The Dark Country
by
Dennis Etchison


"Etchison is the winner of two World Fantasy and three British Fantasy
Awards.  Stephen King says, "Etchison is one Hell of a fiction
writer."

Peter Straub writes: "Dennis Etchison is absolutely one of horror's
most exciting, most radical and most innovative talents.  Using a
chaste, transparent style, he tells an intimately horrifying tale that
catches the reader off balance at every step.  By being starkly
resistant to conventional expectations, this is fat-free horror-horror
without sugar, without maps, without easy transitions or resolutions.
In the safe, intimate world of contemporary horror, it is a kind of
terrorist raid."

The Dark Country.  Copyright (c) 1982 by Dennis Etchison The Dark
Country.  Copyright (c) 1982 by Dennis Etchison Introduction (c) 1982
by Ramsey Campbell.

Illustrations (c) 1982 by Jeffrey K. Potter.

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.  No part of this book,
including illustrations, may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without permission in writing from the author, author's agent, or the
artist, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and
reviews.  For information address Scream/ Press P.O. Box 8531, Santa
Cruz, Ca.  95061

All persons, places, and organizations in this book--save those clearly
in the public domain--are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual
persons, places or organizations living, dead or defunct is purely
coincidental.

The publisher wishes to thank Nancy Tracy, Kirby McCauley, Tim
Underwood, Stuart Schiff, Erik Mikkelsen, Colleen Timmerman, and Sherry
M. Gottlieb for their kind assistance.

First Edition, October 1982

ISBN 0910489009

Acknowledgements:

The stories in this book first appeared in slightly different form
under the following copyrights:

"IT ONLY COMES OUT AT NIGHT": (c) 1976 by Kirby McCauley.

"SITTING IN THE CORNER, WHIMPERING QUIETLY": (c)1976 by Stuart David
schiff.

"THE WALKING MAN" (c) 1976 by Looking Glass Publications, Inc.

"WE HAVE ALL BEEN HERE BEFORE": (c) 1976 by Stuart David Schiff.

"DAUGHTER OF THE GOLDEN WEST": (c) 1973 by Dugent Publishing Corp.

(Originally published as "A Feast For Cathy.") "THE PITCH": (c) 1978 by
Stuart David Schiff.

"YOU CAN GO NOW": (c) 1980 by Renown Publications, Inc.

"TODAY'S SPECIAL": (c) 1972 Dugent Publications, Corp.

"THE MACHINE DEMANDS A SACRIFICE": (c) 1972 by Dugent Publishing
Corp.

"CALLING ALL MONSTERS": (c) 1973 by Mercury Press, Inc.  Copyright
assigned to the author.

"THE DEAD LINE": (c) 1979 by Stuart David Schiff.

"THE LATE SHIFT": (c) 1980 by Dennis Etchison.

"THE NIGHTHAWK": (c) 1978 by Charles L. Grant.

"IT WILL BE HERE SOON": (c) 1979 by Dennis Etchison.

DEATH TRACKS (c) 1981 by Stuart David Schiff.

"THE DARK COUNTRY": (c) 1981 by Dennis Etchison.

The versions included in this volume--and these versions
alone--represent the definitive texts.

All stories reprinted by permission of the author and the author's
agent, Kirby McCauley.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction by Ramsey Campbell v

IT ONLY COMES OUT AT NIGHT 1

SITTING IN THE CORNER, WHIMPERING QUIETLY 15

THE WALKING MAN 19

WE HAVE ALL BEEN HERE BEFORE 33

DAUGHTER OF THE GOLDEN WEST 45

THE PITCH : 59

YOU CAN GO NOW 69

TODAY'S SPECIAL 81

THE MACHINE DEMANDS A SACRIFICE 87

CALLING ALL MONSTERS 99

THE DEAD LINE 107

THE LATE SHIFT 119

THE NIGHTHAWK 137

IT WILL BE HERE SOON 157

DEATH TRACKS 173

THE DARK COUNTRY 185

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE NIGHTHAWK (detail) xx

IT ONLY COMES OUT AT NIGHT 13

THE WALKING MAN 30

DAUGHTER OF THE GOLDEN WEST 57

THE DEAD LINE (detail) 105

THE DEAD LINE 106

THE NIGHTHAWK 152

THE DARK COUNTRY 198

INTRODUCTION

by Ramsey Campbell

It was about time.  I mean the award I presented to Dennis Etchi-son
for "The Dark Country"--the British Fantasy Award for best short story
of the year.  Though the award should have been presented at the
Birmingham fantasy convention, I was forbidden to do so by the
committee, which had become estranged from the British Fantasy Society,
whose award it was.  All this is incidental and not very interesting,
except that the way Dennis was denied his moment of glory in front of
the audience which was waiting to hear who had won the awards seems
frustratingly consistent.  Etchison is still far less appreciated than
he deserves to be, and it was certainly about time for this book.

And yet for a period in his twenty years of writing he was appearing
alongside Stephen King, in alternate issues of Cavalier.  What must the
readers have made of the oblique and allusive Etchisons which appeared
in (continued on page 90) fragments between the nude ladies primly
covering their pubes and the body-brief ads, Big Flash, Scuttles and
Sling Shot (... a tornado of perfection .. . big idea with brief
action)?  Perhaps they didn't know enough about the conventions to
which horror fiction is expected to conform to be deterred by his
unpredictability.

I can only think it's that quality which has denied him the fame
accorded to so many lesser writers.  In these days of super-marketing
labels it's dangerous for a writer of HORROR FICTION to break the
conventions.  Maybe it bothers some readers that

some of his tales pursue their themes beyond what would be the
conventional punch line, while some do without a punch line entirely.
You have my word that he is offering more than hidebound horror fiction
does, not less.

Etchison is a poet of loneliness and alienation, whether in the big
city or on the freeway.

"You Can Go Now,"

"The Nighthawk,"

"It Will Be Here Soon," and "Deathtracks" are four of the most poignant
fantasies (which means anything but escapism) of our time.  On the
other hand, his transplant trilogy is one of the most chilling
achievements in contemporary horror I can think of; in particular, "The
Dead Line" manages to live up to the most horrifying first line ever
written.  Etchison has little time as a writer for the manufacturing of
atmosphere, and why should he when he can even (in "The Pitch") make a
description of food terrifying?  Who else in this too often reactionary
field has forged so far ahead and kept on while so few people noticed?
Now at last the power and range of his work is on display too
strikingly to be ignored.

Dennis Etchison is the finest writer of short stories now working in
this field, and the rest of us ought to learn from him.

Merseyside, England 22 July 1982

vi

"Use the key, "he said to her, "now."

IT ONLY COMES OUT AT NIGHT

If you leave L.A. by way of San Bernardino, headed for Route 66 and
points east, you must cross the Mojave Desert.

Even after Needles and the border, however, there is no relief; the dry
air only thins further as the long, relentless climb continues in
earnest.  Flagstaff is still almost two hundred miles, and Winslow,
Gallup and Albuquerque are too many hours away to think of making
without food, rest and, mercifully, sleep.

It is like this: the car runs hot, hotter than it ever has before, the
plies of the tires expand and contract until the sidewalls begin to
shimmy slightly as they spin on over the miserable Arizona roads,
giving up a faint odor like burning hair from between the treads, as
the windshield colors over with essence of honeybee, wasp, dragonfly,
mayfly, June bug, ladybug and the like, and the radiator, clotted with
the bodies of countless kamikaze insects, hisses like a moribund lizard
in the sun .... All of which means, of course, that if you are
traveling that way between May and September, you move by night.

Only by night.

For there are, after all, dawn check-in motels, Do Not Disturb signs
for bungalow doorknobs; there are diners for mid-afternoon

If you leave L.A. by way of San Bernardino, headed for Route 66 and
points east, you must cross the Mojave Desert.

Even after Needles and the border, however, there is no relief; the dry
air only thins further as the long, relentless climb continues in
earnest.  Flagstaff is still almost two hundred miles, and Winslow,
Gallup and Albuquerque are too many hours away to think of making
without food, rest and, mercifully, sleep.

It is like this: the car runs hot, hotter than it ever has before, the
plies of the tires expand and contract until the sidewalls begin to
shimmy slightly as they spin on over the miserable Arizona roads,
giving up a faint odor like burning hair from between the treads, as
the windshield colors over with essence of honeybee, wasp, dragonfly,
mayfly, June bug, ladybug and the like, and the radiator, clotted with
the bodies of countless kamikaze insects, hisses like a moribund lizard
in the sun .... All of which means, of course, that if you are
traveling that way between May and September, you move by night.

Only by night.

For there are, after all, dawn check-in motels, Do Not Disturb signs
for bungalow doorknobs; there are diners for mid-afternoon

breakfasts, coffee by the carton; there are 24-hour f'flIing stations
bright as dreams--Whiting Brothers, Conoco, Terrible Herbst--their
flags as unfamiliar as their names, with ice machines, soda machines,
candy machines; and there are the sudden, unexpected Rest Areas, just
off the highway, with brick bathrooms and showers and electrical
outlets, constructed especially for those who are weary, out of money,
behind schedule .... So McClay had had to learn, the hard way.

He slid his hands to the bottom of the steering wheel and peered ahead
into the darkness, trying to relax.  But the wheel stuck to his fingers
like warm candy.  Off somewhere to his left, the horizon flickered with
pearly luminescence, then faded again to black.  This time he did not
bother to look.  Sometimes, though, he wondered just how far away the
lightning was striking; not once during the night had the sound of its
thunder reached him here in the car.

In the back seat, his wife moaned.

The trip out had turned all but unbearable for her.  Four days it had
taken, instead of the expected two-and-a-half; he made a great effort
not to think of it, but the memory hung over the car like a
thunderhead.

It had been a blur, a fever dream.  Once, on the second day, he had
been passed by a churning bus, its silver sides blinding him until he
noticed a Mexican woman in one of the window seats.  She was not
looking at him.  She was holding a swooning infant to the glass,
squeezing water onto its head from a plastic baby bottle to keep it
from passing out.

McClay sighed and fingered the buttons on the car radio.  He knew he
would get nothing from the AM or FM bands, not out here, but he clicked
it on anyway.  He left the volume and tone controls down, so as not to
wake Evvie.  Then he punched the seldom-used middle button, the
shortwave band, and raised the gain carefully until he could barely
hear the radio over the hum of the tires.

Static.

Slowly he swept the tuner across the bandwidth, but there was only
white noise.  It reminded him a little of the summer rain yesterday,
starting back, the way it had sounded bouncing off the windows.

He was about to give up when he caught a voice, crackling, drifting in
and out.  He worked the knob like a safecracker, zeroing in on the
signal.

A few bars of music.  A tone, then the voice again.  "... Greenwich
Mean Time."  Then the station ID.

It was the Voice of America Overseas Broadcast.  He grunted
disconsolately and killed it.  His wife stirred.

"Why'd you turn it off?."  she murmured.

"I was listening to that.  Good.  Program."

"Take it easy," he said, "easy, you're still asleep.  We'll be stopping
soon."

"... Only comes out at night," he heard her say, and then she was lost
again in the blankets.

He pressed the glove compartment, took out one of the Automobile Club
guides.  It was already clipped open.  McClay flipped on the overhead
light and drove with one hand, reading over--for the hundredth
time?--the list of motels that lay ahead.  He knew the list by heart,
but seeing the names again reassured him somehow.  Besides, it helped
to break the monotony.

It was the kind of place you never expect to find in the middle of a
long night, a bright place with buildings (a building, at least) and
cars, other cars drawn off the highway to be together in the protective
circle of light.

A Rest Area.

He would have spotted it without the sign.  Elevated sodium vapor
lighting bathed the scene in an almost peach-colored glow, strikingly
different from the cold blue-white sentinels of the Interstate Highway.
He had seen other Rest Area signs on the way out, probably even this
one.  But in daylight the signs had meant nothing more to him than
FRONTAGE ROAD or BUSINESS DISTRICT NEXT RIGHT.  He wondered if it was
the peculiar warmth of light that made the small island of blacktop
appear so inviting.

McClay decelerated, downshifted and left Interstate 40.
The car dipped and bumped, and he was aware of the new level of sound
from the engine as it geared down for the first time in hours.

He eased in next to a Pontiac Firebird, toed the emergency brake and
cut the ignition.

He allowed his eyes to close and his head to sink back into the
headrest.  At last.

The first thing he noticed was the quiet.

It was deafening.  His ears literally began to ring, with the
high-pitched whine of a late-night TV test pattern.

The second thing he noticed was a tingling at the tip of his tongue.

It brought to mind a picture of a snake's tongue.  Picking up
electricity from the air, he thought.

The third was the rustling awake of his wife, in back.

She pulled herself up.

"Are we sleeping now?  Why are the lights... ?"

He saw the outline of her head in the mirror.

"It's just a rest stop, hon.  Iwthe car needs a break."  Well, it was
true, wasn't it?

"You want the rest room?  There's one back there, see it?"

"Oh my God."

"What's the matter now?"

"Leg's asleep.  Listen, are we or are we not going to get a--"

"There's a motel coming up."  He didn't say that they wouldn't hit the
one he had marked in the book for another couple of hours; he didn't
want to argue.  He knew she needed the rest--he needed it too, didn't
he?

"Think I'll have some more of that coffee, though," he said.

"Isn't any more," she yawned.

The door slammed.

Now he was able to recognize the ringing in his ears for what it was:
the sound of his own blood.  It almost succeeded in replacing the
steady drone of the car.

He twisted around, fishing over the back of the seat for the ice
chest.

There should be a couple of Cokes left, at least.

His fingers brushed the basket next to the chest, riffling the edges of
maps and tour books, by now reshuffled haphazardly over the first-aid
kit he had packed himself (tourniquet, forceps, scissors, ammonia
inhalants, Merthiolate, triangular bandage, compress, adhesive
bandages, tannic acid) and the fire extinguisher, the extra carton of
cigarettes, the remainder of a half-gallon of drinking water, the
thermos (which Ewie said was empty, and why would she lie?).

He popped the top of a can.

Through the side window he saw Ewie disappearing around the corner of
the building.  She was wrapped to the gills in her blanket.

He opened the door and slid out, his back aching.

He stood there blankly, the unnatural light washing over him.

He took a long, sweet pull from the can.  Then he started walking.

The Firebird was empty.

And the next car, and the next.

Each car he passed looked like the one before it, which seemed crazy
until he realized that it must be the work of the light.  It cast an
even, eerie tan over the baked metal tops, like orange sunlight through
air thick with suspended particles.  Even the windshields appeared to
be filmed over with a thin layer of settled dust.  It made him think of
country roads, sundowns.  He walked on.

He heard his footsteps echo with surprising clarity, resounding down
the staggered line of parked vehicles.  Finally it dawned on him (and
now he knew how tired he really was) that the cars must actually have
people in them--sleeping people.  Of course.  Well hell, he thought,
watching his step, I wouldn't want to wake anyone.  The poor devils.

Besides the sound of his footsteps, there was only the distant swish of
an occasional, very occasional car on the highway; from here, even that
was only a distant hush, growing and then subsiding like waves on a
nearby shore.

He reached the end of the line, turned back.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw, or thought he saw, a movement by
the building.

It would be Ewie, shuffling back.

He heard the car door slam.

He recalled something he had seen in one the tourist towns in New
Mexico: circling the park--in Taos, that was where they had been--he
had glimpsed an ageless Indian, wrapped in typical blanket, ducking out
of sight into the doorway of a gift shop; with the blanket over his
head that way, the Indian had somehow resembled an Arab, or so it had
seemed to him at the time.

He heard another car door slam.

That was the same day--was it only last week?--that she had noticed the
locals driving with their headlights on (in honor of something or
other, some regional election, perhaps: ""My face speaks for itself,"
drawled Herman J. "Fashio' Trujlllo, Candidate for Sheriff"); she had
insisted at first that it must be a funeral procession, though for whom
she could not guess.

McClay came to the car, stretched a last time, and crawled back in.

Evvie was bundled safely again in the back seat.

He lit a quick cigarette, expecting to hear her voice any second,
complaining, demanding that he roll down the windows, at least, and so
forth.  But, as it turned out, he was able to sit undisturbed as he
smoked it down almost to the filter.  Paguate.  Bluewater.  Thoreau. He
blinked.

Klagetoh.  Joseph City.  Ash Fork.

He blinked and tried to focus his eyes from the taillights a half-mile
ahead to the bug-spattered glass, then back again.  Petrified Forest
National Park.

He blinked, refocusing.  But it did no good.

A twitch started on the side of his face, close by the corner of his
eye.

Rehoboth.

He strained at a road sign, the names and mileages, but instead a
seemingly endless list of past and future shops and detours shimmered
before his mind's eye.

I've had it, he thought.  Now, suddenly, it was catching up with him,
the hours of repressed fatigue; he felt a rushing out of something from
his chest.  No way to make that motel--hell, I can't even remember the
name of it now.  Check the book.  But it doesn't matter.  The eyes.
Can't control my eyes anymore.

(He had already begun to hallucinate things like tree trunks and cows
and Mack trucks speeding toward him on the highway.  The cow had been
straddling the broken line; in the last few minutes its lowing, deep
and regular, had become almost inviting.) Well, he could try for any
motel.  Whatever turned up next.  But how much farther would that be?

He ground his teeth together, feeling the pulsing at his temples.  He
struggled to remember the last sign.

The next town.  It might be a mile.  Five miles.  Fifty.  Think.t He
said it, he thought it, he didn't know which.

If he could just pull over, pull over right now and lie down for a few
minutes-He seemed to see clear ground ahead.  No rocks, no ditch.  The
shoulder, just ahead.

Without thinking he dropped into neutral and coasted, aiming for it.

The car glided to a stop.

God, he thought.

He forced himself to turn, reach into the back seat.

The lid to the chest was already off.  He dipped his fingers into the
ice and retrieved two half-melted cubes, lifted them into the front
seat and began rubbing them over his forehead.

He let his eyes close, seeing dull lights fire as he daubed at the
lids, the rest of his face, the forehead again.  As he slipped the ice
into his mouth and chewed, it broke apart as easily as snow.  He took a
deep breath.  He opened his eyes again.

At that moment a huge tanker roared past, slamming an after-shock of
air into the side of the car.  The car rocked like a boat at sea.

No.  It was no good.

So.  So he could always turn back, couldn't he?  And why not?  The Rest
Area was only twenty, twenty-five minutes behind him.  (Was that all?)
He could pull out and hang a U and turn back, just

like that.  And then sleep.  It would be safer there.  With luck, Evvie
wouldn't even know.  An hour's rest, maybe two; that was all he would
need.

Unless--was there another Rest Area ahead?

How soon?

He knew that the second wind he felt now wouldn't last, not for more
than a few minutes.  No, it wasn't worth the chance.  He glanced in the
rearview mirror.

Ewie was still down, a lumpen mound of blanket and hair.

Above her body, beyond the rear window, the raised headlights of
another monstrous truck, closing ground fast.

He made the decision.

He slid into first and swung out in a wide arc, well ahead of the blast
of the truck, and worked up to fourth gear.  He was thinking about the
warm, friendly lights he had left behind.

He angled in next to the Firebird and cut the lights.

He started to reach for a pillow from the back, but why bother?  It
would probably wake Ewie, anyway.

He wadded up his jacket, jammed it against the passenger armrest, and
lay down.

First he crossed his arms over his chest.  Then behind his head.  Then
he gripped his hands between his knees.  Then he was on his back again,
his hands at his sides, his feet cramped against the opposite door.

His eyes were wide open.

He lay there, watching chain lightning flash on the horizon.

Finally he let out a breath that sounded like all the breaths he had
ever taken going out at once, and drew himself up.

He got out and walked over to the rest room.

Inside, white tiles and bare lights.  His eyes felt raw, peeled.
Finished, he washed his hands but not his face; that would only make
sleep more difficult.

Outside again and feeling desperately out of synch, he listened to his
shoes falling hollowly on the cement.

"Next week we've got to get organized .... " He said this, he was sure,
because he heard his voice coming back to him, though with a peculiar
empty resonance.  Well, this time tomorrow night he would be home.  As
unlikely as that seemed now.

He stopped, bent for a drink from the water fountain.

The footsteps did not stop.

Now wait, he thought, I'm pretty far gone, but--He swallowed, his ears
popping.  The footsteps stopped.

Hell, he thought, I've been pushing too hard.  We.  She.  No, it was my
fault, my plan this time.  To drive nights, sleep days.  Just so.  As
long as you can sleep.

Easy, take it easy.

He started walking again, around the corner and back to the lot.

At the corner, he thought he saw something move at the edge of his
vision.

He turned quickly to the right, in time for a fleeting glimpse of
something--someone--hurrying out of sight into the shadows.

Well, the other side of the building housed the women's rest room.
Maybe it was Ewie.

He glanced toward the car, but it was blocked from {,iew.  He walked
on.

Now the parking area resembled an oasis lit by firelight.  Or a western
camp, the cars rimming the lot on three sides in the manner of wagons
gathered against the night.

Strength in numbers, he thought.

Again, each car he passed looked at first like every other.  It was the
flat light, of course.  And of course they were the same cars he had
seen a half-hour ago.  And the light still gave them a dusty, abandoned
look.

He touched a fender.

It was dusty.

But why shouldn't it be?  His own car had probably taken on quite a
layer of grime after so long on these roads.

He touched the next car, the next.

Each was so dirty that he could have carved his name without scratching
the paint.

He had an image of himself passing this way again--God for

bid--a year from now, say, and finding the same cars parked here.  The
same ones.

What if, he wondered tiredly, what if some of these cars had been
abandoned?  Overheated, exploded, broken down one fine midday and left
here by owners who simply never returned?  Who would ever know?  Did
the Highway Patrol, did anyone bother to check?  Would an automobile be
preserved here for months, years by the elements, like a snakeskin shed
beside the highway?  It was a thought, anyway.  His head was buzzing.

He leaned back and inhaled deeply, as deeply as he could at this
altitude.

But he did hear something.  A faint tapping.  It reminded him of
running feet, until he noticed the lamp overhead:

There were hundreds of moths beating against the high fixture, their
soft bodies tapping as they struck and circled and returned again and
again to the lens; the light made their wings translucent.

He took another deep breath and went on to his car.

He could hear it ticking, cooling down, before he got there.  Idly he
rested a hand on the hood.  Warm, of course.  The tires?  He touched
the left front.  It was taut, hot as a loaf from the oven.  When he
took his hand away, the color of the rubber came off on his palm like
burned skin.

He reached for the door handle.

A moth fluttered down onto the fender.  He flicked it off, his finger
leaving a streak on the enamel.

He looked closer and saw a wavy, mottled pattern covering his unwashed
car, and then he remembered.  The rain, yesterday afternoon.  The rain
had left blotches in the dust, marking the finish as if with dirty
fingerprints.

He glanced over at the next car.

It, too, had the imprint of dried raindrops--but, close up, he saw that
the marks were superimposed in layers, over and over again.

The Firebird had been through a great many rains.  He touched the hood.
Cold.

He removed his hand, and a dead moth clung to his thumb.  He tried to
brush it off on the hood, but other moth bodies stuck in its place.
Then he saw countless shriveled, mummified moths pasted over the hood
and top like peeling chips of paint.  His fingers were coated with the
powder from their wings.

He looked up.

High above, backed by banks of roiling cumulo us clouds, the swarm of
moths vibrated about the bright, protective light.

So the Firebird had been here a very long time.

He wanted to forget it, to let it go.  He wanted to get back in the
car.  He wanted to lie down, lock it out, everything.  He wanted to go
to sleep and wake up in Los Angeles.

He couldn't.

He inched around the Firebird until he was facing the line of cars.  He
hesitated a beat, then started moving.  A LeSabre.  A Cougar.

A Chevy van.  A Corvair.  A Ford.

A Mustang.

And every one was overlaid with grit.

He paused by the Mustang.  Oncemhow long ago?  mit had been a luminous
candy-apple red; probably belonged to a teenager.  Now the windshield
was opaque, the body dulled to a peculiar shade he could not quite
place.

Feeling like a voyeur at a drive-in movie theater, McClay crept to the
driver's window.

Dimly he perceived two large outlines in the front seat.  He raised his
hand.  Wait.

What if there were two people sitting there on the other side of the
window, watching him?

He put it out of his mind.  Using three lVmgers, he cut a swath through
the scum on the glass and pressed close.  The shapes were there.  Two
headrests.  He started to pull away.

And happened to glance into the back seat.

IT ONLY COMES OUT AT NIGHT

He saw a long, uneven form.

A leg, the back of a thigh.  Blonde hair, streaked with shadows.  The
collar of a coat.

And, delicate and silvery, a spider web, spun between the hair and
collar.

He jumped back.

His leg struck the old Ford.  He spun around, his arms straight.  The
blood was pounding in his ears.

He rubbed out a spot on the window of the Ford and scanned the
inside.

The figure of a man, slumped on the front seat.

The man's head lay on a jacket.  No, it was not a jacket.  It was a
large, formless stain.  In the filtered light, McClay could see that it
had dried to a dark brown.

It came from the man's mouth.

No, not from the mouth.

The throat had a long, thin slash across it, reaching nearly to the
ear.

He stood there stiffly, his back almost arched, his eyes jerking,
trying to close, trying not to close.  The lot, the even light
reflecting thinly from each windshield, the Corvair, the van, the
Cougar, the LeSabre, the suggestion of a shape within each one.

The pulse in his ears muffled and finally blotted out the distant
gearing of a truck up on the highway, the death-rattle of the moths
against the seductive lights.

He reeled.

He seemed to be hearing again the breaking open of doors and the
scurrying of padded feet across paved spaces.

He remembered the first time.  He remembered the sound of a second door
slamming in a place where no new car but his own had arrived.

Or--had it been the door to his car slamming a second time, after Evvie
had gotten back in?

If so, how?  Why?

And there had been the sight of someone moving, trying to slip away.

And for some reason now he remembered the Indian in the tourist town,
slipping out of sight in the doorway of that gift

shop.  He held his eyelids down until he saw the shop again, the window
full of kachinas and tin gods and tapestries woven in a secret
language.

At last he remembered it clearly: the Indian had not been entering the
store.  He had been stealing away.

McClay did not understand what it meant, but he opened his eyes, as if
for the first time in centuries, and began to run toward his car.

If I could only catch my goddamn breath, he thought.

He tried to hold on.  He tried not to think of her, of what might have
happened the first time, of what he may have been carrying in the back
seat ever since.

He had to find out.

He fought his way back to the car, against a rising tide of fear he
could not stem.

He told himself to think of other things, of things he knew he could
control: mileages and motel bills, time zones and weather reports,
spare tires and flares and tubeless repair tools, hydraulic jack and
Windex and paper towels and tire iron and socket wrench and waffle
cushion and traveler's checks and credit cards and Dopp Kit (toothbrush
and paste, deodorant, shaver, safety blade, brush less cream) and
sunglasses and Sight Savers and tear-gas pen and fiber-tip pens and
portable radio and alkaline batteries and fire extinguisher and desert
water bag and tire guage and motor oil and his money belt with
identification sealed in plastic-In the back of his car, under the
quilt, nothing moved, not even when he finally lost his control and his
mind in a thick, warm scream.

SITTING IN THE CORNER, WHIMPERING QUIETLY

It was one of those bright places you never expect to find in the
middle of the night, a place of porcelain and neon lighting and
whitewashed walls.  I walked in with my old army bag stuffed full of a
month's dirty clothes and swung it on top of one of the long line of
waiting, open washing machines.

A quarter to three in the morning.

And nobody in sight for miles and miles.

I let out a sigh, which not surprisingly turned into a yawn, and felt
for the change in my pocket.

I didn't see her at first.  That is to say, I knew she was there
without turning around.  I think it was the cigarette smoke.  It cut a
sharp edge through the hot, stifling, humid dryer air that hung so
thick in the laundromat you felt you could stick out your finger and
jab a hole in it.

"Well, he finally got what he wanted."

I moved along the wall to the corner detergent dispenser.  It was very
late and I couldn't sleep and I had come here to be alone, just to have
something to do and to be left alone to do it, and I was in no mood to
try my hand at winning friends and influencing people.

SITTING IN THE CORNER, WHIMPERING QUIETLY 17

I heard water running in the sink next to me.

"That's what he thought, all right."  Her voice came very close to me
now, going on as if picking up a running conversation we might have
been having.

I turned my head just long enough for a quick glance at her.  She was
young but not too, twenty-nine going on forty, and pretty, too, but not
really very.  She had long hair hanging down to the middle of her thin
back, with blond streaks bleached in, tres chic, you know, and one of
her phony eyelashes was coming unglued in the warm, wet air.

"A house in the Valley, two cars--no, three--paid vacation in the
Virgin Islands, and a son, yeah, a little Vladimir Jr.  to carry on his
glorious family name.  Just like he always wanted.  But that was all he
wanted--that's the part they never tell you in front."

She dropped the butt of her Pall Mall and lit another at once, pulling
long, hard drags down into her lungs.

"Last week the kid took the gun from the closet and walked up to me in
the kitchen," she continued, starting to hand-wash a sheet in the
sink.

"Pointed it right at my head and said, "Bang, you're dead, Mommy."

"Well," I said, 'are you gonna do it or not?  Don't ever point one of
those things at someone unless you're gonna use it."

"So he did.  The kid pulled the trigger.  I didn't think he had the
guts.

"Course it wasn't loaded.  That really pissed me off.  It was just like
Vladimir, not teaching him what it means to be abut what would his dad
know about that?  About what it takes to be a man."

She scrubbed at the soiled sheet, pausing to jerk a wet hand up to move
a strand of hair away from her face.  I couldn't help taking a better
look at her face then.  It was like the rest of her, young and yet old,
drawn and tight, made up expensively even now, in the middle of the
night, though obviously in haste, and tired, and blank.  For a second
then, overpoweringly, I had the belief that she was the same young old
woman I had seen seated in the window of a beauty salon in Beverly
Hills once; and later, in a cocktail lounge with another girl, waiting,
with long, sharp fingernails the color of blood.  French-inhaling a
Marlboro and with a look on her face that told you she had a hundred
dollar bill in her purse.  And that she was waiting.  Just waiting.

She picked up her Pall Mall with a wet thumb and first finger, drawing
hard.

I noticed the clock on the wall: three o'clock.

"That was when I got it.  All these years, trying to figure a way to
teach him and that God damned kid of his something."  I fed a couple of
nickies into the detergent machine.

She paused long enough to take a couple of more lengthy hits from her
Pall Mall.  It was so quiet you could hear the sound of the smoke
blowing out into the white light.

"So tonight he comes home and makes the pitcher of martinis, as usual,
and goes into his room and closes the door.  I go to the door and ask
him what the hell's wrong this time.  He says he doesn't know.  He just
wants me to leave him alone."

She laughed startlingly, hoarsely.

"Okay, hot shot, I'll leave you the hell alone, I think.  You wanna
come home from your fucking office looking like a corpse again tonight
and lay around until you fall asleep for the zillionth time?  All
right, I'll let you!

"We'll find out if that's what you really want.

"Only first you and that little pussy of a son of yours are gonna get a
lesson you'll never forget."

She turned on the water full force.  It gushed out, flooding the basin
faster than it could empty.

"Who ever said if you wash it in cold water it'll come out.  Damn.  Why
the hell did I have to give him the striped sheets, anyway?

"So I wake the kid up.  It doesn't matter--he's awake, and the bed's
all wet as usual.  I ask him if he remembers what I taught him.

"It takes a minute or two, but he finally catches on, the dumb little
bastard.

"So I go get the bullets down and tell him to go in there and prove to
me that he remembers what it was I beat the shit out of him for last
week .... " I started to dump my stuff into a machine at the far end of
the room.  Then, all of a sudden, the thread of what she had been
saying got through to me.

I turned back to look at her.

She was grinding a bar of soap into the sheet now.  At the edges the
spot was a thick brown, almost black, but at the heart I noticed it was
still a deep, gummy shade close to the color of her nails as her
fingers flashed violently around the material.  The steam was rising up
from the basin to surround her.

I closed my eyes fast.

Outside, a car came suddenly from nowhere and passed hurriedly by,
swishing away down the empty boulevard.

She finished the story.  I didn't want to hear it, tried to block it
out of my ears but she told it through to the finish.  It didn't matter
to her.  She had never been talking to me anyway.

My eyes jammed shut, harder and harder, until I saw gray shapes that
seemed to move in front of me.  Never before in my life up to that
moment could I remember feeling so detached, so out of it.  I leaned
the heels of my hands against the washer.  The quarter slipped from my
fingers, clanked against the enamel and hit the cold, cracked cement
floor.

The last thing I heard her saying was:

"... So afterward I tell the kid to go back to bed, to go to sleep,
just to go the hell to sleep, but he can't.  Or won't.  He just sits
there on the floor in the corner, the gun still in his lap, whimpering
quietly.  That was how I left him, the little sissy .... "
Disgusted--tired and sick and disgusted out of all memory and beyond
all hope--I forced my things back into the bag and stumbled out of the
laundromat.  She said something after me but I didn't want to hear what
it was.

I pulled my coat up around my ears.  I was starting to shiver.  I
snorted, at no one in particular, at the night and all the people in
it, everywhere, the stupid, unthinking people who don't know enough to
leave a man alone, just to leave you the hell alone the times when you
need it most.  There was no place left for me to go, no place at all
anywhere in the city.  And so, breathing steam, I made it away from
there as fast as I could, heading off down the street in the same
direction as the car and blinking fast, being careful not to step on
any cracks, all the way back to my room.  My quiet room.

THE WALKING MAN

It was one of those long, blue evenings that come to the Malibu late in
the year, the water undulating up to the beach like some smooth, sleepy
girl moving slowly under a satin sheet.  I must have been staring,
because the bartender leaned over and pushed the empty glass against
the back of my hand.

"Another?"

"Vodka," I reminded him.  The sky, out by the point that shelters the
Colony, was turning a soft, tropical orange of the kind one expects to
see only on foreign postage stamps.  The edge of the water lapped the
pilings below the restaurant.  An easy, regular rhythm, like the
footsteps outside on the pier.

He reached for a dry napkin.

"Live around here?"

"A few months," I told him.  It was still true, for the moment, at
least.  I hoped he would let it pass.  I didn't want to go into the
alimony and the rest of it, not now.

He had the Rose's Lime Juice in his hand.  The way he handled it, I
could see he hadn't been at this too long.  He was young, still in his
twenties; I wondered how he had got the job with all that sun-bleached
hair.

"Should've seen it back about May, June," he said.  He picked up a
cherry, one of the green ones, but I held up

my hand and he put it back.

"All that sand out there?"  I turned back to the window and looked with
him.

"Rocks," he said.  I heard the rough ice cubes drop into the glass.

"Right."

"Out there, I mean.  Boulders like you never seen.  Like the moon or
something.  Five, six feet of sand must've washed in over the
summer."

He was right.  I remembered the beach below the sun deck of our newly
leased house: the sand slick as a wet peach as far as we could walk at
low tide, and plied in solid around the posts; and I remembered waking
one morning to find it gone, washed out from under us during the night,
everything but the rocky underpinnings, all the way out to the tide
pools where mussels held to the sharp erosions, crusted hard against
the beaks of the circling gulls.  Now, the season and the waterline
changing, it was all coming back.  I remembered, and he was right.

The drink was up.  I started on it.  The kitchen wouldn't be serving
for another hour and the room was still empty, even here at the bar.
There were a couple of too-young waitresses making like they were busy,
wiping off the plastic menus and refilling the little bowls with sugar
packets.  I sat watching them in the light of the sunset, their figures
silhouetted against the empty panes, but I knew all about the game and
I didn't feel up to it.  They looked like nervous laughs and weekends
at Mammoth and a taste for cold duck, and when they joked at each other
under their breaths the sound came to me above the piped-in music:
telephone voices just out of the shower, brittle as window glass,
unexpectedly cold, and transparent.

There wasn't much left of the drink so I turned on the stool for one
last view.  I knew I couldn't see my place from here, buried past a
stretch of big rich ones, but I tried just the same.

"Which one?"

The voice was so flat, so toneless the thought occurred that it might
have been my own.  I drained the glass against my teeth and put it
down.  The bartender was twisting some bottles of Bud in shaved ice. He
flicked his eyes in what I took to be the direction of the color TV,
but it wasn't on.  It never was.  I leaned in, trying to see past the
end of the bar.

She was back there at the small table, the one you never notice against
the wood.  I wouldn't have spotted her at all except for her eyes, the
way the whites reflected the dim light coming through the stained glass
porthole on the side door.  They were huge, very wide-set, as if drawn
by a Forties comic strip artist; I couldn't place the style.  They were
not looking at me.  I squinted anyway, trying to see into the shadows.
But she was not looking at me.

Something small and white lifted to her lips.  No, I thought, or maybe
I muttered it.  Not this time, and I did not reach for the matches on
the bar.

Then she did something I wasn't ready for, something that had a little
class, just a little, at least.  She went ahead and lit the cigarette,
without the look, the wait.  And suddenly I felt bitter in the throat
at myself as well as the game, at the whole thing, just the whole damn
thing.

"The lady," said the bartender.

"I think she's talking to you."

She still wasn't looking at me.

"What did she say?"

"Don't ask me, man," he said, and he winked.  That settled it for me.
No way.

"No way," I said.

He shrugged.  I climbed off the stool.  He was watching but I wasn't
going to give him the next act.

"Set up one more," I told him.

"I'm going to the head."

"Sure," he said.  You know how he said it.

I took a couple of steps.  Then I renembered about the head.  (A
varnished plaque on the door: BUCKS.) It was back there, down a hall
between the cigarette machine and the pay phone.

The hall next to the small table.

Well, the hell with her.

I passed the table.  I was about to turn into the hall, but I couldn't
resist checking her out, just once.  Call it a flaw in my character, an
itch in the place you know you can't scratch but can't stop yourself
from trying, every time.

There was something I recognized.  Maybe she reminded me of the types
in the class Beverly Hills saloons with the Boston ferns hanging from
the ceiling, the ones I've seen as I passed by outside the glass:
twenty-nine going on forty, skin diet-taut, a streak bleached into the
hair; a look that says that she's got a C-note folded in her bag and
that she's waiting, just waiting.  This one had the expression, I
guess, but that was all.  Her hair was black, no streak.  Not shiny
black, but dull, more like what's left in the grate a minute before the
fire goes out.  Drawn back along the sides of her head, but not tight,
not a cheap face-lift, not like she cared.  Her skin was white, but not
kept from the sun like some courtesan; it was the kind of pale you get
when you don't care enough to go outside.

And there were the eyes.  They set me on edge.  They were too extreme,
like something you learn never to expect in this life: gilt on the
lily, egg in the beer, too much, much too much for the way they tell
you things are supposed to be.

"Which one," she said, again.  She said it that way, not a question,
not anything.

"Don't worry.  You couldn't see my house if you tried."  Don't worry.
You couldn't see my house if you tried.  I said it, I thought it, I
don't know which.

"Will you help me?"

She did not bother to raise her head.

"Which one?  which one of those people?"  she continued.

Now I knew we weren't on the same wavelength.  I had no idea what she
was talking about.

Her eyes were fLxed somewhere close to the line of houses.  The pier, I
gathered.  A few tourists were out on the boards, strolling up and
back, back and up.  They reminded me of shooting gallery targets,
rolling along on tracks and wobbling a little in the breeze.  Except
that I could hear footsteps, even here.

"what about them?"  I asked.

"They remind me of mannequins."  She stubbed out her cigarette, almost
new.

"Do mannequins have wheels, do you know?"

I was standing there looking down at her, studying her face.

It was an exaggerated triangle, inverted--like the Sub-Mariner, I
think, if you remember.  Then again, maybe it was only the
perspective.

"That's a funny thing to say," I said.

"which one would you kill," she said.  Another non question

"Say you could name your price.  Any one you choose."

I thought about it, I don't know why.  She was making some kind of
point, I guess.  I wanted to hear what it was.

"You talk like they're not even human," I said.

She raised her face a few degrees.  Her chin was really tiny, almost
lost below her enormous lower lip, which was puffed out in a perpetual
pout.  More than anything else, I saw her wide, pallid forehead.  She
had not arranged her hair to hide it.

"And we are?"  she said.

"Is that what you mean?"

I leaned on the rail and watched the water bringing sand up to the
shoreline.  Bringing it up or taking it away.

"Say you had to choose."

I pivoted, startled but not surprised.  She had come up like a ghost,
one of those with sheet trailing and no feet below to sound the boards.
I turned back to the rail.  The gulls were swooping on the pear led
waters, trying to pick up fish that had come too close to shore, into
the tide pools between the green rocks where they didn't belong.

I heard her release a long, shuddering breath.  With effort, her voice
low, she said, "If you won't say it, I'll say it for you.  You can't
choose because it wouldn't make any difference.  You can't tell them
apart."

I shut my eyes and held them shut for a while before I opened them.
Shadows on the sand.  People on the beach.  Figures chasing a ball,
picking driftwood, unleashing dogs, rolling trouser legs, walking hand
in hand.  I couldn't see their faces from here.  Each time my eyes
opened the configuration was different, the figures shuffled,
interchanged.

But I was letting myself go.  It was easy.  Too easy.

I pressed my eyelids shut again, so tight I saw dull light.  Thinking:
well all right, why not, maybe this one is different, I pulled myself
up.  Finding the strength, blinking, I faced her with eyes open.  I
reached down, steeling myself and relaxing, setting

and going with it.  Hands on the rail behind, the nails whitened moons,
they must have been, I heard myself saying, "What is it you really
want?"

I left the lights off.

She wanted me, but not desperately.  She gave, but not to lose herself.
She took from me--received and did not grasp.  The moment did seem to
be out of time, but passed to the next moment as easily as the passing
of a breath.  I began to think of her as beautiful.  She might have
been anyone.  She was familiar somehow; I had never known her like.  I
passed from her back into myself as easily as a breath is taken and
released.  I was aware of the wind outside, the lights in the windows
of other houses going on and off along the point, the white sound of
the waves, the passing and repassing of slapping feet on the beach,
drunken laughter beyond the deck.  The absence of laughter.  The easy
silence, and the night.

