And then it happens. Helen slaps him hard across the face, dragging her fistful of keys through each cheek. A moment later, more blood.

Another scarred parasite. Another mutilated cockroach ar-moire.

And Helen's eyes snap up from Oyster bleeding to the starlings circling above us, and bird by bird, they drop. Their black feathers flashing an oily blue. Their dead eyes just staring black beads. Oyster holds his face, both his hands full of blood. Helen glaring up into the sky, the shining black bodies hiss down and bounce, bird by bird, around us on the concrete.

Constructive destruction.

Chapter 31

A mile outside of town, Helen pulls over to the side of the highway. She puts on the car's emergency flashers. Looking at nothing but her hands, her skintight calfskin driving gloves on the steering wheel, she says, "Get out."

On the windshield, there are little contact lenses of water. It's starting to rain.

"Fine," Oyster says, and jerks his car door open. He says, "Isn't this what people do with dogs they can't house-train?"

His face and hands are smeared red with blood. The devil's face. His shattered blond hair sticks up from his forehead, stiff and red as devil's horns. His red goatee. In all this red, his eyes are white. It's not the white of white flags, surrender. It's the white of hard-boiled eggs, crippled chickens in battery cages, factory farm misery and suffering and death.

"Just like Adam and Eve getting evicted from the Garden of Eden," he says. Oyster stands on the gravel shoulder of the highway and leans down to look at Mona still in the backseat, and he says, "You coming, Eve?"

It's not about love, it's about control.

Behind Oyster, the sun's going down. Behind him is Russian thistle and Scotch broom and kudzu. Behind him, the whole world's a mess.

And Mona with the ruins of Western civilization braided into her hair, the bits of dream catcher and I Ching, she looks at her black fingernails in her lap and says, "Oyster, what you did is wrong."

Oyster puts his hand into the car, reaching across the seat to her, his hand red and clotted, and he says, "Mulberry, despite all your herbal good intentions, this trip is not going to work." He says, "Come with me."

Mona sets her teeth together and snaps her face to look at him, saying, "You threw away my Indian crafts book." She says, "That book was very important to me."

Some people still think knowledge is power.

"Mulberry, honey," Oyster says, and strokes her hair, the hair sticking to his bloody hand. He tucks a skein of hair behind her ear and says, "That book was fucked."

"Fine," says Mona, and she pulls away and folds her arms.

And Oyster says, "Fine." And he slams the car door, his hand leaving a bloody print on the window.

His red hands raised at his sides, Oyster steps back from the car. Shaking his head, he says, "Forget about me. I'm just another one of God's alligators you can flush down the toilet."

Helen shifts the car into drive. She touches some switch, and Oyster's door locks.

And from outside the locked car, muffled and fuzzy, Oyster yells, "You can flush me, but I'll just keep eating shit." He shouts, "And I'll just keep growing."

Helen puts on her turn signal and starts out into traffic.

"You can forget me," Oyster yells. With his red yelling devil face, his teeth big and white, he yells, "But that doesn't mean I don't still exist."

For whatever reason, the first gypsy moth that flew out a window in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1860 comes to mind.

And driving, Helen touches her eye with one finger, and when she puts her hand back on the steering wheel, the glove finger is a darker brown. Wet. And for better or for worse. For richer or poorer. This is her life.

Mona puts her face in both hands and starts to sob.

And counting 1, counting 2, counting 3 ..., I turn on the radio.

Chapter 32

The town's name is Stone River on the map. Stone River, Nebraska. But when the Sarge and I get there, the sign at the city limits is painted over with the name '''Shivapuram."

Nebraska.

Population 17,000.

In the middle of the street, straddling the center line dashes is a brown and white cow we have to swerve around. Chewing its cud, the cow doesn't flinch.

The downtown is two blocks of red-brick buildings. A yellow signal light blinks above the main intersection. A black cow is scratching its side against the metal pole of a stop sign. A white cow eats zinnias out of a window box in front of the post office. Another cow lies, blocking the sidewalk in front of the police station.

You smell curry and patchouli. The deputy sheriff's wearing sandals. The deputy, the mailman, the waitress in the café, the bartender in the tavern, they're all wearing a black dot pasted between their eyes. A bindi.

"Crimony," the Sarge says. "The whole towns gone Hindu."

According to this week's

Psychic Wonders Bulletin, this is all because of the talking Judas Cow.

In any slaughterhouse operation, the trick is to fool cows into climbing the chute that leads to the killing floor. Cows trucked in from farms, they're confused, scared After hours or days squeezed into trucks, dehydrated and awake the whole trip, the cows are thrown in with other cows in the feedlot outside the slaughterhouse.

How you get them to climb the chute is you send in the Judas Cow. This is really what this cow is called. It's a cow that lives at the slaughterhouse. It mingles with the doomed cows, then leads them up the chute to the killing floor. The scared, spooked cows would never go except for the Judas Cow leading the way.

The last step before the ax or the knife or the steel bolt through the skull, at that last moment, the Judas Cow steps aside. It survives to lead another herd to their death It does this for its entire life.

Until, according to the

Psychic Wonders Bulletin, the Judas Cow at the Stone River Meatpacking Plant, one day it stopped.

The Judas Cow stood blocking the doorway to the killing floor. It refused to step aside and let the herd behind it die. With the whole slaughterhouse crew watching, the Judas Cow sat on its hind legs, the way a dog sits, the cow sat there in the doorway and looked at everyone with its brown cow eyes and talked.

The Judas Cow talked.

It said, "Reject your meat-eating ways."

The cow's voice was the voice of a young woman. The cows in line behind it, they shifted their weight from foot to foot, waiting.

The slaughterhouse crew, their mouths fell open so fast their cigarettes dropped out on the bloody floor. One man swallowed his chewing tobacco. A woman screamed through her fingers.

The Judas Cow, sitting there, it raised one front leg to point its hoof at the crew and said, "The path to moksha is not through the pain and suffering of other creatures."

"Moksha" says the

Psychic Wonders Bulletin, is a Sanskrit word for "redemption," the end of the karmic cycle of reincarnation.

The Judas Cow talked all afternoon. It said human beings had destroyed the natural world. It said mankind must stop exterminating other species. Man must limit his numbers, create a quota system which allows only a small percentage of the planet's beings to be human. Humans could live any way they liked so long as they were not the majority.

It taught them a Hindi song. The cow made the whole crew sing along while it swung its hoof back and forth to the beat of the song.

The cow answered all their questions about the nature of life and death.

The Judas Cow just droned on and on and on.