When She Was Bad

6

“Doesn’t this thing go any faster?” said Max. He’d tossed his knapsack into the back of the mule, and was facing rearward, with the barrel of the pistol braced on the railing behind the bench seat. But the way the mule was bucking along up the rutted track, he’d have been lucky to hit the taillight-if the mule had had a taillight, that is; it possessed only a single, center-mounted front spotlight.

“Yeah, right, I’ll switch on the fuckin’ afterburners,” said Lily. Being Lilith was second nature to her by now-she hardly even had to think about it. “Look, don’t sweat it-where we’re going, they ain’t gonna be able to follow in that fancy-ass Infiniti.”

Max’s head whipped around sharply. “How would you know?”

Whoops, thought Lily, almost jocularly-somehow, the longer she impersonated Lilith, the more of Lilith’s qualities she began to take on. “Dotted line on the topo map,” she improvised confidently. “Should be coming up right…about…Yeah, here it is. Hold on tight.”

She jerked the wheel hard to the left and steered the vehicle through a steep, uphill, J-turn onto a rutted track only a little less narrow than the mule itself-one side of the vehicle almost scraped the rocky cliff as the mule jolted up the side of the canyon, while the other nearly overhung the steep drop-off.

“Where does this come out?” Max asked her.

“According to the topo map, it swings north back up toward Big Sur,” said Lily, improvising hurriedly as she guided the mule through the first of a series of hairy-looking switchbacks.

“It goddamn well better,” said Max.

Pender slumped forward with his head resting against the top of the steering wheel.

“I’m sorry,” Irene said. In a way it would have been less painful if she’d simply forgotten to bring along her key ring. (Lyssy and Lily had thoughtfully taken only her spare car key.) But she had brought it along: it was in her Coach bag, which she’d left in the Barracuda. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you could…what do you call it, hot-wire it?”

By way of answer, Pender banged his head lightly against the padded wheel-thud, thud, thud.

“No, I suppose not,” said Irene.

“Oh well.” Pender sighed. He sat up again and reached for the door handle. “You know what the Chinese say about a journey of a thousand miles, don’t you.”

Irene: “It begins with a single step?”

Pender: “Bingo!”

But they hadn’t gone much farther than that first step when Pender pointed to the lonely light winding its way up the side of the cliff, a hundred feet or so above the canyon floor. “I thought you said that way doesn’t lead anywhere but the top of the ridge?”

“It doesn’t,” said Irene, taking off her watch cap.

“Does Lily know that?”

“Of course.” She ran her fingers through her damp, flattened hair. “What could she be thinking, Pen?”

“You’re the shrink, you tell me.”

“I don’t know!” Despairingly. “Sometimes I think I don’t know anything anymore.”

“Knowing one knows nothing is the beginning of wisdom, Grasshopper,” said Pender.

Irene smacked him across the arm with her sweaty watch cap. They started off again, and again hadn’t gotten far when Irene tripped over something small and hard. When she saw what it was-the snubnosed revolver Max had tossed away earlier-she knelt down and, under the pretext of tying her sneaker, slipped it into the roomy front pocket of her cargo pants before Pender could decide to pull rank again and take it away from her.

Dr. Al is as gone as the day before yesterday. In his place, a dreamlike sense of motion-bucketing along, rising and falling, swaying, a roller-coaster ride through sheer undifferentiated blackness. Then a vision coalesces out of the blackness, a soundless, slightly skewed, camera’s-eye vision, which Lyssy can neither control nor direct, of a narrow dirt road winding dead ahead through the darkness along the side of a cliff.

Suddenly the camera’s-eye view rotates to the left. Lyssy catches a glimpse of Lily in profile, the hood of her sweatshirt thrown back, her eyes narrowed in concentration and her lips pressed resolutely together as she wrestles with the steering wheel. Lily, he wants to shout-Lily, I’m here.

But before he can figure out whether it’s a dream, or his first experience of co-consciousness, the view rotates around to the right again, then shifts downward, and instead of Lily, Lyssy finds himself looking down at a black pistol gripped tightly in a clawlike, fire-scarred hand.