"Who's out there?"

"What?  Nobody, probably.  It's late."

"I don't mean the beach.  I thought I heard someone walking.  Outside,
there."

She meant the front of the house.

"There's nothing out there but the highway.  Not even a sidewalk.  You
know that."  I watched her in the moonlight from the window.

"All right, what is it?"

She shifted to her side, her hair lifting away from the pillow in long
black tendrils.

"Sometimes there's a man, walking."

I reached for my shirt.

"Smoke?"

But before I could get to my cigarettes, she had one in her mouth.  I
don't know where she got it.  I gave her a light.  I saw the twisted
end, the way it caught and burned unevenly.

She tilled her lungs without blinking and held out the joint.  I
hesitated, but only for a second.  The last couple of times it had made
me remember too much, had made the ache come again.  I took it.  It
tasted like sweet garbage, but it went down easy.

She lay back.  Her eyes were staring.  I seemed to be seeing her from
above: the dark hollows over her collarbone, her breasts, the way they
did not flatten when she lay on her back, the way her breath moved
below her ribs, the tangle between her thighs, glistening under me ....
"How do you know no one is there?"  she said.

"Because--" I flopped onto my back, took another lungful, executed a
quick sit-up.  I crossed the living room, drew open the top half of the
door to the sun deck and leaned out.  The tide was low, a good fifty
feet from the supports, and nothing was moving but a line of sandpipers
between the naked rocks.

"Becausethere's nobody.  On the beach or anywhere else around here."
With irritation.

"What's the--" matter with you, I started to say.

"How do you know?"  she repeated.

My mouth opened.  It stayed open, my jaw scissoring as I came back to
the big pillows.  I squatted next to her on the rug, almost over her.

"I need some more of that, I guess," I said, reaching for the joint,
"before I can pick up what you're trying to say."

She punched up the pillow.

"We were talking about something, back on the pier," she said.

"Remember?"

Though she would not meet my eyes, I stared at her.  I thought her
mouth began to move, but it was only her chin, receding further.

Get it out, I thought.  The rest of it, so that I can know what to
think of you, before I let myself think any more of you than I do.

"Come on."  Or do you want to go back into hiding in that bar, I
thought, do you really?  Is that all you want?

"Damn it," I said, "you're--" spooking me, I thought.  Really.

"I'm what?"  She rose up on the pillow.

"Nothing."

"That's what I thought," she said, slumping.

"Oh God."

"All right," she said.

"Only first you have to tell me something."

Let this be good, I thought, and let it be quick.

"Just this," she said.

"When was the first time you heard the voice?"

I didn't say anything.

"For me," she said, her tone unchanged, "it was only after I started
having the dreams.  They got so bad that for a while I was afraid to go
to sleep.  But then, the first time I heard it, I was finally able to
give up the ghost.  Just like that.  I woke up laughing, and I knew the
world was mine."

I got up.  I sat down.  Then I got up again and went around the
bookcase to the kitchen.  The water felt good on my face.  I tried to
make it last.

"Well?"  she asked.

"Will you do it?"

I lit a cigarette.  It was getting cold.  I wanted to close a window,
but none was open.

"You know you've thought about it.  Admit it.  It could happen
anywhere.  In the middle of the night, in a place you've never been
before, a place where no one knows you.  Glendale, Upland, Paso Robles,
it doesn't matter.  Anywhere at all."

Her voice rose half an octave, like a violin string tightening, winding
up.  She took a deep breath.

"You're driving down an empty street at three o'clock in the morning,
say.  All the TV sets are off.  The police cars are parked at the House
of Pies.  You don't know where you're going.  You turn corners.  Then
you see someone, sooner or later you always do.  He could be anyone.
He's walking alone, hurrying home under the trees, the leaves are
cracking under his feet like bones.  You cut the lights and as you pass
you feel the gun in your hand and your finger on the trigger and--and
it doesn't matter.

"Or maybe you wait until he crosses the street.  You dare yourself not
to hit the brakes, and--and all there is is a sound.

And he's gone.  He never was.  And it doesn't matter."  Her voice was
rhythmic, incantatory.  I let her go on.

"Or in an all-night Laundromat.  And the knife is there in your pocket,
the way you knew it would be when you needed it.  Or you feel your
hands on a throat in the back row of a movie theater.  Or standing on a
cliff over the rocks.  And your hands want to push.  Or under a pier
with only the waves, and you see him, and suddenly you feel the rock in
your hand.  And it doesn't matter.  Somewhere, anywhere, even right
here, why not?  It doesn't matter.  In the middle of the night with no
one to see .... " I locked my knees.  I dug my heels into the jute
carpeting and set my back against the wall.

"So why don't you?"  I couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Why don't you?"  she said quickly.

The cigarette tip made a track in the air.  I watched it.

"Because you've never understood the feeling," she continued, "until
now.  It's never been verified.  You might be crazy.  It's easy to
think that.  One alone is weak.  But two is a point of view."

Her words began to lose all meaning.  They might have been sounds made
by a pointed stick on a fence at midnight.

"So name your price," she said.

"Why?"

"Oh, the money will make it easier the first time.  It gives you a
reason you can live with.  That's only practical."

Practical "Five thousand," she said.

"Why?"

"Ten.  Oh, I have it, don't worry."

"But why me?"

"Your eyes," she said.

"The way you kept looking around every time somebody walked by on the
pier.  As if you almost expected to see yourself."

I just looked at her.  I don't know if she could see me.

"Twenty-five thousand dollars," she said.

"I can get it.  Everyone has his price.  Doesn't he."

I tried to walk.  The room moved before me.  I saw her as if from a
great distance, from the ceiling?  The top of the head, the part in the
hair like a white scar, the high cheekbones, the bony shoulders, the
hands holding the knees, the knees like second breasts, the knuckles
like worn-down teeth.  I moved past her.  Outside, a full moon hung
over the water.

"Listen," I heard her say, "you won't even have to choose.  That's the
hard part, isn't it?  Well, I've already found one for you.  There's
one I always see, a man with his dog, back there between the rocks.
You'll know him--the dog's crippled.  Always the same

time, every night.  And he's old.  It will be so easy.  No one will
see.  Use anything you want."

For a time, I don't know how long, I balanced there.  The white sound
was blowing in from the ocean.

"You see?"  she was saying.

"I need someone.  I need to know, to be free and know that I'm free.
You will be free, too.

We will be the fortunate ones, because we'll know no remorse."  I faced
her.

"The voice," she said, "remember the voice."  She reached to touch
me.

"Everybody has a price," she said.

I had not realized until that moment how unfeeling she was.

Her touch was almost cruel; her words were almost kind.

"That may be true enough," I said slowly.

"How much is it worth, then?"

"Nothing."

Then I just waited.

"And we are?"  she said.

I took a long time trying to think of a way to answer her.

Now the circling gulls were gone; only a single kingfisher remained to
patrol the waters.

I walked, touching each post on the pier.

At first the sound was so familiar I didn't notice it.

The sound of footsteps.

Without looking up, I stopped by the rail.

The footsteps stopped.

Below the pier, the skin of the sand had been polished to an unearthly
sheen.  I stood there, looking down.

"You got a light, by any chance?"  said a voice.

It was a man I had seen walking the boards earlier.

I told him I didn't.

"Don't ever depend on these throwaway lighters," he said, clicking the
wheel uselessly against the flint.

"Once they're empty, they're not worth a dime."

He pitched it underhand into the water.  It fell end-over-end,
disappearing from sight.

"The bar has matches," I said.

He made no move to leave.  Instead he leaned his back against the
rail.

I shifted and glanced around.

Back at the bar, on the other side of the glass, bodies were moving,
rearranging.  I couldn't help but notice.  The filtered moonlight
caught one face out of all the others, at the small table by the hall
to the cigarette machine and the pay phone.

I must have stared for a long time.  Then I got it, finally.  Kirby.

I said it, I thought it, I don't know which.

"Who?"

"Kirby," I said, snapping my fingers again.  He was old enough to
remember, so I went on.

"A comic book artist, back in the Forties.  See that girl in there, the
one with the face like a broken moon?  She looks like she was drawn by
Jack Kirby."  A portrait of Poe's sister, in fact, but I didn't say
that.

There was no reason he should have answered.  He probably thought I was
crazy.

I turned ocean ward again.

The moonlight had broken up on the surface of the water now, like so
much shattered mercury.  I watched the edges of the tide foaming around
the pilings, bringing a wet, white reflection to the hidden rocks.

His elbow was almost touching mine.  He was already off balance.  It
wouldn't have taken much to send him backwards over the edge.

I said to the man, "How would you like to set someone free for me."  It
was somewhere between a statement and a question.

"Lean on, snuff.  For money, of course.  It'll have to be on the
installment plan.  But for her, I'll come up with a hell of a down
payment."

I felt a laugh starting, deep down.

"Come on, come on," I said, "what's your price, man?  Everybody has his
price, doesn't he?

"Yeah," he said right off.  He had been following it.

"Only sometimes," he said, playing it out, "it may not be worth
paying."

I managed a look at him.  His face was leathery, but the skin

around the eyes was still soft.  He squinted, and a hundred tiny
crinkles appeared.

"Before you say any more," he said, "I ought to let you in on
something.  I guess I ought to tell you that I'm what they call a
private investigator."

I couldn't read his expression.

"I also ought to give you a free piece of advice," he said.

"You seem like a decent guy.  Do yourself a favor.  Drop it right now.
' "What?"  I tried to get a fix on him.

"Is she a client of yours or something?"

"The husband, pal," he said confidentially.

"I think you're trying to tell me something.  So who is he?"  He gazed
off down the beach.  He gave a nod, meaning, I figured, one of the big
stilt houses, the ones with the floodlights aimed at the waves.

Then I noticed something moving.

It looked like a man.  I watched as the figure passed between the
pilings, laying a long, stooped, crooked shadow over the stones.

"He looks old," I said.

"And rich," said the detective, if that's what he was.

"Filthy, like Midas.  Otherwise I wouldn't be bothered.  Domestic
surveillance isn't my style.  Can't take the hours anymore."

"Wait a minute," I said.

"The old man.  The husband."  It stuck in my throat.

"He has a dog, right?  And he takes it for walks.  Same time, every
night?"

"Take a look.  Christ, the mutt's only got three fucking legs.

Can you beat that?"

I couldn't.

"He's got an idea she's a tramp, you get the drift?  So I tail her.
Everywhere.  I should blush to tell you how much he pays me.  But all I
got to do is wait and watch .... " "No, I can't beat that, man," I
said.

"I really can't."

And started walking.

And heard footsteps on the pier, footsteps echoed as from far below, my
footsteps, saw shoes falling on the boards, my shoes

when I looked for them seemed very far away my shoes, as I watched the
water, then the sand under the pier, the cracks between the planks
shuttering over the sand, and I saw as from a height, the distance
growing, from all angles, directions, lengths, myself there, the sand
pocked with breathing holes leading to sand crabs, remains of mussels,
clams, oysters, lobster, squid, anemones, puffers, eel, sea snakes,
sharks, rays, barracuda, lungfish, trilobites, sea spiders, spiny
horrors, sentinels buried in the layered scape, as I approached the
bar, footsteps passing the split moorings, the black layers on the
roof, drying ropes frayed by the sojourns of rats from out the tumbling
foundations, the high tilted windows, their panes pulsing with the
passing of the tide, the frames beginning to crack, footsteps, giving
in, giving out, my footsteps the laughter and the absence of laughter
nearing the wooden buildings, the restaurant, the bar beating like
wings against the glass.

And I watched her.

WE HAVE ALL BEEN HERE BEFORE

She sat in the concrete building, in an office with frosted glass
partitions and barred windows, her fingers moving like praying mantises
on the table.  Her eyes half-closed, she saw:

A body.  The body of a woman.  The nude body of a young woman, the
shiny flesh slipping from its bones, floating face up in a swimming
pool.  What was left of the face.

"Right," someone said, after she told them.

Her eyes were still rolled up.  She squirmed in her straight-backed
chair, struggling against the rattle of typewriters from the next room,
and said, "And there is another one."

"That's news," said the Chief.  To one of his men, a lieutenant, he
said, "Better check it out.  Ask Fitz to run the list again, will you,
Billy?  You never know."  Then, "Where?  Can you tell us that?"

"I see.."  trees.  A hill.  A river.  Stream.  It was a stream, but now
it's a river.  The rains, yes.  The rains.  The rains did it."

He leaned over her to see that the tape recorder was still on.

"Isn't there something else, Polly?"  he asked gently.

"Take your time, now."

"No."  She began swaying.

"Yes.  A tower.  Airport nearby.  Yes.  Control tower .... " The Chief
nodded, smiling.

"Now tell us about the man, Polly.  Tell me about the man who did
it."

"The man?"  she said faintly.

"Oh yes, the man.  I see.."  red Pendleton shirt.  Trousers filthy.
Mud.  Driving away.  Old car, can't see... "Wait.  Yes.  Apartment. Two
oak trees.  Dead-end street.  West side of town.  Pink stucco
building."

She fell silent, breathing heavily, her eyeballs straining behind the
lids.

The lieutenant hadn't moved.  He stood at the door, his hand frozen on
the knob.  The Chief jerked a thumb at him impatiently, motioning him
out.

"Blood," she said abruptly.

"Face.  Skin."  She scraped at her arms.

"Washing the blood off.  It won't..."

The Chief put a hand out to steady her.

She stiffened, arching her back.

"Branford Way," she said matter-of-factly.

"Seventeen-something.  Sixth door, on top.  A black Toyota in the
garage.  No, on the street.  Always park on the street.  Kids play in
the garage.  The sixth apartment.  Six.  Six "

The Chief looked at the other men.  He winked.

"She's got it," he said.

"Just like she got the Valley Strangler and--what did the papers call
the other one?  That creep at the University, remember?"

"The Library Rapist," said one of the men, snickering.

"Right," said the Chief.

He moved with them to a corner of the room.

"Now go out and get on the horn--I want every available unit over there
so fast he won't know what hit him.  And get this.  No leaks this time,
understand?  Tell the Information Officer that this investigation is
strictly SOP.  That's the official line, got it?  We're pursuing leads,
searching the area, blah blah.  He can give the press the bit about the
latent print if he wants.  CID.  says it can't be traced, of course,
it's not clear enough, but don't tell Riley that.  I don't trust that
son of a bitch."

"What do you want on the warrant?"

"Shove the warrant!  Go in on narco, traffic tickets, any damn thing, I
don't care, but get in."

Suddenly the woman slumped forward and rested her head on her wrists.

"Wait," said the Chief.

He hovered over her again, his tie flopping against the worn surface of
the table.

"Polly?  Can you hear me?"

She inhaled deeply.  Then she sat up, blinking rapidly, as if awakening
from a dream.

"Hi, Jack," she said.

"How'd I do?"

"Like a top.  You did it again, babe.  How do you feel?"

"Oh, I'm fine," she said.

"Swell."  She rubbed her eyes.

"Hey, what're those two guys doing hiding in the corner?"  She made a
raspy laugh.

"What'd I do, say something about their sex lives?"

"What sex lives?"  said the Chief.

"You were right on the money, babe.  You hit it.  Didn't she hit it?
Everything.  The hill, the pool, the victim.  And the creep.  You're
batting a thousand today, doll."

"Don't I always?  Hey, look at them.  I must've popped their virgin
ears.  Who's got a smoke?"

The men patted themselves down.  The Chief tossed a pack of Viceroys on
the table.  Then he took a disposable lighter out of his coat pocket
and waited while she smoothed her hair and dug out one of the
cigarettes with her fingernails.  A tremor passed through her hands.

"Oh, I can still see it," she said, shuddering.

"The trees and the mud.  The pool.  And the body.  How do you suppose
it stayed in the pool for so long, Jack, without anybody noticing?"

"You said it yourself, Poll, remember?"  He reached for a file folder,
removed a newspaper clipping which he handed to her.

"It was the rain.  The rain did it."

She read the headline.

47 Bodies Reburied

ORPHANS OF THE STORM

"Oh, I remember that," she said, scanning the article.

"It was

on the wire services, even back where I live."  She tsked.  What a
horrible, horrible story."

"It happened over by the Point," said the Chief.

"The February rains were just too much, apparently.  After that last
storm, forty-some bodies came floating up out of their graves--that's
the estimate.  Some slid down the hill next to the cemetery, into the
road, into back yards, even into swimming pools like this one did. They
came right up out of the mud that way, like earthworms, I reckon. Right
out of their coffins and down the hill.  They still haven't found 'em
all.  Grisly story, all right," he added with a chuckle.

She made another sound with her tongue.

"I still don't get it," she said.

"How did your people know that the one in the pool hadn't just, you
know, been buried up there like the rest?"

"She had, she had," said the Chief.

"But not as a certified interment, you see.  Someone--our man in the
red shirt now, thanks to you--murdered her, hid her along with the gun
in one of the fresh graves sometime around Christmas.  We were there
when the Forest Glade people came in with their bulldozers for the mass
reburial.  The city ended up footing the bill for something like
fifteen grand in mud slide damages, by the way.  And while they were
busy tagging the remains, they found a bullet hole in this one's skull.
Polly, there's one more detail I--" The Chief turned, remembering his
men.

"So what are you two gawking at?  Haven't you ever seen a real live
psychic before?"

As he snapped orders and sent them out, she dipped further into the
news story.  She didn't really want to read it, but she was both
repelled and fascinated by the details.

She hadn't known what she would be in for when she accepted the
invitation to fly out this morning.  She had worked with police
departments all over the country in these last eight years, including
the Chief's.  Though more often than not it was work that involved
missing persons or the like, she had had her fair share of homicides,
including the bodies of those laborers up in Sonora County and that
little girl they had found stuffed into the storm drain in Los
Angeles.

But this case was beginning to get to her.  And that was surprising.

Because ever since that first story about her in the National Enquirer
had started the flood of requests back in '71, after she had phoned in
her premonition about the killer of the student nurses in Ohio, she had
seen it all, every kind of crime, and all of it was distasteful.

Yet .. . she wondered if she had been wise in picking this one, after
all.  There would be others in Santa Mara, other ways to help an old
friend.  A hit-and-run manslaughter, say.  Or a gas station holdup, a
liquor store shootout, a beating in the park.  That sort of opportunity
came up all the time.

But this.

There was, she couldn't help thinking, something truly nightmarish
about it.

"So what were you getting at, Polly," said the Chief, taking a seat
across from her at the interrogation table, "when you said there was
another one?"

"Oh, there is," she said.

"Same M.O.?  I mean--" "I know what you mean," she said calmly.

"Another body, female, buried in the same area.  But he didn't use a
gun this time.  In fact, I'm not too clear on just how he did it.  But
she's in the same general location.  You'll find her, I see it."

"Well, if there was one more unidentified on the list, we'll know about
it soon enough.  Meanwhile, I'd better get another team over to the
Point.  Is it our friend in the red shirt again?"

"Yes."

The Chief sighed and leaned back, like a man who has done an honest
morning's work, and lit up one of the Viceroys.

"Polly, I just don't know.  I don't know how you do it."

"Neither do I, Jack," she said, reaching for the pack.

"Maybe I should say I don't know why you do it.  I mean, what's in it
for you?  You know I can't pay more than your plane ticket--the
Commission won't go for it.  Of course I could pay you out of my own
pocket--" "Nonsense," she said.

"I wouldn't hear of it."  She frowned.

"How can you smoke these, Jack?"  She broke off the filter.

"It does have its rewards, though."

"What?  Donations, that sort of thing?"

on the wire services, even back where I live."  She tsked.

"What a horrible, horrible story."

"It happened over by the Point," said the Chief.

"The February rains were just too much, apparently.  After that last
storm, forty-some bodies came floating up out of their graves--that's
the estimate.  Some slid down the hill next to the cemetery, into the
road, into back yards, even into swimming pools like this one did. They
came right up out of the mud that way, like earthworms, I reckon. Right
out of their coffins and down the hill.  They still haven't found 'em
all.  Grisly story, all right," he added with a chuckle.

She made another sound with her tongue.

"I still don't get it," she said.

"How did your people know that the one in the pool hadn't just, you
know, been buried up there like the rest?"

"She had, she had," said the Chief.

"But not as a certified interment, you see.  Someone--our man in the
red shirt now, thanks to you--murdered her, hid her along with the gun
in one of the fresh graves sometime around Christmas.  We were there
when the Forest Glade people came in with their bulldozers for the mass
reburial.  The city ended up footing the bill for something like
fifteen grand in mud slide damages, by the way.  And while they were
busy tagging the remains, they found a bullet hole in this one's skull.
Polly, there's one more detail I--" The Chief turned, remembering his
men.

"So what are you two gawking at?  Haven't you ever seen a real live
psychic before?"

As he snapped orders and sent them out, she dipped further into the
news story.  She didn't really want to read it, but she was both
repelled and fascinated by the details.

She hadn't known what she would be in for when she accepted the
invitation to fly out this morning.  She had worked with police
departments all over the country in these last eight years, including
the Chief's.  Though more often than not it was work that involved
missing persons or the like, she had had her fair share of homicides,
including the bodies of those laborers up in Sonora County and that
little girl they had found stuffed into the storm drain in Los
Angeles.

But this case was beginning to get to her.  And that was surprising.

Because ever since that first story about her in the National Enquirer
had started the flood of requests back in '71, after she had phoned in
her premonition about the killer of the student nurses in Ohio, she had
seen it all, every kind of crime, and all of it was distasteful.

Yet .. . she wondered if she had been wise in picking this one, after
all.  There would be others in Santa Mara, other ways to help an old
friend.  A hit-and-run manslaughter, say.  Or a gas station holdup, a
liquor store shootout, a beating in the park.  That sort of opportunity
came up all the time.

But this.

There was, she couldn't help thinking, something truly nightmarish
about it.

"So what were you getting at, Polly," said the Chief, taking a seat
across from her at the interrogation table, "when you said there was
another one?"

"Oh, there is," she said.

"Same M.O.?  I mean--" "I know what you mean," she said calmly.

"Another body, female, buried in the same area.  But he didn't use a
gun this time.  In fact, I'm not too clear on just how he did it.  But
she's in the same general location.  You'll find her, I see it."

"Well, if there was one more unidentified on the list, we'll know about
it soon enough.  Meanwhile, I'd better get another team over to the
Point.  Is it our friend in the red shirt again?"

"Yes."

The Chief sighed and leaned back, like a man who has done an honest
morning's work, and lit up one of the Viceroys.

"Polly, I just don't know.  I don't know how you do it."

"Neither do I, Jack," she said, reaching for the pack.

"Maybe I should say I don't know why you do it.  I mean, what's in it
for you?  You know I can't pay more than your plane ticket--the
Commission won't go for it.  Of course I could pay you out of my own
pocket--" "Nonsense," she said.

"I wouldn't hear of it."  She frowned.

"How can you smoke these, Jack?"  She broke off the filter.

"It does have its rewards, though."

"What?  Donations, that sort of thing?"

"Oh, some of the families try to pay me, but I send it back.  And some
money does come in the mail.  And if it doesn't have a return address,
I guess I have to do something with it, don't I?"  She smiled and
picked tobacco from her lip with a long red nail.

"But it's not that much, really.  Not as much as the magazines seem to
think."

The Chief shook his head.

"So.  How about some lunch for now, Polly?"  he said.

"Why certainly, Jack."  She gave him a long stare.

"As long as I'm here, I'm at your service."

"Right," said the Chief.  He stood.

"There's a coffee shop on the mall, or--" "What's your office like?"

"I could have it sent over, sure.  But--" "I'd prefer it," she said.

"That way we'll know as soon as anything breaks."

He studied her.

"You're a pro, aren't you, Polly?  A real pro."

"Why, thank you, kind sir.  I guess I just like to be where the action
is."

"You'll get your action, all right," he said.

"There'll be fireworks all over the place when we get him.  If we get
him."

"Oh, we'll get him," she said.

"I can promise you that."

The afternoon crept by.

Then, a few minutes after four o'clock, the Chief shouldered his way
into his office and locked the door.  He turned to find her still
sitting there, dragging on an unfiltered cigarette.

"This one is going to be a tough nut to crack, Polly," he said.

His voice was hoarse.

She waited.

He leaned over the chair, his heavy arms supporting his tired body.

"How do you figure it?"

"Figure what?"

"We go through his apartment top-to-bottom--but there isn't a God
damned thing, right?  No bloody clothing, no muddy shoes, no diary,
nothing.  A big fat goose egg.  So we're interviewing the people in the
building, running the names in his little black book.  But he's a
smoothie, you know what I mean?  One of those professor characters.
Ronald Wilson Claibom, Ph.D. Moustache, sideburns, you've seen the
type.  Lots of connections in the right places.  Won't say word one
till the ACLU gets here.  The ACLU!  Hell, he's gonna be talking false
arrest, a press' conference when he gets out, the whole bit."  The
Chief groaned.

"Christ!"

"You're not going to cut him loose, are you, Jack."  She said it as a
statement.

There was an awkward pause.

"I can't hold him more than seventy-two hours, doll, you know that. Not
unless we get another break."

"I'm sure this time, Jack," she said.

"Don't look at me like that.  What about the red shirt?"

"I'm not looking at you any way," he said wearily.

"Yeah, we found the shirt.  So what?  The lab won't get anything.  It's
been to the cleaners at least once--still in the plastic bag.  Do you
know how many red Pendletons there are in Santa Mara?"  He shook his
head.

"So what else do I have?  The way things stand up now, I can't make a
case.  It's circumstantial.  Or not circumstantial enough.  Besides, no
court in this country is going to swear in your testimony.  I need this
conviction, Polly."

Yes, she thought.  So do I. How lucky for you, then, and for me, of
course, that I'm able to give you just the kind of man you've secretly
despised for so long: a college professor, an intellectual.  The kind
of suspect you've always wanted so badly to nail.

"I told you where to find the other body," she said with irritation.

His head continued to shake as he rested his huge buttocks on the edge
of the desk.

"Billy's team turned it up, all right."

"But what?"

"But we can't make the ID.  It's too decomposed.  Hell, we can't even
make the dental charts."

"And why not?"

"Because we can't find the head."

"Okay, okay," she said sharply.

Circumstantial, she thought.  I should have known.  You want
circumstantial?  I'll give you circumstantial.

"Set up your tape recorder again, Jack.  I'm going to give you what you
need."

A body.  The body of a woman.  The nude body of a young woman.  The
body quivering under the eucalyptus trees as the head is taken from
it.

"That's right," said the Chief, after she had told them.

"Then what?  XYnat does he do with the knife, Polly?  Hide it?  Does he
forget to wipe it off?.  Or drop something?  Yeah, that would do fine.
A button, keys--anything.  And what about the gun from the first time?
Try, baby.  For god's sake, try!"

She let his voice slip away in the mist and peered deeper into the
vision.  A figure running at the edge of the scene, scudding
frantically down an embankment slick with putrefying leaves.  But that
would do her no good now; she let go of the image.

"The apartment," she whispered, trying hard to get there.  The pink
apartment.  Number six.  She searched, allowing her mind to drift above
the floor, above the rug like a disembodied eye.

"Yes, I see..."

The Chief breathed heavily.

"I see .. ."  She forced herself to explore the dark corners and hidden
places, directed by memory, though it had been such a long time.  Then
she said, "Yes.  There, in the closet."

"But we checked--" "Behind the paperbacks..."  He used to do that years
ago, toss his overshoes into the closet after a camping trip, and it
was still there.

"Mud.  From his heels."  The same kind?  Yes, they would say that. They
would be able to "prove" it somehow.  Because they had to.

The Chief positioned the microphone closer to her.  He held his
breath.

"In... the alley.  Empty cartons.  Not empty.  Yes.  I see.."  a
shirt."  It was another Pendleton, the one he had been wearing when he
cut himself on a fishing trip, and he had finally thrown it out.  And
it was red.  The only color he ever bought.  She had been safe in
saying that.  She hoped the blood type would match.  With any luck it
would.

"That's it, Polly!  Talk to me, babe.  We're almost home."

The tape recorder hummed in the small room.  Her hands tightened on the
arms of the chair.  She stiffened, pressing forward.  The sounds in the
next office, the rumble of traffic on the other side of the barred
windows became the roar of the earth as it buckled under the rains and
began to move, disgorging its dead, but she fought it back.  Her hands
went to her ears.

"No," she said.

Then her hands fell to the table once more, her fingers twitching.
Slowly she regained control.

"The car.  Black.  Under the floorboard.  The mat.  Look there.
See..."

"What, Polly?"

"Leaves."  Yes.  Only one, but it would have to do.  A single
eucalyptus leaf carried on his shoe from somewhere and knocked loose by
the pedal, slivered there under the edge who knows how long ago.  But
it was the same kind.  It would do.

There were more details, like the fishing knife that had cut him
accidentally, in the tackle box of the boat locker at the harbor,
stained with his own blood.  Again she hoped it would turn out to be
the same type as the girl's.  But already she had the feeling; she
knew.  It always worked out.

Finally she lowered her head.  When she raised it again, the office was
alive with activity.  The Chief was snapping his fingers, spitting
orders into the phone, hustling his men out the door.  She rubbed her
eyes.

"You did it, doll," he said.  He winked at her.

She rose unsteadily.

"You're not leaving yet," he said.  He sounded surprised.

"I have to," she said.

"I've got a plan.  e to catch.  To Denver.  They need my help.  A child
was strangled there last month and they don't have any leads, none at
all."

"Hold it right there," said the Chief.

He left the office for a moment.  She heard a muffled convert ion the
sound of a locker clanging open.  She thought she felt the ground begin
to shift under her feet, far beneath the floor and the concrete
foundation of the building, but she pushed it out of her mind.

"Here you go."  The Chief thrust a carton of Lucky Strikes

into her hands.

"You know you deserve a hell of a lot more," he told her.

"And you know I know it, too.  Don't you, babe?"  He reached into his
coat for a check.  It was already made out.  He tried to fold her
fingers around it.

"You know me better than that, Jack," she said.  She pushed his hand
away.

They walked together down the hall.

"Don't you even want to see him?"  said the Chief.

"Who?"

"The creep.  Aren't you curious, at least?  Or is it already over for
you?"

She hesitated.

The Chief led her into a darkened room.  When her eyes had adjusted she
made out a row of seats, and a pane of glass that took up most of one
wall.  She reached for a cigarette with shaky fingers.

He stopped her hand.

"Two-way mirror," he said.

She looked through to the man on the other side.  He was seated at a
table in a straight-backed chair.  Tweed jacket, rust-colored wool tie
loosened at the collar.  He was being questioned by two detectives. His
expression was serene and self-assured, as always.  Even more confident
than she remembered, in fact.  But that will change soon enough, she
thought.

"That's him," said the Chief.

"That's Claibom."

Well, so long, Ronnie, she thought.  Do you even remember me?  You'll
probably, never know.  If you do find out, you should be grateful, for
in a way I've saved you.  I've stopped you from treating anyone else
the way you treated me so long ago.  In a sense I've helped you, more
than you know, more than you'll ever know.  In the darkness, she blew
him a kiss.

She went back out into the hall.  The Chief walked her to the lobby.

"I reckon it's so long, then, till next time," he said.

"Can't truthfully say I hope to need you again, Polly.  It's always
good to see you, though, you know that.  What's next for you now? After
Denver, that is?"

She sorted through her purse for her notebook.

"Oh, there was a kidnapping back in Rochester," she said.

"And that terrible business in Kansas.  And then, let me see, there was
that funny drowning down in Malibu.  Have you heard about that?  I
don't know if I can schedule them all.  Chances are I'll be out to the
Coast to see you again soon enough.  Just wait and see."

The police station was now busy with noisy activity, switchboards and
teletypes banging away full force.

"Listen," he said, "I could call the press in for you--set it up in a
few minutes.  All it takes is a couple of phone calls.  That way you'd
at least get some publicity out of this."  When she didn't say
anything, he said, "But I guess you don't need it, do you?  And knowing
you, Poll, I'd guess you don't want it, either."

"Justice," she said, "is its own reward.  That and being able to do a
favor for an old friend .... " She walked to the street.  The night was
coming fast.  As she stood at the curb waiting for her police escort,
she thought she saw a movement out of the corner of her eye.  But it
was only the persistence of the vision: a lonely figure scrabbling down
a hillside, frightened by the sudden realization of what he had done.
She saw him clearly now for only an instant, like the glimmer of the
first star of evening that disappears when you stare too long at it.

He was young, a poor Mexican or Puerto Rican by the looks of him, and
his trousers were f'flthy with mud as she had said.  She had told the
truth about that part.  But that was all.  He had no car waiting, no
apartment to go to; his shirt was blue denim, though it was almost too
wet and dirty to be sure.  She wondered idly where he was going.  Did
he know?  Up or down the state, did it matter?  He would be caught
sooner or later for something else.  That was always the way.  As he
turned to run, his ankles sinking deep into the mulch of the graveyard,
she caught a fleeting glimpse of his eyes, dark and quick in an
intelligent, utterly terrified face.

She closed her eyes, trying to shut it out.

When she opened them, a patrol car was pulling to a halt in front of
her.

She reached for the handle.  She was startled by how cold it was to her
touch.

The young lieutenant climbed out to help her.  He tipped his hat.

"Where to?"  he said.

Where?  Let's see.  There's that bastard of a salesman in Denver, she
thought.  And there's my old teacher, retired and living in Rochester.
And the boy who moved to Kansas, or at least he had been a boy then,
like her in his teens when he had tried to rape her that night.  And
after that... She was aware of her hand on the door.  The cold of the
metal was seeping into her fingers, spreading up her goose fleshed arm,
grasping for her chest, seeking to grip her heart with a deathlike
chill.  She concentrated, focusing her attention.  She snatched her
hand away.

And then she felt the rumbling.  She felt it first in her feet and then
in her entire body.  My God, she thought, is it the whole street?

"What... what is that?"  she asked the officer.

"Pardon, ma'am?"

Now the vision was upon her again, fiercer than ever this time.  She
saw the gray clouds, the heavy soil bubbling and roiling and breaking
up through the dark greenery, and then the long, glistening scratchings
of the dead awash in the storm as they descended the hills.  It was as
if the world were being burst apart from within, from its most secret
and hidden depths.

The officer was touching her, shaking her shoulder.

"Ma'am?"  he was saying.

She forced the image to stop.  Now, she thought.  It grew fainter and
faded.  It seemed to take a long time.  Too long.

"Wh-what?  Oh, Billy.  It was nothing, nothing at all.  I thought I had
forgotten something.  I just had a bad moment there, that's all .... "
And she got into the car and rode without speaking all the way to the
airport, waiting for the earth-moving machines to come in and finish
it.  But they never did.

DAUGHTER OF THE GOLDEN WEST

At the school were three boys who were best friends.  Together they
edited the campus newspaper, wrote or appeared in plays from time to
time, and often could be seen huddled together over waxed paper
lunches, over microscopes in the biology lab, sometimes until dark,
over desks leafed with papers most Saturdays, elbow to elbow with their
English Department advisor, and even over the same clusters of girls
gathered like small bouquets of poppies on the steps of the cafeteria,
joking and conning and in general charming their way through the four
long years.  Almost four years.

Don and Bob were on the tennis squad, Don and David pasted-up the
Buckskin Bugler feature pages, Bob and David devised satirical skits
for the annual Will & Prophecy Class Assemblies, and together they
jockeyed for second, third and fourth positions in their graduating
class--the first place was held inexplicably by one of those
painted-smile, spray-haired secretary types (in fact she was Secretary
of the Senior Class) named Arnetta Kuhn, and neither separately nor en
masse could they dislodge, dissuade, distract, deflower or dethrone
that irritating young woman from her destiny as Valedictorian, bent as
she had been

upon her goal since childhood, long before the boys had met, a target
fLxed in her mind as a stepping stone to a greater constellation of
goals which included marrying the most promising young executive in
Westside Hills, whoever he might happen to be, and furnishing him and a
ranch-style home yet to be built on South American Street with four
dishwater-haired children and a parturient drawerful of Blue Chip
Stamps.  And so it went.

Until May, that is: the last lap of the home stretch.

Until Bob disappeared.

In the Formica and acetate interior of the mobile home in Westside
Hills Court, Don of the thick black hair and high white forehead, lover
of Ambrose Bierce and master of the sweeping backhand, and David, the
high school's first longhair, collector of Marvel comics and articles
on quantum physics, commiserated with Mrs.  Witherson over cans of
sugar-free cola (it was the only kind she had, now that Bob was gone),
staring into their thumbnails and speaking softly in tones that were
like a settling of throttled sighs over an as yet unmarked grave.  It
was a sad thing, surely, it was mysterious as hell, and most of all,
each thought secretly, it was unfair, the most unfair thing he could
have done.

The trophies, glassed certificates and commendations Bob had earned
reflected around Mrs.  Witherson, bending the dim, cold light into an
aurora behind her drooped, nodding head.

"Maybe he ran off with a. With some kind of woman.  The way his father
did."

Instantly regretting it, a strange thing to say, really, Mrs. Witherson
closed a shaking hand around the water glass and tipped it to her lips.
The sherry wavered and clung, then evaporated, glistening, from the
sides; she had taken it up again weeks ago, after the disappearance,
and now the two were concerned about her as if by proxy. For Bob had
told them, of course, of the way she had been for so long after the
loss of his father.  He had been too small to remember him, but he had
remembered the fuming glasses and shaking hands, he had said, and now
his friends remembered them, too, though they did not speak of these
things or even look up as she drank.

"I thought--" Bob's father was killed in the war, David started to say,
but stopped, even without Don's quick glance and furtive headshake.

"He had.  So much.  Going for him."  Bob's mother drained the glass,
gazing into it, and David saw the tip of her slow, coated tongue lap
after the odor of nonexistant droplets along the lip.

"You all know that."  And it was a larger statement than it sounded,
directed beyond the trailer to include and remind them all, whoever
needed to be reminded of the essential truth of it, herself, perhaps,
among them.

They jumped, all three of them.  The telephone clattered with an
unnatural, banshee urgency in the closed rectangle of the trailer.  The
Melmac dishware ceased vibrating on the plastic shelf as Mrs. Witherson
picked up the receiver.  She took it unwillingly, distastefully,
between the circle of thumb and finger.

David pushed away from the unsteady, floor-bolted table and chewed the
inside of his mouth, waiting to catch Don's eyes.

"Mm-hm.  Ye-es.  I see."

It might have been an invitation to a Tupperware party.  A neighbor
whose TV set was on the blink.  A solicitation for the PTA, which could
have accounted for the edge in her voice.  But it was not; it was not.
They both knew it without looking at each other, and were on their feet
by the aluminum screen door seconds before Mrs.  Witherson,
white-faced, dropped the receiver.  It swung from the coiled cord,
dipping and brushing the chill linoleum floor.

The lieutenant at the police station wrote out the address of the
county morgue and phoned ahead, fo.them.  They drove in silence,
pretending absorption in traffic lights.  It was really not like the
movies.  An official in a wrinkled white smock showed them three 8 10's
and there was not much talk, only a lot of nods and carefully avoided
eyes and papers to be signed.  Don stepped into a locked room and
returned so quickly that he must have turned on his heel the instant
the sheet was lifted.  During that brief moment and through the miles
of neon interstices after David did not think of the photographs.

What was left of Bob had been found by a roadside somewhere far out of
town.

48 DENNIS ETCHISON DAUGHTER OF THE GOLDEN WEST 49

And it was "just like the other two," the attendant said.  They drove
and did not stop even when they were back in Westside.  Don took corner
after corner, lacing the town in smaller and smaller squares until each
knew in his own time that there was nowhere to go and nothing to be
said.  David was aware of the clicking of the turn indicator and the
faint green flickering of the light behind the dashboard.  Until he
heard the hand brake grind up.  The motor still running.  Without a
word he got out and into his own car and they drove off in different
directions.

David could not face his room.  He hovered through the empty streets
around his house for half an hour before his hands took over the wheel
for themselves.  He found himself in the parking lot of the Village
Pizza Parlor.  He drifted up next to Don's car and slipped inside,
leaving the keys in the ignition.

Don was hunched to the wall, dialing the pay phone.  David sidled over
to a table in the corner and climbed onto the bench across from Craig
Cobb, former star end for the Westside Bucks and Student Council
football lobbyist.

"Hey, listen, Don told me about Bob and, hey, listen, I'm sorry."

David nodded and shuffled his feet in the sawdust.

Craig's lip moved over the edge of the frosted root beer.  He probably
wanted to pump David for details, but must have dimly perceived the
nature of the moment and chose instead to turn his thick neck and
scrutinize the player piano in the corner, now mercifully silent.

Don returned to the table.

"My mother's going over to stay with Mrs.  Witherson tonight," he said,
sliding in next to Craig.  Then, meeting David's eyes for the first
time in hours, "Craig here tells me we ought to talk to Cathy
Sparks."

They looked at each other, saying, All right, we're in something now,
and we're in it together, and we both know it, and Craig glanced from
one to the other and sensed that they were in something together, and
that it was about their best friend who was dead and no one knew why,
and he said, "R'lly.  He went out with her, y'know."

That was wrong.  Bob hadn't been going with anybody last semester.  If
he had, they would have known.  Still, the way Don's eyes were fLxing
him, David knew there was more to hear.

Craig repeated the story.

"No, see, it was just that weekend.  Saturday."  Right, that was the
last time they had seen Bob.  He had been working on that damned Senior
History paper.

"I was washing my car, right?  And Robert pulls in next to me, the next
stall, and starts rollin' up the windows and so I ask him, you know,
"Who've you takin' to the Senior Party?"  An' he says he doesn't know
yet, and so I say, "Goin' to any good orgies tonight?"  and he says,
"What d'you know about the new girl?"  I guess, yeah, I think he said
he gave her a ride home or something.  I got the idea he was goin' over
to see her that night.  Like she asked him to come over or something.
You know."

