The Best of Lucius Shepard

Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?

Shit happens, like they say. You know how it goes. The cops are looking at you for every nickel-and-dime robbery they can’t solve, and the landlady hates your guts for no reason except she’s a good Christian hater, and everything in the world is part of a clock you got to punch or else you’ll be docked or fined or sentenced to listen to some ex-doper who thinks he has attained self-mastery explain your behavior as if the reasons you’re a loser are a mystery that requires illumination. Otherwise it’s been a kicked dog of a week. The boss man’s had you stocking the refrigerator sections of the food mart, leaving you alone in the freezer while he sits and swaps Marine Corps stories with the guy supposed to be your helper, so you come off work half froze, looking for something to douse the meanness you’re feeling, which could be a chore since you’re a piss and a holler from being broke and New Smyrna Beach ain’t exactly Vegas. Well, turns out to be your lucky night. Along about eight o’clock you wind up with a crew of rejects in a beach shack belongs to this fat old biker, snorting greasy homemade speed, swilling grape juice and vodka, with a windblown rain raising jazz beats from the tarpaper roof like brushes on cymbals. There’s a woman with big brown eyes and punky peroxided hair who’s a notch on the plain side of pretty, but she’s got one of those black girl butts sometimes get stuck onto a white girl, and it’s clear she’s come down with the same feeling as you, so when the rain lets up and she says how she’s got an itch to sneak onto the government property down the beach and check out what’s there, when everybody tells her it ain’t nothing but sand fleas and Spanish bayonet, you say, Hell I’ll go with you. Ten minutes later you’re helping her jump down from a hurricane fence, risking a felony bust for a better view of those white panties gleaming against the strip of tanned skin that’s showing between her jeans and her tank top. She falls into you, gives you a kiss and a half, and before you can wrap her up, she scoots off into the dark and you go stumbling after.

It don’t take more than that to get shit started.

—Hey, I shouted. Come on-back here!

She glanced at me over her shoulder, her grin shining under a moon fresh out of hiding, then she skipped off behind some scrub palmetto. I was trying to recall her name as I ran, then a frond whacked me in the face and I slipped to a knee in the soft sand. I spotted her moving along a rise, framed by low stars. Hell you going, girl? I said, coming up beside her.

She slapped at a skeeter on her neck and said, Lookit there.

The land was all dips and rises, an old dune top gone nappy with shrubs and beach grass, but down below was a scooped-out circular area, wide and deep enough to bury a mini-mall in. Dead center of it stood a ranch house with cream-colored block walls and a composite roof and glass doors. It was a giant banana, I couldn’t have been more startled.

—I heard about there was a house here, she said. But I swear I didn’t believe it!

We scrambled down the slope and tromped around the house, peering in windows. Some rooms were empty, others were partly furnished, and though I wouldn’t have figured on it, the sliding door at the back was unlocked. I shoved it open and she put her hands over her head and got to snapping her fingers and hip-shaked across the threshold. A big leather sofa stood by its lonesome in the middle of the room. She struck a pose beside it, skinned off her jeans and showed me what I wanted. Wasn’t long before we were sweating all over each other, grunting and huffing like hogs in a hurry, our teeth clicking together when we kissed. The cushions got so slippery, we slid off onto the floor afterward and lay twisted together. The moon came pale through the flyspecked glass, but it wasn’t sufficient to light the corners of the room.

—God, I could use something to drink, she said. I know there can’t be nothing in the kitchen.

My carpenter’s pants were puddled at the end of the couch. I undid the flap pockets and hauled out two wine coolers. What you want? I asked. Tropical Strawberry or Mango Surprise?

—I can’t believe you carrying ‘round wine coolers in your pocket.

—I hooked ’em off a truck when I was coming outa work.

We unscrewed the caps, clinked our bottles and drank.

—My name’s Leeli, she said, sticking out her hand. I’m sorry but I forget yours.

—Maceo.

—That a family name? It’s so unusual!

—It’s for some guitar player my mama liked.

—Well, it’s real unusual.

She seemed to be expecting me to take a turn, so I asked what a house was doing out there setting in a hole.

—Beats me. Government bought up all the land ‘round here years ago. To keep people away from the Cape…’cause of the rockets, y’know? But I never knew nothing was here. My ex, his friend runs a helicopter tourist ride? I guess he saw it once.

—Maybe they opened it up for development, I said. And this here’s the model home.

—Y’know, I bet you’re right! She gave me a proud mama look, like my-ain’t-you-smart!

I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I went to loving her up again. She started running hot and came astride me, but before she could settle herself, she let out a shriek and crawled over top the couch. I rolled my eyes back to see what had spooked her, said “Shit…Jesus!” and next thing I was hunkered behind the couch with Leeli, my heart banging in my chest.

Two men and a woman were hanging by the glass doors, nailing us with a six-eyed stare as clear in its negativity as a No Trespassing sign. The men were young, both a shade under six feet, dressed in slacks and Tshirts. A blond and a baldy. They had the look of fitness sissies, like they might have pumped some iron and run a few laps, but never put the results to any spirited use. The woman wore cut-offs and an oversized denim shirt and carried a bulky tote bag. She was fortyish and big-boned, with wavy dark hair, and her body had a sexy looseness that would still draw its share of eye traffic. Her face was full of bad days and wrong turns, the lines cutting her forehead and dragging down her mouth making it seem older than the rest of her. Way the men tucked themselves in at her shoulders, you could tell she was queen of the hive.

Leeli clutched at my arm, breathing fast. Nobody said nothing. Finally I came out from behind the couch and tossed Leeli her panties. I stepped into my pants and feeling more confident with my junk covered, I said, Have yourself a show, did ya?

—Have yourself a show? the blond man said, mocking me, and the baldy sniggered like a kid who’d seen his first dirty picture.

I pulled on my shirt. Y’know this here’s government property? Y’all be in deep shit, I turn your asses in.

—You saying you the government? The woman’s voice was a contralto drawl made me think of a dollop of honey hanging off the lip of a jar. You the first government man I seen got jailhouse ink on his arms. She turned to Leeli, who was tugging the tank top down over her breasts. How’s about you, sweetcheeks? You in the government, too?

Leeli snatched up her jeans. You got no more right being here than we do!

The woman sniffed explosively, like a cat sneezing, and the bald man said, You can’t get much more government than we are. Government’s like mommy and daddy to us.

Leeli piped up, Well, whyn’t you show us your ID?

The flow of feeling in the room was running high, like everyone was waiting for a direction to fly off in.

—Screw this, said the woman. We was just going for a drink. Y’all wanna come?

I was about to say we’d do our own drinking, but Leeli said, It’s Margarita Night over the Dixieland! and soon everybody was saying stuff like, Looked like you was gonna fall out and God you scared the hell outa me and telling their names and their stories. Though he didn’t seem up to the job, the blond man, Carl, was the woman’s husband. Her name was Ava and she owned a club in Boynton Beach where the bald man, Squire, worked as a bartender. I knew a kid name of Squire back in high school who was accused of having sex with a neighbor’s collie. Much as I would have enjoyed bringing this up, I kept it to myself.

We piled out through the glass doors, both Carl and Squire heading toward the water. Fuck you think you going? I asked.

—Ava got her four-by-four parked down on the beach, Squire said.

I was staring at Ava and Leeli, who were still back at the glass doors. Leeli had her head down and Ava was talking. Something didn’t sit right about the way they were together.

—Government don’t care what goes on at the house no more, Squire said, apparently thinking I was off onto another track. We been partying here for years.

You know that kid’s toy ball you can bounce and instead of coming straight back to your hand, it goes dribbling off along the floor or kicks off to the side? My expectations of the weekend had taken just that sort of wrong-angled bounce. After Leeli and I broke in the leather couch, I assumed we’d be heading over to my place, maybe coming up for air sometime Sunday. A shitkicker bar had for sure not been part of the plan.

The Dixieland was down on A1A, a concrete block eyesore with a neon sign on the roof that spelled the name in red and blue letters, except for the N was missing, which might have accounted for the gay boys who occasionally dropped in and left real quick. All the waitresses were decked out in Rebel caps and there were Confederate flags laminated on the table tops. The Friday night crowd was men in cowboy hats who had never set a horse and women with flakes of mascara clinging to their lashes and skirts so short you could see the tattooed butterflies, roses, hummingbirds and such advertising their little treasures whenever they hopped up onto a barstool. Some country & western goatboy was howling on the jukebox about the world owed him a living, while a few couples dragged around the dance floor, Ava and Leeli among them. Their relationship appeared to be deepening.

Carl fell in love with a digital beer display behind the bar that showed a bikini girl waterskiing. I was coming to understand the boy must have some empty rooms in his attic. He stood gawking at the thing like he was stoned on Jesus love. That left Squire and me alone at a table, sucking on our margaritas. Shaving his head probably hadn’t done for Squire what he hoped. It made his face resemble a cream pie somebody drew a man-in-the moon face on, but he tried to sell the look as being the front door into the world of a badass individual with secrets you would want to know. It was kinda pathetic. He threw a couple of insults my way and when that didn’t get a rise, he went on about how tight he was with Carl and Ava, how they’d been partying for two months solid, saying me and Leeli needed to get on board the party train, they’d sure show us a time.

—Two month vacation must get in the way of your bartending, I said and he said, Huh?, then got flustered and came back with, Oh, yeah… hell, I just work when we’re there, y’know.

The juke box played the Dixie Chicks. Leeli squealed, clapped her hands, and did this slow, snaky hula, dancing like she was on stage at a titty bar and using Ava for the pole.

—We ain’t hardly ever there, though. Squire said this like it was super important for me to understand. He started to spout more worthless bullshit, but I told him to hang onto the thought. I walked over to Ava and tapped her on the shoulder and said, ‘Scuse me, buddy. Believe it’s my turn. She flashed a condescending smile and backed off. Leeli kept her eyes closed like she didn’t care what was going on, she was so lost in the music, but when I put my leg where Ava’s hip had been she said, That was rude!

—Yeah she was, I said.

She punched me in the chest, but didn’t leave off dry-humping my leg. Just ’cause we did the deed, don’t you go waving no papers at me.

—That wasn’t my intention.

She didn’t hear and I said it again louder.

This ticked her off. Just what is your intention? she asked.

—I got a friend in Lauderdale lets me use his beach house. I thought we could drive down next weekend and see how it goes. But hey, you wanna fuck the old skank, do it.

—Well, maybe I will! She looped her arms about my neck and smiled me up. Or maybe I’ll wait ’til after Lauderdale.

I thought the two of us were back on track, but when Ava decided to hit another bar, Leeli said in a cajoling voice, I’m having so much fun! Let’s not go home yet! Wasn’t until we wound up in a Daytona Beach motel on Saturday morning, sleeping in the room next to Ava’s, that I realized somewhere in the middle of all those tequila shots, we’d climbed aboard the party train. I remembered telling everybody about the beach house. From that I guess the idea had developed for Ava to drive me and Leeli to Lauderdale, making frequent stops for refreshment, with Ava paying the freight. They weren’t going to welcome me back at the food mart when I turned up a week late for my shift, but that world was spinning me nowhere and I thought I might take a shot at separating Ava from some of the money she’d been throwing around. I worried about her going after Leeli, though. We’d only had us the one night, but Leeli and I seemed to recognize each other’s zero score in life as only folks do who’re born in a neighborhood where the most you aspire to is a double-wide and sufficient loose change to afford a couple of cases on the weekend. We’d both worn out our craziness to the point where we saw we might have us a nice little run and maybe avoid killing each other at the end. Once she loosened up and that sick-of-it-all waitress hardness drained from her face, I saw a sweet seam in her no one had bothered to mine.

I left Leeli sleeping and smoked in the breezeway of the motel, watching two rat-skinny children splash and squeak in the pool, while their two hundred pound plus mama, milky breasts and thighs and belly squeezed into inner-tube shapes by a lemon-yellow bathing suit, lay on a lawn chair and simmered like a dumpling over a low flame. The drapes of Ava’s room hung open a crack and I had a peek. All I saw of her was legs waving in the air and hands gripping onto a headboard. The rest was hidden underneath Squire. His pimply butt was just pumping up and down. Sitting straight in a chair beside the bed, like a schoolboy being taught a lesson, Carl was looking on with interest. Well, come get me Jesus, I said to myself. With Carl and Squire both bagging Ava, she wouldn’t have much time for Leeli. I had to admire Squire’s stamina, but he looked to be doing push-ups on a trampoline and if I was the boy’s daddy I’d have advised him that women tend to enjoy some rhythmic variation. He finally fell off his stroke and rolled onto his back. Ava came up flushed and sweaty, hair sticking to her cheeks. She had a sip of water, spoke briefly to Carl, then straddled Squire and began more-or-less to treat him like he’d been treating her. I’d been feeling about ten cents on the dollar, but watching her work cleaned the crust off my brain. Being the gentleman I am, I decided to buy Leeli coffee and a Krispy Kreme before checking out the rest of my parts.

I hated Daytona, and not just because I was born there, though every time I drove through Holly Hills, redneck purgatory, and saw those little bunkerlike concrete homes with cracked jalousie windows and chainlink fences and Big Wheels with faded colors buried in the front yard weeds, my wattles got all red and swollen. I also hated the beach, the kids who cruised it eight and nine to a convertible or rode around in ten-dollar-an-hour rent-a-buggies, the bikini girls with their inch-deep tans and MTV eyes, the boys in Hilfiger suits with an old man’s dream of financial security stuck like an ax into their brains at birth. I hated the fucking piped-in circus music that played along the boardwalk, sounding like it was made of sugar beets and red dye number seven. I hated the goddamn carnival rides and the heavy-metal curses shouting from the arcades. I liked the ocean all right, liked the blue-green water inside the sandbar, the creamy ridges of foam the tide left along the margin, and the power of the combers, but I wished they rolled in to no shore. I hated the burger joints with their fried-onion stink, their white plastic tables and chairs on a concrete deck, and walk-up windows manned by high school geeks with connect-the-dot acne puzzles on their foreheads, because it was at just such a joint I committed the error in judgment that earned me a nickel in Raiford, sauntering up to the service window so wired on crank, all I could smell was the inside of my nose, pulling a fifty-dollar pistol, and before I could speak the magic words, two plainclothes cops who were drinking milkshakes at the time snuck up behind me and said to turn around real quick, they’d like that, and later in jail, Sgt. John True, a man apparently fascinated with me, visited my cell, the first of our many nights together, and said, When I was a kid I’s just like you—meaning, I suppose, he no longer considered himself a dumbass hillbilly—prior to beating me unconscious. I carried a lot of anger relating to Daytona and that afternoon while we were sitting at a white plastic table on a concrete deck, staring at baskets of onion rings and fried shrimp so heavily breaded, eating one was like eating a hush puppy with a flavorless crunchy prize inside, I let angry out for exercise.

