“What?” he asked, thinking the cop would ask him why they couldn’t hear any cars, not even some kid’s glasspack-equipped low-rider, or a single bass-powered sound-system, or a motorcycle, or a horn, or a shout, or anything.
Instead, Collie said: “We’re losing the light.”
“We can’t be. It’s only-” Steve looked at his watch, but it had stopped. The battery had given out, probably; he’d never replaced it since his sister had given it to him for Christmas a couple of years ago. It was odd, though, that it should have stopped just past four o’clock, which had to be not long after the time he had first wheeled into this marvellous little neighborhood.
“Only what?”
“I can’t say exactly, my watch has stopped, but just think about it. It can’t be much more than five-thirty, five forty-five. Maybe even earlier. Don’t they say you overestimate elapsed time when you’re in a crisis situation?”
“I don’t even know who “they” are, never have,” Collie said. “But look at the light. The quality of the light.”
Steve did, and yes, the cop had a point. Steve didn’t like to admit it, but he did. The light slanted through the tangle (and that was the proper word for it, not greenbelt) in hot red shafts. Red sun at night, sailor’s delight, he thought, and suddenly, as if that was a trigger, it all tried to crash in on him, all the things that were wrong, and he couldn’t stand it. He raised his hands and clapped them over his eyes, whacking himself a damned good one on the side of the head with the butt of the.22 he was carrying, feeling his bladder go loose, knowing he was close to watering his underwear and not caring. He staggered backward and-from a distance, it seemed-heard Collie Entragian asking if he was okay. With what felt like the greatest effort of his life, Steve said that he was and forced himself to lower his hands, to look into that delirious red light again.
“Let me ask you a very personal question,” Steve said. He thought his voice did not sound even remotely like his own. “How scared are you?”
“Very.” The big guy armed more sweat off his forehead. It was very hot in here, but in spite of the dripping, rustling leaves, the heat felt strangely dry to Steve, not in the least greenhouse-ish. The smells were that way, too. Not unpleasant, but dry. Egyptian, almost. “Don’t lose hope, though. I see the path, I think.”
It was indeed the path, they stepped on to it less than a minute after getting moving again, and Steve saw signs-comforting ones, under the circumstances-of the animals which had used this particular game-traiclass="underline" a potato-chip bag, the wrapper from a pack of baseball cards, a couple of double-A batteries which had maybe been pried out of some kid’s Walkman after they went dead, initials carved on a tree.
He saw something far less comforting on the other side of the track: a misshapen growth, prickly and virulent green, among the sumach and scrub trees. Two more stood behind it, their lumpy arms sticking stiffly up like the arms of alien traffic cops.
“Holy shit, do you see those?” Steve asked.
Collie nodded. “They look like cactuses. Or cacti. Or whatever you say for more than one.”
Yes, Steve thought, but only in the way that women painted by Picasso during his Cubist phase looked like real women. The simplicity of the cactuses and their lack of symmetry-like the bird with the mismatched wings-gave them a surreal aspect that hurt his head. It was like looking at something that wouldn’t quite come into focus.
It does look a little like a buzzard, Old Doc had said. As a child might draw it.
Things were starting to group together in his mind. Not fit together, at least not yet, but forming themselves naturally into what they had been taught to call a set back in Algebra I. The vans, which looked like props from a kids” Saturday matinee. The bird. Now these violent green cactuses, like something you’d see in an energetic first grader’s picture.
Collie approached the one closest to the path and stuck out a tentative finger.
“Man, don’t do that, you’re nuts!” Steve said.
Collie ignored him. Reached the finger further. Closer. And closer yet, until-
“Ouch! You mother!”
Steve jumped. Collie yanked his hand back and peered at it like a kid with an interesting new scrape. Then he turned to Steve and held it out. A bead of blood, small and dark and perfect, was forming on the pad of his index finger. “They’re real enough to poke,” he said. “This one is, anyway.”
“Sure. And what if it poisons you? Like something from the Congo Basin, something like that?”
Collie shrugged as if to say too late now, pal, and started along the path. It was headed south at this point, toward Hyacinth. With the red-orange sunlight flooding through the trees from the right, it was at least impossible to become disoriented. They started down the hill. As they went, Steve saw more and more of the misshapen cacti in the woods to the east of the path. They were actually crowding out the trees in places. The underbrush was thinning, and for a very good reason: the topsoil was also thinning, being replaced by a grainy gray sandbed that looked like… like…
Sweat ran in Steve’s eyes, stinging. He wiped it away. So hot, and the light so strong and red. He felt sick to his stomach.
“Look.” Collie pointed. Twenty yards ahead, another clump of cacti guarded a fork in the path. Jutting out from them like the prow of a ship was an overturned shopping cart. In the dying light, the metal basket-rods looked as if they had been dipped in blood.
Collie jogged down to the fork. Steve hurried to keep up, not wanting to get separated from the other even by a few yards. As Collie reached the fork, howls rose in the strange air, sharp and yet somehow sickeningly sweet, like bad barbershop-quartet harmony: Whoooo! Whoooo! Wh-Wh-Whooooo! There was a pause and then they came again, more of them this time, mingling and yipping, bringing gooseflesh to every square inch of Steve’s skin. My children of the night, he thought, and in his mind’s eye saw Bela Lugosi, a spook in black and white, spreading his cloak. MayBe not such a great image, under the circumstances, but sometimes your mind went where it wanted.
“Christ!” Collie said, and Steve thought he meant those howls-coyotes howling somewhere to the east of them, where there were supposed to be houses and stores and five different kinds of McBurger restaurants-but the big cop wasn’t looking that way. He was looking down. Steve followed his gaze and saw a man sitting beside the beached shopping cart. He was propped against a cactus, stuck to its spines like a grotesque human memo which had been left here for them to find.
Wh-Wh-Whoooo…
He reached out, not thinking about it, and found the cop’s hand. Collie felt his touch and grabbed back. It was a hard grip, but Steve didn’t mind.
“Oh, shit, I’ve seen this guy,” Collie said.
“How in Christ’s name can you tell?” Steve asked.
“His clothes. His cart. He’s been on the street two or three times since the start of the summer. If I saw him again, I was going to warn him off. Probably harmless, but-”
“But what?” Steve, who had been on the bum a time or two in his life, didn’t know whether to be pissed or amused. “What’d you think he was going to do? Steal someone’s favorite velvet Elvis painting? Try to hit that guy Soderson up for a drink?”
Collie shrugged.
The man pinned to the cactus was dressed in patched khaki pants and a tee-shirt even older, dirtier, and more ragged than the one Billingsley had found for Collie. His elderly sneakers were bound together with electrical tape. They were the clothes of a bum, and the possessions which had spilled out of the cart when it overturned suggested the same: an old pair of airtip dress shoes, a length of frayed rope, a Barbie doll, a blue jacket with BUCKEYE LANES printed on the back in gold thread, a bottle of wine, half-full, stoppered with what looked like the finger of a lady’s evening glove, and a boombox radio which had to be at least ten years old. Its plastic case had been mended with airplane glue. There were also at least a dozen plastic bags, each carefully rolled up and secured with twine.