The new girl.  The one nobody had had time to get close to, coming in
as she had the last month or six weeks of school.  A junior.  Nobody
knew her.  Something about her.  Her skin was oiled, almost buttery,
and her expression never changed.  And her body.  Dumpy--no, not
exactly; it was just that she acted like she didn't care about how she
looked most of the time; she wore things that covered her up, that had
no shape.  So you didn't try for her.  Still, there was something about
her.  She was the kind of girl nobody ever tried for, but if somebody
asked somebody if he'd ever gotten anything off her, you would stop
what you were doing and listen real close for the answer.

"So maybe ou'll want to talk to her.  She's the last one to see him.  I
guess."  The football player, unmoving in his felt jacket, glanced
nervously between them.

David stared at Don, and Don continued to stare back.  Finally they
rose together, scraping the bench noisily against the floor.

"Only thing is, she'll be pretty hard to find, prob'ly."

"Why's that?"  asked David.

"I heard she moved away soon as the school year was over."  Later,
driving home, taking the long way, thinking, David remembered the
photographs.  The way the body was mangled.  Cut off almost at the
waist.  He tried, but this time he could not get it out of his mind.

So they did a little detective work the next day.

Bob's mother had not seen him after that Saturday morning, when he left
for the library to work on his research paper.  No one else had seen
him after that, either.  Except Craig.  And maybe, just maybe, the
girl.

So.

So the family name was in the phone book, but when they got there the
apartment was up for rent.  The manager said they had moved out the
12th, right after finals.

So they stopped by the school.

The Registrar's office was open for summer school and Mrs.  Greenspun
greeted them, two of her three favorite pupils, with a warmth undercut
by a solicitous sadness of which she seemed afraid to speak.  It was
like walking into a room a second after someone has finished telling a
particularly unpleasant story about you behind your back.

Yes, she had received a call, she said, a call asking that Cathy's
grades be sent along to an out-of-town address.

"The young lady lives with her older sister, I take it," confided Mrs.
Greenspun.

David explained that he had loaned her a book which she had forgotten
to return.

j "Of course," said Mrs.  Greenspun maternally.  And gave them the
address.

It was in Sunland, a good hour-and-a-half away.

David volunteered his old Ford.  They had to stop once for directions
and twice for water and an additive that did not keep its promise to
the rusty radiator.  In the heat, between low, tanned hills that
resembled elephants asleep or dead on their sides under the sun, Don
put down the term paper.  They had picked it up from Mr.  Broadbent,
Bob's history teacher, and had put off turning it over to his mother.
They had said they were going to read it but had not, sharing a vague
unease about parting with the folder.

It was only the preliminary draft, with a lot of the details yet to be
put in, but it was an unbelievable story.

"He was really into something strange," muttered Don, pulling moist
hair away from the side of his face.

"I guess that means we can talk about it now."

"I guess," said Don.  But his tone was flat and he kept watching the
heat mirages rising up from the asphalt ahead.

"I've read something about it," pressed David.

"It's pretty grim, isn't it."  A statement.

"It's got to be the most horrible story I've ever read.  Or the most
tragic.  Depending on how you look at it," said Don.

"Both," he decided.

David felt subjects mixing.  He was light in the head.  He sucked on a
bottle of Mountain Dew and tried to shift the conversation.

"What did that guy at the coroner's office mean, do you think?"

"You mean--" "I mean about the 'other two'."  Suddenly David realized
he had not changed the subject at all.

"Well, you remember Ronnie Ruiz and--what was the other one's name?"

David remembered, all right.  Two others had disappeared, one a couple
of weeks before Bob, the first a few weeks before that.  A month or six
weeks before the end of school.  He had known what the attendant meant
but had been carrying around a peculiar need to hear it confhimed.

"Pathan, I think.  The younger one, Jimmy Pathan's brother.  The
junior.  But I thought he ran off to,join the Reserves."

"I don't know.  It must have been him.  Give me a swig of that shit,
will you?  Hey, how can you drink this?"

"I know, I know, my teeth' il fall out," said David, relieved to talk
about something else.

"But we always had it around the house when I was a kid.  I guess you
can be raised to like a thing, just like your parents' parents probably
gave them the taste.  Hard to put down."

"Sure, man, just keep telling yourself that until your stomach starts
eating itself.  AnyWay, I know they found Ronnie Ruiz in some kind of
traffic thing.  Torn up pretty bad."

"The guy didn't even have a car, did he?"

"I don't--no, now that you bring it up.  But they found him by some
road somewhere.  Maybe he got hit.  The way I remember

it, no one could identify him for sure for quite a while.  Shit, man."
He handed back the sweltering bottle.

"This is shit."

"It's shit, all right," said David.

"A whole lot of it."

"Cathy?"

"I remember you."  The girl showed herself at the shadowed edge of the
door, out of the blinding sun.

"And you.  I didn't think you'd bring anyone with you, when you
called," she said to David, softly so that it was almost lost in the
din of the freeway above the lot.

"This is Don.  He--" "I know.  It's all right.  My sister will be
pleased."

The boys had worked out a scenario to ease her along but never got past
side one.  She had a quality of bored immobility which seemed to
preclude manipulation, and a lack of assertiveness which made it
somehow unnecessary.

They sat in three corners of the living room and made conversation.

She was not pretty.  As their eyes mellowed to the heavily draped
interior, her face began to reflect warm tones like the smooth skin of
a lighted candle: oiled wax.  She wore a loose, very old fashioned
dress, high-necked, a ribboned cameo choker.  As at school, though now
the effect was in keeping with the close, unventilated room studded
with fading, vignetted photographs and thin, polished relics of bone
china.  She moved without grace or style.  She all but stood as she
walked, all but reclined as she sat, inviting movement from others.

The afternoon passed.  She drew them out, and they did not feel it
happening.

Finally the ambience was broken momentarily.  She left the room to
refill their sweating glasses.

Don blinked.

"There is something about that girl," he began measuredly, "and this
place, that I do not like."  He sounded nearly frightened about it,
which was odd.

"Does any of this remind you of anything?"

David rested his head against lace.  His scalp was prickling.

"Any of what?  Remind me of what?"

When she reappeared with new iced teas, cooled with snowball-clumps of
ice, Don had repositioned himself at the mantle.  He fingered a
discolored piece of an old mirror.

"How well did you know Bob Witherson, Cathy?"  he asked, gazing into
the glass as if for reflections of faces and events long past,
something along the lines of a clue.

She paused a beat, then clinked the refreshments into their coasters.
Unruffled, noticed David, trying to get a fix on her.

"I met Bobby at the library," she explained.

"I saw the paper he was writing.  We talked about it, and he asked me
to help him.  I invited him over for dinner.  At my sister's."

As simple as that.

David had been sitting one way for so long, his eyes picking over the
same curios, that he was beginning to experience a false gestalt.  When
Cathy sat again, he almost saw her sink back into the familiar
shimmering outline that was etched on his retinas, the image of her
sitting lying in the overstuffed chair as she had for--how long? Hours?
But this time she remained perched on the edge, as if in anticipation.
David found himself focusing on details of her face: the full,
moistened lips.  And her body: the light pressure of her slim belly
rising and falling to flutter the thin gingl?m dress.  How much fuller,
more satisfied she had looked when he first saw her, right after she
came to Westside.  Than the last.  time he had seen her, too, a couple
of weeks before graduation.  Now she seemed fragile, starved. She was
watching him.

"These pieces must he very old," said Don from across the airless room.
He lifted a fragment of a teacup.  It was decorated in the delicate
handiwork of another era, blue and red and purple flowers scrolled into
the pure white ground surface of the china ware.

David, watching Cathy watching him as he waited to make a move,
resented the interruption.

"Yes."  She spoke easily from another level, undistractible.

"My great-great grandmother brought them with her from Springfield.  In
Illinois."

David inched forward.

"They came West, did they?"  continued Don strangely, get

ting at something.

"Would ... do you mind?  I mean, I was wondering," he faltered,
atypically, "where did they settle?  I mean, where do you come from?"

"Sacramento, originally."

David rose.  He crossed the room halfway.  He stopped on a worn virgule
in the carpet.  Cathy's eyes opened wider to him.  He was aware in a
rush of the power assumed by someone who simply waits and asks no
questions.  But understanding it made it no less effective.

"Your sister has an interesting house," said David.

"You might like to see the rest," she offered cooly.

But Don was still busy formulating something and he would not let go.
David had seen that expression before.

"Why," Don asked carefully, his words hanging like bright bits of dust
in the air, "did Bob ask you to help him on his paper?"  So he saw what
was happening to David, saw it and recognized it and tried to push past
it anyway.

"Why would he?"  he directed at David, as if the obvious reasons were
not enough.

For once Cathy ignored a question.  She got up and walked into the
hallway, drawing it out as long as she could, aware of his eyes on her
back.  Perhaps she was smiling.  She turned.  Out of Don's line of
sight she said, "The parts you haven't seen yet are in here."  And so
saying she leaned forward, grasped the hem of her long dress and lifted
it to the waist.  She was naked underneath.  Her eyes never left
David.

The moment was unreal.  She seemed to tilt before his eyes.  David
moved toward the hall.

Don, thinking she was far into another room, launched a volley of words
in a frantic stage whisper.

"We've got to get together on this," he said.  And, "Think!"  And, "I
say her people came through Truckee in 18--what.  1846."  And, "David,
what about it?  What does that mean to you?"  And, "That's why he
wanted her help on the research.  It's starting to add up.  Does that
make sense, Davey?  Does it?  Does it?!"  And, "I don't know, it's
crazy, but there's something more.  What's the matter, you think it's
something that scares me?  Why should it?  You think I'm fucking crazy?
Do you?"

As David entered the bedroom the roar of the freeway gained tenfold, a
charge of white sound in his ears.  He thought she was saying
something.  He could not see her at first.  Then a flurry of cloth and
a twisting blur of white skin.  Disjointedly he remembered Don as he
had left him there in the darkening living room as the sun went down
outside.  Here in the bedroom it was almost completely dark--the east
side of the house, the drapes thicker.  Gradually his ears attuned to
sounds closer than the churning traffic.  Words Don had spoken in that
choked whisper: What about it?  What about it?  Over and over like a
ticking clock inside him.  He felt his body flushed, feverish.  People
who live like this must be afraid of the cold.  His eyes began to
clear.  He was aware of a slow, tangled movement about the edges of the
room.  Probably the curtains in the breeze.  Afraid of the cold.  He
saw her now faintly like a fish in dark waters, under ice, sliding
horizontally beneath him on the curve of the bed.  He felt himself
fevered, swelling.  Her cold, damp fingers raised his shirt and found
the hairs on his chest.  She slipped under his belt, thumbed and
pulled, straining the buckle.  He heard his zipper winding open.  Did
he?  The shapes moving against the walls in the breeze.  Hushed,
swishing sounds.  The freeway?  Closer, closer.  There was no breeze.

"Are you hungry?"  she asked and then laughed a kind of laugl he had
never heard before.  She slid back and forth under him, spreading her
fish belly-white legs wider.  He moved to her, his ody trembling.

"No."  Her voice.  Of course.  Of course.

"First let me eat you."  She said it.  All right.  All right?  In the
protracted second as she sat up, as she gripped his waist like a vise,
sudden images flashed to mind: words written in the dark and
illuminated from within.  They came in a surge, crowded in on him.  My
sister will be pleased, she had said.  What sister?  He laughed. Almost
laughed.  Now he was sure of the presence of others in the room. They
undulated along the walls.  How many?  T

his is crazy.  She had sisters, yes, that was it, sisters, from
Sacramento, descended from Truckee and the great trek to Sutter's
Fort.

"Oh my God," he said aloud, his voice cracking.  And in the next second
everything, all of it came at once.  As he felt her mouth enfold him he
saw Bob with her, and as her lips tightened he saw

Bob in the photographs, and as her teeth scraped hungrily over him,
drawing him deeper into her, he saw Bob's body, torn, consumed almost
to the waist, and as the teeth bit down for the first time, bit down
and would not be released, grinding sharply together, it all exploded
like a time bomb and he heard his scream off the walls and the
freeway's pulse, above her house, the road where young men were tossed
afterwards like so much garbage and the sound of the sighing women as
he passed into unconsciousness and Don burst confused into the room
with the second draft from her desk where he had found it and before he
could form an answer or even another question about Bob's paper on the
Donner Party and her strange knowledge of it her sisters swooped from
the corners where they had been crouched in waiting and then they were
upon him, too.

THE PITCH

The third floor came down to meet him.

As far as he could see, around a swaying bunch of sphagnum moss that
was wired to one of the brass fire nozzles in the soundproofed ceiling,
a gauntlet of piano legs staggered back in a V to the Kitchen Appliance
Department like sullen, waiting lines of wooden soldiers.  C-Note
shuddered, then cursed as the toe guard clipped the rubber soles of his
wedgies.

He stepped off the escalator.

He turned in a half-circle, trying to spot an opening.

A saleswoman, brittle with hairspray, dovetailed her hands at her waist
and said, "May I help you, sir?"

"No, ma'am," said C-Note.  He saw it now.  He would have to move down
alongside the escalator, looking straight ahead, of course, pivot right
and weave a path through the pink and orange rows of the Special
Children's Easter Department.  There.

"I work for the store," he added, already walking.

"Oh," said the saleswoman dubiously.

"An employee!  And what floor might that be?  The, ah, Gourmet Foods on
One?"

If it had been a joke, she abandoned her intention at once.  He swung
around and glared, the little crinkles fanning out from his

THE PITCH 61

eyes, deepening into ridges like arrows set to fire on her.  Her
make-up froze.  She took a step back.

A few women were already gathering listlessly near the demonstration
platform.  Just like chickens waiting to be fed.  Ready.  All angles
and bones.  May I help you, sir?  I'll plump them up, he thought,
swinging a heavy arm to the right as he pushed past a pillar.  A small
ornament made of pipe cleaners and dyed feathers hooked his sleeve.  He
swung to the left, shaking it off and heading between tables of rough
sugar eggs and yellow marshmallow animals.

They looked up, hearing his footsteps.  He considered saying a few
words now, smoothing their feathers before the kill.  But just then a
sound pierced the Muzak and his face fisted angrily.  It was
Chopsticks.

He ducked backstage through the acetate curtain.

"They don't even notice," he wheezed, disgusted.

"Why, here he is," said the pitchman, "right on time."  Seated on a
gold anodized dining room chair borrowed from the Furniture Department,
he was fooling with the microphone wired around his neck and waiting
blankly for the next pitch.

"All set to knock 'em dead, killer?  What don't they notice?"

"They don't notice my hand goin' in their pocketbooks in about fifteen
minutes."  C-Note sprawled over the second chair, also upholstered in a
grained vinyl imprinted with lime-green daisies.

"Ha ha!  Well, you just rest your dogs for now," said the pitchman.  He
spooled out a length of black plastic tape and began dutifully winding
another protective layer around the microphone's coat hanger neck
piece

C-Note saw that all was in ready: several cartons marked Ace Products,
Inc."  barricaded either side of the split curtain and behind the
pitchman, leaned against two large suitcases, were lumpen bags of
potatoes, a pried-open crate of California lettuce and a plastic trash
can liner brimming over with bunched celery and the wilted cowlick tops
of fat hybrid carrots.  C-Note flexed his fingers in preparation,
turned one wrist up to check his watch and pulled a white-gloved hand
through his lank hair.  He was not worried; it would not fall in his
eyes, not now, not so long as he did not have to lean forward on a
stool over another scale.  Sometimes he had thought they would never
end.  Up and down, down and up.

"We got fifteen units out there," said the pitchman, "another
forty-eight in the box here.  I don't think you'll have to touch 'em,
though.  The locations we do our best is the discount chains.  You
know."

"Sure," C-Note lied, "I know."

"These ladies--" He overlaid the word with a doubtful emphasis.
"--They're all snobs, you know?"  The pitchman cut the tape and then
paused, eyeing him as he pared dirt from under his fingernails with the
vegetable knife.

C-Note stared at the man's hands.

"You want to be careful," he said.

"Check, kid.  You got to slant it just right.  But you can sell
anything, can't you?  You talked me into it.  I believe you."

That was what C-Note had told him.  He had come up to the platform late
yesterday, hung around for a couple of sets and, when the pitchman had
scraped off the cutting board for the last time and was about to pack
up the rest of the units in the big suitcases and carry them out to the
station wagon, he had asked for a job.  You want to buy one?  Then
don't waste my time.  But C-Note had barged through the curtain with
him and picked up a unit, covering one of the kitchen chairs as if it
had always been his favorite resting place.  As he had done just now.
And the pitch.  The pitch he auditioned was good, better even than the
original mimeo script from Ace.  If he pitched as well out there today
in front of the marks, the head pitchman just might earn himself a
bonus for top weekly sales.  Of course, C-Note would never know that.
The pitchman had agreed to pay him cash, right out of my own pocket,
for every sale.  And how would C-Note know how much commission to
expect?  He would not bother to go to the company, not today and not
next week, because that would mean W-2s, withholding--less take-home.
And the new man looked like he needed every dime he could lay his hands
on.  His white-gloved hands.

"Here you go," said the pitchman.

"I'll hold onto your gloves.  Shake out a little talcum powder.  That
way you won't go droppin' quarters."

"The gloves," said C-Note, "don't come off."  And the way he said it
told the pitchman that he considered the point neither trivial nor
negotiable.

The pitchman watched him bemusedly, as if already seeing juice stains
soaking into the white cloth.  He stifled a laugh and glanced aside, as
though to an audience: Did you catch that?

"Well, it's two o'clock, pal.  I'm goin' up to the cafeteria.  Be back
in time to catch your act.  You can start, uh, on your own, can't--?"

"Take it easy," said C-Note, waiting.

"Don't worry, now.  I'm not gonna stick you with no check.  Ha ha.
Cash!"  He patted his hip pocket.

"Not every demonstrator's that lucky, you know."

"I appreciate it.  But I'm not worried about the money."

"Yeah."  The pitchman handed him the neck microphone.

"Sure."  He looked the new man over again as if trying to remember
something more to ask him, tell him.

"Check," and he left, looking relieved to be leaving and at the same
time uneasy about it, a very curious expression.

C-Note left the microphone on the chair and set to work on the units.
He had to prepare them and these few minutes would be his only chance.
If the pitchman had not volunteered to go to lunch, C-Note would have
had to beg off the next demonstration and remain backstage while his
boss pitched out front in order to get to them in time.  He tightened
his gloves and dug his fingertips into the big Ace carton and ripped
the cardboard.  They did not hurt at all anymore; he was glad of that,
in a bitter sort of way.

"... And today only," droned C-Note, "as a special advertising premium
from the manufacturer, this pair of stainless steel tongs, guaranteed
never to rust, just the thing for picking baby up out of the bathtub
.... " He lifted a potato from the cutting board and plunked it
ceremoniously into the waste hole.  Most of the ladies giggled.

"That's right, they're yours, along with the Everlast glass knife, the
Mighty Mite rotary tool, the Lifetime orange juicer and the fruit and
vegetable appliance complete with five-year written warranty and two
interchangeable surgical steel blades, all for the price of the
VariVeger alone.  If you all promise to go home and tell your friends
and neighbors about us, extend our word-of-mouth.  Because you will not
find this wonder product on the shelves of your stores, no ma'am, not
yet.  When you do, next fall sometime, the new, improved VariVeger
alone will list for a price of seven dollars and ninety-five cents.
That's seven ninety-five for the shredder, chopper and julienne potato
maker alone.  You all remember how to operate this little miracle,
don't you, so that you'll be able to put it to work on your husband's,
your boyfriend's, your next door neighbor's husband's dinner just as
soon as you get home tonight?"

More laughter.

"Just crowd in close as you can now, 'cause this is the last time I'm
going to be demonstrating this amazing..."

"Say, does that thing really work?"

"Three years of kitchen testing..."  C-Note saw that it was the head
pitchman, watching from the aisle, a sporting smirk on his lips.

"Three years of testing by the largest consumer laboratory..."

Tfiere was something else.

Distracted, he let his voice roll off for a brief moment, heard the
reverberation replaced by the dull din of milling shoppers, the ringing
of cash registers and the sound of a piano playing on the other side of
the Special Children's Easter Department.  He hesitated, his teeth
setting and grinding.  Why wouldn't she let him stop?  He hovered over
the soggy cutting board, waiting for the sharp crack of the ruler on
the music rest, just missing his knuckles.

A gnarled hand reached up, grasping for a VariVeger.  C-Note snapped
to.

"Just another minute, ma'am, and I'll be handing out the good-will
samples.  If you'll just bear with me, I'm sure you'll go away from
this store feeling..."

And so on and on.  He peeled a potato, set it on the grid of the
VariVeger and slammed his hand down on the safety guard

handle.  Dozens of slim, pallid, finger-like segments appeared
underneath.  A susurrus of delight swept the crowd.

"No need to hold back--the patented safety grip bar makes it for sure
you won't be serving up finger stew tonight!"

Then he took up the Mighty Mite, needled it into a radish and rotated
the blade, holding to the protective finger guard.  And a good thing,
too: without that tiny ridge of aluminum the blade would continue
turning right down through glove, finger and jointed bone.  Five
seconds later he pulled the radish apart in an accordion spiral.

"Here's just the thing for that mother-in-law you thought you'd never
impress!"

Oohs and ahhs.  Nothing worked like a non sequitur.

He diced onions, he ripple-cut potato chips, lateral, diagonal and
crisscross, he sliced blood-red tomatoes into inflationary slips" This
is one way to stretch that food bill to cover the boss, his wife, your
in-laws, your husband and all sixteen screaming kids!"

--he squeezed gouts of juice from a plastic spout like a magician with
a never-empty lotta, he slivered green beans and cross-haired a turnip
into a stiff blooming white flower.  He shredded lettuce head after
head, he riced more potatoes, he wavy-edged a starchy-smelling mound of
French fries, he chopped cabbage, he separated a cucumber into a fleshy
green Mobius strip, he purled twists of lemon peel, he segmented a
carrot, grated another, then finished by describing the Everlast glass
knife, stacking the packages into a protective wall in front of him.
You know.  You know what he said.  And he gave the signal and the money
came forth and he moved forty-three unit combinations at a price less
than one-half of the fanciful manufacturer's retail, the bills folded
between his fingers like Japanese paper water flowers, blooming and
growing in the juices as his gloves became green, green as Christmas
trees made of dollars.

He scraped the garbage into a hole, mopped his forehead, put away
twenty unsold packages, stripped off his plastic apron, unplugged the
mike and departed the platform.

Just as he was about to peel the drenched gloves from his hands, the
head pitchman appeared at the slit in the curtain.  C-Note left his
gloves on.

The pitchman flashed his hand forward, then thought better of it.

"Hell of a salesman," he announced.

"We thank you," said C-Note.

"But--"

"Don't let it go to your head, though."

"No, sir.  I got--" "Hell of a salesman.  But what the hell was that
business with the knife?"

"I sold the knife.

"Long with the rest of the package.  Isn't that all right, sir?  But if
you don't mind, I got to--" "But you didn't demonstrate the knife.
What's with that?  You afraid you're gonna cut yourself or--" C-Note's
sharp eyes nailed him where he stood.

"If you don't mind, I got to go now."  He started for the curtain, head
down.

"I mean, this gut of mine's startin' to eat itself.  If you don't mind.
Sir.  If you think I earned my lunch."

"Hell yes, you earned it, boy."  The pitchman put a foot up on the
kitchen chair.  His toe brushed the carton, the one with the torn-open
top.

"Hey, wait a minute."

C-Note drew back the curtain.

'ook, you want your money or don't you?"

C-Note turned back.

"Ha ha."  The pitchman unfolded some money.  C-Note took it without
counting, which made the pitchman stare.

"Hell of a salesman," he muttered, smiling crookedly.  He watched the
heavyset man leave.

"Kid must have to take a hell of a leak," the pitchman said to himself.
It was only after he had counted and stacked the limp piles of bills in
the money box, counted the units, shaken his head and paced the floor
several times, lost in some ambitious vision, that he noticed the
torn-up carton.

"Hell of a salesman," he said again, shaking his head with pleasure. He
poked around inside, counting the reserve.  Cutting his finger on
something, he drew it back with a grimace and stuck it in his mouth.

"Well goddam," he

said slowly, patiently, pulling up the crease in his trousers and
seating himself before the carton from which, he now realized,
unpackaged units had been inexplicably switched, "what in the name of
the .. ."  goddam holy hell do we have here?  he might have said.

C-Note hurried for the back stairs.  On the landing he stopped and
looked at his hands.  They were trembling.  Still moist, they resembled
thick, mushy clumps of pseudo podia  Loosening the fingers one by one,
he eased the gloves off at last.

His fingers quivered, fat and fish belly-white.  The tips were
disfigured by a fine, shiny line.  They had healed almost perfectly,
sewn back right afterwards, in the ambulance; still, the fusion was not
quite perfect, the ends angled out each slightly askew from the
straight thrust of the digits.  No one would notice, probably, unless
they studied his hands at close range.  But the sight of them bothered
him.

He braced himself, his equilibrium returning.  He swallowed heavily,
his breath steadying, his heart leveling out to a familiar regular
tattoo.  There was no need to panic.  They would not notice anything
out of the ordinary, not until later.  Tonight, perhaps.  At home.

He recognized the feeling now as exhilaration.  He felt it every
time.

Too many steps to the ground floor.  He turned back, stuff'rog the
gloves into his coat pocket, and re-entered the store.

He passed quickly through the boundaries of the Kitchen Appliance
Department.  Mixers.  Teflon ware.  Beaters, spoons, ladles, spatulas,
hanging like gleaming doctors' tools.  If one were to fall it would
strike the wood, making him jump, or smack the backs of his hands,
again and again.  One of them always had, every day.  Some days a
spoon, other days something else, depending on what she had been
cooking.  Only one day, that last day, had she been scoring a ham; at
least it had smelled like a ham, he remembered, even after so many
years.  That day it had been a knife.

The Muzak was lilting, a theme from a movie?  Plenty of strings to
drown out the piano, if there was one.  He relaxed.

The women had somnambulated aimlessly from the demonstration platform,
their new packages pressed reassuringly to their sides, moving like
wheeled scarecrow mannequins about the edges of the Music Department.
From here it was impossible to differentiate them from the saleswoman
he had met there, by the pianos.  She might have been any one of
them.

He passed the platform and jumped onto the escalator.  The rubber
handrail felt cool under his grip.  Hastily he pulled a new pair of
white gloves from his inside pocket and drew them on.

At the first floor, on his way out to the parking lot, he decided to
detour by the Candy Department.

"May I help you, sir?"

Her hands, full and self-indulgent, smoothed the generous waist of her
taut white uniform.

"A pound-and-a-half of the butter toffee nuts, all right, sweets?"

The salesgirl blushed as she funneled the fragrant candy into a paper
sack.  He saw her name badge: Margie.  There was nothing about her that
was sharp or demanding.  She would be easy to please--no song and dance
for her.  He tipped her seventy-five cents, stroking the quarters into
the deep, receptive folds of her soft palm.

He'tilted the bag to his mouth and received a jawful of the tasty
sugared nuts.

A' the glass door he glanced down to see why the bag did not fit all
the way into his wide trouser pocket.  Then he remembered.

He withdrew one of the parts he had removed backstage and turned it
over, fingering it pleasurably as he waddled into the lot.  It was a
simple item, an aluminum ring snapped over a piece of injection-molded
plastic.  It glinted in the afternoon sunlight as he examined it.  A
tiny safety guard, it fit on the vegetable shredder just above the rim
that supported the surgical steel blades.  A small thing, really.  But
it was all that would prevent a thin, angular woman's fingers from
plufging down along with cucumber or potato or soft, red tomato.
Without it, they would be stripped into even, fresh segments, clean and
swift, right to the bone.  He slipped it back into his pocket, where it
dropped into the reservoir of other such parts, some the little safety
wheels from the vegetable garnisher, some the protective bars from the
Mighty Mite rotary tool.  But mostly they were pieces from the
VariVeger, that delightful invention, the product of three years of
kitchen testing, the razor sharp, never-fail slicer and stripper, known
the world over for its swift, unhesitating one-hand operation.

He kept the bag in his hand, feeding from it as he walked on across the
parking lot and down the block, losing himself at once in the milling,
mindless congestion of Easter and impatient Mother's Day shoppers.

YOU CAN GO NOW

The receiver purred in his hand.

He glanced around the bedroom, feeling as if he had just awakened from
a long, dreamless sleep.

A click, then recorded music.  He had been placed on hold.

Th'ere was something he was trying to remember.  Everything seemed to
be ready,
but-"Thank-youforwaitinggood~afternoonPacificSouthwestAirlinesmayIhelp-
ou?"

He told the voice about his reservation; he was sure he had one.  Would
she-Yes.  Confirmed.

He thanked her and hung up.

Wait.  What was the flight number?  He must have written it down--yes.
It was probably in his wallet.

He bent over the coat on the bed, feeling for the slim leather
billfold.  There, in the breast pocket.  He fumbled through business
cards, odd papers, credit plates.

No.

and

But no matter.  He would find out when he got there.

Still, there was something.

He pulled out the drawer in the nightstand, under the phone, started
poking around, not even sure of what he was looking

He found a long, unmarked envelope, near the bottom.  He took it and
held it tightly as he slipped the coat on, then put it into the inside
pocket while he felt with his other hand for the keys.  He patted his
outer pockets, but they were not there.  Head down, he left the room.

His bags were stacked neatly by the wall of the foyer, but the keys
were not there.  He paced through the living room, the kitchen,
checking the tables.

He went back to the bedroom, eyes down.

There.

By the door.  The key ring was wedged by the bottom edge, between the
door and the pile of the carpet, as though it had been flung or kicked
there.

He picked it up, walked to the front door, lifted his bags, and went
out to the car.

The face was spattered with dry, flaking paint, so it would have been
hard to read the numbers, anyway.

He toed the accelerator until he was moving five miles over the speed
limit, then ten.

He was glad to have made such good time; a few extra minutes would mean
a drink first, maybe two-It was funny.  The car ahead, at the foot of
the ramp.  The back-up lights were on, but not the brake lights.  He
did not slow, because it meant that the signal at the intersection
would be--Headlights.  They were headlights.  Headed directly at him.

You can go now, said a voice.

He leaned on the horn, but then there was the heavy, bone-snapping
impact and everything was driven into him with such force that the horn
stayed on, bleating like a siren, whether or not he would have wanted
it to or would even have thought of it or of anything, of anything else
at all.

It was still early afternoon, so the freeway would be a clear shot most
of the way.

He switched off the air conditioning--who had left it on?--and rolled
down the window, stretching out.  The seat was adjusted wrong again,
damn it, so he had to grope for the lever and push with his feet,
struggling to seat the runner back another notch.

He connected through to the San Diego Freeway, made the turn and tried
to unwind the rest of the way.  He sampled the radio, but it was only
more of the same: back scratchings about love or the lack of it and the
pleasure or the pain it brought or might bring; maybe, could be,
possibly, for sure, always, never, too soon, not soon enough, in the
wrong rain or the wrong style.  Wrong, wrong.  He flicked it off.

The airport turnoff would be coming up.

He flexed his arm, checking his watch.  But it had stopped.

He was late getting to LAX, so he swung at once into the western
parking lot, hoofed it over to the PSA building and sloughed his bags
through the metal detector without stopping at the flight information
desk.  A couple of quick questions later, a hostess in a
Halloween-colored uniform was pointing him toward the boarding tunnel,
and then another was ushering him onto the plane and back to the
smoking section.

He stashed his bags and found himself in a seat on the aisle, next to a
pregnant woman and two drugged-looking hyperactive children.  They
continued to squirm, but slowly, as though underwater, as he tugged at
the seat belt, trying to dislodge the oversized buckle from beneath his
buttocks.

A double vodka and two cigarettes later, he was halfway to Oakland and
swinging inland away from the silvery tilt of the sea.  He drained the
ice against his teeth and snared the elbow of a stewardess.

Another?

Well, the bottles were all put away, but--yes.  Of course.  Of
course.

The smaller child was busy on the floor in front of the seat, trying to
tear out the pages of a washable cloth picture book about animals who
wore gloves and had one-syllable names.  The child had already stripped
the airline coloring book, the oxygen mask instruction card and the air
sickness bag into piles of ragged chits.  Now, however, he dropped his
work and wobbled to his feet, straining to clamber up the seat and
under his mother's smock.

But the mother was absorbed in the counting and recounting of empty
punch cups--one, two, three, see?  one, two three--over and over, for
the older child, who was working with all his might to slide out from
under his seat belt.  He would flatten like a limbo dancer until his
shoes touched the floor and his knees buckled; then the mother would
reach down, hoist him back up and begin counting the cups for him
again.

"One, two, three, see?  Why don't you try, Joshua?"  Ignored, the
smaller child twisted like a bendable rubber doll and, sucking the ink
off two fingers, watched the man across from him.

Who looked away.  He was, mercifully, beginning to feel something from
the double: a familiar ease, faint but unmistakable.  He folded his
hands, cold against each other, and tried to unwind while there was
still time.  He caught a glimpse out the window of farmlands sectioned
like the layers of a surgical operation, beyond the flashing tip of the
wing.

The child followed his eyes.

"Breaking the child announced.

Idly he watched the wing swaying slowly as it knifed through the air
currents.  He remembered seeing the wing moving up and down like that
on his lVtrst flight, how he worried that it might break off until
someone had explained to him about expansion and contraction and
allowances for stress.

"What's breaking?"  said the mother.

"Nothing's breaking, Jeremiah.  Look, look what Mommy's..."

The stewardess reappeared.  She rattled the plastic serving tray,
bending over his lap with the drink.

He reached into his back pocket for his wallet.

"Want more punch!"  said the older child.

"More punch?"  asked the stewardess.

The wallet wasn't there.  He remembered.  He reached inside his coat.

He felt a long envelope, and the billfold.  He removed both, peeled off
two bills and laid them on the tray.

"Breaking  said the smaller child.

At that moment a shadow passed over the tray and the stewardess's wet
fingers.  He glanced up.

Outside, heavy strands of mist had begun to drift above the wings,
temporarily blocking the sun.  Looking down, he saw the black outline
of the plane passing over the manicured rectangles of land.

Suddenly, sharply, the plane dropped like an elevator falling between
floors.  Then just as suddenly it stopped.

"Looks like we might be hitting some turbulence," he said.

"Sure you've got a pilot up there?"

His attention returned to the window.  Now darker clouds clotted the
view, turning the window opaque so that he saw a reflection of his own
face within the thick glass.

He heard a voice say something he did not understand.

"What?"  he said.

"I said, that's funny," said the stewardess, "like an open grave."

A flash of brilliant light struck outside, penetrating the cloud bank.
She stopped pouring the drink.  He looked up at her, then at the tray.
He noticed that her hands were shaking.

Then a dull, muffled sound from the back of the plane.  Then a series
of jolts that rattled the bottle against the lip of the glass.  He
thought he heard a distant crackling, like ants crawling over aluminum
foil.  Then the quick, shocking smell of smoke wafted up the aisle.

"Oh my God," whispered the stewardess hoarsely, "we've been--" "I
know," he said, strangely calm, "I know," with tears of blood I tell
you I know.

The tray, ice and drink went flying, and then they were

al ling everything falling inward and children, pillows, oxygen masks,
bottles, the envelope he still clutched stupidly in his hand, the whole
thing, the plane and the entire world were falling, falling and would
not, could not be stopped.

It was dusk as he drove into the delta, and the river, washed over with
the memory of the dying red eye of the sun, seemed to be reflecting a
gradual darkening of the world.

He wound down the windows of the rented car, cranking back the wind
wings so that he could feel the air.  The smell of seed crops and of
the rich, silted undergrowth of the banks blew around him, bathing him
in the special dark parturience of the Sacramento Valley.

He had been away too long.

And soon he would be back, away for a time from the practices of the
city, which he had come to think of more and more lately as the art of
doing natural things in an unnatural way--something he was afraid he
had learned all too well.  But now, very soon, he would be back on the
houseboat; for a while, at least.

He did not know how long.

He would anchor somewhere near The Meadows.  He would tie up to that
same tree in the deep, still water, near the striped bass hole, hearing
the lowing of cattle from behind the clutch of wild blackberry bushes
on shore .... And this time, he dared himself, he might not go back at
all.  Not, at least, for a long, long time.

He drove past the weathered, century-old mansions left from the gold
days, past the dirt roads marked only by rural mailboxes, past the
fanning rows of shadowy, pungent trees, past the collapsing wooden
walkways of the abandoned settlement towns, past the broad landmark
barn and the whitewash message fading on its doors, one he had never
understood:

HI ARA PERU RESH.

He geared ing rush of anti under the car, th leaf springs groan Then he
saw.  caught the warm sn knew, at last, that h dock.

He braked in the, riverbank.  He heard the knocking of hulls aga ins

' ',"..  : ,?:

long pier, the planks glistened

" ......... cleats, the slack, frayed rc ,?"."  , .?;2.:.c:... :3:;
,?:;, :7?

the water, the buoys bobbx ',":t?  ...... smer, rented houseboat c ." .
 ,...,:..:.:?:

towed Wpy s Landing "c: , :. ':,-.- ... The bods moved underf " down,
and he sed, re ding ."???."

hours to reg Mn his sea legs.  He rea the end of the docng PA , wh
would be wMting ..... He tried to remember how long Yes, that writ Memo
riM Day rode h'about paying for the yero used her oMya few tes each ye?
Ev g that way M the lt few weeks.  albatross,t She had actuy smd that.
But; to her ter so my months, he forgot it home.  It Mways did.

He looked up.

The space w empty.

His eyes darted around the landing, but she w nowhere that he could
see.

UMess of course.  She had been moved.  That was it.  But why?  His boat
had never been signed any other st for long he had owned her. Something
had happened, then.  But there

ialling, every th masks, bottles, the the whole thing, the t--falling
and would not, corn, It was dusk as he drove into the delta, and L.
over with the memory of the dying red eye of the su,.

be reflecting a gradual darkening of the world.

He wound down the windows of the rented car, cran back the wind wings
so that he could feel the air.  The smell of seed crops and of the
rich, silted undergrowth of the banks blew around him, bathing him in
the special dark parturience of the Sacramento Valley.

He had been away too long.

And soon he would be back, away for a time from the practices of the
city, which he had come to think of more and more lately as the art of
doing natural things in an unnatural waymsomething he was afraid he had
learned all too well.  But now, very soon, he would be back on the
houseboat; for a while, at least.

He did not know how long.

He would anchor somewhere near The Meadows.  He would tie up to that
same tree in the deep, still water, near the striped bass hole, hearing
the lowing of cattle from behind the clutch of wild blackberry bushes
on shore .... And this time, he dared himself, he might not go back at
all.  Not, at least, for a long, long time.

He drove past the weathered, century-old mansions left from the gold
days, past the dirt roads marked only by rural mailboxes, past the
fanning rows of shadowy, pungent trees, past the collapsing wooden
walkways of the abandoned settlement towns, past the broad landmark
barn and the whitewash message fading on its doors, one he had never
understood:

the .

smaller, toward Wimt."

the last, unpaved mile in a gro wand eucalyptus pods rained up :,
hands, the shocks and the he next grove and coals.  And he and the

The boards ,;?  ."."

down, and he smiled, .6:4 hours to regain his sea legs.

the end of the docMng PA, ,..:.

would be %Mting.

He tried to remember how long it h Yes, that writ Memori Day weekend.
rode h about paying for the year-round space-used her oMya few tes each
ye?  Even Shelley haa g that way in the lt few weeks.  Cut your lo mes
albatross She had actuy sd that.  But at tes e this, co,."  to her
after so my months, he forgot it .  It felt e cong home.  It Mways
did.

He looked up.

The space was empty.

His eyes dted ound the landing, but she w nowhere that he could see.

UMessof course.  She had been moved.  That w it.  But why?  His boat
had never been assigned any other st for long he had owned her.
Something had happened, then.  But there

?"

had been no long distance ,. would not be one to hide any.  Would he?

He took a few steps, his hands in h.

the river in both directions.

He could just make out the diner/office/ta the trees.  A dim light was
burning behind the pc.

panes.

Yes.  Old John would know.  Old John would be able him the story,
whatever it was.

Which was the trouble.  Knowing him, it would take an hour, two.  A
beer, three beers, maybe even dinner.  The lonely old man would not let
him go with a simple explanation, of that he was sure.

And now he found he could think only of the Shelley Arm.  He had waited
and he had planned and he had come all this way, and at the moment
nothing else seemed to matter.  He needed to feel her swaying under
him, rocking him.  Now, right now.  Then.  Everything.  Would be.  All
right.

He stepped off the end to the bank, peering under the covered section
of the landing, even though he knew that his boat would have been too
large to clear the drooping canvas overhang.

He crouched at the edge, feeling suddenly very alone.  The river
smelled like dead stars.  He watched the water purl gently around the
floats and echo back and forth over the fine sand.  A few small bubbles
rode the surface, and a thin patina of oil shone with mirror-like
luminescence under the dimming sky, reflecting a dark, swirling
rainbow.

No stars were visible yet.  In fact, the sky above the trees grew more
steely as he watched.

He looked again at the water.  He fingered a chip of gravel and tossed
it.  It made a plunking sound and settled quickly, and as it
disappeared he found that he was straining to follow it with his eyes
all the way down to the bottom.

He reached into his coat for a cigarette.  His hands were still cold,
and growing colder.

d left .

Mt.  the page.

The Hter stood.  He he'd th.

taun, on the struts and drew it out, along with stared at the
envelope.

'q't remember-4 sheet of bond light

His legs were crampeu.  :'..  ;

His shoes sloshed the water, h, ;& swinging arc of his cigarette tip h.
<;7 found the cigarette and extinguished He 0ropped it and moved
forward, am she really there?  he thought.

Then he waded out into the low tide, th, around him with a sound like
musical notes, the me.  still gripped in his hand, trailing the
water.

