“Take your things and go, goddammit.”
The woman did not go. She stood there, like she was waiting to be dismissed. Jackie sighed. Her back hurt so much, and her hand itched madly in the cast. She had never felt so distant from herself.
“All right. I can’t actually give you a ticket because it would just say ‘King City’ over and over, I won’t pay you anything, you won’t die for any period of time, and I won’t put it out for sale. But just sign here and you can go. Okay?”
The woman signed the name Catharine to the ticket, put the pen down, and asked in a small, shaken voice: “Is it over now?”
Jackie nodded. Catharine shuddered and walked out, upright and smiling, a different woman than had entered the shop.
Jackie took the hoe and, with her good arm, awkwardly leaned it on the trash can next to her. She opened the box. Inside was the mangled body of a tarantula. It had been hacked over and over until most of its body had detached from itself, a jigsaw puzzle way past solving. She looked out the door and watched the lights of Catharine’s car diminish into the highway distance. Jackie tossed the box in the trash, wincing as she did.
The lights and voices out in the desert were gone. She sat alone in the dark pawnshop, looking at nothing in particular, thinking about nothing in particular. Somewhere, Catharine felt better. Nowhere, the tarantula felt nothing at all.
Chapter 36
Diane bought a bus ticket to King City. It was as easy at that.
The bus left at 7:00 A.M. She brought a small suitcase and a little bit of cash. She boarded the bus, which was a standard bus, flint gray, with a long, rectangular body, two flat front windows, seven wheels, and several narrow viewing slots along the sides, so that the passengers could have a heavily obstructed view of the outside world.
The bus pulled out of the station and onto the highway. Diane tried texting and calling Josh again. It was painful, emotionally and physically, to do so, but she kept doing it anyway. She wished Jackie were with her. It would be easier with another person on her side, someone so steady and fearless, as young as she was, but Jackie was on her own painful journey, and Diane would have to do this alone.
The man sitting across the aisle from her was asleep moments into the ride. He was wearing overalls and a wooden hat. He had only one arm, which he kept folded behind his head. There was a tattoo along his tricep of a head of Boston lettuce crawling with ants. From between the broad leaves came two bare human legs, and below it all was a banner that read, CORAZÓN.
She listened to him breathe. His inhale was long and pinched, a thread of breath pulled taut into his sinuses. His exhale began with a muffled pop, like the sound of a freezer door opening, and spiraled out to a wheeze.
Diane closed her eyes. She tried to breathe synchronously with the man across the aisle. She put one arm behind her head, and breathed intentionally.
Yesterday, she had called the Sheriff’s Secret Police and reported her car and her son missing. When asked for a description of the car, she described colors and shapes. This matched the police’s understanding of what a missing burgundy Ford hatchback looked like. When asked for a description of Josh, she cried. This matched their understanding of what a missing teenage son looked like.
The Secret Police—who were standing in Diane’s doorway only seconds after she had said “Secret Police” into the poorly hidden microphone mounted above her refrigerator—had said they would look for him.
“We’re looking for him now,” they had said, standing completely still. A helicopter had flown over the house, but this had been unrelated. Helicopters were almost always flying over the house.
Helicopters keep us free, the house had thought.
HELICOPTERS KEEP US FREE, the billboards all over town said.
Helicopters keep us free, the Sheriff’s Secret Police had said to Diane then, in her kitchen, and also during all routine traffic stops and at community events and through bullhorns mounted atop cruisers cruising through quiet neighborhoods on Sunday mornings.
She had shown the police the paper with “KING CITY” written all over it.
One of the officers had held the paper to his face and then showed it to another officer, who had smelled it and then dropped it to the floor, where another officer had belly-crawled by quickly with a clear plastic bag and thick rubber gloves. The crawling officer had grabbed the paper with the gloved hand, put it in the plastic bag, sealed it, and written “nope!” on the bag in black marker. The officer had belly-crawled away, leaving the bag behind.
It didn’t look like they were going to help her at all. The next day she had gotten up early and taken a taxi to the bus station.
As the bus drove on, she tried to sleep but could not. She urged herself to hold still, but would eventually feel an itch on her side and would have to start over. The bus kept its lateral trajectory, which felt flat and straight. Every time she squinted out her viewing slot, she saw desert sameness.
Her phone’s battery was almost dead, even though she had charged it before leaving the house. Anyway, it had no signal to call out or in. She wished she had brought a municipally approved book to read, like Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth or The Complete Plays and Verse of Kurt Russell.
The man across the aisle never moved. His legato breaths stayed constant, a windy metronome.
The bus had been in motion, nonstop, for several hours, and she had not been able to sleep or read or use her phone. There was no visual complexity to the passing scenery or visceral texture to the drive. She was thankful for the man with the lettuce tattoo. She loved him, this man. He was, aesthetically and aurally, perfect. She loved him the way one loves an old bridge or a wool sweater or the sound of a growing tulip.
As she stared at him, the bus slowed and veered right. King City at last. She had only a vague plan for when she arrived. She would first try to find their Secret Police department, wherever it was hidden. Perhaps there was a radio host, some version of a Cecil Palmer for King City, California. She could contact that person and ask for them to put out a call for Josh, the way Cecil generously announced over the radio the location and personal details of Night Vale citizens without even being asked at all.
The bus came to a stop at a traffic light. They were clearly out on the edge of town. There was a used car lot. The bus turned, and her viewing slot showed her an old house that looked similar to Josie’s. Diane leaned into the aisle and looked out the front of the bus, at a familiar low skyline: the library, the Rec Center, the Pinkberry, the distant Brown Stone Spire.
She walked to the front of the bus and leaned over the white line, careful to keep her feet behind it.
“Is this Night Vale?” Diane asked.
“It is,” said the driver. Her name tag said MAB.
“But this was the King City bus.”
“Right.” Mab’s sunglasses hid any feelings she might be having about the questions.
“But we never stopped or turned.”
“Not many turns on that road.”
They passed the Antiques Mall. Today the antiques in the window were playful, jumping over each other and wrestling.
Diane stumbled over the white line as the bus turned onto Somerset.
“Feet behind the line please.”
She obeyed.
“I don’t understand. Why did we never stop in King City?”
Mab eased the bus to a stop at the downtown bus/train/paddleboat terminal. She turned and pulled off her sunglasses. Her feelings about Diane’s questions still weren’t clear because she had no eyes.
“My bus started in King City. Why would I stop in King City?”