There's a big plywood billboard beside the road, but it's not nearly so tall as the faded Texaco sign-that round placard dangling from a lamppost, a perfect black circle to contain its five-pointed red pentacle, that witch's symbol to keep out some great evil. Dancy already knows all about pentagrams, so she turns her attention to the billboard, instead; it reads live panther-deadly man eater in sloppy whitewash lettering.
She leaves the highway, skirting the edges of a wide orange-brown mud hole where the Texaco's parking lot and driveway begins, crunching across the white-grey limestone gravel strewn around the gasoline pumps. The old man is standing up now, digging about in a pocket of his overalls.
"How ya doin' there, sport?" he asks her, and his hand reappears with half a roll of wintergreen Certs.
"I'm fine," she says, not smiling because her shoulder hurts too much. "You got a bathroom I can use?"
"You gonna buy somethin'?" he asks and pops one of the Certs into his mouth. His teeth are stained yellow-brown, like turtle bones that have been lying for years at the bottom of a cypress spring.
"I don't have any money," she tells him.
"Hell," he says and sits back down on the plastic milk crate. "Well, I don't guess that makes no difference. The privy's right inside. But you better damn flush when you're done, you hear me? And don't you get piss on the seat."
Dancy nods her head, then stares at him until the old man leans back and blinks at her.
"You want somethin' else?"
"Do you really have a live panther?" she asks him, and the man arches both his eyebrows and grins, showing off his yellow-brown, tobacco-stained smile again.
"That's what the sign says, ain't it? Or cain't you read?"
"I can read," Dancy Flammarion replies and looks down at the toes of her boots. "I wouldn't have known to ask if I couldn't read."
"Then why'd you ask such a fool question for? You think I'm gonna put up a big ol' sign sayin' I got a live panther if I ain't?"
"Does it cost money to see it?"
"You better believe it does. I'll let you use the jake free of charge, 'cause it wouldn't be Christian to do otherwise, but a gander at that cat's gonna set you back three bucks, cold, hard cash."
"I don't have three dollars."
"Then I guess you ain't gonna be seein' my panther," the old man says, and he grins and offers her a Certs. She takes the candy from him and sets her duffel bag down on the gravel between them.
"How'd you get him?"
The old man rubs at the coarse salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin and slips what's left of the roll of Certs into the bib pocket of his overalls.
"You some kind of runaway or somethin'? You got people out lookin' for you, sport? You a druggie?"
"Is he in a cage?" she asks, matching his questions with a question of her own.
"He's a she," the old man grunts. "Course she's in a cage. What you think someone's gonna do with a panther? Keep it in a damned burlap sack?"
"No," she says. "How'd you say you caught him?"
"I didn't."
"Did someone else catch him for you?"
"It ain't no him. It's a she."
Dancy looks up at the old man and rolls the quickly shrinking piece of candy from one side of her mouth to the other and back again.
"You're some kind'a albino, ain't you," the old man says, and he leans a little closer. He smells like sweat and Beech-Nut chewing tobacco, old cars and fried food.
"Yeah," she says and nods her head.
"Yep. I thought so. I used to have some rabbits had eyes like yours."
"Did you keep them in cages, too?"
"You keep rabbits in hutches, sport."
"What's the difference?"
The old man glares at her a moment and then sighs and jabs his thumb at the screen door. "The shitter's inside," he grumbles. "Right past the Pepsi cooler. And don't you forget to flush."
"Where do you keep him?" Dancy asks, looking past the old man at the closed screen door and the shadows waiting on the other side.
"That ain't exactly none of your business, not unless you got the three bucks, and you done told me you don't."
"I've seen some things," she says. "I've seen black bears, out in the swamps. I've seen gators, too, and once I saw a big ol' bobcat, but I've never seen a panther before. Is it the same thing as a cougar?"
"You gonna stand there talkin' all damn day long? I thought you needed to take a leak?"
Dancy shrugs her narrow shoulders and then looks away from the screen door, staring north and east down the long road to the place it finally vanishes, the point where the cloudy sky and the pastures collide.
"If any police show up askin' if I seen you, don't expect me to lie about it," the old man says. "You sure look like a runaway to me. No tellin' what kind of trouble you might be in."
"Thank you for the candy," she says and points at her duffel bag. "Is it okay if I leave that out here while I use your toilet? It's heavy."
"Don't make no difference to me," the man says. "But don't you forget to flush, you understand me?"
"Sure thing," Dancy says. "I understand," and she steps past him, climbs the four squeaky wooden steps up to the screen door and lets it bang shut. Inside, the musty air stinks of motor oil and dust, dirty rags and cigarette smoke, and the only light comes from the door and the fly-specked windows. The walls and floor are bare pine boards gone dark as rotten teeth, and a huge taxidermied bass hangs above the cash register. There are three short rows of canned goods, candy bars in brightly colored paper wrappers, oil and windshield wipers and transmission fluid, snack foods and mousetraps, bottles of Bayer aspirin and cherry-flavored Maalox. There's a wall of hardware and fishing tackle. She finds the tiny restroom right where he said she would, and Dancy latches the door behind her.
The restroom is illuminated by a single, naked incandescent bulb hanging from the ceiling. Dancy squints up at it, raises her left hand for an eclipse, and then glances at her reflection in the smudgy mirror above a sink stained by decades of iron water. She isn't sure how long it's been since she's seen herself like that; not since sometime before Bainbridge, so more than a week, at least. Her white hair is still wet from the rain, wet and tangled like a drowned thing. A drowned rabbit that spent its whole short life trapped in a cage called a hutch, maybe, and she lowers her hand so the stark light spills down on her again.
The albino girl in the mirror lowers her hand, too, and stares back at Dancy with eyes that seem a lot older than Dancy's sixteen years. Eyes that might have been her grandmother's, if they were brown, or her mother's, if they were the easy green of magnolia leaves.