Dazed, he glanced around the bedroom.

The receiver was in his hand.  By now the plastic had become quite warm
against his palm.  He stared at it for a moment, then returned it to
his ear.

He heard recorded music.

Click.

78 DENNIS ET CHI

"Thank-youforwaitinggoodafternoon-Pa.  Airlines-may-I-help-you ?"
?...:, There was something he wanted to tell her.  He ha a ing hard to
remember, but-His eyes continued to roam the lower half of the room.

he spotted the keys, the car keys, wedged between the bottom edge of
the door and the pile of the carpet, as though they had been flung or
kicked there with great force.

It started to come back to him.  Shelley had done it.  She had thrown
the key ring with all her strength, a while ago.  Yes.  That had
happened.

He raised his head at last, rubbed his neck.

And saw her, there on the other side of the bed.

She lay with eyes closed, hands at her sides, fingers clutching the
bedspread.

He didn't want to disturb her.  He modulated his voice, cupping the
mouthpiece with his hand.

He told the maddeningly cheerful voice on the phone--it reminded him of
a Nichiren Shoshu recruiter who had buttonholed him on the street
once--to cancel one reservation.  His wife was not ready, would not be
ready on time.

Yes.  Only one.  That's right.  Thank you.

He hung up.

He lifted the phone and replaced it on the nightstand.

On the bed, where the phone had been, was an envelope.  He picked it
up.  It was empty.

There was a sheet of paper on the floor, where Shelley had crumpled and
thrown it.  That was right, wasn't it?

He smoothed it out on his knee.

It was written in a very careful, painstaking longhand, much more
legible than his own.  He started to read it.

At the end of the first stanza he paused.

Yes, it was something Shelley had found--no, she had had it all along,
saved (hidden?) in her drawer in the nightstand.  She had taken it out
earlier this morning, or perhaps it had been last night, and had shown
it to him, and one of them had become angry and

CAN GO NOW

qw it had started.

under m,

there w be mo my eyes tell your ey, than love of touch face lost in my
face... do you ow what Hves tween our breathing ps?

(4) twisted hair se heB e so sounds stopped by my chest... dark es
sleep while I speak to your heart

He turned to his wife.

It was true; she was beautiful.  Whoever had written those words had
loved her.  He studied her intently until he began to

feel an odd sense of dislocation, as if he were seeing her for the
first time.

He looked again at the paper.

At the bottom of the page, following the last stanza, there was a
name.

It was his own.

And in the corner, a date: almost fifteen years ago.  Quietly, almost
imperceptibly, he began to cry.

For so much had changed over the years, much more than handwriting.  He
did not love her now, not in any traditional sense; instead, he
thought, there was merely a sense of loving that seemed to exist
somewhere between her and his mind.

As he sat there, he forced his eyes to trace the lines of her body, her
face: the shrug of her sholders, the sweep of her long, slender neck,
the surprisingly full jaw and yet the almost weak point of the chin,
the slight lips, the sad curve at the corners of her mouth, the smooth,
even shade of her skin, the narrow nose, the nearly parallel lines that
formed the sides of her small face, the close-set eyes, the thin and
almond-shaped lids and delicately sketched lashes, the worried cast of
her forehead and the baby- fmc wisps at the hairline, the soft down
that grew near her temples, the fuller curls that filled out a nimbus
around her head, the hair bunched behind her neck, the ends hard and
stiff now where the dried brown web had trickled out, just a spot at
first but soon spreading onto the pillow after he had lain her down so
gently.  He had not meant it.  He had not meant anything like it.  He
did not even remember what he had meant, and that was the truth.  He
had tried to tell her that, practically at the moment it had happened,
but then it was too late.  And it was too late now.  It would always be
too late.

He lowered his head.

When he opened his eyes again, he was looking at the paper.  At the top
of the page, perfectly centered, was the title.  It said:

TODAY'S SPECIAl.

"How about some nice bottom round steak?"  asked Avratin the butcher.

"Is today's special."

"No round steak."

"Ah.  qell, Mrs.  Teola--" "Taylor."

"--Mrs.  Taylor."  Avratin the butcher tapped the trays behind the open
glass, then thumbed back another display of cuts.

"I got some nice, nice clods, can cut for Swiss steak if--" "No Swiss
steak."

Avratin started to siph, pinched off his nose with his thick curving
forefinger, which was getting cold.

"Excuse me.  I know what you want.  For you, some nice, nice, very nice
pot--"

"No pot roast, neither."

His hands began describing in the air.

"Some lovely chuck, some darling rump, a little--" He squeezed the air.
"--Tender, juicy flank steak, eh?"  He saw her turn away, the gray bun
at the back of her neck beginning to wag.

"Some brisket for boiling!"  He heard his wife's heavy heels in the
sawdust and at that slapped his forehead with both hands--give up--for
her to see.

"My, you're looking very well today," Avratin's wife cooed.

Muttering, Avratin slid the last tray back in place, grumbling to
himself, sifting the red chunks of beef tenderloin through his fingers,
which were now quite cold; the meat plopped back onto the paper liner
and he slammed the glass, knocking the parsley loose from the top of
the ground round "Yeah, you should hope you don't see my sister,
Rose."

"Oh, Rosie  And how is her operation?"

"Don't ask."

"Well, Mrs.  Teo--" "Taylor.  Taylor!  My husband puts Teola in the
book, nobody calls him."  The gray bun wagged in growing impatience.

"But now he's Manny Taylor.  Manny Taylor!  I want you tell me, would
you call from the yellow pages a man with the name Manny Taylor?"

"Well," began Avratin's wife, standing closer to her husband, "what's
good for your mister's business--" "We should all live so long, I
promise you.  My God, my God."  She shook her bun and hunched toward
the door.

Avratin's wife cleared her throat "Today special, we have some very
nice fish, Mrs.  Taylor," she called sweetly and waited for the woman
to turn back under the creaking overhead fan.

"You got nothing I want," said the woman finally, only half-turning,
shifting her brown carry-all to her other hand.

"Why, Mrs.  Taylor," sang Avratin's wife.

"You've been our faithful customer for thirteen years.  Those years,
they mean only that you should come to this?  You're taking your
business elsewhere now?  God forbid that Lou and I should forget our
friends so easy."

"You should talk, dearies.  You should talk.r' This she said directly
to Avratin, sizing him up in his white apron as if he were an
imposter.

"You get Luttflsk back, then maybe we talk meat.  That Luttfisk, he
knows meat!"  And she shuffled out the door.

A moment later, to no one in particular, to the passing cars, to the
old man at the curb with the white beard and the stiff black hat,
Avratin's wife called, "My Lou, he was owning this shop before that
Luttfisk was starting in the business!  Don't you forget that!"

But Avratin was shaking his head, reaching around to untie the strings,
throwing his apron on the hook.

"Louie?"

He headed across the empty store to the back.

"Ask me why I'm closing an hour early.  But ask me!  Go ahead!  You ask
me about business, and I'll tell you.  Business... is .. lousy!"

Avratin's wife threw up her hands, imploring the ceiling fan to do
something, anything.

In the tiny bedroom, by a single small lamp with the crisp, yellowed
cellophane still clinging to the shade, with the sound turned down on
the Johnny Carson Show, Avratin and his wife were having an argument.

"... Twenty years in the retail meat business and you knife me in the
back.  Twenty years putting bread on your plate, only to have you--"
"Listen to this!  He's too proud, too proud to admit a mistake "
"--Twist, twisting the knife!"

Reproach, recrimination, guilt, counter-accusation, selfdepgecation.
The old pattern.

And only to come to this: that at the end, the finish, before grumbling
into bed, during the sermonette, Avratin raised his hurt face to the
water-stained ceiling one last time to declare, before the gods and
whatever other audience might be listening:

"All right, I take care of it, I take care of everything.  No matter
that Luttfisk tries to rob me, his own partner.  I get a man can take
care of the job.  I promise you, the problem be f'Lxed,
once-for-all!"

At the Century-Cudahy Storage and Packing Co."  the White Collar
Butcher was a very important man.  No one at the plant could say
exactly why, though it had to do with the fact that he was the best
butcher in the county, that he had the finest set of tools anyone had
ever laid eyes on, and the obvious quiet pride he

took in his work.  It had to do with the way he picked his own shifts,
coming in unpredictably and always with the attitude of a man who has
already been at work for several hours.  It had to do with the air of
authority he carried with him into the walk-in, the indefinable look of
knowing something that he would never tell on his thin, expressionless
lips, his smooth, ageless face, his small steel-blue eyes that were
perpetually set on a place somewhere beyond the carcasses and the
warehouse.

Alone at night, the White Collar Butcher stood motionless before the
freezer, his eyes on the temperature gauge.  But they were not focused
there.  Then, slowly, surely, he turned his back on the hook beam
scales and stood over his meat block.  He moved his hand from the
evenly beveled edges to the guard at the right of the block.  His hand
was heavy, a special tool itself, quite perfectly balanced, smooth and
pink and tapered ideally to the handles which he now allowed his
fingers to play over lightly: the meat saw, the cleaver, the steak
knife, the boning knife, below them the small scale, the aluminum
trays, the spool of twine and, to the left, the blackboard.  Then, with
smooth, automatic, practiced moves he took down his tools one by one
and washed them, wiped them and rubbed the handles, proceeded to
sharpen them on the slow grinding wheel and then the whetstone, touched
up the edges with the steel and wrapped them individually in soft,
protective leather.

He set the pouches out neatly and then, by reflex acquired through
years of practice, slipped his hand into his trouser pocket and
withdrew a folded square of white paper.  With one hand he opened it
and read the name and address printed there with a grease pencil in
straight block letters.  The name and address.

He refolded it and slid it back into his pocket under the apron.

Another job.

Then, positioning in an easy, familiar stance, he reached for the wire
brush and steel scraper and box of salt and began cleaning his cutting
block, employing short, sure motions with his strong arms and
shoulders, conserving his energy for the job to come.  And as he worked
on into the night, his tanned face and immaculately styled hair set off
tastefully above the high, fashionable collar and wide hand-sewn tie
that lay smoothly against his tailored shirt of imported silk, the
whole effect suggesting a means far beyond his butcher's salary, was
that perhaps the beginning of a narrow, bloodless smile that pinched
the corners of his thin, efficient, professional lips?

For five nights Avratin hammered his pillow and spent more time than he
should have in the cramped bathroom.  Then the good news arrived.

Up went the noisy butcher paper painted with the proclamation he had
kept rolled and hidden for three days now.  He was nervous with
anticipation as he tore off strips of masking tape and slapped it up
across the plate glass windows.  It covered the whole front of the
store, right over the futile daily specials from the week past, as well
it should have.

The first customers of the day were already waiting at the door when
Avratin's wife finished dressing and joined her husband.

She stopped in the middle of the fresh sawdust floor, looking about as
if by some transmogrification of sleep she had just walked into a
strange, new life, or at least someone else's store.  She moothed her
hair and gaped, turning around and around.

"This is a holiday?  Or I'm sleeping still.  Pinch me, Lou."

Avratin had pulled out all the trays in the meat case and was busy
arranging his new, large display.

"Take it easy, take it easy, Rachel.  You got your wish."  The last
parking space in front filled up, and at last Avratin stood and leaned
back and watched the women milling around on the sidewalk, pointing
excitedly to the sign.  He smiled a special smile that he had not used
in years.

"Lou!  Lou!  Lou!  You didn't do nothing too drastic, did you?"  Then
what he had said seemed to hit her.

She clipped to the door, shook the knob, apologized to the woman with
the gray bun who was first in line, hurried back to get the keys,
almost ran to the door and opened it.

Avratin watched her outside, shading her eyes, holding off

their questions until she could get a good look at it herself.

She stood with one hand on her hip, one hand above her eyes, reading
and rereading the banner with disbelief.

The women scrambled inside, heading for the meat case.  He leaned back
on his hands, watching them over the scales, a bright morning chill of
anticipation tingling in his blood.

They stopped in front of the case, staring for long seconds.

Avratin wanted to speak to them, but held himself in check a moment
longer.

His wife was the last to enter the store.  She pushed her way through
the inert bodies, ignoring the still, dulled faces on a few of which
was beginning to dawn the first dim, uncomprehending light of
recognition.

"Lou, I saw the sign," she beamed.

"Is it true?  Is it?  Where is he?"

Avratin leaned forward.  He spread his arms behind the transparent case
in a gesture of supplication, palms out.  His eyes rolled up to the
creaking, slowly revolving fan and then returned to the display, newly
arrived from the man in the high white collar, which he had just now
finished arranging so carefully under the glass, the whole length of
the counter, to the new cuts, strange cuts, so invitingly laid out,
preserved by the cold, here something red, there something brown and
almost recognizable, there a fine shank, there an opened ribcage, there
a portion of a face you knew so well you almost expected it to greet
you.

"Here," Avratin answered, in a voice he had not used in years.

"Here!  Can't you read the sign?

"LUTTFISK IS BACK!"

Very shortly thereafter the short, muffled cries began.

THE MACHINE DEMANDS

A SACRIFICE

Soot fell in a continuous haze that obliterated the sun over the
freeway, leaving a gritty texture on the once-bright finishes of the
variegated cars and trucks.  For miles ahead they extended bumper to
bumper in a snaking line, stretching on through infinite gradations of
opaque smog, and if you let your arm hang down from the window and
brushed the door with your fingertips, they would come away grainy and
black-edged and imprinted with hundreds of microscopic lacerations.

It was five o'clock in Los Angeles on a July afternoon.

A short black van with the words E'MER.GEN.Z.INC stenciled on the sides
was stalled in the far right lane.

"Jeezus," said the driver, wiping the sweat out of his eyes with a
dirty sleeve.  His face was bloated like a brown paper bag full of
potatoes, his black eyes peering out through two torn, badly placed
holes.

"It's that fuel pump again--you know that, don't you?"  He shook his
head and glared outside for confirmation.

"I thought the Company was supposed to put in a rebuilt one, after last
time," said the other, a slight young man named Jaime who was new on
the job, with exaggerated disgust.  This was in fact only the end of
his first work week, and he still looked

THE MACHINE DEMANDS A SACRIFICE

to the fat man for direction, trying to limit his end of the
conversation to a general swearing, bitching echo.

"Jeezus H. Christ," said the fat man, hunching over the wheel and
shifting his huge buttocks.

A horn started up behind them.

The fat man shook his head at the floorboard.

"I am the Company, me and Raoul.  Told that son of a bitch--but no,
he's worried we'll miss some nice, juicy accident if I put erin the
shop till noon.  Man, I tell you..."

"Yeah," said Jaime.

"Well, hell, I'll get out and push the son of a bitch.  There's a crash
pad right up ahead.  Thank God at least for that."

He climbed down from his side and went around to the back.  The driver
got out and pushed at the door, straining to reach the wheel inside.
There was a wide shoulder by the side of the freeway, only yards ahead.
After a few nauseous grunts through carbon monoxide and bleating horns,
the driver hoisted himself in and braked as the van rolled to a stop in
front of the compactor.

"Far enough," he gasped, stumbling out.

"Don't want to junk this baby yet.  God damn.  Get too close and the
junker takes over.  ' Jaime stood around trying to look grim, kicking
rocks off the blacktop.

"Now we just got to wait for it to cool.  How much credit we got on the
card register, kid?"

"Uh, the starting fund from this morning, plus that two-car we found.
The digits we sold 'em.  Not much."

"Great.  All we need's a COPter to spot us right now."  The fat man
leaned on the magnetic grapple of the compactor and let a sigh whistle
out through his small mouth.

"The junk fee on the van would just about pay the breakdown fine," he
laughed bitterly.

"They got it figured so it comes out exactly even, that's what I
think."

"Yeah.  Except for the vacutract unit," said Jaime.

"Right, Jesse?"

But the fat man was looking back over his shoulder, past the massive
compactor.

He stuck a thick finger to his lips.  He motioned to the kid, a
rat-shrewd light coming into his eyes.

Jaime walked over, keeping behind the line of the automatic junking
machine.  He bobbed his head around the crane where Jesse indicated and
saw it.

An '89 sedan with a selenium top was racked up at close to a 45 degree
angle, the right side crumpled against the pavement from hood to tall.
A man in a business suit with spider webs of blood spun from his ear
and forehead was laid out on the front seat.  A thin man with glasses
was reaching up and in the opened driver's door, tending the wounds.

"Watch this," mouthed Jesse, trying to force his shirttails back into
his belt under the light smock.

He stepped boldly around the compactor.

"What happened here?  He hit the rail?"

The man with glasses half-turned, startled.  He quickly sized up Jesse
and his partner--too quickly, thought Jaime, his heart dropping.

"I'm a doctor," announced the man.  He started toward his own car,
parked at the end of the pad.  Just then the bottleneck ahead on the
freeway unclogged momentarily, for the river of stagnating cars revved
up and surged forward a few choppy feet.

"Just--let this be," sighed the doctor arbitrarily, flattening his
hands in the haze.

"I've got him sedated right now."

Jesse ambled forward.

"Looks like you're pretty near to having a dead man on your hands,
doc," he said.

"Who are you people?"  snapped the doctor.

"We were just passing by.  Our unit's back there.  Thought we might be
of some--" The doctor's cool gray eyes flicked between the two men.

"You thought you might make a bootleg sale or two, eh?  Well, you can
just go on.  Go on, now."

"We're in business to help people, same as you, sir.  Now if this is an
emergency, why, you know, we might be in a position to help you save
this poor guy's life."  Jesse stepped closer.

"Any internal injuries?"

"Listen, you.  I'm the doctor.  I pulled off to assist, and I can

only hope to God I'm not too late.  I've already called for an
ambulance.  This man is going to Central Receiving.  Go on now, get
going, before I call for a COPter."

"Uh, your ambulance is close by, is it?"

The doctor fumbled with his stethoscope and shook it at Jesse.  It
flopped like a serpent.  Impatient and indignant, he strode up to Jesse
and almost struck him across the face with it.

Jaime looked down at his fingernails.

"Under the laws of the State of California I can have you arrested,"
threatened the doctor.

"You realize that?"

"Don't know what you're getting at," said Jesse cordially.

"Mr.  Sandoval here and I were just returning from a two-car call on
the Ventura Freeway and--" "Not only your license to buy and sell,"
continued the doctor, "but my own license to practice.  Oh, I know your
game, all right.  I know how you independents operate.  I wasn't born
yesterday.  Moving in like vultures when you spot a quick touch, taking
what you want with or without authorization, selling your wares to
anyone fool or desperate enough not to ask questions!  I'm going to
call in a complaint right now."  He turned and headed for the red phone
box on the rail.

"What's the number on your van?"

Jaime, facing backwards, touched his partner's arm.

"Hey, Jesse, maybe we better..."

Just then an undulating wail, unnoticed till now, increased to an
ear-splitting level and an ambulance, long and shiny with Day-Glow
lights flashing, screeched up the connecting ramp.  Its doors and
tailgate flung open and a stretcher touched down before it had stopped.
Two antiseptic attendants sprang down and snapped back a side panel. A
new portable vacutrans unit gleamed at the ready.  They lugged it out
and headed for the wreck.

Jaime looked at Jesse.

"Jeezus H. Christ," said Jesse.

"Looks like the sons of bitches beat us out again."  He ran his stubby
fingers through his short, oily black hair.

"Come on, kid," he muttered.

"Let's get out of here.  We're wasting time."

"Do you think the van'll start now?"

Jesse whistled two descending notes.

"Get in," he said.  Jaime got in.  He ground the starter again and
again.

"Come on, come on," growled Jesse.  He climbed in and struggled with
the engine cover between the seats.

"I think I hear something.  Let's go.  Piss on it.  God damn, I'll get
it going."

He yanked his smock up under his arms.  His shirt was unbuttoned
halfway already.  Jaime saw the wide segmented plastic belt hanging
over Jesse's belly and swallowed his surprise.  He watched Jesse unhook
the belt, position it above the overheated fuel pump and pull the
stopper.  Amber liquid poured down over the metal, steaming, until the
reservoir was empty.  Jaime stuck his head out the window and took a
breath.

A whirring sound began in his ear.  He moved his hand to brush it away.
Then he noticed the COPter dipping low.  The policeman touched down on
the other side of the compactor.

"Hey," suggested Jaime.

"Don't tell me."

The policeman lowered his arm, stopped the whirling blades and folded
them back into the nightstick.  He went to the wrecked vehicle first.

"That'll cool her down," grunted Jesse, fastening the empty belt and
covering it again with his clothing.

Jaime floored the accelerator and twisted the key.  The engine turned
over and caught.

"Tromp on it," said Jesse.

They cut away from the freeway, slipped back onto the Harbor at Eighth
and connected with the Santa Monica.  The traffic smoothed out a
little.  They passed an empty Chinese GT buckled against the Adams off,
an overturned milk tanker covered with flies in the center lane at La
Brea, an impossible-looking two-car head-on at the Robertson on-ramp,
five or six stalled cars on or near the next few crash pads at
quarter-mile intervals and a grotesque four-car pileup smeared across
as many lanes just before Washington.  Jaime slowed, but Jesse pointed
at the two independent units already converging on the scene; it wasn't
worth their time.  Above it all, lacing the sky in a dense
crosshatching,

were the circling COPters, officers of the law hand-strapped to their
spinning, humming nightsticks, about to drop in a black swam2.

"I thought he was gonna stop us back there."

"What?  Aw, they know their job.  They can't hassle a unit doing legal
business at an accident."

"Good thing we got started, anyway," said Jaime.

"The fine for a breakdown on--"

"The bastards."  The van roared on.

"I think it's about six, Jesse."

"Don't rub it in.  But we can't go back yet.  I got a wife and kid to
feed."

"I guess I'm lucky," said Jaime.

"My kid, she ain't got a tooth in her head.  My wife made one big
mistake, that's for sure."

They passed the LAST SANTA MONICA EXIT sign.

"She loses a tooth, my wife tells her to put it under her pillow for
the fairy.  Some fairy.  I leave her a quarter.  Next thing you know,
she's pullin' out teeth to get more money.  I can't afford to give her
no allowance.  She's a good kid, real smart, she understands--business
is tough.  But this fairy shit.  I don't have the heart to tell her. So
pretty soon she's got no more teeth.  Whadaya think of that?  Take this
street here."

They prowled the blocks off Lincoln, Jesse calling the turns, and found
themselves eventually on Navy.  Jesse dipped his head, scanning the
small houses and narrow corners in the protracted twilight.

"This is more like it," he said.

They hung a left and steered on deeper into a disintegrating
neighborhood.  Jaime felt tense.  Once they passed an automatic patrol;
Jaime straightened his arm to wave, caught himself when he heard Jesse
snicker, and pretended to adjust the side view mirror instead.  He had
to remind himself that nothing more than a TV scanner swept the passing
streets from behind the aluminized windows.  Jaime felt a familiar fear
throbbing low in his back.

"Turn here," ordered Jesse.  The tips of his fingers rubbed together.

"Here?"

"Yeah.  I can feel it.  Can't you?"

Jaime started to shrug, stopped.

"I'm... not sure," he said.  Halfway along the short block, parked at
an odd angle, was an old sedan.  Years of unrepaired dents trimmed the
body, a few half-heartedly pounded out and coated with fading primer,
the edges of the dents now rusted in permanently.  A shadow moved to
one side within the car and a dark shape shifted by the open passenger
door.

"Well well," said Jesse, "let's see what we got here."  The van cut its
lights, passed slowly.

"We got one," announced Jesse.  They pulled up in front of the car.

Jesse studied the rearview mirror.

"All right, boy," he said.

"Let me do the talking."  He jerked open his door and lumbered to the
curb.

"Hello, good evening.  Any trouble here?"

A woman stood up uncertainly.  Jaime saw her; something stirred in him.
"why, uh, ye-es," she said, eyeing them, their van.  Then, relieved
into a decision: "Can you help me, please?"

Jesse grew bolder.

"Let's just see what the trouble is here."  He spoke with authority.

"Stand aside," he ordered.

Jaime edged out and watched by the van.  His senior partner certainly
knew his job--there was no doubt about that now--and he tried to listen
to catch a few pointers.

"... Just went out of control," she was saying.  It was hard to hear.
Two little faces studied Jaime from the window.  She went on explaining
how her husband had lost control of the car.

"Just keeled over" were the words she used over and over.

"Get the litter," yelled Jesse.

The young man swung open the back panel and brought the water litter,
flipping on the heater in the handle.  An overweight man in a metallic
green suit was sprawled on the front seat.  They turned his legs and
Jesse cradled his head, not too carefully, thought Jaime, as they
hauled him out.  His hat with the fishing lure in the band fell into
the gutter.

"You going to be all right," the woman said over the man.

"Oooh..."

They wheeled the litter to the van.  The water pad slogged and gurgled
under the body.  Jesse pulled a lever and the tailgate lifted them
inside.

Jesse strapped an electrode plate over the chest.  He clicked on the
diagnostic scanner and checked the dials hurriedly, preoccupied.  The
man groaned and the respiration dial wavered.

"He all right?  Isn't he?"  the woman called in a high voice from
outside.

Jesse shot a look at the young man.  It pressed him hard, relentlessly,
and Jaime felt himself shrinking in his clothes.

With a grunt Jesse stumbled out and walked ominously to the car.  He
clasped his hands at his back and lowered his head.

Jaime heard him say, "Your husband--he is your husband, right?"

"Yes sir, we just..."

"Well, your husband is dead.  At the present time."

She protested, then raged, then wailed, but Jesse talked her through
it.  At last she nearly collapsed against the car.  Jaime had seen it
before.  Only this time the sequence wasn't right.  He was confused.

"Well, do something, please!  Oh sweet Lord!"

"I think we caught him in time," said Jesse.

"But if we had put him in suspension just a few minutes earlier--" "Oh,
Lord, Lord... I" "I can try, that's all I can do.  Uh, I'll need your
card."  The woman opened the car door and practically fell inside.  One
of the children started crying.  She dumped out her handbag and clawed
through the contents.

Jesse took the credit plate from her.

"We'll be right with you," he said.

"I wish I could make you a firm promise.  But we'll do our best," he
added, almost cheerfully.

Back in the van, Jesse snapped his fingers.

"Run a thermal on him," he barked.

"Jesse, why did you say he was dead?"

"Talk later!  Get on the stick!  We don't want no interference to drive
up."

Jaime turned on the thermal table and watched the scope nervously as
the shapes of organs wavered into bright color focus on the analyzer.
The lungs expanded, shrank, the heart hesitated, swelled, pulsed
feebly.  Most of the colors were right.  But streaming heat outlines of
the wrong color clotted the pulmonary artery.  The victim, his body a
rising, straining knot, labored through congested membranes for
breath.

Jesse took out a syringe.

"Give him this, quick.  I don't want him to check out ahead of time. Or
we'll have to work mighty fast.  He isn't even in suspension.  It's a
massive coronary, looks like."  He riffled the plastic over leaves of
the anatomy directory, found the page.

"Yeah.  What's it matter?  He's gone anyway."

"What won't matter, Jesse?"  asked the young man, slipping the needle
under a pinch of ashen skin.

"You're about to learn a lesson, boy.  A big one."

He bounced around the interior of the van, flicking on the vacutract
unit, turning on the UV in the body dome overhead, checking the
temperature on the storage compartment, cursing when he snagged his
jagged thumbnail on his smock.  He switched on the autoclave and dared
it to heat fast enough.

He hovered, his belly hanging over the edge of the table.

"No dice.  Adrenalin's not enough, eh?  Good, fine, I don't care."

"Jesse?"

"Wha-at.  Get his clothes off."

Jaime wanted to ask what they were doing.  How they could operate
without a certificate of death from a doctor or a requisition for parts
from a regular ambulance unit.  Wanted to know if Jesse was worried
about their license to extract and sell.  Wanted to know why--but he
understood why Jesse had said the man was dead already now as the
plastic blimp descended from the roof and suctioned onto the body like
a leech.  It was too late, anyway.  The laser knife made its first
incision.

"Sure, Jesse.  I got it."

The autowaldoes whispered in unison, almost with anticipation under the
bubble.  At the first stroke came a cry from outside the van as the
wife fell in despair.  At the same instant a bubbling groan came from
the man on the table.  Then the last breath whistled out of him like
air from a shriveling balloon.  Jesse punched a pattern for kidneys,
spleen, gall bladder, pancreas, for

nearly ever thing but the over tasked heart.  And the liver.

"Damn liver," he mumbled disgustedly.

"He was a boozer, the lousy--" The stainless steel pincers poised and
peeled back layers and lifted and groped, severed and sutured and
weighed, calipered and deposited the organs in the vacuum tube to the
nitrogen bank and then finished up neatly with a muffled sucking sound.
The scissor-point fingers suspended over the corpse, flashing and
switching for a moment, and then retracted.  The body was left
gutted.

Jaime tried to say something.

"Don't mean a thing, kid.  He's garbage now."

Jaime heard the sound of a car passing far away, a bird on the wires
outside, the racing of his own heart.  He didn't know anything to
say.

His partner pulled a body envelope out of the 'clave, wrapped the body,
sealed it with the sealing iron.  Seconds, minutes passed but Jaime
could think of nothing to say.

He saw Jesse wheel the litter to the tailgate, press the button to
lower it, climb out and push it to the old car.  The woman screamed.
She seemed to lose her mind when she saw it.  Jesse struggled with her
until he could inject her with a tranquilizer.  She slumped into the
car.  He tossed the credit plate in after her.  Then he put the bag by
the lamppost on the cracked sidewalk.  The bulb was burned out but
Jaime saw clearly the formless encapsulated remains like a giant slug
caught on the cement.  He saw the two little black faces staring and
crying.  The children were jumping up and down on the car seat now.
They kept their fingers in their mouths; spittle ran down their dark
wrists, leaving their cold fingers glistening.  Tears streamed
alongside their flat noses, shining them, and their brown eyes wavered
and glittered like jewels.  When Jesse started toward them with needles
Jaime called out.  Tried to call out.  His throat was a single dry,
painful muscle.  He bit down until his jaws hurt.  Their eyes were
looking at him.

Jesse headed back to the van.

"Get out!  Up front!  We're not clear yet."

Jaime moved but not fast enough.  Jesse grabbed him by the smock and
flung him toward the cab.

"Start it up.  Start it!"

Jesse took over.  He stuffed Jaime into the front seat and gunned the
engine.  His ferret eyes darted about the empty street.

"We got to make this look right."  He slammed into reverse, drew back,
shifted into first and pulled up to the tail of the car.  Then he
locked against the car and rammed it forward into the lamppost.  There
was a grinding and a buckling of metal and a splintering of glass.  A
piece of the lamp hit the top of the car, rolled off and shattered on
the street into a million un repairable fragments.

On the way back, Jesse would not stop talking.

"That coon'll never find out who we were," he was saying.

"Just like we used to do it in "Nam.  The first 'tract and 'trans units
came in while I was over there.  We used to keep the ARVN forces up
with transes from the body count.

"Got to keep the war machine running!"  they told us.  Then there
wasn't enough.  We fmaily had to get into our own casualties.  The NCOs
told us to get what we needed off our own.  They wouldn't let us take
nothing off the whites.  We got some of the brown brothers together and
made sure ours got left alone.  We had to look somewhere.  Most of the
civilians, the gooks, were too small.  Women, kids.  So we came down on
the nigger bodies.  We made sure there were always enough of 'em.  Then
they started transing stateside.  Right away there were too many
patients, not enough donors.  I coulda told 'em that was gonna happen.
So when we got on the outs we went into business, me and Raoul.  We
wasn't the only ones.  There are plenty of units like us.  Sure, plenty
now."

Jesse settled back, moving his belly behind the wheel.

"Whatsamatter, kid?  We made a good hit."  He patted the thermostat.

"We'll sell 'em tomorrow.  Or the next day.  Don't worry."

They squealed around a corner and headed up the long gray ramp to the
freeway.  They passed a collison but two independent units were wheeled
into place next to it already, the two drivers haggling over the
rights.  Jaime saw a fist pounding the air.

"Me, now I got something to worry about."  Jesse yanked the drainage
belt loose under his smock.

"Damn pisser.  Gotta get me some new kidneys.  You ever have a tube
runnin' up your dick?  I'll get 'em, though.  That's for sure.  Long as
it's not off no damn spade."

They sped past accident after accident, metal and chrome and flesh
spattered over and over again across lanes for miles, as if part of the
same accident.  And always the vans moving in from all directions,
cutting across dividers, heading against the traffic, closing in.

"I need a lotta stuff, just for myself."  Jesse bit fiercely at his
torn thumbnail.

"Old ticker won't hold up forever.  Not to mention the rest of me.  Get
pains in te middle of the night, you know?"

He turned his head on the thick stalk of his neck.

He glanced across at Jaime.  His eyes roamed over Jaime's thin body,
the strong young muscles, the firm abdomen.  He smiled, a crack
splitting his cruel brown face.

Jairne was hypnotized by the passing lights.  His eyes focused on the
side view mirror outside the door.  He saw that his jaw hung slack, his
mouth half open as if to speak, as it had been for mile after endless
mile.  He saw the white, sharp, strong teeth, good teeth, the kind
anyone would be proud to own.  He sat gripping the religious medal
around his neck, so tightly it burned his hand.

"Don't let it get to you, kid.  It's that damn smog.  It's worsen a
sacka onions."  He slid his fleshy hands down to the bottom of the
steering wheel.

"But it's all in a day's work, I guess.  Be home with my wife an' kid
in a few more mintues.  Welcome to the Company, Jaime.  We need
somebody like you.  Believe me."  When he heard no answer he said,
"That is your name, right?  Jaime?"

But Jaime did not hear him.  He was back on the dark street, waiting,
but she would not stop.  She would not stop screaming.

CALLING ALL MONSTERS

The first thing I see is the white light.

And I think: so they have taken me to one of those places.  I knew it.
That was why the pain.  My brain stops spinning like a cracked
gyroscope long enough for me to relax.  Then I get it, all of it.  And
I think I may go mad, if it is true.

A rubber hand closes my eyes and I see red again.  Black lightning
forks shimmer in a kind of has-relief in front of me.  Then the
whirling stains settle in.  I think they are Rorschach tests.  The
black shapes flow like ink on a blotter.  I look into the first one. It
seems to me to be an accident.  I see a car, no, two cars, and the
smaller one is jackknifed over the big one.  Then the pain starts again
at the back of my head, not throbbing like before but only dull and
steady like a hot light bulb so I try not to think any more about the
ink blot.

The voices again over me.  They drone, too slow, hurting my ears,
trying to seep in through the hardening blockages I can feel there,
especially the low one that sounds like the man has a greasy tongue.  I
want them to stop but they continue, the greasy tongue bending closer.
Then I understand, but don't understand, because I know he must be
speaking a foreign language.  I want the sound

to stop.  They always speak in foreign languages or at least thick,
oleaginous accents, slow and heavy until they give the orders, then
harsh and guttural.  I remember.  I want it to stop because it hurts
me.  Don't they care?  It hurts me!

"I'm sorry," says the man, slipping his hands into his coat pockets.

"But it's too late for us to do anything."

But of course it hurts me.  That is part of it.  I remember now.  It is
always that way.  They even called it the House of Pain once, didn't
they?  Yes, and the accent oppressive and stressed where you didn't
expect it to be and he never bothered about anesthesia.  I believe he
said it was a shortage of supplies on the island but I don't believe
that.  I think for him it was a House of Pleasure.

Yes, that is what they are doing.  That is what they are doing.  Maybe
I keep forgetting, keep drifting off because it is less painful that
way.  My heart doesn't speed when I think of it.  You would think it
would.  All I feel there is the hardness, cold and brassy and clammy,
over my heart.  I don't understand that part yet but somehow it seems
to fit.

I am bound.  I know that now.  The cool pressure around my rib cage
loosens like a mummy's fingers and the cold lifts from my heart,
leaving a sticky spot there.  I strain mightily to move my arms and
legs but still they won't work.  Strapped.  I get it more clearly.
Lifting, there was lifting right after the start of the pain, and even
then I couldn't move, so I must have been bound even then, and more
lifting, always higher.  But I played it smart.  I kept my eyes closed.
I knew what was coming.  I didn't need my eyes to tell me where they
were taking me.  It was up lots of stairs, almost always, the top of an
old building, tons of sweating stone blocks crumbling in the mortar and
piles of dust and powdered limestone in corners where the torches never
reached, and the stairs wound in a spiral up and down, down to the
dungeons but they took me up, up to the laboratory.  They always take
them up at first.  To the skylight.  But now it must be night, the
light artificial.  They always worked at night on the important
experiments.

"I'm sorry," says the man in charge, hiding his powdered hands in his
white coat.

"But it's too late for us to do anything to save him.  We've run all
the standard tests, and so now..."  He makes a helpless gesture.

Something smooth and lightly textured brushes my chin, my lips, my
nose, my brow.  Now the red darkens.  I hear the swish of starched
smocks.  There are several of them.  They move surely, impatiently.  So
this is a big one.  Not just the ubiquitous assistant but others,
experts from all over have come to observe.  The low voices grind
again, like old automobiles on cold mornings with the electrolyte
low.

They hurry, I feel it in my skin more than hear it.  It must be night.
The air they stir toward me is cold.  I grow colder.  Even my head.
Funny but as the cold spreads up from my neck the spot at the back of
my head aches less and less.  That is, '.I suppose, some kind of
relief.

But still I am afraid.

I wait for the generators to start up.  They always need them for
electricity.  I hear no lightning.  So they must use the generators to
rev up their particle chambers, their glowing vacuum tubes, their
bubbling flasks of colored fluids, their magnetic arcs jumping and
sweeping up and up and up the conductor rods.  Snapping and crackling,
humming and spinning rotors that whir and whine and buzz.  I used to
like them.  I think of the lightning bugs I used to collect in
mayonnaise jars.  They sparked and jumped on the sill all night and it
reminded me of their experiments, and the thought scared me a little
but it was still pleasurable, a sublimely creepy game I played on
myself that always slipped me off into a comfortable dream.

The difference now is that I can't wake up.

I hear a hum.  They are ready.

"I'm sorry," says the man in charge, hiding his powdered hands in a
wrinkled white coat.

"But it's too late for us to do anything to save your husband.  We've
run all the standard tests, and so now..."  He bares his hands
nervously and moves them in a helpless gesture.

The woman bursts into tears.

"But you can't!  I showed you

the will, notarized, carried with me all these years And the copy in
his pocket" The doctor fumbles through his papers.

"I can show you his EKG.  Here, see for yourself."

As the machinery is lowered over me on damped hinges, I can no longer
feel the pain in my head.  Sounds, sensations are receding.  I wonder
if it is the head they are after.  I remember such a head, floating in
a porcelain tray, clear tubes of nutrient running in through the
nostrils, stained bandages pinned around the crown.  The eyes were
open, and so maybe it will not be so bad.  And the head went on
thinking.  What did it think?  Let me try--yes, the door, the one with
the heavy bar in front.  And the sliding window at the base for food.
Another experiment.  The head, released from physical demands, focused
its powers to make contact and control.  Even the deformed monster from
the previous operation.  He controlled the creature behind the door,
calling it out to smash through the boards and-But now they fit it over
my abdomen.  I can no longer feel there but I know that is where the
instrument is clamping down.  That is where they always start.

I wonder if my table is mounted to swivel, to turn me upright.  I hear
the sheet rustling down below.  They may, since I am strapped so
completely I can't move a toe or finger.  I hear the clasping of
surgical steel.  It begins.

The doctor ducks her freezing gaze and agitates his papers, moistening
a finger.

"Let me show you his EKG.  Here, you can see for yourself, no activity
whatever.  I'm sorry, but we have to go ahead, do you see?  We can't
afford to risk any further deterioration.  We have the other clause to
consider, the main clause."

For the love of God I can't feel but I can hear it slicing away.  Why
can't I feel?  They must use anesthetic now but even so I know what
fiends they are.  I think I always knew.  O now the obscene sucking
sound growing fainter even as my hearing dissolves, wet tissue pulling
apart.  They suction my bood, the incision clamped wide like another
mouth a monstrous Caesarean and I hear the shiny scissors clipping
tissues clipping fat, the automated scalpels striking tictactoe on my
torso and I know they are taking me, the blood in my head tingles
draining down down and I am almost gone, O what is it what are they
doing to me the monsters ME they must be it can't be that other nono my
papers they couldn't do THAT they couldn't break the terms it says in
blackandwhite NO so it has to be like those other times I have seen the
altered specimen on the table the wrapped composite the sutured One Who
Waits drifting in fluid for the new brain the shaved skin the
transplanted claws the feral rictus the excised hump promised long ago
the suddenly stripped subcutaneous map scarred creations I call you
in

"I'm sorry," says the doctor in charge, quickly hiding his
pale-powdered hands deep in his wrinkled, blood-smeared white coat.

"But it's too late for us to do anything to save your husband.  We've
run the standard tests for death and there is just no response,
nothing.  I am sorry.  So now... "He bares his shriveled hands
furtively and moves them in a helpless gesture of absolution.

The wife erupts in tears of frustration and rage.

"But you can't operate yet!  I showed you the will, notarized, carried
with me all these years, since the first time.  And the copy of the
instructions in his wallet, and the neck chain, you found them at the
accident tonight What more does it take?"

"The main clause."

"B-but that was conditional, you can read--/" She comes close to
blowing it then, nearly falling all over herself in a quivering puddle
right there in the hospital corridor.  She tries one last time.

"He--he wanted the contract, a kind of extra life insurance benefit for
the children.  But it meant more, a lot more to him.  It was really the
last chance for him to do something for others, for humanity.  But he
got to be obsessed with the technical question of dying, don't you
understand?  the exact moment of death.  When?  He was never sure. When
is it?  Can you prove it to me?"

"My dear lady, the heartbeat and respiration cease, the

muscles go slack..."

"God damn it, you cold fish!  He wanted an EEG!"

The doctor backs off assuming a professional stance.

