"Not a singleton," Johnny said. "A pair." He looked up, not quite smiling. "Maybe," he said, "they're Chinese fiddlebacks."
3
Tak! Can ah wan me. Ah lah.
The cougar's eyes opened. She got up. