Stone Junction

Daniel struggled to open his eyes but he was being lowered into a fresh, clay-streaked grave, his naked body glowing in the alkaline light of the moon. Standing in a circle around the pit, twelve old women were singing a wordless incantation of wails and parched moans, their upraised faces shining like oiled leather, their bodies swaying to the feathered tambourines they played. But the music Daniel heard wasn’t the thump and shimmer of tambourines, but the sound of shattering glass.

When his back touched the ground, the music stopped. Above him, framed by the grave, the moon slowly spiraled into itself till it disappeared, the stars following like flecks of foam. People whose faces he couldn’t see began to file past, each silently dropping a white rose into his grave, flowers to cushion the fall of covering earth, flowers to sweeten his decay. Daniel’s hands were crossed on his bare chest. He pressed his right palm against his ribcage, feeling for a heartbeat. Pressed harder when he felt nothing. Harder, beginning to panic, when a voice hollered, ‘Hey! Daniel!’ and he bolted from the bed, heart racing, riding the adrenaline rush as it cleared his senses.

Another holler: ‘Hey, you alive in there?’

It sounded like Wally Moon. Daniel tried to make his voice gruff with sleep. ‘Yeah, hey, who is it?’

‘Wally.’

‘Yeah, okay, just a minute.’ He picked up the bowling bag and slid it under the bed. He buttoned his shirt as he crossed the room, tucking it in before he opened the door.

He need not have been so formal. Wally Moon was standing on the porch naked, dripping wet. ‘The stones in the sweathouse are still hot if you want to get clean. Sorry if I woke you, but I don’t like to waste heat. Besides, it’s about your only chance for a hot bath till the next one.’

‘Thanks,’ Daniel said, ‘that was thoughtful. A sweat would be perfect. And no problem about waking me up; glad you did. I’ve got some work to do tonight anyway, and––’

Wally’s squint cut him off. ‘You work at night?’

‘I’m a writer,’ Daniel said quickly. ‘Religious stuff.’

‘Oh, a poet.’

‘Not quite, no, more like a scholar, sort of a religious anthropologist, I suppose – theological essays, research papers, that general vein.’

‘So you’re going to stay here and work tonight?’

‘If it doesn’t stretch your hospitality.’

‘No, I meant it when I said you could stay as long as you like. But I just wanted to make sure you planned to work, because I need to borrow your truck till the morning.’

‘Ummm, gee,’ Daniel began, ‘I’d really like to let––’

Wally, more as if continuing than interrupting, said, ‘I told you my wife was off in the mountains menstruating? Well, she went in our truck and it broke down – she called me on the CB just before I headed to the sweathouse.’

Daniel said, ‘The front differential on my truck is busted. No four-wheel drive.’

Wally wiped a trickle of water from his cheek. ‘Don’t need four-wheel. She broke down on the highway about thirty miles from here, not out in the hills. Just need to tow it in if I can’t fix it, but Annie said it sounded like the engine was eating metal, so it might not be simple to fix.’ Wally shook his head. ‘Menstruating women should not be around machines. They confuse machines. But don’t worry about your truck, because Annie says she is done menstruating. Annie is always very lustful when she returns from the mountains.’ Wally grinned, looking directly at Daniel.

It was a universal appeal: Let me borrow your wheels so I can get laid. The appeal demanded a generosity beyond the merely convenient. Daniel, feeling vaguely conned, reached in his pocket for the keys.

Daniel was in the sweathouse when he heard his truck rumble past and fade toward the highway, the music pounding from its radio the last sound to dissolve. Faint from hunger and the heat, he bent forward from his squat, lowering his head to his knees. He inhaled strongly, stretching his lungs, but his attempt to keep the exhalation smooth collapsed into a sigh. He tried to imagine Volta’s face. The face flickered but wouldn’t hold.

Daniel mumbled anyway, ‘I know, it was stupid to let Wally take the truck. He and his wife could get nailed, they might turn me, or take the truck and money. Hundreds of shitty possibilities. But even if stupid, it was the right thing to do, or at least that’s how I felt it. I’m working on nerve alone now, out on the edges looking for the center, not a realm that rewards a rational approach. Thought isn’t fast enough. Don’t make me doubt myself, Volta, don’t make me hesitate. Hesitation could be fatal. Let me do it myself. Don’t stand between me and the Diamond. This one isn’t yours. It has a spiral flame through its center, like the one I saw. It wants me to see inside, wants me to know. Let me go.’ He realized he was no longer addressing Volta but the Diamond.

Daniel started laughing and immediately felt faint again. He dipped his hand in the bucket of cold water at his side and flung a cupped handful on the hot stones. The water sizzled into steam. The steam curled through the slender shaft of moonlight from the small, heat-fogged window behind him, coiled, braided, swirled through itself, dispersed. Daniel looked for a pattern, a rhythm. He threw another handful of water on the stones. A dragon’s tail lashed slowly through the light. The durable lines of a pig. A great blue heron ponderously lifted from its fishing roost and glided downriver. A lion’s paw. The bash and plunge of a whale. A twisted question mark. A rose billowing into bloom. A thousand possibilities, but nothing that cohered.

Twenty minutes later Daniel half staggered from the sweathouse and made his way to the shower. When the cold water hit him, jolting him back into his skin, he saw a slender twist of flame flash behind his eyes.

His body steaming in the cool night air, he walked naked back to his cabin, slipped the Diamond from the bowling bag, and vanished.

Calm, steady, focus locked, Daniel gazed into the Diamond all night, waiting for it to open. He reappeared with the Diamond an hour before dawn, so exhausted he didn’t think to put it away. He curled around its light and immediately fell asleep.

Smiling Jack Ebbetts punched the Play button and said to Volta, who was pouring them both a shot of cognac, ‘I don’t know if it’s something or nothing or a load of shit. You tell me.’ He sat down across the table from Volta in the basement of the Allied Furnace Repair building, swirled the cognac in his glass, tossed it back.

The tape began with a ringing telephone. Smiling Jack said quickly to Volta, ‘He gave me his direct line so it didn’t go through the secretary.’

The ringing stopped.

‘Keyes.’

‘Hello, Melvin,’ Smiling Jack’s voice boomed in a hearty Texas drawl, ‘this is Jacques-Jacques Lafayette, Dredneau’s good buddy and brain trust. You got your half of this deal for me?’

‘Yes. Or the best I could. I’m not really pleased with this deal, though. I’m––’

‘Well, shit-fire, Mel, it’s simple enough: You talk and I don’t; you don’t and I do.’

‘But suppose I talk and then you talk anyway? Or want me to keep talking so you don’t? Let’s talk about that.’

‘Mel, what you’re talking like is a man with a paper asshole. Haven’t you ever heard of honor? Human trust? Mutual benefit?’

‘Yes. I’ve heard of blackmail, too. And coercion.’

‘Well, fuck ya then, son. I better do business with this Debritto boy. Besides the information, maybe I could get a few of them two hundred fifty Ks that my little ol’ computer tells me were recently transferred from your very own Whole Corn Distributing Company to a numbered Cayman account. Shit-oh-dear, wouldn’t the Washington Post have fun with that on the front page!’

‘I’d like some guarantee,’ Keyes whined. ‘You can understand that.’

‘You got a guarantee, hoss! You got my word. Now quit dicking me around while you’re trying to slap a trace on my call,’ cause the call’s routed through an empty apartment in San Angelo. Shit or get off the pot, Mel. You’re not playing with kids.’

‘Okay, I’m going to connect you with Shelby Bennett in our Denver office. The information came directly to him about four hours before the bomb was to be planted. His informant is named Alex Three. He’d called Shelby before. There’s no tapes, and Shelby ran Alex Three and Al X Three, and like he expected, got a blank screen. It’s a code name. Shelby says––’

‘’Scuse me, pardner, but why don’t you let Shelby tell me hisself.’

‘Sure, I’m putting it through now. I’m going to stay on the line.’

‘You don’t have a real bone in ya, do ya Melvin? Not one trusting bone. Reckon it must raise hell with your faith.’

As Shelby Bennett’s phone rang on tape, Volta said to Jack, ‘You’re incorrigible.’

Jack smiled, then he and Volta listened as Shelby Bennett confirmed the information Keyes had already given. On tape, Texas Jacques- Jacques said, ‘Shelby, I’d be obliged if you’d answer a couple of questions for me.’

‘I’ll try, Mr Lafayette,’ Shelby replied.

‘How many times has this Alex Three hombré rang up you?’

‘Nine, starting in seventy-five and ending a few years later with the plutonium tip.’

‘Why do you think that was his last call?’

‘Because his conditions weren’t met.’

‘What sorta conditions we talking about here?’

‘Just one, really. That nobody get hurt.’

‘Who fucked it up?’

Bennett paused a moment. ‘Nobody, really. I couldn’t handle it personally because I was here, in Denver. He said he understood, that he was trusting me to put it in the proper hands, but that I’d be responsible if his condition wasn’t satisfied. I told him that anything involving theft of nuclear materials went straight to the director; I had no choice unless I wanted a career change. He said to do my best to retain control. But when I called the director he took it out of my hands.’

‘Why’d this good ol’ Alex Three choose you for these friendly calls?’

‘When I asked him that myself, he said, “I hear you’re honest and reliable.” That’s the only reason he ever gave.’

‘He ever let on how he was getting his information, or why he was passing it on?’

‘I asked his source the first time he called, and he said, “Me.” I never bothered to ask again.’

‘He ever ask for anything in return?’

‘No, but he said he might. I told him I couldn’t make promises, but that I’d do whatever I honorably could.’

‘Ya get that, Mel?’ Texas Jacques-Jacques yelled down the line. ‘This fella knows how to establish a professional working atmosphere. You lissen up and learn something, hear?’ When Keyes didn’t reply, he asked Bennett, ‘Now Shelby, I’m hoping you might be able to tell me what sorta other tips this Alex Three passed along.’

‘I’d rather not – and anyway, I doubt if they’re germane. Nothing even close to the level of the plutonium theft. I can tell you that most of it involved small South American matters and internal government corruption. I’ll give you an example: We had some of our own low-level people ripping off emergency medical supply shipments after a big earthquake down south. That sort of thing.’

‘His information always pretty accurate, was it?’

‘Utterly.’

‘You never met him, that right?’

‘Always by phone.’

‘Ever tempted to slap on a trace, see where he was calling from?’

‘He told me not to bother. I didn’t.’

‘Okay now, so all you ever heard was his voice. You can tell a lot about a man just listening to him talk. What did you hear?’

‘Male, mid-thirties or a little older, faint Germanic accent – Swiss maybe – good vocabulary, very precise. But these weren’t long conversations, you understand.’

‘No tapes, huh?’

‘No. He asked me not to. It was a request, not a condition.’

‘You think you’d recognize his voice if you heard it again?’

‘I don’t know. He hasn’t called since Livermore.’

‘Well, thanks for your help, Shelby.’ Preciate it. Mel does, too, I’m sure.’

Keyes said, ‘Yes, thanks Shel; I owe you one.’ He waited for Bennett to get off the line and said to Texas Jacques-Jacques, ‘That’s all there is, cowboy. You satisfied with my end?’

‘You know, my ol’ Pappy, bless his wildcat soul, always told me that if a man’s real anxious to sell, give it some hard, cold thinking ’fore you buy. I got to respect my Pappy’s advice. I’ll get back to you on it soon as I got it mulled over good. Keep your loop tight, Mel.’

Keyes was sputtering, ‘Hold on now, you––’ when the recording ended.

Smiling Jack hit Stop, then Rewind. He glanced at Volta, who was staring into his untouched glass of cognac. ‘You want to hear it again, Volt?’

‘Later, perhaps.’

‘What do you think? Flowers or fertilizer?’

‘Flowers. I think you got everything there was, the whole truth and nothing but, and you had fun doing it. Please reconsider giving me the honor of nominating you to replace me on the Star. The Alliance is losing that sense of fun; you could refresh it.’

‘Damn, Volt, I think you’re getting maudlin in your old age – or else it’s tougher than you thought to sit here waiting for Daniel to call. Maybe you should get some natural light and fresh air on you. Do a bunch of pushups. Jog over to McDonald’s and get back in the world.’

Volta barely smiled. ‘You’re right, waiting has been tougher than I thought. The hardest part is that I’ve had four straight days with time to reflect, and what I see of myself doesn’t please me. I’m losing my effectiveness, and I’m not having fun. I’m tired of excruciating decisions, balancing acts, judgments that must consider the welfare of the Alliance before the good of my heart – though truly they aren’t often at odds.’

‘Jesus,’ Jack said, ‘you’re turning sane.’

‘I’m beginning to cherish that infrequent state of mind, yes.’

‘Well, before your effectiveness peters out completely, how do you want to move on this Alex Three info?’

‘I think we should follow your dear ol’ Pappy’s advice and mull it over reeeal good.’

Jack looked skeptical. ‘Way you were just talking, didn’t sound like your muller could take much more.’

‘Plenty of room,’ Volta assured him. ‘Throw it in there with the rest and sit back and wait for something to connect. I’m assuming, naturally, that you’re having Alex Three run through our own sources.’

‘Yeah, got them on it pronto, but they haven’t turned diddley yet.’

‘Alex Three,’ Volta mused. ‘Try it under Alexandra, also – and Xan. Maybe try working on Al Ex-Three, or maybe X as “times,” a multiplier, or as addition. Al Triple? All three times? A.L.? American League? Three-time winner in the American League?’

‘I told Jimmy and J.J. to run any combos they could come up with. And those boys are whizzes on them computers.’

Volta lifted a hand. ‘I was just babbling out loud, not impugning their abilities. Actually, I was avoiding thinking about a tougher decision.’

‘Like whether to tell Daniel, right?’

‘No. He gets the information when we receive the Diamond. The tough decision is whether to tell Shamus.’

‘Not much to decide, is there? He’s gone loco, first of all, and besides he hasn’t been in touch.’

‘Not recently, but he might. And Alex Three had to get his information from close to the source, so Shamus is the best one to ask. Maybe he even knows who this Alex Three is. Let’s play it this way: Call Dolly and tell her that if Shamus checks in, she can tell him only that we’ve discovered the snitch, and how it went down in the alley with a trigger-happy agent. But don’t tell even Dolly we know who the agent was, much less the name. Only you and I have that name at the moment, and that’s enough.’

‘We can hope Daniel will make it three when he calls and decides to trade the Diamond for his mama’s killer, and a lead on the snitch.’

Volta said, without conviction, ‘Possibly.’ He smiled wryly at Jack and raised his glass of cognac: ‘To hope.’ He paused as he brought the glass to his lips and added, ‘And to faith.’

When Volta set down the empty glass, Jack said, ‘Aw, don’t worry. Things are just hanging fire right now. Pretty soon some pieces will come tumbling together, and you’ll know what to do because you – more than anyone I ever met – know what to do. I mean, don’t think you can shamelessly flatter me with this Star bullshit and get away unscathed.’

‘Scathe me,’ Volta said, ‘I need it.’ But he didn’t smile.

‘You don’t think he’s gonna trade that Diamond, do you? You really don’t.’

‘Jack, I’ve been sitting here four days feeling that Diamond take him. It was the one imponderable, how he’d react to the Diamond. Maybe I just didn’t ponder it deeply enough.’

‘Volt, would you quit whipping on yourself? I mean, how could you’ve considered that?’

‘I could have used some imagination,’ Volta said.

* * *

In a rich baritone and a horrible Irish accent, someone was singing ‘Dannnny Boy, Dannnny Boy, the pipes are calling––’

Daniel bolted awake. He looked around wildly: naked, daylight, the Diamond beside him on the bed. He lunged for the bowling bag and stuffed the Diamond inside, yelling at the singer, ‘What? Wait a minute, goddammit!’ He slid the bag under the bed, and pulled on his pants. It wasn’t until his first step toward the door that a sharp painful yank made him realize he’d caught half his pubic hair in the zipper. ‘Arrrhhh!’ he howled, clawing at his crotch for the zipper pull. At his howl, the singing stopped.

‘Daniel?’ Wally Moon called from the porch. ‘Hey! You all right in there?’

Daniel flung the door open, his face flushed. ‘Yes, Wally, I’m wonderful. Just got jerked from a sound sleep by some serenading Mongol-Apache and in my haste to get dressed I caught my pubic hair in my zipper, which caused the pained cry that elicited your concern. But other than that, top o’ the morning to ya.’

Wally winced. ‘Oooh, I’ve done that. Not only hurts like a son-of-a-bitch, but it scares you, too. Better than catching a fold of skin on your dick, though – you ever done that, zip up your dick?’

‘No, not yet, Wally.’ Daniel’s anger was dissipating rapidly, his confusion with it. He remembered Wally had borrowed his truck. He didn’t notice any sign of the keys in Wally’s hands.

As if to confirm the keys’ absence, Wally spread his arms, his open palms upraised in a mild plea for forbearance. ‘I had to wake you to give you the news.’

‘What news?’

‘Good news,’ Wally said merrily.

‘Do you have my truck?’

‘No,’ Wally smiled. ‘That’s the good news.’

‘For who?’

‘For you. See, we towed our truck in about sunup – it ate a valve – and after we had some breakfast, Annie went to Tucson for parts. We don’t have much money, but we have lots of relatives between us, and Annie’s cousin’s brother-in-law has a wrecking yard in Tucson. Anyway, about an hour ago, two guys in a grey Chevy sedan, last year’s model, came up the road. They were both large men with nice shines on their shoes. They said they were U.S. Treasury agents out looking for a man named Isaiah Kharome so they could give him a large tax settlement that he’d never collected. But to tell you the truth, they didn’t look like men happy to be returning money. They looked like men who had terrible childhoods.’

‘I see,’ Daniel said. ‘What did you tell them?’

‘I told them we hadn’t had a guest in over a month and that I didn’t recall seeing a seventy-two Chevy four-by with a camper, New Mexico license LXA 009. I wouldn’t have been able to tell them that with much conviction if your truck had been parked here.’

‘Thanks,’ Daniel said. ‘They weren’t Treasury agents, though, I can tell you that. The IRS is hunting me because I claim my writing is religious and therefore tax exempt, but they don’t agree. They’ve been hounding me for months – Isaiah Kharome is my pen name.’

‘Ah,’ Wally said, as if he finally understood. ‘I didn’t think they had money for you. Only trouble. But see how generosity encourages good fortune? You kindly lend me your truck, and it’s gone when they’re here. Not only that, I’ve always thought that when people are chasing you, the best place to be is behind them.’

‘So they’ve gone on, I take it. Toward Tucson?’

‘That’s what their car tracks show. I always take a morning run so I went down to the highway to check.’

‘I’m a little worried about your wife. They might see the truck on her way back from Tucson.’

‘Before my run, I used the CB to call my uncle in Dos Cabezas who has a phone and he called Annie’s cousin’s brother-in-law’s wrecking yard to leave a message that she shouldn’t drive on the interstate today. She will understand. Annie is strange even for a woman, but she possesses great intelligence. She also likes to drive fast, so I would expect her back by early afternoon with your truck, and also with some groceries. We will have a feast to good luck this evening if you would like to join us.’

Daniel frowned and said ruefully, ‘No, gosh, I can’t. I’m supposed to be in Phoenix tonight.’

Wally said with a faint chastising edge, ‘I had a teacher, an Apache holy man named Two Snakes, who taught that the best place to hide was where they’d already looked.’

‘He sounds like a very wise man,’ Daniel said, ‘but I have obligations beyond my control, and I must honor them.’

Wally nodded. ‘Religious obligations and family obligations are very important to keep things going right. But you should take the scenic route to Phoenix – Six sixty-six, to Seventy, to Sixty, and then Eighty. But of course these tax people are everywhere you go these days.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Daniel assured him. ‘I’m difficult to catch and much harder to keep.’

When Daniel heard his truck drive in two hours later, he was still sitting on the edge of the bed, his shirt in his hands. He was thinking about what to do next, given the news of pursuit. He felt tired, calm, and strangely content, as if something was coming inevitably to a conclusion, its trajectory locked. He admitted to himself that he wanted a conclusion, wanted one soon. He didn’t feel he had the power to hold on much longer. He decided to call Volta at the first opportunity. His cover was evidently blown and he wanted to know why. That was a practical matter. But he also owed Volta an explanation, or as much of one as he could give. And maybe Volta could give him some advice on how to proceed with the Diamond, how to see inside it. Daniel didn’t want to return it until he’d seen what it was the Diamond wanted him to see. Maybe Volta could offer him perspective. He felt like he was too close to see clearly, yet he couldn’t back away.

Daniel pulled out of the Two Moons Rest Stop an hour before dark. He left five thousand dollars on top of the TV, more an endowment to the notion of rest than a tip for services. Wally Moon had his head under the hood of a battered pickup when Daniel drove by. Daniel tooted twice. Without looking up, Wally Moon lifted the box-wrench in his hand and made a gesture that was, at once, forward and farewell. THE NOTEBOOKS OF JENNIFER RAINE APRIL

My name is Jennifer Raine Escapedangone; also known as you can kiss my sweet little ass good-bye. Me and Mia went out easy the way Clyde came in. Quick on tiptoes down the hall to the end of the wing and the unlocked janitor’s supply room and then feet first down the laundry chute into the basement, kids on a slide, landing on a pile of fear-rank, night-sweat sheets that Clyde had mounded there for us. The basement walls were ringed with huge washing machines and dryers, and right above them was a series of narrow, ground-level windows. The fifth window on the eastern wall had a broken lock. I slithered through onto the cool lawn, then reached back for Mia. I felt our hands touching in the darkness, the pain and trust between us giving me strength, and pulled her through the window. We scampered across the moon-shadowed grounds to the brick wall, six feet at most, more a screen than a barrier, and from there, as my dear DJ says, it was simply a matter of over and out, out, out, out, and free, good gods, at last!

The first place we stopped was your standard all-nite drug-dealing diner at the edge of town – chafed plastic glasses, tape-scabbed stools at the formica counter, the waitress in a frayed, ice-blue rayon dress, bra and slip straps showing through, country-and-western on the radio in the kitchen, the spattering grill-grease and the radio’s static indistinguishable, and four junk-grayed men nodding to the same slow rhythm as they dunked donuts in their cold coffee.

I ordered a chocolate milkshake to share with Mia. We’d just finished when two young strutters came in, sleaze-boys, the kind who live on what they roll from junkies. I didn’t like the way they looked at me. I wanted out of there so bad I left the whole five for the waitress and headed for the door.

The greasiest one waited until I’d passed before he called, ‘Hey mama, where you going? The party’s just about to get started.’

‘Sorry, I have a date with the DJ to dance on Jim Bridger’s grave.’ I walked away.

I hitched a ride around dawn from an old rancher in a battered flatbed who said he could only take me a little ways; I told him that was far enough. I lied to all his questions, and said nothing when he scolded me for hitching alone. ‘Lotsa bad men out driving. Drunked-up, too.’

He took me almost to Fairfield. I went to a Salvation Army store and bought some faded Levis and a men’s flannel shirt with my last five dollars.

After that I hitched a ride – another farmer – to here, somewhere in the central valley. I’m writing this by the scatter of moonlight through the cracked shakes of an abandoned barn. It’s ramshackle and smells like old piss, but it’s shelter enough on this warm spring night.

Ever since we got here (Mia’s already asleep – she had a tough day) I’ve been trying to remember that yeasty odor of bread rising in my grandmother’s warming oven from when I was four or five, and I just smelled it now, sharp and musky, and I remember my blue pajamas and the moonlight sheen on the goosedown quilt as soft as a goodnight kiss. And if I hold really still and forget myself, I feel the mist of my father’s seed in my mother’s pulse, can feel myself passing bodiless between them, my face erupting out of nothingness, my tiny mouth already hungry for a voice, and I can see my first dream shiver through the veins in my almost transparent eyelids, but I can’t remember what I was dreaming. The first dream – that’s what I want to know. I want to remember the first dream I ever had. And then I’ll use that knowledge to ransom my ghost from the lightning.

Daniel didn’t call Volta at the first opportunity, nor the hundredth. He couldn’t figure out if the second thoughts represented prudent doubts or were merely allowing him to put it off. His cover was clearly blown, and Daniel had to consider the possibility that Volta had decided that the Diamond was safer with the government than with him, and had turned him to CIA, rolled over on him, ‘dropped a dime’ as Mott said.

He had to consider it, but he didn’t believe it. More likely, there was a tap, or maybe an agent inside the Alliance. A tap would make it risky to even call Volta, since they probably would set it up for immediate trace. That would provide his general location, if nothing else. He wasn’t worried about being caught – he could vanish with the Diamond and walk through a wall of tanks – but he didn’t want the annoyance. Nor did he want to leave them the truck with Wally’s and Annie’s fingerprints and a paper trail they could perhaps follow back to the AMO people who had set it up. But when all that convenient logic was exhausted, Daniel, with the fiercest honesty he could muster, knew the reason for his reluctance was a decidedly unreasonable intuition that he would be sadder for the call. Sadness would weaken him in his attempt to see what the Diamond wanted to offer.

He was thinking about drawing a blind yes or no from a hat when it struck him that he had never tried looking into the Diamond’s center with his eyes closed. He pulled over at the next rest area and vanished with the Diamond. He looked into its center steadily and then closed his eyes. He saw an after-image of the spiral flame that faded quickly. He could imagine the Diamond, see the flame center clearly, but could not see inside it. After an hour, he forced himself to reappear with the Diamond and get back on the road.

He received two signs almost immediately. The first was premonitory: a mileage sign that read GLOBE 37. The second sign was so direct Daniel stopped the moment he saw it. The sign was on the wall of a fire-gutted gas station, written large on the outside face of the cinderblocks; the heat-blistered paint had peeled and fallen away, and of what was once a list of parts and services, all that remained were:

AKES

ARK PLUG

VOLTA REGULAT

The phone booth at the far end of the lot was unscathed except for a lingering odor of damp smoke.

Volta answered on the first ring: ‘Allied Furnace Repair, Night Service.’

Daniel said, ‘The place I’m calling from advertises “akes, ark plugs, volta regulats.” It left me no choice.’

‘Well,’ Volta replied mildly, ‘I’m glad to see you’re beginning to develop a sense of humor. You’re going to need it. First of all––’

‘I have doubts about the privacy of this line,’ Daniel interrupted, adding, to explain his apparent rudeness, ‘before we get started.’

‘No, the line is secure. But I surmise by your doubts that you already know your traveling identity has been compromised.’

‘So I’ve gathered.’

‘Listen while I explain what happened. Listen carefully. It’s a revelatory explanation.’

Daniel listened as instructed. As Volta described Dredneau’s torture, Daniel closed his eyes and slumped back against the phone-booth wall. He could feel what was coming in Volta’s voice from the slight tremor at the end of each precise statement, feel it in the precision itself, and when Volta revealed that the man who’d tortured Dredneau had also shot his mother for no reason, Daniel softly cried, ‘Ohhh no. No.’

Volta paused a moment, then continued, ‘Subsequently, through some inspired work by Smiling Jack, we learned the code name of the person who betrayed the Livermore theft to the CIA.’ Volta stopped and waited.

Daniel, too stunned to think, took a deep breath. ‘The killer and the snitch – you didn’t mention their names.’

‘Daniel,’ Volta said evenly, ‘I will give you the names when you bring me the Diamond. I promised you in the hospital, the first time we met, that I would do everything I could to help you find your mother’s killer, and now he is known. I’ve honored my promise. Daniel, you vowed that in exchange for my help you would share with me the privilege of beholding the Diamond and the responsibility of returning it to hiding, safe from us all. You haven’t honored your promise, and even granting extraordinary circumstances, that shows an utter lack of respect for me, and yourself. If you want to revenge your mother, you must honor your promise with the Diamond. That’s fair.’

Daniel howled, ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do? Terrorize him until he kills himself?’ Daniel hurled the phone at the glass wall but the cord was too short and snapped back against his wrist. He grabbed it and slammed it down on the hook.

He stormed back to his truck, started it, then turned it off and slumped back in the seat. ‘It’s fair, it’s fair, goddammit, it’s fair. But I didn’t want to know, don’t need decisions.’ He walked resolutely back to the phone booth and redialed Volta’s number.

Volta again answered on the first ring. He didn’t seem surprised to hear Daniel say, ‘You’re right, it is fair. But I’m going to keep the Diamond until I see inside it, or through it, or whatever it allows me to do. I want to see inside this Diamond a thousand times more than I want to revenge my mother’s death – and even though Wild Bill cleaned out most of that cold frenzy, I would still revenge it. Do you understand what I’m saying? That as much as I would like justice for my mother, it’s nothing compared to my desire to open the Diamond. I need you to let me go. I need your blessing.’

‘I’ve already let the Diamond go, Daniel, and I think the only way it will ever open for you is to let it go. You’re free to do as you can, free to go, free to return. I have no claims on your soul. I wish you luck, and I wish you success. But I will not give my blessings because I believe the Diamond will destroy you. It may destroy you beautifully, magnificently, but it will destroy you, Daniel, and I will not bless pointless waste.’

‘It wants me to see. I can feel it.’

‘It’s a mirror, Daniel. Just another mirror.’

‘I think it’s a window. A door.’

‘Know thyself,’ Volta said, ‘and to thine own self be true. I have too much admiration for you to deny your right to explore as you must. But I wouldn’t be true to myself – or you – if I didn’t tell you I think you’ll be destroyed, and that if you are, Daniel, it will break my heart.’

‘But you don’t understand––’

‘Perhaps not,’ Volta cut in. ‘I grant that possibility. But then, maybe you don’t understand. Maybe you’re obsessed, powerless against the Diamond, or simply too young to know better.’

‘It’s possible,’ Daniel said. ‘But that’s what I’m committed to finding out.’

‘May you find what you seek.’

Daniel smiled in the dark phone booth. ‘That sounded like a blessing to me.’

‘Then may you find what you deserve.’

‘I’ll take that as a blessing, too. I’ve earned this right, Volta, and though you truly helped me earn it – for which you have my endless gratitude – it’s mine. And this is what I’m feeling in my marrow: It is mine not because I earned it or physically possess it; the Diamond is mine by destiny.’

Volta said, ‘Be thrice blessed then. I’ll add an ancient Estonian blessing: “May your journey have an end.” The Diamond is your responsibility now.’

Daniel said quickly, ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way. But as part of my sense of responsibility, I vow to bring the Diamond to you when my work is finished, or if for some reason I can’t and am forced to return it to hiding, I’d like to return it to wherever you had intended.’

‘No, Daniel. I let it go. I can’t tell you how clean it felt when I finally released it from my grasp. And for that lesson, I thank you. I’m going to fold up this operation now, and go home to Laurel Creek Hollow. You have the routing numbers; the direct line is seven multiplied by the day of the month. Call if you want, or come visit. I’ll guarantee your welcome but not my assistance; that will depend on the wisdom of what you need and my capacity and inclination to provide it. Let us take our leave as friends.’

‘That’s all I wanted,’ Daniel said, his eyes burning with tears. ‘Thank you.’

‘Good-bye, Daniel,’ Volta said.

‘Thank you,’ Daniel repeated. ‘Yes, good night. I’ll be in touch.’

They hung up at the same time.

Volta spent the rest of the night on the phone and radio dismantling the operation and reassigning people and resources to other projects. Ellison Deeds, Jean Bluer, and Smiling Jack were all in the field somewhere, so he left messages to call him upon their respective returns. He packed equipment till well after sunrise, then slept fitfully for a few hours. He lay in bed and tried to imagine what Daniel saw when he looked into the Diamond. Daniel had said he could only see into the Diamond when he vanished with it. Volta was skittish about even imagining himself vanished. He remembered the temptation to cross the threshold and keep going, consumed in some undreamable whirlpool of felicity, an ecstatic suicide. Instead, he tried a technique he’d learned from Ravana Dremier, slowly condensing himself to an essence and then separating it from his psyche, lifting himself out of himself as an objective witness, yet retaining his will to know.

He still couldn’t imagine Daniel vanished and looking into the Diamond, but paradoxically – having abandoned rationality for empathetic imagination – he suddenly understood what he might have deduced through laborious reasoning. Daniel saw a spiral flame in the Diamond, just as he’d seen it in the vision he’d reported to Volta. That explained why he’d called it ‘mine,’ and why he thought it was meant for him alone. His vision, of course, had disposed him toward seeing it. Volta was the only other person in the world capable of confirming whether the spiral flame was indeed only visible to the vanished. And both of them knew Volta wouldn’t vanish again. Daniel had perhaps chosen to spare them both the sorrow of refusal – whether out of kindness or pity, Volta wasn’t sure.

And he wasn’t certain Daniel could survive the situation in which he was so terribly alone. There was nothing Volta could do about it and remain true to himself, and probably nothing he could do even if he betrayed himself. Volta had let the Diamond go – not as joyously or as easily as he’d tried to make it seem to Daniel – but he couldn’t release Daniel from his heart. Volta understood that he, no less than Daniel, had confused the ideal and the real, but he understood, in a way Daniel did not, that such a confusion seldom goes unpunished. Because Volta had no children, Daniel, orphan of fire, was an ideal son. And now it was going to hurt.

Volta closed his eyes and tried again to imagine Daniel vanished with the Diamond, tried to see the spiral flame through Daniel’s mind. He was failing so badly he was relieved to hear a key in the lock and Smiling Jack’s voice booming down the stairs, ‘Dreamers awake!’

Volta swung his feet to the floor, muttering, ‘One dreamer’s not sure anymore if he knows the difference.’

As he stepped from behind the partition, Smiling Jack advanced, waving a half-gallon of Ten High. ‘What do you say, Volt? Let’s get really fucked up and full of sentimental despair and then finally decide life, despite every heartbreak and anguished cry, is worth each pulse and breath.’

Volta tried to smile. ‘I’d drink to that, but you have work to do and I won’t drink and get stupid without you.’

‘What work? Message I got said we’re shutting this one down.’

‘We are, but I’m putting you in charge of loose ends. You tie such strong knots.’

‘What is this, an alliance of magicians and outlaws or the fucking navy?’

‘It changes with every breath,’ Volta said.

‘Maybe so,’ Jack sighed, ‘but I’m not going to try to change your mood. Be grim, glum, and gloomy.’

‘Jack, while I can’t admire your alliterative abilities, I thank you for your thoughtfulness.’

Smiling Jack sat down on the worn beige sofa. ‘How’s Daniel? What’d he have to say?’

‘He’s emotionally ragged and spiritually lost – dangerously so. He’s trying to see something inside the Diamond that he thinks only he can behold. He believes the Diamond wants him to see inside it. He intends to keep the Diamond until it opens and he understands. He said it is a thousand times more important to him to pursue the Diamond than revenge his mother’s death. Other than that, our conversation was devoted to relieving each other of responsibilities for our stupid decisions.’

‘What do you think?’ Jack said.

‘I’m trying not to. That’s why I want you to take responsibility for the follow-through. Two things: stay on Alex Three’s identity, and do justice to Mr Debritto. Set him up with the code as we’ve already discussed. When, where, and which Raven is up to you. I don’t want to know till it’s over.’

‘Okay,’ Jack said solemnly, ‘but there may be another loose end. Shamus called Dolly this morning, claiming he has some crucial information he can only share with you and Daniel, so he wants to set up a meeting. He said he’d never heard of an Alex Three.’

‘How’d he sound to Dolly?’

‘Nuts.’

‘No meeting right now. Have Dolly convey that we’re both unavailable.’

‘Where are you going to be?’

‘Home,’ Volta said.

Daniel woke in the front seat when the sun was high enough to blaze through the windshield. He had planned it that way when he’d parked the truck facing east, well hidden behind the burned-out gas station.

After talking to Volta he’d vanished with the Diamond. He tried concentrating on the twist of flame at the Diamond’s center, focusing to a pinpoint intensity and then suddenly letting go, hoping the force of the Diamond’s resistance would collapse outward – like someone holding a swinging door closed spilling into the street at the abrupt removal of the counterbalancing force. It didn’t work.

He tried staring into the thread-thin, spiraling flame and praying with all his heart that the Diamond would open to him, let him see what he needed, let him step across the threshold clean. It didn’t work.

An hour before dawn he took out his pocketknife and nicked his left thumb. He held his thumb above the Diamond, let the blood drip on the radiant globe before he sought to see inside. It didn’t work.

Beaten and exhausted, he’d fallen into a dreamless sleep at dawn, not stirring until he felt the sunlight on his face. He sat up blinking, checked the Diamond in the bowling bag on the floor, and slid back behind the wheel.

Daniel drove straight through to Phoenix. He stopped at a Shell station for a city map, then checked the Yellow Pages in the phone booth’s directory. He found exactly what he sought in the first listing under Auto Dismantling – ‘Aura Wreckers … cash to smash.’ When he noticed his fuel gauge showed less than a quarter tank, he unthinkingly pulled over to the pumps. When the attendant asked him, ‘Fill’er up, sir?’ Daniel started laughing so hard he could barely shake his head and gasp, ‘No, empty ’er.’

‘Beg your pardon?’

‘Nothing,’ Daniel said, more in control, ‘I thought I needed gas but I don’t.’

‘Help you with anything else?’ the attendant said. He eyed Daniel with wary concern.

‘No, I guess not,’ Daniel told him. ‘I don’t even know if I want in or out anymore, or if there’s a difference.’

‘You look like you’ve been on the road awhile. Tired. It gets to you.’

Daniel said earnestly, ‘I hope so.’

The attendant nodded vaguely and said, ‘Well, take it easy. Have a good one.’

Daniel thanked him and headed through Phoenix.

He stopped down the street from Aura Wreckers. In the camper, he dressed in his bowling shirt, jeans, and shoes, packed a change of clothes and toilet kit in a day-pack, and stuffed a thousand-dollar roll from the attaché case in his front pocket. He took the pack and attaché case back to the cab and set them on the floor with the bowling-bagged Diamond. He crumpled the phony registration and pink slip in the ashtray and burned them, tear-blind from the smoke before he cranked the windows down.

Daniel wheeled into the oil-splotched yard of Aura Wreckers and pulled up near a crane with a powerful magnet on its cable. The crane was picking up hulks from a pile of wrecked cars and dropping them into a forty-ton hydraulic crusher that turned each one into a small metal cube. A large beer-bellied man operating the crusher yelled at Daniel, ‘Hey, no parking! Office is back there.’ He pointed toward the building.

Daniel gathered the bowling-bag, attaché case, and day-pack and walked toward the man, who looked pained at his approach. Before Daniel was halfway there the man called, ‘C’mon, man – move your ride and put you in it – we don’t have no insurance that covers fools. This is a heavy-equipment area, and I’m the yard boss.’

Daniel stopped in front of him and looked into his eyes. ‘My truck must be destroyed.’

The yard boss looked at the truck and then back to Daniel. ‘What for?’ he said suspiciously. ‘It was still moving when you got here.’

Daniel roared, ‘It is possessed of demons! I know because I am a man of God and a professional bowler. As a Minister of Faith with the Gospel Strike Church of Imperishable Bliss, I am under vows of frugality, and therefore drive from match to match on the PBA tour, spreading some of the Sun Lord’s literature on the way. And as I travel these faithless states, I pick up every hitchhiker I see, some of whom are striking young women, many not even seventeen, wandering lost in this world, bereft of love and comfort. I swear to heaven my intentions are noble when I pick them up – to share the wisdom and consolation of The Word – but there are demons in the truck, vinyl warlocks, devils of chrome, and they tear my heart from the River of Light and hurl it into the Sewer of Raw Desire. I know it’s the truck, because lewd and carnal desires seize those comely young women, too, and soon the demons have dragged us panting into the camper where we rut for hours like lust-crazed warthogs, and I feel their hot, tight, naked bodies move under me like a wave of ball bearings and my heart wants nothing more than the endless replication of our joined moment of release forever and forever!’

The yard boss gave the truck a more thoughtful appraisal. ‘Don’t look like much of a pussy wagon to me.’ He shook his head. ‘But what the hell – if you got the pink slip and the registration’s in order, I’ll give ya a coupla hundred for it. Maybe take it for a drive. Fuck, ya never know, maybe something sweet’ll jump my bone.’

Daniel thundered, ‘I want it destroyed! It is possessed by Creatures of Filth!’ Daniel raised his fist and slammed it down into his palm. ‘The Creatures of Filth must be crushed!’

The yard boss stepped back and folded his arms over his protruding gut. Tilting his head, he inquired with a trace of derision, ‘What are you, some kinda fucking wacko? You can’t be for real. The real gets weird, sure, but not this weird. Huh? How about it? You for real?’

With an extended index finger, Daniel began thumping the center of his forehead. He smiled at the yard boss. ‘It appears I am.’

The yard boss considered a moment. ‘Ya got the pink slip and reg?’

‘The demons covered them with a green slime that sucked off all the ink. Turned that pink slip blank and snowy white.’

‘Get outa here,’ the yard boss muttered, pointing with his chin. ‘We don’t touch fucking nothing without clear title, and especially from loonies who seem to have blown their mental transmissions but are still coasting to a stop. No title, no deal.’

Daniel reached into his front pocket and took out the roll of bills. ‘Would a thousand dollars change your mind?’

‘Completely,’ the yard boss said, counting it quickly before shoving the roll in a back pocket. ‘Get out what you want and pull it over. I’ll go tell Jake there, running the crane, that you’re next. And Reverend? Any more demons get to haunting your vehicles, bring ’em on in and we’ll give them a Monster Mash that’ll pop their little black hearts like rotten cherries. Same deal, same price.’

‘Bless you, son,’ Daniel said fervently, spreading his arms. ‘May you flow with the River of Light.’

Daniel watched smiling as the cable-lowered magnet locked on his truck with a solid clank, rocking it on its springs. Cable reversed, the truck jerked free of the ground, sunlight exploding on its twirling chrome as the crane swung it toward the crusher like a fish being lifted from water to land. The magnet released and the truck dropped into the press, windshield shattering on impact. Then, with a breathy hydraulic hiss and the dry shriek of buckling metal, the press reduced the truck and its contents to a gleaming four-foot cube.

Daniel was impressed by this model of concentration, and fought a merry urge to try the crusher on his brain. He lifted his arms heavenward and cried out in joy, ‘Free, free, oh Blessed Light; free at last!’

He slung the day-pack over one shoulder and stooped to pick up the case and bowling bag. He hefted the bowling bag, imagining the Diamond burning inside. ‘How about it, huh?’ he mumbled to the Diamond. ‘Free at last sound good? You and me together, baby, both of us, nothing but dense, wild, diamond light, stone solid and loose as flame. Marry me.’ He started giggling uncontrollably at the thought of giving the Diamond a diamond ring. It would be like giving Venus a rat’s asshole for a wedding band.

Still giggling, he walked through the gate, turned west, and stuck out his thumb. From the churn of connections, he realized he hadn’t slept with a woman since he’d been on the road with Bad Bobby. Over a year. With Jean Bluer he’d been absorbed in other identities, and after that all his energies had gone into vanishing, consumed in being nothing at all. He remembered thinking after he’d first vanished that he might be able to make love with the same woman twice, but he hadn’t thought to try. His body, however, hadn’t forgotten. A heavy current swirled through him. Bursting into tears at Wally’s mention of loving his wife. Exceeding the demands of effective characterization with his description of all those lust-struck nubile teen-angels. Marriage. Conjunction. He was horny, so horny he could feel the Diamond’s warmth against his thigh, or so erotically ripe he imagined he did. He let his arm drop to his side. He squared his shoulders; took a slow, deep breath; closed his eyes. He tried to imagine the spiral as a woman, see her face, gather her body from the spiral’s burning curve, feel her opening with him, feel her heartbeat real against his palm, both of them bathed in light.

A deep male voice called, ‘Ya dreaming there, kid, or looking for an actual ride?’

An old Ford flatbed, dusty and dinged, rattled at idle where it had pulled over next to him. He hadn’t even noticed. The short leather-faced man at the wheel pushed up a cowboy hat older than the truck and said, ‘You riding or hiding, son? Ain’t going further than the Juniper Mountains, but you’re welcome along if that’s how your stick floats.’

‘What’s that mean?’ Daniel said.

‘Old mountain-man lingo, from beaver-trapping. Means which way you’re going, how you’re inclined, what you hanker.’

For a moment, Daniel thought of waving him on and waiting for a woman to stop. He wanted to be with a woman. But the old cowboy in the flatbed looked like he might know something. Daniel picked up the attaché case and said, ‘I’m riding.’

THE FIRST NOTEBOOK OF JENNIFER RAINE APRIL SOMETHING (7TH? 9TH?)

A long way from last night. I just hit Reno and things are good and bad, and probably that’s ‘normal’ if you’re ‘sane’ and ‘mature,’ but maybe because I’m none of the above, I’m down with the blues. Not depressed, Doc – blue. A touch of postpartum blues, the adrenaline of our delivery from confinement to liberty fading, from thrilling act to a new set of mean facts. It’s tough to live in hiding or on the run.

I’ve got the mama-blues working on me, too. Mia woke up screaming last night in the barn. She had a terrible dream about fire-snakes falling on her in the darkness, their sizzling venom turning her to stone. I couldn’t console her. I rocked her for hours, humming lullabies, but she just kept on sobbing until my helplessness overwhelmed me and I wanted to smother her to silence her cries. Instead, I left her weeping on the straw pallet and went outside to look at the moon and stars until I was small enough to go back in and rock her in my arms again and let her weep. I can’t feel where she’s hurt the way I could before; her pains have become too complex. I can only love her and hope she heals. Women hurt and heal differently.

I don’t know about men. They seem to confuse permission and plunder. In my cosmology, the sun created itself and imposed a single rule of existence: Everything created had to create something in return. The sun, to demonstrate, created Earth. Earth created a mighty river fed from a bottomless spring. The flowing river hit a mammoth golden stone and forked into freshwater and saltwater, into rivers and oceans. At the exact point where water met stone, men and women were created. Men created the clock. Women created the moon.

See, Doc, I’m not crazy. I just know what’s going on.

I have to admit some of my blues are the rejected kind. The only good news today was a ride from the barn to Reno, courtesy of an Alaskan fisherman named Billy Krough. I halfway fell in love as we rambled along. Billy, alas, was tall and strong, and while he wasn’t really handsome, his face, especially his deep-set, sky-blue eyes, had character. Smart, too. I require intelligent men. Bright Billy knew where Jim Bridger’s grave is – eastern Wyoming. I’d instinctively run in the right direction. The brain isn’t the only organ that thinks.

Billy was headed for Las Vegas to play big-time poker, his last blast before heading back to Petersburg for the salmon and halibut seasons. He makes enough money in the four tough months of fishing to take off and travel the other eight. His two long-time loves broke up over his off-season restlessness and his months gone at sea. Seemed to actually understand their point of view and had remained good friends. And there we were in the front seat, Mia sound asleep in the back, and I wanted someone to hold me close, so I slid across and snuggled in tight and said, ‘Hold me.’

He did, and it was tender and truly sweet, but without a trace of that wild carnal edge you would have to cross if you want to get so close together you can’t tell each other apart.

I pushed it. I said, ‘I want to get closer. I want you to love who I am.’ Love doesn’t do much for the powers of explanation, but since Love has never asked for one itself, that seems fair enough.

Billy was kind. He squeezed me a little bit closer and explained that he’d promised a certain woman not to play around, a promise he intended to honor despite what he was thoughtful enough to call a ‘delectable temptation like you.’ Me! But not so delectable the temptation couldn’t be declined.

Shit. Why are the ones who are too good to be true always being true to someone else?

Billy let us off in downtown Reno. He wasn’t even stopping to play cards since the action he wanted was in Vegas. He gave me a fifty- dollar bill, saying he wanted to treat me to a long bath and a night of safe rest, though I was absolutely free to piss it away gambling. A real gentleman.

I haven’t decided what to do with the fifty. I’m writing this in a Winchell’s donut shop while I think it over. Mia is still asleep. Poor little girl, she shouldn’t have to go through this. She’s exhausted.

I’ll let her sleep until she’s done dreaming and wakes herself. It’s no problem to carry an imaginary daughter around. They’re light.

What we Crazy Janes with imaginary daughters call ‘inside jokes.’ Hee-hee.

Gonna laugh them blues away.

Eli Boyd, a semiretired ranch hand who worked his own twenty acres up near Hope Mountain when he wasn’t working on somebody else’s spread – which was too goddamn often as far as Eli was concerned – drove the old Ford flatbed at a steady fifty miles per hour and just as steadily told Daniel jokes, tales, yarns, and no-shit true stories of the Old West, back when a man could ride two days to hump the schoolmarm and never cut another human track along the way. Daniel listened, from Aura Wreckers in Sun City to the I-40 junction. One story in particular seized his imagination.

Eli began, ‘Cowboys are known fools for drinking up their wages, and I was doing my part till something happened that stopped me cold. Ain’t a pretty story, but by God it not only saved me money on liquor, but all the expensive craziness that goes with it: dancing girls, bar repairs, bail, court costs, and them goddamn hospital bills.

‘Happened in Colorado high country up outa Durango, musta been ’round fifty-five, fifty-six, somewhere in there. I was working for the Randall boys then, and me and one of their cousins was moving some horses up to summer pasture. We got ’em up to the line shack ’bout nightfall and put ’em in this little ol’ barn the Randalls’ great-great-granddaddy had built. Then me and Jamie – that was this cousin’s name, just a kid really, nineteen or twenty – we went over to the line shack and grubbed up and shot the shit for a while before we hit the rack, pretty tuckered from being in the saddle since dawn.

‘Jamie was a strange kid, a bit on the jumpy side and not real overwhelming in the smarts department. Stark fact of it is, Jamie may have been an in-breed somewhere in the Randall line. Folks ’round Durango used to claim the only virgin Randall women were the ones who could run faster than their brothers.

‘For all Jamie’s dumbness, he was good with horses. It was like he’d drawn what little brains he had all together and brought it down real hard on one thing, and that thing was horses. That kid loved horses. And he was good with ’em.

‘So we’re sacked out and sawing logs when these high, shrill whinnies out in the barn snap us awake. We both jump pronto in our boots and grab our shooting guns.

‘“Wolf?”’ I whisper to him as we head for the door.

‘“I don’t know,” Jamie says, and his voice is real thin and tight.

‘We’re just gettin’ to the barn when these two young buckskin mares come bolting into the corral and I could see right away in the moonlight that their legs was chewed all to hell. I knew then what had happened; feller I used to ride trail with in the Junipers had seen it hisself when he was a young poke. The barn rats had gotten into some fermented silage and gone full-berserk frenzied, rampaging through the stalls eating the horses’ legs from right above the hoof clean up to the knee – left it that flat, stringy, bluish-white color like you get when you skin out a deer. The horses looked like they all had white stockings, not much blood at all. Sweet fucking Jesus, it was ghostly!

‘But what really froze my blood was them rats squealing, so high-pitched it could shatter your skull like cheap glass or at least leave you deaf from all the needle holes in your eardrums. The squeals from the trampled rats sounded different than the shrieks of those that only wanted to eat on some warm flesh.

‘I mean to say my jaw’s down around my knees,’ cause even though I’d heard of it, seeing it is something entirely different. Actually, being stunned stupid is about the best thing to do in that situation unless you feel like discharging a firearm against a herd of crazed rats in a dark barn full of insane horses. None for me, thanks; no sir. Let nature take its twisty course. I wanted to make sure Jamie saw the wisdom in letting it be. I didn’t like what I saw. Jamie’s eyeballs had rolled damn near ’round backwards in the sockets, same sickly white as them horses’ legs, and stone blank, just like those Cuban what-cha-call’ems – them zoombies. Gone, know what I mean?

‘And all of sudden Jamie screams, “The horsies! The horsies!” Like a little kid. He runs for the barn.

‘“Don’t, Jamie!” I yell. “Don’t shoot, it’ll spook ’em worse.” Damn if he doesn’t toss his gun away. But just before he goes in he stops and yanks out an old rusty icepick some hunter left stuck in a corral post.

‘Now you notice I ain’t running to stop him nor help him. It’s right there in Article Twenty-two of the Code of the West: “If some fucking in-breed wants to run into a bedlam of barn rats on a drunken feeding spree, that’s his business.”

‘I stood there in my boots and long johns and waited for the horses to get out in the corral where they had room to move. The noise died down enough for me to hear Jamie panting inside the barn, “You fuckers, you fuckers,” and the thud of the icepick in the plank floor. I struck some fire to a hurricane lamp and went inside.

‘Jamie was down on his hands and knees. The back of his right hand, the one without the icepick, was about chewed down to bone. An ugly sight, but it wasn’t much compared to what Jamie was doing. He’d got a rat trapped in the corner of a stall and just kept stabbing it and stabbing it, fifty, sixty times, that icepick a blur in the lamplight.

‘“Jamie!” I yell, and he wheels to look at me, muscles in his cheeks jerking, white spit frothing from his mouth, his eyes turned back ’round normal but looking a thousand glazed miles away. And he roars like a goddamn mountain lion, “Noooo! Noooo!” and goes scuttling after the rats, which are writhing in little squealing clumps eating their dead.

‘He gets one his first stab and keeps stabbing it until another leaps at his face and he wheels and chases it into a stall where I can hear his sobs and the thud of that icepick like someone beating on a heavy door. All of a sudden he lets out a scream so powerful everything freezes to silence, the whole barn absolutely still. And he whoops, “I got him, Eli! I finally got him.” And he starts laughing.

‘I go in with the lantern and there’s Jamie, grinning, his eyes locked on something far away. He’s sprawled out against the back of the stall, and his right hand is icepicked to the wall straight through the palm. He says, “Look, Eli, I finally got him.”’

Eli left Daniel thinking about this at the Junction of 93 and I-40, Eli’s right rear turn signal erratically blinking as he headed east for his home on the range.

Standing with his thumb out for another ride, Daniel decided it was a cautionary tale, wisely taken to heart. Maybe Volta was right. Maybe he should just let it go. The old men seemed to think so, anyway, and he would be foolish not to consider their counsel when he was at a loss about what to try next. Maybe if he physically let it go, he could open it through memory and imagination. He looked at his upraised thumb, then opened his hand as if setting an invisible bird free. He imagined how it would feel to drive an icepick through his palm, imagined it so clearly he almost cried out with the pain.

Shamus was sitting at the tiny desk in a cheap Sacramento motel. His silver-scarred hand was pressed to his ear, dictating possibilities his free hand jotted down on a yellow legal pad.

‘A.T. Al times three. Three Al’s? Try that. Alalal. Allah? Swiss accent. Male, mid-thirties. Three owls, maybe? That budge anything loose in that compacted bowel you call a brain? Think, shithead! Help me out. Three owls. Awls? Laws? Three Laws? No, no, wrong direction. Al Triple X? Al to the Third Power – what’s that, Al Nine? Third power. Al Thrice? Al Thrice! That’s it! You get it, bumble-fuck?’

‘No,’ Shamus said dully. He was very drunk.

‘Al for Alchemy. Thrice-Great. Trismegistos. “For this reason I am called Hermes Trismegistos, for I possess the three parts of wisdom of the whole world.” C’mon, Shamus – you tell me.’

‘Volta. That rotten, snitching prick,’ Shamus said, rage stirring him from stupor. ‘And it’s just like that arrogant bastard to use Hermes Trismegistos and alchemy all scrambled into a cute code. That’s his style, and he’s so fucking confident, he gave it to us. And we knew it all along.’ Shamus wrote Volta’s name so savagely the lead snapped when he crossed the t. ‘Volta the All Wise. Perfect sense. A Swiss accent would be a snap for Volta. And then he rubs our faces in it. Guess he forgot we studied with Jacob Hind. We’re damn near the alchemical scholar he was. How could he think he could sneak that kind of cuteness by us?’

Shamus’s scarred hand said in his ear, ‘Maybe he knew he couldn’t, you idiot; ever think of that?’

Shamus was baffled. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘He wants you to think it was him, to deflect you from Daniel. Figure it out, dildo – somebody had to tell Volta what was going on.’

‘It was them together, just like we thought. But where are they?’

The scarred hand moved from his ear to face him. ‘Listen: one will lead you to the other. Find one, you find them both.’

* * *

Daniel’s next ride was an hour coming. When he saw the Chevy pickup with a camper begin to brake, his first impulse was to run. It was his truck, somehow reborn from a cube of metal. With a rush of relief he noticed the Michigan plates and the reflecto-decal lettering arched above the camper door:

ERNIE & IRMA

Geritol Gypsies

Irma scooted over to make room for him in the cab. She was a tiny, delicate, white-haired woman, mid-sixties, in brown slacks, fresh yellow blouse, and a brown knit cardigan. She held a small poodle on her lap. The dog eyed Daniel tremulously. The poodle seemed somehow incomplete to Daniel but he wasn’t sure why.

Ernie reached around the poodle to shake hands. Daniel could never have disguised himself as Irma, but Ernie would have been easy. Like Daniel, he was six feet and blue-eyed, but with forty years and as many pounds added. Daniel would have had to exhaust hundreds of wardrobes to match Ernie’s polyester shirt, which had a line of Conestoga wagons running up his right arm, a cattle drive up the trail of his left, and a blazing pastel sunset across the back. Daniel found the shirt so improbable he blinked to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating.

After Ernie introduced himself and pulled back on the road, Irma patted the panting little poodle and said, ‘This is Chester.’

Daniel smiled at the dog. ‘Howdy, Chester.’

Chester shivered, then wagged his haunches.

Daniel noticed that Chester either had lost his tail or it had been docked extremely close.

Irma explained: ‘A great big Doberman Pinscher bit off Chester’s tail.’ She bent down and cooed, ‘We don’t like big dogs, do we Chester?’ Chester buried his head between her knees. Irma looked at Daniel proudly. ‘Chester understands everything I say.’

‘Where ya headed, Herman?’ Ernie said a little too quickly, as if embarrassed.

Daniel, forgetting for a moment that he’d introduced himself with the name on his bowling shirt, wasn’t sure who Ernie was addressing. He blustered, ‘Oh, you know, just on down the line for now.’ Frisco eventually, but the pro tour still is a while off, so I’m sort of making do with what action I can find. Heard they’ll gamble on anything in Nevada.’

