At last Lollypop picked up Nigel's body, carried it to the wagon and laid it on the deck. He climbed back aboard, rolled the dead girl out of the cabin and dumped her over the gunwale, and then gently dragged Nigel inside and closed the door behind them.
Five minutes passed, then the ceiling-clinging thing let go and spread its arms and legs and spiraled down like an autumn leaf and touched down, silently, on the dead girl's face.
There was no further motion in the garage; and after a while the Jaybird girl outside got free of the alarm and wandered aimlessly away into the night, and then the silence was unbroken.
Chapter 5
When a sudden clatter of hoofbeats spilled Rivas out of the night's web of dreams, he decided that he'd been premature yesterday in deciding that his fever was abating. His skin was hot and dry and tight and his breath was arid in his head and the bright morning sunlight seemed to be making faint rainbow auras around everything. His head was murky with the sort of unspecific depression left behind by a night of heavy drinking or the worst sort of nightmares. He rolled over into a crouch on the pile of cardboard that had been his bed, and he squinted around at the weedy yard. A collapsed, rusty swing-set leaned against a fence near him, and the cardboard freshly shoved under it reminded him that when he'd gone to sleep last night the Jaybird girl had been sleeping there. So where was she now? He stood up, feeling dangerously tall and fragile, and stumbled out of the yard to the tree he'd tied the horses to.
One of the horses was still tied to it. Rivas peered around, blinking tears out of his eyes and wishing that his nose would either produce a sneeze or stop tingling, and finally saw her, fifty yards down the street, riding the other horse.
»Hey! » he yelled. «Uh . . .» Why hadn't he learned her name? «Hey, girl! »
She looked over her shoulder, then reined in and rode back to the tree, which he was now leaning against. «What?» she said.
«Where are you going?» He had to squint to look up at her against the bright blue sky.
«The Regroup Tent,» she said impatiently. «Where did you think?»
«Well, Christ . . . you weren't going to wait for me?»
«I thought you were sick.»
«Oh! » he said, nodding in exaggerated comprehension. «I see. You thought I might slow you down. »
«Right.»
He throttled his anger by reminding himself that she was a vital stage prop in his role as a stray Jaybird . . . and just for a moment, though he suppressed the thought almost instantly, he knew he'd have ditched her in an instant if she'd been sick and of no use to him.
«Well, I'm not sick,» he said. «This is just an allergy. I'm allergic to these . . . bushes, here. Okay? So wait for me. And don't run off without me again, hear?»
She blinked at him in some surprise. «It's the duty of every strayed follower of the Lord to return to the fold as quickly as possible.»
«Well, sure,» he said, intrigued by the hint of an Ellay accent in her voice, «but not so hastily that you're likely not ever to get there at all. One girl alone, why . . . you wouldn't get two miles before you'd run into a snake or a punch-bee or a rapist or another couple of pimps.»
She seemed genuinely puzzled. «But my soul would be in the Lord's hands. Why should it upset you? »
He spread his hands and opened his eyes wide to show her how sincere he was. «Because I care what happens to you, that's why.» She waited while he saddled his horse and got onto the animal by half climbing the tree.
The girl didn't speak as they rode slowly down the sunlit street, but she looked vaguely troubled.
«Didn't I save you from those two guys who killed your friend?» he reminded her after a couple of minutes.
«Yes,» she said. Phone poles stood every few hundred feet along the left side of the road, and sun-rotted rope rings dangled from some of the cross pieces, way up there where only birds could get to, and a couple still held yellow sticks of forearm bones. At about every twenty-fifth hoof clop the horses passed through the shadow of another pole. «But . . .» the girl said after a while, «we aren't supposed to care about each other that way . . . . That's for the shepherds, rescuing is . . . and even they don't do it because they care about us but just because the Lord wants us.»
Rivas glanced at her with some respect. Very good, sister, he thought. You've got clear eyes for a birdy chick. She caught his look and smiled uneasily before looking away.
Rivas let his gaze drift to the buildings in the middle distance ahead, standing out there among the heat shimmers like broken, discolored teeth in green gums, and he let his eyes unfocus so that it all became just blurs of color. As the morning wore on, he wished he'd taken Nigel's hat as well as his slingshot. The hot sun made it feel as if his fever had spread out from him and infected the whole world, like a spilled beer gradually soaking through a whole book, so that the pages tore or stuck together in clumps, and all continuity was gone. He could remember, if he tried very carefully, who he was, how old he was, and what his purpose was in being here; but during this monotonous southward ride he didn't need to keep all those things in mind, and so he just rocked with the motion of the horse and, unless something roused his attention, thought about nothing at all.
Don't put on the act for me, old boy. I know you hate 'em all, every one of em.
He frowned and focused his eyes. Where had he heard that recently? Who was it that had said that to him? He couldn't have been sober at the time, or he'd remember. Unless he'd been overpoweringly sleepy . . .?
It's me you love. Me only.
It was last night. A dream? Yes, of course it had been a dream, a fever-warped one. He tried to remember something more about it, but couldn't.
At midmoming he killed two doves with Nigel's slingshot, and as he was awkwardly butchering them another sentence from his dream came to him. You're too ashamed to admit it, the voice had said.
Rivas paused, the bloody knife hovering over one of the half-dismembered birds, and he tried to remember what the dream had been about and who in it had been saying these things to him. Then he remembered seeing something in the dream . . . a person . . . himself? Was he looking in a mirror? And why, of all things, did he see himself sucking his thumb?
He finished butchering the birds, and started a fire by dampening some shredded cloth from his shirt with Currency and then banging together various rocks and bits of scrap metal until some sparks fell on the shreds and ignited the alcohol vapor. Then he spitted the doves and cooked them over a fire of powdery old lumber pieces. His companion didn't seem surprised when he let her have one of the birds, served with a mock flourish on a Ford hubcap, but she didn't look pleased either.
«What's your name?» Rivas asked her between bites as he leaned back against the big splintered sign that shaded them. He'd whimsically chosen it for their lunching spot because of the archaic message painted on it in big stark letters: ALL CANNIBLES HEREABOUTS CRUCIFYED– NO EXEPTIONS.
She gnawed a charred breast for a few moments, then said carefully, «Sister Windchime.»
He smiled. «I like that. I'm Brother—» What, not Pogo, «—Thomas.»
«It's nonessential for you to like my name,» she said irritably. Rivas remembered that nonessential was a pretty harsh term of disapproval among Jaybirds. «And why do you have that bottle of money?» she went on.