Текст книги "Supernatural Noir "

Автор книги: Paul Tremblay

Соавторы: Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan,Brian Evenson,Joe R. Lansdale,Lucius Shepard,Laird Barron,Nate Southard,Gregory Frost,John Langan,Richard Bowes,Tom Piccirilli
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

But the hand stayed there, very lightly, for a second or two, and something squirmed around the edges of Madison’s thoughts.

She did the clamping-the-legs-together and caught Lourdes’s hand where it was. The fingers spread, rubbed.

Then Lourdes gently pulled away and sat back. Gently she asked what Madison was doing. Madison didn’t know. Well, she sort of knew.

“Has somebody touched you there, Madison? On purpose? Not on accident like just happened?”

“Yeah.” Squeaky voice into the baby doll’s hair.

“Can you tell me about it?” A tiny shake of the head, though she could have told; she’d been practicing. “Can you tell the baby doll about it?”

“What’s her name?”

“What do you want her name to be?”

The technique to get buy-in worked. Madison smiled. “Pretty.”

“That’s a good name. Can you tell Pretty about it?”

Careful. Don’t be easy, don’t play too hard to get. There was a humming sensation at the base of her brain—the primal part, the reptilian part that took care of basic survival stuff.

“Is it too scary over there all by yourself, Madison? Do you and Pretty need to come sit by me?”

Madison did need to. This is it. Don’t blow it.

“Or on my lap?” Whoa. “Even a big girl like you needs somebody to hold her sometimes.” Hold sounded nice. Hold me.

“I don’t like it here.”

“You don’t like it here in the office?”

“This room’s ugly.”

Lourdes didn’t take offense or laugh. “Would you like to go into the other room where the toys are?”

Can you say kidnapping? Madison nodded. Lourdes led the way.

They sat on big, soft pillows on the floor. Pretty the doll went onto Lourdes’s lap first, a canary into a mine, into Lourdes’s lap, into the hollow there. Madison sat cross-legged on the floor, crotch open under the white jumper, pink flowered panties barely covered. Little Shit faced forward to fend off any gropes of her chest. Her boobs and crotch were throbbing, boobs painfully, crotch not so much. Hopefully the call button was still there inside the Ace girdle—the temptation to feel for it and give herself away was weirdly erotic, like the urge to step off a cliff that made you have to back away. Instead, she put her hand under her flared skirt and rubbed herself, and saw Lourdes smile.

“Why don’t you come over here by me?”

Madison really wanted to go and really wanted to stay right here, almost but not quite out of reach. It was like being licked in the inside folds of her brain.

What are you doing? Which of the three of them was saying that to which of the three of them?

Lourdes scooted close. She smelled like Lourdes, like somebody Madison didn’t quite remember. “Can you show me with Pretty what somebody did to you?”

Madison giggled and kissed Pretty with her mouth open, touched the plastic mouth with her tongue.

“Someone put his tongue in your mouth?”

“Her.”

“Someone put her tongue in your mouth?”

Madison nodded and licked the doll’s mouth again.

“A grown-up woman?” Madison nodded and the woman’s, the therapist’s voice got even more gentle. “Did she do anything else to you, honey? Touch you anywhere else?”

A heat was spreading in all their minds and bodies now. Madison squirmed. Little Shit tried not to. Lourdes put an arm around her. “Can you show me with Pretty?”

Madison put the doll against her crotch. Little shit really hoped she didn’t have to insert the sorry thing.

“She touched your vagina?” The word clanged like a bell. Lourdes was practically cooing. “Like this?”

It seemed to take long minutes before Lourdes’s fingers actually came into contact with the stretch of pink flowered panties. It seemed to be all one quick motion when the fingers wormed inside the elastic. The realization exploded in Lourdes’s awareness that the skin she was caressing wasn’t hairless but shaved at the same instant that Madison threw up and Little Shit went for the call button.