"Your husband agreed to sell his usable internal organs to the
transplant bank for the usual fee which you, as his beneficiary, will
receive within 60 days.  Neither you nor your husband made any move to
break the contract prior to his, eh, demise this evening and so, I'm
afraid.."  there is nothing further I am empowered to do.  The standard
tests of death have been administered in accordance with the laws of
the state, and now his internal physical remains belong to the Nieborn
Clinic.  His personal effects, of course, remain yours--I'm sure they
are at the front desk by now--as well as his, eh, other remains, which
will be available to you for burial or cremation.  In the morning.  And
now, if you'll excuse me, Mrs.  .... " She sobs.  There is nothing else
for her.

I call you now as always before you must return taste sweet revenge on
these the true monsters break in now the floodgate opens the dam breaks
the skylight shatters under death locked weight the torch is dropped
the windmill collapses the trapdoor opens the tank splits and gushes
controls are short circuited the surrogate returns the animal people
cry ARE WE NOT MEN?  at last the grafts rebel appendages reborn to
murder I call you back I call you in now do not wait come as always to
the laboratory House of Pain operating room crypt castle tower NOW I
call you where are you?  now I call you I call you I call you ARE WE
NOT MEN?  O God what forgotten corner have I walled myself into what
have I done FOR THE LOVE OF GOD The vacutract unit is shut off The
organs are sealed and deposited in liquid nitrogen.  The heavy
insulated door is closed, and the chrome catch padlocked.  Rubber
gloves are stripped. Leave the remains for the orderlies.  It goes to
the morgue anyway. But for God's sake keep that sheet over the face, so
curiously distorted at the end.

The operation is a success.

the last thing I see is the blackness

THE DEAD LINE

This morning I put ground glass in my wife's eyes.  She didn't mind.
She didn't make a sound.  She never does.

I took an empty bottle from the table.  I wrapped it in a towel and
swung it, smashing it gently against the side of her bed.  When the
glass shattered it made a faint, very faint sound like wind chimes in a
thick fog.  No one noticed, of course, least of all Karen.  Then I
placed it under my-shoe and stepped down hard, rocking my weight back
and forth until I felt fine sand underfoot.  I knelt and picked up a
few sharp grains on the end of my finger, rose and dropped them onto
her corneas.  First one, then the other.  She doesn't blink, you know.
It was easy.

Then I had to leave.  I saw the technicians coming.  But already it was
too late; the damage had been done.  I don't know if they found the
mess under the bed.  I suppose someone will.  The janitors or the
orderlies, perhaps.  But it won't matter to them, I'm sure.

I slipped outside the glass observation wall as the technicians
descended the lines, adjusting respirators, reading printouts and

making notations on their pocket recorders.  I remember that I thought
then of clean, college-trained farmers combing rows of crops, checking
the condition of the coming harvest, turning down a cover here, patting
a loose mound there, touching the beds with a horticulturist's
fussiness, ready to prune wherever necessary for the demands of the
marketplace.  They may not have seen me at all.  And what if they had?
What was I but a concerned husband come to pay his respects to a loved
one?  I might have been lectured about the risk of bringing unwanted
germs into the area, though they must know how unlikely that is with
the high-intensity UV lights and sonic purifiers and other sanitary
precautions.  I did make a point of passing near the Children's
Communicable Diseases Ward on my way there, however; one always
hopes.

Then, standing alone behind the windows, isolated and empty as an
expectant father waiting for his flesh and blood to be delivered at
last into his own hands, I had the sudden, unshakable feeling that I
was being watched.

By whom?

The technicians were still intent on their readouts.

Another visitor?  It was unlikely; hardly anyone else bothers to
observe.  A guilty few still do stop by during the lonely hours,
seeking silent expiation from a friend, relative or lover, or merely to
satisfy some morbid curiosity; the most recently-acquired neomorts
usually receive dutiful visitations at the beginning, but invariably
the newly-grieved are so overwhelmed by the imper-sonalness of the
procedure that they soon learn to stay away to preserve their own
sanity.

I kept careful track of the progress of the white coats on the other
side of the windows, ready to move on at the first sign of undue
concern over my wife's bed.

And it was then that I saw her face shining behind my own in the pane.
She was alert and standing for the first time since the stroke, nearly
eighteen months ago.  I gripped the handrail until my nails were white,
staring in disbelief at Karen's transparent reflection.

I turned.  And shrank back against the wall.  The cold sweat must have
been on my face, because she reached out shakily and pressed my hand.

"Can I get you anything?"

Her hair was beautiful again, not the stringy, matted mass I had come
to know.  Her makeup was freshly applied, her lips dark at the edges
and parted just so, opening on a warm, pink interior, her teeth no
longer discolored but once more a luminous bone white  And her eyes.
They were perfect.

I lunged for her.

She sidestepped gracefully and supported my arm.  I looked closely at
her face as I allowed her to hold me a moment longer.

There was nothing wrong with that, was there?

"Are you all right?"  she said.

She was so much like Karen I had to stop the backs of my fingers from
stroking the soft, wispy down at her temple, as they had done so many,
many times.  She had always liked that.  And so, I remembered, had I;
it was so long ago I had almost forgotten.

"Sorry," I managed.  I adjusted my clothing, smoothing my hair down
from the laminar airflow around the beds.

"I'm not feeling well."

"I understand."

Did she?

"My name is Emily Richterhausen," she said.

I straightened and introduced myself.  If she had seen me inside the
restricted area she said nothing.  But she couldn't have been here that
long.  I would have noticed her.

"A relative?"  she asked.

"My wife."

"Has... has she been here long?"

"Yes.  I'm sorry.  If you'll excuse me--" "Are you sure you're all
right?"  She moved in front of me.

"I could get you a cup of coffee, you know, from the machines.  We
could both have one.  Or some water."

It was obvious that she wanted to talk.  She needed it.  Perhaps I did,
too.  I realized that I needed to explain myself, to pass off my
presence before she could guess my plan.

"Do you come here often, Emily?"  It was a foolish question.  I knew I
hadn't seen her before.

"It's my husband," she said.

"I see."

"Oh, he's not one of... them.  Not yet.  He's in Intensive Care."  The
lovely face began to change.

"A coma.  It's been weeks.  They say he may regain consciousness.  One
of the doctors said that.  How long can it go on, do you know?"

I walked with her to a bench in the waiting area.

"An accident?"  I said.

"A heart attack.  He was driving to work.  The car crossed the divider.
It was awful."  She fumbled for a handkerchief.  I gave her mine.

"They say it was a miracle he survived at all.  You should have seen
the car.  No, you shouldn't have.  No one should have.  A miracle."

"Well," I told her, trying to sound comforting, "as I understand it,
there is no 'usual' in comatose cases.  It can go on indefinitely, as
long as brain death hasn't occured.  Until then there's always hope.  I
saw a news item the other day about a young man who woke up after four
years.  He asked if he had missed his homework assignment.  You've
probably heard--" "Brain death," she repeated, mouthing the words
uneasily.  I saw her shudder.

"That's the latest Supreme Court ruling.  Even then," I went on
quickly, "there's still hope.  You remember that girl in New Jersey?
She's still alive.  She may pull out of it at any time," I lied.

"And there are others like her.  A great many, in fact.  Why--"

"There is hope, isn't there?"

"I'm sure of it," I said, as kindly as possible.

"But then," she said, "supposing .... What is it that actually happens,
afterwards?  How does it work?  Oh, I know about the Maintenance and
Cultivation Act.  The doctor explained everything at the beginning,
just in case."  She glanced back toward the Neomort Ward and took a
deep, uncertain breath.  She didn't really want to know, not now.

"It looks so nice and clean, doesn't it?  They can still be of great
service to society.  The kidneys, the eyes, even the heart.  It's a
wonderful thing.  Isn't it?"

"It's remarkable," I agreed.

"Your husband, had he signed the papers?"

"No.  He kept putting it off.  William never liked to dwell on such
matters.  He didn't believe in courting disaster.  Now I only wish I
had forced him to talk about it, while there was still time."

"I'm sure it won't come to that," I said immediately.  I couldn't bear
the sight of her crying.

"You'll see.  The odds are very much on your side."

We sat side by side in silence as an orderly wheeled a stain-less-steel
cleaning cart off the elevator and headed past us to the observation
area.  I could not help but notice the special scent of her skin.
Spring flowers.  It was so unlike the hospital, the antisepticized
cloud that hangs over everything until it has settled into the very
pores of the skin.  I studied her discreetly: the tiny, exquisite
whorls of her ear, the blood pulsing rapidly and naturally beneath her
healthy skin.  Somewhere an electronic air ionizer was whirring, and a
muffled bell began to chime in a distant hallway.

"Forgive me," she said.

"I shouldn't have gone on like that.  But tell me about your wife." She
faced me.

"Isn't it strange?"  We were inches apart.

"It's so reassuring to talk to someone else who understands.  I don't
think the doctors really know how it is for us, for those who wait."

"They can't," I said.

"I'm a good listener, really I am.  William always said that."

"My--my wife signed the Universal Donor Release two years ago," I began
reluctantly, "the last time she renewed her driver's license."  Good
until her next birthday, I thought.  As simple as that.  Too simple.
Karen, how could you have known?  How could I?  I should have.  I
should have found out.  I should have stopped your hand.

"She's here now.  She's been here since last year.  Her
electroencephalogram was certified almost immediately."

"It must be a comfort to you," she said, "to know that she didn't
suffer."

"Yes."

"You know, this is the first time I've been on this particular floor.
What is it they call it?"  She was rattling on, perhaps to distract
herself.

"The Bioemporium."

"Yes, that's it.  I guess I wanted to see what it would be like, just
in case.  For my William."  She tried bravely to smile.

"Do you visit her often?"

"As often as possible."

"I'm sure that must mean a great deal."

To whom?  I thought, but let it pass.

"Don't worry," I said.

"Your husband will recover.  He'll be fine.  You'll see."

Our legs were touching.  It had been so long since I had felt contact
with sentient flesh.  I thought of asking her for that cup of coffee
now, or something more, in the cafeteria.  Or a drink.

"I try to believe that," she said.

"It's the only thing that keeps me going.  None of this seems real,
does it?"

She forced the delicate corners of her mouth up into a full smile.

"I really should be going now.  I could get something for him, couldn't
I?  You know, in the gift shop downstairs?  I'm told they have a very
lovely store right here in the building.  And then I'll be able to give
it to him during visiting hours.  When he wakes up."

"That's a good idea," I said.

She said decisively, "I don't think I'll be coming to this floor
again."

"Good luck," I told her.

"But first, if you'd like, Emily, I thought--" "What was.."  what is
your wife's name?  If you don't mind my asking?"

"Karen," I said.  Karen.  What was I thinking?  Can you forgive me? You
can do that, can't you, sweetheart?

"That's such a pretty name," she said.

"Thank you."

She stood.  I did not try to delay her.  There are some things that
must be set to rest first, before one can go on.  You helped remind me
of that, didn't you, Karen?  I nearly forgot.  But you wouldn't let
me.

"I suppose we won't be running into each other again," she said.  Her
eyes were almost cheerful.

"No."

"Would you .. . could you do me one small favor?"

I looked at her.

"What do you think I should get him?  He has so many nice things.  But
you're a man.  What would you like to have, if you were in the
hospital?  God forbid," she added, smiling warmly.

I sat there.  I couldn't speak.  I should have told her the truth then.
But I couldn't.  It would have seemed cruel, and that is not part of my
nature.

What do you get, I wondered, for a man who has nothing?

I awaken.

The phone is silent.

I go to the medicine cabinet, swallow another fistful of L-tryptophan
tablets and settle back down restlessly, hoping for a long and
mercifully dreamless nap.

Soon, all too soon and not soon enough, I fall into a deep and troubled
sleep.

I awaken to find myself trapped in an airtight box.

I pound on the lid, kicking until my toes are broken and my elbows are
torn and bleeding.  I reach into my pocket for my lighter, an antique
Zippo, thumb the flint.  In the sudden flare I am able to read an
engraved plate set into the satin.  TWENTY-FIVE YEAR GUARANTEE, it says
in fancy script.  I scream.  My throat tears.  The lighter catches the
white folds and tongues of flame lick my face, spreading rapidly down
my squirming body.  I inhale fire.

The lid swings open.

Two attendants in white are bending over me, squirting out the flames
with a water hose.  One of them chuckles.  Wonder how that happened? he
says.  Spontaneous combustion?  says his partner.

That would make our job a hell of a lot easier, says the other.  He
coils the hose and I see through burned-away eyelids that it is
attached to a sink at the head of a stainless-steel table.  The table
has grooves running along the sides and a drainage hole at one end.

I scream again, but no sound comes out.

They turn away.

I struggle up out of the coffin.  There is no pain.  How can that be? I
claw at my clothing, baring my seared flesh.  See?  I cry.  I'm alive! 
They do not hear.

I rip at my chest with smoldering hands, the peeled skin rolling up
under my fingernails.  See the blood in my veins?  I shout.  I'm not
one of them!

Do we have to do this one over?  asks the attendant.  It's only a
cremation.  Who'll know?

I see the eviscerated remains of others glistening in the sink, in the
jars and plastic bags.  I grab a scalpel.  I slash at my arm.  I cut
through the smoking cloth of my shirt, laying open fresh incisions like
white lips, slicing deeper into muscle and bone.  See?  Do I not bleed?
They won't listen.

I stagger from the embalming chamber, gouging my sides as I bump other
caskets which topple, spilling their pale contents onto the mortuary
floor.

My body is steaming as I stumble out into the cold, gray dawn.

Where can I go?  What is left for me?  There must be a place.  There
must A bell chimes, and I awaken.

Frantically I locate the telephone.

A woman.  Her voice is relieved but shaking as she calls my name.

"Thank God you're home," she says.

"I know it's late.  But I didn't know who else to call.  I'm terribly
sorry to bother you.  Do you remember me?"

No luck this time.  When?  I wonder.  How much longer?

"You can hear me," I say to her.

"What?"  She makes an effort to mask her hysteria, but I hear her cover
the mouthpiece and sob.

"We must have a bad connection.  I'll hang up."

"No.  Please."  I sit forward, rubbing invisible cobwebs from my
face.

"Of course I remember you.  Hello, Mrs.  Richterhausen."

THE DEAD LINE I I5

What time is it?  I wonder.

"I'm glad you called.  How did you know the number?"

"I asked Directory Information.  I couldn't forget your name.  You were
so kind.  I have to talk to someone first, before I go back to the
hospital."

It's time for her, then.  She must face it now; it cannot be put off,
not anymore.

"How is your husband?"

"It's my husband," she says, not listening.  Her voice breaks up
momentarily under electrical interference.  The signal reforms, but we
are still separated by a grid, as if in an electronic confessional.

"At twelve-thirty tonight his, what is it, now?"  She bites her lips
but cannot control her voice.

"His EEG.  It... stopped.  That's what they say.  A straight line.
There's nothing there.  They say it's nonreversible.  How can that be?"
she asks desperately.  I wait.

"They want you to sign, don't they, Emily?"

"Yes."  Her voice is tortured as she says, "It's a good thing, isn't
it?  You said so yourself, this afternoon.  You know about these
things.  Your wife..."

"We're not talking about my wife now, are we?"

"But they say it's right.  The doctor said that."

"What is, Emily?"

"The life-support," she says pathetically.

"The Maintenance."  She still does not know what she is saying.

"My husband can be of great value to medical science.  Not all the
usable organs can be taken at once.  They may not be matched up with
recipients for some time.  That's why the Maintenance is so important.
It's safer, more efficient than storage.  Isn't that so?"

"Don't think of it as 'life-support," Emily.  Don't fool yourself.

There is no longer any life to be supported."

"But he's not dead!"

"No."

"Then his body must be kept alive .... " "Not alive, either," I say.

"Your husband is now--and will continue to be--neither alive nor dead.
Do you understand that?"

It is too much.  She breaks down.

"H-how can I decide?  I

Is be?  Icl Set Th I ri ing up I'm not Do a crem I st in the ja through
like wh See Th I st: bump of to the n My dawn.

Wh There m A b Frar Aw name.

"Th didn't kr you reml No 1 "Yo'

"W

her cove tion.

"No.  my face.

can't tell them to pull the plug.  How could I do that to him?

"Isn't there a decision involved in not pulling the plug?"i "But it's
for the good of mankind, that's what they say.  people not yet born.
Isn't that true?  Help me," she says imp ingly.

"You're a good man.  I need to be sure that he won't sul Do you think
he would want it this way?  It was what your v wanted, wasn't it?  At
least this way you're able to visit, to go seeing her.  That's
important to you, isn't it?"

"He won't feel a thing, if that's what you're asking.

doesn't now, and he never will.  Not ever again."

"Then it's all right?"  I wait.

"She's at peace, isn't she, despite everything?  It all so so ghastly,
somehow.  I don't know what to do.  Help please .... " "Emily," I say
with great difficulty.  But it must be done.  you understand what will
happen to your husband if you autl ize the Maintenance?"

She does not answer.

"Only this.  Listen: this is how it begins.  First he will be, nec ted
to an IBM cell separator, to keep track of leucoc, platelets, red
cells, antigens that can't be stored.  He will be around the clock to
manufacture an endless red tide for t: fusions J" "But transfusions
save lives!"

"Not just transfusions, Emily.  His veins will be a battle gro for
viruses, for pneumonia, hepatitis, leukemia, live cancers.  then his
body will be drained off, like a stuck pig's, and a supply of
experimental toxins pumped in, so that he can g producing antitoxins
for them.  Listen to me.  He will begh decay inside, Emily.  He will be
riddled with disease, turn parasites.  He will stink with fever.  His
heart will deform, his bi fester with tubercules, his body cavities run
with infection.  hair will fall, his skin yellow, his teeth splinter
and rot.  In name of science, Emily, in the name of their beloved re
sear1 I pause.

"That is, if he's one of the lucky ones."

"But the transplants..."

"Yes, that's right!  You are so right, Emily.  If not the blood, n the
transplants.  They will take him organ by organ, cell by [. And it will
take years.  As long as the machines can keep the .gs and heart moving.
And finally, after they've taken his eyes, kidneys and the rest, it
will be time for his nerve tissue, his ph nodes, his testes.  They will
drill out his bone marrow, and en there is no more of that left it will
be time to remove his mach and intestines, as soon as they learn how to
transplant se parts, too.  And they will.  Believe me, they will."

"No, please .... " "And when he's been thoroughly, efficiently
gutted--or en his body has eaten itself from the inside out--when there
is ;hing left but a res pirated sac bathed from within by its own
:rement, do you know what they will do then?  Do you?  Then y will
begin to strip the skin from his limbs, from his skull, a millimeters
at a time, for grafting and re-grafting, until--"

"Stop!"

"Take him, Emily!  Take your William out of there now, bt, before the
technicians can get their bloody hands on him!  nothing!  Take him
home.  Take him away and bury him forr.  Do that much for him.  And for
yourself.  Let him rest.  Give that one last, most precious gift. Grant
him his final peace.  can do that much, can't you?  Can'tyou?"

From far away, across miles of the city, I hear the phone and then
clack dully into place.  But only after I have heard another sound, one
that I pray I will never hear again.  Goodspeed, Emily, I think,
weeping.  Godspeed.

I resume my vigil.

I try to awaken, and cannot.

There is a machine outside my door.  It eats people, chews a up and
spits out only what it can't use.  It wants to get me, I w it does, but
I'm not going to let it.

The call I have been waiting for will never come.

I'm sure of it now.  The doctor, or his nurse or secretary or ng
machine, will never announce that they are done at last,

that the procedure is no longer cost-effective, that her remains will
be released for burial or cremation.  Not yesterday, not today, not
ever.

I have cut her arteries with stolen scalpels.  I have dug with an ice
pick deep into her brain, hoping to sever her motor centers.  I have
probed for her ganglia and nerve cords.  I have pierced her eardrums. I
have inserted needles, trying to puncture her heart and lungs.  I have
hidden caustics in the folds of her throat.  I have ruined her eyes. 
But it's no use.  It will never be enough.

They will never be done with her.

When I go to the hospital today she will not be there.  She will
already have been given to the interns for their spinal taps and
arteriograms, for surgical practice on a cadaver that is neither alive
nor dead.  She will belong to the meat cutters, to the first-year reed
students with their dull knives and stained cross sections .... But I
know what I will do.

I will search the floors and labs and secret doors of the wing, and
when I find her I will steal her silently away; I will give her safe
passage.  I can do that much, can't I?  I will take her to a place
where even they can't reach, beyond the boundaries that separate the
living from the dead.  I will carry her over the threshold and into
that realm, wherever it may bE.

And there I will stay with her, to be there with her, to take refuge
with her among the dead.  I will tear at my body and my corruption
until we are one in soft asylum.  And there I will remain, living with
death for whatever may be left of eternity.

Wish me Godspeed.

THE LATE SHIFT

They were driving back from a midnight screening of The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre ("Who will survive and what will be left of them?") when one
of them decided they should make the Stop "N Start Market on the way
home.  Macklin couldn't be sure later who said it first, and it didn't
really matter, for there was the all-night logo, its bright colors cut
tin$5 through the fog before they had reached 26th Street, and as soon
as he saw it Macklin moved over close to the curb and began coasting
toward the only sign of life anywhere in town at a quarter to two in
the morning.

They passed through the electric eye at the door, rubbing their faces
in the sudden cold light.  Macklin peeled off toward the news rack,
feeling like a newborn before the LeBoyer Method.  He reached into a
row of well-thumbed magazines, but they were all chopper, custom car,
detective and stroke books, as far as he could see.

"Please, please, sorry, thank you," the night clerk was saying.

"No, no," said a woman's voice, "can't you hear?  I want that box, that
one."

"Please, please," said the night man again.

Macklin glanced up.

A couple of guys were waiting in line behind her, next to the styrofoam
ice chests.  One of them cleared his throat and moved his feet.

The woman was trying to give back a small, oblong carton, but the clerk
didn't seem to understand.  He picked up the box, turned to the shelf,
back to her again.

Then Macklin saw what it was: a package of one dozen prophylactics from
behind the counter, back where they kept the cough syrup and airplane
glue and film.  That was all she wanted-a pack of Polaroid SX-70 Land
Film.

Macklin wandered to the back of the store.

"How's it coming, Whitey?"

"I got the Beer Nuts," said Whitey, "and the Jiffy Pop, but I can't
find any Olde English 800."  He rummaged through the refrigerated
case.

"Then get Schlitz Malt Liquor," said Macklin.

"That ought to do the job."  He jerked his head at the counter.

"Hey, did you catch that action up there?"

"What's that?"

Two more guys hurried in, heading for the wine display.

"Never mind.  Look, why don't you just take this stuff up there and get
a place in line?  I'll find us some Schlitz or something.  Go on, they
won't sell it to us after two o'clock."

He finally found a six-pack hidden behind some bottles, then picked up
a quart of milk and a half-dozen eggs.  When he got to the counter, the
woman had already given up and gone home.  The next man in line asked
for cigarettes and beef jerky.  Somehow the clerk managed to ring it
up; the electronic register and UPC Code lines helped him a lot.

"Did you get a load of that one?"  said Whitey.

"Well, I'll be gonged.  OldJuano's sure hit the skids, huh?  The pits.
They should have stood him in an aquarium."

"Who?"

"Juano.  It is him, right?  Take another look."  Whitey pretended to
study the ceiling.

Macklin stared at the clerk.  Slicked-back hair, dyed and greasy and
parted in the middle, a phony Hitler moustache, thrift shop clothes
that didn't fit.  And his skin didn't look right somehow, like he was
wearing makeup over a face that hadn't seen the light of day in ages.
But Whitey was right.  It was Juano.  He had waited on Macklin too many
times at that little Mexican restaurant over in East L.A."  Mama
Something's.  Yes, that was it, Mama Carnita's on Whittier Boulevard.
Macklin and his friends, including Whitey, had eaten there maybe fifty
or a hundred times, back when they were taking classes at Cal State. It
was Juano for sure.

Whitey set his things on the counter.

"How's it going, man?"  he said.

"Thank you," said Juano.

Macklin laid out the rest and reached for his money.  The milk made a
lumpy sound when he let go of it.  He gave the carton a shake.

"Forget this," he said.

"It's gone sour."  Then, "Haven't seen you around, old buddy.  Juano,
wasn't it?"

"Sorry.  Sorry," said Juano.  He sounded dazed, like a sleepwalker.

Whitey wouldn't give up.

"Hey, they still make that good me nudo over there?"  He dug in his
jeans for change.

"God, I could eat about a gallon of it right now, I bet."

They were both waiting.  The seconds ticked by.  A radio in the store
was playing an old '60's song.  Light My Fire, Macklin thought.  The
Doors.

"You remember me, don't you?  Jim Macklin."  He held out his hand.

"And my trusted Indian companion, Whitey?  He used to come in there
with me on Tuesdays and Thursdays."

The clerk dragged his feet to the register, then turned back, turned
again.  His eyes were half-closed.

"Sorry," he said.

"Sorry.  Please."

Macklin tossed down the bills, and Whitey counted his coins and slapped
them onto the counter top.

"Thanks," said Whitey, his upper lip curling back.  He hooked a thumb
in the direction of the door.

"Come on.  This place gives me the creeps."

As he left, Macklin caught a whiff of Juano or whoever he was.  The
scent was sickeningly sweet, like a gilded lily.  His hair?  Macklin
felt a cold draft blow through his chest, and shuddered; the air
conditioning, he thought.

At the door, Whitey spun around and glared.

"So what," said Macklin.

"Let's go."

"What time does Tube City here close?"

"Never.  Forget it."  He touched his friend's arm.

"The hell I will," said Whitey.

"I'm coming back when they change fucking shifts.  About six o'clock,
right?  I'm going to be standing right there in the parking lot when he
walks out.  That son of a bitch still owes me twenty bucks."

"Please," muttered the man behind the counter, his eyes f'Lxed on
nothing.

"Please.  Sorry.  Thank you."

The call came around ten.  At first he thought it was a gag; he propped
his eyelids up and peeked around the apartment, half-expecting to find
Whitey still there, curled up asleep among the loaded ashtrays and
pinched beer cans.  But it was no joke.

"Okay, okay, I'll be right there," he grumbled, not yet comprehending,
and hung up the phone.

St.  John's Hospital on 14th.  In the lobby, families milled about,
dressed as if on their way to church, watching the elevators and
waiting obediently for the clock to signal the start of visiting hours.
Business hours, thought Macldin.  He got the room number from the desk
and went on up.

A police officer stood stiffly in the hall, taking notes on an accident
report form.  Mackiin got the story from him and from an irritatingly
healthy-looking doctoruthe official story--and found himself, against
his will, believing in it.  In some of it.

His friend had been in an accident, sometime after dawn.  His friend's
car, the old VAX, had gone over an embankment, not far from the Arroyo
Seco.  His friend had been found near the wreckage, covered with blood
and reeking of alcohol.  His friend had been drunk.

"Let's see here now.  Any living relatives?"  asked the officer.

"All we could get out of him was your name.  He was in a pretty bad
state of shock, they tell me."

"No relatives," said Macklin.

"Maybe back on the reservation.  I don't know.  I'm not even sure where
the--" A long, angry rumble of thunder sounded outside the windows.  A
steely light reflected off the clouds and filtered into the corridor.
It mixed with the fluorescents in the ceiling, rendering the hospital
interior a hard-edged, silvery gray.  The faces of the policeman and
the passing nurses took on a shaded, unnatural cast.

It made no sense.  Whitey couldn't have been that drunk when he left
Macldin's apartment.  Of course he did not actually remember his friend
leaving.  But Whitey was going to the Stop "N Start if he was going
anywhere, not halfway across the county to--where?  Arroyo Seco?  It
was crazy.

"Did you say there was liquor in the car?"

"Afraid so.  We found an empty fifth of Jack Daniels wedged between the
seats."

But Macklin knew he didn't keep anything hard at his place, and neither
did Whitey, he was sure.  Where was he supposed to have gotten it, with
every liquor counter in the state shut down for the night?

And then it hit him.  Whitey never, but never drank sour mash whiskey.
In fact, Whitey never drank anything stronger than beer, anytime,
anyplace.  Because he couldn't.  It was supposed to have
something'tcrdo with his liver, as it did with other Amerinds.  He lust
dldn haqe the right enzymes.

Macklin waited for the uniforms and coats to move away, then ducked
inside.

"Whitey," he said slowly.

For there he was, set up against firm pillows, the upper torso and most
of the hand bandaged.  The arms were bare, except for an ID bracelet
and an odd pattern of' zigzag lines from wrist to shoulder.  The lines
seemed r have been painted by an unsteady hand, using a pale gray dye
of some kind.

"Call me by my name," said Whitey groggily.

"It's White Feather."

He was probably shot full of painkillers.  But at least he was okay.
Wasn't he?

"So what's with the war paint, old buddy?"

"I saw the Death Angel last night."

Macklin faltered.

"I--I hear you're getting out of here real soon," he tried.

"You know, you almost had me worried there.  But I reckon you're just
not ready for the bone orchard yet."

"Did you hear what I said?"

"What?  Uh, yeah.  Yes."  What had they shot him up with?  Macklin
cleared his throat and met his friend's eyes, which were focused beyond
him.

"What was it, a dream?"

"A dream," said Whitey.  The eyes were glazed, burned out.

What happened?  Whitey, he thought.  Whitey.

"You put that war paint on yourself?."  he said gently.

"It's pHisoHex," said Whitey, "mixed with lead pencil.  I put it on,
the nurse washes it off, I put it on again."

"I see."  He didn't, but went on.

"So tell me what happened, partner.  I couldn't get much out of the
doctor."

The mouth smiled humorlessly, the lips cracking back from the teeth.

"It was Juano," said whitey.  He started to laugh bitterly.  He touched
his ribs and stopped himself.

Mackiin nodded, trying to get the drift.

"Did you tell that to the cop out there?"

"Sure.  Cops always believe a drunken Indian.  Didn't you know that?"

"Look.  I'll take care of Juano.  Don't worry."  whitey laughed
suddenly in a high voice that Mackiin had never heard before.

"He-he-he!  what are you going to do, kill him?"

"I don't know," he said, trying to think in spite of the clattering in
the hall.

"They make a living from death, you know," said Whitey.  Just then a
nurse swept into the room, pulling a cart behind

"How did you get in here?"  she demanded.

"I'm just having a conversation with my friend here."

"Well, you'll have to leave.  He's scheduled for surgery this
afternoon."

"Do you know about the Trial of the Dead?"  asked Whitey.

"Shh, now," said the nurse.

"You can talk to your friend as long as you want to, later."

"I want to know," said Whitey, as she prepared a syringe.

"What is it we want to know, now?"  she said, preoccupied.

"What dead?  Where?"

"where?"  repeated whitey.  "why, here, of course.  The dead are here.
Aren't they."  It was a statement.

"Tell me something.  What do you do with them?"

"Now what nonsense ... ?"  The nurse swabbed his arm, clucking at the
ritual lines on the skin.

"I'm asking you a question," said Whitey.

"Look, I'll be outside," said Macldin, "okay?"

"This is for you, too," said Whitey.

"I want you to hear.  Now if you'll just tell us, Miss Nurse.  What do
you do with the people who die in here?"

"Would you pleaseJ" "I can't hear you."  Whitey drew his arm away from
her.  She sighed.

"We take them downstairs.  Really, this is most

But Whitey kept looking at her, nailing her with those expressionless
eyes.

"Oh, the remains are tagged and kept in cold storage," she said,
humoring him.

"Until arrangements can be made with the family for services.  There
now, can we--?"

"But what happens?  Between the time they become 'remains' and the
services?  How long is that?  A couple of days?  Three?"  She lost
patience and plunged the needle into the arm.

"Listen," said Macklin, "I'll be around if you need me.  And hey,
buddy," he added, "we're going to have everything all set up for you
when this is over.  You'll see.  A party, I swear.  I can go and get
them to send up a TV right now, at least."

"Like a bicycle for a fish," said Whitey.

Macklin attempted a laugh.

"You take it easy, now."

And then he heard it again, that high, strange voice.

"He-he-he!  tamunka sni kun."

Mackiin needed suddenly to be out of there.

"jim?"

"What?"

"I was wrong about something last night."

"Yeah?"

"Sure was.  That place wasn't Tube City.  This is.  He-he-he!"  That's
funny, thought Macklin, like an open grave.  He

walked out.  The last thing he saw was the nurse bending over Whitey,
drawing her syringe of blood like an old-fashioned phlebotomist.

All he could find out that afternoon was that the operation wasn't
critical, and that there would be additional X-rays, tests and a period
of "observation," though when pressed for details the hospital remained
predictably vague no matter how he put the questions.

Instead of killing time, he made for the Stop "N Start.

He stood around until the store was more or less empty, then approached
the counter.  The manager, whom Macklin knew slightly, was working the
register himself.

Raphael stonewalled Macklin at the first mention of Juano; his beady
eyes receded into glacial ignorance.  No, the night man was named Dom
or Don; he mumbled so that Macklin couldn't be sure.  No, Don (or Dom)
had been working here for six, seven months; no, no, no.

Until Macklin came up with the magic word: police.

After a few minutes of bobbing and weaving, it started to come out.
Raphe sounded almost scared, yet relieved to be able to talk about it
to someone, even to Macklin.

"They bring me these guys, my friend," whispered Raphe.

"I don't got nothing to do with it, believe me.

"The way it seems to me, it's company policy for all the stores, not
just me.  Sometimes they call and say to lay off my regular boy, you
know, on the graveyard shift.

"Specially when there's been a lot of holdups.  Hell, that's right by
me.  I don't want Dom shot up.  He's my best man!

"See, I put the hours down on Dom's pay so it comes out right with the
taxes, but he has to kick it back.  It don't even go on his check. Then
the district office, they got to pay the outfit that supplies these
guys, only they don't give 'em the regular wage.  I don't know if
they're wetbacks or what.  I hear they only get maybe $1.25 an hour, or
at least the outfit that brings 'em in does, so the office is making
money.  You know how many stores, how many shift that adds up to?

"Myself, I'm damn glad they only use 'em after dark, late, when things
can get hairy for an all-night man.  It's the way they look.  But you
already seen one, this Juano-Whatever.  So you know.  Right?  You know
something else, my friend?  They all look messed up."

Macklin noticed goose bumps forming on Raphe's arms.

"But I don't personally know nothing about it."

They, thought Mackiin, poised outside the Stop "N Start.  Sure enough,
like clockwork They had brought Juano to work at midnight.  Right on
schedule.  With raw, burning eyes he had watched Them do something to
Juano's shirt front and then point him at the door and let go.  What
did They do, wind him up?  But They would be back.  Macldin was sure of
that.  They, whoever They were.  The Paranoid They.

Well, he was sure as hell going to find out who They were now.

He popped another Dexamyl and swallowed dry until it stayed down.

Threats didn't work any better than questions with Juano himself.
Macklin had had to learn that the hard way.  The guy was so sublimely
creepy it was all he could do to swivel back and forth between register
and counter, slithering a hyaline hand over the change machine in the
face of the most outraged customers, like Macklin, giving out with only
the same pathetic, wheezing please, please, sorry, thank you, like a
stretched cassette tape on its last loop.

Which had sent Macklin back to the car with exactly no options, nothing
to do that might jar the nightmare loose except to pound the steering
wheel and curse and dream redder and redder dreams of revenge.  He had
burned rubber between the parking lot and Sweeney Todd's Pub, turning
over two pints of John Courage and a shot of Irish whiskey before he
could think clearly enough to waste another dime calling the hospital,
or even to look at his watch.

At six o'clock They would be back for Juano.  And then.  He would. Find
out.

Two or three hours in the all-night movie theatre downtown, merging
with the shadows on the tattered screen.  The pop corn girl wiping
stains off her uniform.  The ticket girl staring through him, and again
when he left.  Something about her.  He tried to think.  Something
about the people who work night owl shifts anywhere.  He remembered
faces down the years.  It didn't matter what they looked like.  The
nightwalkers, insomniacs, addicts, those without money for a cheap
hotel, they would always come back to the only game in town.  They had
no choice.  It didn't matter that the ticket girl was messed up.  It
didn't matter that Juano was messed up.  Why should it?

A blue van glided into the lot.

The Stop "N Start sign dimmed, paling against the coming morning.  The
van braked.  A man in rumpled clothes climbed out.  There was a second
figure in the front seat.  The driver unlocked the back doors,
silencing the birds that were gathering in the trees.  Then he entered
the store.

Macklin watched.  Juano was led out.  The a.m. relief man stood by,
shaking his head.

Macklin hesitated.  He wanted Juano, but what could he do now?  What
the hell had he been waiting for, exactly?  There was still something
else, something else .... It was like the glimpse of a shape under a
sheet in a busy corridor.  You didn't know what it was at first, but it
was there; you knew what it might be, but you couldn't be sure, not
until you got close and stayed next to it long enough to be able to
read its true form.

The driver helped Juano into the van.  He locked the doors, started the
engine and drove away.

Macklin, his lights out, followed.

He stayed with the van as it snaked a path across the city, nearer and
nearer the foothills.  The sides were unmarked, but he figured it must
operate like one of those minibus porta-maid services he had seen
leaving Malibu and Bel-Air late in the afternoon, or like the loads of
kids trucked in to push magazine subscriptions and phony charities in
the neighborhoods near where he lived.

The sky was still black, beginning to turn to slate close to the
horizon.  Once they passed a garbage collector already on his rounds.
Macklin kept his distance.

They led him finally to a street that dead-ended at a construction
site.  Macklin idled by the corner, then saw the van turn back.

He let them pass, cruised to the end and made a slow turn.  Then he saw
the van returning.

He pretended to park.  He looked up.

They had stopped the van crosswise in front of him, blocking his
passage.

The man in rumpled clothes jumped out and opened Macklin's door.

Macklin started to get out but was pushed back.

"You think you're a big enough man to be trailing people around?"

Macklin tried to penetrate the beam of the flashlight.

"I saw my old friend Juano get into your truck," he began.

"Didn't get a chance to talk to him.  Thought I might as well follow
him home and see what he's been up to."

The other man got out of the front seat of the van.  He was younger,
delicate-boned.  He stood on one side, listening.

"I saw him get in," said Macklin, "back at the Stop "N Start on Pico?"
He groped under the seat.  for the tire iron.

"I was driving by and--"

"Get out."

"What?"

"We saw you.  Out of the car."

He shrugged and swung his legs around, lifting the iron behind him as
he stood.

The younger man motioned with his head and the driver yanked Macklin
forward by the shirt, kicking the door closed on Macklin's arm at the
same time.  He let out a yell as the tire iron clanged to the
pavement.

"Another accident?"  suggested the younger man.

"Too messy, after the one yesterday.  Come on, pal, you're going to get
to see your friend."

Macklin hunched over in pain.  One of them jerked his bad arm up and he
screamed.  Over it all he felt a needle jab him high, in the armpit,
and then he was falling.

The van was bumping along on the freeway when he came out of it.  With
his good hand he pawed his face, trying to clear his vision.  His other
arm didn't hurt, but it wouldn't move when he wanted it to.

He was sprawled on his back.  He felt a wheel humming under him, below
the tire well  And there were the others.  They were sitting up.  One
was Juano.

He was aware of a stink, sickeningly sweet, but with an overlay he
remembered from his high school lab days but couldn't quite place.  It
sliced into his nostrils.

He didn't recognize the others.  Pasty faces.  Heads thrown forward,
arms distended strangely with the wrists jutting out from the coat
sleeves.

"Give me a hand," he said, not really expecting it.

He strained to sit up.  He could make out the backs of two heads in the
cab, on the other side of the grid.

He dropped his voice to a whisper.

"Hey.  Can you guys understand me?"

"Let us rest," someone said weakly.

He rose too quickly and his equilibrium failed.  He had been shot up
with something strong enough to knock him out, but it was probably the
Dexamyl that had kept his mind from leaving his body completely.  The
van yawed, descending an off ramp, and he began to drift.  He heard
voices.  They slipped in and out of his consciousness like fish in
darkness, moving between his ears in blurred levels he could not always
identify.

"There's still room at the cross."  That was the younger, small-boned
man, he was almost sure.

"Oh, I've been interested in Jesus for a long time, but I never could
get a handle on him .... " "Well, beware the wrath to come.  You really
should, you know."

He put his head back and became one with a dark dream.  There was
something he wanted to remember.  He did not want to remember it.  He
turned his mind to doggerel, to the old song.  The time to hesitate is
through, he thought.  No time to wallow in the mire.  Try now we can
only lose And our love become a funeral pyre.  The van bumped to a
halt.  His head bounced off steel.

The door opened.  He watched it.  It seemed to take forever.

Through slitted eyes: a man in a uniform that barely fit, hobbling his
way to the back of the van, supported by the two of them.  A line of
gasoline pumps and a sign that read WE NEVER CLOSE--NEVER UNDERSOLD.
The letters breathed.  Before they let go of him, the one with rumpled
clothes unbuttoned the attendant's shirt and stabbed a hypodermic into
the chest, close to the heart and next to a strap that ran under the
arms.  The needle darted and flashed dully in the wan morning light.

"This one needs a booster," said the driver, or maybe it was the other
one.  Their voices ran together.

"Just make sure you don't give him the same stuff you gave old Juano's
sweetheart there.  I want them to walk in on their own hind legs."

"You think I want to carry 'em?  .... We've done it before, brother.
Yesterday, for instance."  At that Macklin let his eyelids down the
rest of the way, and then he was drifting again.

The wheels drummed under him.

"How much longer?  .... Soon now.  Soon."

These voices weak, like a folding and unfolding of paper.

Brakes grabbed.  The doors opened again.  A thin light played over
Macklin's lids, forcing them up.

He had another moment of clarity; they were becoming more frequent now.
He blinked and felt pain.  This time the van was parked between low
hills.  Two men in Western costumes passed by, one of them leading a
horse.  The driver stopped a group of figures in togas.  He seemed to
be asking for directions.