‘That’s why they call it Lost Wages,’ Ernie grinned.

‘So I’ve heard,’ Daniel said politely, having wearied of this on the poker circuit. He had decided to avoid Las Vegas. Too many people knew him and he didn’t feel like working up a more elaborate disguise.

‘So you’re on the loose,’ Ernie said.

‘Yeah, basically. And I’m not sure if I’ve got no place to go, or too many.’

Thoughtfully, Ernie said, ‘Know what ya mean. I was like that when I was young and roaming, right before W. W. Two started. It was like I couldn’t even imagine my life, know what I mean?’

With a faint smile Daniel said, ‘With me, it’s more like I can’t stop imagining it.’

‘About the same thing, huh?’ Ernie said. ‘Just another way of looking at it.’

Irma said to no one in particular, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that bad.’ She turned to Daniel with a distracted smile. ‘Do you enjoy your work?’

‘I don’t know,’ Daniel said. When they glanced at him nervously, Daniel smiled and explained as well as he could. ‘I guess it seems strange not to know if I enjoy my work, but I’m honestly uncertain. I don’t think of bowling in terms of enjoyment. I’m too busy concentrating on trying to do it right, do it well – do it at all, for that matter.’

Irma smiled blankly, idly stroking Chester’s thin back.

Ernie volunteered, ‘I worked for GM, thirty-five years at the Chevy plant in Detroit – what we call “Motown.” Irma and me been married thirty-four years. I retired three years ago, kids gone, house paid for, so me and Irma just take off whenever the notion moves us. Going out and seeing things keeps ya young. Last fall we went and looked over New England. Real pretty in the fall, all them red and golden leaves. Now this country here strikes me as a little grim, but the light’s nice, the sunsets and all.’

Irma, with the same distracted smile, said to herself, ‘It always is.’

Daniel said, ‘What’d you do at GM, Ernie?’

‘I was just on the line. Mounted the spare, put in the jack and lug wrench, then shut the trunk.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’ Daniel said.

Ernie shrugged his heavy shoulders. ‘Like ya said, it’s a job.’

Irma said to the poodle, ‘He enjoyed it, didn’t he, Chester?’

Chester yapped sharply once.

Irma nodded with satisfaction.

‘You know,’ Ernie addressed Daniel, ‘I didn’t mind the routine. Gives life shape. And even if you’re doing one thing all the time, it’s never really the same. Like closing those car trunks – each one sounded different. Millions, and every one different. You know what I mean?’

‘I think so,’ Daniel said.

Irma asked Chester, ‘Does Daddy know what he means?’

Chester yapped twice. ‘Twice means “no,”’ Irma translated, a smug glint in her eyes.

Ernie muttered, ‘Damn dog hates me. I was the one who thought he needed some exercise. Let him off the leash to go sniff around the park and the Doberman bit off all his tail and half his ass in one chomp ’fore I could nail him with a rock and run him off. Tried to tell Chester he was up against a rule of life: Big dogs eat. Being on the leash wouldn’t have made no difference.’

Daniel bent and said to the quivering poodle, ‘We don’t like big dogs, do we, Chester?’

Chester hid his head. ‘He’s so amazing,’ Irma trilled. ‘He understands everything he hears.’

Ernie, Irma, and Chester said good-bye on the west side of Las Vegas during the sunset’s fiery crescendo of gold and crimsons, the colors so pure and clear that the blinding sundown on Ernie’s shirt paled to the edge of vanishing, so stunning that Ernie turned off the engine and they sat and watched in silence, Chester stretching his front paws against the dashboard to get a better view. Daniel was taken with how easily the air let the colors go, how inexorably Earth turned on the axis of darkness and light. He suddenly felt a panic to get out of the truck’s cab, vanish, vanish or else start weeping. But he couldn’t vanish with them there. He said, fighting the tightness in his throat, ‘Well, on that lovely, fiery note, I’ll take my leave. Thank you for the ride and your splendid company.’

Amid their farewells, he slid out. Just before closing the door, Daniel said, ‘Drop it in a river.’ Even Chester seemed puzzled by the remark.

Daniel stepped back to let the truck pull away, but it didn’t budge. Muffled inside the cab, Chester barked frantically. Irma rolled down the window, calling excitedly, ‘You forgot your balling ball! Chester saw it! Understands everything, just like I told you.’

Daniel lifted the bowling bag through the open window. ‘Wish I had Chester’s mind,’ he said. ‘Pretty dumb to forget your means of livelihood. Thanks again. Take care.’

He watched the taillights disappear back toward Las Vegas. He knelt to unzip the bowling bag, shielding the Diamond’s light from traffic, though the road was empty. He looked into the Diamond. ‘You don’t want me to let you go, do you? I’m the one, aren’t I? If so, help me. Help me. Please, please help me.’ He vanished with the Diamond.

Around midnight, without warning, Daniel’s concentration buckled and collapsed. He tried to tighten his focus but there was no power left. Overwhelmed, it took him a terrifying moment to gather himself and imagine him and the Diamond returned. The entry back was ragged. Daniel had no idea where in the world he was. On his knees, he stared at the Diamond, wondering where the spiral flame had gone. He heard a faint roar to his right. He turned, blinded by a ball of light hurtling toward him. He dove to the side, wrapping his body protectively around the bowling bag just as the driver of the black Trans-Am stood on the brakes and skidded into a one-eighty, stopping a hundred and fifty yards down the road. As the car headed back, Daniel zipped the bowling bag shut. The driver pulled onto the opposite shoulder and swung across the divider and stopped beside Daniel. For a moment the long blond hair made Daniel think it was a woman. He was sharply disappointed when a stocky man in his mid-thirties wearing cowboy boots, Levis, and an army fatigue jacket stepped around the car and said, ‘What in the name of fuck was that all about?’

‘What?’ Daniel said with puzzled innocence, getting to his feet.

‘Didn’t you see it, man? There was this huge fucking flash of light and bam! There you were, this weird glow all around you. No fucking way you could miss it.’

Daniel said, ‘I was squatting down when I heard you coming and stood up real sudden – might have been the headlights reflecting off the case here, lots of bright metal, might have caught the light perfect.’

Slowly shaking his head, the blond man stared at Daniel and his belongings. He shrugged. ‘Maybe I was having a ’palm flashback. Looked like the true item to me, though. Fuck, who cares, huh? Why sweat the little shit when Death knows your address, that’s my motto.’

‘It’s a good one,’ Daniel said.

‘So, what is it, you hitching here or what? I’m going west till dawn, then I turn around and head back.’

‘Thanks,’ Daniel said. He picked up the attaché case and bowling bag.

The blond man said, ‘What are you got up as there, anyway? You the Wandering Bowler or what?’

‘I’m a professional bowler and a religious zealot,’ Daniel explained.

‘Yeah, just about anything beats the fuck out of working.’ He opened the door for Daniel.

‘How about you?’ Daniel said, slipping inside. ‘You’re out late for a nine-to-five man.’

‘I repair slot machines at the Shamrock. Swing shift, two to ten. Gives me the hard side of midnight and early morning to ride patrol.’

‘What are you patrolling for? Or against, if that’s the case.’

‘My old employer,’ the man said. ‘Death. I used to be Death’s Chauffeur.’

‘For true?’ Daniel said. He didn’t feel like listening to bullshit.

‘Straight skinny, brother; mortal fact. Let’s get it rolling here and I’ll tell you how it is.’ He shut the door.

‘Great.’ Daniel barely said it aloud, but he couldn’t decide if he felt ironic. ‘Don’t sweat the little shit,’ he reminded himself. ‘Ride on through.’

The blond man’s name was Kenny Copper. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, a judge had presented him with a choice between two years on the county labor farm for disturbing the peace/resisting arrest/assault on a police officer – which the court saw as a cluster of offenses, not a logical progression of self-defense – and immediate enlistment in the marines. He landed in Saigon eight months later, a PFC rifleman with Baker Company. Within the week they were shipped to Khe Sanh.

He told Daniel as they rocketed northwest on 95, ‘I put my head up the Dragon’s ass, man, and I saw the World of Shit. The Cong were shelling the holy fuck out of us. We sent out a couple of recon patrols just for drill; never saw the dudes again. Anything that touched the airstrip got blown away. No Med-Evac. No replacements. They air-dropped rations and ammo, but whatever came down outside our perimeter – which was about half the shit they dropped – that was Christmastime for Charlie. We owned Hell; Charlie owned everything else. But here’s the twister, Herm, your basic cold fuck – we were just bait for the trap, dead and stinkin’ meat,’ cause they wanted the Cong to mass for a siege, get ’em all heaped up on us, and then bring down the hammer. Real neat thinking, huh? Real swift. I mean, the gooks didn’t whip our ass by being dummies, not that you needed a Ph. D. in chemistry to figure it out, right? The Cong kept the pressure tight enough to choke, but they didn’t overcommit. So we went down, not any fucking hammer.

‘It wasn’t too bad at first. I’d brought a pound of Buddha weed in on the chop – fifty Yankee dollars on any street corner in Saigon – and that cut us some slack between the shit-rain and fire-fights. Everybody on base knew our bunker was Boogie City. Black dude I booted with, name was Donnell Foxworth – Arson, we called him, ’cause he said he specialized in burning pussies to the ground – Arson had two ammo boxes full of primo sounds. Motown, Hendrix, the Doors, Dylan, Stones, you name it. Between the Buddha weed and the music, the troops stayed loose.

‘And man, we needed some serious morale boosting, because the gooks had the high ground, their mortars and light artillery locked down on us dead zero, like frogs in a tub. Whenever they took the notion, day or night, for two minutes or twenty hours, they sent down a shit-rain of fire. You never been there, man, you just can’t know what it’s like to hear incoming, incoming, incoming till that shrill death whine has your blood howling like a gut-shot dog; your whole fucking body peeled back to bare nerves; your asshole puckered so tight that when it finally relaxes you crap your chaps; Dylan turned up loud on the deck, screaming in your ear, ‘Well HOW does it FEEL! to be on YOUR OWN!’ – I tell you true, if a round didn’t blow you away, the rest of it did. I don’t give a fuck if you had all the weed in ’Nam and a sound system that’d cave in your skull – all the smack; all the pussy in the world. Just no way you could keep it from getting too real. Constant sickening fear.

‘About the third week, they really started pounding it in, and the perimeter turned into Sapper City. Try sleeping when them mortars are walking the dog all over you, when you know there’s someone outside who’d love to slit your throat. I was holding on to myself in a muddy trench, literally had my arms wrapped around me, curled against the dirt wall, down with some killer gook dysentery, gagging on the smell of my own fear, shit pants, powder, smoke, exploded earth and bodies, when we took one inside, about half a football field down from where I was hunkered. Concussion fucking near blew my brains out my ears. I pushed myself up on my knees and looked up into the rain and the night, stunned so fucking bad I was wondering if I could see way up there the actual point where the rain started to fall. I was looking hard when a white square came fluttering down beside me. The second I touched it I knew what it was. Though I would have given anything not to look, this was something I was supposed to see. A guy in our outfit, Billy Hines, young guy from Missouri, real quiet, kinda bashful, was married to some seventeen-year-old sweetheart named Ginnilee whose first letter to him in-country said she was pregnant from his last leave. She’d sent a picture her mother had taken of her standing on the front lawn, the small house in the background out of focus. Written on the back, it said, “Wife with child. Never forget I love you. Ginnilee.” And her face … oh man, so young and hopeful and brave, the sweetest little strawberry-blond with freckles, man, fucking freckles, and all you had to do was see the light around her face to know she was pregnant. Chester wore it on his helmet. One time I asked why he didn’t tuck it away where a pretty lady like that wouldn’t get so jungle-scuzzed and rained on, and he said’ – Kenny’s voice began to quaver – ‘he said, “She’s my good-luck charm. She’s gonna shine me right on through all this shit, home to her and the baby.” And man, when I picked her picture up out of the mud and saw her, man, saw her all the way to my soul, I vanished somewhere inside myself. You know what I mean, man? Left the premises. Stepped out.’

In the headlight glare of an oncoming semi, Daniel caught the wet flash of tears on Kenny’s cheeks. He wiped at his own. Nothing he could have said seemed adequate.

Kenny glanced at him, then back to the road. ‘The doctors told me I was gone about three weeks, but that don’t count the one it took before they got me out of Khe Sanh on a chop that was crazy enough to come in. “Shell shock,” some of the docs called it, or “catatonic shock.” I didn’t bother to tell ’em I’d been all right until I looked into her face. But I don’t give a fuck what the doctors want to call it, I know what it was. It was a limbo trance. Until my spirit could get itself together again, heal itself, the rest of me was not real, and my ass was up for grabs.

‘And that’s when Death snagged me for his personal chauffeur, dressed me in a white satin suit and put me behind the wheel of his black, ultra-swank seventy Caddy limo.’ Kenny paused and glanced at Daniel again. ‘You following this shit?’

‘So far,’ Daniel said.

‘I don’t see Death, right? He always rides in the back, behind a smoked-glass partition with this tiny little slot just over my right shoulder. He’d get in, I’d start the limo, he’d slip a stiff white card through the slot with a name on it – no address, just the name – and I’d go find the person. Don’t ask me how ’cause I have no fucking idea. Just knew. I’d find the person, park, Death would get out and be gone a minute, then he’d get back in and slip another name through the slot. No food, water, sleep, piss, shit – one name after another.

‘At first, when I was still on the fire base, I knew some of the names, guys in my outfit. And there were some Vietnamese names, too. After a while I didn’t know any of the names. But I fucking always knew where to find them.

‘Then one night driving along there’s a huge flash of light behind us, like an ammo dump getting off, and when I glance back the light’s just right somehow so I can see through the partition into the backseat, see Death. He’s a skeleton all right, man, with this mad, hungry, lonely grin, but forget the Grim Reaper shit,’ cause he’s wearing a business suit, one of them sharp, pinstriped jobs, and his finger bones, every one of them, is crusted with diamond rings.

‘The next card comes through the slot, I don’t even have to look to know my name’s on it. When you see Death, Death looks back, and there’s millions of fucked-up people to chauffeur him around.

‘I didn’t think twice – if I was going down, I was gonna take that motherfucker with me. So I stood on the gas until we were howling through the dark and then I jerked the wheel hard right and hit the door rolling.

‘But I didn’t get him. He’s got some kind of dual controls in the backseat there, and I hear the brakes lock before I clear the car. Now feature this, man: I don’t hit the road, the bushes, nothing – I’m just falling through space. All I can concentrate on is the image of Ginnilee’s face. I look into it, into her eyes and her smile and her dreams and the life inside her, and I don’t know whether I’m imagining, remembering, or actually seeing her, because when I stop falling and open my eyes, I’m looking at this ugly old nurse who growls, “About time, soldier. There’s a war on.” But they sent me home to the VA.

‘Not many know what Death looks like, what kind of wheels he has. Those that do have a responsibility to ride patrol and waste the motherfucker on sight. No questions. No answers. I got my piece from ’Nam under the seat. When I see him, I’m gonna blast them diamonds off his fingers, blow him down to dust.’

Daniel said, ‘You think you can kill Death?’

‘I don’t know. But I sure as fuck can try.’

‘Almost have to,’ Daniel said softly. He leaned back in the seat and shut his eyes. He tried to imagine Ginnilee’s face but he was too weary. He opened his eyes only to be blinded by the high beams of an oncoming car. As it passed, Daniel, struggling to refocus, thought he caught a glimpse of a black limo. He wheeled to look out the rear window, telling Kenny, ‘I got an eyeful of headlight, but I think that might have been it, the black limousine.’

‘Fuck, man, are you on drugs? That was a red seventy-seven Toyota.’

Daniel watched the taillights move closer together as they faded in the distance. From what he’d seen, the car was long, low-slung, black. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Relax, man,’ Kenny reassured him. ‘It’s a crazy story to get behind, I know. Hard news. Cut the spook loose in ya is all. Remember, I drove the fuckin’ limo; I’d know it blind. That was a red seventy-seven Toyota – bank it.’

Daniel turned back around on the seat. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘It’s your call, your patrol – only trying to help out.’

‘I roger that, bro’, and much obliged. Fuck, man, you were crying with me there during the war stories – think I don’t know you’re on my frequency? I pick up every hitchhiker I see on patrol, and I tell ’em all about Ginnilee’s face and that gone month driving Death around. Some of them say nothing, some tell me I’m full of shit, some humor me like I’m some sort of war-psychomoron, and almost all of them decide that they’d rather stand on the empty desert highway than ride another mile with me. Maybe one out of a hundred has even a little fucking tiny tear to shed, has the heart to cry because it hurts. And you’re one of them, man. You ever seen Death?’

The question, sudden and oblique, caught Daniel off balance. ‘What makes you ask that?’

Kenny shrugged. ‘A hunch. A feeling. I wasn’t meaning to get in your shit about it. You don’t have to tell me diddly.’

‘I almost died once,’ Daniel said. ‘From a bomb explosion. My heart stopped when they were loading me in the ambulance; they had to shock it to get it started. That’s what the doctor told me, anyway – I don’t remember. I was falling, that’s the last thing I remember, falling till it seemed I’d fall forever, then right in front of me, out of nowhere, was a mirror, and I remember lifting my hands to protect my face but I don’t know if I fell through it or it shattered or what. I guess the closest I’ve ever come to seeing Death was in that mirror, but I don’t remember what I saw there, if I saw anything at all.’

‘That’s Death, all right. He loves to fuck around with mirrors, mirrors and windows – two of his favorite toys.’

‘If you don’t mind a personal question, something you said has got me curious.’

Kenny glanced over at him. ‘Do it, man. Shoot.’

‘I’m not quite sure how to put it,’ Daniel replied. ‘You said when you looked at Ginnilee’s picture, you vanished inside yourself. Do you mean your body actually disappeared, turned into air?’

‘Negative. Just the fucking opposite. My body stayed and my mind vanished. You had the right track, though; just the wrong train.’

Daniel thought about this. It actually seemed to make better sense than the way he was going about it. He tried to imagine his mind vanished, smiling when he realized he’d gotten ahead of himself, that first he’d have to imagine his mind. The thought cracked him up.

Kenny eyed him nervously. ‘What got you off, man?’

‘I was trying to imagine my mind.’

‘Yeah, I know – it’s weird, huh? Like a TV watching itself, or a slot machine playing itself, shit like that.’

‘Shit like that,’ Daniel repeated, still chuckling.

Kenny, eyes back on the road, seemed almost solemn. He nodded his head once, as if confirming a decision, and turned to Daniel. ‘I got a deal for you, Herman, a stone guarantee. Why don’t you hook up with me for awhile, ride some patrol. I can get you decent work in the casino if you want some play money, but if you’d rather kick back I’ve got an extra bunk and lots of rations. I’m no fucking Julie Child, but I cook good enough I don’t use nothing from cans.’

Sobered by the offer, Daniel said, ‘I’m honored, but I have a mission of my own. Maybe when it’s over, I’ll take you up on it.’

‘What’s your mission, man. This some of that “religious zeal” stuff?’

‘Some, I guess. You see, I found the Grail––’

‘Say what?’ Kenny cocked his ear. ‘The Grail?’

‘Like the Holy Grail,’ Daniel said.