Squire got things off to a start by going on about how easy it would be to knock over the Joyland Arcade. You gotta have balls, he said, cause time to do it’s when it’s crowded. You walk on up and let ’em see your piece and grab them bags of money! He looked to Ava like he was expecting to have his belly rubbed. She smiled and dribbled salt from a packet onto her rings.

—You got a hard-on for quarters? I asked. They don’t bag nothing but the change.

—You have people with you. Three or four of ’em so you can carry more.

—You think four loads of quarters divided four ways is more’n one load divided one way? You ain’t been studying your arithmetic.

—You take the bills too, Squire said. Like, of course, he knew that.

—Where am I? I asked Leeli.

Her expression begged me to shut up.

—Seriously. Did we wake up somewhere’s else this morning? Some other planet where stupid rules?

Carl chuckled and I said, Fuck is your problem, man? All you do’s sit around and make fun of shit. What put you so high in the roost? Far as I can tell, Squire’s your intellectual superior and he ain’t got the brains of a box of popcorn.

—You the one’s acting superior, Ava said, and forked up some slaw.

—Fuck, I am superior! Superior to this shit. Maybe it gets you wet listening to the criminal genius here, but it don’t even give me a tickle.

Squire told me to watch my mouth, I was talking to a lady, and I said, Come on, you fucking chihuahua! Step to me!

Leeli caught my arm and said, Maceo! I jerked free and swatted my shrimp basket, backhanding it across the deck. People bespotted with ketchup splatter from the basket stared at us from the adjoining tables. The assistant manager, who could have passed for fourteen, looked like he was about to cry. Leeli was yelling at me, Squire was avoiding my eyes, Ava was calmly wiping her sleeve with a napkin. Carl giggled and said, Fucking chihuahua!

One of the citizens I’d splattered, a thick-necked, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, Chevy-Suburban-driving son of the suburbs, his belly sagging like a hundred-year-old hammock, gave his pregnant wife a comforting pat on the shoulder and heaved up from his cheeseburger, but Ava saved his ass by intercepting him on the way to our table and slipped him a twenty for his dry cleaning bill. Other folks put in their claim and once she had satisfied them, she sat back down and said to me, Temper like that, it’s a wonder you still on the street.

Calmer now, I felt no call to answer. I gave her a fuck-you smile and popped one of Leeli’s shrimp into my mouth. It was covered with grit that had blown up from the beach, which made it extra crunchy.

—You so smart, Ava said, whyn’t you tell us how you’d handle the Toyland?

—Wouldn’t nothing but a damn fool mess with it. Too many cops. Too many boyfriends might wanna play hero. You feel the need to rob something, head out on the freeway. You know the back roads along the exits, you can take down two gas stations easy and be sitting in a bar before the cops get motivated.

—I suppose it was your expertise landed you in prison.

—Oh I was a fool. No doubt about that. It don’t mean I’m still a fool.

Challenged, I delivered a lecture on proper criminal procedure, most of it learned in Raiford, but salted in with personal experiences that I embellished for dramatic effect. You gotta terrorize a place, I told them. People ain’t always scared, they see the gun. Sometimes they can’t believe you’re for real and they go to debating what to do. You don’t want that, you want ’em scared. So you say something lets ’em know how scared they oughta be.

—Yeah? Squire said churlishly. Like what?

I made my hand into a gun and pointed it at his chest. Hands up! Who wants to die? You say that, it gets their attention every time.

—I like that, Carl said, grinning. Hands up who wants to die?

—Takes the punch out of it, you say it with a smile, I said. Tell ’em like you mean it.

With that, Carl jumped up and snarled, Hands up! Who wants to die?

The pregnant lady yipped and the people at the table behind me grabbed up their belongings and scooted. Ava pulled Carl down into his chair and I said to him, That’ll get it done.

Leeli stood and said, Can we just go? Please!

We set off down the boardwalk toward the car and she fell into step with Ava and Carl. Irritated by this, not wanting to be stuck with Squire, I dropped off the pace, lollygagging along. That’s how Leeli wanted to play it, I told myself, to hell with her. I’d find myself a sweeter can of tuna. I started eye-fucking the bikini girls strolling past and when one made a smartass remark, getting her friends to laughing at me, I told her once she lost that babyfat she oughta try a real dick, but right now it’d likely be too much for her.

Ava drove south and then west on State Road 44 toward Orlando. She went to talking about the old days, the 60s, when there was so many UFOs in the sky—because of the rockets at the Cape, she guessed—you could see them from out on 44 every night. Boys useta take us down here to see ’em, she said, ’cause they thought we’d let ’em get fresh while we were stargazing. Leeli, who was riding shotgun next to Carl, said, I bet they were right, huh?

—’Course they were, Ava said, and they shared a laugh.

—You ever see any UFOs? Leeli asked.

—All the time! You look up in the sky, you couldn’t help seeing ’em. Pretty soon what you thought was a group of stars would get to darting around, making these really sharp turns, flying in formation.

She asked Leeli to fish around in her tote bag and find her cigarettes. Once she got a smoke going, she said, Couple times we saw one real close.

—A flying saucer?

—Uh huh. We saw this one shoot a green light from its belly. Straight down to the ground.

—Maybe it was Santa Claus you saw, I suggested. Waving his green flashlight.

Ava took a glance back toward me. You don’t believe in UFOs, Maceo?

—’Bout as much as I believe in liberty and justice for all.

—Don’t listen to him, Leeli said. He’s a contrary sort.

I told Leeli she didn’t know squat about me and then said to Ava, Whatever you saw, wasn’t no flying saucer. Ain’t no sense to any of that business.

—That might be, Ava said. Most things don’t make sense, especially you try and understand ’em too hard.

—I suppose that’s profound, but I’m just a dumb Florida Cracker. It goes right by me.

Ava flicked ash and sparks out the window. You might catch up to it one of these days, she said.

It struck me that Ava must be a lot older than I’d estimated, she was dating back in the 60s, but I didn’t stay with the thought. I was a six pack along into a decent buzz and still feeling sour about Leeli, fully occupied with self-pity and scorn. When we stopped for gas I pulled Leeli aside, fed her all the I’m-sorry she could swallow and persuaded her to switch seats with Squire. I discovered a sensitive spot under her ear and before long I had her squirming pretty good, though each time my fingers traipsed near the old plantation home, she’d give them a spank. Squire began telling a lie about a beauty queen he’d gone with in high school and Ava shut him up quick, saying she needed to concentrate on the road. That clued me in she was upset about Leeli, and I felt satisfied in mind.

Scattered around the edges of Disneyworld were a number of shooting ranges where for a few dollars you could fire assault rifles. Given the encouragement this surely offered the freaks who flocked to the ranges, you had to wonder if the city fathers of Orlando didn’t unconsciously long to see TV coverage of a giant blood-spattered mouse. While Carl and Squire were busy playing soldier at Buck’s Guns and Sporting Gallery, me and Ava and Leeli walked to a nearby 7-11 and bought some forty-ouncers, one of which I chugged walking back to the parking lot. The girls sat talking on the hood of Ava’s truck. I wasn’t drunk enough to feel mean, but I felt separate from things. The cars racing along the six-lane were shiny toys with glaring headlights and dabs of meat inside. The strip malls lining the road were grimy slot-car accessories. The heat came from a neon tube inside my head and the starless orange-lit sky was a gasoline-soaked rag someone had throwed over the whole mess so’s to hide it from company. What I’m saying, it wouldn’t have taken much to upgrade me to mean. Ava was pitching hard at Leeli, touching her thigh, the back of her hair. I just kept working on my second forty. If I could drink fast enough, I wouldn’t care what they did and I’d be able to ignore some deeper thoughts that were trying to gnaw out my brains like a squirrel with a nut meat.

When Squire and Carl returned, all hotted up from proving their marksmanship, Ava announced a surprise. She had reserved us rooms at the mouse’s hotel. We’d have a few cocktails, go on some rides, and see what developed. This made Carl happy, but Squire and Leeli didn’t seem to care. I sucked down a third forty on the ride over and after Ava checked us in, I told her I felt poorly and was going to my room.

—Me, too, said Leeli. I’m awful tired.

This surprised Ava as much as it did me. You sure? she said to Leeli. Space Mountain’ll juice you right up.

—Naw, we’ll catch y’all later. Leeli started walking so fast, she beat me to the elevator.

I had a shower while Leeli ordered room-service cheeseburgers and Cokes. The food left me placid and sleepy. I laid out on the bed in my skivvies and Leeli stood at the window, her arms folded, stern of face, like she was taking stock of a brightly lit country she’d just done conquering.

—You don’t have to worry ’bout me making a move, that’s what’s keeping you vertical, I said. I’m through for today.

She made a noise that didn’t tell me much.

I grabbed the remote from the bedside table and found a wrestling show on TV. Wrestling hasn’t been the same since the prime of Hulk Hogan and the Giant and Macho Man Savage, you ask me. Back in the day your superhero had a gut just like the asshole sitting next to you in the bar and so when you smacked him with a beer bottle, you had a greater sense of accomplishment. Now there was too many pretty boys and it was more tumbling and role-playing than the honest-to-God fake it once was.

Leeli wriggled out of her jeans. Ava gave me money to buy clothes, she said. Reckon we better do it soon.

—We can get some fine clothes here. Get us some mouse shirts and mouse hats with the ears. Maybe you can get some panties with the mouse on the crotch and wear ’em inside out.

She pulled off her tank top and threw it at me in a ball. You always have to be a shit?

—It was a fucking joke! Jesus!

She stared at me as if she didn’t believe it.

—I swear, I said.

She held the stare a second longer. Damn! she said. Why do I like you?

—You want a honest answer?

—Naw, I know why. She sat down on the bed, glum as old gravy, picked up the remote and went surfing, changing channels so fast, there was only little blurts of sound. Know what Ava told me? She says she works for the government. The FBI.

—No shit! I said. Is she a friend of Spiderman?

—She showed me her badge! Leeli bugged her eyes and stuck out her tongue.

—Give me ten bucks and I’ll show you a badge. I can probably find one in the gift shop.

Leeli threw herself down on the pillow like she was trying to hurt herself. You wanna hear this or not?

—Sure. Lemme have it. I turned to lie facing her so she’d know I was listening, and rested a hand on her waist.

—She said she was an agent and Carl and Squire are in some sorta experiment. She’s in charge of ’em. She says she’ll pay me a ton of money to be part of it. The experiment.

—Want me to say what I’m thinking?

—I’m not an idiot! I know she likes me, and I know it could all be a story. But she’s willing to pay twenty thousand dollars! For one month!

—You see the money?

Leeli gave a vigorous nod. I get five now, the rest after.

—Well, shit. I rolled onto my back. I guess this is goodbye.

—Not necessarily.

—Yeah, necessarily. I can’t compete with someone throws around twenty thousand bucks.

She sat up crosslegged and muted the TV. Look, I’m not no shiny apple been sitting on the shelf like you think.

—That ain’t what I think, I said, grumpy from losing out to a rich dyke.

—Then why you treating me like I don’t know which end of a jar to open? I been with women. It ain’t my favorite, but there’s times I felt that way. And I can feel that way again. Enough to earn us twenty thousand dollars, I can.

The word us punched a hole in my overcast.

—I don’t trust Ava, Leeli said. But with you along I don’t have to trust her. So I told her you had to come with us.

—What’d she say?

—She said it’d be okay ‘long as you don’t get crazy ’bout I’m sleeping with the both of you.

I turned this proposition over to see if it was missing a piece. I don’t know, I said. I get these mood swings.

—Oh, really! I couldn’t tell. She flounced down beside me, resting her chin on my chest. Can you deal with it? ‘Cause if you can’t, I might not do this. But I want that money! You imagine the party we could have on twenty thousand? I bet we can get more’n twenty, you ease back and lemme treat Ava right.

I hooked my thumb under the waistband of her panties and gave the elastic a snap. You a bad woman, ain’tcha?

—Goodness me! She batted her eyelashes. I don’t know what in the world more I’m gonna have to do to prove it.

In the morning we had another conversation. It kicked off wrong when I said what bothered me was Ava offering twenty when she could have snagged Leeli for less. Once I got her cooled down, she said, huffily, It’s not like she was comparison shopping. She’s took with me. Guess you’d have trouble understanding that.

—You know that ain’t it. I’m just being a realist.

—That’s what a realist is? A pea-brained Florida cracker?

—Damn, Leeli! Some guy offered me twenty grand to go party with him for a month, you’d think something was screwy.

—Maybe.

—Maybe my ass!

A polite room-service knock ended this round. The waiter, a college boy with a forelock of frosted hair, rolled his cart to the table at the window, off-loaded Leeli’s omelette and my breakfast steak, and stood waiting for his tip.

—I got no cash on me, I told him.

—You can add it to the bill, sir.

This was spoken like he was advising a backward child who’d stepped in shit. He had the kind of smug, fleshy face made me yearn to see it staring up from inside a roll of sheet plastic, dripping wet from a canal where he’d been swimming underwater for a week. I snatched the bill from him and wrote one billion dollars on the tip line. His eyes flicked to the amount and froze.

—I was you, hoss, I said, I’d polish up one of them special Disney smiles and waltz on outa here.

I guess he wasn’t a total candyass. He had some size on him and I could tell he was weighing job security against the joys of bashing my face in with one of those metal domes that kept the food warm. I thought about sucker-punching him just to see how far he’d fly, but he turned on his heel and headed for the door.

—Rock on, dude, I called after him.

I sat down to eat. Leeli gave me a God-you’re-hopeless look. She bit into her toast with a snap, as if somehow it might do me an injury. We ate without talking for a while, then she said, It might be true what Ava told me. ‘Bout the experiment. Carl and Squire are pretty strange.

—One’s a retard, other don’t know he’s a retard. That ain’t so strange.

She diddled the fork in her eggs. I can’t figure why she’d tell me that story if it wasn’t true.

I had to talk around a bite of steak. To make herself look like a big deal.

—People with the money she’s got, they don’t hafta do that.

—If they’re freaks they do. I finally got the bite chewed. Say it’s true. Fuck does it matter? We still get paid.