Behind them, a castle lay in ruins.  Part of a castle.  And over to the
side Macklin identified a church steeple, the corner of a
turn-of-the-century street, a mock-up of a rocket launching pad and an
old brick schoolhouse.  Under the flat sky they receded into
intersections of angles and vistas which teetered almost imperceptibly,
ready to topple.

The driver and the other one set a stretcher on the tailgate.  On the
litter was a long, crumpled shape, sheeted and encased in a plastic
bag.  They sloughed it inside and started to secure the doors.

"You got the pacemaker back, I hope."

"Stunt director said it's in the body bag."

"It better be.  Or it's our ass in a sling.  Your ass.  How'd he get so
racked up, anyway?  .... Ran him over a cliff in a sports car.  Or no,
maybe this one was the head-on they staged

for, you know, that new cop series.  That's what they want now,
realism.  Good thing he's a cremation--ain't no way Kelly or Dee's
gonna get this one pretty again by tomorrow."

"That's why, man.  That's why they picked him.  Ashes don't need
makeup."

The van started up.

"Going home," someone said weakly.

"Yes .. ."

Macklin was awake now.  Crouching by the bag, he scanned the faces,
Juano's and the others'.  The eyes were staring, fixed on a point as
untouchable as the thinnest of plasma membranes, and quite
unreadable.

He crawled over next to the one from the self-service gas station.  The
shirt hung open like folds of skin.  He saw the silver box strapped to
the flabby chest, directly over the heart.  Pacemaker?  he thought
wildly.

He knelt and put his ear to the box.

He heard a humming, like an electric wristwatch.

What for?  To keep the blood pumping just enough so the tissues don't
rigor mortis and decay?  For God's sake, for how much longer?

He remembered Whitey and the nurse.

"What happens?  Between the time they become 'remains' and the
services?  How long is that?  A couple of days?  Three?"

A wave of nausea broke inside him.  When he gazed at them again the
faces were wavering, because his eyes were filled with tears.

"Where are we?"  he asked.

"I wish you could be here," said the gas station attendant.

"And where is that?"

"We have all been here before," said another voice.

"Going home," said another.

Yes, he thought, understanding.  Soon you will have your rest; soon you
will no longer be objects, commodities.  You will be honored and
grieved for and your personhood given back, and then you will at last
rest in peace.  It is not for nothing that you have labored so long and
so patiently.  You will see, all of you.  Soon.

He wanted to tell them, but he couldn't.  He hoped they already knew.

The van lurched and slowed.  The hand brake ratcheted.  He lay down and
closed his eyes.  He heard the door creak back.

"Let's go."

The driver began to herd the bodies out.  There was the sound of heavy,
dragging feet, and from outside the smell of fresh-cut grass and
roses.

"What about this one?"  said the driver, kicking Macldin's shoe.

"Oh, he'll do his 48-hours' service, don't worry.  It's called
utilizing your resources."

"Tell me about it.  When do we get the Indian?"

"Soon as St.  John's certificates him.  He's overdue.  The crash was
sloppy."

"This one won't be.  But first Dee'll want him to talk, what he knows
and who he told.  Two doggers in two days is too much.  Then we'll
probably run him back to his car and do it.  And phone it in, so St.
John's gets him.  Even if it's DOA.  Clean as hammered shit.  Grab the
other end."

He felt the body bag sliding against his leg.  Grunting, they hauled it
out and hefted it toward--where?

He opened his eyes.  He hesitated only a second, to take a deep
breath.

Then he was out of the van and running.

Gravel kicked up under his feet.  He heard curses and metal slamming.
He just kept his head down and his legs pumping.  Once he twisted
around and saw a man scurrying after him.  The driver paused by the
mortuary building and shouted.  But Macklin kept moving.

He stayed on the path as long as he dared.  It led him past mossy trees
and bird-stained statues.  Then he jumped and cut across a carpet of
matted leaves and into a glade.  He passed a gate that spelled DRY LAWN
CEMETERY in old iron, kept running until he spotted a break in the
fence where it sloped by the edge of the grounds.  He tore through
huge, dusty ivy and skidded down, down.  And then he was on a
sidewalk.

Cars rewed at a wide intersection, impatient to get to work.  He heard
coughing and footsteps, but it was only a bus stop at the middle of the
block.  The air brakes of a commuter special hissed and squealed.  A
clutch of grim people rose from the bench and filed aboard like
sleepwalkers.

He ran for it, but the doors flapped shut and the bus roared on.

More people at the corner, stepping blindly between each other.  He
hurried and merged with them.

Dry cleaners, laundromat, hamburger stand, parking lot, gas station,
all closed.  But there was a telephone at the gas station.

He ran against the light.  He sealed the booth behind him and nearly
collapsed against the glass.

He rattled money into the phone, dialed Operator and called for the
police.

The air was close in the booth.  He smelled hair tonic.  Sweat swelled
out of his pores and glazed his skin.  Somewhere a radio was playing.

A sergeant punched onto the line.  Macklin yelled for them to come and
get him.  Where was he?  He looked around frantically, but there were
no street signs.  Only a newspaper rack chained to a post.  NONE OF THE
DEAD HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED, read the headline.

His throat tight ned his voice racing.

"None of the dead has been identified," he said, practically
babbling.

Silence.

So he went ahead, pouring it out about a van and a hospital and a man
in rumpled clothes who shot guys up with some kind of super-adrenalin
and electric pacemakers and night clerks and crash tests.  He struggled
to get it all out before it was too late.  A part of him heard what he
was saying and wondered if he had lost his mind.

"Who will bury them?"  he cried.

"What kind of monsters--" The line clicked off.

He hung onto the phone.  His eyes were swimming with sweat.  He was
aware of his heart and counted the beats, while the moisture from his
breath condensed on the glass.

He dropped another coin into the box.

"Good morning, St.  John's, may I help you?"

He couldn't remember the room number.  He described the man, the
accident, the date.  Sixth floor, yes, that was right.  He kept talking
until she got it.

There was a pause.  Hold.  He waited.

"Sir?"

He didn't say anything.  It was as if he had no words left.

"I'm terribly sorry..."

He felt the blood drain from him.  His fingers were cold and numb.

"... But I'm afraid the surgery wasn't successful.  The party did not
recover.  If you wish I'll connect you with--" "The party's name was
White Feather," he said mechanically.  The receiver fell and dangled,
swinging like the pendulum of a clock.

He braced his legs against the sides of the booth.  After what seemed
like a very long time he found himself reaching reflexly for his
cigarettes.  He took one from the crushed pack, straightened it and
hung it on his lips.

On the other side of the frosted glass, featureless shapes lumbered by
on the boulevard.  He watched them for a while.

He picked up a book of matches from the floor, lit two together and
held them close to the glass.  The flame burned a clear spot through
the moisture.

Try to set the night on fire, he thought stupidly, repeating the words
until they and any others he could think of lost meaning.

The fire started to burn his fingers.  He hardly felt it.  He ignited
the matchbook cover, too, turning it over and over.  He wondered if
there was anything else that would burn, anything and everything.  He
squeezed his eyelids together.  When he opened them, he was looking
down at his own clothing.

He peered out through the clear spot in the glass.

Outside, the outline fuzzy and distorted but quite unmistakable, was a
blue van.  It was waiting at the curb.

THE NIGHTHAWK

The little girl stood gazing north, toward the rich houses and the pier
restaurant that was still faintly outlined through the mist.  The high
windows captured the white light of the sky in small squares, like a
row if mirrors for the gulls; the pilings and struts underneath could
have been stiff black legs risen from the sea and frozen in the
November wind, never to walk again.

Is Maria coming?  she wondered.

She had hurried to the corral first thing, of course, but Pebbles was
gone.  Maria must have come home early and taken him out, down past the
big rocks to the Sea Manor, maybe, or up under the pier to the tide
pools by the point at the edge of the Colony.  She did not know what
time Maria's school let out, had never asked, but still had always
managed to be the first one home; she would be laying out the bridles
or patching a break in the fence with driftwood from under the
burned-out house by the time Maria came running--always, it seemed.
Yes, always.  Every time.

She began to wander back along the wet sand, found a stick and paused
to block out a word in the sand--COPPER--turning round over each letter
and humming to herself to keep

the chill away.  But the fog came settling in now, a thick, tule fog it
looked like, and she saw her breath making more fog in front of her
face and so hastened the rest of the way with her head down, hearing
only the cold breaking of the waves out on the dark, musseled rocks.

She stayed with Copper for as long as she could, leaving extra feed for
Pebbles, too, so that Maria would not have to bother when she brought
him back.  Copper seemed restless, bobbing and pawing the sand, eager
to be taken out.  She tried to explain that it was too late now for a
real ride and instead walked her out and around the cliff side and
back, over the leach line creek that trickled from the cottages to the
ocean. The tiny rivulet with its sculptured and terraced bed--she and
Maria, trotting the ponies carefully from one crumbling tier to the
other, liked to imagine that it was the Grand Canyon.  But the truth
was that she had no heart for riding, not now.  Not with the dark
coming on so soon and the fog all around.  Not alone.

She was cold and growing colder as she climbed the wooden stairway and
let herself in through the side door, the one to the storage room, and
then slipped into the house as quietly as she could.  She started to
close the door on the fog, but decided to leave it ajar for
Grandfather, who would probably be coming in soon.

She heard the television voices from the living room, the same ones she
always heard when she went into the house after school.  They laughed a
lot, though there was an edge to the voices whenever they were
interrupted by the music or the buzzer, which was almost all the time,
it seemed.  They were probably pretty nervous, too, about being kept on
the program for so long, day after day, week after week; sometimes, of
course, one of the voices would say the right things and win enough
money to buy its freedom, and then they would have to let it go home
and the next afternoon there would be another voice, a new one, to take
its place.  They always sounded excited and happy when they said a
right answer, and then the audience would not laugh and the buzzer
would not buzz.

She padded over the jute-covered floor and slipped around the doorway
into the kitchen.  She stopped with her hand on the refrigerator door.
She looked back at the rattan chair and couch, the sandbag ashtrays,
the clock and the flying metal geese on the wall, the shiny black
panther on the table, the lamp shaped like a Hawaiian dancer, the ivy
planter, the kissing Dutch girl and boy, the picture of the crying
clown and the ones of the father and mother in the stand-up frames. She
turned away.  She opened the refrigerator and poured a glass of
Kool-Aid.

"Is that you, Darcy?"

"Yees," she called sweetly, Grandma, but would not say it.

"Have you seen Maria yet?"  She heard the grandmother climbing out of
her chair, not waiting for an answer.

"I must talk with you, dear.  This morning we received a most
disturbing telephone call .... " The grandmother was coming, even
though the TV was still on.  It must be something bad, she thought.

On the other side of the kitchen window the fog was descending heavily,
almost like rain.  In fact she heard a tapping begin on the low
roof--but no, that would be Grandfather, hammering with his short
strokes, scraping his slippers on the rough tar paper.  Just a minute,
I have to talk to Grandfather.  Would that be good enough?  She turned
from the window to watch the doorway for the black walking shoes, the
hem of the flowered dress.  Another kind of movement caught her eye,
down low by the floor, but she knew that would only be the fog.

There was the hammering on the roof, the pl inking of the wind chimes
by the geraniums out on the rafting of the sun deck, the fog deepening
until it, too, could almost be heard settling over the house.  There
was the slow, unsteady pursuit of the grandmother, nearly upon her
now.

And something else, something else.

A dull, familiar thumping.

She looked quickly and saw, through the window, a moving shape
approaching along the beach.  She knew at once that it was Pebbles. The
pony hesitated, breathing steam, and the vapor thinned around him
momentarily so that his markings showed

clear and unmistakable, like a cluster of moonstones through the white
water of a pool at low tide, far out by the broken sea wall.

"Got to go," she yelled, Grandma.

"Maria's got Copper.  Ooh, that girl--!"

She darted out and, by the time the refrigerator door had swung shut
and before the grandmother could object, had dropped from the deck and
was sprinting toward Maria and the pony.  It wasn't true, of course; of
course not.  Maria was riding Pebbles.  But it had worked.

"Hey," she called.  Then, again, when there was no answer, "He-ey!"

Maria, small and dark atop her pony, reined and turned Pebbles, his
hooves slapping the slick, packed sand.  She had kept near the water,
had not even come close to Darcy's house; but she had had to pass by on
the way back, and now she held her body tense and distant, almost as
though afraid she might meet something there on the beach--herself,
say--with which she knew she would not be able to cope.

"Hey, yourself," she said, because she had to say something.  But her
face did not change.

"Did you stay home today?"  tried Darcy.  She waited and, trying to
make it look like she was not, had not been waiting, leaned forward and
watched her feet as they dug down into the sand.  She stepped back, and
the imprints of her toes began to fll up with water.

"Well, were you sick or something?"

"I got to go now," answered Maria.

She was like that.  Once, when they were playing and Darcy had said
something wrong--it must have been something she had said because
nothing had happened, they had only been sitting with their knees up,
molding little houses in the sand with a paper cup--Maria had stopped
and stared over the water with that smooth, flat face of hers, as if
hearing what no one else on the beach or in the world could hear.  And
then she had said that, the same thing, Igot to go now, and she had
jumped up, brushed off her hands and started running--and not even
toward her own house, so that Darcy knew Maria hadn't been called home,
even if she couldn't hear it herself.  Maria was like that.

The pony started walking.

"You better not ride him anymore today, Maria," yelled Darcy.

"Ma-ria, he'll get all sweaty and sick for sure, y u 11 see.

O "

Maria kept riding.

"Well," said Darcy, staring after, "I waited."

At the corral Maria dismounted but did not raise her eyes when her
friend finally caught up.

"What do you care about Pebbles," Maria said to her.  Only then did
Darcy notice the scratches, fresh and deep, on Pebbles' right flank.
Three parallel lines sliced into flesh that was still pink and
glistening.

Darcy sucked in her breath.

"Maria!"  She forgot everything else.

"Who did that?"

Maria walked away.  She trailed her fingers over the makeshift fence,
the tarp that covered the hay, and went to sit in the ruins, in the
shadows, under the starfish that someone had nailed cruci-fLxion-style
to the supports of the big house years ago, before it burned; now the
hard, point ille arms, singed black at the tips, still clutched tight
to the flaking, splintery wood.  She put her elbows on her knees and
her face in her arms and started to cry.

Copper had sidled over to Pebbles, but the other pony shied away,
protecting his flank.  Copper snorted and tried to nuzzle.  Darcy
reached for a blanket to throw over Pebbles, but hesitated because of
the wound.

She joined her friend under the house.

After a time Darcy said, "I'll tell Grandfather.  He'll get the vet to
come over.  You'll see."

"No."

Maria was crying deep down inside herself, from a place so protected
that there were no sounds and nothing to show, nothing but the tears.

"Well, I'll go get some Zephiran right now from my house.

And we'll fix it ourselves.  I will, if you want me to, Maria."

"No!"

"Maria," she said patiently, "what happened?"

Maria's narrow lips barely moved.

"It came.  In the night, just like you said."

"What did?"

"You know what.  The--the--" "Oh no."  Darcy felt a sinking inside,
like an elevator going down too fast; she hadn't felt it for a long,
long time.  The last had been when she was very small, about the time
that the mother and father went away.  She couldn't remember the
feeling very clearly; in fact, she couldn't even be sure what it was
about; surely, she knew, it was about something she did not and could
not understand.

"Don't you be silly.  It wasn't really real."  That was right.  It
wasn't, it wasn't.

"Maria, that was only a story.  Ma--a."

"That was what my Daddy said," the dark girl went on.

"But he said you were still evil to make me scared of it."  She was
beginning to rush the words, almost as though afraid she might hear
something and have to go away before she could finish.

"You were the one, the one who told me about him, about how he comes at
night and sees in your window and if you were bad, then--you know.  You
know what he does, the Nighthawk."

The Nighthawk.  Of course she remembered the story.  It had always been
just that, a story to scare children into being good, the kind of story
thought up by grandmothers to stop too much running in the house and
laughing and playing games in bed.  But it was also a story you never
forgot, and eventually it became a special late kind of story for
telling on the beach, huddled close to a campfire, under the stars,
seeing who could scare the other the worse, all shivery in sleeping
bags, hidden from the unknowable mysteries of a sudden falling star or
the sound of wings brushing the dark edge of the moon.

She didn't know what to say.

The two of them sat that way for a while.

"Well, I'll help you take care of him," she offered at last.

"You know that."

"It doesn't matter."

"He'll be good as new.  You'll see."

"Maybe.  But not because of you."

Darcy looked at her friend as though seeing her for the fLrSt.  time.

Maria let out a long sigh that sounded like all the breaths she had
ever taken going out at once.

"My Daddy's getting a better place.  Up in the canyon, by the real
stables.  He said Pebbles can't stay here till we find out what hurt
him.  And he says I can't play with you anymore."

"Why?"

"Because."

"But why?"

"Because you're the one who scared me of those stories."  Her brown
eyes were unreadable.

"You can't tell me about the Nighthawk, Darcy," she said.

"Not anymore, not ever again."

Darcy was stunned.

"But I didn't make it happen," she said, her own eyes beginning to
sting.

"I don't even know what happened to Pebbles.  Maybe he--well--" But she
was confused, unable to think.  She remembered the story from the mouth
moving above her in the darkness as she huddled close to her big
brother, a long, long time ago, it must have been.

"Th-there isn't any real Nighthawk, don't you get it?  Come on, I
thought you were big!  You know it, don't you?  Don't you?"

"Don't you?"  said Maria mockingly.

"I don't want to have those dreams, like last night.  Darcy, I don't
want to!"

Darcy's mouth was open and stayed open as she heard a new sound, and it
was not the blood pulsing in her ears and it was not the waves smashing
out by the sea wall and it was not her own heartbeat.  She looked over
and saw Maria hunch down quickly, struggle to cover her eyes, then jerk
herself up--almost wildly, Darcy thought later--as the sound became
loud, louder.  Darcy moved her lips, trying to be heard, trying to say
that it was only one of those big Army helicopters somewhere above the
fog, cruising low over the coastline--they were so much louder than the
Sheriff's 'copter, their huge blades beating the air like some kind of
monster--but Maria was already running.  Just like that.  In a few
seconds she had disappeared completely in the fog.

Grandfather was sorting his tools when Darcy came up.  She moved
slowly, as though underwater, absently poking at a pile of ten-penny
nails, at the chisel, at the claw of the hammer.  She had been trying
to think of where to begin, but it was no use.

"Well, how goes it today, sweetheart?"  he said, when she made no move
to go inside.

do and clearly, s und sore were colin ther alw.the ] rum it w spec a ca
wor mys the,

"Yo time had

She knew he would wait to hear her story for today, wh; ever it might
be, before getting around to the next part: the sore thing that might
be wrapped clean and special in a handkerchi in his jacket or lying
inside on the kitchen table or, if it we another article about horses
he had clipped from a ma gazing folded and waiting in his shirt pocket.
Then and only then wou he get on to the serious part.  She looked up at
him and knew tlq she loved him.

"Oh--" She wanted to tell.  Maybe if she started with teacher story or
a recess story; but she couldn't feel it.

"Oh, sar old stuff, I guess," she said.

He glanced at her, pausing perhaps a beat too long, and sai "The
pictures came, the ones we sent away for in the Sund Times.  Those
prints of the white stallions."  He fixed her with 1 good eye.

"Remember?"

She felt a smile beginning in spite of herself.  She reached o to help
him.

"And I believe your grandmother would like a word wi you, Darcy, before
you go downstairs."

"I know," she said quickly.

He latched his toolbox, wiped his hands on a rag.  Reluctantly she
started inside.

"See you at dinner," he said.

"Afterwards, we can measu them for frames and figure where they should
go.  All right?"  She turned back.

"Grandpa?"

"Yes?"  He waited.

"What--what does it mean when somebody says you: 'evil'?"

He laughed easily.

"Well, Darcy," he said, "I'd have to say it just means tt somebody
doesn't really know you."

She felt her way downstairs.  Now do as you're told.  S made sure to
land each foot squarely in the middle of each ste I'm sure her father
knows what's best, leaving it open to the like that.  That way no part
of her would touch the ed em ember--but of course you couldn't-She was
aware of a res sure at her heels.  Now why would you ask a thing like
that, ild?  Why can't you leave well enough-She knew what she would see
were she to look back.  You'd better watch yourself, >ung lady.  You're
not too old to forget the-She would see-- I idn 't mean anything.  I
didn't mean anything!  Your Mama and addy, rest their souls-She would
see the fog.  Say it.  Curlingose.  Say it.  About her ankles.  Say it.
Say "Help me."  She started.

Joel stood there in the semidarkness, one hand extended.  e other hand
was on the knob to the door next to hers, the or to his room.  When her
eyes adjusted, she saw that he held me thing out to her in his stubby
fingers.

Without thinking, she took it.  A pair of ringed keys, new and any .
She studied them uncertainly.

Joel picked at a splinter along the doorjamb.  As she watched, trcy
made out the bright brass gleam of a new lock.

"It's a dead-bolt," he said, as if that would explain every-ing.

"Can't be forced, not unless you break the frame.  The nges are on the
right side, too."

"But--" "I want you to keep the keys in a safe place.  Really safe. Got
"When she nodded, he added with deceptive casualness, "You nt to come
in?  You hardly ever do anymore, you know."

He opened the door and led her inside, looking like someone no had
something terribly valuable to give away but could hard-remember where
he had hidden it.

She hadn't seen the inside of her brother's room in weeks, .ybe months.
Since before she had met Maria.  Usually they ed (more correctly, she
listened while he talked) in her room, way, though, or else she managed
to avoid him altogether to on her bed, playing her records or writing
in her diary or nking about the horses, the ones in the movie
Grandfather had fen her to see, the wild ones leaping through water and
fire on eashore somewhere.  It was very much like a dream.

While her own room seemed to be in a perpetual state of

144 146 DENNIS ETCHISON THE NIGHTHAWK 147

She ever it n thing th in his j: another folded he get o she love 'to
teacher old stuf He "The p Times.  good eh Sh to help "A: you, D He Rel
them f She "O 'y

'evil'?"

He somebc

Sh made s I'm sur like th redecoration, Joel's remained the same
jail-like no-color; she had posters and cutouts to cover her walls,
Joel had s, and evolution charts and black felt-tip drawings she co
understand, marked up and shaded so dark that she couldI how he was
able to make any sense of them.  Still, it all rem her of something, as
it always did: she found herself th again about a house with unlocked
doors and huge, lovin$ bobbing in and out of the darkness over her. And
fire, and' and something else, something else.

The main thing she noticed" of course, was the statue shelf over the
headboard of Joel s unmade bed.  And, as bef fascinated and frightened
her at the same time.

It was a glazed plaster sculpture a couple of feet hi8 paint brushed on
real fast and sloppy, probably so that it co sold cheap in the kind of
stores that have pillows and as with words and pictures of buildings
printed on them.  Sore of snake, a cobra, she thought, and it was
coiled around wh supposed to be a human skull.  Maybe it had come out
of th{ out of one of the eyes; she wasn't sure.  But crawling out other
eye was an animal that looked like a mouse.  It was ah attack the
snake, to try to bite it on the neck, or maybe to it, to hold its
attention so that it would do no harm; she know which.  The snake was
poised, squinting down, dripping.  There was no way of telling which
one would w had seen another like it once, in the window of a shop
Palisades where they sold old-looking book-s and those stic Fourth of
July punks that smell sweet when you light the wondered where Joel had
gotten it and why and how n cost, had even asked him one time, but he
had only looked funny and changed the subject.

She sat on the edge of the bed.

"Joel," she began, knowing he would jump in about hi: and keys,
whatever they were for, if she did not.  Ther, things on her mind now,
questions that were as yet on] formed but which needed answers before
she would be listen and really hear him.

"Joel," she said again, trying to way to ease into it.

"Was--was our house always this the way it is now?  Or did Grandpa
build it over when we little?"  he glanced around the room, pretending
interest in the ed walls and cramped ceiling.

"Course it was," he said, casually condescending.

"You're ng about the other place."

What other place is that, Joel?"

The first house, the one over by your corral.  The place we lived with
Mother and--" e stopped himself, shot one of his sudden, funny looks at
;ff she had caught him off-guard.  le had an odd feeling then, as if
they had begun to talk something they were not supposed to, and her not
even ng.  The feeling attracted her and scared her at the same

(ou don't go poking around in there, do you?"  he asked in rolled
voice.

"Not all the way in there, where the house 9 be?"  knyone can go, Joel.
It's right there on the beach.  What's it."

,o,u've been in there, underneath there?  You've been there we always
been there before.  So what?"  straightened, his back to her.

"You shouldn't, you know.  safe."

7hat do you mean?  Of course it's--" 'here was an explosion once, you
know," he said, cutting with more information than he had planned to
give.

"The es are probably still there.  Anyway, I don't want you bering a
thing like that.  And," he added, as if to cover up, ught to stay home
more."

e felt a laugh coming on, one of those wild, hip, h ones that n't want
to stop.  She threw herself backwards own the bed, s over her head. His
bed was so bouncy, mounded with all .ts the grandmother had made for
him.  He, not safe," she sang.

"Oh Joel, you're just on another

one of your bummers.  I know why you have such bad dreams.  You pile on
so many blankets, your body heats up at night like a compost heap!"

"Don't you taunt me, Darcy.  Don't, or I'll--" There, she had caught
him again.  Or you'll what?  Send the Nighthawk?

He turned and stared at her for too long a time, until she stopped
laughing and they both grew uneasy.  Then he began moving about the
room, picking at things, his compass and protractor, the lens cover to
his telescope, putting them down again, pacing.  It was an unnatural
pause; Joel never ran out of crazy things to talk to her about, which
was why she always had to be the one to leave.

He faced her again.

"I hear Grandma's pretty mad at you, Darcy."  This time he was doing
the taunting.  The tension was gone from his face now, hidden again
just below the surface like one of those sharp, crusted rocks when the
tide changes.

"What's it about this time?"

"Oh, who knows?"  It was almost true; the grandmother was pretty nearly
always mad at her about something.

"I don't know, why is a mouse when it screams?  That probably makes
about as much sense."  Then, when he didn't laugh, "It was about the
ponies, I guess."

"What about the ponies?"

"What do you care?"

"I had a dream about them," he said tightly.

Another one of his dreams.  She sighed.  She didn't want to hear about
it so she went ahead and told about Pebbles.  But not the part about
Maria.  She was not ready to talk about that part yet, least of all to
him.

But then she stopped and said, "It was about the corral, your dream,
wasn't it?  That was where you went.  In your dream.  Wasn't it."

Sometimes, she did not know why, Joel tried to make himself look like a
stone boy; this was one of those times.

"Darcy, I tried to warn you.  All of you."  And, surprisingly, tears of
rage came to his eyes.

"I told him, I told her to tell him, but she must've thought she could
take care of--" A new thought struck her, cold and fully shaped as a
steel' bit and it stayed and would not let go.  Perhaps it had been
there all along and only now was she able to feel it fully, its chill,
and begin to know what it was.

She said, "What was it that hurt Pebbles?"

There was a ringing silence.

"You know, don't you, Joel.  I think you know."

She saw him start to shake.  She went on, oddly detached, as if she
were watching what was happening through the wrong end of his
telescope.

"You know what else I think?  I--I think that maybe Mama and Daddy got
hurt the same way, a long time ago.  I already know they didn't just
'go away," like everybody says."

She waited.

He did not try to answer.  He lost his balance and hunkered close to
the floor, by the edge of the bed.  His hands clawed into the quilt and
pulled it down with him.

Now she did begin to feel afraid.  She felt a nervous jolt enter her
body, sort of like a charge of static electricity from the air, but she
strained to keep breathing, to draw energy from the feeling and not be
smothered by it.  She had to know.

"Say something!"  she said to him.

She saw his face press into the pillow, heard his shallow, rasping
sobs.  She felt a terrible closeness in her own chest as her breath
caught and took hold again.  She thought of touching him but could not.
Because she never had.  Not like that.

"What about--" she began, and this was the hardest part, but it had to
be said, "--what about the fire?  Tell me about the fire, Joel.  Tell
me about Mother and Father."

I'll help you, I will, she thought, and never, ever ask again.  If only
you'll tell me.  And then an answer came, slowly at first and then like
something icy melting far away and rushing down to meet the sea.  And
whether it was his voice or her own she did not know just then, but
could only focus on the pictures that appeared in her mind.  And the
pictures showed the big old house bursting upward into the sky and the
boards falling back down again into a new and meaningless configuration
on the sand, and she thought of charred pick-up-sticks.  And before
that: within the

house a woman, breathing on her knees by the range, the oven open, the
burners flickering and the image rising in a watery, gaseous mirage,
and she thought Mama.  And before that: a man dying in a hospital bed,
his body laced with fresh scars, pink and glistening, and Mama weeping
into her closed fists, her hair tumbling forward like brackwater and a
little girl watching, and she thought Daddy.  And before that: Daddy's
face outside the window the night he brought Copper for her, smiling
secretly and then the smile fading, shocked, as something, something
moved against him beyond the glass, and she turned, turned for her
brother who was not there, and she thought the Nighthawk.  And before
that: another face, dream-spinning over them both in the dark when Mama
and Daddy were not home, an old face that went on storytelling long
after she had fallen asleep, a face she had not let into her room since
she had been old enough to lock it out, and again she thought the
Nighthawk.

She stayed her hand in the air, near his head.  Her voice was almost
kind; her touch would have been almost cruel.

Outside, the tide was shifting.  A single wave, the first of many,
rolled and boomed against the retaining wall beneath the house.  The
bed throbbed once under her, and a pane of dirty glass in the one tiny
window shook and rattled.  His head jerked up.

"No!"

"$hh," she said, "she'll hear you."

But of course it didn't matter.  The grandmother wouldn't mind.  She
didn't mind anything Joel did, but only coddled him more.  She waited
on him, even in the middle of the night sometimes, with soothing cups
of soup and those gray-and-red pills that were supposed to be hidden in
the back of the top shelf of the medicine cabinet.  And if Grandfather
heard or cared, he wouldn't do anything about it, either.  He left the
boy alone, no matter what, to dream his dreams and become what he
would.  Of course it was silly to think that Grandfather would
be--what?  afraid of him?  Of course it was.  He was only a boy.  He
was only her brother Joel.

She followed his gaze to the window.  The water was rolling in long,
slow curls, tipped at the ebb with a pearly-white phosphorescence.  But
Joel wasn't seeing that.

For the first time she noticed the window sill.

It was scored with dozens, hundreds of vertical cuts and scratches; the
marks shifted and deepened as she watched, as Joel's shadow undulated
over the scarred wood.  Then she glanced back and saw the burning
aureole of the high-intensity lamp behind him, across the room, the one
the last tutor, who had stayed the longest, had left on his final
visit.

Without warning, Joel lurched up.  He stood a moment, turned around,
around again, in the manner of an animal who has awakened to find
himself trapped in a room with the door shut and the air being sucked
from his lungs.  Whatever he was looking for he did not see, or even,
probably, know how to name it, because just then he did a strange
thing, really: he shrank down until he was sitting on the floor, right
where he had been standing, without having moved his feet at all.  She
had seen something like that only once before.  It had been the day the
grandmother came home from what Darcy knew had been the funeral for the
father and mother; it was as if she now had permission to remember. The
grandmother had come in cradling two armloads of groceries.  She had
stood in the middle of the kitchen, scanning the walls like that, not
seeing any of it, least of all the little girl there in the doorway,
because Darcy was not what she was looko ing for, any more than the
walls or ceiling or the table and chairs.  And she had moved from side
to side, turning from the waist, and then the expression had come over
her face and she had sunk down onto the linoleum, the bags split and
the contents rolling, forgotten, a collapsed doll with its strings cut.
 She had probably not even known that Darcy was there.

"Use the key," he said to her, "now."

"Why?"

"Do it, Darcy."

She stepped around him carefully and backed to the door.  She saw the
way the light played over the sculpture above the bed.  The way its
eyes shone, forever straining but unable to see the most important
thing of all.  The way the shadow had

grown behind the hood, so that it had come to be larger, darker, more
like the monster from a bedtime story than she had ever noticed.  She
found herself staring into the eyes until she seemed to recognize
something; yes, she herself remembered the way it felt, the need to
lash out and hurt.  What would have happened to her those times if she
had not had Grandfather there to help?  And there was something else,
too, about a snake she had seen in a book, one that had gotten so mad
or afraid that it had actually tried to swallow its own tail .... The
eyes held her longer than she liked.  The sharp eyes that missed
nothing, not the other creatures that had come close enough to
threaten, not the head that had nurtured it but which was now too old
and empty to protect it, not anything but itself, what it had become,
the very thing it feared most, the creature of its dreams, the most
difficult thing of all to know when the dreams it is given are all
nightmares.

She was standing between the door and the lamp.  The shadow of Joel's
head and body moved and distorted.  She drew back involuntarily and,
behind her back, her hand brushed the cold doorknob.

She shuddered.

She imagined the fog creeping down the steps from outside, hissing over
the floor and pooling by the edges.  She pushed the door shut and moved
away.

As she moved, her own shadow merged with the other, rendering it
somehow less frightening.  But the eyes on the headboard shimmered and
burned out of the blackness, and she wanted to say, Does it see,
Joel?

He gestured at her imploringly.

She wished she could say I got to go now, the way Maria would have said
it, and simply run away as fast as she could.  But there was the dark
outside, and the fog that followed her down the stairs, waiting to
slither under doors and between cracks.  There was the grandmother, she
knew, waiting at the top of the stairs with her words, her stories that
would not soothe but only bring more nightmares.  She wondered whether
the grandmother knew that; probably not, she realized, and that was the
most frightening thought of all.

She went to him.

"What do you want me to do, Joel?"

Suddenly she felt her wrist taken in a death grip.

"No, Joel, not me!"  she cried, wrenching free.  She lunged for the
door.

"I'm doing it, see, I'm..."

She reached up to lock the door, thinking, Why did he give me both
keys?  But it was a good idea to lock it now, yes, she would-She stared
at the door.

Where was the lock?  The mechanism was on the outside, as were the
hinges.  So the keys could not be used to keep anything out.

They could only be used to lock something in.

Very slowly she came back to him, his unblinking eyes following her.

"What do you see, Joel?"  she said softly.

There was the room.  The window.  The luminous waves, aglow now with
the pale, dancing green of St.  Elmo's fire rippling below the surface.
The sky ablaze with a diffused sheen of moonlight above the fog.  The
glass chill and brittle now, and if she placed her fingers on it they
would leave behind five circles imprinted in mist, the record of a
touch that would remain to return each time someone sat close and
breathed at the night.

Then she was listening to the slapping of the surf, the trembling in
the close room, the sound of a sob and the high, thin weeping of the
wind, that might have been the keening of an animal left too long
alone.

"Do you hear that, Joel?  Is that Copper?"

And she saw the room and that it was only her brother's, and she heard
the crying and knew that it came from her own lips, and she reached out
her hand to him and felt his moist hair, the bristles at the back of
the neck, the fuzz at his temple and the quivering in his cheek and the
wetness running to and from his tender mouth and the shaking of his
body.

Closing her eyes, she said, "How do you feel?"

He would have told her to go away, just to go away and lock the door
and not open it until the morning.  But she placed herself between him
and the window and said:

"I'm going to stay, Joel.  I want to.  I'll watch and listen from here
and if anyone--if Copper--needs me, I'll know it.  Do you
understand?"

"No," he said pitifully, after some time had passed.

She kept her eyes shut tight against the fog and the world as she said,
"It's all right.  I'm only waiting, Joel, for you to go to sleep."

Because, she thought, somebody has to.

And that was the way their first real night together began.

IT WILL BE HERE SOON

1/ Something Strange in Santa Mara

It was a time of leisure and deadly boredom, of investigation and in
conclusion of heat waves and chills under an effluvial sky; of cancer
research and chemical juggernauts, of Tac Squads and the Basic Car
Plan, of God freaks and camper cities; of no longer suppressed unrest. 
Assassination, mass murder, ascension to office; the bomb in the
backyard and the cop in the woodpile.

Still, had Martin been able to love anyone, he would have loved his
father.

"Santa Mara's not what it used to be," Martin's father was saying.

The older man rubbed his hands and glanced around the garage, almost as
though expecting to see himself walk in at any moment.  Boxes of many
sizes were barricaded on the cement floor, some with their flaps tied
upright with twine in the style of old-time grocery carry-outs.  Poking
out of the boxes was an uncatalogable array of picture tubes (dusty),
plastic knobs, tuners, dials, tube testers, transformers, radios,
cabinet legs, schematics, speaker cones (broken), screws, capacitors,
battery chargers,

resistors, screwdrivers, manuals, transistors, wire strippers, solder
rolls (sagging), sockets, relays, short wave sets, circuit breakers,
wrenches, epoxy, white box tape, panels, power cords (frayed), pliers,
coils, flywheels, oscilloscopes, wire cutters, washers, templates, heat
sinks, mica sheets (cracked), motors, switches, circuit boards, nuts,
magnets, friction tape, fuses, vacuum tubes--a detritus of years
accumulated privately, away from the light of day.

From the single screened window filtered a hissing sound, as the mother
watered her rosebushes one last time.

"So," began Martin uneasily.

"How's the new house coming?"

"Oh, your mother--Henny, I mean--was out there yesterday for the
pouring of the concrete.  You have to watch things with a mobile home.
The dirt's got to be packed right.  Otherwise the first rain'll sink it
all in and burst the pipes.  I should have gone out.  But this damned
numbness has been getting to me."  He massaged his left arm absently.

"See, you have to make sure she's leveled right from the start, before
you let them put the skirting around.  There are so many things.  Let
me tell you."  He sighed.  It sounded like all the breaths he had ever
drawn going out at once.

Martin gave up trying to count the boxes.

"What's going to happen to all this?"

"Oh, She's got it figured.  The park association's promised us a tool
shed on the back.  I'll have to use that for my workshop, I guess.
Meanwhile, there's the storage locker.  I put a check in the mail
today.  Two months in advance."

Martin looked at his fingernails.  Somewhere down the block, puppies
were yelping.

"Hallendorf's," said his father.

"They never let up, ever since."

He cleared his throat.

"How is old Pete, anyway?"

His father glanced up with tired eyes.

"He never made it home, Jack.  In there the same time I was, you know.
Different floor."

"I didn't know, Dad.  I'm sorry."

Martin felt his father's eyes on him.

"Jackie?  Do you know the way to Santa Mara?"

He tried to read his father's meaning, studying his face like a problem
book from which the answer page has been torn out.

"I guess I do, Dad," he said finally.  He tried to laugh.

"I made it here, didn't I?"

His father was smiling strangely.

"Good."  He leaned forward conspiratorially.

"That was why they didn't let him out, you know."  He nodded once, as
if he had made a point.

"Is that right?"

"I'll tell you, though.  There's something that I know."  Martin
waited.

"I know that Santa Mara's not what it used to be.  It never was.  '

2/ Wiggle Alley

Going through Wiggle Alley opens gates Hitting bumper when lit
activates flip outs Going into moving hole starts rollovers Spelling
out name of game closes flippers EXTRA points on last shot scores
SPECIAL

One, Two, or More Players It's Fun to Compete!

Martin hated bowling alleys.

He left the pinball machine, turned over three (or was it four?) drinks
in the lounge and then slipped out through the glass door, closing off
the ringing of the machine and the cries of children, the clicking of
disposable cocktail tumblers, the clapping of the Thursday Nite League
down on the lanes and the clattering work of the automatic
pinspotters--a dull and numbing sound, something between the thud of
vinyl and the knock of real wood.

He got into his car and drove back across town, passing the old Seventh
Day Adventist campground on the way; he saw that sometime since his
last visit to Santa Mara it had been cleared and

a Zody's Discount Department Store put up in its place.

He passed the park, slowing by the picnic tables.  Beyond the fire pits
the old natatorium still stood; he noticed that most of the high
windows had been broken out by vandals, so that the building now
appeared somehow foreboding, the jagged remnants of panes reflecting
the night breeze's strafing of the cold waters inside.

He passed the war memorial cannon, and almost stopped there.  Had he,
as a child, ever carved his initials into the gray paint?  He couldn't
remember.  As he drew alongside, he saw that it had been decorated with
a dark, intricate pattern.  Then he recognized the matrix as a web of
spray-can gang writing.  It covered everything  He could not make out
any of the hieroglyphs.

He drove on.

He passed many vaguely familiar tree-shrouded streets, but did not turn
into any of them.

He felt a wall of sound before he heard it, and knew that he was near
the new freeway.  He geared down through the underpass and, after a
couple of instinctive turns, found himself coasting into the driveway.
Thump.  There, now he had done it.  Done something.  But it was only
the mailbox--he had clipped it with his front fender.  No damage.  But
he realized that he did feel something from the drinks, after all.

He cut the ignition.  The engine ticked, cooling down, as he sat
staring into the familiar shrubbery at the front of the house. Jasmine,
he remembered.  There had been night-blooming jasmine.

He got out of the car.

Down the block, the puppies were crying again.  He headed for the back
door, but before he got to it he heard something else:

a switching, scissoring sound, as of blades.

He squinted into the darkness.

Near the end of the street, a dimly-outlined figure pushed what looked
like a lawn mower to the sidewalk, turned and disappeared back into the
shadows.

Hell of an hour, he thought.  And shivered.  It was turning late in the
year, and the breeze he felt would soon be a wind.  He fumbled for his
old door key under the planter.  Leaves caught at his hands and face.
He knew the scent.  It wasn't jasmine.  It was oleander.

He sat at the table in the empty kitchen, the light reflecting off the
enameled walls and stripped floor.

He was trying to understand.  Something was missing, all right.  What
exactly was it that he was supposed to feel?

There was a book on the table.  He reached for it.  It was
mimeographed, stapled, with a hand-lettered cover.  Class of '61,
Fifteen Year Reunion, Disneyland.  It must have come in the mail and
been left out for him by the mother.  She had probably thought he would
toss it out unopened, if he saw it first.  She was right.

