Chapter 42
Forty-Two
Arthur sucked a breath to shout for Gwen and inhaled a chest full of choking smoke. He coughed, a harsh, racking cough that
felt like it was going to pry bones apart in his chest. Without thinking, he dropped from the stool, searching for air close
to the floor.
He heard shouts. A stool fell. He crawled away from the card table and thumped heads with Allie.
“It’s so dark,” Allie said. “What happened to the fire?”
“Swallowed it, luv,” King Sorrow said. “A little amuse-bouche before the mains.”
At first Arthur didn’t know where King Sorrow’s voice had come from. Then he had a nasty idea—he thought it was possible he
himself had spoken in King Sorrow’s voice. In fact, he thought all of them had replied to Allie as King Sorrow, speaking together. It would explain the way the dragon’s words seemed to reverberate
from every corner of the room.
Arthur made his way along on hands and knees, calling for Gwen. She grabbed his hand in the smoke and the darkness, her fingers
cold, her grip almost painful.
“He can’t hurt us,” Arthur told her. “He’s just trying to scare us. He already had his feast.”
The smoke replied: “Fair play, Arthur. But a dragon on a diet can still look at a menu.”
Gwen tugged on Arthur’s hand. “Come on,” she said, and let go.
He followed the sound of her clambering away, until he spied a long straight silver line of moonglow on his right.
Arthur thought it was the space between the floor and the curtains pulled across the French windows.
Night—and cold, clean air—waited on the other side.
He managed the last yard, felt the rough fabric of the curtain brushing his face, pushed it aside, and looked out onto
the bright glare of late morning under a western sun, so dazzling that it hurts his eyes.
This is Reno. He doesn’t know how he knows, although he can see he’s on a four-lane street, with casinos on two corners and
a gentleman’s club on a third. At this hour of the day, the avenue could not look any more cheap or run-down.
Jayne Nighswander’s eyes are bright with sleeplessness. She wears a tank top with the words cinderella city written across the chest in a glittery Disney-fied cursive and a rattling necklace of what looks like pale pink seashells.
Cinderella City was in Colorado. They had ice cream there at a place called Farrell’s. Jayne had a scoop of peppermint, Ronnie
had a chocolate sundae he didn’t eat. He smoked a cigarette and watched it melt. Later that night, Jayne was in the motel
bathroom, trying to take a dump, when she saw a shape rise behind the shower curtain, a serpentine figure as thick as a Japanese
elm, with a great frill that opened around its head. She screamed and jumped up and pulled the curtain aside. There was nothing
there, but she threw up anyway: a peppermint-flavored mouthful of puke. Arthur knows all of this as if he were there, wearing
her skin, when it happened.
Cinderella City was the last she had seen of King Sorrow, and that was three days ago.
She had not smelled his filthy smoke since; he had not woken her with one of his sly bons mots in the middle of the night; she had not seen his shadow or his scaly claw, nor sensed him sailing through the night, a thousand feet above the car, when they drove after dark.
At some point, late Friday afternoon, it had come to her that they had managed to get clear.
Those Rackham trust fund assholes had been right .
. . about that part, at least. She fingered the necklace around her neck and Arthur saw now that it was half a dozen dried-out garlic bulbs on a plain white thread.
After the Oakes woman won her parole, the bald-headed cyborg named Wren had reached out to Jayne and told her to try garlic, that sometimes garlic repelled creatures that thrived on human fear.
She thought now he had been fucking with her head and having a laugh at the same time.
As far as she could tell, the great serpent took no notice of the garlic at all, though she went on wearing it, had got used to its persistent faint perfume.
Garlic didn’t make a difference, but distance did.
The dragon hadn’t been able to follow them west of the mountains.
They had left him at last on the other side of the Colorado back range.
Probably.
Just in case she’s wrong about that, Jayne spent thirty minutes working on a letter at the little desk in the motel room.
Now she stops in front of a blue mailbox and taps the edge of the envelope against it.
(On his hands and knees in The Briars, Arthur gave his head an unconscious little shake, as if a biting insect were humming
around his face. He couldn’t see far enough into Jayne’s mind to learn anything more about the letter in her right hand. It
bothered him not to know what was in it and who it was for. In the next moment it struck him that the King was happy to show
them most of his cards, his dragon of clubs, his dragon of diamonds . . . but he had decided to keep this one back, a bad
thought.)
“You aren’t the only one with a pet dragon, bitch,” she says, and drops the letter in and closes the hatch on the big blue
postal box.
