Later, much later, when the fog had settled in like an amphibious skin stretched over everything and the driftwood fire had burned down to coals, Sky pushed himself up from the sand and stretched his arms out in front of him. “Well,” he said, “how about that pizza?” Raymond blinked up at him. The others had wandered off separately, ghosts dissolving in the mist, all except for the woman. At one point, Dougie had bent over her and tugged at her arm as if he were trying to tear a fistful of weeds up out of the ground, but she wasn’t giving an inch and they’d hissed at each other for what seemed like a week before Sky said, “Why don’t you just give it up already,” and Dougie stalked off into the mist. She was sitting beside Raymond now, her lips wet on the neck of the bottle, nothing but dregs and saliva left at this point. “I don’t know if I could eat,” she said.
“Everybody’s got to eat, right, Ray? Am I right?”
Raymond didn’t have an opinion. He wanted to go get another bottle before the stores closed, but his money was gone.
“I don’t know,” the woman said doubtfully.
But Sky roused them, and a moment later they were all three stumbling through the sand to the sidewalk and along the sidewalk to the boulevard, Pal leading the way with his tail thrust up like a banner. It was unnaturally quiet, everything held fast in the grip of the fog. Cars drifted silently by as if towed on a wire, one pulled along after the other, their headlights barely visible. There was a faint music playing somewhere, saxophone and drums, and it came to them in snatches as they walked in the deep shadow of a bank of condos thrown up for the convenience of the tourists. Raymond didn’t know what he was doing or where he was going, and he didn’t care, because Sky was there and Sky was in command. His feet hit the pavement and he tried to keep from lurching into the shrubs that bristled along the high stucco walls of the condos. At one point the woman bumped up against him and he put his arm out to steady her, and in that moment of casual intimacy, he mumbled something along the lines of, “You know, I don’t even know what to call you.”
“Her name’s Knitsy,” Sky said over his shoulder. “Because her fingers are always knitting in the air — isn’t that right, Knitsy? I mean, knitting nothing, right?”
Her voice was breathy and shallow, with a sharp rural twang to it. “Sure,” she said, “that’s right.”
“And what’s that rhyme with — ditzy, right?”
“Sure, whatever.”
Raymond wanted to ask her about that, make a joke, but it would have been a cruel joke, and so he kept it to himself. Knitsy. Let her knit, and let the guy with the broken glasses stare out at the world like an ambassador with a pince-nez and let Sky lord it over everybody. What difference did it make? The world was nothing but cruelty and stupidity anyway. And he himself? He was drunk, very drunk. Too drunk to keep walking and too drunk to lie down.
They were away from the beach now, trailing down the alley behind Giulio’s Pizza Kitchen and the One-Stop Travel Shop. Sky motioned for silence, and they hung back in the shadows, whispering — hide-and-seek, that’s what it was, hide-and-seek — while Pal trotted across the pavement to reconnoiter the Dumpster. Reeling, watching the spots swell and explode before his eyes, Raymond felt Knitsy’s cold rough hand snake out and take hold of his own. His heart was thrumming. The fog sifted through the alley, etherized and unreal. Lit by the dull yellow glow of the streetlight on the corner, the dog might have been onstage somewhere, on TV, in a video, going through the repertoire of his tricks, and they watched as he sniffed and squirmed, prancing back and forth, till he finally went up on his hind legs and began to paw at the belly of the Dumpster. And then Sky was there, lifting the metal lid and retrieving the two large pies, still snug in their boxes, one decorated with pepperoni, the other with pineapple and ham.
IN THE MORNING — the morning, that was the hurtful time — Raymond woke to a shifting light, the peeling tan upthrust trunks of a grove of eucalyptus, and the sky revealed in a frame of leaves. He was on his back, something underneath him — a plastic tarp — and a blanket, heavy with dew, thrown over the cage of his chest. Beside him, snoring lightly and twitching in her sleep, was a woman with dirty fanned-out blondish hair and the deep indigo tattoo of a scorpion crawling up her neck. But that was no surprise — nothing was a surprise, unless it was the sidewalk, and this wasn’t the sidewalk. This was — he lifted his head to take in the half-collapsed teepee fashioned of blue tarps backed up against a chain-link fence, the scrub at his feet, the trash scattered over the leaf litter and the pregnant rise of the mound giving onto the railroad tracks — this was the woods. He saw Pal then, Pal poking his whiskered head out of the teepee to give him an unfathomable look, and beyond Pal, Sky’s red Mongoose mountain bike, for which — and it was all coming back to him now — Sky had paid nearly a third of his monthly SSI disability check. So this was Knitsy, then, and that was Sky inside the collapsing teepee. Or wigwam. Call it a wigwam. Better sound to it.
His head slipped back to the tarp. He tried to close his eyes, to fight down the stirring in his lower abdomen that was like the first stab of stomach distress — what his mother used to call the runs — but the thirst wouldn’t let him. It was there again, powerful, imperious, parching him all the way from his throat up into the recesses of his skull. I’ve got to get out of here, he was thinking, got to get up and out of here, find money, find work, a toilet, a tap, four walls to hide myself in. But he couldn’t move. Not yet.
That first night, the night she locked the door on him, they’d been drinking bourbon with beer chasers, and all his muscles were sapped — or his bones, his bones seemed to have melted away so that all he wanted to do was seek the lowest point, like water — and the best he could do was hammer on the door and shout the sort of incoherent things you shout at times like that until the police came and she told them she paid the rent around here and she didn’t know him anymore and didn’t want to. He wound up sleeping in the back of the building, under the oleanders against the fence, which made his face and hands break out in shining welts that were like fresh burns. He was planning on using his key after she left for work, but she didn’t leave for work, just sat there in the window drinking bourbon and waiting for the locksmith. That night he pounded on the door again, but he melted away when he saw the police cruiser coming up the street, and after that, he gave it up. First month, last month, security: where was he going to get that? He tried calling his brother collect in Tampa but his brother wouldn’t take the call. The bars were open though, and the corner stores with the Coors signs flashing in the windows. He got loaded, got hammered, wound up on the sidewalk. Now he was here.
He dozed. Came to. Dozed. And then, out of some beaten fog of a dream, he heard footsteps crunching gravel, a yip from Pal, and a voice — Sky’s voice — raised in song: “Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus Lane.”
Knitsy stirred, and they both came up simultaneously into the bewilderment of the day. Her hair was bunched on one side, her dress torn at the collar to reveal a stained thermal T-shirt beneath it. A warm, brewing odor rose from her. She looked at Raymond and her eyes retreated into her head.