Leeli had built a little fence of eggs around her sausage patty. Nothing this good ever works out, she said, staring at the plate like she was considering making a rock garden out of her cottage fries. What I think’s gonna happen and what does happen, there’s always a mile of swamp ‘tween the two.

—Yeah, well, I said. There is that.

With a step that was a shade perky for my tastes, Leeli ran off to tell Ava the news. For want of better occupation, I took my Disneyworld pass and went to experience America. As I waited in line the man behind me kept ramming my legs with his gray-headed mama who was sitting in a wheelchair, gripping the arms and scowling like a fury. Everywhere you turned you saw parents yelling at kids who were bawling about they didn’t get this or that. Stuck in a photograph album, I supposed these same scenes would dredge up fond memories years from now. It depressed me that I wasn’t able to work such a change with my own miseries. Must be I come to Disneyworld too late in life for the enchantment to do its trick.

Close by the Pirates of the Caribbean, an elderly fat man with the word Jellybean embroidered on the chest of his overalls and dozens of jellybeans stuck on his straw cowboy hat had cordoned off a section of walkway and there created portraits of celebrities from thousands of—guess what?—jellybeans. He was working on his knees, dribbling jellybeans onto a rendering of the Statue of Liberty, which except for the spiky headdress looked a whole hell of a lot like his take on the fat Elvis. People stood around saying, Isn’t that amazing. He seemed so jolly in his craft, I naturally wished him ill. Odds were he was a twelve-stepper who after a lifetime of domestic abuse visited upon wife and children had gone simple enough from Jesus and caffeine to believe this shit was a suitable atonement. A four-year-old howler with the mouse on his chest and a stalk of blue cotton candy in his fist broke free of his parents and came to stand by Jellybean. Way he held the candy to his mouth and screamed, you could easily picture him at twenty-one doing the same with a microphone and getting laid by supermodels. When his mama tried to drag him off, he endeared himself to me forever by ralphing all over Miss Liberty. Jellybean offered him grandpa consolation, but I caught a glint of good old murder in his eye.

We stayed at Disneyworld four more days. Leeli spent the nights with Ava and mornings with me. The rest of the hours we traveled as a pack. At these times the air got icy. Dinners became occasions of grand formality, long bouts of chewing and swallowing broken by courteous exchanges. Please pass the butter. Would you like another dessert? Can I bring you back something? Leeli had to make sure both Ava and I got our share of flirty glances and secret smiles, and the strain of it all roughed her up some. I learned to let her relax when she came back to our room. She would take two valium from a bottle Ava had given her and sit by the window, her breath ragged, like she was pushing herself to exhale. Finally she’d smile and say, Hi or How you doing?, as if she had just noticed me.

-—I can’t take much more of Carl, she said one day. It’s not about him watching. I’m almost grateful he’s there. It kinda makes it easier to switch off my head. But the talking they do.. Jesus Lord! She glanced at me for a reaction. Am I boring you?

—I was just letting you tell it.

—I know you’re being sweet with me, and I appreciate it. But I’m wore out with sweetness. I could use a shot of male insensitivity. Can you handle that?

I grinned at her and said gruffly, Hell they talking about, woman?

Leeli sighed like those words had hit the spot. Ava’ll stop right in the middle of things and explain what’s going on. Anatomical stuff, y’know. And Carl he just sits there humming to himself.

—He don’t say nothing back?

—Sometimes he asks can he go do something with Squire, and she’ll say maybe later or naw it’s not your time to be with Squire.

—See what I told you? He’s a fucking retard.

—He’s not dumb! Ava’s always testing him or something. Asking him weird questions. He never gets a’one wrong. She’ll ask him to do a sum and he does ’em in his head. Just snaps ’em off!

—Remember that Tom Cruise movie where his brother did all that? That guy was a retard.

—It’s not just Carl. Ava, she’s…

—What?

—She’s a strong woman, is what it is. Sometimes I get a feeling I’m gonna drown in her, y’know. Like she’s this tide rolling over me and when it goes out again, nothing’s gonna be left of me. Leeli hung her chin onto her chest. I don’t know I can do this for a month.

—Fine with me. Let’s take the five and split.

The second hand must have galloped damn near ten times around the dial before she said, Chances this good don’t come around but every so often. Let’s give it a few days.

She come over to the foot of the bed and crawled up beside me and cuddled into my shoulder like she wanted to sleep. I did my best to be pillow and comforter, but the heat of her and my natural preoccupations got me all charged up. She reached her hand down and played with me awhile, then lost interest and closed her eyes. Want me take care of that for you? she asked after another bit.

—We’ll have our time, I said. Whyn’t you rest?

She blinked and peered at me. Wide open, those brown eyes could be like a car coming at you with its high beams on. They left me dazed and fighting for the road.

—That a real feeling I see in there? she asked.

—Whatever you see, that’s what it is. You know I ain’t smart enough to fake nothing.

She didn’t act like she believed this. Her lights dimmed and she lay quiet. She fingered my shirt button and appeared to be studying the stubble on my chin. I asked what she was thinking.

—Lots of things.

—Say one.

—I was wondering if anybody’s smart enough to know they’re faking and I was wishing we already had that twenty thousand.

—Anything else?

—I was thinking you got a whole crowd of people paying rent in your skull. Different sizes, different ways of doing. But they all wearing the same face.

A woman starts to get deep on you, you know it’s just the coming attraction for a head movie that’ll be playing six shows daily in the weeks to come. She’s evaluating her prospects and unless you’re a fool, you best do some evaluating your own self. Generally speaking, a commitment is being called for, but with Ava in the picture I wasn’t sure how things were fitting together in Leeli’s thoughts. She went to drowning in moods so wide, they’d wash over me from the next room. Sometimes she wanted me to be patient and other times she wanted me to haul her off to the monkey jungle. After playing mama’s little helper at night, she needed daddy to straighten her out. I didn’t have a good record when it come to treating female mental disease, but I managed it with Leeli. I gave her to know I was there for her like Oprah and Tarzan both. It surprised me that I was up to the task and when I meditated on this, I realized the feeling Leeli had spotted in me might be for real. A runty little weed sprouted from sandy soil—that was all it was. If it was going to survive, Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye would have to drop in from TV heaven and manifest a miracle. But there it waved, baking under the sky of all the shit that had ever gone wrong with me, waggling its dried-up leaves, trying like hell to grow up and learn how to whistle. Puny as it was, it stood taller than any decision I could have made to chop it down.

From Disneyworld the party train crossed the state to Ybor City, then up to Jacksonville and then back down to Silver Springs. Eleven days and we hadn’t gone a mile toward Lauderdale. Often as not, whenever Leeli was with Ava and Carl, Squire would seek me out. He figured we were in the same boat, I expect. Whereas Carl had one trick, Squire was proficient in two. Like he was a grade up on Carl in Ava’s pre-school. Mostly he desired to talk about how much pussy he’d been getting since a precocious early age, but it was plain he’d never gotten any that hadn’t got him first. He recounted a string of fabulous conquests, each more of a joke than the last. A female jockey, a porn star, a TV actress, the girl who played center for the Dallas Sparks. They had the feel of lies he’d overheard in a bar and loved so much he’d taken them in and given them a new home. Tempted as I was to blow a hole in his picture window, I let him rave. Sooner or later he’d wind down and go to thinking about Ava. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know this. Ava thoughts stamped their brand on that boy’s face. If I had thumped his head at those moments, it would’ve bonged like a bell.

In Silver Springs, instead of staying at the resort, we checked into a dump on a blue highway east of Ocala. A dozen frame bungalows painted beige with dark brown trim and tarpaper roofs and screen doors tucked in among palmetto and Georgia pine. From the road they looked like the backdrop for a 1940s photograph of Grandma and Grandpa on the dashboard of their Model A, off to homestead down in Stark or Sanford, right before Grandma gave birth to the next gold-star-destiny generation of Scrogginses or Culpeppers or Inglethorpes. Up close you saw them different. Tarpaper hats tipped at shady angles over chunky, sallow faces with indifferent eyes, like Chinamen with sly intentions. The screens documented tragic insect stories. Palmetto bugs the size of clothespins scuttled from crack to crack. The sheets were maps of gray and yellow countries. Facing my bed was a framed picture so dusty I could lie back and make it anything I wanted. You smelled the toilet from the steps outside. The place fucking cried out for a shotgun murder.

Of an evening the owner, Mr. Gammage, a scrawny old geezer whose bermuda shorts hung like loose sail from his hipbones, would beautify the grounds. Chop a few weeds, prune a shrub or two, cut back a climbing cactus from a palm trunk. He’d fuel his labors with glugs from a thermos that likely contained a libation stiffer than Gatorade. If he was feeling frisky he’d start his electric trimmer and hunt up stuff to trim. You could tell he loved that machine, the way he flourished it about. Watching him survey his property, hands on hips, his turkey-baster belly popped full out, it was my impression he was a happy man, though it was tough to understand why. Whenever he revved up the trimmer his wife would come to the office door and yell for him to quit making that noise. She was built short and squarish and commonly wore a dark brown housecoat. This sponsored the idea she might have given birth to the bungalows or was their spirit made flesh, or something of the sort. Her face was topped off by about a foot of forehead on which God had written a grim Commandment. I felt the air stir when she glared at me. Inside the office there was a Bible big as a microwave and I bet she would open it and pray for everything around her to disappear.

I was sitting outside my bungalow our second afternoon there, nursing a forty, when she come flying from the office and took a run at Squire. He’d fallen out on the grass near the highway, his head resting in a petunia bed. Mrs. Gammage screamed, Get outa my flowers, punching the ground with a lurching, stiff-gaited stride like an NFL guard with bad knees. Squire never moved, not even when she kicked him. She kicked him again. I wouldn’t say I was spurred to action, but since I was technically supposed to be on Squire’s side, I thought I should make a supportive gesture. Time I got myself on over to the petunias, she had stopped kicking and was bending to him and saying, Hey! Hey! She had a thin, bitter smell, like a bin of rutabagas. Squire’s eyes were half-open, but only one iris showed.

—’Pears like you killed him, I said.

Mrs. Gammage staggered back from the petunia bed, gazing at Squire with an expression that crossed stricken with disgusted. He was already dead! I didn’t do nothing coulda killed him.

—You kicked him right in the side of his chest where the heart’s on. That’ll do ‘er every time. It’s a medical fact.

I was just fucking with her, but Squire hadn’t twitched and it dawned on me that he actually might be dead. His color was good, though. Only dead man I’d ever seen up close was this old boy got shot in the head outside the Surf Bar in Ormond Beach for arguing about his girlfriend should have won the wet T-shirt contest. All the color had left him straightaway. His skin had the look of gray candlewax.

Mrs. Gammage snorted and snuffled some. Maybe she was seeing herself strapped into Old Sparky over to Raiford, or maybe she hadn’t yet gotten that specific with self-pity and was tearing up because she felt the victim of a vast injustice—here she’d been protecting her precious petunias and now Jesus had gone and let her down despite all everything she’d done for him. I had in mind to tell her that feeling she was having that everything had tightened up around her and no matter how hard she tried to turn with it, the world was no longer a comfortable fit, and if she made a move to pry herself loose from that terrible grip, it’d pinch her off at the neck…I would have told her after a while it got to feel natural and she likely wouldn’t know what to do things didn’t feel that way. Before I could advise her of this, Ava came on the run and shooed us away, babbling about how Squire was prone to these fits and she’d handle it, just to leave her alone with him because when he woke up he was scared and she could gentle him. I returned to step-sitting out front of my bungalow and Mrs. Gammage streaked toward the office to recast the deadly prayer spell she’d been fixing to hurl at the universe. Ava kneeled to Squire, hiding his upper body from sight. My forty had gone warmish, but I chugged down several swallows and wiped the spill from my chin and looked back to the petunia bed just in time to see Squire sit bolt upright. It wasn’t the kind of reaction you’d expect from someone smacked down by a fit. No wooziness or flailing about. It was like Ava had shot a few thousand volts through him.

Leeli had come out of Ava’s bungalow, wearing white shorts and a green halter. She wandered over to me and sat on the stoop. What you think’s wrong with Squire? she asked in a hushed voice.

—Boy’s so slow, maybe his brain idles out every so often.

She stared at Ava and Squire as if she was trying to figure something out. I did some staring myself, digging my eyes under that halter. The heat cooked her scent strong. I leaned closer and did a hit. She glanced up and asked, What you doing?

—I wish I was smelling breakfast, I said.

Squire and Ava scrambled up, Squire gesturing like he was wanting to explain something of importance. They made for Ava’s bungalow. Leeli started to join up with them, but Ava waved her off and said she needed to tend Squire for a while. That brightened Leeli, but she watched until the door closed behind them.

—Don’t none of this strike you peculiar? she asked.

—Pretty much everything strikes me peculiar. So I guess nothing does, really.

If I hadn’t been consumed with getting Leeli into the bungalow and the two of us shaking the walls so hard, the framed picture would shudder off its veil of dust and the palmetto bugs would prepare for the fall of creation, I might’ve had room for some helpful thoughts. I don’t suppose it matters, though. Chances are I wouldn’t have reached any conclusion. If I had, either I wouldn’t have acted on it or else it would have been the same half-assed conclusion I come to without even stretching my brain. Studying on things until you couldn’t tell whether what you thought was what you wanted to think and all that—it wasn’t my style. I had two ways of going at the world. One, I was a furnace of a man and everything I saw was viewed in terms of how it would do for fuel. The other, I was a pitiable creature who’d been walked on for so long there was a damn dog run wore down into my skull and whenever a shadow crossed my path, my instinct was to snap my teeth. Neither of those boys gave a sugary shit about situational fucking analysis.

Ava was kept busy that night tinkering with Squire’s self-esteem. ‘Least that’s what I believed had sucked his fire down so low, his pilot light kicked off. It was like Leeli had been busted out of jail. She wanted one of everything with me. We come close to killing each other. Toward nine we took a break, borrowed Ava’s car, and brought back catfish and puppies and fries. Halfway through our greasy feast, we went at it again, smearing fish juice all over the bed. It would’ve took oven cleaner to scour the sheets. Long about midnight we smoked cigarettes on the steps. Fireflies bloomed in the hazy dark. The breeze hauled a smell of night-blooming cereus out from the shadows of the palms. A shine from the bulb over the office door fresh-tarred the blacktop. We had us one of those made-in-Nashville moments. Our arms around one another, heads together. Snap the photo, frame it with a heart, and stick in a word balloon with me saying something forever stupid like, Somepin’ wunnerful’s gonna happen to them peaches, honey. Hillbilly Hallmark. I gave Leeli a kiss that sparked a shiver and she settled in against me.