She doesn’t hear the envelope sliding down the chute, so she opens the hatch again, to make sure it dropped, and an enormous
scaly claw, big as her head, reaches up from inside the darkness and SLAMS down against the open steel drawer. Talons big
as meat hooks punch through the steel. Jayne screams and the hatch slaps shut.
Claws bunched into a fist crash against the inside of the mailbox, creating a great mushroom-shaped dent in the side, and
Jayne screams again and steps off the curb into traffic. A horn wails and she jumps and a panel truck swerves to avoid her.
It whips past so close, the slipstream sucks the air out of her mouth. She staggers back onto the curb. Inside the mailbox,
the dragon smashes his tail against the inner walls. The rivets burst along one side of the container and a drift of letters
pours out. Jayne turns and runs. One cheap plastic flip-flop falls off her right foot. She doesn’t go back for it, can’t go
back, and she wants to cry, wants to shout Not fair! We drove two thousand miles! They said you couldn’t follow me that far and I’m wearing this fucking garlic necklace
and it’s NOT FAIR! but she doesn’t have the breath for it and her eyes blur and she bangs into someone, careens off him, spins and—
—twelve minutes later falls through the door into the dim of their motel room. Ronnie is still asleep. She grabs his hands,
pulls him into a sitting position. His head rolls limply on his neck, his eyelids fluttering. He’s naked except for his jockeys
and his own dried-out and crumbling garlic necklace.
“Wake up,” says Jayne. “It’s here. We have to go. Right now.”
He mewls in his sleep. He’s been dipping into their swiftly diminishing supply of Percocet this last week to take the edge
off his terror. She slaps him—she’s been doing a lot of that lately—to bring him around. She hits him hard enough to leave
a pink handprint on his cheek.
“The fuck, bitch?” he asks, listlessly.
“We have to go. It’s coming.”
He stares at her glassily. “Where we going to go, babe? Wherever we go is gonna be Samarra. Don’t you know that?”
She doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about and doesn’t care.
“I will leave you here,” she says. “I will leave you in his path and hope that buys me a few days.”
That gets him moving. Five minutes later, they’re back on the road, with a quarter of a tank of gas and a little less than
ten dollars between them.
“Where to, darlin’?” Ronnie asks, but she shakes her head and points a finger and he steers them—
—east and south and east again, stitching a line back and forth across the Nevada/California border. They are only 140 miles
from Los Angeles when the engine begins to make a hollow knocking sound. A half hour later, fluffy white steam begins to seethe
up around the edges of the hood. By then, Jayne has come to believe if they can get to LA, they might survive another night.
She reckons they can get themselves arrested and brought to a major lockup. She would like to see King Sorrow come get them
through concrete walls, past a hundred cops with access to riot gear and machine guns.
When the car goes, it happens suddenly. Something shrieks like a teakettle under the hood. Then there is a sudden wham, like someone firing the Ithaca that Jayne pawned for fifty dollars in Pennsylvania. The car begins to hitch along in little jolts.
“There goes the belt,” Ronnie says, with perfect calm.
“No,” Jayne says. “No, no, no. There’s nothing out here.”
“There’s a drive-in,” he says, and nods at a billboard.
THE AMERICAN DRIVE-IN
ONE MILE
YOU’RE ALMOST THERE
HAPPY ENDINGS GUARANTEED!
But when they reach the American—by then they are coasting, slowing steadily—it’s abandoned. Even before Ronnie stops the
car, Jayne knows this is where it will end. He turns them onto a narrow dirt road, weedy and overgrown. The tires thump over
a rusty chain that once barred the way but has long since fallen to the ground.
They pull through the sequoias into a scruffy meadow with the drive-in screen at one end. The canvas is dirty and there’s
a twelve-foot-wide hole in one corner revealing the strut work behind. The exposed wooden beams look like crosses waiting
for the condemned. At the other end of the field is a concrete pillbox that once served as the projection booth. The great
field is filled with even rows of rusting pipes. Once upon a time, speakers sat on top of those pipes, but they’ve long since
been removed.
Ronnie rolls to a stop in one of the rear slots and puts the Ranchero into park. The dusk reverberates with insect song.
“I don’t understand what happened to the Ranchero,” Jayne says.
“It’s like that thing about bankruptcy,” Ronnie says. “It happens gradually, then all at once. I read that somewhere. Maybe
in Hustler.”