‘You mean like in the Knights of the fucking Round Table? Some kind of trophy cup from God or something like that? I always dug those knights thundering off to lance some flipped-out dragon. Foxworth used to laugh at me about it. Said, “Fuck dem knights and da round table. Thas a lot of hard riding fo’ not much pussy.” I told him pussy wasn’t the point. The point was the quest, fighting your way through. He said, “Thas cool wi’ me, Kenny. You quest it, I’ll fuck it.” That was Foxworth, man, pussy and music. Fucking Foxworth. Ate a Claymore at Song Be. Heard about it from a guy in the VA, bed next to––’ Kenny stopped, lifting his hands from the wheel in a helpless shrug. ‘Sorry, man,’ he apologized. ‘I shit all over your riff. I get spaced here at night. Get the diarrhea jaws.’

Daniel said, ‘I understand. No problem.’

‘So anyway, before I went drifty, you were saying you’re after this Grail, right?’

‘Not exactly. I found the Grail – not the Holy Grail, but one like it. My mission is to figure out what to do with it.’

‘Fuck, man! Hang on to it.’

‘I thought of that first, too,’ Daniel said, ‘but now I’m convinced hanging on to it is the one thing I can’t do.’

‘I know some people in Vegas who could move it for thirty percent, if what you mean is too hot to hang on to. Free introduction, just to help a brother get clear.’

‘Not necessary. It can’t be sold or bought or stolen or kept. But maybe it can be opened.’

‘Got a torch in the shop,’ Kenny offered.

‘No, wouldn’t do it, but thanks for the thought. I’ll find a way, I’m sure.’

‘Right on, brother. One way or another, blow the walls down. Soul belongs to Jesus but your ass belongs to the Corps. Any way I can help you, call the Shamrock and let me know. I’ll ride in like the fucking cavalry, my iron flipped to rock’n’roll. Me and fucking Foxworth, man, we had this secret army, all the drug-suckers and wailing fools, the loonies and the lonely and the desperately fucked up, a secret army of us called The Brotherhood of the Hideous Truth. Foxworth was the supreme commander, and I was his field general, General Chaos he called me. Only had one rule for meetings. They couldn’t begin until everyone was too stoned to stand up and salute the flag. Fucking Foxworth, man …’

Daniel listened till he could almost imagine Foxworth sitting between them, drinking Bacardi with beer chasers, grinning at his certain knowledge that of the five billion adult human beings on the planet, over half had pussies – and even if that wasn’t the ultimate point, it surely offered reason to live.

At Daniel’s insistence, Kenny let him off near dawn in the middle of nowhere, just road and sagebrush as far as you could see.

‘Look me up any time, man; I’ll be there,’ Kenny reminded him as Daniel got out.

‘Shoot straight,’ Daniel said.

Kenny raised a clenched fist. ‘Now you got the spirit. Semper fi, bro’.’ Daniel smiled and started to close the door. ‘Whoa, mofo! You forgot your bowling ball. Get your shit squared away, son. There’s a war on.’ He handed the bag out to Daniel with a wink. ‘How can you bowl ’em over without a fucking ball? That’d be like going questing without a lance.’

‘Indeed,’ Daniel said as he took the Diamond back. ‘Thanks again.’

Kenny swung the Trans-Am across the center divider and headed back to Las Vegas. The loss of Daniel’s company depressed him. In that vanished month as Death’s Chauffeur, Kenny had developed an acute sensitivity to the thin musky odor released in the breath of those who would die soon. Kenny shook his head dolefully. ‘You stupid jaw-jacking shithead, he was the best bait you’ve had in fifteen years and you fucked it up just like you’ve fucked up everything. Get your shit squared away, boy; there’s a war going down.’ He remembered saying the same thing to Daniel. When he thought about it, he realized those were the last words Foxworth had ever said to him. Fucking Foxworth. He started crying again.

Gurry Debritto smiled as he finished decoding the transmission. He put the message with the others his West Coast listeners had picked up. If the locations were accurate – his subcontractors were the best in the world – the Diamond had been flown to Seattle, driven by van to Coos Bay, Oregon, and was now on an unnamed ship seventy miles due west of the mouth of the Smith River, headed down the coast. He reread the last transmission:

SAIL AWAY. PROBLEMA. FIRST NEST FOULED. BACKUP SHAKY. SAME BAY AND DAY BUT SHIFT STORAGE OKIE TURF 107772400. SHINE ON HARVEST MOON. BLT T GO.

Gurry Debritto nodded. They were good, these people, but always the little problems and changes required adjustments. Evidently the original destination had been somehow fouled and the backup couldn’t be trusted, so they were shifting to a new place. He had a hunch where. The boat was headed south along the coast to the same bay as planned, and San Francisco Bay seemed a logical place to start, particularly in light of OKIE TURF – Oakland, if his hunch was right. He turned to the keyboard and punched up the Oakland Index, then the street directory. He assumed the time and address were contained in the numbers 107772400. He studied them for a moment, deciding to start with the obvious – 2400 as the time. He tapped out 107 77 Street on keyboard and there it was: CARDINAL LIGHT IMPORTS, twenty-one-thousand-square-foot warehouse, owned by Tao-Hihe Chemical, leased to Cardinal Light Imports in January. He punched in the access code for Langley Central Records, then the security clearance sequence that was one of the perks he’d insisted upon as a condition for his services.

Not much on Harvey Moon, but enough. President of Cardinal Light Imports, a board member of Tao-Hihe Chemicals, and an elder of the Breaking Wave Temple, a Taoist church that drew their religious inspiration from Lao-Tzu and their social analysis from Karl Marx. Suspected of smuggling arms for Mao (unconfirmed) and drugs for the Danish Provos (unconfirmed; perhaps disinformation). Lives aboard yacht [Susy-Q: Cayman Reg: LV967769]. Married seven times; thirty-one children…

Debritto read on. Thirty-one fucking kids. Didn’t these people understand that they had to quit breeding like dogs?

He repunched the Oakland street directory and jotted down the map file number for Seventy-seventh Street. If they were bringing the Diamond down on Moon’s yacht, it would be sweet to take it right there on the boat. But the yacht would be risky, too hard to secure. He’d have to hire help, and he’d always worked alone in close.

When he pulled the Seventy-seventh Street aerial from the map case and located the Cardinal Light warehouse, he dropped all consideration of hitting the yacht. The warehouse was perfect. One story, open ground all around it, a large skylight on the roof. He always appreciated skylights. He liked looking down. Perhaps Mr Moon would show up in person. So far, they’d been more than accommodating. They were bringing it right to him. He was in Berkeley, right next door. He could take the Nimitz and be there in twenty minutes.

He went down to the basement and opened the weapons locker. He would have at least a day to set up the warehouse. It was just past midnight, a perfect time to go take a look. He decided he could afford the extra weight and bulk of four grenades, a drag on stealth but nice to have if even half the Moon kids showed. In a way, he wished they would.

‘Thirty-one kids,’ he muttered, slipping the.380 in his ankle holster. ‘That’s a crime against humanity. This has to stop. If the idiots keep breeding and the intelligent wisely don’t, humans will devolve back to animals. Beasts. Goddamn cunts. Let’s make a baby. If the fucking women weren’t so weak we’d have a chance.’

As soon as he had the Diamond in his control, he’d brush up on his underwater demolition techniques and go slap a mine on Mr Moon’s floating pleasure dome.

Debritto rolled up over the roof gutter and came up in a crouch. The warehouse was just like in the picture: flat tar roof, skylight, three small vent pipes. He held himself motionless for a full minute, eyes scanning the roof, listening. Staying low, he moved to the edge of the skylight. He laid out flat and listened. He could hear muffled music inside, probably a radio. He slipped the silenced.357 from its shoulder holster and inched forward.

What he saw confused him. A man’s face stared up into his. In the instant he realized the warehouse floor was covered with mirrors, the dart hit an inch below his left ear. He tried to roll and snap off a shot but instead flopped onto his back. His body went rigid, the gun slipping from his hand as the fingers stiffened and spread until they were almost bent backward. His lungs were filling with ice. Just before he lost consciousness he saw a tall figure in a black cape and black nurse’s cap step from behind the closest ventilation pipe and raise the blowgun to his lips. The back of Debritto’s right hand stung.

He heard footsteps, a rustle of cloth, a burning sensation in one of his arms. His eyes were open but he couldn’t see. His body had turned to frozen glass. He was a fly in amber, paralyzed, senseless. But he could hear, he realized, had heard footsteps and a rustle of cloth.

A woman’s voice whispered in his ear, ‘Dimethyl tubocaine chloride, a neuromuscular blocking agent. To slow you down enough to listen. I suggest you listen as if your life depended on it. The second dart was a mixture of curare and datura. I gave you two injections a moment ago, both containing synergistic combinations. Belladonna. Tetraclorothane. Methyl iodide. Sodium acid sulfate. Plus a few others I’d lost the labels for. Oh, and some hallucinogens for color. I won’t bore you with the specific effects of each. You’ll know soon enough. And I can’t tell you the cumulative effects because I’ve never tried these combinations before. You’ll be the first to know. Maybe the only one who ever will. And you do deserve to know, don’t you, Mr Debritto? I think so. Information is the root of understanding, and compassion is its flower. I’m an understanding and compassionate woman, Mr Debritto. I am also a Raven, quicksilver’s daughter, the moon’s witness, a messenger between the dead and the living, and a dweller in both realms. I know you doubt my compassion as you lie here so pathetically trapped inside your senseless flesh. Doubt is a tribute to intelligence, as I’m sure you’d agree if you could. So let me prove my compassion, Mr Debritto, prove it with a promise and a gift. I promise I will call you an ambulance within twenty minutes. And the gift is a critical piece of information that could mean the difference between life and death. I’m not sure whether I’ve given you a lethal dose or not. Lucky, lucky you. Yet another adventure in self-discovery. Poor baby. Poor, poor baby.’ She paused, and though he couldn’t feel it, gently stroked his brow. When she spoke again, her voice seemed harsher and more intense: ‘He was able to steal the Diamond because he believed in the Diamond. Now we’ll find out what you believe in.’

Debritto heard the rustle of her skirt as she walked away. He tried to move his right hand to find the gun but it was impossible, his mind trapped in a block of ice. He pitted his rage at her against the terror of his own helplessness. He would not be beaten by a woman, by a weak, brainless cunt. She probably hadn’t given him a fatal dose. Too soft to make irrevocable decisions, too sentimental to exercise full power. He tried to concentrate on remembering the poisons she’d said she used. How stupid to mention them. If the paralysis faded he could tell the doctors, who’d know the antidotes. But concentration was difficult lying there paralyzed on the roof. He tried to squeeze his attention back to the poisons she’d named. He heard a female voice whispering in his ear, but it was another woman speaking. His mother’s voice told him, ‘You are evil. Corrupt with evil. Sick with evil. Mad with evil. Evil, evil, evil.’

Debritto’s rigid body barely twitched when he tried to scream. This couldn’t be his mother. He had no memory of her. She’d died when he was five months old. That’s what his father had told him. Why should he doubt his father? He’d always told him the hard truth. No, it had to be the poisons – some sort of auditory hallucination.

‘You were born evil. Full of sickness and rot. Shame of my flesh. Shame of my heart. You know my voice from the womb. You have dreamed my dreams. I gave you life. I gave you life, and you defiled it. Now I’ve come to take it back.’

Tape Transcript (partial):

Interrogation of Elwood and Emmett Tindell, brothers (ID Access LCR 86755)

File: OPERATION NEST EGG

Tonopah Emergency Field Office, Nevada

April 10, 1987

Present: Reg. Sup. Keyes; agents Stanley, Dickerson, Peebe

PEEBE: Okay fellas, I want you to tell it to Supervisor Keyes. He’s flown in after a hard day, so keep it short and to the point.

ELWOOD: We got the same deal still? No charges on us – nothing; half of any reward or business deals; you take brother Emmett to the hospital and get his nuts fixed up; we get us a new Camaro and two thousand bucks each? That what we talking?

EMMETT: El, you’re fucking hopeless. Don’t tell ’em shit.

ELWOOD: Don’t fret on me, Em; your big brother knows what he’s doing. We’re in the big time here. This is CIA, not your sheriffs and highway troopers. This is national law. They can deal. So, Mr Peebe, Mr Keyes, how about it?

KEYES: That sounds reasonable to me. However, since we’re overburdened with paperwork, would you take twenty thousand in cash to cover the car and the medical bills yourself? You still get half of any reward money, walk out of here clean.

ELWOOD: You got the money on you, I wouldn’t mind looking it over.

KEYES: Dickerson? Show him. You can count it later. You don’t walk till you pass the polygraph, though.

ELWOOD: The what?

KEYES: Lie detector. We pay for truth and punish bullshit.

ELWOOD: I got no problem with that. Brother Em, how about you?

EMMETT: Officers, he’s been using drugs something fierce ever since he was a baby. There’s lots of things he thinks are true that ain’t even close.

ELWOOD: Why are you being like this, Em? We got outer-space invaders running around and you don’t want to cash in. Your nuts still swoll and achy, that it? Getting whopped in the nuts always did get you strange. Remember when we were seven and that red-headed Simmons girl liked to kick your nuts up your throat for waving your pee-pee at her? Remember? You got real fretted and grumpy, and––

KEYES: I’m sure you both had charming childhoods, but I’m much more interested in what happened this morning on Highway Ninety-five.

ELWOOD: Well sure. Okay. Me and Emmett was driving along, heading up to Reno to see if we could get us some jobs, and––

PEEBE: [to Keyes] Car was stolen in Phoenix yesterday. We just put the make and numbers out on the us-only line, Phoenix west, but it was already on a general APB.

ELWOOD: Hard to look for work without a car.

KEYES: Forget the car. Never happened. Go on.

ELWOOD: So we’re driving along about an hour after sunup and we see this guy sitting alongside the road. Kinda got his head tucked down on his chest and his hands over his face. Looked like maybe he was feeling puny. So me and Em, we pull over, see if he’s all right. But this guy – said his name was Herman – he wasn’t even next door to right. We seen that straight off. One thing, he’s wearing fucking bowling shoes, I mean right out there in the sage-brush and all. Bowling shirt, too. Name of some construction company on the back – Rice Construction, Price, something like that. He’s packing his bowling ball with him, and he’s got this backpack and real nice briefcase, too. Weird. Like he don’t know if he’s a bowler, forest ranger, or banker. What’s weirder, he’s crying. Not ‘boo-hoo,’ you know, but his eyes are ’bout as red as granddaddy’s long johns and his cheeks are all wet and streaky. But what’s––

KEYES: What’d this guy look like? Age? Size? Eye color?

PEEBE: We got it in detail already; went out with the car description on our line. I can run it by you quick.

KEYES: Quick.

ELWOOD: Hold on, dammit. It’s just getting to the really weird––

PEEBE: [to Keyes] Mid-twenties, six feet, hundred sixty to eighty pounds, blue eyes, brown hair, scar on right temple, dressed as described.

KEYES: White man?

PEEBE: Yes sir. Sorry.

EMMETT: He’s just jerking your chain. Ain’t too many blue-eyed spades or spics I ever saw.

ELWOOD: You guys want to hear the weird part, or what?

KEYES: Okay, let’s hear it. The guy was crying …

ELWOOD: So naturally I ask him what’s wrong. And he says, ‘I think I was remembering a dream my mother had when I was in her womb.’ You got that? Guy fucking thinks he’s remembering dreams from inside his mama? Me and Emmett weren’t much for school, but you don’t need no graduation papers to see this guy is bat-shit loony, maybe run off from a nuthouse or something. His eyes looked crazy, too, kinda glassy and far away, and he generally looked all grungy. So wasted, me and Em had to help him get in the backseat.

KEYES: How much help? I mean, did he voluntarily enter your vehicle?

ELWOOD: Pretty much, yeah. We said we’d take him on to Reno, wouldn’t even make him pay for no gas. Me and Em was being nice.

PEEBE: Spare us. No charges, right? Just what happened.

ELWOOD: So we’re driving along and talking with this guy – Brother Em’s at the wheel, me riding shotgun, this Herman weirdo in the back – just getting acquainted, you know, and I ask him what he’s got in his bags and briefcase, just out of being curious. And he says real matter-of-fact, real cool, that he’s got extra clothes and shit in the little backpack, a grill in the bowling bag, and in the briefcase he’s got about twenty thousand dollars, cash money. So––

EMMETT: El, you dumb shit, he said grail. Grail, not grill.

ELWOOD: Me and Em’s been arguing over this all afternoon, but grill – like for cooking up meat – is what I heard. Struck me as kinda odd, too, that he’d be packing around some little grill in a bowling bag,’ specially since it looked like it already had a bowling ball in it. So I asked him if we could see this grill. He said seeing the grill was something you had to earn. So I said how ’bout seeing the money, and son of a bitch if he don’t say ‘Sure’ and open it right up. I took a good eyeful – never seen so much in my life – and then I looked at Em, and Em was looking at me. Me and Em been poor ever since we got orphaned off when we was pups. We––

PEEBE: Get to it, Elwood – save the shit. Your rap sheets are longer than your dicks.

ELWOOD: Okay. Sure. So we pull off on a nice little turnout a ways up the road – one of them history monuments – and Em gets this Herman guy out of the car to check out the marker, take a leak. Guy takes the fucking bowling bag with him. Now the way we work it, Brother Em’s the holder and I’m the whopper. I use a sawed-off ax-handle,’ bout this long, top foot drilled out a quarter-inch wide and filled back up with lead. So I come up behind him real easy as he’s standing there beside Em. Em nods he’s ready, so I plant myself solid, and when Em grabs him around the shoulders, I swing down with the club, swing hard. And this is the truth – hook me up to the biggest lie detector you got – right in the middle of the swing, the guy fucking disappears. And Em’s standing there with his legs braced, holding nothing but air, and the club smacks him right in the nuts. I’m sorry, Em. Fuck, what can I say?

EMMETT: Nothing, you dumb shit.

ELWOOD: He’s an alien, Em. People are into aliens. We’re gonna make a ton o’ money just by warning people against him. Could get us on TV.

KEYES: Whoa, you two. Let’s get back on track. Emmett, did you see this guy disappear like your brother claims?

EMMETT: That’s what my eyes saw. The rest of me ain’t believing it.

KEYES: Okay then. He disappeared. Then what happened?

ELWOOD: Well, Emmett screamed and went down. I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on – looking around kinda wild to see where the guy mighta went to, but he was nowhere. Emmett’s sorta gurgling at my feet, so I bend down to see if I can help him, and the car starts up. Guy had snuck back to the car and was stealing it. Drove right off toward Reno, giving the horn a couple of big honks. Was another hour before your people happened by.

KEYES: I want you both to think hard: You said this guy got out of the car with the bowling bag, right? So when he disappeared, what happened to it?

EMMETT: No idea.

ELWOOD: Me either. I don’t remember seeing it on the ground by Em. Didn’t see him come back to get it. Figure it must have gone with him.

PEEBE: We searched the area. Nada.

ELWOOD: We’re dealing with some kind of outer space alien, right? Some sorta critter from the stars that can take our shape but get back invisible when it wants?

KEYES: So it would seem. But whatever he is, we’ll find him.

EMMETT: Hey, officer – don’t you listen? The guy can disappear. Get it? Poof! If he can disappear, maybe he can do other things. Ask me, you’d have to be superstupid to fuck with him. Super-super.

Daniel fidgeted behind the wheel of the Tindell brothers’ turquoise- and-pink Cutlass. Their alleged Cutlass, anyway, since he’d wisely checked the registration only to find it in the name of Mrs Heidi Cohen. Daniel somehow doubted she knew Emmett and Elwood personally. He remembered Mott telling him that if you were going to drive what he called ‘blind loaners’ – vehicles that the owners didn’t know they’d lent – you should borrow a new one every twelve hours.