—I could stand another beer, she said.

—Want me to fetch it?

—Naw, it’s too much trouble.

Skeeters whined. A night bird said its name about three hundred times in a row. The TV inside the office flickered a wicked green, an evil blue, a blast of white, as if Mrs. Gammage was receiving communication from an unholy sphere. I wouldn’t have much cared if the rest of everything was just this hot and black and quiet.

Squire seemed fine to me, especially for someone who looked to be a goner, but Ava was still acting mothery the next morning. Around noon she herded us into the car and drove to Silver Springs for, I guess, a give-Squire-love day. At a stall near the gift shop she bought a T-shirt with his face airbrushed on it by a genuine T-shirt artist. Squire had the good sense not to wear the thing. Wanna go see the tropical fish? she asked of Carl and Squire both. Squire said he didn’t know, whatever, and Carl repeated the word fish until he figured out how to spray spittle when saying it. We crammed into a glass-bottomed boat with a mob of lumpy fiftyish women in baggy slacks and floral blouses. I assumed they were a church group, because they appeared to be the cut-rate harem belonging to this balding, gray-haired individual with a banker’s belly and a sagging, doleful face, dressed like a Wal-mart dummy in slacks with an elastic waistband and a sweated-through sports shirt. A pretty blonde in a captain’s hat steered the boat and as we glided across the springs, her voice blatted from the speakers, identifying whatever portion of nature’s living rainbow we were then passing over. The man stood the whole trip, clutching a pole for balance, providing his own commentary and sneaking glances at Leeli, who was wearing short-shorts. He was trying to make some general point relating to the fish. It had a charry Unitarian flavor, a serving of God and fried turnip slices. All the ladies nodded and favored him with doting gazes. Squashed between two of them was a chubby kid about fourteen who had the miserable air of a hostage. One of the women whispered urgently at him, probably telling him to pay attention or sit up straight. He stared cross-eyed into nowhere, dreaming of columbining the bunch of us. I winked at him, wanting him to know that some of us so-called adults could be dangerous haters, too, when forced to ooh and aah over a glittery mess of edible sea bugs. This only got him hating me extra special. If somebody had slipped him a piece, they would’ve found me with my splattered head resting on a cellulite-riddled thigh.

After the boat ride we headed for a Howard Johnson’s restaurant down the road from the resort. The reverend and his flock had beaten us there and were crammed into a circular booth across from ours. The ladies chattered away, the kid stared at his fries like they were a heap of golden brown logs on which he was roasting his mom in miniature. Part of my problem was I’ve been cursed with this inept paranoia that sees danger everywhere except where danger lies. Though I’d done nothing criminal recently, the reverend’s presence made me feel criminally guilty. I fiddled with the suspicion that his turning up at the restaurant was police-related. That he’d recognized me for the perpetrator of a crime I’d committed and forgot. Now and then his fruity voice cut through the chatter. He was still going on about the damn fish.

—Did you notice, he asked, how the entire school turned as one? Indeed, all the actions of the underwater world seemed in concert, as though directed by a single mind. Is it such a leap to conceive that our actions are so directed?

Hell yes! would’ve been my answer, but Carl thought this was about the best thing he’d ever heard. He jumped around in his seat, repeating portions of the reverend’s lesson and said to Ava, You see? See what I mean?, like these phrases connected with an argument they’d been having.

—I know, she said, and patted his hand to calm him.

—A single mind directed! he said loudly.

Several of the ladies were shooting pissy looks his way. Anna shushed him and said they’d talk about it later. But Carl wanted to talk about it right then and there. I’d never seen him so heated up. Whenever the reverend’s voice carried to us, Carl would go to chuckling, spitting back the reverend’s words, saying, Yes! Yes!, and sputtering other foolishness, giving this weird sort of affirmation, like he was a shouter in a retard church.

Eventually, urged on by his outraged ladies, the reverend scooted out of the booth and ambled over. He clasped his hands at his belly, delivered us a patient look, and asked Carl if he wouldn’t mind toning it down.

Carl beamed at him and said, Yes! A single mind!

Leeli said, Can’t you see the man ain’t right! Ava offered an apology and I said, You best take your fat ass on back to the hen house, or they gonna need another rooster.

The reverend armored his face with a smile and looked down on me from a peak of blessed understanding. Young man, he said. Actually he said a good bit more, but the words young man were all I heeded. When I was five Reverend Nichols from the First Baptist told my mama having such a sweet little fellow as me by his side would be an asset when he was doing fund-raising, and since this gave her more time for drinking, she loaned me out to him on a regular basis. Young man, he’d say once we were alone, wanna sit on my lap while I drive? Young man, I’m gonna open you to God’s greatest gift. I didn’t much appreciate anybody calling me young man, and I sure as hell didn’t want it from a preacher. I caught him by the collar and yanked him down so he was gawking into the leavings of my chicken-fried steak. The only thing I recall saying was, Cocksucking holy Joe motherfucker, but I know I expanded on that considerable. People were tugging at me, women were screaming, something struck the side of my head, but I was serene in the midst of it, talking to the reverend, showing him the ketchup-smeared edge of my steak knife.

Rougher hands grabbed me and the reverend broke free. Two guys wearing aprons wrangled me into the aisle, where we did some wrestling and grunting and swearing. A swung purse the size of a satchel knocked one guy off me. I clocked the other with a gut punch that cured him of upright and put him on his knees kissing the carpet like a devout Arab. Shouting people choked the aisle, a few wanting to get at me, the rest trying to get away. I heard Leeli cry, Maceo!, but I couldn’t find her in the crowd, so I beelined for the exit, shoving aside Christian and heathen alike. The manager loomed ahead of me. A porky fellow in a maroon shirt and a black tie, his skin that spoiled pumpkin color comes either from a tanning booth or somewheres in India. A wedge of old ladies blocked him off to the left, clearing a path, and I went toward the door. That’s when Carl shouted the magic words.

—Hands up! he said with sincere ferocity. Who wants to die?

The manager had retreated behind the cash register and Carl, beaming like a lottery winner, was pointing a blue steel automatic in his general direction, swinging the muzzle to cover the counter and a portion of window. People started hitting the ground, hiding in the booths, and wasn’t more than a couple of seconds before the only ones standing were the five in our party and the manager. You could hear whispering and sobbing and the wheedle of some old pop song turned into a symphony, but it was stone quiet compared to how it had been. Ava slapped at her tote bag, gave it a squeeze, and that told me where Carl had got his shiny new toy.

—Give it to me, Carl, I said, easing toward him a step.

—Okay. He kept on swinging the gun back and forth kind of aimlessly, like it had a momentum that was carrying his arms through an arc.

—Give me the gun, Ava said. You don’t need that gun now.

Squire was at her shoulder, nodding as if he firmly supported this idea, and Leeli, smart girl, was halfway out the door.

The manager made a move for something under the register. Ava and I both shouted a warning to Carl. I said, Watch it, man!, and Ava spoke what sounded like a word in a foreign language—I couldn’t tell for sure because our shouts mixed together. Carl whipped the gun around and fired just before the manager fired, the explosions overlapping. Carl’s head jerked, blood sprayed. His bullet kicked the manager into a buffet cart. He fell behind the counter. A few screams speared the quiet. Smoke lazied in the air. Somebody’s lunch treat sizzled and blackened on the griddle. I stepped forward and snatched the gun from Carl. There was blood all over his face, but he was still smiling. Ava wrapped him in a hug and hustled him to the door. I had a quick look back of the counter. The manager was staring off into someplace I never want to see. Frightened eyes were locked on me from every direction, like forest animals peeping at a mangy tiger that had interrupted their play. I fired a shot into the ceiling and told them not to twitch forever and ran like hell.

In the truck everybody talked at once, except for Squire. He was gazing out the passenger-side window, having himself a fine vacation. Ava and Leeli fussed over Carl in the back seat, and I drove fast toward Ocala. I hadn’t put a face on the wrongness of what happened, but it nibbled at the edges of a fucked-up angry fear that raised a red shadow in my brain and jammed spikes into my bone-holes, making all my limbs want to stiffen and wiggle like a bug with a pin through its guts. Leeli urged me to drive faster and Ava said, Take us back to the motel! This all stirred in with Oh Gods and Carl repeating over and over in a sunny voice, Hands up who wants to die, shaping a child’s song of the line. I told them to shut the fuck up, then I yelled it. For half a minute it was quiet. A big shopping mall come floating up on our left. I slowed and swung the car into it. Ava screeched, What’re you doing? as I swerved into a parking slot away from the buildings, hidden by other cars from the highway. I switched off the engine. She clawed at my shoulder, cursing and giving orders.

I turned to her and saw that the manager’s bullet had dug a furrow along Carl’s jawline. The wound was oozing blood, yet he didn’t seem to mind. I’m gonna find us another car, I said. But we ain’t going back to no motel.

Ava objected to this and I said, Here’s your keys. Go where the fuck you want. I’m getting the hell gone.

I climbed out and told Leeli to come along with me.

Ava caught Leeli’s arm. I need her here!

—Well, I need a lookout, so fuck what you need!

—Take Squire, she said.

—Yeah, that’ll help. Come on, Leeli.

Leeli hesitated.

A cop car whipped past on the highway, howling like a devil with a hotfoot.

—Goddamn it! Now! I said. You wanna wait around ’til he comes back for us?

Leeli hopped out and glanced uncertainly between me and Ava. She blinked and shivered as if the sun was killing her.

For the first time ever I saw a distinct lack of confidence in Ava’s face. You better not leave us here! she said. I swear to God!

—I wasn’t thinking on it, I said.

There was some sort of promotion going on within the mall. The lot was more crowded than you’d expect. Jolly old farts wearing gaudy sport coats and blue Shriner-type hats were holding bunches of balloons on strings, handing them out to children and mommies, collecting money to cure some great evil that would never die, and two lanes of parking were used up by a carnival with a little Ferris wheel, kiddie rides, game and snack stalls. Some high school girls strolled in a small pod, twelve tits in a row, those belonging to a hefty redhead nosing out a close race. They were eyed by a pack of high school boys whose thoughts of rape had likely gotten sly and civilized during hygiene class. Senior citizens dressed in peppy colors gazed soberly at the wheel. I reckon they were recalling greater wheels from the big glorious world that had died out from under them. Treacly music played—the same, it seemed, that played everywhere I traveled.

Ava’s gun was stuck in my belt, under my shirt. Its weight made me walk taller than I should have felt. I held hands with Leeli, hoping to persuade folks we were a young couple hot for some corn dogs or whatever hell meat they were pushing at the carnival. We skirted the more populated area of the lot. I spotted a newish Ford van with smoked windows. We snuck up on it from the rear. Just as I was ready to pounce, Leeli warned me off. Standing a few cars over was a huddle of men in blue hats. These old fellows had ridded themselves of balloons. They were laughing, the nudge-nudge laughing men do when they hear a real good smutty joke. The fattest of them had a two-handed grip on his belly, like he was about to lift up a slab of fat and show them something even funnier. Of a sudden the men rested hands on each other’s shoulders, forming a circle, and bowed their heads, praying, I supposed, for more balloons or for Jesus to cover the point spread against Satan or that one of the high school girls would lose her mind and fuck them.

Out front of the Home Depot was an old Chevy panel van. I busted the driver’s window with the gun butt and hotwired it. The engine shook like the mounts were loose and made a tired, trebly noise until I got it idling. Leeli brushed glass off her seat and jumped in. I headed the van toward the nearest exit and she dug her fingers into my thigh and asked where I was going.

—South fucking America if we can get that far, I said.

A pinch of time zipped by. Turn it around, she said.

—That’s not gonna happen.

—I mean it! You turn this thing right around!

—Fuck you going on about?

—I’m serious! She reached out with her left foot and stomped on the brake, nearly swerving me into a parked Camry. I’m not running out on my friends.

She kind of hiccuped over the word friends, but kept her gaze firm and determined.

—Your friends? You talking about the Munsters back there?

Her eyes flicked away.

—Oh, okay. You’re talking about those twenty thousand friends. This ain’t about twenty thousand dollars no more, Leeli. This here’s about twenty-to-life.

—I don’t care!

—You’ll care when those lifer bitches with the tattooed mustaches start wanting to get cozy.

She opened the door, planted one foot on the asphalt. I’m not staying ‘less you go back for Ava and them.

—Those motherfuckers gonna get us killed! They almost got us killed! —Way I see it, you didn’t act such a fool with that preacher, Carl wouldn’t never done nothing!

I put my eyes out the windshield. A lost balloon was sailing off into the blue—it vanished as it crossed the sun. Damn it, Leeli! Get your ass back in here!

She slid down from the seat and stood in the glare, defiant as a dog off its chain.

I gunned the engine. I’m leaving!

She slammed the door shut.

—Something wrong with those people, I said. Man’s shot in the face and it don’t even phase him? Fuck is that? This ain’t nothing we should be messing with.

She took off walking. Her round little butt looked real tasty in those shorts.

—Aw, Leeli! Come on back here, girl!

I’m not a complete fool. I understand it’s all about pussy, but pussy must be a sickness with me, otherwise I cannot explain why I let myself get pulled back into a situation I knew was a dead loser. A psychiatrist might say I was hunting for just such a situation, but if Leeli had been one of the reverend’s old gals, I wouldn’t have wasted a second before putting her in the rear view. I admit self-destruction is the way of my life. The way of every life, maybe. But the style Leeli brought to her walk-off scene, switching her hips and arching her back and giving a sad, pouty look over her shoulder, psychology wasn’t that huge a factor.

I told her to drive and funneled Ava, Carl, and Squire into the rear of the van, then climbed in behind the passenger seat so I could keep an eye on everybody. Squire was by the doors, legs kicked out, his head wobbling like he was listening to private music. Ava was next to the wheel hub, comforting Carl, who rested his good cheek on her shoulder.

—Get east, I said to Leeli. Use the interstate and keep it under the limit.

Ava asked, Where we going? It was loud in the van and she had to shout it.

—Friend of mine’s place in South Daytona!

She thought about this and nodded gloomily.

—Wanna tell me what’s going on? I pointed to Squire and then Carl.

She shook her head. Not now! She shifted to accommodate Carl’s weight and said, I’d like my gun back!

—I like maple sugar on my oatmeal, I told her. But sometimes I gotta do without!

