«Except we have to move around a lot,» put in Urania. «The pocalocas keep zeroing in on us,» Barbara explained. «I've tried to keep moving east, figuring to get to Ellay, but those damned women make us backtrack a lot of the time. They'll march past quickly, then back again not so quick, and then if we don't rouse the horses and get the wagon out of there they start just milling around, looking everywhere, like they're not even sure what they're looking for. I've been having Urania decoy them away by singing in a street in the other direction—they hate music—but lately they haven't been as easy to deflect. I think they want what's left of . . . their god,» she said, looking at the tequila bottle, «or the guy that killed him,» she said, looking at Rivas. «Or, more likely, both.»
Rivas shivered. He raised his right hand and tried to make a fist; he could, but he couldn't have crushed a sponge in it. God, I'm weak, he thought. A single pocaloca could kill me right now, easy as killing a bug. I'm going to have to get some exercise . . . and some food.
With the thought of food came an awareness of ravenous hunger—and of the smell that filled the wagon. «Could I have some of your donuts?» he asked.
«Of course,» Barbara said. «But there's some soup, if you'd rather. Bean and onion, and the guy I bought it from thins it with sherry.» She said this a bit primly, as if she still couldn't bring herself to approve of alcohol.
«Oh, yes, please,» said Rivas fervently.
Barbara went to the front part of the wagon, which was evidently a tiny kitchen, clattered around for a minute, and then returned with a steaming bowl and a spoon. «I'd better feed you,» she said.
«My God, I'm not a baby,» Rivas said. «I can feed myself. Here, give me the spoon, I'll show you.»
She did, and he could hold it, but his hand shook so badly that most of the soup spilled out of the spoon, and then he dropped the spoon in. It sank out of sight.
«God damn it,» he grated, afraid for a moment that he might cry at this defeat.
Barbara fished it out, wiped it off, dipped up some soup and held it to his mouth. «It's no disgrace,» she whispered. «Eat, dummy.»
He did, and it was delicious, and in a few minutes she'd scraped the last spoonful out of the bowl.
«Would you like something to drink?» she asked him as she stood up.
«Sure, thanks,» he said. «What have you got?»
«Nothing, but there's a market a block away, and the donuts made some money this morning.»
«Okay, I'll, uh, pay you back,» he ventured.
«Don't be silly. What would you like?»
«Beer?»
She pressed her lips together, but said, «Okay. Back in five. Uri, anybody knocks, make sure it's me before you open up, right?»
«Sure, sure.»
«See you.» Barbara left, drawing the door closed behind her.
Rivas turned and stared at Uri. She did look much better now than she had at the Regroup Tent and the disastrous dinner; her hair was clean and she seemed to have got enough sleep lately. He didn't need a mirror to know that she must look ten years younger than he did. But she wasn't Uri, the girl he'd dreamed of and written songs to for thirteen years, the girl that had made all other girls seem coarse and insensitive and stupid by comparison. And he realized at last that what had made her so enduring an obsession was his deprivation of her. If her father hadn't separated them after that birthday party, she'd simply have been his first girlfriend. It was the drama of frustrated love—and the safety of it, too, of course, for frustrated love is never subjected to the daily patch-and-make-do reality of a marriage—that had made him base his life on it.
He remembered, suddenly, what he'd been dreaming of, just before he woke up. Probably prompted by hearing Uri's voice, he'd been dreaming of the birthday party. It was a dream he'd had before, but always before in it he'd been young Rivas, winding up barking in drunken apprehension behind the bushes. This time he'd been the present day thirty-one-year-old Rivas, somehow transported back through time to be an observer of that traumatic evening thirteen years ago.
He'd seen the kid who was his younger self come lurching out of the Barrows house, pale and sweaty and unhappy-looking, and go reeling toward the road—then stop, slap a hand across his mouth and go lunging into the bushes. There had followed the inelegant racket of someone being violently ill.
An elderly couple had strolled out of the house, and registered startlement at these sounds. «What on earth is that, Henry?» the woman asked.
«Oh,» said the man, smiling tolerantly, «it sounds like a dog, behind the bushes there. Nothing we need concern ourselves with.» They'd started to wander away then.
But a moment later a strange new sound arose from behind the bushes. «Rowf. Rowf. Arf barf. Owooo —Oh, God, gaaak —oh, rowf, rowf . . .»
Urania, who had fetched herself another donut, looked up and caught Rivas's eye just as he began laughing. He was too weak to laugh very hard, but he did it for quite a while.
«You laughing at me?» Urania asked when he'd subsided somewhat.
He sniffed and weakly wiped tears away from his eyes. «No, Uri. Me.» He looked at her fondly. «It's been thirteen years, Uri. Did you think about me much?»
«Some,» she said. «Of course I've been busy. Uh . . . did you think about me much?»
He shrugged. «I thought so.»
«Would you like one of these donuts?»
«I guess not, thank you.»
Abruptly there was a hard knock at the wagon's door, and, overlapping that noise, Barbara's voice, quiet but tense: «Lemme in, quick. That last gang of pocalocas is back.»
Urania let her in, and Barbara hurried forward and crouched by Rivas. «Can we let them have that?» she asked, pointing at the bottle with the crystal in it.
Starkly aware of his own helplessness, Rivas shook his head. «No. That's Jaybush dormant in there, that crystal. It they can get it, he'll be alive again.»
«Okay, we run.» She turned to Urania. «Uri, they're coming from behind us. Do you remember how to drain the deep fryer?»
«Well, you only showed me once. You turn the—»
«You've got to do it. And then take the broom, hop down and quickly sweep the oil off to both sides of the street. Go!»
«But why do—»
«Now, damn it!»
Uri went, grumbling, to the front of the wagon.
«Can I help at all?» asked Rivas.
Barbara dropped the bar across the flimsy door. «Of course not,» she said with the briefest backward glance. She peered through a narrow hole in the door, sunlight making a luminous slash across her smooth cheek. Without feeling the least bit less useless, Rivas found himself growing excited by the sight of her.
Brilliantly appropriate response to peril, you idiot, he told himself.
Urania came puffing back in through the kitchen. «There, it's all—»
«Bring me the broom,» snapped Barbara.
Rolling her eyes like a martyr, Urania went back to the kitchen. Rivas could hear a sort of unsynchronized marching outside, getting louder. Urania returned with the broom, which was dripping and reeked of cooking oil.
Barbara straightened and snatched it from her. «Now when I say go,» she said quickly to Urania, «you fling the back door open—lift the bar first—and then instantly run forward and whip up the horses and get us out of here fast, it doesn't matter where. Got it?»
«Yes,» said Urania, moving forward and taking hold of the bar.
«Go.»
The bar clanked back, the door was flung open, and Rivas, raising his head in the bunk, was sure he glimpsed the pain-gaunt face of Sister Sue in the moment when Barbara held the broom head to the candle and the oil-soaked straw brush blazed into flame. Then the wagon lurched forward and Barbara blocked his view as she leaned out the door to toss the burning broom to the pavement.
Over the rattling of the wheels and his own pounding heartbeat he didn't hear any whoosh of sudden ignition, but he did hear screams of surprise and pain and rage. Barbara lost her balance and had to grab the door frame, and Rivas watched her swing out and around, her white teeth bared with effort, and then he saw muscles flex in her brown arms and legs as she dragged herself back inside. She gave him a taut grin as she pushed the door shut.