Taking stock of SLC’s meager possessions steadied me, and I gave standing another try, but I was still too dizzy. I was scared and pissed off—I wanted to get back to Annie—and I said, “I don’t know why the fuck you just sittin’ round waitin’ to die, man.”
“That’s all I’d be doin’ things was normal,” said SLC. “Sit or stand, don’t make much difference.”
“What I can’t figure is, how come people don’t move outa the way of these things.”
“Where you suggest we move to? Ain’t nothin’ out there ’cept more jungle, and you can’t live on the plain ’cause the beardsleys is all over.”
“Have you looked?” I asked. “You hunted around for a better place?”
“Much as I’m goin’ to look.” SLC set down his soup, sucked on his teeth. “You wanta look, you go on ahead.”
“Maybe I will.” I heaved myself up and this time I managed to make it to my feet.
“Well, that’s fine. But I recommend you stay where you are for now. Goin’ out in the passageways is a damn sight more dangerous.”
The room did a half spin, and I leaned against the wall.
“Got yourself a concussion…oh yeah!” SLC said brightly. “Best thing for you is to sit on back down. I’ll heat you some soup.”
In my dazed condition, the prospect of sitting down for a bowl of hot soup was appealing for the moment, but the next minute, the thought of slurping tomato soup while thousands of poisonous pancakes fluttered about killing dogs and people seemed like the peak of insanity. Still unsteady, I started for the door.
“Hang on, boy!” SLC set his bowl on the floor and stood—it took him a couple of tries before he made it upright. “If you ain’t got sense enough to stay put, I best go with you. Way you’re staggerin’, you ain’t gon’ get very far by yourself.”
I’m not sure what was on SLC’s mind. He might have been so senile, he’d forgotten the reason he had for keeping to his room. Or maybe he was so old, he figured he wasn’t risking all that much. He latched onto my elbow and we started off. We passed a couple of bodies, their faces branded with empurpled blazes where they had been touched by fritters, but luck was with us and we didn’t meet up with any ourselves. Once I thought I saw some floating off from us a ways on a branch two levels down, but I was seeing lots of floating things and I couldn’t be sure if any of them were real. As for SLC, he hobbled along, muttering to himself, acting no different than he usually did, except every so often he would glance up at me and flash a snaggletoothed grin.
When we pushed through the curtained door into Annie’s room, I thought she was going to throw us back out. She yelled at me, said how she thought I was dead, and what was I…Crazy? Didn’t I know any better than to go sniffing around after something that would kill me? She cried, she yelled some more, called me names. Finally I put my arm around her, agreed with everything she said for about ten or fifteen minutes, and she calmed down enough to sit with me on the mattress.
“I thought you was dead,” she said. “You didn’t come back, and I just knew they’d got you.”
“I shouldn’t have gone,” I told her. “It was dumb.”
“It was way more’n dumb! It was…” She couldn’t find the words and so I chimed in, saying, “It was irresponsible.”
“You make it sound like you was late for work or somethin’. You coulda been killed.” She looked gloomily down at my hand, which was resting on the blanket next to hers, as if she saw in it a bad sign she’d not noticed before. “I thought you’d changed.”
“Hey!” said SLC. He had settled in the corner and was sitting with his knees drawn up, looking worried. “Ain’t y’all got anything to eat in here?”
In the morning the fritters were gone. They took sixty-three souls with them, about a quarter of Yonder’s population. We burned the bodies on the stones where usually the laundry was stretched to dry, and scattered the ashes in the river. I went to Josiah Tobin’s wake, which consisted of eight old hobos sitting in his room, chewing jungleberries, and reminiscing about Josiah, telling lies about what a great rider he was and how he’d foxed the bulls in Yakima that one time, and didn’t he fry up the best hobo hash you’d ever tried? I felt like a young heathen among them. I wanted to say that stories about how Josiah had pissed his life away didn’t tell nothing of the man, and that to my mind he was the smartest son of a bitch I’d ever met on the rails, and the thing we should study on was not the mess he’d made of himself, but what he could have been if he’d given life more than half-a-try. But when it came my turn to speak, I told a story about drinking out in a desert squat east of Phoenix with him and Ragbone Sally. I guess I figured saying what I had thought wouldn’t mean much to anyone except Josiah.
Once the funerals were done, life over Yonder went back to normal. It was like nothing had happened. I tried to resist the impulse to embrace the sense of relief that caused us to want to put the attack behind us, but I didn’t try hard enough—a few days later I started going fishing with Euliss Brooks again, and me and Annie got back on track, and the tree where we all lived regained its customary lethargic atmosphere. My jungleberry consumption increased for a while, and Bobby Forstadt was, for about the same length of time, a bit more strident about his computer game theory, saying that the recurring menace of the fritters fit right in, and what we should be doing was attempting to influence the game. That was a fair sample of our reaction to sixty-three deaths. It wasn’t natural, but I suppose I’d become a full-on citizen of Yonder, and the unnatural responses of my fellows no longer struck me as being out of line. But I wasn’t happy. Annie and I were growing closer, but there was nowhere to go with it. If we had been back in the world, maybe we would have gotten off the rails and found regular work and built some sort of a life together; but what could you build living in a tree like kids on a backyard camp-out. We talked about catching out without any goal other than the filling up of time. We talked about returning to the world and giving it a go, but our talk was energyless and never got too serious.
Some people in Yonder kept calendars, recorded the passage of days, but I didn’t catch the habit—the days generally were so much alike, they seemed one long day striped with nights, and I saw no point in marking them. Thus I’m forced to estimate that it was about three weeks after the fritter attack when things turned for me. I was out fishing with Euliss, and at midmorning we decided that since we hadn’t had much success sitting together in the middle of the stone ledge, we’d try our luck at opposite ends of the ledge. It had rained overnight, and the sun was out, putting dazzles on the eddies, and the fishing should have been good, but neither one of us had gotten a nibble. The only odd thing I noticed was that the elders had reeled in their tentacles. When I mentioned this to Euliss, asked if he’d ever seen anything like it, he said maybe there was a day when it had happened before, but he wasn’t sure. Then he advised me to concentrate on my fishing and pushed the brim of his baseball cap down over his eyes, signaling that he wasn’t interested in talking. We were sitting about thirty feet apart, and I was watching the flow of the green water about my line when out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a rippling out at the center of the gorge. I was about to call it to Euliss’s attention, but he beat me to the punch and shouted, “Got me somepin’!”
I clambered to my feet, dusted the seat of my trousers. “Is it a big ’un?” I asked, thinking I’d walk over and see what he’d hooked.