The sun was bouncing along just above the palm tops like a dragged bait, and the light was growing orangey, and a brown shadow gathered in the rear of the van. It was all calming somehow, the shadow and the rattling, droning speed. I felt submerged in it, a man sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool, unmindful of trouble in the air, and I worked the ride into a movie, not a big spectacular with sinister terrorist plots or world-shattering disasters, but a movie from back when stars used to play in crummy little stories about nobodies on their way to damnation. Creedence and Lynard Skynard for the soundtrack. My daddy’s kind of songs, but I liked them all the same. I found one cigarette left in my crumpled pack and lit up. It didn’t taste a thing like movie smoke must taste, clean and savory, a working man’s reward, but my exhales hazed the air so it looked old-fashioned and yellowy brown, 1970s air, air with some character, and I sat fingering the gun, trying to put my mind onto a future different from the sort promised by the movie I was in, but thinking mainly about the manager, what a strange thing it was for a man to come halfway around the world from a place where they had monkeys and elephants and shit to go with their nuclear bombs just to catch a bullet in a Hojos and die staring up at track lighting and Styrofoam ceiling tile.

Rickey Wirgman, who I’d called my friend, was more of a brother fuck-up and former criminal associate, like a cousin you don’t have much use for but deal with on occasion. His grandfather had left him some property on the edge of the marshlands near South Daytona, a collection of weathered frame buildings alongside a stretch of open water that grandpa, if not for a crack habit and some harsh words spoken to a fellow inmate in the Volusia County Jail that caused his history to take a sudden tragic turn, might have developed into a full-blown financial disaster. A fishing camp had been his thought. In the years since he’d inherited, Rickey had run a contest to see what would fall apart the fastest, himself or the roof he slept under. He sold off pieces of the land to survive and recreated with the finest dope and the nastiest hookers. The sheds and cabins were rotting away, but the marsh was pretty in the twilight. Black watercourses meandering through tall green grasses, here and there a tiny humped island thick with palms going to silhouettes in the soft gray light, and pelicans crossing in black flapping strings against a streak of rose along the horizon, like a caption in a cool language. Exotic-looking. A Discovery Channel place. The grass was tamped down around the relics of the fishing camp. Seemed like some huge, heavy thing had made an emergency landing, maybe a big jetliner bellying in, and the survivors had squatted where they’d been spilled until death had swallowed them too, and now their shelters were decaying. Scattered around in the higher grass behind the cabins were beat-up refrigerators and washing machines and stoves. They got you thinking it wasn’t a plane had crashed, but one of those bird dinosaurs, and its teeth had busted from its mouth or it had laid a number of curious square white eggs before passing.

We hid the van behind a shed and straggled toward the main lodge. Lodge was a hundred-dollar name for a structure that was the house equivalent of a crooked old beekeeper who had stroked out in his sleep while wearing his hat and veil. Window shadows for eyes and a gnawed-off nose opening into a screen porch and boards the color of cigarette ash and a slumped partial second story with tattery shingle tiles drooping off the roof edge. There were no lights. Frogs bleeped out in the marsh, like electric raindrops, and skeeters would cover your arm unless you kept swiping them off.

—Nobody’s home, Leeli said in an exhausted tone.

—Maybe. It don’t matter. The porch stair creaked and bowed to my step. The billowed-out screens were rusted through in patches, torn loose from the railing. Just pick out some rooms, I said. I’ll see if anybody’s here.

I left the others to creep around and scare the spiders and explored some. You couldn’t find a grayer place, you searched in a cemetery. Every square inch and object had run out of time and stopped being what it once was. Phantom things that resembled tables and chairs and rugs and pictures on the walls and the walls themselves were just ghosts made of dust and habit and a gray smothery smell. The kitchen sink was gray and so were the stains on it. Peels of linoleum curled up from the floor like eucalyptus bark. The only bit of color I noticed was three custom car magazines poking from beneath an empty bookcase. Rickey’s version of the redneck dream.

From down the hall came a gentle muttering. Around the corner I caught sight of a pale flickery glow escaping through a half-closed door. I pushed it open. A lounge chair faced a pint-sized color TV set on an orange crate. The chair was an island throne rising from an ocean of beer cans, pizza boxes, take-out cartons, grocery sacks, empty tins, condom packets, shrinkwrapped cookies, crumpled tissues, video cases, batteries. You name it, it was there. Stretched in the chair, wearing bib overalls, lording it over this his solitary realm, was the fucking vulture god of decay. He was thinner than the last I saw him, his beard about six inches longer, but he still had the worst comb-over in Central Florida. The dirt on his ankles made an argyle pattern. His right arm dangled off the chair arm, his fingers almost touching a settlement of pill bottles on the floor. He was watching football. The Gators and somebody. I asked who was winning and he tipped back his head, trying to find me, but not in an awful hurry about it.

—Shit! The word leaked out of him like a last gasp. He gave a blitzed laugh, two grunts and a hiccup. That you, man?

I picked a straight chair from beside a sheetless mattress in the corner and sat so he could watch me and the TV both.

—Maceo. He made a fumbly gesture, patting an invisible dog by his knee. Crazy motherfucker. Where you been?

—Raiford. New Smyrna for a while after.

—Oh, yeah…right. Rickey’s face was gaunt, greasy with sweat, ready to crack and sag. The bridge of his nose was swollen and had a ragged cut across it that wasn’t healing too good.

I asked what he was up to and he said, Dilaudid. Crystal meth. Mostly dilaudid lately. You want some? I got a shitload.

—There’s people with me. We need to hide out here a couple or three days.

He blinked rapidly. It was like part of his brain was attempting to semaphore another part that trouble was at hand, but the message didn’t come through. Yeah…okay, he said feebly. Wherever you want, y’know. There’s rooms. His eyes, charcoal smudges, returned to the TV. A faint cheer mounted as a tiny guy in blue-and-orange scampered down the sideline. The Gators were kicking ass. Rickey made a grinding, choking noise in the back of his throat. I knew that paved-over feeling in the esophagus, the warm dry space that kept him safe from the guttering of his own life, the valueless thoughts featherdusting the inside of his skull. Like a perfect fever.

—I’ll take a few of them Dilaudid, you don’t mind, I said.

—I told you go ahead. His fingernail ticked one of the bottle caps. I got a whole shitload.

I kneeled by the chair, palmed one of the bottles and shook four white tabs out of another.

—You get settled, come on back you wanna talk. Rickey wriggled his ass around as if he had an itch.

—Yeah, maybe. We’re kinda wore down.

—Hey, Maceo!

I could see him looking for a way to hold me there. I guess I’d reminded him he was lonely.

—’Member that little honey you’s fucking, one with the blue streak in her hair?

—Twila, I said.

—Yeah, her. She got the virus. He said this with the sort of cheerful expectancy you might use to announce the birth of twins. ‘Spect some of them NASCAR boys better get theyselves checked, he went on. Last I heard, she was passing out blowjobs at Mac’s Famous Bar like they was dollar kisses.

—She musta knew what she was doing. Twila didn’t give a shit. My feet crunched the litter ocean as I stepped toward the door.

—Maceo?

—What?

—You wanna bring me something from the ‘frigerator? I got pizza in there and I’m too fucked-up to walk.

—I’ll do ‘er in a while.

The corridor had gone dark. I stood a moment, getting my bearings, and heard Rickey quietly say, Oh, God…God! Maybe he was hurting, maybe the veil of the future had lifted and he saw a shadow stealing toward him. Or maybe it was the Gators done something stupid.

Leeli had spread sheets on the bed in a room off the kitchen, and sealed a hole in the window screen with a stuffed rag, and secured a lamp for the bedside table. She was sitting on the bed, her knees tucked to her chin, tanned legs agleam in the tallowy light.

—What we gonna do? she asked.

—I told you what I wanted to do back in Ocala.

She hid her face, resting her forehead on her knees. It’s not back in Ocala now. We gotta figure something to do.

—Don’t know about you, but I’m getting high. I showed her the pills.

—What is it?

—Dilaudid.

—Is it something good?

—It’s evil. You gonna fucking adore it.

I powdered a handful of pills in the bottom of a teacup and let Leeli feed her nose from the tip of a knife blade.

—Oooh, she said, sliding down in the bed, closing her eyes.

—What I tell ya?

I did more than Leeli, enough so the world fitted around me like a warm liquid glove and there were little sparkles at the corners of my sight and when I moved my hand I felt the exact curve of my shoulder and the muscles playing sweetly in my arm. I lay back next to Leeli. The ceiling was bare gray boards and beams with black grainy patterns and sparkles pricking the gaps that were probably stars. It looked distant and enormous, part of some ancient building that was proud of itself, a church where saints and great soldiers were buried, and terrible instruction was regularly given to the faithful, lots of Gothous and Verily-thee-must-hastens that resulted in dungeons filled with bones and chained apes with blood on their teeth and crestfallen martyrs, but it didn’t have no message for me. My eyelids were trying to droop and my mind drooped too, blissfully trivial, noticing stuff about the high, the tremor in my leg, a pincushion sensation in my left foot, a nerve jigging in my chest. Something landed softly on my stomach, its warmth spreading like a melting pat of butter. Leeli’s palm. Feel up to having some fun? she asked. Her hand slipped lower and she flicked my zipper.

—I ain’t never gonna say no, but I’m pretty damn wasted.

—Me, too. I don’t really need to or nothing. I just want to see what it’s like…when I’m like this, y’know. Okay?

We fucked like space babies in no gravity, coming together at goofy angles, forgetting for long moments what we were doing, our minds scatting on some loopy riff, reawakened by the touch of lips, a breast, something that got us all juicy and eager for a time, speeding it up and lapsing again into slow motion, into stillness. It took Leeli damn near an hour to come and once she started it took her almost the same to stop. She curled up into me after like a dazed, sleek bug that had eaten too much of a leaf and said, Sweet Jesus. That was amazing! I was too gassed to respond. If we’d been a pair of spiders, she could have gnawed off my legs and laid eggs in my belly and I wouldn’t have argued the matter.

Leeli had some trouble sleeping due to the itching that goes with the Dilaudid wearing off, but finally her breathing grew even and deep. I did a few more hits, pulled on my pants and went onto the porch. A wind had sprung up, driving away the skeeters and quieting the frogs. Clouds edged with milky light were racing the moon, parting around it, and the grasses gave forth with an approving chorus, like the sound Leeli made when the Dilaudid rushed upon her, only louder by a million throats, seeming to appreciate the architecture of dust and reflected fire in the sky, the hosanna clouds, the lacquered moon-colored water, the grasses tipped in silver, the black cutouts of the palm islands like left-over pieces of Africa. I had that feeling of small nobility and pure solitude the world wants you to feel when it reveals this side of itself, so you’ll believe nature was this awesome beautiful peaceful rock concert deal before man come along and doggy-fucked it full of disease, and not the bloody, biting, eat-your-meat-while-it’s-alive horror show it truly is. That night I was okay about feeling this way and I walked along the shore, sucking in the odors of fish and frogs and the millions of unrecorded deaths that had accompanied the Hojo manager’s as if they were the latest Paris perfumes.

I thought I was out there on my lonesome, just me and a scrap of wilderness and Dilaudid, but when I climbed a hummock to avoid wading through the marsh, I spied Ava, Carl, and Squire standing at the tip of a grassy point about sixty feet farther along. Ava was gesturing at the sky like she was naming stars or teaching about the weather or something. Squire and Carl, whose jaw was bandaged, were gazing upward. I was too fogged to jam their nature walk in with all the other nothing junk I knew concerning them and make any sense of it, but when they strolled off still farther from the lodge, I realized this was my opportunity to take a peek at Ava’s personals and maybe scoop up some cash. I hustled back as fast I could, which was not real fast, and located the room where she was bunking. Her tote bag was stuffed under a pillow. I found no money, but among the keys and Kleenex and cosmetics and all was a badge holder holding a photo ID. Official evidence that Ava was affiliated with the FBI. A fake, I thought, but then remembered where I’d met up with her and wasn’t so sure. At the bottom of the bag was a leatherette photo album. The first picture was an overexposed black and white shot of Ava and Carl leaning against a vintage Chevy Impala. The ‘sixty-two convertible. She appeared to be around seventeen, eighteen, and wore white socks and buckle shoes and a print dress with a belling skirt that covered her legs to the mid-calves. Carl had on jeans and a sport shirt with its tail hanging out. He looked no younger than he did now. Another guy sat behind the wheel of the Impala. His face was a blur of sunlight, but going by his round head, I guessed this to be Squire. Both Ava and Carl were grinning and pointing at a shield-shaped sign on the shoulder of the road. The sign was also blurred, but readable: State Road 44.

Several of the remaining pictures were shots of Carl, some of Ava and Carl. A few recent ones showed them with Squire. None of these said much to me, not like the first. Seeing that Ava had aged, though not so much as she should have, and Carl hadn’t aged a day, this gave rise to Star Trek movies in my head. Space aliens, UFOs, abductions, secret government projects, intelligent robots, all kinds of happy horse-shit. A couple of times I thought I’d figured out who they must be, but if they were aliens or whatever on the run from the government, what the hell were they doing on government property? If they were working with the government, why were they hanging out with the likes of Leeli and me? And what was that house doing in the dunes near the Cape? A trap for lowlifes such as myself, I decided. That was it. Damn straight. Alien creatures from beyond the stars were studying the pork rind set. Government super-clones were learning how to mimic the scum of the earth so they would be in place to assassinate the redneck Jesus, who’d be coming to a womb in Kissimmee any day now. Or could be robot killers who did the evil bidding of the Bush administration were given vacations during which they hung out with real folks and fucked them up every whichaway. Or Squire and Carl were aliens who’d suffered brain damage in the Roswell crash and Ava was their rehab nurse, training them in the ways of society, and their vibrations were keeping her young. I got somewhat insane behind all this, creating tabloid headlines, picturing me and Leeli on the talk shows, discussing her alien lesbian lover with Jerry and Jay and David and the rest, going out to Hollywood to attend the premiere of the movie about our life story. Gradually I calmed down. There was bound to be a logical explanation for the photo and Carl’s recuperative powers and everything else. I told myself I’d get to the bottom of it eventually.

I woke the following morning with a pistol barrel poking my nose and Rickey’s hand on my throat and his burnt-out eyes giving me a close-up of the dark sour-smelling rathole they opened into. It was like the little room he lived in was inside him, too. Straggles of hair curtained off his face, but did nothing to filter his rotten breath.

—Motherfucker, you stole my dope! he said.

Leeli gave a squeak and rolled off the bed, covering herself with the sheet.

