
She stared suspiciously at the brownish lumps and liquid he held out to her in the bisected metal pan. It tasted of tin and cheap TV dinners and she ate it mechanically.
The meadow was already darkening, closing her in with him for another night. She shuddered and he noted her movement although he seemed to be looking away from her.
"You're cold."
"A little."
He moved to drape a sleeping bag around her shoulders, his hands touching her impersonally. What did she remember about his hands?
She did not want to talk to him, but having no one at all to talk to was the worst thing; the quiet let her mind rove freely to pick at fragments of the horror. She saw Danny's face, his dead eyes beseeching her, his dead mouth calling to
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her before it filled with a fountain of blood. And she fought to keep the food she'd just eaten from rising in her gorge.
"I have to go into the woods again," she said faintly.
"I'll go with you."
She didn't argue. Her body and all of its functions didn't matter any longer. He had taken it, erasing something she had guarded carefully all her life.
She squatted near a stump and turned her head away, but she felt him watch her. He turned back toward the clearing, their little camp visible now only by the molehill of yellow embers lighting the black. He tossed more logs on the fire and it billowed high, a circle of warmth against the true cold around them. The smoke choked the air on the downwind side of the flames and she was forced to sit beside him, but she held her sleeping bag around her like armor, dreading his hands. He had raped her; she was sure of that now, but she could not remember how many times. He was like an animal in rut. She had heard Doss say that a ram could do it dozens of times in a single day, and there was that kind of energy about the red man.
She spoke very carefully. "I need to know what happened to my husband. I think—if you could tell me everything— that I could cope with it. I am having a great deal of difficulty. I imagine things. I see terrible pictures because I don't know what really happened." He was quiet for a long time. "If I thought it would help you, I would tell you, but it wouldn't help you. I told you that it was sudden, that he didn't feel pain, and that's enough for now. When it's time, and when there isn't so much danger around us, I will answer everything you ask. Not now. And we won't have sex tonight. . ." She felt a wave of relief. No. It was probably one of his tricks.
"We can talk, but there are rules. You have to take the part of life that cannot be dealt with and shut it off. Talk about anything that happened before we came together, or talk about what will happen tomorrow or next week. But we will not talk of anything in between." 179
"That's impossible."
"No. Think this: that you and I are riding on a train through the night. We're going somewhere we want to go, and you're a nice pretty woman, and I'm not such a bad guy, and we have a long way to go together. So we talk to each other and we pass the time, and we leave behind us everything that we don't want to think about, and everything ahead of us is under my control."
"But nobody can control the future."
"Yes. Yes, it can be shaped and painted the way we choose. Now, look at the fire and keep staring at it. See the lights in the houses along the track? Hear the whistle blowing? Hear how the wheels go clackety-clackety-clackety underneath us, bumping over the tracks."
"No. I hear a loon crying."
His hand grasped her arm so tightly that his fingers hurt. "That's not a loon; that's a whistle. You have to listen."
"I'll try."
"Clackety-clackety-clackety-clack." His voice was so deep that it vibrated oddly in her bones. She shifted so that her arm slipped away from his hand and he let her go easily.
"How old are you?"
"That doesn't matter. That's only part of time."
"I don't know how to talk. I'll break your rules."
"You're soft and gentle, like my mother was. You even look like her."
"Where is she now?"
"Gone."
She waited for him to say more, but he fell silent, staring into the fire.
"I remember everything, you know. Do you believe that I can?"
"Yes." She would not disagree, afraid to set off some spark that would trigger his crazy side.
"We weren't town people like you were. We were with the carnivals—because that was the only thing she knew. My mother was very young, but everything she did was for me, and she was with me every minute she could be."
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He paused as if he expected her to deny that, but she said nothing.
"She danced and she was good; she could have danced anywhere, but she was afraid to try. I remember she wore this little pink costume with shiny things on it, little beads—whatchacallit—sequins. She looked like a princess. And her hair was like yours, but longer." His voice changed, anger sliding into it; she tensed, but he talked on, remembering. "We never had shit. Nothing. We lived in a crummy little bus-trailer thing, cold in winter, an oven in the summer, and the tires always blowing. I'd wake up in the night and we'd be stopped somewhere along some road and she'd be crying because we'd been left behind and she couldn't find anyone to get us going. Unless you've lived like that, you don't understand. Town kids used to laugh at me when I tried to play with them. Their mothers would come out and tell me to go away.
"So, anyway, I always wanted a bicycle. Fuck, she couldn't afford to feed us. She had these silver shoes with different colored bows to match her costumes, and they were all cracked on the sides and so thin on the bottom that she got slivers from the stage, and she couldn't afford new ones because she was trying to feed me. I'll bet you've never been hungry in your life, have you? Did you ever eat cornmeal mush and boiled potatoes for a whole month running?"
"No."
"So a bicycle was out of the question. I could ride one when I was four. Some bratty town kid came by and he had his bright red bike and I got on it and I rode that sucker and he started screaming and crying and saying I stole it. I just got on it and rode it. First time. That was free. The wind swishing by my ears and my legs pumping and I knew I could go anywhere I wanted, only his daddy comes running up and grabs the handlebars and says, 'Give it back, you little bastard,' and the kid's standing there and grinning like a monkey and sticking his tongue out.
"Lureen, she tried to explain I was only trying it out, and 181
I remember that prick town-daddy reached out and patted her on the breast as though she didn't deserve any respect, and he said, 'You keep your little bastard-trash kid off my son's bike.'"
"You must have hated him."
"I showed them. They were sorry."
"You were just a little boy. How could you—"
"Oh, I was a smart little fucker. I watched them go back to their car once, and they had their stupid dog with them— shut up in the car with the windows rolled down a little bit because it was hot. I just waited until they went back on the midway, and then I tried the doors. They weren't locked, so I rolled up every window really tight. They had a nasty surprise when they found it."
She felt a wave of nausea and fought not to let him know. But he kept talking.
"I got a bike later. Some kid left it with a flat tire, and I took it before he got back. The geek patched the tire and it was good as new."
"What's a geek?"
"Some old alky that bites the heads off live chickens."
". . . why?"
"Because it brings the rubes in. They go for sick stuff, like pickled babies."
"You don't like people."
"Some. Most of the time there's not much to like. Everybody's out for himself."
He was so violent. Every subject that came up seemed to draw some awful story from him, as if there was nothing inside him beyond hate. She tried to think of something gentler to talk about. "Where is your mother—Lureen?"
"Haven't you figured that out yet?"
"No."
"She died. That's the only way she ever would have left me, the only way. She was going into town one night in— hell, it doesn't matter—Texas, Oklahoma maybe. This cowboy was driving and she was sitting in the front seat, and he ran his convertible right up the back of a truck