Why had he gone to the bowling alley, anyway?  Even as a teenager he
had hated it--yet tonight he had gone there.  And he had felt let
down.

Why?

He slapped the table.

The machine.  He remembered.  Absurdly, there had been only four balls,
instead of five, in the pinball machine.

He laughed bitterly.  He leaned forward and squeezed his eyes shut;
when he opened them again the lashes stuck together wetly.

Crazy bastard, he thought, you poor, crazy bastard.

He knew why he had gone there.

He had wanted to make some kind of contact.  One of the girls, perhaps,
who had stayed on in Santa Mara.  Who had been waiting all these years
for someone to come back and--what?  Take her away?  Take her to a
motel?  He riffled the pages of the book.  The telephone was there on
the wall.  The information operator would give him a number.  If he
could just remember a name.  He opened the book, reached for the
phone.

His father shuffled into the kitchen.

"Jack," he said, nodding formally.

"Thought that might be you."  He sighed and sank into a chair.

"Couldn't sleep.  Do you suppose," he said, "that you might be up to
listening to your old man yap for a while?"

3/ Talking Heads

"There's a lot of things I haven't told anyone, Jack," he said, leading
the way into the unlighted living room.

"Least of all her."  Martin waited by the couch.  His father went ahead
and sank into the overstuffed cushions.  He heard a groan, but couldn't
tell whether it was the couch or not.  He sat on the arm.  His father
handed him the television remote control.

"You ever try any of those psychedelics, Jack?"  It sounded as if he
were saying the word for the first time; as he spoke, he motioned at
the TV set.

Martin felt for the ON button.

"You mean LSD, that sort of thing?"

A used-car salesman with freeze-dried hair flickered to life on the
screen.  Martin left the sound down.

"You don't have to answer, of course.  The reason I bring it up--" He
stopped.  He glanced around, his eyes settling on the doorway that led
to the dark hall and the bedrooms.  Then he put a finger to his lips,
cupped a hand behind his ear and motioned at the set again.

Martin understood.  He eased up the volume control until it was just
loud enough to mask their voices.

His father chuckled sourly at the salesman.

"Look at that son of a bitch, will you," he said.

"Those teeth.  Like he's ready to eat us right where we sit.  Hand me
the heating pad, will you, son?  I think you're sitting on it."

Martin smiled and felt for the cord.  Son of a bitch.  He was mildly
surprised; he could not remember hearing his father talk that way
before today.  Of course it didn't matter anymore.  It must feel good
for him, he thought.

His father muttered and pushed himself up, but instead of plugging in
the heating pad he went to the corner, to some packing cartons, and
rummaged about.  The commercial ended, the program resumed: it was
Chuck Ashman, the local columnist, in the midst of another of his
late-night interviews.  His father came back to the couch, arms full.

He handed Martin a pair of headphones.  In the frosty television light,
Martin recognized a tape deck and a stack of hand-labeled cassettes.

Everything's changing, slipping out from under him since the operation,
the forced retirement, he thought.  And now the move.  So what if he's
a little--what?  Eccentric?  Was that a word he could use about his
father?  Well, at least he isn't senile; whatever he is, he certainly
has a right to it.

There was a new Dolbyized tape deck, an expensive one, microphones,
patch cords and all the accessories.  It was a better system than
Martin had back at the apartment; in fact, he realized with a sinking
feeling, he didn't even have his audio equipment anymore, not since
Kathy had cleaned out the place.  He hadn't even contested the
settlement.

"Looks like a pretty sweet set-up, Dad."

"These," his father said with quiet intensity, "are the tools of my
research.  At least that's what I call them," he added
self-deprecatingly.  He leaned back, waiting.

Martin handled the tapes uncertainly.  The labels were dated, going
back about six months--about the time his father had come home from the
hospital--and all were marked RaudiveSheargold meth."  mic."  followed
by anywhere between one and a dozen check marks.

"You know anything about Voices, Jack?"

He looked up.  His father indicated a collection of books, magazines,
and newspaper clippings on the coffee table.  One of the books was
titled Voices from the Tapes, another Unpopular Science.  He also
recognized a copy of FATE and an old National Enquirer.

He suppressed a grin.  So this was the sort of thing the old man was
getting into now.  He couldn't believe it.  He vaguely recalled going
into Los Angeles to hear Gabriel Greene lecture about his meetings with
the "space people" many, many years ago, about the time he had been
going through his science fiction paperback phase, but seemed also to
remember that he had had almost literally to drag his father along.  In
fact, the man had always been methodical, even hidebound in his
thinking; the lifelong interest in electronics, the spa retime
correspondence courses

--that had been quite the right kind of hobby for such a careful,
logical mind.  But now this.

"I'd like to hear about it, Dad."

The old man propped his hands behind his head and began speaking,
staring into the TV and past it.  He warmed to the subject slowly,
point by point, but soon his voice was coming fast and hoarse, his
words clipped, his white hands describing in the air.  The gist of it
went something like this:

In '64, a certain naturalist had been trying out a new tape machine to
record bird songs in the field; during playback, his

Great Dane pricked up his ears at portions of the tape where nothing
was audible, at least to the human ear (his master's voice?).  A boost
in amplification revealed a faint, barely intelligible voice above the
background noise, one with a peculiar, rhythmic, otherworldly cant to
it that was soon to become familiar.  There then followed other
scientists, laboratories, experiments, miles of magnetic tape, and
before long "Spirit Voice

Phenomena" had been verified; a new movement was born.  And so on. With
a straight face, Martin's father explained how he believed "the Voices"
to be evidence of intelligent beings beyond the physical plane.

"... And there's Dr.  Raudive in Germany, who has recordings of 72,000
different voices."

Martin's attention was wandering, but he tried at least to follow the
drift.  A fleck of spittle flew from his father's mouth; it reminded
him of a moth.  He didn't quite know how to take all this, though he
presumed he was supposed to take it quite seriously.

"You record with the gain full up.  That's Sheargold's method.  I can
only do it when she's not around.  You can imagine what doors slamming,
dishes sound like " "So.  Let me see if I follow.  You rewind the tapes
then, and--" "Right.  I monitor each reel, at different levels, through
the Koss headset.  And chromium dioxide tape, which is what this
machine is biased for.  Condenser mikes, of course."

Of course.  And does he actually hear things?  wondered Martin.  Well,
maybe so, Maybe he does.

"What's turned up so far?"

His father plugged the phones into the machine, inserted a cassette
from the top of the stack and started the PLAY button.

"You tell me," he said.

"You might be able to help, Jack.  If you're inclined to.  I haven't
gone over this one yet."

Martin shrugged and slipped the phones over his ears.  It began with
the sound of his father's voice: his name, the date--yesterday, "one
forty-six p.m."  Santa Mara, California"--and then a regular, unending
hiss as the recorded volume went all the way up.  Even in the Dolby
playback mode, the surface noise was harshly audible.  Like sticking
your head in a giant conch shell, he thought.

He closed his eyes, straining to hear a pattern in the wash of white
sound, but it only wound on, steady and unchanging, like a perpetual
ebbing of water.  He began to think of the microscopic particles of
oxide passing under the sounding head of the deck as grains of sand on
a wide, endless stretch of beach.  No voices, horns, telephones,
alarms; only peace.  He felt the cushion beneath him rise and fall,
like the earth itself and its tides rocking his weight through a
merciful, dreamless sleep.

He thought he detected a Low drone under the susurrus.  Then a flash of
light danced on his eyelids as the TV screen shifted images across the
dark room.  He opened his eyes.

He tried to focus.  His father's lips were moving.  In the half-light,
the lips had a bluish, ghostly tinge.  He un cupped the phones from his
head; the ear cushions broke their seal with a pop.

"... Every night, about this time.  Every night.  As close to me as
that door."  The old man raised a pale finger and pointed toward the
hall.

Martin couldn't know how much he had missed.  He waited, but the old
man did not go on.

He cleared his throat.

"So," he tried, feeling disoriented.

"What--how was it that you got started in all this?"

Eyes fixed ahead, his father said, "Kathy left some books for me at the
hospital, that time she drove out from the city.  One of the times you
couldn't make it.  Business meeting or something," he said distantly,
without recrimination, as if talking about a different life.

"Yes sir, I knew I had to try to make contact as soon

--that had been quite the right kind of hobby for such a careful,
logical mind.  But now this.

"I'd like to hear about it, Dad."

The old man propped his hands behind his head and began speaking,
staring into the TV and past it.  He warmed to the subject slowly,
point by point, but soon his voice was coming fast and hoarse, his
words clipped, his white hands describing in the air.  The gist of it
went something like this:

In '64, a certain naturalist had been trying out a new tape machine to
record bird songs in the field; during playback, his Great Dane pricked
up his ears at portions of the tape where nothing was audible, at least
to the human ear (his master's voice?).  A boost in amplification
revealed a faint, barely intelligible voice above the background noise,
one with a peculiar, rhythmic, otherworldly cant to it that was soon to
become familiar.  There then followed other scientists, laboratories,
experiments, miles of magnetic tape, and before long "Spirit Voice
Phenomena" had been verified; a new movement was born.  And so on. With
a straight face, Martin's father explained how he believed "the Voices"
to be evidence of intelligent beings beyond the physical plane.

"... And there's Dr.  Raudive in Germany, who has recordings of 72,000
different voices."

Martin's attention was wandering, but he tried at least to follow the
drift.  A fleck of spittle flew from his father's mouth; it reminded
him of a moth.  He didn't quite know how to take all this, though he
presumed he was supposed to take it quite seriously.

"You record with the gain full up.  That's Sheargold's method.  I can
only do it when she's not around.  You can imagine what doors slamming,
dishes sound like .... " "So.  Let me see if I follow.  You rewind the
tapes then, and--" "Right.  I monitor each reel, at different levels,
through the Koss headset.  And chromium dioxide tape, which is what
this machine is biased for.  Condenser mikes, of course."

Of course.  And does he actually hear things?  wondered Martin.  Well,
maybe so, Maybe he does.

"What's turned up so far?"

His father plugged the phones into the machine, inserted a cassette
from the top of the stack and started the PLAY button.

"You tell me," he said.

"You might be able to help, Jack.  If you're inclined to.  I haven't
gone over this one yet."

Martin shrugged and slipped the phones over his ears.  It began with
the sound of his father's voice: his name, the dateq yesterday, "one
forty-six p.m."  Santa Mara, California"--and then a regular, unending
hiss as the recorded volume went all the way up.  Even in the Dolby
playback mode, the surface noise was harshly audible.  Like sticking
your head in a giant conch shell, he thought.

He closed his eyes, straining to hear a pattern in the wash of white
sound, but it only wound on, steady and unchanging, like a perpetual
ebbing of water.  He began to think of the microscopic particles of
oxide passing under the sounding head of the deck as grains of sand on
a wide, endless stretch of beach.  No voices, horns, telephones,
alarms; only peace.  He felt the cushion beneath him rise and fall,
like the earth itself and its tides rocking his weight through a
merciful, dreamless sleep.

He thought he detected a low drone under the susurrus.  Then a flash of
light danced on his eyelids as the TV screen shifted images across the
dark room.  He opened his eyes.

He tried to focus.  His father's lips were moving.  In the half-light,
the lips had a bluish, ghostly tinge.  He un cupped the phones from his
head; the ear cushions broke their seal with a pop.

"... Every night, about this time.  Every night.  As close to me as
that door."  The old man raised a pale finger and pointed toward the
hall.

Martin couldn't know how much he had missed.  He waited, but the old
man did not go on.

He cleared his throat.

"So," he tried, feeling disoriented.

"What--how was it that you got started in all this?"

Eyes fixed ahead, his father said, "Kathy left some books for me at the
hospital, that time she drove out from the city.  One of the times you
couldn't make it.  Business meeting or something," he said distantly,
without recrimination, as if talking about a different life.

"Yes sir, I knew I had to try to make contact as soon

166 DENNIS ETCHISON IT WILL BE HERE SOON

as I got out.  After what happened."

Martin's heart sank as, unexpectedly, he found himself overwhelmed with
guilt.  I never made it out to visit, not once while he was in there.
But Kathy did.  Of course.  She would.  That was like her.  Buttering
people up, maintaining every appearance... and then, one day, poof.
Gone.  Just like that.  That was her way.  She wasn't really
cold--merely cowardly.  She left some books.  Which ones?  Unpopular
Science?  Had she meant it as a dig at the old man's love of real
scientific research?  No, she wasn't that subtle.  In her way, maybe
she had actually believed he would want to read about some of her
off-the-wall fads.  Shiatzu, lecithin, pyramid power, plants that talk.
The irony was that this time the someone who had given her the benefit
of the doubt was his own father.  He wondered if she knew that.  Was
she gloating over it now in some ashram or teepee or wherever the hell
she and her latest curly-headed guru were getting it on?

"You don't suppose she wants them back, do you?"

What?  The books?  He did know that the two of them had shot their wad,
didn't he?  Is he that far out of it, then?

He was beginning to get a feeling he didn't know how to name.  But he
had to pursue it.

"Dad, what was it you were getting at before, when you asked me about
drugs?  LSD, that sort of thing.  Remember?"

"Mm.  I sure thought I was high, let me tell you.  The whole time I was
in there.  I thought I was on some kind of trip."

"What kind of medication were you getting?  You know, they must have
kept you pumped full of something after the surgery."

"Oh, I asked the doctor.  Painkillers, he said.  That's all, just
painkillers."

Martin considered.

"I've heard experiences like that aren't all that rare.  I mean, you
were probably running a fever, hallucinat "I might have thought the
same as you at first.  But then they started coming for me.  Every
night, right at midnight, whether I was asleep or not.  Of course,
after the first few times, I made a point of staying awake."

Again Martin seemed to have missed something.

"Who?"

MI KEL

Member of Rock Group "Cyclc Sluts"

They continued to watch the silently moving lips.

"He could be one," said the old man.  He even chuckled.

"As well as anyone, I suppose.  Who knows?"  Then he said, "Maybe I'm
just getting old."

Martin turned his head, trying to see his father's eyes in the dim
light.

"I must be.  Trying to get through to them.  But, you know,

There was a pause.

"I wish I knew the words to describe them."

"I wish you'd try."

"Mm.  Let's just see here once.  They were dressed in one-piece
outfits, what do you call them?  Tunics.  They had faces that were
smooth and just-not-human.  They might have been, but they weren't."

"They--they came into your room?"

"From the walls.  They came out of the wardrobe.  They'd stand and
watch.  Waiting.  I thought they wanted me to go with them."

Good lord, he thought.

"Couldn't hear.  They'd laugh and point at my cast.  Mocking, I guess,
because I didn't get it.  Finally I figured they had to be
communicating on some other frequency.  As soon as I find it ....
Tomorrow maybe I'll rig an RF choke to a 100,000 ohm resistor, with a
diode instead of a mike coupled direct into the recorder.  Jack," he
said, leaning forward, with a charged intensity that filled the room
with an almost palpable presence.

"Jack, they were trying to tell me something.  Do you understand me?
They managed to leave a part of it on my cast, don't ask me how.  Did I
tell you that?  Look at that one, will you?"

On the screen, the interview was still in progress.  Opposite Ashman
sat one of the most bizarre-looking beings Martin had ever set eyes on.
Out of a reflex curiosity he moved to turn up the volume, when an
identifying caption appeared over the face:

sometimes I think it's the only thing that keeps me going.

"She got it in her head to move.  I can't fight.  She says there'll be
'luxury' out there.  Less upkeep.  There'll be less to do, all right. I
can tell you.  I'll knock around inside that trailer like a loose lug
nut  Don't even know if I'll be able to keep up with the research out
there.  Of course, after a while, who knows?  Maybe I won't even want
to."

His voice took on an incantatory rhythm.

"You know what it'll be like?  I'll tell you.  It'll be just the same
as it was here on sick leave, before the operation.  Get up.  Can't
sleep past dawn, anyway.  Putter around.  Watch TV.  Take a walk.  Take
a nap.  Sit around waiting for dinner.  More TV, go to bed.  Get up
again, try to watch Torn Snyder.  Go back to bed.  Can't talk to
her--never could.  I don't know what she wants from me, I swear I
don't.

"She sure as hell doesn't want me to move my old radios and the rest of
it, I know that.  Well, she got her way--but only for the time being.
They're going into storage.  I'm paying for that with my own money.
Until we get the spare room.

"She had some of it packed away before I got home from the hospital.
Did you know that?"

They sat side by side, not looking at each other.  Crickets started u15
outside.  It grew very late.

"To tell the truth, I haven't tinkered with my old sets for a long
time.  Since way before the accident.  God knows, maybe it'll get to be
like that with the research.  Maybe I never will hear them, after all.
Maybe the ones who say they do are on some kind of trip.  Or it's a
function of the equipment.  I guess I have to admit that.  Don't I,
Jack."  It wasn't a question.

Martin felt words caught in his throat.

"You know why I stopped listening to my old sets?"  his father said.

"I'll tell you.  Because they don't sound as good as they used to. They
just don't sound the same at all."

The old man rose and moved slowly across the room, toward the
television set and the door to the hall.  When he spoke again, the
voice sounded far away, getting farther, and very tired.

"I was thinking you could help me, son.  The research.  No, that's
right, you have to go back to your work, your own life tomorrow.  I
understand.  It was good of you to come out and help us pack.  The
movers are taking care of everything.  We won't have to lift a finger.
It was good of you, though."

He turned back.

"Why do you suppose that is?  The old sets, I mean.  Why don't they
sound like they used to?"

I know why.  It's the programs.  They aren't the same as they used to
be.  They aren't the same programs, he thought, and they aren't as
good.  But he didn't say it.  He didn't say anything.  He couldn't.

4/ All Screaming, All Bleeding, All Dying

A recap of the news came on the all-night channel; at some point the
newscast became something called "Creature Features," this week
presenting a double bill of Italian or German horror movies of the
sleaziest kind, their screaming and bleeding and dying badly dubbed
into English and interrupted every seven minutes or so for repetitions
of a commercial spot for a recreational vehicle dealership.

Unaccountably, he began to feel that he was being watched.  He left the
set on.

He passed into the dream as easily as a breath is taken and released.
He was aware of the street lamp outside the window, the lights in the
last houses along the block finally winking off, the passing and
re-passing of cars on the empty street, the easy silence, and the
night.

He found himself stranded at the outskirts of an unknown city.  He had
forgotten what he was doing there, who had left him, when or if it
would ever return.  From time to time he froze in his tracks, aware of
the long umbilical by which he was attached to an electrical outlet, he
did not know where.  He worked his way through rubble, picking over
piles of rags and discard, even though he could no longer remember what
it was he was looking for.  The sky grew ripe.  A panic began to swell
in his chest.  There was a loosening, a sag and then he felt it slip
away and he could not move.  Time passed.  His kidneys ached with the
dull throb of

fear.  Time was running out.  With monumental effort, with the last of
the residual energy in his synapses, he strained his fingers to his
pockets.  He handled crystals, connectors, the myriad spare parts he
always carried with him, feeling for the right pieces with which to
effect a repair.  Then he began to backtrack laboriously along the
cord, searching for an alternate power source.  He would jerrybuild a
tap and go on.  He had no choice.  It was his life.  His movements were
jerky, painfully slow, a metal man in search of an oilcan.  He would
have to splice in an extra-long, heavy-duty extension that would not
fail him again.  But time ran out; time stopped, and it was too late
for anything: too late for help, for divine intervention or for
surcease of any kind, ever.

Martin snapped the television off and set staring as the image
disappeared in a thick, murky cloud of color.

"It will be here soon," said the mother.

"What will?"

"The moving truck, what else?  Won't that be nice?"  Martin sat at the
table, picking at his breakfast.  With his left hand he leafed through
the class reunion program.  Through the window, he saw the gaunt figure
of his father; he had finished his morning walk and was now fooling
with some of the cartons from the garage.  A few boxes were still
inside, next to the kitchen door; these, Martin knew, would be the last
to go.  The tools of his research.

The mother finished wrapping the last of her dishes in newspaper.  She
had grown cheerfully plump, he noticed, and, perhaps for the first time
since his dad had married her, she was humming to herself under her
breath.

"He talked to you last night," she said.

"Yes."

He went on thumbing through the book.  He came upon a page listing
several people he thought he had known once.  Each had been allotted a
paragraph summary of the last fifteen years.  He recognized the name of
a boy who had been his best friend.

"I knew it," she said.  She wiped her hands and turned around in the
kitchen, distracted, as if trying to spot some small betraying detail.
He knew she wanted his plate.  He didn't move.

"Well, he surely won't need any of that nonsense to keep him occupied
once we're settled into Greenworth.  A man of his age... She knew his
eyes were on her and stopped.

"I'll just see to the rosebushes," she said.

"The new people made me promise to leave them, but I've packed away
enough cuttings."

He didn't watch her leave.

He returned to the book.  There was the name of his best friend.  "...
Bill and Cathleen enjoy water sports, horseback riding, camping and
life.  The proud parents of Kevin and Teri Lynn, they presently reside
in Santa Mara, where Bill is General Manager of the Lee Bros.  Shoe
Mart "

He stood up.

He saw his father at the curb, waiting like an animal for the
exterminator.  Slowly Martin walked to the door.  His hand touched a
box.

The deck had been re-Packed in the original shipping container.  He ran
his fingers over the brushed aluminum and molded plastic.  The tapes
were arranged around the edges of the box like eggs in a carton.

He wandered back to the kitchen table.  He turned another page, started
to skim the book, then snatched it up and pitched it into the trash
can.

He looked out again at his father, who was now ambling out of sight
around the garage, head down, as if watching for cracks in the
cement.

Martin picked up a carton.  He would carry it outside, wait for the
moving truck and put it in himself so that nothing would be broken.  He
could do that much.  And the box underneath.  It was probably full of
more tapes.  He flipped it open with his shoe.  He saw a large,
misshapen white object.

He set the box down.  The object looked like plaster of Paris.  He
touched it.  It was a cast, bent and molded to fit an arm and part of a
shoulder, the cast his father had been fitted for at the hospital,
after the fall.  The whitewash was smudged, dirty and he bent closer.

It was covered with graffiti.  Probably the signatures of nurses,
patients.  But in among the angular, unreadable letters were the words
Do you know the way to Santa Mara?

What the hell?  he wondered.  Was this the message "they" had left
behind?  He read it again.

It was, unmistakably, his father's handwriting.

He sighed, shaking his head.  He pictured the old man saving the cast
after it was removed, hiding it, perhaps even dragging it out every
evening and sitting there in front of his TV or his machinery, lost
between his earphones, waiting for a sign that they had come again.
Like the Cargo Cult out in the South Pacific.  Waiting, with the sign
he believed he had been given, that had come from the in scape of a
fever dream.  Waiting.  For the return of the gods and their answers
and their salvation.  It wasn't true, of course.  It never was.  But,
he thought, maybe, just maybe there is a key to some kind of truth in
the asking, in the very questioning itself; maybe; maybe there is,
after all.

I want to be out there, he thought, to be there with him, next to
him.

But before he went outside, he knelt down and gingerly removed the
deck, disturbing the arrangement of tapes as little as possible.  He
set it on the linoleum, unwound the cord and plugged it into the wall.
He found the mike, the headphones and the last tape his father had
recorded, the one not yet covered with check marks, the one that had
yet to be monitored.

He inserted it, connected the microphone and headset and started the
cassette.  He listened to the rushing of blank tape for several
minutes.  Once he seemed to hear a real sound, only to recognize it as
the faint crying of the pups down the block, a plaintive weeping that
had been picked up during his father's recording.  Then, with perfect
precision, with perhaps the greatest care he had ever taken in his
life, with one eye on the window and one eye on the mechanism, he
depressed the SOUND-ON-SOUND RECORD button, uncovered the microphone,
lifted it to his lips and, in the weakest and most unrecognizable voice
he could muster, began to whisper calculatedly inarticulate, mysterious
and indecipherable syllables onto the track.

ANNOUNCER: Hey, let's go into this apartment and help this housewife
take a shower!

ASSISTANT: Rad!

ANNOUNCER: Excuse me, ma'am!

HOUSEWIFE: Eeek!

ANNOUNCER: It's okay, I'm the New Season Man!

HOUSEWIFE: You--you came right through my TV!

ANNOUNCER: That's because there's no stopping good news!  Have you
heard about New Season Body Creamer?  It's guaranteed better than your
old-fashioned soap product, cleaner than water on the air!
It's-ASSISTANT: Really rad!

HOUSEWIFE: Why, you're so right!  Look at the way New Season's foaming
away my dead, unwanted dermal cells!  My world has a whole new
complexion!  My figure has a glossy new paisley shine!  The kind that
men... ANNOUNCER: And women!

HOUSEWIFE love to touch!

ANNOUNCER: Plus the kids' Il love it, too!

HOUSEWIFE: You bet they will!  Wait till my husband gets up!  Why,

DEATH TRACKS

I'm going to spend the day spreading the good news all over our entire
extended family!  It's--ANNOUNCER: It's a whole New Season!  HOUSEWIFE:
A whole new reason!  It's--ASSISTANT: Absolutely RADICAL!

The young man fingered the edges of the pages with great care, almost
as if they were razor blades.  Then he removed his fingertips from the
clipboard and tapped them along the luminous crease in his pants, one,
two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, stages of flexion about
to become a silent drum-roll of boredom.  With his other hand he
checked his watch, clicked his pen and smoothed the top sheet of the
questionnaire, circling the paper in a cursive, impatient holding
pattern.

Across the room another man thumbed a remote-control device until the
TV voices became silvery whispers, like ants crawling over aluminum
foil.

"Wait, Bob."  On the other side of the darkening living room a woman
stirred in her bean-bag chair, her hair shining under the black
light.

"It's time for The Fuzzy Family."

The man, her husband, shifted his buttocks in his own beanbag chair and
yawned.  The chair's styrofoam filling crunched like cornflakes under
his weight.

"Saw this one before," he said.

"Besides, there's no laugh track  They use three cameras and a live
audience, remember?"

"But it might be, you know, boosted," said the woman.

"Oh, what do they call it?"

"Technically augmented?"  offered the young man.

They both looked at him, as though they had forgotten he was in their
home.

The young man forced an unnatural, professional smile.  In the black
light his teeth shone too brightly.

"Right," said the man.

"Not The Fuzzy Family, though.  I Filtered out a track last night. It's
all new.  I'm sure."

The young man was confused.  He had the inescapable feeling that they
were skipping (or was it simply that he was missing?) every third or
fourth sentence.  I'm sure.  Sure of what?  That this particular TV
show had been taped before an all-live audience?

How could he be sure?  And why would anyone care enough about such a
minor technical point to bother to find out?  Such things weren't
supposed to matter to the blissed-out masses.  Certainly not to AmiD ex
survey families.  Unless... Could he be that lucky?

The questionnaire might not take very long, after all.

This one, he thought, has got to work in the industry.

He checked the computer stats at the top of the questionnaire:
MORRISON, ROBERT, AGE 54, UNEMPLOYED.  Used to work in the industry,
then.  A TV cameraman, a technician of some kind, maybe for a local
station?  There had been so many layoffs in the last few months, with
QUBE and Teletext and all the new cable licenses wearing away at the
traditional network share.  And any connection, past or present, would
automatically disqualify this household.  Hope sprang up in his breast
like an accidental porno broadcast in the middle of Sermonette.

He flicked his pen rapidly between cramped fingers and glanced up,
eager to be out of here and home to his own video cassettes.  Not to
mention, say, a Bob's Big Boy hamburger, heavy relish, hold the onions
and add avocado, to be picked up on the way?

"I've been sent here to ask you about last month's Viewing Log," he
began.

"When one doesn't come back in the mail, we do a routine follow-up.  It
may have been lost by the post office.  I see here that your phone's
been disconnected.  Is that right?"

He waited while the man used the remote selector.  Onscreen, silent
excerpts of this hour's programming blipped by channel by channel:
reruns of Cop City, the syndicated version of The Cackle Factory, the
mindless Make Me Happy, The World as We Know It, THUGS."  even a repeat
of that PBS documentary on Teddy Roosevelt, A Man, a Plan, a Canal,
Panama, and the umpteenth replay ofMork andMindy, this the infamous
last episode that had got the series canceled, wherein Mindy is
convinced she's carrying Mork's alien child and nearly OD's on a
homeopathic remedy of Humphrey's Eleven Tablets and blackstrap
molasses.  Still he waited.

"There really isn't much I need to know."  He put on a friendly,
stupid, shit-eating grin, hoping it would show in the purI'm going to
spend the day spreading the good news all over our entire extended
family!  It's--ANNOUNCER: It's a whole New Season!  HOUSEWIFE: A whole
new reason!  It's-ASSISTANT: Absolutely RADICAL!

The young man fingered the edges of the pages with great care, almost
as if they were razor blades.  Then he removed his fingertips from the
clipboard and tapped them along the luminous crease in his pants, one,
two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, stages of flexion about
to become a silent drum-roll of boredom.  With his other hand he
checked his watch, clicked his pen and smoothed the top sheet of the
questionnaire, circling the paper in a cursive, impatient holding
pattern.

Across the room another man thumbed a remote-control device until the
TV voices became silvery whispers, like ants crawling over aluminum
foil.

"Wait, Bob."  On the other side of the darkening living room a woman
stirred in her bean-bag chair, her hair shining under the black
light.

"It's time for The Fuzzy Family."

The man, her husband, shifted his buttocks in his own beanbag chair and
yawned.  The chair's styrofoam filling crunched like cornflakes under
his weight.

"Saw this one before," he said.

"Besides, there's no laugh track  They use three cameras and a live
audience, remember?"

"But it might be, you know, boosted," said the woman.

"Oh, what do they call it?"

"Technically augmented?"  offered the young man.

They both looked at him, as though they had forgotten he was in their
home.

The young man forced an unnatural, professional smile.  In the black
light his teeth shone too brightly.

"Right," said the man.

"Not The Fuzzy Family, though.  I Filtered out a track last night. It's
all new.  I'm sure."

The young man was confused.  He had the inescapable feeling that they
were skipping (or was it simply that he was missing?) every third or
fourth sentence.  I'm sure.  Sure of what?  That this particular TV
show had been taped before an all-live audience?

How could he be sure?  And why would anyone care enough about such a
minor technical point to bother to find out?  Such things weren't
supposed to matter to the blissed-out masses.  Certainly not to AmiD ex
survey families.  Unless... Could he be that lucky?

The questionnaire might not take very long, after all.

This one, he thought, has got to work in the industry.

He checked the computer stats at the top of the questionnaire:
MORRISON, ROBERT, AGE 54, UNEMPLOYED.  Used to work in the industry,
then.  A TV cameraman, a technician of some kind, maybe for a local
station?  There had been so many layoffs in the last few months, with
QUBE and Teletext and all the new cable licenses wearing away at the
traditional network share.  And any connection, past or present, would
automatically disqualify this household.  Hope sprang up in his breast
like an accidental porno broadcast in the middle of Sermonette.

He flicked his pen rapidly between cramped fingers and glanced up,
eager to be out of here and home to his own video cassettes.  Not to
mention, say, a Bob's Big Boy hamburger, heavy relish, hold the onions
and add avocado, to be picked up on the way?

"I've been sent here to ask you about last month's Viewing Log," he
began.

"When one doesn't come back in the mail, we do a routine follow-up.  It
may have been lost by the post office.  I see here that your phone's
been disconnected.  Is that right?"

He waited while the man used the remote selector.  Onscreen, silent
excerpts of this hour's programming blipped by channel by channel:
reruns of Cop City, the syndicated version of The Cackle Factory, the
mindless Make Me Happy, The World as We Know It, THUGS."  even a repeat
of that PBS documentary on Teddy Roosevelt, A Man, a Plan, a Canal,
Panama, and the umpteenth replay of Mork and Mindy, this the infamous
last episode that had got the series canceled, wherein Mindy is
convinced she's carrying Mork's Mien child and nearly OD's on a
homeopathic remedy of Humphrey's Eleven Tablets and blackstrap
molasses.  Still he waited.

"There really isn't much I need to know."  He put on a friendly,
stupid, shit-eating grin, hoping it would show in the pur

pie light and then afraid that it would.

"What you watch is your own business, naturally.  AmiD ex isn't
interested in influencing your viewing habits.  If we did, I guess that
would undermine the statistical integrity of our sample, wouldn't
it?"

Morrison and his wife continued to stare into their flickering 12-inch
Sorry portable.

If they're so into it, I wonder why they don't have a bigger set, one
of those new picture-frame projection units from Mad Man Muntz, for
example?  I don't even see a Betamax.  What was Morrison talking about
when he said he'd taped The Fuzzy Family?  The man had said that,
hadn't he?

It was becoming difficult to concentrate.

Probably it was the black light, that and the old DayGlow posters, the
random clicking of the beaded curtains.  Where did they get it all?
Sitting in their living room was like being in a time machine, a
playback of some Hollywood Sam Katzman or Albert Zugsmith version of
the sixties; he almost expected Jack Nichol-son or Luanna Anders to
show up.  Except that the artifacts seemed to be genuine, and in mint
condition.  There were things he had never seen before, not even in
catalogues.  His parents would know.  It all must have been saved out
of some weird prescience, in anticipation of the current run on
psychedelic nostalgia.  It would cost a fortune to find practically any
original black-light posters, however primitive.  The one in the
corner, for instance, "Ship of Peace," mounted next to "Ass Id" and an
original Crumb "Keep on Truckin'" from the Print Mint in San Francisco,
had been offered on the KCET auction just last week for $450, he
remembered.

He tried again.

"Do you have your Viewing Log handy?"  Expectantly he paused a beat.

"Or did you--misplace it?"

"It won't tell you anything," said the man.

"We watch a lot of oldies," said the woman.

The young man pinched his eyes shut for a moment to clear his head.

"I know what you mean," he said, hoping to put them at ease.

"I can't get enough of The Honeymooners, myself.  That Norton."  He
added a conspiratorial chuckle.

"Sometimes I think they get better with age.  They don't make 'em like
that anymore.  But, you know, the local all'fliates would be very
interested to know that you're watching."

"Not that old," said the woman.

"We like the ones from the sixties.  And some of the new shows, too,
if--" Morrison inclined his head toward her, so that the young man
could not see, and mouthed what may have been a warning to his wife.

Suddenly and for reasons he could not name, the young man felt that he
ought to be out of here.

He shook his wrist, pretending that his collector's item NixonoAgnew
watch was stuck.

"What time is it getting to be?"  Incredibly, he noticed that his watch
had indeed stopped.  Or had he merely lost track of the time?  The
hands read a quarter to six.  Where had they been the last time he
looked?

"I really should finish up and get going.  You're my last interview of
the day.  You folks must be about ready for dinner."

"Not so soon," said the woman.

"It's almost time for The Uncle Jerry Show."

That's a surprise, he thought.  It's only been on for one season.

"Ah, that's a new show, isn't it?"  he said, again feeling that he had
missed something.

"It's only been on for--" Abruptly the man got up from his bean-bag
chair and crossed the room.

He opened a cabinet, revealing a stack of shipment cartons from the
Columbia Record Club.  The young man made out the titles of a few loose
albums, "greatest hits" collections from groups which, he imagined, had
long since disbanded.  Wedged into the cabinet, next to the records,
was a state-of-the-art audio frequency equalizer with graduated slide
controls covering several octaves.  This was patched into a small black
accessory amplifier box, the kind that are sold for the purpose of
connecting a TV set to an existing home stereo system.  Morrison leaned
over and punched a sequence of preset buttons, and without further
warning a great hissing filled the room.

"This way we don't miss anything," said the wife.

The young man looked around.  Two enormous Voice-of the-Theatre
speakers, so large they seemed part of the walls, had sputtered to life
on either side of the narrow room.  But as yet there was no sound other
than the unfathomable, rolling hiss of spurious signal-to-noise output,
the kind of distortion he had heard once when he set his FM receiver
between stations and turned the volume up all the way.

Once the program began, he knew, the sound would be cleat-ening.

"So," he said hurriedly, "why don't we wrap this up, so I can leave you
two to enjoy your evening?  All I need are the answers to a couple of
quick questions, and I'll be on my way."

Morrison slumped back into place, expelling a rush of air from his
bean-bag chair, and thumbed the remote channel selector to a blank
station.  A pointillist pattern of salt-and-pepper interference swarmed
the 12-inch screen.  He pushed up the volume in anticipation, so as not
to miss a word of The Uncle Jerry Show when the time came to switch
channels again, eyed a clock on the wall over the Sony--there was a
clock, after all, if only one knew where to look amid the glowing
clutter--and half-turned to his visitor.  The clock read ten minutes to
six.

"What are you waiting to hear?"  asked Morrison.

"Yes," said his wife, "why don't you tell us?"

The young man lowered his eyes to his clipboard, seeking the briefest
possible explanation, but saw only the luminescence of white shag
carpeting through his transparent vinyl chair--another collector's
item.  He felt uneasy circulation twitching his weary legs, and could
not help but notice the way the inflated chair seemed to be throbbing
with each pulse.

"Well," trying one more time, noting that it was coming up on nine
minutes to six and still counting, "your names were picked by AmiD ex
demographics.  Purely at random.  You represent twelve thousand other
viewers in this area.  What you watch at any given hour determines the
rating points for each network."

There, that was simple enough, wasn't it?  No need to go into the
per-minute price of sponsor ad time buys based on the overnight share,
sweeps week, the competing services each selling its own brand of
accuracy.  Eight-and-a-half minutes to go.

"The system isn't perfect, but it's the best way we have so far

"You want to know why we watch what we watch, don't you?"

"Oh no, of course not!  That's really no business of ours.  We don't
care.  But we do need to tabulate viewing records, and when yours
wasn't returned--" "Let's talk to him," said the woman.

"He might be able to help."

"He's too young, can't you see that, Jenny?"

"I beg your pardon?"  said the young man.

"It's been such a long time," said the woman, rising with a whoosh from
her chair and stepping in front of her husband.

"We can try."

The man got slowly to his feet, his arms and torso long and
phosphorescent in the peculiar mix of ultraviolet and television light.
He towered there, considering.  Then he took a step closer.

The young man was aware of his own clothing un sticking from the
inflated vinyl, crackling slightly, a quick seam of blue static
shimmering away across the back of the chair; of the snow pattern
churning on the untuned screen, the color tube shifting hues under the
black light, turning to gray, then brightening in the darkness, locking
on an electric blue, and holding.

Morrison seemed to undergo a subtle transformation as details
previously masked by shadow now came into focus.  It was more than his
voice, his words.  It was the full size of him, no longer young but
still strong, on his feet and braced in an unexpectedly powerful
stance.  It was the configuration of his head in silhouette, the
haunted pallor of the skin, stretched taut, the large, luminous whites
of the eyes, burning like radium.  It was all these things and more. It
was the reality of him, no longer a statistic but a man, clear and
unavoidable at last.

The young man faced Morrison and his wife.  The palms of his hands were
sweating coldly.  Fie put aside the questionnaire.  Six minutes to
six.

"I'll put down that you--you declined to participate.  How's that?  No
questions asked."

He made ready to leave.

"It's been such a long time," said Mrs.  Morrison again.

Mr.  Morrison laughed shortly, a descending scale ending in a bitter,
metallic echo that cut through the hissing.

"I'll bet it's all crazy to you, isn't it?  This stuff."

"No, not at all.  Some of these pieces are priceless.  I recognized
that right away."

"Are they?"

"Sure," said the young man.

"If you don't mind my saying so, it reminds me of my brother Jack's
room.  He threw out most of his underground newspapers, posters, that
sort of thing when he got drafted.  It was back in the sixties mI can
barely remember it.  If only he'd realized.  Nobody saved anything.
That's why it's all so valuable now."

"We did," said Mrs.  Morrison.

"So I see."

They seemed to want to talk, after allwlonely, perhaps--so he found
himself ignoring the static and actually making an effort to prolong
his exit.  A couple of minutes more wouldn't hurt.  They're not so bad,
the Morrisons, he thought.  I can see that now.

"Well, I envy you.  I went through a Marvel Comics phase when I was a
kid.  Those are worth a bundle now, too.  My mother burned them all
when I went away to college, of course.  It's the same principle.  But
if I could go back in a time machine..."  He shook his head and allowed
an unforced smile to show through.

"These were our son's things," said Mrs.  Morrison.

"Oh?"  Could be I remind them of their son.  I guess I should be
honored.

"Our son David," said Mr.  Morrison.

"I see."  There was an awkward pause.  The young man felt vaguely
embarrassed.

"It's nice of him to let you hold his collection.  You've got quite an
investment here."

The minute hand of the clock on the wall ground through its cycle,
pressing forward in the rush of white noise from the speakers.

"David Morrison."  Her voice sounded hopeful.

"You've heard the name?"

David Morison, David Morrison.  Curious.  Yes, he could almost remember
something, a magazine cover or... "It was a long time ago.  He--our
son--was the last American boy to be killed in Vietnam."

It was four minutes to six and he didn't know what to say.

"When it happened, we didn't know what to think," said Mrs. Morrison.

"We talked to people like us.  Mostly they wanted to pretend it never
happened."

"They didn't understand, either," said Mr.  Morrison.

"So we read everything.  The magazines, books.  We listened to the news
commentators.  It was terribly confusing.  We lmally decided even they
didn't know any more than we did about what went on over there, or
why."

"What was it to them?  Another story for The Six O'Clock News, right,
Jenny?"

Mrs.  Morrison drew a deep, pained breath.  Her eyes fluttered as she
spoke, the television screen at her back lost in a grainy storm of deep
blue snow.

"Finally the day came for me to clear David's room .... "

"Please," said the young man, "you don't have to explain."  But she
went ahead with it, a story she had gone over so many times she might
have been recalling another life.  Her eyes opened.  They were dry and
startlingly clear.

It was three minutes to six.

"I started packing David's belongings.  Then it occurred to us that he
might have known the reason.  So we went through his papers and so
forth, even his record albums, searching.  So much of it seemed
strange, in another language, practically from another planet.  But we
trusted that the answer would be revealed to us in time."

