She was back in Skinner’s room, reading National Geographic, about how Canada split itself into five countries. Drinking cold milk out of the carton and eating saltines. Skinner in bed with the tv, watching one of those shows he liked about history. He was talking about how all his life these movies of history had been getting better and better looking. How they’d started out jumpy and black and white, with the soldiers running around like they had ants in their pants, and this terrible grain to them, and the sky all full of scratches. How gradually they’d slowed down to how people really moved, and then they’d been colorized, the grain getting finer and finer, and even the scratches went away. And it was bullshit, he said, because every other bit of it was an approximation, somebody’s idea of how it might have looked, the result of a particular decision, a particular button being pushed. But it was still a hit, he said, like the first time you heard Billie Holiday without all that crackle and tin.
Billie Holiday was probably a guy like Elvis, Chevette thought, with spangles on his suit, but like when he was younger and not all fat.
Skinner had this thing he got on about history. How it was turning into plastic. But she liked to show him she was listening when he told her something, because otherwise he could go for days without saying anything. So she looked up now, from her magazine and the picture of girls waving blue and white flags in the Republic of Quebec, and it was her mother sitting there, on the edge of Skinner’s bed, looking beautiful and sad and kind of tired, the way she could look after she got off work and still had all her make-up on.
“He’s right” Chevette’s mother said.
“I-I am?”
“About history, how they change it.”
“Mom, you—”
“Everybody does that anyway, honey. Isn’t any new thing. Just the movies have caught up with memory, is all.”
Chevette started to cry.
“Chevette-Marie” her mother said, in that singsong out of so far back, “you’ve gone and hurt your head.”
“How well you say you know this guy?” she asked.
Rydell’s SWAT shoe crunched on little squares of safety-glass every time he used the brake. If he’d had time and a broom, he’d have swept it all out. As it was, he’d had to bash out what was left of the windshield with a piece of rusty rebar he found beside the road, otherwise Highway Patrol would’ve seen the holes and hauled them over. Anyway, he had those insoles. “I worked with him in L.A.” he said, braking to steer around shreds of truck-trailer tires that lay on the two-lane blacktop like the moulted skin of monsters.
“I was just wondering if he’ll turn out like Mrs. Elliott did. Said you knew her too.”
“Didn’t know her” Rydell said, “I met her, on the plane. If Sublett’s some kind of plant, then the whole world’s a plot.” He shrugged. “Then I could start worrying about you, say.” As opposed, say, to worrying about whether or not Loveless or Mrs. Elliot had bothered to plant a locator-bug in this motorhome, or whether the Death Star was watching for them, right now, and could it pick them up, out here? They said the Death Star could read the headlines on a newspaper, or what brand and size of shoes you wore, from a decent footprint.
Then this wooden cross seemed to pop up, in the headlights, about twelve feet high, with TUNE IN across the horizontal and TO HIS IMMORTAL DOWNLINK coming down the upright, and this dusty old portable tv nailed up where Jesus’s head ought to have been. Somebody’d taken a.zz to the screen, it looked like.
32. Fallonville
Must be getting closer” Rydell said.
Chevette Washington sort of grunted. Then she drank some of the water they’d gotten at the Shell station, and offered the bottle to him.
When he’d crashed out of that mall, he’d felt like they were sure to be right by a major highway. From the outside, the mall was just this low tumble of tan brick, windows boarded up with sheets of that really ugly hot-pressed recyc they ran off from chopped scrap, the color of day-old vomit. He’d gone screeching around this big empty parking lot, just a few dead clunkers and old mattresses to get in the way, until he’d found a way out through the chain link.
But there wasn’t any highway there, just some deserted four-lane feeder, and it looked like Loveless had put a bullet into the navigation hardware, because the map was locked on downtown Santa Ana and just sat there, sort of flickering. Where he was had the feel of one of those fallen-in edge-cities, the kind of place that went down when the Euro-money imploded.
Chevette Washington was curled up by the fridge with her eyes closed, and she wouldn’t answer him. He was scared Loveless had put one through her, too, but he knew he couldn’t afford to stop until he’d put at least a little distance between them and the mall. And he couldn’t see any blood on her or anything.
Finally he’d come to this Shell station. You could tell it had been Shell because of the shape of the metal things up on the poles that had supported the signs. The men’s room door was ripped off the hinges; the women’s chained and padlocked. Somehody had taken an automatic weapon to the pop machine, it looked like. He swung the RV around to the back and saw this real old Airstream trailer there, the same kind a neighbor of his father’s had lived in down in Tampa. There was a man there kneeling beside a hibachi, doing something with a pot, and these two black Labradors watching him.
Rydell parked, checked to see Chevette Washington was breathing, and got down out of the cab. He walked over to the man beside the hibachi, who’d gotten up now and was wiping the palms of his hands on the thighs of his red coveralls. He had on an old khaki fishing cap with about a nine-inch bill sticking straight out. The threads on the embroidered Shell patch on his coveralls had sort of frayed and fuzzed-out.
“You just lost” the man said, “or is there some kind of problem?” Rydell figured him to be at least seventy.
“No sir, no problem, but I’m definitely lost.” Rydell looked at the black Labs. They looked right back. “Those dogs of yours there, they don’t look too happy to see me.”
“Don’t see a lot of strangers” the man said.
“No sir” Rydell said, “I don’t imagine they do.”
“Got a couple of cats, too. Right now I’m feeding ’em all on dry kibble. The cats get a bird sometimes, maybe mice. Say you’re lost?”
“Yes sir, I am. I couldn’t even tell you what state we’re in, right now.”
The man spat on the ground. “Welcome to the goddamn club, son. I was your age, it was all of this California, just like God meant it to be. Now it’s Southern, so they tell me, but you know what it really is?”
“No sir. What?”
“A lot of that same happy horseshit. Like that woman camping in the goddamn White House.” He took the fishing cap off, exposing a couple of silver-white cancer-scars, wiped his brow with a grease-stained handkerchief, then pulled the cap hack on. “Say you’re lost, are you?”
“Yes sir. My map’s broken.”
“Know how to read a paper one?”
“Yes sir, I do.”
“What the hell’d she do to her head?” Looking past Rydell.
Rydell turned and saw Chevette Washington leaning over the driver’s bucket, looking out at them.
“How she cuts her hair” Rydell said.
“I’ll be damned” the man said. “Might be sort of good-looking, otherwise.”
“Yes sir” Rydell said.
“See that box of Cream o’ Wheat there? Think you can stir me up a cup of that into this water when it boils?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, I’ll go find you a map to look at. Skeeter and Whitey here, they’ll just keep you company.”
“Yes sir…”
PARADISE, so. CALIFORNIA