The Ace bandage unwound and her boobs deployed like airbags. You little shit. The call button wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Then she found it, and Raul and Dixie slammed into the room with guns drawn.

Lourdes just sat there. Madison was gone. Little Shit covered what body parts she could. When they pulled Lourdes to her feet and cuffed her, Thanks was in her mind, like a wave on a beach. Not the word, just the gratitude itself. Thank you then, and the name she’d given Lourdes to call her by. And, before she could get all the way out of Lourdes’s mind, something like I love you.

–

Melanie Tem’s solo novels include her Bram Stoker Award–winning debut, Prodigal, and most recently Slain in the Spirit and The Deceiver. She has also collaborated with Nancy Holder on Making Love and Witch-Light, and with Steve Rasnic Tem on Daughters and The Man on the Ceiling. The earlier novella version of The Man on the Ceiling won the 2001 Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, and World Fantasy Awards. The Tems also collaborated on the award-winning multimedia CD-ROM Imagination Box.

Her short stories have been published in the collection The Ice Downstream; on E-Reads; in numerous magazines, including Colorado State Review, Black Maria, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Cemetery Dance; and in anthologies, including Snow White Blood Red, Acquainted with the Night, Poe, Portals, Black Wings II, and Blood and Other Cravings. She has also published nonfiction articles and poetry.

Tem is also a playwright and an oral storyteller.

She lives in Denver with her husband, writer and editor Steve Rasnic Tem, where she works as an adoption social worker. They have four children and four granddaughters.

| DITCH WITCH |

Lucius Shepard

–

Late in the day, Michael kept passing little towns with deserted streets and winking caution signals, paper trash swirling in the gutters, places that reminded him of movies in which mankind had been destroyed and computers continued to operate stoplights and sprinklers and house pets feasted on the rotting flesh of their owners. Beyond them, sun-browned hills conveyed the interstate north toward Oregon. Traffic was sparse and he boosted his speed, letting the Cadillac drift wide on the turns, driving with his neck turtled and his shoulders hunched. He felt that he was burning with indefinable brilliance and menace, that he had inhabited some nihilistic fantasy and become its outlaw Jesus. Every half an hour or so the girl beside him, a skinny bottle blond in a tank top and cutoffs, would break into his baggie of coke, taking a few hits for herself, then loading the tip of her nail file and holding it beneath his nose, smiling and making meaningful eye contact as he sniffed and blinked. She had milky skin, nice legs, and sharp features that reminded him of photographs from Depression-era Appalachia and matched her hick accent. She might, he thought, remain pretty for three or four years before she began to look dried up and waspish, and that would most likely be fine with her. Three or four good years would be about what she expected.

He had picked her up in a rest area near Sacramento and she had jumped in, abubble with false conviviality, saying, Hi, I’m Tracy, where you heading? Seattle? Me, too! She talked a mile a minute about her travels in Europe, the ex-boyfriend who had become a rock star, an affair with an older man. If she had done half what she claimed, she would have been older than he was, and he figured her for seven or eight years younger. Seventeen, maybe. He had told similar lies during his days on the streets and knew her story was not designed to be believed; it was like a prostitute’s makeup, both a statement of availability and a cheap disguise. She was frightened, probably broke, hoping to hook up with somebody who would take care of her. He wondered if he would let himself be hooked. It would be the stupid thing to do, the careless, impractical thing. The allure might be too much to resist.

“I might not go all the way to Seattle,” he said after driving for an hour through the empty golden afternoon. “I might head east. Hell, I might even head back to LA.”

He thought about Charlie. One kiss, he said to himself. A pathetic little kiss, that’s all it had been. Charlie wasn’t trying to seduce you, he was just fucking up the same as he did with everything else. Punishing himself for playing in a different key. And it’s not as if you were cherry, un-uh, yet here you go running through the world, fuming with outrage and clutching your torn bodice like a goddamn nineteenth-century virgin.