—Where the fuck is it? Rickey asked.

—I took four goddamn tabs! I said. You want ’em back, you gonna have to scrape out my nose!

—Don’t think I won’t! He screwed the barrel down hard against my cheek. I’m missing a bottle.

—He didn’t take nothing! Leeli said. I promise!

—You check around by your chair? I asked. Jesus, you could hide a Volkswagen under all the crap you got on your floor.

His face lost some intensity.

—I guess you were so clearheaded last night, you couldn’t have set it down somewheres and forgot, I said. You would know if you give it a kick accidental when you got up to piss or something.

Thought confused his expression. He backed away from the bed, the pistol angled toward the side.

—Jesus Christ! I sat up and swung my legs onto the floor. Fuck you so crazy about, anyway? You said you had a good goddamn supply.

—It’s gotta last the weekend, he said sullenly.

—You run out, I know you’ll get you some more. I pulled on my undershorts. What’s wrong with you, man? Busting in here like that. I ever cheat you before? I ever treat you anything but righteous?

Rickey puzzled over that. The words came slow from his mouth, like slobber off a bull’s lip. I can’t recall.

—Well, you’d remember if I did, wouldn’t you?

—I s’pose so. Yeah. He lowered the pistol and let out a soggy, rueful snort of laughter. Fuck, man. Y’know, I…just people been fucking me around a lot lately.

—If you can’t find it, don’t come back in here busting on me about it. You know you gonna find it sooner or later in that mess. Someday you run out, you gonna be stumbling around and it’ll turn up under your big toe. Be like finding a diamond in a cornfield.

This fairly brightened Rickey—he nodded energetically, seeing a vision of that glorious day. I noticed Leeli cowering in the corner, looking extra fine with her breasts gathered above her arm and her ass sticking out from the sheet.

—Hey, Leeli. Get your tail over here, I said. This here’s my ol’ pal Rickey.

I tried to move Rickey on out of there before he could get paranoid again, but his eyes were leaving tracks all over Leeli, even after she covered everything up, and he kept hanging around. He began asking why we needed to hide and such. I told him some lies and when that didn’t stop his questions, I said I wanted to borrow his car so we could buy food and stuff. The best way to derail Rickey’s suspicions always was to beg a favor. If he could deny you something, he’d start feeling masterful and forget whatever was bothering him. I argued and pleaded, but he was resolute. Nobody drives my car but me, he said. Like everyone in the world was dying to park their behinds in his funky-smelling shitbox so they could race off to Monaco and display this automotive jewel before graceful society. It ended with Rickey agreeing to bring us food himself and stalking off to search for his missing Dilaudid with head held high.

—That was sly, way you managed that, Leeli said, giving me a smooch. You’re pretty smart for white trash.

—Guess what that makes me in the real world, I said.

Rain and guns. I think it must’ve been raining when the first gun was drawn hot from its tempering fire, because when it comes rain, I get a itch to handle a gun if I’ve got one. Which is a roundabout way of saying it rained and Rickey went for food, Leeli hunkered beside me on the bed fixing her nails, while I sat turning Ava’s Colt in my hands, picking at the plaque on the grip, rubbing a little raised, rough patch alongside the chamber, thinking gun thoughts, testing its heft and balance, knowing that if I was really pretty smart I would walk down to the water’s edge and toss it on in. Having a gun was not in my best interests. Without one, if I was at a beach party, let’s say, and some worthless drunken individual tipped over my beer and said diddley dog about it, the worst could happen was busted knuckles and a hospital trip—but I had a gun, God knows, that beer might seem like the very selfsame beer for which the Founding Fathers sacrificed their lives, and I’d be called upon to uphold its sacred honor.

It was an uncommon hard and lasting rain. A drizzle started about ten o’clock and five minutes later it was like a billion hailstones were bouncing off the roof, filling the house with a roar. A weird slivery darkness ensued. The cloud bellies passing over us were black as Satan’s boot soles and the wind flattened the marsh grasses with a constant rush. The rain slacked off many times during the day, a couple of times it stopped altogether and the land yielded up a sodden, animal smell; but it kept returning in strength. Rickey drove off to buy food. Carl and Squire sat on the porch playing a hand-held game of some kind. Leeli got a little closer to her new best friend, Mr. Dilaudid, and fell asleep. I wedged the Colt in my waist and paid a visit to Ava.

Her door was open a foot and I stuck my head in without knocking. She was standing at the window, stark naked, arms folded beneath her breasts and hair loose about her shoulders, gazing out at the rain. She must have felt me there, because she turned her head and delivered me a flat, unsurprised stare. What do you want? she asked.

—A few words would be good.

—I guess it’s inevitable.

—I’ll wait out here while you throw something on.

—No need. We’re like family now.

Ava went back to watching the weather and I let my eyes out for a run. Though her face was hagging out, her body belonged to a woman in her prime. She wanted to give me a show, it didn’t bother me none. The door proved to be stuck open. I eased in and perched on a straight chair set next to a dresser with its drawers stove-in. Her room was shabbier than ours. Rat turds speckled the boards along the molding and spiderwebs spanned the corners. The bed was so swaybacked, some of the springs were flush to the floor.

—I sneaked a look at your photograph album last night, I said.

—Oh? What did you think?

—I think you’re damn sexy for a woman’s gotta be in her fifties.

—Sixty-one, she said. I’m sixty-one.

—Okay. A woman in her sixties. And Carl, how old is he?

—Carl. Her smile had a fond quality. Carl’s ageless.

—Squire, too. He ageless?

—In a way.

She crossed to the bed with a three-step stroll and laid herself out, back against the headboard, arms spread on the pillows. Her pubic hair was trimmed to a neat strip and she had a long waist to go with her trophy chest. She reminded me of this naked woman in a painting one of my high school teachers had prattled on about, some rich horny bitch from another century lying on a couch and looking at you with a similar scornful, seductive attitude.

—If you want to come over here with me, it’s all right, she said.

—I’m fine where I am.

—Leeli won’t mind, that’s what’s worrying you.

—You don’t know nothing about that, believe me.

She shrugged, smiled.

—Why would you even want me to come over there? I asked. We ain’t got nothing going on.

—I like sex.

—So do I, but…

—Oh I see! You have to like the girl first. You require an emotional attachment.

I didn’t care for her mocking me and I was tempted to fuck her knock-kneed, but that would have been playing with her deck. I don’t have to like her all that much, I said. Helps if I like her some, though.

Her smile cut itself a wider curve. You don’t like me a tiny bit?

—I ain’t even sure what the fuck you are. Whyn’t you clear that up for me?

The rain came harder, spitting through the window screen, drops darkening a wedge of floor beneath it. Some giant’s stomach grumbled and the light dimmed.

—You gonna shoot me if I don’t tell you?

—That wasn’t my intention.

—No? Yet you come in here with my gun on display.

—Just making a point.

—The point being, you might be prepared to shoot me.

—You want me to shoot you? You keep pissing me off, maybe I will. Don’t seem like it would affect you that much, anyway. Or is it just the boys who’s good at taking bullets?

This was the first real conversation I’d had with Ava. I’d seen that on the outside she was a cool, collected sort. Now I was coming to think coolness ran deep in her, that instead of a heart, a little refrigeration unit was humming in her chest, pumping out frosty air. She seemed like a lotta women I’d known who’d survived bar fights that passed for marriages. Women who felt you couldn’t do nothing more to them than had been done already. Yet I didn’t accept that picture of her. She was too steady, too unconcerned. I had a notion that her steadiness came from a perception of my weaknesses. Like she was X-raying me, reading all my flaws.

—You’d like me to tell you a story, she said. Is that it?

—A true story. I don’t want no fairy tales.

—All right.

She proceeded to whip one off about how she and Carl had been dating back in the 60s while she was in high school and he was in college, and they had gone down to State Road 44 to look at the flying saucers and have sex, and a saucer had abducted them, worked some weird change on them both, and set them back on earth for God knows what purpose, maybe just as test subjects, and they were prodded this way and that by alien agencies—powerful ones that penetrated every layer of society, even the FBI—and they were always being put in strange situations, and this was why they had been at the house in the dunes when Leeli and I showed up.

I was about to ask if Squire was an alien agent, one who was doing the prodding, when she launched into a second story, saying Carl and Squire had been hybrid clone babies, grown from human eggs and alien juice extracted from a dead UFO pilot, and she’d been in charge of them when the government decided the experiment wasn’t producing any valuable result and decided to kill the two boys, so Ava, with the help of highly placed friends, had run off with them, and they’d been pursued for a time, but then the government changed their minds and thought the thing to do was let the boys run, acquire life experiences, and see if they developed into a crop worth harvesting. They lived in constant fear of judgment, she said. Never knowing if the government would change their minds again. She was worried that Carl shooting the Hojo’s manager might be the last straw and the government would send their killers.

I wondered if she could’ve tapped into my thoughts of the night before and devised these stories to suit my tabloid fantasies. Why’d you tell two stories? I asked. You told me just the one, I might’ve believed it.

—You’re not a believer, Ava said. You’re a doubter. Don’t matter what I say, you’re gonna pick at it.

The rain had ceased and you could hear everything dripping. A bluejay began jattering and a dog started going crazy at the sound. Four-legged somethings, probably squirrels, skittered across the roof. All those noises, it was like the world was surfacing to snatch a breath before the rain went to drowning it again.

—Carl’s my son, Ava said. He’s the spitting image of his daddy. He’s dead…Carl Senior. He was killed in a car wreck right before we was about to marry. I was already pregnant. Carl was born retarded and he’s got lotta other problems. There’s this disease makes his nerves not work right. He can’t hardly feel a thing. It’s killing him. I don’t know how much longer he’s got. Not long, I expect. Squire, he’s just this fella I met in a bar over in Boynton Beach. He keeps me happy and he’s simple enough to relate to Carl. Carl Senior’s daddy worked for NASA. One of the directors. Even though I never married his son, he was kind to us. When he died he left a trust for me and Carl. The house where you met us? He had it built for us. Pulled some strings so we could have access. The government don’t care about the land no more and his friends make sure people leave us be when we’re there. Ava crossed her legs and clasped her hands behind her head. That fly any higher for you?

—You’re a piece of fucking work, I’ll give you that, I said.

Ava grinned. You’ll never know ’til you cut you a slice.

—What the hell you hanging around with us for, you got all this money?

—I like Leeli. I like you, too. Different, though. I was enjoying myself with y’all until yesterday.

—The thing gets me, I said after studying on things a patch, is how come you don’t seem so worried about your son or your old boyfriend or your experimental subject, whichever he is…about him committing murder.

—Oh we’ll be all right. I got confidence in you.

—Now that’s a lie.

—You got us outa Ocala, didn’t you? With your experience in these matters and my money, we’re gonna do fine. I was thinking about Mexico.

—Mexico?

—Uh-huh. I was thinking I’d charter a plane and we’d lay low for a few and then jump on over. After Leeli finishes her time with me, the two of you can skedaddle. Twenty thousand’ll go a long way in Mexico.

—Whyn’t you just call your bigwig friends to haul your ass outa this?

—Maybe I will, things don’t go well. But you know how it is, Maceo. You got a favor in the bank, you want to hold back from using it long as you can.

My thoughts skipped back and forth from story to story. I didn’t believe any of them, but I kind of believed them all. I suspected there was a spoonful of truth in each, or that each was a standin double for a truth she hadn’t spoken.

—It don’t matter who I am, who Carl and Squire are, she said. We still hafta deal with the problem.

Trying to decide what to believe and what to do about it tied knots in my thought strings. Ava lay grinning at me, looking from the neck down like a dessert tray. I gave myself a nudge toward the bed, pretending to buy the proposition that if I tore one off with her, I’d have a better feel for the situation. Old hayseed philosophers gathered in the boiler room of my brain, swapped round a bottle, and spewed dipshit wisdoms: You can’t say how a peach tastes ’til the juice runs down your chin. Staring at the groceries don’t tell you who the cook is. Video footage of a naked, sucked-dry corpse, its mouth wrenched open in a final agony, was playing in the den, with graphics reading ALIEN EMBRACE KILLS REDNECK LOVER. I stayed where I was, speculating pro and con upon what I might be missing.

The door shrieked as someone shoved against it. Squire squeezed on in, followed by Carl. Squire glared at Ava, at me, and Carl beamed. His bandage was soaking wet, smudged with dirty finger marks.

—Hi, honey, Ava said.

—That man went for food’s coming down the drive, Squire said.

—That’s nice. Soon we can have us a feast! She patted the bed, an invitation, and Squire, good dog that he was, laid down beside her. Carl gazed at the chair I was on for a second, then plunked himself down on the floor next to the bed. Squire began toying with Ava’s nipples, kissing her neck. The rain swept back in. I heard a clattering from the front of the lodge, a door slamming, but I didn’t turn from watching Squire and Ava. The rainy noise seemed to be tightening the space around us, compressing and heating the air. I told myself the minute Squire started taking off his clothes, I was gone, but there was something mesmerizing about Ava, about the lush, lazy strain of her belly, the slow surges of her hips, and the way her eyes would graze me every so often. I felt the cold pull of her. The sexy warmth of her surface was a dream and beneath lay an undertow that sucked all the swimmers who’d strayed out past the bar into whatever deep lightless place her story really sprung from. I had a glimmering of how it would be to go with the flow, to stroke hard and arrow down into her dark, to reach the great secret at the bottom, whether toothy maw or golden kingdom, it wasn’t much important, because you were bound to be part of it, and as Squire’s fingers traipsed between her thighs and her hips lifted, I thought what I was feeling now was closer to the truth than anything she’d said, and knew that she was willful and careless and irresistibly strong. The instant I understood this, however, I declared bullshit on it. I was watching a dirty movie, I told myself, and not falling down no rabbit hole.

—Fuck y’all doing? Rickey had popped his head in and was gawking at the bed, where Squire and Ava hadn’t missed a beat.

—Notice how the entire school turns as one, Carl said happily.

—Hallelujah! I said. The single mind’s directing.

Rickey slid himself in past the stuck door. I could see he was hoping to get in on the act, but was all puffed up and ready to be outraged in case he couldn’t. Goddamn it! he said, and stepped over to the window,getting a side angle on the center ring. I don’t want no weird shit going on in my house!

—God, no! I said. There’s never been no weird shit like people fucking and people watching going on out here. Not in this holy temple.

Rickey might have said something back, but his mouth stopped working, because right then Ava opened her legs and Squire started wrestling off his jeans.