When he discovered the registration anomaly shortly after leaving the brothers in the dust, Daniel had decided to ditch the car. He’d pulled off on a spur road and gathered his stuff to walk away when he was taken with the notion to try vanishing with the Diamond in daylight again.

He vanished for three futile hours. He still couldn’t see the Diamond’s spiral flame in daylight, and without its axis to mark the center, he couldn’t focus. He’d tried imagining the spiral flame but this split his attention. He gave up in a fit of frustration. He needed to step back. He was acting as if there were deadlines. He could take the rest of his life to work with the Diamond.

The time pressure he felt was actually the phantom pressure of pursuit, the sense that he had to enter the Diamond before he was caught. But objectively, they couldn’t catch him or seize the Diamond as long as he could vanish and take it with him. In an oblique way, his urgency was a failure to be true to himself, a failure to trust his powers.

‘I don’t trust me. Me don’t trust I. Is this a natural neural lag in accommodating change, or do we have a serious disagreement? And if it’s a disagreement, how can it be harmoniously resolved?’

Daniel tried to think about this, more from duty than passion. One evening at Nameless Lake Wild Bill had said the trouble with self-analysis was the built-in human eagerness to accept all sorts of preposterous and absurd suppositions, not the least of which were both the possibility and desirability of knowing one’s self. Bill had likened this to using a corkscrew to pull your image from a mirror. Daniel smiled. With mock sternness he told himself, ‘You have a problem with self-image. Admit it – I admit it.’ He came to his own defense. ‘But if you can vanish, you’re supposed to have problems with self-image. You’d be insane if you didn’t.’

Daniel started laughing. Knowing himself was no more improbable than a frog bringing him an armload of roses or falling petals turning into frogs.

The laughter relaxed him, collapsed the manic pressure to solve it all right now. He was a moth flinging itself at the sun. Volta was wrong. The Diamond wouldn’t destroy him; the Diamond was simply a possible means for him to destroy himself.

He decided his best strategy was to give up for awhile. He’d offered himself to the Diamond and so far had been refused. Fine. No more vanishing with the Diamond except in defense. If he was patient, maybe the Diamond would come to him.

He also decided to keep the twice-swiped Cutlass. If he couldn’t be captured, nothing could compromise his safety – or nothing except losing the power to vanish. Conserving his strength for emergencies was even more reason to quit vanishing with the Diamond.

His new approach, he thought, was adventurous yet eminently sane. Yet he was fidgeting behind the wheel because he kept imagining himself looking into the Diamond, pouring himself into the spiral-flamed furnace at its center, and he couldn’t allow himself that anymore. He turned on the radio for distraction.

A half-hour later, with the first stars glimmering above and the lights of Reno a pale hollow on the horizon, a blast of static fried the local station and Denis Joyner took the air.

Transcription:

Denis Joyner, AMO Mobile Radio

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I’m David Janus, your host for this sundown program of ontological inquiry, ‘Moment of Truth,’ brought to you from the mobile studio of the Public Bullcast System on the frequency to which you’re evidently tuned.

I trust you’ll find this evening’s program as compelling as I do, though its format is slightly different than our usual broadcast fare. That’s right, Santa, there is no Virginia. And while it saddens me to disabuse you of such sweet beliefs, I can only echo my old friend Ludwig Wittgenstein’s sweeping disclaimer that ‘the world is the case.’ Alas, dear listeners, we can only drink it by the glass.

Which brings me to the creative origins of tonight’s presentation. This afternoon as I browsed my library, sipping a young but ambitious petite syrah, I realized my enlightenment, while total, has become slightly stale of late. I therefore resolved that I would henceforth seek to explore complexities worthy of my pretensions. Thus decided, I fortified myself with an ounce of Serbian caviar accompanied by a chilled liter of Thunderbird (sic itur ad astra!), and began to search for neglected volumes from which I might glean information on topics which have traditionally bewildered less formidable brains than my own.

Quickly then – tempus fugit, as old Thoth said – tonight we’ll examine that most intractable mystery of existence, the sine qua non of consciousness itself, the irreducible element of being, the gray jelly smeared on each cracker of thought, the meat and potatoes of knowledge, the very fire in the forge. I refer, of course, to the human mind.

The mind is a glass floor.

The mind is the spirit’s tear.

The mind is our prior and subsequent ghost.

The mind is the Bullion Express and the blood on the tracks.

The mind is a stone door.

The silver on the backs of mirrors.

The wave that defines the coast.

It’s what the drunk grave robbers couldn’t stuff in their sacks.

The mind is the sum of all and more.

The spasm between one and zero in the Calendar of Black-Hole Years.

The contract between the lash and the whipping post.

A quilt of dreams stitched with facts.

A meaningless argument among the whores.

Rain that keeps falling when the sky clears.

A masquerade party, guest and host.

A candlelit landscape of puddled wax.

The mind is what thought is for.

The parking lot at the Mall of Fears.

The fire-pit for the piggy roast.

What the soul surrendered and won’t take back.

The mind is neither either nor or.

The real center of an empty sphere.

This has been your man of the hour on ‘Moment of Truth.’ I trust your attention proved worthy of my intelligence, and that as you listened you cried out that ultimate Destructuralist accolade, ‘Tha’s a big ten-four, good buddy!’ And so, until next time, do keep in mind that every moment is a moment of truth. But for now: Ciao, baby, and Adieu.

Daniel snapped off the radio and stared down the road. He remembered Volta talking about an AMO-financed mobile pirate radio station and wondered if that’s what he’d been listening to. It figured. He’d have to mention it to Volta the next time they talked, tell him that it had strengthened him while he was running with the Diamond. The reminder that he was part of an ancient alliance of magicians and outlaws cheered him up. But also, and perhaps more importantly, David Janus was hard evidence that he, Daniel, was relatively sane. He was impressed that the DJ could still function. This gave Daniel hope. He needed hope. Hope and rest and patience. And food. He needed to eat. He needed lots of things.

Thankful, Volta watched Red Freddie’s plane lift from the Eel River airstrip and bank toward the mist-shrouded moon. Volta hadn’t enjoyed the flight. From the moment they’d left El Paso, Red Freddie had lobbied him hard. Red Freddie wanted AMO to ‘strike more blows against the Empire, real blows instead of this candy-ass policy of gentle subversion.’ Red Freddie wanted to blow up dams and burn banks and bind and gag the president of Maxxam in the top of an old-growth redwood the company had marked for harvest. Direct action, that’s what Red Freddie wanted.

Volta wanted to indulge the seeping melancholy that infused him the moment he’d understood the Diamond would destroy Daniel. He was tired of control. But Red Freddie was a member of the Alliance as well as a friend. His policy suggestions deserved a thoughtful response. So Volta had listened and answered with diplomacy and patience.

Volta was so glad to be alone that he drove three miles up the hill before he remembered he needed groceries. He took mental inventory of the Laurel Creek pantry as he drove. There was probably enough to get him through a week, but he wanted to stay home at least a month. He decided to go back to town and stock up so he wouldn’t have to interrupt his retreat later.

Volta judged his decision sensible and efficient. No surprise there. He hadn’t surprised himself in years. Solid, sensible, honorable Volta. He felt trapped inside his integrity, an integrity that had slowly turned arid. He had accepted the responsibilities of the Star, and he had honored them. They were responsibilities so serious that to accept them virtually forbade foolishness. No regrets. But now he needed to water his garden. Needed to be foolish.

As if to test his resolve, a golden opportunity for foolishness presented itself on the outskirts of town. This was the smallest carnival Volta had seen in all his wanderings – four games, a junior Ferris wheel, a House-Trailer of Horrors, and a booth the size of a one-hole outhouse selling clouds of cotton candy, soda water, and caramel apples. Skimpy, true, but it was a carnival.

Volta was taken first by the force of her concentration and not her long, lovely, reddish-blonde hair. She was ten or eleven, that strangely mercurial age of female prepubescence that actually ranges from three to thirty-five. She was fiercely focused on tossing ping-pong balls into a mass of small goldfish bowls arrayed on a plywood-sheet table. Volta quietly walked over and stood behind her. She tossed and missed, shaking her head angrily, her waist-length hair shimmering in the stark, bare-bulb light.

She dug into her pocket and finally produced a quarter. ‘Last chance,’ she told the man behind the plank.

He handed her three ping-pong balls from his apron, squinting at her through the smoke from his Marlboro. ‘Your last chance, huh? Well, good luck.’

Volta watched her concentrate. She was a sweetheart, freckles and all. Volta foolishly allowed himself a pang of regret for his childlessness.

When her last toss bounced harmlessly off a bowl’s rim and landed in the dust, the girl stamped her foot and said ‘Shit’ quickly, as if velocity made it acceptable. Her shoulders slumped and she turned to walk away. Volta was ready.

‘Miss,’ he said as he bent down to pick up something from the ground, ‘I believe you were standing on this.’ He held up the dollar bill he’d palmed.

She looked confused. ‘I don’t think so. I spent both of mine.’

Volta admired her honesty, but he relished the sudden glint of hope in her eyes. ‘Miss, you were standing on it. It must be yours. And if it’s not, it’s yours by right of good fortune.’

She took the bill with a grin that made Volta happy in a foolishly uncomplicated way. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘May I offer you some technical advice on tossing ping-pong balls into goldfish bowls?’

‘What?’ Her tone was a dead heat between wary and eager.

‘The trajectory of your toss is too flat. While the bowls look close together, they’re actually far enough apart that a ball seldom skitters into one. Also, the balls aren’t that much smaller than the neck opening on the bowls. The outcurving edge makes the opening appear wider than it is. Appearances are the best deception. We want to believe our own eyes. But I trust you see the secret by now: Loft the ball high instead of tossing it low – that way you get a straight drop on the opening, the full circle to shoot at.’

Her seventh ball dropped in so perfectly it almost bounced back out.

The sallow guy behind the plank raised his voice a few desultory decibels, ‘Awwwrighhht here.’ Nother winner.’

She grinned up at Volta. The wrinkle in her nose was enough to fuel his melancholy for days. ‘My name’s Gena Leland. What’s yours?’

‘The Great Volta,’ he bowed. He hadn’t used his stage name in twenty years.

‘Really? You in the carnival?’

‘No. I’m a retired magician.’

She was about to ask something else when a towheaded boy, clearly kin, ran up and grabbed her arm. ‘Come on, Gena. Mom’s getting pissed.’

The man behind the plank tapped her other arm. ‘Here, kid; you won it.’ He handed her a goldfish bowl, but this one held water and a tiny goldfish.

Gena hissed, ‘Okay, Tommy, just a sec.’ She accepted the goldfish and handed it to Volta.

Surprised, he took it, but immediately tried to hand it back. ‘No, you won it; it’s your prize.’

She put her hands behind her back. ‘But you taught me how. Besides, I don’t want it. I wasn’t doing it to win a goldfish. I just wanted to do it, get one of those balls in.’

‘Oh,’ Volta said. ‘I thought you wanted the goldfish.’

‘No. My mom says it’s a pretty big responsibility to take care of another living thing. Gotta go.’

And she and her brother were gone on flashing sneakers.

The bowl cupped in his hands, Volta looked down at the goldfish. With a sudden and startling clarity, Volta felt Daniel open a door. ‘Shit,’ Volta said quickly. Then, with a freedom more befitting his age, he added a long anguished ‘Fuuuuuuuck!’

Daniel stopped at Jackrabbit Pizza in a mini-mall at the edge of Reno. The Cutlass wouldn’t lock, so he took the Diamond, money, and day pack in with him. When he opened the pizzeria door, he was startled to see a large rabbit behind the counter. As his eyes adjusted to the light, the rabbit slowly turned into a tall, gangly, teenage boy with a small, pinched face and wispy mustache. The kid was wearing a pair of stiff, slender rabbit ears and a light-grey smock made of the same sheeny velveteen fabric, a material closer to carpet than cloth. The kitchen workers also wore rabbit ears and furry smocks. Clearly a uniform, Daniel decided, unless all three shared the same sartorial eccentricity.

The pizzeria had two long aisles of tables and benches, padded booths along the near wall, and a mini-arcade of computer games, pinball machines, and a mechanical pony ride along the back wall. It was noisy and warm, a fragrant braid of yeast, garlic, tomato, and sizzling pepperoni wafting from the kitchen. Daniel stepped up to the counter.

‘Good evening.’ The tall rabbit-boy reached for a pad. ‘Ready to order?’

Daniel decided you could say anything you wanted to someone wearing jackrabbit ears, so he said, ‘The mind is a pizza with the works.’

The kid’s button nose twitched just like a rabbit’s scenting danger on the air. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the kid said, ‘I missed that.’ He glanced timidly at Daniel and immediately shifted his gaze back to his order pad.

‘Pardon me,’ Daniel said, ‘I get mumbly alone on the road. I said “I wouldn’t mind a pizza with the works.”’

‘Small? Medium?’

‘Medium.’

‘Anything to drink?’

Daniel looked at the menu board. ‘A pitcher of beer.’

The rabbit-eared kid said, ‘Comes to nine ninety-five.’

Daniel set the bowling bag down and dug in his front pocket. He handed a hundred-dollar bill to the kid. ‘Keep the change.’

The kid looked at the bill and then back at Daniel. ‘That’s a hundred-dollar bill, sir. It’s only nine ninety-five.’

‘That’s right,’ Daniel said. ‘So, if my math doesn’t fail me, that leaves you a tip of ninety dollars and five cents. Correct?’

The kid shook his head, his rabbit ears swaying slightly. ‘Gee, that’s more than I make in a week.’

‘Please,’ Daniel said with a dismissive flick of his hand, ‘I can afford it. Furthermore, I admire your courage.’

‘My courage?’

‘In wearing that outlandish rabbit uniform.’

The kid winced. ‘Don’t remind me. I forget till someone reminds me. Owner makes us wear them. He catches you without your ears on, you’re fired on the spot.’

Daniel didn’t respond. He was looking at the kid’s ears.

Nervously, the kid went on, ‘Sometimes it’s a real bummer. Girls from school come in once in a while, know what I mean. Pretty hard to look cool when you look stupid. This one girl, Cindy, thought I looked so silly she still cracks up giggling every time she sees me in the halls.’

‘Marry that woman,’ Daniel said, ‘she’ll keep you honest.’

‘Right,’ the kid said with a plaintive sarcasm, ‘she’s really going to marry Mr Rabbit Ears. It’s not like I’m Paul Newman to start with.’

Daniel advised him, ‘Tell her you are a master of the Nine Tantric Circles of Intimate Permissions.’

The kid lowered his eyes. ‘I don’t even know what a tantric is. Even if she’d be interested in knowing it, and I doubt she would. That would impress her, huh? “What nine tantric circles, Carl?” “Uh, well, Cindy, gee, duh.” Gotta tell her something, right?’

‘Absolutely,’ Daniel agreed.

‘So, you got any suggestions? You know about these tantric circles?’

Daniel winked. ‘That knowledge is the source of my wealth. Unfortunately, I’m bound not to reveal them, though in fact they’re open secrets. I can point you to the right path, though. Use your imagination. That’s what I did. And if Cindy uses her imagination, perhaps you’ll enter the First Circle together.’

Carl looked at Daniel, clearly puzzled. Daniel was vaguely disappointed when he said, ‘Well, thanks for the tips, sir. Let me get your pitcher, and I’ll call when the pizza’s ready. You’ll be number ninety-three.’

Daniel’s disappointment turned to an anger spawned more by the kid’s sloth than the implicit slight. ‘What I can’t decide,’ Daniel said, ‘is whether you should get down on your knees and thank your boss for forcing you into foolishness, or whether you should twist those rabbit ears together and tell him to stick ’em up his ass. If you’re going to be foolish, at least have the sense to enjoy it. If you find it demeaning, quit. The bosses of the world can’t do anything to you that you can stop them from doing. We all deserve ourselves.’

Carl was filling the pitcher from the counter tap. ‘You sound like a teacher,’ he said without enthusiasm.

Daniel considered this a moment. ‘I’m not sure I know enough to be a teacher, or could teach what I do know. I’m more of a romantic religious idiot trying to get his bearings in the Diamond-light of existence.’

‘Oh yeah?’ the kid said, sliding the pitcher across the countertop. ‘You with some church, some Eastern religion?’

Daniel sensed the kid’s eagerness to be rid of him, but rabbit-boy clearly hadn’t learned that religious inquiries encouraged conversation. Daniel decided to spare him. ‘No, none of that mystic Eastern woo-woo for me. I’m a Judo-Christian. I flipped.’ He gave the kid the wildest grin he could summon.

It must have been good. Carl gulped and turned for the kitchen, mumbling over his shoulder, ‘Better get your order in… be ten, fifteen minutes.’

Daniel sat at a table facing the mini-arcade. The machines flashed invitingly, but nobody wanted to play. Not the rabbit-eared kid at the counter, not a single patron. Daniel felt himself sliding toward depression and fought for equilibrium. He moved his left foot over and softly pressed it against the bowling bag. The feel of the curve against his foot gave him an immediate impulse to leap on the table, shout for attention, and vanish. That would wake them up. Instead, he concentrated on his beer, feeling the cool glass against his lips, tasting each drop.

Daniel was halfway through his pizza when a small boy tore by him, aiming straight for the pony ride – a fiberglass golden palomino cast in full gallop, ears laid back. The boy still had some baby fat in his cheeks and two front teeth were missing. He had brown eyes as lustrous as melting chocolate chips. Daniel sensed a delicacy about the boy, though there was nothing delicate about the way he swung into the saddle, twisted the plastic reins around his wrist, and shoved in his quarter; nothing delicate at all as he spurred the pony to full speed or whipped out his trusty six-gun – extended index-finger barrel, cocked-thumb hammer – and began blazing away, ‘Blatchooee! Blatchooee!’ The loud, wet report cut through the noise from other patrons.

‘Dad!’ the boy yelled. ‘Look! I’m killing the bad guys!’

The boy’s father was arguing in a low, tight voice with a woman Daniel assumed was the boy’s mother. They continued the argument without looking up.

‘Hey!’ Daniel yelled at them. They and most of the other diners looked up, startled.

Daniel didn’t care. He was going to be himself. He pointed at their son on the pony. ‘Your son is killing the bad guys.’

The mother turned without really looking and called over her shoulder, ‘Good for you, Billy.’ The father, a stocky, crew-cut guy not much older than Daniel, turned and shot him a challenging stare.

Daniel almost said Attention is the key to the vault, Dad, but thought better of it. He didn’t know anything about being a father. He shifted his gaze back to the cowpoke blasting away from the back of his swift steed, dropping one grubby bad guy after another until time ran out and the pony shimmied to a stop. The boy dismounted with panache. His father was saying, his voice tight and mean, ‘Read my lips, Mary: We don’t got the fuckin’ money for a new dryer.’

As the little boy passed, Daniel said, ‘Looks like you rid the world of some pretty nasty guys.’

‘Yup,’ the boy said, slowing but not stopping. ‘That Snake sure is a good horse.’

‘Well, you handle him real fine, too.’

The boy gave him a sidelong smile as he passed, a smile of deep and secret pleasure. ‘Thanks, pardner.’

‘Hey, you, pal,’ the kid’s father called, ‘you got some kinda problem with my boy?’

‘Not at all,’ Daniel smiled. ‘I was merely complimenting him on his imagination. You’ve got a fine son there.’ Daniel wasn’t feigning his smile; he was wondering how the jerk would like getting his liver pulverized by a Reverse Heel-Whip out of the Drowsing Crane position.