“This car really yours?” the girl asked.

“You think I stole it? I’m not the kind of guy who can afford a Caddy?”

“Naw, I . . .”

“You got me. I stole it from this old fag I lived with in LA.”

A pause. “Yeah. Right.”

“No joke,” he said. “He was like my perv uncle, you know. My pretend daddy. Don’t sweat it. He’ll be too twisted up by me leaving to call the cops. Time he gets around to thinking about the car . . . The guy owns a dealership. He’ll find a way to put it on his insurance.”

She stared at him, horrified.

“I told you it’s cool,” he said.

Her voice quavered as though from strong emotion. “You’re gay?”

He restrained a laugh. “I like girls, but I’ve done a few tricks. You know how it is.”

He looked sharply at her, forcing her to acknowledge the comment—she lowered her head and responded with a frail-as-sugar noise. Satisfied, he swerved around a slow-moving piece of Jap trash and leaned on the horn.

He could still turn back, he thought. Things could be mended. Charlie would fall all over himself trying to apologize, and life at home might be better than ever.

Too realistic, he decided; too humiliating, too logical and kind.

The sky grayed, rinsing the girl’s hair of its sheen—it showed the old yellow of flat ginger ale. Her breasts looked tiny, juiceless. Mouse breasts. She caught his eye and flashed one of her Runaway Poster Child smiles, rife with daffy trust and precocious sexuality. He was offended by her presumption that he would be taken in by it.

“We going to drive straight through?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Might be better to stop somewhere, you know, than hitting Seattle all wore out.”

She said this with studied indifference, fishing in the glove compartment for the coke, making a production of unearthing the vial from among road maps and candy wrappers, as if that, and not the idea of cementing the relationship, were foremost on her mind.

He said, “I’ll see how the driving goes.”

“Well, if I got a vote it’d be great to catch a shower.”

As if in sympathy with her, his skin began to feel oily, itchy, in need of a wash.

She sat sulking, toying with the vial; after a mile or two she began to sing, a frail, wordless tune, something the Lady Ophelia might have essayed during the last stages of distraction. Suddenly vivacious, she waved the vial under his nose and said, “Want to hurt yourself?”

After they had done the coke, she fiddled with the radio, trying to bring in a rock station from the background static, and Michael settled back to enjoy the Cadillac feeling in his head, the Cadillac richness of the afternoon, the richness of a stolen car, cocaine, another man’s money in his pocket and a strange woman at his side.

“You look sick,” said the girl. “Want me to drive?”

“I’m okay.”

“Know what’s the best thing when you’re sick from coke? Milk. And not just milk. Cheese, ice cream. Dairy products, you know. Maybe you should stop somewheres and get some milk.” She crossed her legs, jiggled her foot. “I could go for an ice cream myself. I mean I ain’t sick, you know. I got a thing for ice cream is all. Especially the kind with the polar bears on the wrapper. Ever had one of them?”

“Oh, yeah! They’re terrific.” His grin tightened the packs of muscle at the corners of his mouth.

“I could eat ’em all night long,” she said with immense satisfaction. “Course I wouldn’t want to lose my shape.” She twisted about to face him. “I do a hunnerd sit-ups every morning and every night. I jog, too. You like to jog?”

“You bet.”

“I’m serious. You should take care of yourself.”

“Why?”

“You just should,” she said defensively.

“I’d need a better reason than that to waste my time.”

“It ain’t a waste. It makes good sense.”

“Why?”

“Because . . .” Flustered, she shifted away from him, plucked at the hem of her cutoffs. “You want to live a long time, don’tcha?”

“I’m fucking with you,” he said. “Okay?”