—That’s Ava there showing her rosy, I said to Rickey. Squire, he’s the boy ’bout to have some fun. Down there in the front row, that’s Carl.

—In concert, said Carl. In simple harmony and balance.

—Carl’s got this kinda religious thing going, I told Rickey.

This inspired Carl to point at me and say, Hands up! Who wants to die?

Rickey pricked up his ears at that, but again gave no response. Squire had climbed on board the Ava train and was making tracks for the station, giving out with chuffing noises. The springs backed him up with a jangly, crunchy rhythm and the rain kept drumming and Ava sang a lyric with a single breathy word. Carl nodded, smiled. Rickey’s eyes cut toward me—I expect he was wanting a sign it would be okay for him to mix in.

The floorboards creaked. Leeli had crept in and was nailing me with a .45 caliber stare. She said, You asshole!, and ducked back out. Catching a last glimpse of Ava’s heels and Squire’s pimply backside, I wheeled up from the chair and after her. I checked the porch and saw Leeli standing with her arms folded out in the rain. I didn’t think she was crying or nothing, just had a mad on. Rickey came up at my shoulder and said, Hey, man! Is that Ava, she doing everybody?

—Don’t be shy, boy. Ask her.

—You serious?

—She ain’t gonna screech and hold her knees together if you do. She’ll just tell you yes or no.

—Cool.

—You might wanna wait to ask ’til Squire’s finished, I said as he turned away.

—Oh…yeah. Okay.

—But you better go back on in now. You wanna be there so you can get next.

He set off again and I called to him, asked where the food was.

—Kitchen, he said and slipped into Ava’s room.

Eight Burger King take-out sacks were resting on the kitchen table. I found one full of double cheeseburgers and carried it onto the porch. Leeli! I shouted, and waggled the sack out through the hole in the screen door. I got burgers!

Her head twitched, but she didn’t turn. I sat on the porch steps under the porch overhang and unwrapped a cheeseburger and had a bite. Soaked through, Leeli’s yellowy white hair had the look of the down on a baby chick. She glared at me similar to how this drunk Seminole boy I’d met in the Panama Beach lock-up one fine morning had glared: sideways, his shoulders rolled forward, with his close eye wide and the other narrowed. I figured Leeli and that Seminole had about the same ambition toward me.

I finished the burger and Leeli stomped over, snatched the bag and switched past me into the lodge. Don’t you come after me! she said. I’m not talking to you.

—I hear you, sugar, I said. I’ll be right in.

With her belly full, Leeli’s mood improved. She was near to purring, curled up on the bed and looking out at the rain, but still it took me a few tries to drag her into a conversation. I was just sitting there, I said, when they started going at it. What you expect me to do? —Leave, she said. I know how Ava and Squire get. You had plenty of warning.

—That mean you watched ’em?

—She wants me to!

—Then why go beating on me about it?

She clammed up, so I worked another angle, and when that didn’t satisfy her, I said, ‘Member what you told me ’bout how you felt sometimes Ava was drowning you? I think I got a taste of what you were talking about.

A little something tweaked behind Leeli’s face, but she didn’t let it out.

—Yeah, it was strange, I said. It was like she was pulling on me. Maybe that’s why I kept setting there.

—She’s a witch, Leeli said. I swear she is.

—I don’t know ’bout that.

—That’s right! You don’t know fuck all! I’m telling you she’s got this power…it just eats away at you ’til you’re nothing. ‘Til you’re like Carl or Squire.

I spun this around and then said, That’s how come you think Carl and Squire are slow?

—Sometimes I think that. Leeli picked at a fray on the pillowcase. Sometimes I think she just wore ’em away.

The witchy woman had tried to draw me close and drown me in her power. This seemed crazier than what Ava had told me, but only a little. Thinking about Ava as someone who left you hollow inside but still walking around wasn’t that tough a chore. I’d known regular folks who could do the same sort of job on you and I said as much to Leeli.

—Naw, un-uh, it’s more’n that. It’s what you were saying. She pulls at you, but she’s not playing you. It’s who she is, know what I mean? It’s like that’s all she is…this force.

A lightning crack ran violet down the eastern sky, like we were inside a gray egg that was cracking open in the middle of hell. The thunder came a few seconds later.

—You pull at me, too, I said. Know that? You been pulling at me since New Smyrna.

Leeli’s face went little-girl serious and big-eyed.

I eased down beside her, laid a hand on her hip.

—I’m scared, she said. Ava wants to go to Mexico. I can’t think what to do.

—Let’s leave tonight. Let’s just go.

—Where? Where can we go?

—This old boy I got to know in Raiford runs with some bikers got land over ‘round Palatka. Cops never come near their place. We could stay ‘long as we want.

—Maybe you’d be comfortable with a buncha bikers, but I wouldn’t. She snuggled in closer. Maybe we should go with Ava and the second we get to Mexico, that’s it. Money or not.

—I don’t like the idea of traveling more miles with her.

—It’s the safest way. Won’t be no security to pass through with a charter. Leeli picked up my hand from her hip and moved it around so I was holding her. ‘Less you got something better’n bikers.

I considered Lauderdale, but Lauderdale was a hell of a drive and we couldn’t stay for long at my friend’s house.

—Ain’t you scared? Leeli asked. I can’t tell if you are or not.

—I’m past scared, I’m on into survive. That’s why I say get shut of ’em now.

We left it hanging that way and closed the door and got foolish on the bed. Desperate straits and the desire to forget them lit up our nerves and made us better lovers. Leeli like to have died in my arms and my heart was sprained and limping in my chest, I worked it so long and furious. I left her drowsing and went into the kitchen and had another burger and a purple milk shake that tasted like nothing purple and puddled like melted plastic in my stomach. The TV was playing in Rickey’s room. I figured Ava must have kicked him to the curb.

I returned to the bedroom and drifted beside Leeli. My flesh felt light and insubstantial and everything had the sharpness of an important memory, how you feel the thing remembered before you see and smell and taste it. It was like the world itself was forming a memory that used me how a pearl uses a sore spot, sealing me in so I could be dug out at some later date to be admired. The rain blew slanty, then straightened out, then it blew sideways and the lightning moved closer. The air darkened to an ashy color. Things bumped and clanked against some section of the lodge. You’d have thought the rain had turned to chains. The marsh grass rippled with pantherish fury, twisting and flowing in every direction. The storm smell was ozone and dank trouble.

Sleep wouldn’t take me. I got dressed and padded down the hall to visit Rickey. He was in his chair, scratching himself, watching the local news with the sound low. He gave a disinterested, Hey, and paid me no mind as I drew up a chair.

—You get laid? I asked.

—Damn! Did I! That woman’s got some evil fucking ways!

Rickey didn’t look much different for the experience and I thought the last shriveled-up scrap of soul must have been sucked out before Ava got to him.

He craned his neck to see me. How long y’all staying?

—Day or two. Why, you wanna go again with her?

—She promises not to kill me.

—Better ask for the pony ride next time.

Rickey coughed out a laugh and spat into the garbage alongside his chair. He spaced out on the TV and I couldn’t think of anything more to say. Rickey wasn’t much of a talker but he enjoyed people with him when he watched his programs. I knew if I didn’t hang out a while, he’d feel he wasn’t being respected, so I sat there dead-headed, peering at his mess. Must have been every kind of candy wrapper in the world scattered around that floor. It was like investigating a cave where some sick animal had puked up a month of bad meals. The next time I glanced toward the TV, I saw a blonde woman in a pants suit with her microphone stuck in the face of the gray-haired reverend I’d manhandled back in Ocala. I told Rickey to hit the volume, and when he was slow to act, I grabbed the remote and did it myself. The reverend shook his head mournfully and said, There was so much confusion, I don’t know which one actually fired. It was the skinny one I saw holding the gun, but that’s after the shooting. All I can tell you for certain is I heard somebody shout, Hands up! Who wants to die? And then I heard the shots.

—Hands up! Who wants to die? The blonde reporter acquired a serious look as the camera went to a close-up on her. Vikay Choudhoury responded to that challenge with a hero’s answer and now he lies dead. She paused for effect and said, This is Gloria Renard. Channel Twelve—

I thumbed the mute button. There was a cold spread of panic inside me, like I was standing on the edge of a cliff and had just lost my balance.

—You get on outa here, Maceo! Rickey stared at me through the straggles of his hair. I mean right fucking now!

—I didn’t kill nobody, I said.

—I don’t care you did or you didn’t. Every damn cop in Volusia knows who it is says that dumb fucking hands-up-who-wants-to-die bullshit. You think they won’t be snooping ‘round here? Wonder is, they ain’t here already.

—We can’t leave now. They be on us ‘fore we get clear the driveway.

Rickey reached down beside his hip and produced his pistol. I’ll shoot you my own self, you don’t get on out.

Anger was a cold snake snapping out of me. I ripped the gun from his hand, then I stood and began punching him. He tried to block the first couple with his forearms, but each one was a lesson I’d been taught to deliver, a preachment of old pain. The blows drove him lower in the chair until his butt was hanging half off the seat and his head was jammed into the join of the cushions and there was blood in his eyes. I couldn’t have said why, but the sight of him unconscious jabbed another red-hot stick into my brain. I smashed the pistol against the wall again and again. The trigger guard fell off and the cylinder popped out from the housing and I threw the rest to the floor. I knew Rickey was right about the cops. Maybe that was what set me off. That and recognizing how good a look at my face I’d given everybody in the Hojos. When God invented the notion of crazy trumping common sense, He must’ve had me in mind for the standard model. Everything considered, it was a goddamn miracle I’d come this far in life.

The storm lived around us. Seemed the lodge was a battery discharging thunder cracks and splintered lightning that made stretches of churning marsh grass bloom for unholy seconds against the dark gulf of land and sky. I told Leeli about Rickey and the reverend and the cops and tried once again to persuade her to leave with me. She wouldn’t budge. Mexico, she kept saying, was the way to go. I didn’t put up all that much of an argument, having no better choice to offer. We brought Ava and Carl into the conversation, leaving Squire asleep, and stood on the porch in the flickering light and hashed things out. The storm appeared to frighten Carl. He sat in one of the rotted porch chairs, his hands to his ears, rocking his upper body.

Leeli said she knew of a little rural airport west of New Smyrna where we could charter a plane, no questions, and Ava said she and Carl and Leeli would use Rickey’s car and take care of it right away.

—Like hell! I said. We’ll go together.

—You crazy? You know how it is when there’s a big storm, Ava said. Accidents and drownings. Cops’ll be all over the highway. There’ll be roadblocks. They see you, we’re finished.

—That’s right! Leeli said. They gonna be too busy to worry ’bout looking for us now.

—I’ll be damned I’m gonna let you run off without me, I said.

—We can’t run off! Won’t nothing be flying ’til the storm blows out. But we set things up, we can fly soon as it does.

—Just you go then, I said to Ava.

—I can’t leave Carl. You see how he is. And I need Leeli to point the way.

A pitchfork of lightning ripped away the dark and the thunder had a metallic sound, like somebody was pounding out a dent in the sky. Wind shivered the lodge and slammed loose boards.

—Naw, I said. Leeli can give you directions.

—What if I get ’em wrong? You got Squire here. Ain’t that enough of a guarantee?

I couldn’t see Ava’s face in that moment, but I thought I felt slyness steaming off of her. Tell her the directions, Leeli, I said.

—All those country roads. Leeli put a hand to her brow like a mentalist trying to make contact. I can show her, but I don’t know I can tell her.

Rain drove in through the screen and we all moved back from it except for Carl, who just sat there rocking.

—I don’t trust you no more’n you trust me, I said to Ava. We gonna have to work something else out.

Another lightning flash brought leached colors to the porch and fitted a long shadow beneath every object. Things looked to be tilted, as if the wind had knocked the lodge askew.

—Hang on, Ava said, and went off toward her bedroom.

Leeli caught my hand and said something I didn’t catch, but had the sound of an assurance, and then Ava came back out onto the porch and handed me a thick envelope.

—Fuck’s this? I asked.

—The rest of the money I promised Leeli. You can hold it while we’re gone.

Leeli’s eyes got stuck on the envelope as I inspected the contents. Hundred dollar bills and plenty of them.

—That guarantee enough for ya? Ava asked. ‘Tween Squire and the money, it’s ’bout the best I can do.

I stuffed the envelope into my hip pocket. Leeli unstuck her eyes. I could see it was a strain for her and that she didn’t love the idea of leaving the envelope behind. All right, I said. I started to deliver a warning, to pose consequences, but there didn’t seem much point to it. We all knew the lay of the land.

—All right, I repeated. Let’s get it rolling.

You know how it goes. Sometimes you’re so deep in the world, so mired in its trouble, you forget that you were born, you forget you were raised to be a dead man, you think you got where you’re standing all on your own and that you’re holding destiny in your hands, and when somebody passes you a golden ticket that’s stamped Freedom or Foreverafter, you don’t check to see if the ink’s dry or if there’s printing on the back, because you’re walking the road your daddy cut for you and stepping along in clothes your mama sewed, because it’s the tendency of your kind to believe the lottery can be won, great prizes are within your grasp, and though the only winning ticket ever came your parents’ way was an error in their favor made by a bartender or a grocery clerk, though you understand you’re their homemade fool, you just can’t accept that the rules of their life apply to you. That golden ticket is a guarantee all right, a twenty-four karat guaranteed loser. You know this in your heart, but you hang onto the bitch like it was a pass through the Gates of Glory or a voucher for an all-expenses-paid weekend at Casino World on the Redneck Riviera, whichever premium you prefer.

Thoughts such as these slammed my head as I dug through Rickey’s pockets, hunting for his keys. He was still unconscious, his face swollen from the beating I’d supplied him. Looked like he’d pissed off a swarm of bees. The keys were in the bib pocket of his overalls. I stood jingling them in my hand, holding a last debate over the wisdom of giving them to Ava. An old movie was playing on the TV. Japanese men in moonsuits were gazing awestruck at a fleet of flying saucers that soon began incinerating them with fiery beams. Watching them turn into bright wavering silhouettes and vanish somehow made my decision for me.

Things moved right smartly after that. Ava and Carl went for the car, Leeli gave me a pert little kiss and said, Be back soon, and ran off after them. I patted my hip pocket to make certain the money was still there. A minute later I was standing on the porch steps, watching a pair of red taillights, one patched with duct tape, jouncing along over the uneven ground toward the highway, shining up tracers of rain. I had a moment of dissatisfaction with my decision and I pulled Ava’s gun from the waist of my jeans with half a thought of shooting out a tire. The car stopped at the end of the drive. There wasn’t any traffic I could see and I wondered what was going on. A creep of paranoia stirred me from the steps and out in the rain. I imagined Ava and Leeli arguing over whether or not to betray me. Thunder mauled the sky. The car swung out onto the highway. I felt like six kinds of fool, with the rain running down my neck, alone as ever was, the gun cold and weighty in my hand.

