The worst was what Darlene suggested: that he would lead me to Deane?
But wasn’t that the best as well?
Damnation, I hadn’t a clue. I mean, the whole thing was beginning to wear on me, and if I’d been in the car by myself, I think I would have gone ahead and swung the sucker around. But somehow, after dragging Darlene out, quitting didn’t seem right. With another person, you could always believe you were in the midst of adventure, an attitude often difficult to sustain alone. Alone, for instance, it often felt like regular old danger.
“This must be Petey’s.”
Darlene snorted through her nose.
The ramshackle old beach house was not a pretty sight. First off, several of the windows had been tinfoiled over, and one window just had cardboard where the panes used to be. Second, the porch steps were missing. And the guys hanging around on the porch looked like rejects from the Salvation Army. Third—well, what was the point? This place was a real armpit.
“How much will you pay me to walk in there with you?”
“Let’s reconnoiter.” I drove us around the block and parked in an inconspicuous spot, where we could watch the ocean. The white edges of the breakers glowed.
Darlene was fidgeting a little, probably from the reds. “Cold feet?”
“You betcha.”
“What have we got to lose?” Mostly, she just wanted to get out of the car.
“Our lives and our good looks. Maybe both.”
“Oh, Pet.”
Then I remembered something. Not a coincidence exactly—why else was I carrying the things around in my purse? “Here,” I said, handing her one after rooting around for them. “Put this on.”
“What the hell is it?” Darlene held hers up to the car window, trying to get a good look, but the streetlights weren’t very bright.
“It’s a sort of a necklace.”
“Who made it—Dracula?”
I hadn’t really looked at the gris-gris in a long time, and maybe never very closely. Mine was mostly feel to me: it felt right when I put it around my neck, so right that the question was why it had ever been off my neck. Yet, all four gris-gris had been sitting in my cigar box ever since the day Deane walked past us in the airport. That was my big mistake, letting them take theirs off. If only—but I couldn’t think about that stuff. I’d gone over it and over it in my head all these years, and it didn’t do me any good that I could tell. All I knew was that this afternoon, without even thinking about it, I’d put June’s and mine in my purse.
“God, that’s two favors you owe me. Going in that dump and wearing this creepy bit of weirdness.”
“Just put it on, okay?”
“I hope I don’t catch something from—”
She was getting on my nerves. “It’s an amulet, okay? And it happens to be very powerful. And it just so happens that you’ll be very sorry if you don’t wear it. So just shut up and put it on or stay in the car, okay?”
“What a bitch! And it’s my goddamned car, in case you happened to forget! And who needs you to tell me what to—”
Were any of the old powers left? I shut my eyes and fingered the gris-gris.
Darlene quieted down. Her platinum hair glowed in the dim light, like a ball of heat lightning.
“We’ll stick together,” I said, after a minute.
She shrugged and climbed out her side of the car.
The first trick was climbing up onto the porch, but luckily we were both wearing jeans. Nobody paid much attention to us, and that was a break at least. Inside, the scene was what you’d expect, except more so. The music was loud, the lights were dim; the smell of cheap wine and marijuana was a record-breaking contact high. Many bodies were crowded into the two rooms you could see into from the front doorway. There were groups standing and talking, groups in cross-legged circles, and groups sprawled in corners. “Inagadda da vida, wah-wah” boomed out from the stereo, the bass turned up so high that the drumming felt grooved into your skull.
Darlene disappeared in the crowd, the drop of water sent back to the sea, but I felt like a visitor from Mars. A thin green shield separated me from regular life-forms. I was oil, agate, and could not be absorbed.
“Hey, chick.”
My spine went cold. The face the voice issued from appeared close to mine. The smell of his breath and skin roiled the bottom of my stomach.
“That’s right, babe, you.”
Tommy stood in front of me. Deep lines in his pale skin connected the edges of his nose with the edges of his mouth. But the deepest line of all was the scar etching a swift diagonal across his left cheek. His pale eyes looked at mine, but there was nothing you could read there, no person home. Recognition? Curiosity? Anybody’s guess.
“You alone?”
“I’m with a girlfriend.” Stick together, dammit, Darlene!
“Now you’re with me.” He touched my arm, and I jerked back, as if burned.
The expression on his face chilled me into silence, and I allowed my body to be directed over to the far corner of the living room. That’s when I realized I was really here, and didn’t know why. You think bad stuff is better than nothing happening. Then you remember what bad stuff is really like.
When we were seated on big pillows covered with tatty fake fur, he pulled a reefer out of his shirt pocket and lit up. Though clearly, by his lack of tan and unbleached hair, he was not a surfer, his body had the same lean tautness, and was dressed in the typical Mexican shirt and faded bellbottoms. From the neck up, he looked to be over thirty, and his forearms, where the shirt cuffs were rolled, sported tattoos, the kind you do yourself with razor blades and ballpoint pens.
Part of me wished I were strong enough to strangle him with my bare hands. The other part—well, at least he existed. And again, somehow that meant everything else might, too. For instance, that night—
He poked me with his finger, so I took a long drag on the dope, immediately feeling gooey-limbed and soggy. Great: who knew what kind of horror it was laced with. In another moment I’d be hurtling through the galaxy, an unhinged Catherine wheel tumbling over itself in the stratosphere.
My skin seemed to shrink away from him though I was doing my best to hold in there. I felt like one of those plants, you touch the leaves and they wrinkle up.
“Where do I know you from?” His speech was a little slurred and he took another hit on the reefer. “Why don’t you show me your tits, maybe I’ll remember you.”
Now I was offended. I mean, really! I ducked back just in the nick as the greaseball made a lunge for my shirt.
“Awww, got her little feathers all ruffled! Well, let me tell you something, bitch. You look just like this other bitch I used to know, only you’re a rotten bag of bones and she was some stacked…” He trailed off, not even looking my way anymore, and took another hit.
Then my anger really hit me, like ten tons of bricks. The reality of it all hit me, too. This fool, this wicked and repulsive animal in front of me, was Tommy, Tommy, the creep who hurt me when I was little, and probably burned down our house. Maybe it was even all his fault that Deane was the way she was.
Men! All I’d ever seen of them, they were scummy!
“I’d sure like to get my hands on that bitch,” he mused, idly inhaling another half-inch of marijuana. “I’ve been meaning to track her ever since I got sprung.”
“Oh?” It was hard keeping the emotion out of my voice.
“Nobody’s left from the old gang, you know?” Tommy shook his head sadly, like he was missing his old Cub Scout troop or something.
“Anybody seen her around?” I aimed for a tone of utter nonchalance.