She tried another tack, working hard to establish what a fine traveling companion she’d make, but he tuned her out. Mount Shasta loomed against a twilight sky; the huge white cone with a single golden star sparkling off to the side had the graphic simplicity of a banner. In his mind he pushed ahead to Seattle, imagining whale worshipers and lumberjack sex cults, but those thoughts found no traction and he found himself thinking about LA. He was back on Sunset with the mutant carbon breathers and death’s-head bikers and tweaking whores and the little black kids with their little guns and little crack rocks, with the runaways he had lived among before Charlie took him in. Kids who came on with a mixture of paranoia and hard-boiled defiance, yet proved by their deaths to have been innocents with a few sly tricks. Most of them dead now, the rest just swallowed up. His memories of them were as oppressive as family memories, which was what they had been—a screwed-up family with no parents, no home, no future, no visible means of support, cooking stolen hamburger over oil-drum fires and selling bad dope and getting infections. He tried to escape the memories, to find a place in his head where they hadn’t established squatter’s rights, and wound up in a hotly lit, cluttered space that seemed familiar, but that he couldn’t identify. It must be, he thought, partly a real place and partly some pathological view he’d had of it . . . Oncoming headlights blinded him and he swerved into the left lane, angrily punching on his brights, leaving them on until the other driver dimmed his. He felt wrecked, wired. It had gotten dark and Shasta lay far behind.

The girl made a weak noise; for a second he was not sure how she had come to be there.

“Where are we?” he asked, and she said, “Wha . . . ,” and sat up straight, as if she were in a classroom, trying to give the impression that she had been paying attention.

“We in Oregon yet?” he asked.

“Uh . . . I don’t know. Maybe. There was a sign back a ways.”

He fingered a cigarette from a crumpled pack and lit up. The smoke tasted stale, but cleared his head. The radio, with its crackle of static and glowing green dial, seemed like an instrument for measuring background radiation.

“I remember now,” said the girl with sober assurance. “We been in Oregon a long time.”

Curls of mist trailed across the road, and towering into a starless sky, a group of neon signs ahead was haloed by a doubled ring of shining air. Apart from the rank grasses along the shoulder, Michael could see nothing of the land. A road sign shot past. One thirteen to Portland, twelve to Whidby Bay. On the left a pancake house with glaring picture windows looked as bright and isolated as an orbital station. The mist was thickening and it tired him to peer through it.

“Break out the coke,” he told the girl.

Dutifully, she fed his nose. His heart raced, the skin on his forehead tightened, but there was no sharpness, no shrugging off of fatigue. His skull was impacted with something that prevented all but the most rudimentary thought. He was exhausted, he stank, his fingernails were rimmed with black. At the last possible moment he swung off the interstate and sent the Cadillac squealing along the curving access road that led to Whidby Bay.

“Where we going?” the girl asked.

His mouth was so dry he could barely speak and, when he did, the word he spoke sounded guttural and unfamiliar, like troll language.

“Motel.”

–

Set at the end of the main street, capping off a row of muffin shops, gift shops, restaurants that resembled cabins and had cutesy names, and a closed-up Boron station, the Elfland Lodge appeared to be too much motel for a town the size of Whidby Bay, a three-story green-and-white structure with a wing at one end and no more than a half-dozen cars in a huge parking lot bordered by a chest-high hedge. Michael supposed that the town must have a booming tourist season, a time for macramй festivals and vegan-paloozas, and this was not that time—either that or someone was using the place to launder money. An electrified sign featuring a leprechaun-like figure in a green suit doing a jig was mounted on a pole out front. Stick-on letters applied to its facing promised free cable and welcomed the Whidby Bay HS Class of ’87 for their 25th Year Reunion—dates showed this glorious event was scheduled to begin and end the week previous.

The night man was a plump, thirtyish guy with frizzy hair and a beer gut, wearing Mother Goose glasses and a T-shirt that read ORYCON 26 and sported a cartoon of a chubby rocket put-putting through the void, propelled by little poots of smoke. He was kicked back in a swivel chair behind the reception desk when Michael entered, listening to an iPod, his head nodding as if to a sprightly rhythm. The lights in the office were dim, there was a strong scent of air freshener, and a stubbed-out roach lay in an ashtray back of the desk.

