He couldn’t stand the sick ratblood heat against his skin another second. He tore his shirt the rest of the way open and then pulled it off. He did it one-handed. There was no way he was going to drop the tire iron. You’ll take my tire iron when you pry it from my cold dead fingers, he thought, and laughed. He was still shuddering. He exam-ined his chest carefully, obsessively, for any break in the skin. There was none. “Lucky,” he muttered to himself as he pulled the recapper over to the wall and then hurried to the garage door.

“Lucky, goddam lucky, fucking goddam rat-in-the-box.”

He pushed the button by the door and it began trundling up. He stepped to one side, giving Cynthia room, looking everywhere for rats and spiders and God knew what other nasty surprises. Next to the worktable was a gray me-chanic’s coverall hanging from a nail, and as Cynthia drove the Ryder truck into the garage, engine roaring and lights glaring, Steve began to beat this coverall with the tire iron, working from the legs up like a woman beating a rug, watching to see what might run out of the legs or armholes.

Cynthia killed the truck’s engine and slid down from the driver’s seat. “Whatcha doin.

Why’d you take your shirt off. You’ll catch your death of cold, the tempera ture’s already started to-”

“Rats.” He had reached the top of the coverall without spooking any wildlife; now he started working his way back down again. Better safe than sorry. He kept hearing the sound the rat’s spine had made when it broke, kept feeling the rat’s tail in his fist. Hot, it had been. Hot.

“Rats.” She. looked around, eyes darting.

“And spiders. The spiders are what got the guy in th He was suddenly alone, Cynthia out the open garage door and on the tarmac, standing in the wind and blowing sand with her arms wrapped around her thin shoulders “Spiders, ouug, I hate spiders! Worse’n snakes!” She sounded pissed, as if the spiders were his fault. “Get out of there!”

He decided the coverall was safe. He pulled it off the hook, started to toss the tire iron away, then changed his mind. Holding the coverall draped over one arm, he pushed the button beside the door and then went over to Cynthia. She was right, it was getting cold.

The alkali dust stung his bare shoulders and stomach. He began to wriggle his way into the coverall. It was going to be a little baggy in the gut, but better too big than too small, he supposed.

“I’m sorry,” she said, wincing and holding a hand to the side of her face as the wind gusted, driving a sheet of sand at them. “It’s just, spiders, ouug, so bad, I can’t… what kind.”

“You don’t want to know.” He zipped the coverall up the front, then put an arm around her. “Did you leave any thing in the truck.”

“My backpack, but I guess I can do without a change of underwear tonight,” she said, and smiled wanly. “What about your phone.”

He patted his left front jeans pocket through the cover-all. “Don’t leave home without it,”

he said. Something tickled across the back of his neck and be slapped at it madly, thinking of the brown recluses lined up so neatly along the edge of the desk, soldiers in some unknown cause out here in nowhere.

“What’s wrong.”

“I’m just a little freaked. Come on. Let’s go to the movies.”

“Oh,” she said in that prim little no-nonsense voice that just cracked him up. “A date.

Yes, thanks.”

As Tom Bittingsley led Mary, the Carvers, and America’s greatest living novelist (at least in the nov-elist’s opinion) down the alley between The American West and the Desperation Feed and Grain, the wind hooted above them like air blown across the mouth of a pop bottle.

“Don’t use the flashlights,” Ralph said.

“Right,” Billingsley said. “And watch out here. Gar-bage cans, and a pile of old crap.

Lumber, tin cans.”

They skirted around the huddle of cans and the pile of scrap lumber. Mary gasped as Marinville took her arm, at first not sure who it was. When she saw the long, somehow theatrical hair, she attempted to pull free. “Spare me the chivalry. I’m doing fine.”

“I’m not,” he said, holding on. “I don’t see for shit at night anymore. It’s like being blind.” He sounded dif-ferent. Not humble, exactly-she had an idea that John Marinville could no more be humble than some people could sing middle C off a pitch-pipe-but at least human. She let him hold on.

“Do you see any coyotes.” Ralph asked her in a low voice.

She restrained an urge to make a smart come-back-at least he hadn’t called her “ma’am.”

“No. But I can barely see my own hand in front of my face.”

“They’re gone,” David said. He sounded completely sure of himself. “At least for now.”

“How do you know.” Marinville asked.

David shrugged in the gloom. “Just do.”

And Mary thought they could probably trust him on it. That was how crazy things had gotten.

Billingsley led them around the corner. A rickety board fence ran along the backside of the movie theater, leaving a gap of about four feet. The old man walked slowly along this path with his hands held out. The others fol-lowed in single file; there was no room to double up. Mary was just starting to think Billingsley had gotten them down here on some sort of wild-goose chase when he stopped.

“Here we are.”

He bent, and Mary saw him pick something up-a crate, it looked like. He put it on top of another one, then stepped up onto the makeshift platform with a wince. He was standing in front of a dirty frosted-glass window. He put his hands on this, the fingers spread like starfish, and pushed. The window slid up.

“It’s the ladies’,” he said. “Watch out. There’s a little drop.”

He turned around and slid through, looking like a large, wrinkled boy entering the Over—the-Hill Gang’s club-house. David followed, then his father. Johnny Marinville went next, first almost falling off the crate platform as he turned around. He really was close to blind in the dark, she thought, and reminded herself never to ride in a car this man was driving. And a motorcycle. Had he really crossed the country on a motorcycle. If so, God must love him a lot more than she ever would.

She grabbed him by the back of the belt and steadied him. “Thanks,” he said, and this time he did sound humble. Then he was wriggling through the window, puffing and grunting, his long hair hanging in his face.

Mary took one quick look around, and for a moment she heard ghost-voices in the wind.

Didn’t you see it.

See what.

On that sign. That speed-limit sign.

What about it.

There was a dead cat on it.

Now, standing on the crate, she thought: The people who said those things really are ghosts, because they ’re dead. Me as much as him-certainly the Mary Jackson who left on this trip is gone. The person back here behind this old movie house, she’s someone new.

She passed her gun and flashlight through the window to the hands held up to take them, then turned around and slid easily over the sill and into the ladies”.

Ralph caught her around the hips and eased her down. David was shining his flashlight around, holding one hand over the top of the lens in a kind of hood. The place had a smell that made her wrinkle her nose-damp, mildew, booze. There was a carton filled with empty liquor bottles in one corner. In one of the toilet-stalls there were two large plastic bins filled with beer-cans. These had been placed over a hole where, once upon a time, she supposed, there had been an actual toilet. Around the time James Dean died, from the look of the place, she thought. She realized she could use a toilet herself, and that no matter how the place smelled, she was hungry, as well. Why not. She hadn’t had anything to eat for almost eight hours. She felt guilty about being hungry when Peter would never eat again, but she supposed the feeling would pass. That was the hell of it, when you thought it over. That was the exact hell of it.