The night grew wilder yet, the thunder continuous. A ring of fiery stick men a thousand feet tall jabbed and flashed on the horizons, penning me into their magic circle. There was such a confusion of light and sound, it rooted me to the spot. Behind the lodge a clump of palms bulked up solid, taking the shape of a black frowning Buddha in my mind, scrunched up and angry from having me in his sight. It seemed I could feel the wickedness of that place and time, the mortal separation from the flow of life that wickedness enforces. I was flying, stranded on a scrap of soggy marsh that had been chewed off from the planet and set to spinning loose in the void. The rain needled my cheeks and brow, spitting alternately dark and silver. The lodge looked to be changing shape, crouching like a beast one second, the next blurring into an emblem of negativity, a symbol on a rippling banner, then collapsing back into the ruinous thing it pretended to be. I had the idea this was my night, my big moment, that I was being showed a reflection of everything I’d said and thought and done, the chaos of my life given larger, windier form, and this was the only celebration of my useless days I’d likely get, this storm too small to have a name but big enough to damage the unprepared, the tore-down spaces, the vacant properties of the world. Then I glanced south to where Ava and Carl and Leeli had gone and saw a flash of green. Not a dazzling seam and not the dull flicker of heat lightning, but a dynamic burst of bright neon color like an enormous bug zapper taking a hit. The color hung in the air, draping its afterimages around the palm crowns, and I recalled Ava’s story about the green light coming from the UFO. I tried to think of something else it could have been. I expect there must have been a hundred possibilities, but I couldn’t come up with one. The rain slowed to a drizzle and as if the green flash had been a cue, the storm began to fade, flaring up now and again with a grumble and a distant snip of fire, then fading even more, its battery running low. Drips and plops succeeded the fury of the wind. Through scudding clouds you could glimpse a freckling of stars, and soon a slice of moon surfaced from the horizon. I knew Carl and Ava and Leeli were gone. It wasn’t the flash that told me so. Too many thoughts were flapping around in my attic for me to work that part of it out. The alignment of the world, the wrecked lodge and foundered cabins, the swaying grasses and the dark water slurping at the mucky bank, the stars and all the rest—it was like a sign saying Gone had been struck through every layer of creation.

Naturally I didn’t entirely believe this sign. Despite Ava’s anything-goes attitude toward screwing, I figured Squire must do something special for her, and I just knew Leeli wasn’t about to leave that money on the table. I patted my hip pocket again and this time I found nothing. No bulge, no envelope sticking out. I patted my other pockets and looked on the ground close by. Since I’d come out from the porch to watch them drive away, I hadn’t hardly moved a step, but there was no sign of the envelope. I told myself the wind must have took it. I searched along the edge of the water, near the porch, and as I was poking around in the grass, kicking scrap wood and fallen shingles aside, growing more desperate every second, because with or without Leeli I needed that money to get clear of Volusia County, it occurred to me there might never have been an envelope. Maybe Ava was that much of a witch. Maybe she’d handed me a parlor trick, an illusion, and made Leeli and me see what she wanted. Maybe Leeli had been in on the hustle and just pretended to be worried about the money. It was her, wasn’t it, led me to Ava in the first place? The missing envelope and the green flash and the stories Ava told, they all washed together into a stew of possibilities. I couldn’t separate out anything from it that sounded more than half true.

I stopped my searching and stood by the water. The clouds had slid off to the north, except for a wedge that was convoying the rising moon. The stars were thick. It was as if there had been no storm, just a gentle rain that smeared the vegetable smells around into a sickly green sweetness. I told myself I must be wrong about everything. Before long they’d be pulling into the driveway, talking about our plane ride. But fool though I was, I wasn’t that big of a fool. I could mumble all the pretty wishes I wanted to, but gone was still the impression I got.

I felt like a baby trapped under a bear rug, unable to crawl, too smothered to cry, and I must’ve stood by the water damn near an hour, trying to poke holes in the weighty thing that held me down. I was flummoxed by a question I wasn’t even sure had been asked, stumped and dumb, unable to work out a plan or think of a direction to travel in. I didn’t know what to do. Hitchhike out of there? Drive away in a van every cop in Central Florida was probably on the lookout for? Heading into the marsh and living off mullet and gator tail was about my only option. The skeeters began to trouble me. Mostly I let them have my blood, but I spanked a few dead. Seemed like I’d been living with my brain switched off and now a recognition stole over me not just of how fucked I was at the moment, but how fucked the normal weather was in Maceo’s world. Everything was returning to normal. The frogs squelched up their bleepy cries. Cicadas established a drone. A fish jumping for a bug out in the marsh made a squishy plop and I could have sworn it was my own heart’s sound. Squire came out onto the porch steps, rubbing his stubbly scalp, sleepy as a tick full of juice, and asked, Where they all at?

—Went to charter a plane.

He gaped at me. They gone? Ava and everybody?

—Yeah.

—We gotta go find ’em! He tripped on the bottom step and reeled out sideways into the yard, catching a furl of the rusted screen to right himself. He was wearing jeans that still had creases in the legs and that stupid T-shirt with his face spraypainted on it Ava had bought him in Silver Springs. Move it! he said. We gotta find ’em now!

He got to scooting around the yard, little dashes this way and that, like a dog with the runs in a hurry to locate a good place to do his business. Which way they go? he asked.

—I told you. They went to charter a plane somewheres ‘round New Smyrna.

—They ain’t gone to New Smyrna! Dumb motherfucker! They ain’t going nowhere near New Smyrna!

Usually somebody calls me a dumb motherfucker, I don’t have much of an argument. It’s not much different from saying that the grass is pretty green or the water looks wet. But Squire irked me with his agitated movement and his two round faces, the one on his chest smiling, the other scowling, both of them staring at me.

—Leave me be! I walked off a few paces and gazed out into the marsh. With the passage of the storm, heat was coming back into the world. A drop of sweat trickled down my side. The air was slow and thick and humid. Something with curved black wings scythed across the low-hanging moon. A dullness swept over my thoughts, an oppressive, clammy feeling like the first sign of a fever.

—You just gonna stand there? Squire grabbed onto my shoulder and spun me about. We gotta get us a move on!

—Don’t put your hands on me, I said.

—Aw, Jesus! He wheeled away from me and looked to the sky. Thank you for sticking me with this ignorant fucking hillbilly!

I refitted my eyes to the marsh, the stirring grasses and the moon-licked water to the east.

—Goddamn it! Squire said. You’n me, we need to work together. I can find ’em!

It struck me that he was speaking with more authority than he’d previously displayed, but I didn’t concern myself with this. Wasn’t that it didn’t tweak my interest, just I was more interested in the way my head was emptying out, like a car engine giving little ticks as it cools.

Squire went to hammering at me, trying to rouse me to action, and finally I said, What you want me to do, asshole? Drive you around in a stolen van ’til we get popped?

—We don’t hafta go far. Won’t be on the road more’n a few minutes.

—They been gone an hour…maybe more. You think they just circling out there?

—Trust me, man. I know what I’m talking about.

—Trust you? I said. Fuck you! Now I told you, leave me be.

I stepped away along the shore and stopped at the very edge of the water, my shoes sinking into the muck, wanting to restore the glum yet comforting acceptance into which my thoughts had been sinking. Squire followed me, giving orders, pleading, working every angle. Didn’t matter what he said, it was all the same to my ears, a yammering that bored holes in my skull and poured itself in hot and heavy like lead into a mold. I told him to shut up. He kept at it. I told him again to shut up and it didn’t even put a hitch in his delivery. I was acting like I had shit for brains, he said. Behaving like a child. Didn’t matter what he said. Every word hardened into a white-hot ingot, stacks of them crowding the space between my ears. I tried to see past him, past the heat growing inside me, looking to cool my eyes in the lavender cave of sky among the last clouds where the moon floated. It wasn’t a help.

—What do I gotta do, spell it out for your sorry ass? Squire said. What the fuck’s it gonna take to get through?

He punched at my shoulder with the heel of his hand.

—Don’t be doing that, I said.

—It don’t bother you, you set there and watched Ava and them roll off into the fucking sunset, but this here—he punched at me again—that bothers you?

A thready strip of cloud spooled out across the moon, a golden bridge unraveling.

—You are hillbilly shit piled high, y’know that? Squire said. I heard him kick at the ground and then his voice came from a distance away: Guess you must like the idea of ol’ Ava licking your girlfriend’s pussy.

I turned on him, seeing only those two ugly round faces, one atop the other mutant-style, and I lifted my right hand. I was kind of surprised to see the gun—guess I’d forgotten I was holding it—and maybe it was surprise twitched my trigger finger, or maybe another flickering snake tongue of anger. Or maybe I just wanted to kill him, though I had the notion somewhere in the back of my mind that he was not a man, he’d eat the bullet, lie there a while, then sit up all of a sudden the way he’d done back in Ocala. The shot punched out the left eye of his lower face. He gave a melancholy grunt, like a hog disappointed by its supper, and went spinning to the ground. Heart’s blood came from his chest in such a hurry, it might’ve had somewhere more important to go. Speckles of wet dirt clung to his cheek. His one true eye was open blind and the other was pressed into the earth. I thought I heard a voice of wind and rustling grass say my name in welcome.

You might not understand, but then again you might, how when you reach the end of the road and still find yourself breathing, the unraveled threads that tied you to your life resemble a puzzle you could easily have solved if you’d been one ounce smarter or one inch less crazy, and you think now that you’ve gained a perspective, you can probably develop some sort of reasonable explanation for all the crap you hadn’t understood, but when you gather those threads up they hang limp from your fist and don’t none of the frayed ends match, and you realize they weren’t really connected, they had no more connection to each other than stalks of dead grass floating on marsh water, and everything you depended on being true was just a tricky kind of emptiness that looked like something real, and so when I tried to fit Squire cooling out at my feet and the bossy way he’d acted in with Ava’s stories, it only made a deeper puzzle, one I knew I’d never get straight.

I kept the gun aimed at him, hoping he’d sit up, halfway hoping he would just so I could shoot his ass again. Anger seeped out of my skin, leaving me shaky. The painted eye on Squire’s chest smoldered. I had an urge to throw the gun into the marsh, but I didn’t have enough fire in me to follow through and I dropped it on the ground. Thing to do, I realized, was to gather food and whatever else I could use from the lodge and hightail it into the marsh. I’d need the gun. My chest felt scraped hollow and filled with cold gas. It cost me some effort to reach for the gun. I bent over halfway, put my hands on my knees, and stalled there. A black rope was being pulled through my head, scouring out the positive thoughts.

—Stand up straight, motherfucker!

Rickey was leaning against the side of the porch, holding a sawed-off 12-gauge with a taped grip. Didn’t appear he could see out of one eye, but the other was working good and pinned on me.

—Come thisaway! he said.

I walked a few steps toward him. He gestured with the sawed-off and told me to sit.

—You a cocksure son-of-a-bitch, leaving me alive. Rickey spat a dark wad of blood and saliva.

The wet soaked through the seat of my pants. Rickey started toward me, weaving a little, then thought better of it and leaned back against the porch. His face was all lumped and discolored, like an atomic war radiation victim.

—I saw you kill that boy, he said. Kill him how you’d do a sick dog. You didn’t useta be that cold, man. Something happen in Raiford make you that way?

I didn’t have no answers for him.

—You liked to kill me, but I don’t kill so easy. Rickey fumbled in his pocket and fetched out a cell phone. One fine morning a few years from now, they be strapping you down and fixing to kill you. You remember me on that day, Maceo.

He thumbed three numbers, gave a show of doing it so I’d know he was calling 911. I drew up my knees and rested my head on my arms. Rickey talked for a minute, too low for me to hear.

—Hey, Maceo!

He’d moved to the steps and was sitting on the bottom one, the sawed-off angled across his knees.

—Hands up! Who wants to die? he said. How you like them apples, huh?

A queer little road of moonlight slithered off along the water into the east. I wished I could follow it. I wished there was a tree with hundred dollar bills for leaves growing out behind the lodge, and that Rickey was too weak and sore to pull off both barrels before I could reach him, and that the end of this world was the beginning of the next, and I wished I’d had more time with Leeli.

—I feel them police dogs panting, Rickey said, stretching out his legs and getting comfortable. I feel that heat humming out along the road.

It come to seem all like a painting, then. One you’d see in a museum with a brass plate on a frame enclosing a night on the marshlands south of South Daytona, a night wild with stars and a wicked moon hanging like a bone grin among the remains of the running clouds, a gray tumbledown lodge with a stove-in roof and a lumpy, bloody man sitting on the steps, aiming a chest-buster at another man sitting in the grass, and a corpse lying near the water’s edge, gone pale and strange. It would look awful pretty and have the feeling of something going on behind the scenes. Like silver nooses were hanging from the stars and important shapes were hiding back of the clouds, big ones with the heads of beasts, showing a shade darker than the blue darkness of the sky. It was that rich, dark blue give the picture a soul. The rest of it was up to you. You could study it and arrive at all sorts of erroneous conclusions.

—Damn if I don’t believe I can smell ’em, Rickey said. Y’know the smell I’m talking about? That oiled-up leather and aftershave smell them state pigs have? He spat again. You shouldn’t go fucking over your friends, man. It just don’t seem to never work out.

I took another stab at explaining things to myself. Witches and spacemen and scum of the earth. Somewhere in all that slop of life was a true thing. I knew in my gut it was an amazing thing, unlike any you’d expect to meet up with on your way through hell, and I believed if I was to chew on it a time, jot down a list of what I saw and what I thought, I might understand who Ava and Carl and Squire were. But I’d always been bound for this patch of chilly ground. It wasn’t worth pursuing how I got there, whether it was some old dog of a reason bit my ass or fate jumped the curb and knocked me down an unknown road.

A thought of Leeli twinged my heart. Appeared I’d cared about that old girl somewhat deeper than I knew.

The air-horn of an eighteen-wheeler bawled out on the highway, something huge going crazy, and trailing behind it, almost lost in the roar of tires and engine, a siren corkscrewed through the night.

Rickey spat up more blood.

Like they say, shit happens.

I figure that about tells it.