“One twenty . . . it’s out back,” the night man said, handing over a key card. Then as Michael was about to leave, he called, “Dude! Check out the elves.”

This roused a mild paranoia in Michael. “Elves?”

The night man adopted a fatuous air and a fruity tone of voice. “Those from which our establishment derives its name. The owner brought them back from the Black Forest. Believe me, they are not to be missed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Black Forest. In Germany, you know,” the night man said defensively. “Elves . . . little statues of elves.”

“Why the fuck should I care about some dumb-ass statues?”

“They’re artifacts. Relics. I guess some old Nazi guy owned them.”

Michael continued to glare at him, unsure whether or not he was being played in some way.

“Hey, forget it,” said the night man. “I simply thought you’d find them amusing.”

Michael parked in front of 120, a few slots away from a brown Dodge minivan, the only other vehicle on the seaward side of the motel. Heavy surf pounded close by. Salty air. Orange light bulbs ranging the breezeway illuminated a wide stretch of lawn bounded by a waist-high flagstone wall; beyond the wall, the darkness was absolute. He saw no elves.

There were, however, what looked to be a bunch of oddly shaped, painted rocks standing at the far end of the property. With the girl in tow, he strolled across the lawn toward the rocks and soon realized that these were the elves of which the night man had spoken. There were twenty of them, each about three, three and a half feet tall, carved from wood, disturbingly lifelike, and they had been arranged into groups of five, distinct within the larger grouping. They had dark brown faces, floppy caps like Santa hats but green, shirts with embroidered buttonholes and seven-league boots with sagging tops. Their laminated surfaces held a sticky-looking gloss.

“Lord help us,” said the girl. “Those things are wicked.”

Michael was inclined to agree. These were not the benign creatures of heroic fantasy, but the corrupt denizens of Grimms’ fairy tales. More like dwarves than elves. Their faces were those of long-chinned, hook-nosed, cadaverous old men with Mormon beards and hideous rouge spots dappling their cheeks. About half of them brandished axes and long knives and warty cudgels. Their gnarled hands and thick limbs gave the impression of unnatural strength. Some were hunched over, appearing to have been struck wooden and inanimate in the midst of a furious assault, while others leered at their companions as though anticipating a bloody result. In motion, Michael supposed, they would lurch and caper, tilt and wobble, but fast—they would be as fast as wolverines, clumsy yet facile, ripping bellies, slashing throats, then tripping over their victims’ bodies. He questioned the sensibilities of the man who had stationed them in such an untroubled spot.

The girl tried to drag him away. “I got to pee!”

“I’ll be in in a minute.” He handed her the key card.

“C’mon with me.”

She plucked at his arm and he shook her off, saying, “You need help to pee?”

Her lips thinned. “You stay out here, I can’t be responsible.”

He chuckled and shook out a cigarette from his pack. “I wasn’t counting on you being responsible.”

“They got evil in ’em. You’re just stirring ’em up, standing here and all. They’ll hurt you. Or maybe worse.”

“The elves?”

“Whatever you want to call ’em.”

“And you know this how? You have these amazing powers, right? Your mama’s a witch back in West Virginny and she passed them on to you.”

“Tennessee! I’m from Tennessee! And it don’t have nothing to do with my mama!”

“So you are a witch? You whup up potions out of possum guts and a pinch of geechee root? You cure warts and love troubles? How’d you get to be a witch if your mama didn’t teach you?”

She fixed him with a hateful stare.

“I bet I know.” He lit up and adopted a hick drawl. “You was standing on a corner over to Taterville one evening, waiting on the bus to Hog Jowl, when this here beam of light pierced down from heaven . . .”

She stalked off toward the motel.

“Or maybe you was in Hog Jowl! Waiting on the bus to Taterville!” he called after her. “I get them two places confused!”