The father let this go, sliding over on the bench for his boy to sit down.

By the time Daniel finished another slice, the golden palomino had a new rider. He wasn’t as trigger-happy as the first, but he dropped his share.

And then a whole birthday party of children, accompanied by four harried mothers, came rabbling through the door. Carl-the-Counter- Rabbit already had a slice of pizza with a birthday candle ready for each of them, and one of the mothers produced a roll of quarters for the pony.

The boys, to a man, rode fast and hard with some fancy tricks thrown in, like hanging on the side and shooting across the saddle. The boys were full of bravado and purpose. Daniel loved them. But he loved the little girls even more. They rode with a quiet and stately abandon, eyes closed, the wind blowing their hair out behind them, taking on the power of the golden palomino but not confusing it with their own. He wondered what the little girls imagined as they rode, where they were going, how far away. He wanted to gather them all, boys and girls together, gather them all into his arms and carry them somewhere safe from the slaughter of time and change.

When the birthday party left, Daniel felt his depression ooze forward again. He wanted to vanish into the children’s minds, into some moment he could barely remember, before you were cornered by the lines you drew or trapped by someone else’s. He sat with his hands folded on the table, watching flecks of foam thin to scum and dry inside the empty pitcher. The pizza and beer, his first food since the Two Moons, left him feeling bloated and half-drunk. The last tatters of his energy fled to his stomach to aid digestion. Energy to make energy, and with each transformation a tiny bit lost to entropy. Running down to nothing. Those kids, so innocent. You couldn’t truly appreciate innocence until it was lost, and then you couldn’t get it back. Run down to nothing. The mind is a golden palomino. Hang on, children; it’s the ride of your life. Don’t be afraid. You’re safe with me but I’m not with myself, that’s our problem. There’s time, time, time. All the time in the world. Eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired.

Carl-the-Counter-Rabbit’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it’s ten o’clock, Jackrabbit Pizza’s closing time.’ Daniel, who wasn’t aware he’d been drowsing, leaped wildly to his feet, spinning around to check the room. Carl was being tactful. Daniel was the only one left.

He left the Diamond and money under the table and walked up front, taking the empty pitcher and glass with him. Carl was in the kitchen wiping down a prep table. He came out immediately, looking nervous. ‘Hate to hurry you, sir, but the boss’ll be here to cash out in about five minutes, and he gets really pissed if the place ain’t cleared – you know, on account of robbers and all.’

Daniel said, ‘Carl, you should explore the spiritual life. You must be a mind-reader, because I was just going to ask you if the boss was coming in tonight. When he gets here, would you inform him that I would like to see him for a moment at my table. My name is Nova Rajneesh. I have a business proposition for him.’

Carl was backing away. ‘Oh no, now, come on, mister, please. I shouldn’t of said nothing.’

‘I’m not a robber,’ Daniel assured him. ‘I want to do business.’

‘Well geez, do you think you could call him in the morning?’

‘Unfortunately, I’m forced to leave town tonight. And let me assure you that he’ll find my business proposition so enjoyable he’ll likely give you a bonus that will make my recent tip seem meager. Now, if you’d be kind enough to lend me a pen and one of those empty pizza boxes, I’ll let you return to your work.’

Carl reluctantly unclipped the pen from his velveteen smock and handed it and a pizza box across the counter. ‘You sure this won’t get me in trouble?’

‘You’re covered,’ Daniel said. ‘I promise.’

Daniel began writing rapidly on the pizza box. When he had finished, he opened the briefcase and counted the money: nineteen thousand dollars. He doled out four grand and zipped it in the day pack. When he looked up, a red-faced man, forty pounds overweight and bald, was bearing down on him. Daniel rose to greet him.

Before he could, the man bellowed, ‘My name’s Max Robbins, I own this place, and I’d like to know what the fuck you think you’re doing here after closing time? Carl, one of my fucking cretin employees, said you want to talk business. I don’t wanna talk business. I want your ass outa here.’

Daniel lifted the case’s lid and turned it so that Mr Robbins received the full effect of the neatly bound sheaves. Daniel offered his hand. ‘Mr Robbins, my name is Nova Rajneesh. I am what the media fondly refer to as an “eccentric millionaire.” Actually, I’m an impulsive multimillionaire, but why quibble.’ They shook hands, then Daniel continued, ‘I haven’t much time, so excuse me for jumping to the point. I’m the Supreme Chairman of the Nova Rajneesh Philanthropy Fund, a perfectly legal tax dodge, the intricacies of which need only concern my attorneys. The substance of my proposition is contained in this hastily drawn contract.’

Daniel picked up the pizza box. ‘You’ll note, Max, there are actually two contracts, but they’re identical. One will be my copy. If you’ll allow me to read:

The owner of Jackrabbit Pizza herewith agrees to accept the sum of $15,000 to provide free mechanical pony rides for all children upon request until such time as the money (at 25¢ a ride) is exhausted. Administrative and bank fees may be subtracted from the original sum, but in no event may the total fees exceed $3000.

In further consideration of this bequest, no employee of Jackrabbit Pizza will be forced to wear any type of uniform or costume as a condition of employment, effective on signature of this agreement.

A separate account shall be kept of this bequest, with books subject to audit at any time.

Dated and signed, etc.

Robbins said, ‘Don’t see much there for me.’

‘Then you’re either stupid or greedy. Not only do you get a customer attraction which will undoubtedly be reflected in increased revenues, you also get an undeserved reputation as a generous man – and, of course, most of the three-thousand-dollar administrative fee.’

‘All right, prick, you’re on.’

Daniel called Carl to witness the deal. Daniel tore the signed boxtop in half, giving Robbins his copy along with the briefcase of money. Robbins sat down to count as Carl and Daniel watched. Finally Robbins smiled. ‘All there,’ he said, starting to close the case.

Daniel cleared his throat. ‘I believe, Mr Robbins, that the witness fee is properly an administrative expense. Two hundred dollars is standard.’

Robbins glared. ‘Witness fee? What’s this shit? You think you can just roll me over and fuck me?’

‘Fair enough,’ Daniel said, ‘we’ll split it.’ He gave Carl two fifties from the day pack.

As Robbins reluctantly handed Carl a matching hundred from the briefcase, Daniel said, ‘While this pizza-box contract may strike you as unusual, and while it’s true my ways are unorthodox, I didn’t become wealthy by accident. I am an excellent businessman. My contract and litigation departments are used to seeing contracts written on cocktail napkins, the upholstery of Rolls Royces, bicycle seats, lipstick on mirrors, paper bags; and in every court case we’ve undertaken – and there have been many – those contracts were found to be binding. My contract department also directs our teams of investigators, whose random visits will ensure that the provisions of the contract are being followed to the letter. And the penny.’ Daniel stowed his copy in the day pack.

Robbins was rereading his copy of the contract, his lips moving slightly. ‘Don’t see nothing about investigators here. Where’s it say investigators?’

‘Auditors – same thing.’ Daniel put an arm through the day pack’s strap and slung it over his shoulder. Carl was carefully securing the two hundred dollars in his billfold.

‘So, all right,’ said Robbins, ‘these investo-auditors come, maybe somebody’s spilled coffee on a ledger, numbers don’t come out exactly even, stuff like that. What happens?’

‘The investigators or auditors, as the case may be, report to the contract department. Contract calls litigation. Litigation assembles a battery of attorneys. We file suit. We own a little pizzeria in Reno, the whole business probably worth less than a tenth of our legal fees. You see, Mr Robbins, with me it’s a matter of principle, not money. How many more millions do I need?’

‘I didn’t hear none of this lawsuit shit when we were signing contracts. Forget it. I’m backing out. It smells like grief.’

‘Too late,’ Daniel chirped. He picked up the bowling bag.

Robbins started to rise, muttering, ‘Now wait here just a fu––’

‘He’s right,’ Carl cut him off. ‘I saw you sign it. You wanted to.’

‘Hey, Carl,’ Robbins turned on him, ‘who took the dick out of your mouth? You go do some of that work I pay you for. Work? Remember? And take off that silly, fucking rabbit costume – makes you look like some kinda homo Bugs Bunny or somethin’.’

‘Mr Robbins,’ Carl said, his voice quavering, ‘I am a homo. That’s why when I take off my bunny uniform, I’m going to roll it up neatly and stick it up your ass.’

Robbins’s head snapped up as if he’d been kicked in the chin. He stared at Carl; the intensity of his gaze matched the purplish-red flush seeping downward from his bald pate toward his trembling jowls. Daniel was ready to intervene, but Robbins, perhaps sensing Daniel’s sentiments, smiled instead of erupting. He lifted his right hand up beside his ear and waggled his chubby fingers as he cooed, ‘Bye-bye, Carl. You’re fired.’

‘Hey,’ Daniel said, ‘you can’t fire Carl. He’s our witness.’

‘Fine.’ Robbins nodded his head rapidly. ‘He witnessed. He signed. Now his faggot-ass is out of here in two minutes or I call the cops.’

Daniel said, ‘What is it with you, Robbins? You ever opened a law book in your life? There’s three kinds of contract witnesses: there are signatory witnesses – that’s what you thought Carl was, I guess; then there are material witnesses – they document the contracted transfer of materials, not the contract signing; and the third – Carl’s category – are called I-witnesses – not e-y-e eye, but the personal pronoun, capital I – because they are appointed by one of the contracting parties – me – as a lock sito representative – that’s Latin for “constantly there” – to keep tabs on the contractual compliance of the other party. If you fire my witness, you should plan on spending the next ten years of your life and every penny you have in court.’

‘Come on! What’re you telling me? I can’t fire the pansy? Ever? That’s bullshit. S’pose he starts hanging his whang over the counter? Comes in wearing bra and panties and fucking prancing around, huh? Fuck that. Take me to court.’

Daniel shook his head. ‘You’re hopeless. Of course he can be dismissed – if he’s convicted of a felony. But since the money would be gone by the time he even came to trial, the point is moot. Your only other option is a CWBO.’

‘Like I’m supposed to know what the fuck that is?’

‘Actually, you should. It’s the Contested Witness Buy-Out. If you can’t get along with an I-witness, you can pay him a two-thousand-dollar buyout severance and replace him with a mutually agreed-upon substitute.’

Robbins was incredulous. ‘You mean I gotta give this dork-snorkeler twenty yards to get him out of my face?’

‘That’s correct. It’s deducted from the administrative costs, by the way, as our auditors will be informed.’

‘Fuck it,’ Robbins said, ‘I gotta think this is some kind of setup here, but it’s your money. Sure.’

Robbins counted out the two thousand and tossed it at Carl. ‘Bye, fuck-face.’

Carl grinned at Daniel. ‘Oh, now I can buy a new dress. But you, Max, I’ll always love you.’ He tried to put some smolder in his voice. ‘Ever since I met you I’ve known where you secretly want it. You’re one of those poor, poor souls who can never admit it to themselves.’ He pivoted on his heel and headed for the employee exit, laughing wildly as he tossed away his rabbit ears.

Since Robbins was glaring at Carl’s back, Daniel, for the fun of it, vanished, leaving by the front wall.

Four cars surrounded the Cutlass, the two with their flashers on imparting a strobed jerkiness to the movements of the men swarming the Cutlass. Invisible, Daniel walked over beside an unmarked car. A description of his bowling shirt was coming over the radio. That wasn’t good news, but wasn’t a major problem, either.

Two cops walked right through him as they headed toward the pizzeria. That was a major problem. They’d impound the money, fingerprint the case. He thought this over. No rides for the kids. No idea whose prints could be on the case, except his own. He went back through the wall just as the cops knocked on the door.

As Daniel entered, he almost lost his concentration in a fit of laughter. Max Robbins was going crazy looking for the briefcase – Daniel had forgotten it would vanish when he did. The case was right on the table where Robbins had left it, but he couldn’t see it. He was down on his knees searching under the tables. His florid face turned fish-belly white when he heard the pounding from the front and the word ‘Police.’

Daniel closed the case, picked up the contract on the table, and left through the back wall. Invisible, he walked about twenty blocks toward town, then turned right on Industrial Way. He walked north for awhile, then turned back east on a dark, quiet cul-de-sac. At the very end was an old, wooden-sided warehouse that was too perfect to be possible – T. H. Hothman’s Theatrical Supply. Daniel walked through the closest wall to check it out. Eighty percent of the inside space was a single storage area, aisle after aisle of costumes and props. There was a modest office behind the partition, an adjoining bathroom with shower, and a bedroom. And though the bedroom was hardly the size of two decent closets, it had a firm bed, a narrow dresser, and, on top of the dresser, a thirteen-inch portable TV. Daniel snapped it on to see if he’d made the news.

Almost. The bodies of Elwood and Emmett Tindell, reputed international drug dealers, had been found by a rancher earlier that evening. They had been professionally executed at close range. Unnamed sources speculated that Colombia’s Piscato cocaine cartel had ordered the execution over unpaid bills.

THE FIRST NOTEBOOK OF JENNIFER RAINE APRIL? (LOST TRACK)

I found the truth, and it is simple: Life is amazing. Me and Mia left the donut shop at midnight, seven hours ago, and now I’m rich, loaded, and just got laid. Better things could happen to a nicer girl, but I’ll settle for these.

I owe it all to the DJ. (No, change that to Snake-eyes and Boxcars. Change it to Lady Luck and wonder drugs and a giant country-and-western outlaw gambler known as Longshot, who is now peacefully sleeping in the next room after having, as he sighed, ‘his brains fucked out and danced on.’ Change that to pranced on. Change it to blitzing.) Oh, them amazing changes. Roll on, river! Roll the dice.

I left the donut shop near midnight and walked downtown. I’d decided to buy a bus ticket to Jim Bridger’s grave in eastern Wyoming with the money Billy had given me. If $50 wasn’t far enough, I’d go as close as I could.

I’d looked up Greyhound’s address in the donut shop phone book, but when I got there, it wasn’t. It had been torn down to make room for a new casino. Funny, I can’t remember the casino’s name, but I remember that the neon outside seemed to pulse, pulse like a gaudy heart. Hypnotized by the rhythm, dazzled by the colors, I tried to decide what this meant. Was it a sign that I should gamble the money rather than play it safe, or was it a temptation that would prove the pain of folly should I succumb?

I was still thinking – hey, it’s a tough choice – when a guy wearing this incredible burgundy greatcoat with gold piping and enormous epaulets grabbed me by the arm, hard, and hissed in my ear, ‘Hustle it somewhere else, Sugar Hump. There ain’t no independents on the strip, and I don’t know you. You want to push some pussy, that’s your business; but don’t hustle it here, take it across the tracks,’ cause if you don’t, you must not like your face,’ cause I can just about promise if you stay here somebody will pull it off and fix it so that no one else will like it either.’

He thought he was doing me a favor, explaining how it was. When he saw I was listening he let go of my arm.

When he finished, I let him have it: ‘Listen, you presumptuous jerk, I’m looking, not hooking. I’m trying to decide if I want to gamble my fifty dollars or get down the line. You wouldn’t know a whore from a horticulture handbook.’ (Girl, you do go on!)

‘What are you saying?’ he snarled. ‘I’m dumb?’

I realized then he wasn’t a pimp standing his turf, but a casino doorman. I said, ‘Not dumb, mistaken. We all make mistakes.’

He started to say something but glanced over my shoulder and shut up. When I turned around I saw why: there was a man six foot seven and a trim 240 who looked just like Jesus if Jesus was a cowboy who’d got dressed up for the big city. He was wearing snakeskin boots that probably moved some exotic species from the rare to endangered list, a western-cut sport coat with a beaverskin yoke, a white cowboy hat with a band of rattlesnake rattles strung on a gold wire, and a solid silver belt buckle in the shape of a gila monster. Knocked me out.

Impressed the doorman, too, or at least drained the nasty from his tone. ‘Evening, Longshot. Still picking winners?’

‘Enough to keep even,’ Longshot said, his voice like polished oak. He glanced at me – just for a second, but he really looked – then back at the doorman. ‘Slow night, Lyle?’ he said, sounding plumb puzzled that Lyle had nothing more interesting to do than hassle an absolutely provocative lady, even if she was a little rumpled and road-grubby.

‘Just telling the sister how it is,’ Lyle shrugged. ‘Spare some grief.’

Longshot’s nod said ‘Understood, appreciated, see ya later.’ He turned to me and said, ‘Ma’am, I couldn’t help but overhear the decision you’re struggling with, whether to put it on the line or use it for getting’ down the line. That’s a rough choice every time you’ve got to make it; I know,’ cause I’m forty-three years old and had to choose a bunch o’ times. My name, by the way –’ scuse my rough manners – is Longshot.’

‘I’m Jennifer Raine,’ I said. (I felt that safe with him.)

He tipped his hat!

So I lifted the hem of my imaginary dress and curtsied.

When he grinned, light danced in his lonesome-prairie, sky-blue eyes. ‘Jenny Raine,’ he repeated softly, as it should be said. ‘Jenny Raine. Sounds close to “gentle rain,” but I bet you can get stormy, too.’

I smiled right at him. ‘Hurricane,’ I warned, but with what I hoped was an inviting smile.

‘Have you made your decision, or are you still mulling it around?’

‘Mulling,’ I said, trying to make it sound as if mulling was something I did with my hips. ‘You said you were a man of experience. Have any advice for the young?’

‘Matter o’fact, I do: Lay it on the line.’

‘Always?’

‘Nope. But anyone in town can tell you that the best thing I have going is my ability to know when someone’s about to break loose and go hog-wild lucky. Jenny, you’re so ripe for a hot roll that I’ll back you ten grand, right now tonight, for half the action.’

‘Nope,’ I said, imitating his flat inflection. ‘But if you’ll match my fifty, anything either of us hits we’ll split down the middle.’

He offered his arm. Lyle, who’d faded back to his post, opened the door as we swept inside.

I know shit about gambling, so I let Longshot choose the game. He led me straight upstairs to a $10,000-limit crap table, took our pooled money, and bought one black chip. The guy who sold him the chip looked amazed. He said to Longshot, ‘Musta been a nightmare run to leave you short.’

Longshot grinned his easy prairie-sky grin. ‘No bad dreams, Ed; more like good vision.’

He asked what I wanted to bet it on – Come or Don’t at even money, numbers from two to twelve, Snake-eyes to Boxcars – I stopped him right there. ‘Boxcars,’ I said. I could hear the roar and rattle of a train coming down the mountain, see newspaper-wrapped hoboes watching the stars hurtle by.

Longshot said, ‘Double sixes pays 30–1, but it’s 36–1 against rolling it. Long odds.’

He was explaining what I’d done, not challenging my choice. I batted my pretty blue eyes and said, ‘I like long shots, Longshot.’ (Jenny, you’re so bad.)

A skinny guy in rimless glasses rolled the dice. Boxcars. Three thousand dollars.

Longshot smiled at me and said, ‘How much and on what?’ God, does he have style.

I could still hear the train wailing lonely through the night. ‘All of it,’ I said. ‘Boxcars again.’

The guy running the game lifted a brow at Longshot. Longshot told him, ‘The lady says let it ride.’

When I heard ‘let it ride,’ I knew we were rich. We were. Boxcars. Ninety-three thousand dollars.

Longshot gave me the sweetest smile. ‘It’s a $10,000-limit table.’ I loved that – not even asking if I wanted to stop, right, but regretting we couldn’t bet more. Now that gave me confidence.

