“Sure,” I said, marveling at how easy it was. “Sure, sounds like fun.”
She was smiling like all the angels in heaven. “Great,” she said. “Let me just take off this smock and get my purse,” and she started out of the room, only to swing round at the doorway and lean into the post for a moment. “Maybe you know the place? It’s on the Covelo road?”
One of the ceramic pinheads reached out and punched me in the solar plexus but I held on, praying, gasping for breath, feeling the great hot tongs of fate fishing around for me as if I were a lobster in a pot.
“It’s called Shirelle’s.”
Chapter 7
The parking lot at Shirelle’s — that barren wasteland, that tundra — was as packed with vehicles as a used-car lot. There were pickups, RVs, Mustangs, Bobcats and Impalas, choppers, dirt-bikes and Mopeds, Trans Ams and Sevilles, woodies, dune buggies, vans — and the monolithic cherry-red cab of a Peterbilt truck, a machine among toys, rising like an island from the sea of steel and chrome. Beyond the cars I could make out cowboy hats and tiny sun-flamed faces and the metronomic dip and rise of the head of a grazing horse. I recognized the scene. Bingo under the trees, the church picnic, county fair. Children ran squalling through a blue-black haze of barbecue smoke, dogs yelped, Frisbees hung in the air. Over it all came the inevitable twanging thump of amplified country music—Duckett, duckett, duck-etttt/Duck, duck, duck-etttt—and the hoots and yahoos of inebriated giants in big-brimmed straw hats. I swung into the lot with a crunch of gravel and found a parking spot between two glistening, high-riding pickups. “Well,” I said, turning to Petra, “this is it, huh?”
She was leaning forward in her seat, legs long and naked and brown, scanning the lot with the intensity of a child at the fair. “There’s Sarah’s car,” she said, “and that’s Teddy’s motorcycle.” She shot a look past me. “And good, good. Alice is here, too.” Her hand was on my arm, light as a breath of air, heavy as a shackle. “I think you’re really going to like them.”
Odd, I thought, emerging from the car, that I’d barely noticed all this on my way into town an hour and a half ago. (I’d been aware of an unusual level of activity — cars swinging in and out of the lot, music blaring — but had been afraid to look too closely for fear I’d find myself staring into Savoy’s face, or Shirelle’s or Sapers’s or George Pete Turner’s.) Odder still that we’d taken my car — the interdicted Toyota — but I’d felt, for reasons that have to do with the masculine ego and the need to assert it, that I should be in command. Despite the fact that Petra had offered to drive and that the very sight of the Toyota was a provocation to every law enforcement officer within a thirty-mile radius.
I slammed my door. Petra slammed hers. I stood there a moment in the hellish sun, the smell of burning meat in my nostrils, and felt as naked and exposed as a sinner at the gates of Dis. Twice before I’d trod this very ground, and twice before I’d found myself in deep trouble. The place was a sink of enmity, a nest of yahooism, as fraught with danger as the Willits police station. (Quick clips of the leering faces of Sapers, Marlon, Shirelle, Savoy and Jerpbak passed in review through the contracting lens of my consciousness.) Good God. I’d gone back on my word, left the farm wide open to discovery and paraded my car about the streets, and now here I was, strolling blithely into the lion’s den as if I had nothing to fear. What am I doing? I thought, suddenly seized with panic. Couldn’t I control my urges, get a grip on myself, act like an adult? Of course I could, yes, of course. It wasn’t too late. I’d tell Petra that I didn’t feel well, that I hated fairs, country music, sunshine, that my parents had been missionaries roasted by cannibals and that the smell of the barbecue pit turned my stomach. But then she took my hand to lead me forward, and something rose up in me that had neither regard for danger nor respect for fear, and I felt nothing but bliss.
Admission, FOR ALL THE MEAT, BEER AND SALLID YOU CAN HOLD, was six dollars, and we stood in front of a card table manned by a rapier-nosed, watery-eyed old fellow in a plaid shirt while Petra dug through her purse and I examined the contents of my pockets. I had about fourteen or fifteen dollars to last me the rest of my life, but for the same reason I’d insisted on driving, I attempted to pay for both of us. I came up with two fives and two singles that were so worn they looked like leaf mulch, and laid them on the table, but Petra wouldn’t hear of it. “No way,” she said, scooping up the bills and forcing them into my front pocket. “I invited you, remember?”
The old man looked confused. He stared up at us out of pale, swollen eyes, then produced a handkerchief and blew his nose carefully, tenderly, as if he were aware that each blow might be his last. “Two?” he said, his voice distant and cracked, and then held out a trembling pink hand to take the twenty Petra offered him. As he fumbled for change in the cigar box at his elbow and then carefully tore two pale orange stubs from a wheel of all-purpose tickets, I couldn’t help thinking, with shame and mortification and an odd sensation of arousal, of the makeshift desk at the suck palace and the ten sordid despairing minutes I’d given up there. I took the ticket guiltily — ADMIT ONE — and followed Petra, my guide and support, into the roped-off area that enclosed the sickly tree, the gaping dark entrance to the bar and the smoking pit.
For the first few minutes I kept my head down, tense and wary, concentrating on bits of broken glass in the dirt, on the sharp, minatory toes of cowboy boots, on bare ankles, painted toenails and snub-nosed sneakers. Petra led me to the beer booth, where I studied the footprints in the beer-muddied earth and the way the froth dissolved at the bartender’s feet. “What’ll it be, honey?” the bartender asked, twanging the verb until it fell somewhere between bee and bay.
“Two beers,” I said, addressing his belt buckle.
Petra laughed. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “My voice is changing.”
I stole a glance at the guffawing bartender, expecting Lloyd Sapers or George Pete Turner, and was relieved to find myself staring into the grinning, wild-eyed, gold-toothed, sun-blasted face of a drunken stranger in a Stetson hat. “Good beer, boy,” he said, handing me two plastic cups filled to the rim. “Drink up. We got a bottomless keg here.”
I nodded, wrenched my face into a simulated grin and gave the crowd a quick scan (the backs and profiles of strangers, naked shoulders, sunburned beer bellies, bola ties and blue jeans), and then ducked my head again, expecting the blade to fall at any moment. Then Petra said, “There’s Sarah,” and nudged me in the direction of a maze of tables heaped with food.
Sarah was tall, broad-shouldered and bosomy, dressed in Dan-skin top and jeans, her hair teased straight out from her head until it looked like one of those furry hats worn by the guards at Buckingham Palace. She sat at a long table behind a sign advertising her health-food store — THE SEEDS OF LIFE — and served falafel, tahini, tofu salad and carrot juice as alternatives to the ceremonial slabs of bloody beef that made National Heifer Week the event that it was. She wasn’t doing much business. I took her hand as Petra introduced us, then watched as she scribbled “Out to Lunch” over the store logo and laid a sheet of plastic wrap over the tofu salad. “Everybody’s over here,” she said, and we followed her past the smoking barbecue pit (out of the corner of my eye I saw billowing smoke, vague menacing figures, the glow of hot coals) to a blanket spread out in the shade of the building.