She whirled about and said venomously, “You think you’re so damn smart! Well, go on! Stay there and see what happens!”

Startled by her defiance, he watched after her until she vanished inside the room. Little Missy, he thought, could serve up a side of mean. He returned his attention to the elves. He gave some of them names—Groper, Sleazy, Ratfuck, Spongehead—but became bored, distracted by the booming surf. Peering over the flagstone wall, he could see nothing, but it was apparent that the motel stood atop a cliff, a high cliff if his spider senses were reliable. The darkness beneath wanted him, drew him down, and he had a fleeting impulse to vault over the wall. Not a good sign. Almost as not-good as no longer being able to amuse oneself with one’s own wit.

Turning away from the drop, he could have sworn one of the elves had moved closer. Moved and stopped the moment he turned, once again counterfeiting the inanimate. The elf was weaponless, crouching, its swarthy, snarling face visible between upraised hands, poised to deliver a push.

“Wily little bastard,” he said. “You want some of me?”

The elf appeared to quiver with eagerness, the light trembling on its surfaces, glinting from its eyes.

“Fuck you!”

Michael flipped his cigarette at the elf, showering it with sparks. As he crossed the lawn he tried not to glance behind him, but he looked back twice.

–

Once inside 120, he stripped off his shirt, switched off the lights, and lay down, listening to the shower hissing, the shuddery hum of the air conditioner. Glare from the breezeway penetrated the drapes, spreading a sickly murk throughout the room. The blond production-line furniture and the mirror bolted above the writing desk wavered like fixtures in a mirage. He felt that he was floating off the bed. Nerves jumped in his cheek. Phosphenes drifted and flared in the dimness. Something was lumped up under his ass, and he remembered Charlie’s money. He sat up, pulled the wad from his hip pocket and counted it. Seven thousand dollars and change. The bills were cool and slick, like strange skins.

He wondered if he should give Charlie a call. It would be painful, but Charlie might feel better afterward. He would be guilty, morose. The first thing he’d say would be not to worry about the money or the car, and he hoped Michael could forgive him. He hadn’t meant it, the kiss. For four years he’d been straight with Michael, and he had fucked up once. It would never happen again. And then, he, Michael, would say . . . maybe nothing. Maybe he’d just hang on the phone, knowing that if he opened his mouth he would indict himself, because it had been his fuckup, too. Or maybe he’d get angry with Charlie for making him feel guilty and call him a spunk muncher, a pole smoker, an aging drag queen with a ring in his dick. But Charlie wouldn’t let him off so easily. If you’re determined to run, he’d say, all right, but don’t pretend it was casual, don’t pretend you’re not feeling anything. They’d trade back and forth like that for a while, and finally Michael would say he had to go, and Charlie would say, okay, but once you’ve had time to think things over, please, please, get in touch, and so what was the point in calling when he knew everything that would be said . . . And, hell, Charlie would know he was going through this process and wouldn’t expect a call, so what was the goddamn point?

“I am going to hell,” he said, anticipating a demonic chuckle in response.

The girl came out of the bathroom, toweling her hair, still wearing tank top and panties. He thought it was extremely demure of her to be clothed at this juncture—such restraint and modesty well might be considered a touch of class in their circle.

“It’s so cold in here!” she said.

“I like it cold.”

“Well.” She toweled briskly. “I guess it’s just my hair’s still wet.”

He let out a sigh and saw a shadow pour from his mouth; a sensation of calm stole over him, like the calm after the passing of a fever.

The girl pulled off the tank top; beneath a tan line, her pale breasts were luminous in the half-light, the nipples pink and childlike. She burrowed beneath the covers, drawing them up to her chin.

“You coming in?” she asked.

He skinned out of his jeans and shorts. The sheets were cold and once he had drawn them up, he could no longer feel anything below his waist. The girl’s thigh nudged his and he felt that—a patch of skin warming to life. Strands of damp hair tickled his shoulder.