"We're still living with it," said Morrison.

"It's with us when we get up in the morning, when we give up at night.
Sometimes I think I see a clue there, the way he would have seen it,
but then I lose the thread and we're back where we started.

"We tried watching the old reruns, hoping they had something to tell.
But they were empty.  It was like nothing important was going on in
this country back then."

"Tell him about the tracks, Bob."

"I'm getting to it .... Anyway, we waited.  I let my job go, and we
were living off our savings.  It wasn't much.  It's almost

used up by now.  But we had to have the answer.  Why?  Nothing was
worth a damn, otherwise .... "Then, a few months ago, there was this
article in TV GUIDE.  About the television programs, the way they make
them.  They take the tracks--the audience reactions, follow?  --and use
them over and over.  Did you know that?"

"I--I had heard..."

"Well, it's true.  They take pieces of old soundtracks, mix them in, a
big laugh here, some talk there--it's all taped inside a machine, an
audience machine.  The tapes go all the way back.  I've broken 'em down
and compared.  Hall the time you can hear the same folks laughing from
twenty, twenty-five years ago.  And from the sixties.  That's the part
that got to me.  So I rigged a way to triter out everything--dialogue,
music--except for the audience, the track."

"Why, he probably knows all about that.  Don't you, young man?"

"A lot of them, the audience, are gone now.  It doesn't matter. They're
on tape.  It's recycled, 'canned' they call it.  It's all the same to
TV.  Point is, this is the only way left for us to get through, or them
to us.  To make contact.  To listen, eavesdrop, you might say, on what
folks were doing and thinking and commenting on and laughing over back
then.

"I can't call 'em up on the phone, or take a poll, or stop people on
the street, 'cause they'd only act like nothing happened.

Today, it's all passed on.  Don't ask me how, but it has.

"They're passed on now, too, so many of 'em."

"Like the boys," said Mrs.  Morrison softly, so that her voice was all
but lost in the hiss of the swirling blue vortex.

"So many beautiful boys, the ones who would talk now, if only they
could."

"Like the ones on the tracks," said Mr.  Morrison.

"Like the ones who never came home," said his wife.

"Dead now, all dead, and never coming back."

One minute to six.

"Not yet," he said aloud, frightened by his own voice.

As Mr.  Morrison cranked up the gain and turned back to the his set,
the young man hurried out.  As Mrs.  Morrison opened her ears and
closed her eyes to all but the laugh track that rang out around her, he
tried in vain to think of a way to reduce it all to a few simple marks
in a now pointless language on sheets of printed paper.  And as the
Morrisons listened for the approving bursts of laughter and murmuring
and applause, separated out of an otherwise meaningless echo from the
past, he closed the door behind him, leaving them as he had found them.
He began to walk fast, faster, and finally to run.

The questionnaire crumpled and dropped from his hand.  Jack, I loved
you, did you know that?  You were my brother.  I didn't understand,
either.  No one did.  There was no time.  But I told you, didn't I?
Didn't I?

He passed other isolated houses on the block, ghostly living rooms
turning to flickering beacons of cobalt blue against the night.  The
voices from within were television voices, muffled and anonymous and
impossible to decipher unless one were to listen too closely, more
closely than life itself would seem to want to permit, to the exclusion
of all else, as to the falling of a single blade of grass or the unseen
whisper of an approaching scythe.  And it rang out around him then,
too, through the trees and into the sky and the cold stars, the sound
of the muttering and the laughter, the restless chorus of the dead,
spreading rapidly away from him across the city and the world.

THE DARK COUNTRY

Martin sat by the pool, the wind drying his hair.

A fleshy, airborne spider appeared on the edge of the book which he had
beer reading there.  From this angle it cast a long, pointed needle
across the yellowing page.  The sun was hot and clean; it went straight
for his nose.  Overweight American children practiced their volleyball
on the bird-of-paradise plains.  Weathered rattan furniture gathered
dust beyond the peeling diving board.

Traffic passed on the road.  Trucks, campers, bikes.

The pool that would not be scraped till summer.  The wooden chairs that
had been ordered up from the States.  Banana leaves.  Olive trees.  A
tennis court that might be done next year.  A single color TV antenna
above the palms.  By the slanted cement patio heliotrope daisies,
speckled climbing vines.  The morning a net of light on the water.
Boats fishing in Todos Santos Bay.

A smell like shrimps Veracruz blowing off the silvered waves.  And a
strangely familiar island, like a hazy floating giant, where the
humpback whales play.  Yesterday in Ensenada, the car horns talking and
a crab taco in his hand, he had wanted to buy a pair of huaraches and a
Mexican shirt.  The best tequila in the

world for three-and-a-half a liter.  Noche Buena beer, foil labels that
always peel before you can read them.  Delicados con Filtros
cigarettes.

Bottles of agua mineral.  Tehuacan con gas.  No retornable.  He smiled
as he thought of churros at the Blow Hole, the maid who even washed his
dishes, the Tivoli Night Club with Reno cocktail napkins, mescal
flavored with worm, eggs fresh from the nest, chorizo grease in the
pan, bar girls with rhinestone-studded Aztec headbands, psychoactive
liqueurs, seagulls like the tops of valentines, grilled cor vina with
lemon, the endless plumes of surf .... It was time for a beer run to
the bottling factory in town.

"TBuenos d(as!"

Martin looked up, startled.  He was blinded by the light.  He fumbled
his dark glasses down and moved his head.  A man and a woman stood over
his chair.  The sun was at their backs.  "iAmericano?"

"Yes," said Martin.  He shielded his forehead and tried to see their
faces.  Their features were blacked in by the glare that spilled around
their heads.

"I told you he was an American," said the woman.

"Are you studying?"

"What?"

Martin closed the book self-consciously.  It was a paperback edition of
The Penal Colony, the only book he had been able to borrow from any of
the neighboring cabins.  Possibly it was the only book in Quintas
Papagayo.  For some reason the thought depressed him profoundly, but he
had brought it poolside anyway.  It seemed the right thing to do.  He
could not escape the feeling that he ought to be doing something more
than nursing a tan.  And the magazines from town were all in Spanish.

He slipped his sketchbook on top of Kafka and opened it awkwardly.

"I'm supposed to be working," he said.

"On my drawings.  You know how it is."  They didn't, probably, but he
went on.

"It's difficult to get anything done down here."

"He's an artist!"  said the woman.

"My wife thought you were an American student on vacation," said the
man.

"Our son is a student, you see," said the woman.  Martin didn't, but
nodded sympathetically.  She stepped aside to sit on the arm of another
deck chair under the corrugated green fiberglass siding.  She was
wearing a sleeveless blouse and thigh-length shorts.

"He.  was studying for his Master's Degree in Political Science at
UCLA, but now he's decided not to finish.  I tried to tell him he
should at least get his teaching credential, but--" "Our name's
Winslow," said the man, extending a muscular hand.

"Mr.  and Mrs.  Winslow."

"Jack Martin."

"It was the books," said Mr.  Winslow.

"Our boy always has books with him, even on visits."  He chuckled and
shook his head.  Martin nodded.

"You should see his apartment," said Mrs.  Winslow.

"So many."  She gestured with her hands as if describing the symptoms
of a hopeless affliction.

There was an embarrasing lull.  Martin looked to his feet.  He flexed
his toes.  The right ones were stiff.  For something fur the to do, he
uncapped a Pilot Fineliner pen and touched it idly to the paper.
Without realizing it, he smiled.  This trip must be doing me more good
than I'd hoped, he thought.  I haven't been near a college classroom in
fifteen years.

A wave rushed toward the rocks at the other side of the cabins.

"Staying long?"  asked the man, glancing around nervously.  He was
wearing Bermuda shorts over legs so white they were almost
phosphorescent.

"I'm not sure," said Martin.

"May I take a peek at your artwork?"  asked the woman.  He shrugged and
smiled.

She lifted the sketchbook from his lap with infinite delicacy, as the
man began talking again.

He explained that they owned their own motor home, which was now parked
on the Point, at the end of the rock beach, above

the breakwater.  Weekend auto insurance cost them $13.70 in Tijuana.
They came down whenever they got the chance.  They were both retired,
but there were other things to consider--just what, he did not say. But
it was not the same as it used to be.  He frowned at the moss growing
in the bottom of the pool, at the baby weeds poking up through the sand
in the canister ash trays, at the separating layers of the sawed-off
diving board.

Martin could see more questions about to surface behind the man's tired
eyes.  He cleared his throat and squirmed in his chair, feeling the
sweat from his arms soaking into the unsealed wood.  Mr.  Winslow was
right, of course.  Things were not now as they once were.  But he did
not relish being reminded of it, not now, not here.

A small figure in white darted into his field of vision, near the edge
of the first cabin.  It was walking quickly, perhaps in this
direction.

"There's my maid," he said, leaning forward.

"She must be finished now."  He unstuck his legs from the chaise
longue.

"She has keys?"  said the man.

"I suppose so.  Yes, I'm sure she does.  Well--" "Does she always
remember to lock up?"

He studied the man's face, but a lifetime of apprehensions were
recorded there, too many for Martin to isolate one and read it
accurately.

"I'll remind her," he said, rising.

He picked up his shirt, took a step toward Mrs.  Winslow and stood
shifting his weight.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the maid put a hand to the side of
her face.

Mrs.  Winslow closed the pad, smoothed the cover and handed it back.

"Thank you," she said oddly.

Martin took it and offered his hand.  He realized at once that his skin
had become uncomfortably moist, but Mr.  Winslow gripped it firmly and
held it.  He confronted Martin soberly, as if about to impart a bit of
fatherly advice.

"They say he comes down out of the hills," said Winslow, his eyes
unblinking.  Martin haft-turned to the low, tan range that lay beyond
the other side of the highway.  When he turned back, the man's eyes
were waiting.

"He's been doing it for years.  It's something of a legend around here.
They can't seem to catch him.

We never took it seriously, until now."

"Is that right?"

"Why, last night, while we were asleep, he stole an envelope of
traveler's checks and a whole carton of cigarettes from behind our
heads.  Can you beat that?  Right inside the camper!  Of course we
never bothered to lock up.  Why should we?  Everyone's very decent
around here.  We've never had any trouble ourselves.  Until this trip.
It's hard to believe."

"Yes, it is."  Martin attempted to pull back as a tingling began in his
stomach.  But the man continued to pump his hand, almost desperately,
Martin thought.

"The best advice I can give you, young man, is to lock your doors at
night.  From now on.  You never know."

"Thanks, I will."

"He comes out after the sun goes down."  He would not let go of
Martin's hand.

"I figure he must hit the beach three-four in the morning, when all the
lights are out.  Slips right in.  No one notices.  And then it's too
late."

Martin pretended to struggle with the books so that he could drop his
hand.

"Well, I hope you're able to enjoy the rest of your vacation."  He eyed
the maid.

"Now I'd better--" "We're warning everybody along the beach," said
Winslow.

"Maybe you should report it."

"That don't do no good.  They listen to your story, but there's nothing
they can do."

"Good luck to you, then," said Martin.

"Thank you again," said the won mn peculiarly.

"And don't forget.  You lock your door tonight!"

"I will," said Martin, hurrying away.  I won't, that is.  Will, won't,
what did it matter?  He side-stepped the dazzling flowers of an ice
plant and ascended the cracked steps of the pool enclosure.  He crossed
the paved drive and slowed.

The maid had passed the last of the beachfront houses and was about to
intersect his path.  He waited for her to greet him as

she always did.  I should at least pretend to talk to her, he thought,
in case the Winslows are still watching.  He felt their eyes, or
someone's, close at his back.

"Buenos dibs, "he said cheerfully.

She did not return the greeting.  She did not look up.  She wagged her
head and trotted past, clutching her uniform at the neck.

He paused and stared after her.  He wondered in passing about her
downcast eyes, and about the silent doorways of the other cabins,
though it was already past ten o'clock.  And then he noticed the scent
of ozone that now laced the air, though no thunderhead was visible yet
on the horizon, only a gathering fog far down the coastline, wisps of
it beginning to striate the wide, pale sky above the sagging telephone
poles.  And he wondered about the unsteadiness in Mrs.  Winslow's voice
as she had handed back the sketchbook.  It was not until he was back at
the beach that he remembered: the pages he had shown her were blank.
There were no sketches at all yet in the pad, only the tiny flowing
blot he had made with his pen on the first sheet while they talked,
like a miniature misshapen head or something else, something else,
stark and unreadable on the crisp white sulfite paper.

He was relieved to see that the private beach had finally come alive
with its usual quota of sunbathers.  Many of them had probably arisen
early, shortly after he'd' left for the quiet of the pool, and
immediately swarmed to the surf with no thought Of TV or the morning
paper, habits they had left checked at the border sixty miles from
here.  A scattered few lagged back, propped out on their patios,
sipping coffee and keeping an eye on the children who were bounding
through the spume.  The cries of the children and of the gulls cut
sharply through the waves which, disappointingly, were beginning to
sound to Martin like nothing so much as an enormous screenful of ball
bearings.

There was the retired rent-a-cop on holiday with his girl friend,
stretched out on a towel and intent on his leg exercises.  There was
the middle-aged divorcee from two doors down, bent over the tide pools
hunting for moonstones among jealous clusters of aquamarine anemones.
And there was Will, making time with the blonde in the blue tank top.
He seemed to be explaining to her some sort of diagram in the slicked
sand between the polished stones.  Martin toed into his worn rubber
sandals and went down to join them.

"Want to go to a party?"  Will said to him as he came up.

"When?"

"Whenever," said the blonde in the blue top.  She tried to locate
Martin's face, gave up and gazed back in the general direction of the
southern bungalows.

There a party was still in progress, as it had been since last
Wednesday, when Will and Martin had arrived.  The other party, the one
on the north side, had apparently been suspended for a few hours,
though just now as Martin watched a penny rocket streaked into the sky
from the bathroom window, leaving an almost invisible trail of
powder-blue smoke in the air above the water.  The skyrocket exploded
with a faint report like a distant rifle and began spiraling back to
earth.  Martin heard hoarse laughter and the sudden cranking-up of
stereo speakers inside the sliding doors.  So the party there was also
nearly in full swing again, or had never let up.  Perhaps it was all
one big party, with his cabin sandwiched like a Christian Science
reading room between two pirate radio stations.  He remembered the
occasional half-dressed teenager staggering around the fire pit and
across his porch last night, grunting about more beer and did he know
where those nurses were staying?  Martin had sat outside till he fell
asleep, seeing them piss their kidneys out on the steaming stones by
the footpath.

"Bummer," said the girl seriously.  Martin noticed that she was lugging
around an empty twelve-ounce bottle.  She upended it and a few slippery
drops hit the rocks.

"You guys wouldn't know where the Dos Equis's stashed, wouldjou?"

"No esproblema, my dear," said Will, steering her toward the patio.

Martin followed.  Halfway there the girl wobbled around and hurled the
bottle as high as she could away from the shoreline.  Unfortunately,
her aim was not very good.  Martin had to duck.  He heard it whistle
end-over-end over his head and shatter on the

flat rocks.  Will caught her under the arms and staggered her inside.
Next door, a Paul Simon song was playing on the tape deck.

By the time Martin got there she was on her way out, cradling a bottle
of Bohemia.  Again she tried to find his eyes, gave up and began
picking her way across the rocks.

"Take it slow," yelled Will.

"Hey, sure you don't want to lie down for a while?"

Martin grinned at him and walked past into the high-beamed living room.
The fireplace was not lighted, nor was the wall heater, but a faint but
unmistakable odor of gas lingered in the corners.

"We better stock up on Dos Equis from now on," said Will.

"Is that her favorite?"

"She doesn't care.  But we shelled out a deposit on the case of
Bohemia.  Dos Equis is no return."

Martin stood staring out at the island in the bay.  The fishing boats
were moving closer to shore.  Now he could barely make out the details
of the nearest one.  He squinted.  It wasn't a fishing boat at all, he
realized.  It was much larger than he had imagined, some kind of oil
tanker, perhaps.

"Guess what, Will?  We're going to have to start locking the doors."

"Why?  Afraid the put as are gonna OD on Spanish fly and jump our bones
in the middle of the night?"

"You wish," said Martin.  He sniffed around the heater, then followed
the scent to the kitchen and the stove.

"The gas pilots," he said.

"It's the draft.  YouJwe're--ai ways going in and out.  The big door's
open all the time."

"Got a match, man?"  Will took out a bent cigarette, straightened it
and crumpled the pack.  The table was littered with empty packs of
cheap Mexican cigarettes, Negritos and Faros mostly.  Martin wondered
how his friend could smoke such garbage.  He took out his Zippo.  Will
struck it with an exaggerated shaking of his hands, but it was out of
fluid.  He stooped over the gas stove and winked at Martin.  He turned
the knob.  The burner lit.  He inhaled, coughed and reached for the
tequila.  He poured lnself a tall one mixed with grapefruit juice.

"Mmm.  Good for the throat, but it still burns a little."

"Your system runs on alcohol, Willy.  You know that, don't you?"

"Don't all machines?"

"Myself, I could go for some eggs right now.  How about you?  What've
we got left?"  Martin went to the sink.  It was full of floating
dishes.

"Hey, what the hell is it with the maid?  We did remember to leave her
a tip yesterday.  Didn't we?"

"One of us must have."

That was it, then.  That was why she had skipped them, and then snubbed
him this morning.  That had to be it.  Didn't it?

The tape deck next door was now blaring a golden oldie by Steely Clan.
Martin slid the glass door closed.  Then he snagged his trousers from
the back of a chair and put them on over his trunks.  Started to put
them on.  They did not feel right.  He patted his back pocket.

Will slid the door back open halfway.

"You're serious, aren't you?  Look at it this way.  Leave it like this
and the gas'll just blow on outside.  Relax, man.  That's what you came
down here for, isn't it?  After what happened, you need..."

Martin checked the chair.  On the table were a deck of playing cards
from a Mission Bay savings and loan, the backs of which were imprinted
with instructions about conserving energy, a Mexican wrestling magazine
with a cover picture of the masked hero, El Santo, in the ring against
a hooded character in red jumpsuit and horns, and an old mineral water
bottle full of cigarette butts.  On the floor, lying deflated between
the table legs, was his wallet.

"There's another reason, I'm afraid."  Martin twisted open the empty
wallet and showed it to his friend.

"Who in the hell...?"

"Well, it certainly wasn't the maid.  Look at this place."  Outside, a
small local boy came trudging through the patios.  He was carrying a
leather case half as big as he was.  He hesitated at the cabin on the
south side, as three teen-aged American boys, their hair layered
identically and parted in the middle, called their girls out into the
sun.

"It must have happened during the night."

"Christ!"  said Will.  He slapped the tabletop.  He reached for

his own wallet.  It was intact.

"There.  I was over there partying all night, remember?  They must've
passed by every place where anybody was still up."

The small boy opened his case and the American girls began poring
excitedly over a display of Indian jewelry, rings and belt buckles and
necklaces of bright tooled silver and turquoise.  From a distance, an
old man watched the boy and waited, nodding encouragement.

"You should have gone with me," said Will.

"I told you.

Well, don't you worry, Jack.  I've got plenty here for both of us."

"No, man.  I can wire my agent or--" "Look," said Will, "I can even
kite a check if I have to, to cover the rental till we get back.
They'll go for it.  I've been coming here since I was a kid."

I've got to get away from here, thought Martin.  No, that isn't right.
Where else is there to go?  I've come this far already just to get
away.  It's hopeless.  It always was.  You can run, he told himself,
but you can't hide.  Why didn't I realize that?

"Here," said Will.

"Here's twenty for now."

"Are you sure?"

"Don't worry about it.  I'd better go see if the nurses got hit, too.
Saw a bunch of people in a huddle down the beach a while ago."  He
drained his glass.

"Then I'll make another beer run.  The hell with it.  We're gonna party
tonight, God damn it!  You going by the office, Jack?"

"Sure."

"Then you might as well report it to the old lady.  I think she's got a
son or a nephew in the federales.  Maybe they can do something about
it."

"Maybe," said Martin, cracking open a beer.  He could have told Will
that it wouldn't do any good.  He stopped in at the office anyway.  It
didn't.

He wandered on up the highway to Enrique's Cafe.  On the way he passed
a squashed black cat, the empty skin of it in among the plants, the
blood-red flowers and spotted adder's tongues and succulents by the
roadside.  The huevos rancheros were runny but good.  When he got back,
Will's four-wheel' drive was still parked under the carport.  He took
the keys and made the beer run into town himself, police cars honking
him out of the way to make left turns from right-hand lanes, zigzagging
across the busy intersections of the city to avoid potholes.  He bought
a case of Dos Equis and, for forty cents more, a liter of soft, hot
tortillas.  As the afternoon wore on he found himself munching them,
rolled with butter and later plain, even though he wasn't really
hungry.

That evening he sat alone on a bench by the rocks, hearing but not
listening to a Beatles song ("Treat Me Like You Did the Night Before"),
the smoke from his Delicado wafting on the breeze, blending with wood
smoke from the chimneys and rising slowly to leave a smear like the
Milky Way across the Pleiades.  It's time for me to leave this place,
he thought.  Not to run away, no, not this time; but to go back.  And
face the rest of it, my life, no matter how terrible things may have
turned back home since I left.

Not Will, though; he should stay awhile longer if he likes.  True, it
was my idea; he only took the time off at my suggestion, setting it all
up to make me comfortable; he knew I couldn't take any more last week,
the way things were up there.  He's my friend.  Still, he was probably
waiting for just such an excuse in order to get away himself.

So I'll call or wire the agency for a plane ticket, give them a
cock-and-bull story about losing everything--the truth, in other words.
It was the truth, wasn't it?  I'll say the trip was part of the
assignment.  I had to come down here to work on some new sketches for
the book, to follow a lead about headstone rubbings in, let's see,
Guanajuato.  Only I never made it that far.  I stopped off for some
local color.  Charge it against my royalty statement .... I'll talk to
them tomorrow.  Yes, tomorrow.  Meanwhile, there's still tonight ....
But I should tell Will first.

He resumed walking.  There was a fire on the brealoaater by the Point.
He went toward it.  Will would be in one of the cabins, partying with a
vengeance.  Martin glanced in one window.  A slide show was in
progress, with shots that looked like the pockmarked surface of another
planet taken from space.  He pressed

closer and saw that these pictures were really close-ups of the faces
of newborn seals or sea lions.  Not that one, he thought, and moved
on.

One of the parties he came to was in the big cabin two doors north of
his own.  That one was being rented, he remembered, by the producer of
a show in the late seventies called STARSHIP DISCO.  Martin had never
seen it.

An Elvis Costello tape shook the walls.  A young card hustler held
forth around the living room table.  A warm beer was pushed into
Martin's hand by a girl.  He popped the beer open and raised it,
feeling his body stir as he considered her.  Why not?  But she could be
my daughter, technically, he thought, couldn't she?  Then: what a
disgusting point of view.  Then: what am I doing to myself?.  Then it
was too late; she was gone.

Will was not in the back rooms.  The shelf in the hallway held three
toppling books.  Well well, he thought, there are readers down here,
after all.  Then he examined them--By Love Possessed by Cozzens,
Invitation to Tea by Monica Lang (The People's Book Club, Chicago,
1952), The Foundling by Francis Cardinal Spellman.  They were covered
with years of dust.

He ducked into the bathroom and shut the door, seeing the mirror and
razor blade lying next to the sink, the roll of randomly-perforated
crepe paper toilet tissue.  There was a knock on the door.  He excused
himself and went out, and found Will in the kitchen.

"iDos cervezas, Juan!"  Will was shouting.

"Whoa.  I feel more like I do now than when I got here!"  With some
prodding, he grabbed two cold ones and followed Martin outside, rubbing
his eyes.

He seemed relieved to sit down.

"So," began Martin.

"What did you find out?  Did anyone else get popped last night?"

"Plenty!  One, the nurses.  Two, the bitch from San Diego.  Three,
the--where is it now?  Ojai.  Those people.  The..."  He ran out of
fingers.

"Let's see.  Anyway, there's plenty, let me tell you."

The ships were now even nearer the shore.  Martin saw their black hulls
closing in over the waves.

"I was thinking," he said.

"Maybe it's time to go.  What would you say to that, man?"

"Nobody's running scared.  That's not the way to play it.  You should
hear 'em talk.  They'll get his ass next time, whoever he is.  Believe
it.  The kids, they didn't get hit.  But three of those other guys are
rangers.  Plus there's the cop.  See the one in there with the hat?  He
says he's gonna lay a trap, cut the lights about three o'clock,
everybody gets quiet, then barn!  You better believe it.

They're mad as hell."

"But why--" "It's the dock strike.  It happens every year when there's
a layoff.  The locals get hungry.  They swoop down out of the hills
like bats."

Just then a flaming object shot straight through the open front door
and f'Lzzled out over the water.  There was a hearty "All r-right from
a shadow on the porch, and then the patio was filled with pogoing
bodies and clapping hands.  The night blossomed with matches and
fireworks, 1000-foot skyrockets, bottle rockets and volleys of Mexican
cherry bombs, as the party moved outside and chose up sides for a
firecracker war.  Soon Martin could no longer hear himself think.  He
waited it out.  Will was laughing.

Martin scanned the beach beneath the screaming lights.  And noticed
something nearby that did not belong.  It was probably a weird
configuration of kelp, but.."  he got up and investigated.

It was only this: a child's broken doll, wedged half-under the stones.
What had he supposed it was?  It had been washed in on the tide, or
deliberately dismembered and its parts strewn at the waterline, he
could not tell which.  In the flickering explosions, its rusty eye
sockets appeared to be streaked with tears.

A minute after it had begun, the firecracker war was over.  They sat
apart from the cheering and the breaking bottles, watching the last
shot of a Roman candle sizzle below the surface of the water like a
green torpedo.  There was scattered applause, and then a cry went up
from another party house down the beach as a new round of fireworks was
launched there.  Feet slapped the sand, dodging rocks.

"Do you really believe that?"

DENNIS ETCHISON THE DARK COUNTRY 199

"What?"

"About someone coming down from the hills," said Martin.  Like bats. He
shuddered.

"Watch this," said Will.  He took his bottle and threw it into the air,
snapping it so it flew directly at a palm tree thirty feet away.  It
smashed into the trunk at the ragged trim line.

Instantly the treetop began to tremble.  There was a high rustling and
a shaking and a scurrying.  And a rattling of tiny claws.  A jagged
frond dropped spear like to the beach.

"See that?  It's rats.  The trees around here are full of 'em.  You see
how bushy it is on top?  It never gets trimmed up there.  Those rats
are born, live and die in the trees.  They never touch down."

"But how?  I mean, what do they eat ifm?"

"Dates.  Those are palm trees, remember?  And each other, probably.
You've never seen a dead one on the ground, have you?"

Martin admitted he hadn't.

"Not that way with the bats, though.  They have to come out at night.
Maybe they even hit the rats.  I never saw that.  But they have mouths
to feed, don't they?  There's nothing much to eat up in the hills.  It
must be the same with the peasants.  They have families.  Wouldn't
you?"

"I hate to say this.  But.  You did lock up, didn't you?"

Will laughed dryly.

"Come on.  I've got something for you.  I think it's time you met the
nurses."

Martin made a quick side trip to check the doors at their place, and
they went on.  They covered the length of the beach before Will found
the porch he was looking for.  Martin reached out to steady his friend,
and almost fell himself.  He was getting high.  It was easy.

As they let themselves in, the beach glimmered at their backs with
crushed abalone shells and scuttling hermit crabs.  Beyond the oil
tankers, the uncertain outline of the island loomed in the bay.  It was
called Dead Man's Island, Will told him.

He woke with the sensation that his head was cracking open.  Music or
something like it in the other room, throbbing through the thin walls
like the pounding of surf.  Voices.  An argument of

some kind.  He brushed at the cobwebs.  He had been lost in a nightmare
of domination and forced acquiescence before people who meant to do him
harm.  It returned to him in fragments.  What did it mean?  He shook it
off and rolled out of bed.

There was the floor he had pressed with his hand last night to stop the
room from spinning.  There was the nurse, tangled in the sheets next to
him.  He guessed she was the nurse.  He couldn't see her face.

He went into the bathroom.  He took a long draught of water from the
faucet before he came out.  He raised his head and the room spun again.
The light from the window hurt his eyes--actual physical pain.  He
couldn't find his sock.  He tottered into the other room.

A young man with blown-dry hair was playing the tape deck too loudly.
The sound vibrated the bright air, which seemed thin and brittle,
hammering it like beaten silver.  There was the girl in the blue tank
top, still seated next to the smoldering fireplace.  An empty bottle of
Damiana Liqueur was balanced against her thigh.  Her eyes were closed
and her face was stony.  He wondered if she had slept that way, propped
upright all night.  On the table were several Parker Brothers-type
games from stateside: Gambler, Creature Features, The Game of Life.  A
deck of Gaiety Brand nudie cards, with a picture on the box of a puppy
pulling a bikini top out of a purse.  Someone had been playing
solitaire.  Martin couldn't remember.

There was a commotion outside.

"What's that?"  he said, shielding his eyes.

"Talking Heads," said the young man.  He showed Martin the tape box.

"They're pretty good.  That lead guitar line is hard to play.  It's so
repetitious."

"No, I mean .. ."

Martin scratched and went into the kitchen.  It was unoccupied, except
for a cricket chirping somewhere behind the refrigerator.  Breakfast
was in process; eggs were being scrambled in a blender the nurses had
brought with them from home.  Martin protected his eyes again and
looked outside.

There was Will.  And there were three or four tan beach boys from the
other party.  And the cop.  He wasn't doing his leg exercises this
morning.  They were having an argument.

Martin stumbled out.

"But you can't do that," one of them was saying.

"Stay cool, okay, mother fuck  You want the whole beach to know?"

"You think they don't already?"

"The hell they do!  We drug him over out of the way.  No one'll--" "No
one but the maids!"

"That's what I'm saying.  You guys are a bunch of jack-offs.  Jesus
Christ!  I'm about this close to kicking your ass right now, do you
know that?"

"All right, all right!"  said Will.

"That kind of talk's just digging us in deeper.  Now let's run through
the facts.  One--" Martin came up.  They shot looks at each other that
both startled him and made him unreasonably afraid for their safety as
well as his own.  They stopped talking, their eyes wild, as if they had
gobbled a jar of Mexican amphetamines.

Will took him aside.

"We've got to do something!"  said the one with the souvenir hat.

"What're you--?"

"Hold on," said Will.

"We're all in this together, like it or--"

"I'm not the one who--" "--Like it or not.  Now just try to keep a
tight asshole another minute, will you, while I talk to my friend Jack?
It's his neck, too."

They started back up the beach.  Will propelled him ahead of the
others, as to a rendezvous of great urgency.

"They got him," said Will.

"Who?"

"The thief, whoever he was.  Poor bastard.  Two guys from next door
cornered him outside our place.  Sometime around dawn, the way I get
it.  Apparently he fell on the rocks.  He's dead.  They found me here a
little while ago.  Now--" What?

"--Now there's no use shitting bricks.  It's done.  What we

have to do is think of a way to put ourselves in the clear--fast. We're
the strangers here."

"We can make it look like an accident," said the one in the hat.

"Those rocks are--" "Accident, hell," said the security cop.

"It was self-defense, breaking and entering.  We caught him and blew
him away.  No court in--" "This isn't the USA, you dumb shit.  You know
what greaser jails are like?  They hate our guts.  All they want's our
money.  This buddy of mine, he got .. ."

And so it went till they reached the porch, the surrounding beach
littered with the casings of burnt-out rockets, vomit drying on the
rocks, broken clam shells bleaching between the rocks, the rocks like
skulls.  And here blood, vivid beyond belief even on the bricks of the
patio, great splotches and gouts of it, like gold coins burnished in
the sun, a trail that led them in the unforgiving light of day to the
barbecue pit and the pile of kindling stacked in the charcoal shade.

Martin knelt and tore at the logs.

And there.

The body was hidden inside a burlap sack.  It was the body of the boy
who had come by yesterday, the boy who had wanted to sell his
jewelry.

He felt his stomach convulse.  The small face was scraped raw, the long
eyelashes caked and flaking, the dark skin driven from two of the ribs
to show white muscle and bone.  A great fear overtook Martin, like
wings settling upon him, blocking out the sun.  He folded under them
momentarily and dry-heaved in the ashes.

Will was pacing the narrow patio like a prisoner in a cell, legs
pumping out and back over the cracking cement, pivoting faster and
faster at the edges until he was practically spinning, generating a
hopeless rage that would not be denied but could not be released.  His
hands were shaking violently, and his arms and shoulders and body.  He
looked around with slitted eyes, chin out, lips drawn in, jaws grinding
stone.  Far down the beach by the Point an elderly man came walking,
hesitating at each house and searching each lot.  He was carrying a
leather case.

Will said, "You kicked him to death, didn't you?  You stomped this
child until he was dead."  Then, his voice a hiss, he began to curse
them between his teeth with an unspeakable power and vileness.  The one
in the hat tried to break in.  He started shouting.

"It was dark!  He could've been anyone!  What was he doing creepin'
around here?  He could've been--" But Will was upon him, his arms
corded, his fingers 'going for the throat.  The others closed in.
People on the beach were turning to stare.  Martin saw it all as if in
slow motion: himself rising at last to his full height, leaping into it
a split-second before the others could grab hold, as he fell on their
arms to stop the thumbs from Will's eyes, to break Will's hands from
the other's throat.  Everything stopped.  Martin stepped between them
as the young one fell back to the flagstone wall.  Martin raised his
right hand, flattened and angled it like a knife.  With his left he
cupped the back of the young man's neck, holding it almost tenderly.
The young man's eyes were almost kind.  They were eyes Martin had seen
all his life, outside recruiting offices and Greyhound bus depots the
years over, and they were a law unto themselves.  He brought his right
hand down sharp and hard across the face, again, again, three times,
like pistol shots.  The tan went white, then red where he had slapped
it.  For a moment nobody said anything.  The old man kept coming.

They passed motorcycle cops, overheated VW's, Jeeps, Chevy Luvs, Ford
Couriers with camper shells, off-road vehicles with heavy-duty shocks
and, a mile outside of town, a half-acre of pastel gravestones by the
main road.  Martin fit as best he could among the plastic water jugs,
sleeping bags and Instamatic cameras in the back seat.  The boys from
next door were piled in with him, the one in the hat in front and Will
at the controls of the four-wheel drive.

The twenty-mile access road behind Ensenada wound them higher and
higher, pummeling them continuously until they were certain that the
tie rods or the A-frame or their bodies would shake loose and break
apart at the very next turn.  The lane shrank to a mere dirt strip,
then to a crumbling shale-and-sandstone ledge

cut impossibly around the backs of the hills, a tortuous serpentine
above abandoned farmland and the unchecked acreage between the
mountains and the sea.  Twice at least one of the wheels left the road
entirely; they had to pile out and lay wild branches under the tires to
get across fissures that had no bottom.  Martin felt his kidneys begin
to ache under the endless pounding.  One of the boys threw up and
continued to retch over the side until Will decided they had gone far
enough, but no one opened his mouth to complain.  After more than an
hour, they set the hand brake at the start of a primitive downslope,
blocked the wheels with granite chips and stumbled the rest of the way,
numb and reeling.

The silence was overpowering.  Nothing moved, except for the random
scrabbling of lizards and the falling of individual leaves and blades
of grass.  As they dragged the sack down to the meadows, Martin
concentrated on the ribbon of dirt they had driven, watching for the
first sign of another car, however unlikely that was.  A small, puddled
heat mirage shimmered on the dust, coiled and waiting to be splashed. A
squirrel darted across the road, silhouetted as it paused in
stop-motion, twitched its pointed head and then ran on, disappearing
like an escaped shooting gallery target.  Great powdered monarch
butterflies aimlessly swam the convection currents; like back home, he
thought.  Yes, of course; I should have known.  Only too much like
home.

"Dig here," said Will.

The old wound in Martin's foot was hurting him again.  He had thought
it would be healed by now, but it wasn't.  He rocked back wearily on
one heel.  A withered vine caught at his ankle.  It snapped easily with
a dull, fleshy sound as he shook free.  He took another step, and
something moist and solid broke underfoot.  He looked down.

He kicked at the grass.  It was only a tiny melon, one of dozens
scattered nearby and dying on the vine.  He rolled it over, revealing
its soft underbelly.  Too much rain this season, he thought absently;
too much or too little, nourishing them excessively or not enough. What
was the answer?  He picked it up and lobbed it over their heads. It
splattered on the road in a burst of pink.  Watermelons, he thought,
while fully-formed seeds pale as unborn larvae slithered off his shoe
and into the damp grass.  Who planted them here?  And who will return
for the harvest, only to fred them already gone to seed?  He stooped
and wiped his hand.  There was a faint but unmistakable throb and
murmur in the ground, as though through a railroad track, announcing an
unseen approach from miles away.

"What are you going to do, Jackie?"

Martin stared back at Will.  He hadn't expected the question, not
now.

"It's like this," said Will, taking him to one side.

"Michael, for one, wants to get back to his own van and head on deeper
into Baja, maybe San Quintin, lay low for a few days.  He wasn't
registered, so there's no connection.  Some of the others sound like
they're up for the same, or for going north right away, tonight.
Kevin's due to check out today, anyway."

"And you?"

"Don't know yet.  I haven't decided.  I'll probably stay on for
appearances, but you do what you want.  I wouldn't worry about the maid
or anyone coming by to check up.  Anyway, we hosed off the patio.
Nobody else saw a thing, I'm sure.  The girls don't know anything about
it."

There was a grunt.  The sack, being lowered, had split open at the
seams.  Hands hurried to reclose it.

"What's that?"

Wil/grabbed a wrist.  A silver bracelet inlaid with polished turquoise
glittered against a bronze tan in the afternoon light.

"I--I bought it."

"Sure you did," said Will.

"I brought it with me on the trip.  Ask my girl.  Shem" Will stripped
it off the arm and flung it into the shallow grave.

"You want to get out of this alive, kiddo?  That kind of work can be
traced.  Or didn't you think of that?  You didn't think, did you?  What
else did you steal from him while you were at it yesterday?  Is that
why he came back last night?  Is it?"

"Lookit, man, where do you get off--" "We al hang together," said Will,
"or we all hang together.  Get it?"

He got to his knees to close the sack.  As an afterthought, he reached
deep and rifled the dead child's pockets for anything that might tie in
with Quintas Papagayo.

His hand stopped.  He withdrew a wad of paper money which fell open, a
flower on his palm.  A roll of American dollars, traveler's checks,
credit cards.

"Hey, that's--" "I had eighty bucks on me when--" Martin joined him in
examining the roll.  The checks were signed NORMAN WINSLOW.  Two of the
cards, embossed on the front and signed on the back, read JACK

MARTIN.

"Knew I was right!"  said the one in the felt hat.

"Fuck if I wasn't!  Lookit that!  The little son of a bitch .... "

Martin straight-armed the wheel, running in darkness.

He reminded himself of the five-dollar bill clipped to the back of his
license.  Then he remembered that his wallet was flat, except for the
credit cards.  Motorcycle cops passed him like fugitive Hell's Angels.
He kicked on the lights of his rented car and thought of the last news
tape of the great Karl Wallenda.  He had been running, too, though in
wind, not fog, toward or away from something.

Did he look back, I wonder?  Was that why it happened?  ... Heading for
the end, his last that day was weak.  Or maybe he looked ahead that
once, saw it was the same, and just gave up the ghost.  No, not
Wallenda.  For him the game was running while pretending not to--or the
other way around.  Was that his private joke?  Even in Puerto Rico, for
him the walk was all.  Keep your head clear, he wanted to tell
Wallenda.  For that was how it finished, stopping to consider.  But
Wallenda must have known; he had been walking for years.  Still he
should have remembered .... Martin put on his brights, gripped the
steering wheel and made for the border.

He turned on the radio, found an American station.

It was playing a song by a group called The Tubes.  He remembered the
Trivoll Night club, the elevated band playing "Around the World" and "A
Kiss to Build a Dream On."  He remembered Hussong's Cantina, the knife
fight that happened, his trip to the Blow Hole, policia with short hair
and semiautomatic rifles.  The house trailers parked on the Point, the
Point obscured by mist.  The military guns with silencers... The doll
whose parts had been severed, its eyes opening in moonlight.

Shaking, he turned his mind to what lay ahead.  He wanted to see
someone; he tried to think of her face.  Her eyes would find his there
under the beam ceiling, the spider plants in the corners growing into
the carpet, the waves on Malibu beach, the Pleiades as bright, shining
on what was below: the roots between the rocks, the harbor lights like
eyes, the anemones closed inward, gourds and giant mushrooms, the
endless pull of riptide, the seagulls white as death's-heads, the
police with trimmed moustaches, the dark ships at anchor .... He came
to a bridge on the tollway.  Ahead lay the border.  To his right a
sign, a turnoff that would take him back into Baja.

He sat with the motor running, trying to pick a direction.

Printing and binding for this volume by BraunBrumfield, Inc."  Arm
Arbor, Michigan, through the agency of Paul de Fremery, San Francisco,
California.

Garamond text typeset by The Typesetters, Santa Cruz, California.

Cover printed by Pilot Press, Santa Cruz, California.

Book design by Jeff Conner.

Acid free paper used throughout.

Of the first edition of 1,000 copies printed, 100 are numbered and
signed by the author and artist.

Dennis Etchison's

THE

DARK

COUNTRY

Illustrated by J. K. Potter Introduction by Ramsey Campbell

Sixteen stories of modern horror and dar fantasy collected for the
first time in this limite edition.  Includes "The Dark Country," winn
of the British Fantasy Award for best short stor of 1981.

Illustrated by leading artist of the macabrt J.K. Potter, with a
special introduction b Ramsey Campbell.

SCREAM PRESS bad books

Jacket by J. K. Potter Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN: 0910489009