Good thing, because I didn’t hear the train anymore. The train was gone. And in its place, as if its fading whistle had snagged her breath, Mia keened softly in her sleep. For an instant I flashed through her dreams, and she was dreaming again of snakes falling on her in the darkness, their eyes like tiny beads of moonlight.

‘Snake-Eyes,’ I told Longshot. ‘Last roll.’ And then, because I wanted him to know me, I said, ‘I have an imaginary daughter I have to take care of.’

That splendid man looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Whatever you say. Whoever you are.’

As we girls say, I was swooning.

Hello, aces! Snake-Eyes! Yes. Three hundred thousand dollars. Three hundred and ninety-three thousand dollars total. One hundred and ninety-six thousand five hundred each. Minus tips. I gave Lyle $500 on our way out.

Me and Longshot (Mia, after that one cry, had fallen deeply asleep) celebrated our good fortune by assaulting his drug supply – cocaine, killer weed, and disco-biscuits (my first time with any of them except marijuana, and that was nothing like these crusty buds), and then by joining in those sweet little obliterations that keep us alive.

Life is great.

Nina Pleshette, an R.N. at Oakland’s Kaiser Hospital, dialed the number she’d been given from a pay phone in front of the building. An answering machine picked up her call on the third ring. The message said, ‘Thank you for calling on TNT. At the tone, please punch in your code, followed by the code you seek.’

The tone was a bugle blowing Charge, followed immediately by Red Freddie screaming, ‘Smash the State!’

Nina punched in RN43, paused, then punched R77. There were two clicks, then the sound of an autodialer.

The phone rang twice in a concrete bunker three hundred miles northeast before Charmaine put down the research paper she was reading and answered with a soft ‘Hello.’

‘This is RN43. The patient died at 11.45 p.m. without regaining consciousness.’

‘That’s too bad,’ Charmaine said. ‘Did he have any visitors?’

‘No.’

‘Has a cause of death been established?’

‘No. No official diagnosis, either. The doctors were proceeding on the assumption it was a rare allergic reaction to an undetermined agent. His immune system just seemed to collapse.’

‘Thank you for calling,’ Charmaine said, and replaced the receiver.

She returned to the paper on ricin, a poison for which she’d been working on an antidote for almost two weeks. She concentrated on the molecular diagram, trying to imagine how it interacted with various coenzymes, but after a few minutes she put the paper aside and thought about Gurry Debritto. She was surprised he’d given up so quickly. She must have released a terrible force inside him, some mirror image of his own murderous power. She knew it wasn’t the drugs. The two darts had carried nonfatal doses of neuroblockers. The two injections she’d given him were harmless. In fact, since both had contained a balanced combination of vitamins and minerals, they should have given him strength against himself.

Daniel was exhausted and sickened by the televised news. If Elwood and Emmett were international drug dealers, he was the ghost of Elvis Presley. Their murders had been professional all right, and so was the ‘official speculation.’ But it didn’t make sense that the CIA would put his description on an APB. Volta had predicted with virtual certainty and Daniel had seen the logic in his reasoning, that the CIA would fear the exposure of its incompetence and its secrets more than the loss of the Diamond.

He tried to remember the scene around the Cutlass. Four cars. Two city police with their flashers, one sheriff, and one more – an unmarked gray Ford, a little off to the side, whose radio described his bowling shirt. Two guys inside, coats and slacks. The spooks. He made a surmise he liked – the cops merely had the Cutlass on the hot-sheet from the Tindells’ original theft, but the CIA, having somehow snagged the Tindell brothers, knew the car had been boosted again, and by whom. So they knew he had been crying over his mother’s dream, that the Diamond was likely in the bowling bag, and that he could disappear – if they believed the Tindell brothers, which might have been difficult.

Daniel was disgusted with himself. He’d gotten cute and vanished when he could have as easily handled the Tindells with Tao Do Chaung. He’d had to show them what real power was all about. If he’d just kicked them senseless, they’d probably still be alive. The ‘unnamed sources’ wanted to remain that way, and weren’t likely to tolerate people like Elwood and Emmett swearing up and down in national media that they’d seen this disappearing bowler who claimed he had the Grail, and that even the CIA had questioned them. But who would have believed their proofless account of a hitchhiking bowler who vanished? Their deaths had been unnecessary.

He was so tired he almost missed the message: We know who you are and we’re not fucking around. That’s why the bodies had been dumped where they’d be discovered immediately. Pressure. Every time you reveal yourself, someone will pay the consequences.

He couldn’t allow himself any more foolishness. No more fun. Frivolity was fatal. He winced recalling his righteousness with Volta: The Diamond is my responsibility now. Dumb. The only thing he could honestly claim responsibility for was the dangerous indulgence of mindless whims. He’d been acting as if all this was make-believe in Meta Land. This was the real world, even if he wasn’t in it. Real terror the Tindells had felt. He wondered if they called out to each other as they knelt beside the road. He started to cry. He closed his eyes tightly against the tears, but his hands suddenly felt wet with blood and he had to open his eyes to check. His hands were dry. He pressed them hard to his face, pushing his head down into the pillow.

‘That’s right,’ he said aloud, ‘if you can’t indulge your funny little whimsies, indulge the guilt.’

And what about Bunny Boy Carl and Max Robbins, his boss? Daniel tried to concentrate. He assumed Carl had washed the pitcher and glass, but decided to check. Carl had left before he’d vanished with the money and contract – good, no prints there – but Carl would probably get questioned. Not as hard as Max, though, especially if he started babbling about a case full of money and a guy who just seemed to vanish. Daniel realized it had been stupid not to hang around invisible and listen to Max’s conversation with the cops. Yet the worst Max could tell them was the crazy truth, and Max hadn’t struck him as the sort to make himself look dumb. Whatever Max’s story, it was out of Daniel’s control.

That left the prints in the car. And maybe the pitcher and glass at the pizzeria. Daniel sagged, but he had to do it. He exchanged his bowling shirt for the first one that fit from one of the aisles of hangered costumes. It was white with muted ruffles down the front, a riverboat gambler’s shirt. A cutaway black coat went with it. No hat. Oh well. He started to take the Diamond and decided that a riverboat gambler going bowling at 2 a.m. was too whimsical. He hid it in a costume box labeled SWISS MAID SIZE 12.

He walked back to the pizzeria, staying visible until he approached the empty parking lot. He walked through the Jackrabbit Pizza wall. The pitcher and glass had either been washed or taken by the cops. He called a cab to meet him on the corner. He told the cabbie his girlfriend had gotten busted for drunk driving and they’d impounded his car. The cabbie knew where to go.

Daniel loitered in front of the Stolen Car Impound till the cabbie was out of sight, then he vanished. He walked into the car, hunched down, and reappeared, quickly wiping it down. He’d just vanished when the fingerprint team arrived to start dusting.

Daniel reappeared in a phone booth down the block, called a cab to let him off a half mile from Hothman’s Theatrical Supply, vanished, and walked the rest of the way. He reappeared in front of the box holding the Diamond, took it into the tiny bedroom with him, lay down, thought responsibility is hard, serious work, and fell asleep without a thought of vanishing.

He awoke late in the afternoon. After first checking the warehouse to be sure no one was working weekends, he showered in the small bathroom. Refreshed, he returned to the bedroom, shed his towel, and stretched out naked on the bed to think about what to do next. The possibilities overwhelmed him. As he took a deep breath, he saw the faint image of a young blond girl offering him a sphere with a gold center, saying something. He was not sure if this was memory or a desperate hallucinatory invention, but her face floated out of formlessness like an image rising in a darkroom tray. He strained to hear what she was saying, but she was too distant, the words wouldn’t carry. He concentrated on her lips as she began to fade, tried to hear the shape of her sounds as she dissolved. He thought he heard, ‘It’s a bead.’

The mind is the shadow of the light it seeks.

The mind is a mess.

Daniel felt he understood. A bead. Yes, yes, yes. The Diamond was a bead on the Solar Necklace, strung on the golden spiral of flame through its center. The notion of a Necklace of Light, a circle of spherical diamonds, each reflecting all, containing all, emptying all the golden light back into the Infinite Dazzle, excited Daniel’s imagination. He reached down and patted the bowling bag. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’

Where exactly, he wasn’t sure, but he intended to make the journey one careful step at a time. First, he needed to understand if the Diamond was a bead out of its proper order, whether it needed to be returned to its place.

Daniel decided to head for the Rockies. He’d outfit himself for long hauls and hike the wild high country considering the Diamond until he was sure of his next move.

He had a sudden insight, as if in reward for his wisdom: he’d been heading west because that was the direction to Nameless Lake. Daniel cringed. Wild Bill, he felt certain, would know that, and would be waiting there, maybe with Volta. He felt a deep surge of admiration for the clarity and strength Volta brought to responsibility, and a new appreciation for the cost of that commitment. Daniel decided that if his time in the mountains proved futile, he would take the Diamond to Volta, combine forces with him and whoever else they agreed should join. He figured he’d be humbled enough by then to bless any help he could beg.

He needed a new identity for the trip.

He needed to head east. They wouldn’t expect him to reverse directions.

He needed to decide how to travel. This time he wouldn’t compromise anyone’s safety by letting them see him vanish, or by revealing anything about the Diamond. He decided to keep hitching. Hitching provided him with instructive company. He’d felt lonely driving the Cutlass, self-enclosed.

He was impressed by the simplicity of his plan, and grateful for it. He swung off the bed and padded naked into the warehouse’s high-shelved aisles of costume-box identities and five long racks of hangered shelves.

His identity should provide comfort, warmth, and a natural way to carry the Diamond. An Italian Duke with a bowling-bag? Too much. He needed something with a certain symbolic congruence with his journey. He liked the idea of the Spanish Explorer – Cabeza de Vaca in the Rocky Mountain high – but he’d have to cut off the damn collar. The Riverboat Gambler, which he’d already mostly assembled, was as good a choice as any if he could find the beaver top hat to crown it and a way to pack the Diamond. He spent twenty minutes pawing through hatboxes but didn’t find anything fitting.

The mind is the sum of the identities it assumes.

Frustrated, Daniel thought of randomly plucking from the racks and boxes. He ambled down the aisle marked Miscellaneous. Staggering under the armload he’d collected, he set it down on the floor to see what he’d snagged and how the pieces fit each other.

There were some arresting possibilities: a Coptic tunic of undyed linen inlaid with roundels of multihued wool; an Aegean helmet with boar tusks jutting from each side (it would be daring with the Riverboat Gambler outfit); two tasseled cloaks, one a brilliant cardinal, the other lapis-lazuli blue; another tunic, this one fur-lined, with a sleek taper to the sleeves; a Babylonian kaunake; a white turban.

Daniel was squatting there wondering if he could hide the Diamond under the turban when he saw, directly across the aisle, at eye level, exactly what he was looking for. The listed contents indicated a complete costume:

MOUNTAIN MAN / TRAPPER

AMERICAN CIRCA 1840–60

SIZE 46 (APPROX.)

BUCKSKIN SHIRT/PANTS

ELKSKIN MOCCASINS & LEGGINGS

FOXHEAD CAP (7¼–½)

CHEYENNE DYED-QUILL BELT W/ ANTELOPE SKIN POUCHES

LARGE POSSIBLES SACK: BUFFALO HIDE,

BRAIDED OTTER-SKIN STRAP

POWDER HORN, BUCKSKIN THONG

The first two words – MOUNTAIN MAN – convinced him; the contents delightfully confirmed it. Perfect. Especially the possibles sack, which if he remembered correctly from his boyhood reading was a large pouch for the miscellany of the trapper’s work as well as personal treasures, totems, and medicines. Johnny Seven Moons had told him the mountain men were about as close as whites ever came to being Indians.

Daniel, for a long moment, remembered walking naked in the spring rain between Seven Moons and his mother, each holding a hand, how safe he’d felt, how complete, as the warm rain streamed down his body. Seven Moons and his mother were both dead now, but he knew the memory would remain when there was no one left to remember, curving through space like light from a dead star, curving back to its origin in the Infinite Dazzle.

Daniel dressed slowly, savoring the assumption of another self. As he slipped on the buckskins, he imagined the odors of pinesap and smoke and grease dripping from buffalo steaks. The moccasins and foxhead cap fit like they’d been custom made, and the pouched belt decorated with dyed porcupine quills was a work of art. The rough-tanned possibles sack, however, looked worrisomely small.

He picked up the powder horn and returned to the bedroom. He lifted the Diamond from the bowling-bag. To his great satisfaction, the Diamond slipped right in the possibles sack. He cinched the thong around the elkhorn catch, knotting it securely. He put his few toilet items in the belt pouches, then carefully stuffed the powder horn with some of the money from the attaché case – around eight thousand dollars.

He hid his old clothes in various costume boxes, stashed the day pack and its four thousand dollars in the SWISS MILKMAID box. He slipped the case – with about five thousand left in it – onto a shelf with other luggage and hand grips. He returned all the costumes he’d strewn around to their proper boxes.

He smoothed out the bed and hung the damp towel behind the dresser after using it to wipe off prints.

He stood a few minutes, pondering what he might have missed. Granted, the mountain-man garb would attract attention, but, as Jean Bluer had taught him, the outlandishly improbable is often the best disguise. Besides, seriousness needn’t necessarily compromise style.

Daniel loved the hang of his buckskins, the way the moccasins connected him to the floor, the slung weight of the Diamond under his left arm, the idea of a fox curled on top of his skull. Without the case and bowling bag, he felt lighter. Lighthearted, too, but not giddy.

He vanished and exited through a wall, heading north. A half mile later he reappeared, turning west toward town. He ignored the curious stares, waved back when someone yelled from a passing car. He tried to recall what he’d read on the mountain men, their stories, their names. He wanted a name that fit his journey. He chose Hugh Glass. He remembered the story of Hugh Glass, who had crawled two hundred and fifty miles to the nearest fort after a grizzly had mauled him. Strength. Determination. Tenacity. He would be Hugh Glass.

A dusty old pickup waited in the gas bay of a Shell Station on the corner while a stooped gray-haired man watched it fill. On impulse, Daniel asked if he happened to be heading east. He was. But his wife and granddaughter were with him, just freshening up in the bathroom, and they were taking Highway 50, which he called the ‘loneliest road in the world,’ and their turnoff was only thirty miles out, and that would leave Daniel in the middle of goddamn nowhere in the dark. But hell, if it didn’t make him no mind, hop on in the back.

Daniel felt lighter and lighter.

THE FIRST NOTEBOOK OF JENNIFER RAINE

APRIL/LEAVING RENO

Life is still great.

My name is Susanna Rapp. Says so right here on my driver’s license, birth certificate, and passport. Rapp is an old Germanic word meaning ‘young raven’ or ‘brilliant counselor,’ depending on the root. I do like to talk, and Rapp sounds tough. ‘Susanna’ because I always liked that song, ‘Oh Susanna, don’t you cry for me…’ Hey sweetheart, I’ll cry if I feel like it. Even though I’m not the sort of woman men serenade.

When Longshot got up this morning, I had to tell him that as much as I liked him – which is a lot – I’d have to be moving on. I told him about meeting the DJ at Jim Bridger’s grave. Longshot understood. And because he did understand, because he honestly cared to, I told him the short version of my life.

When I had finished, he said, ‘I don’t think you’re crazy. You’re kinda intense and slippery and taken with some fancies. I’ve gotten out there myself, more than once to tell the truth, and I always got back.’

‘How?’ Imagine my eagerness.

‘Well, I have a kind of unusual method. Works good for me, but it’s on the order of fightin’ fire with fire. I get an ounce of blow and a fast car and drive straight to Kansas City, then turn around without stoppin’ and drive right back. Reams out the sludge.’

I tell you, that man is charming. And since I’d hoped he’d beg me to stay, preferably forever, I was a little depressed. But let me tell you, a little depression is no problem for a woman with nearly two hundred thousand dollars in her purse.

First, with Longshot’s help (he seems to know everybody), I spent five grand on a new identity. Clicked my picture and rolled my thumb, and an hour later I was Susanna Rapp.

I bought a brand-new cardinal Porsche. Seventy thousand. I was cheering up.

I felt good enough about myself then to buy clothes. Ten thousand dollars – but that includes luggage and shoes.

I bought Longshot a big silver belt buckle with two glazed plastic eyeballs glued to it. Engraved around the edges is the motto: ‘The eyes of Texas are upon you.’

Longshot said, ‘The best thing about being crazy is you can do crazy things.’

From Longshot I bought an ounce of cocaine and an ounce of weed and twenty Quaaludes – all for a grand. He claimed that since the drugs were for therapeutic purposes, not recreational, he was honor bound to sell at cost. When I asked point-blank if he was a drug dealer, he said with that easy grin, ‘Not really. I stock up for hard times when there’s quality available. Long shots wouldn’t be long shots if they always came in.’

His farewell kiss had true affection. He said his arms would always be open. As we said in junior high, ‘Is that cool, or what?’ He was wearing his ‘Eyes of Texas’ belt buckle when he waved good-bye.

I decided I couldn’t spend a thousand dollars on drugs without spending at least that much on Mia. She’d been sleeping ever since her nightmare in the barn. I tried to wake her up for a little mother- daughter shopping spree. When I couldn’t wake her, I almost panicked. But I could hear her heartbeat, slow but strong.

I tried to imagine what she was dreaming, what she was doing, but I couldn’t get inside her. I think she’s in a trance, maybe trying to imagine something herself. We have to imagine each other to reach each other, so maybe that’s why I feel blocked out. That’s okay. I have to trust her to know what’s best for herself.

But for that moment I thought she was dead, so scared my first instinct was to rush her to the hospital. That’s what I’ve got to be careful about – acting as if she were real. That’s when I get in trouble. Terror makes me forget. Pain makes me forget.

I bought Mia an amazingly soft, thick, pale-blue silk comforter big enough for a double bed. I wrapped it around her in the backseat, fluffed the two matching plush pillows to cushion her head.

I’m sitting in my Porsche at Uncle Bill’s Bugle Burger Drive-In, where I’ve just finished half a Bugle Burger and both a large and a medium Pepsi. As Longshot warned, cocaine discourages gluttony for anything but cocaine. Sure makes you thirsty, though. Better buy a case of mineral water before I hit the road.

My new Easter outfit, a back-zippered sheath with a slit skirt, is made of raw silk, the color of buffed cream, the lines clean and supple. My Easter bonnet is a wide-brimmed straw hat, airy and light, with a rainbow of silks braided around the crown, the unraveled ends trailing down my shoulders like a waterfall of color. I’m wearing these crazy platform shoes with a four-leaf clover cast into each of the three-inch clear-plastic heels. Keep luck rolling. I also bought a sleek black suit with a black hat and veil for the meeting with the DJ on Jim Bridger’s grave.

Now for a few toots and the long highway to Wyoming. I’ll have plenty of drugs left for the DJ. I’m already a little tired of them. That’s how I’ve always been – I adore them for a while, but then I get tired of the same point of view all the time.

On my road map, I–80 looks like the straightest shot to eastern Wyoming. But I’m intrigued by Highway 50, which is so barren on the map there’s plenty of room to note: ‘Highway 50, the Loneliest Highway in the World.’ That sounded like a tourist attraction for explorers of the psyche, something of a lonesome highway itself. From 50 I can cut north to Wyoming. A difference of hours. If the DJ is serious, he’ll wait. If he isn’t there, I’ll be so heartbroken crazy I’ll give Longshot’s cure a shot and fight fire with fire, wired to Kansas City and burning the return. I shall return. But now I’ve got to go.