“Hey,” she said softly. “You pretty whacked out, huh?”

“That’s me . . . whacked out.”

“You had a tiring day.” Her hand spidered across his abdomen. “All that driving and hardly ever stopping. You must be wore right down.”

He touched one of her breasts, let its weight nestle in his palm. It was a fine thing to hold, but he felt not even a glint of arousal. “I don’t think it’s going to work,” he said.

“All that coke’s numbing you out,” she whispered, her mouth brushing his ear, her fingers caressing, molding his limp cock. “You lie back now and let me take care of you.”

He became immersed in her fresh, soapy smell, in her breathy voice and the mastering cleverness of her hand.

“I wish it was just the two of us,” she said.

“Is somebody else here?”

“I mean, you know. Like even when you’re alone, how you can feel other people pressing in on you. People in the vicinity.”

“Uh-huh.”

She took to singing distractedly again, an aimless, wordless, off-key tune of the sort a child might sing while concentrating on a toy. She gripped him more tightly and increased her rhythm. “You ain’t still mad, are you?”

“Not so much.”

She gave a husky laugh, and it seemed there was a note of triumph in it. “You’re a funny fella. I don’t know why you strike me funny, but you sure do. Maybe it’s ’cause you like pretending you ain’t serious about nothing when you serious about ’most everything.”

“Seriously funny,” he said. “That’s me.”

“That don’t mean a blessed thing,” she said, making it sound seductive. “You can talk like that all you want, ’cause I’m onto you.”

The planes of her cheeks, her lidded eyes and half smile . . . They were so close to him, they no longer appeared to be elements of a face, but features on a map that he couldn’t read.

“Yeah? How’s that?”

“I been watching you all day. I can tell when you’re easy, when you’re worried. When you’re lying.” She peeled back the covers, checking to see what her hand had wrought. “Look at that! ’Pears it’s gonna work after all.”

She scooted lower in the bed, teased him with her lips, then slipped half his length into her mouth; he brushed the hair back from her face so he could watch her cheeks hollow. After a minute she wriggled back up beside him. Her tongue darted out, flirting with his, and her hand moved slowly, insistently.

“You keep that up, I’m going to come,” he said.

“Be all right with me,” she said. “I think that’d be kinda nice.”

He laughed, happy with her.

“Know what else I know about you?” she asked after a pause.

“What?”

“You know all about me . . . Least, more than you think you know. But you’re so busy being funny, you ain’t noticed.”

He felt a delicate shift in attitude that he hadn’t felt for a long time, that perhaps he had only told himself he could feel. The silky lengths of her wet hair gave her face a cunning sweetness like that of a nymph, a dryad, and he had the idea that her expression—rapt, yet with a trace of uncertainty—was a mirror image of his own.

“We’re the same people,” she said. “You might be older than me, and you think you’re smarter. But we been the same places, we had the same trouble. We understand each other.”

Though he had reached this conclusion on his own, he wanted to deny it now but could not—he recognized her from some foul adit of experience, a dead end, a still-life alley with full moon and heaped garbage bags glistening like fat black boulders, and while she gave a blow job to some middle-aged douche he would wait in the zebra-striped island of light and shadow beneath a fire escape, her agent, her mystic protector, counting the cash, watching her shade kneel and merge with the flaps of a raincoat, and afterward she would hurry over to him, wiping off her lips, and ask, “We got enough?” Enough for the joys of modern chemistry, enough to transform an abandoned house into the Beverly Hilton, cockroaches into glittering brown jewels, life into a death trip with pretty colors, hunger into a cool side effect, love into a blue movie with a warped soundtrack and junk food.

“Bet you don’t believe me,” she said.

“You might be wrong.”

As if saying this bridged some vital distance between them, he felt close to her, shrouded in a thick, honeyed sexuality, and believed he knew her completely.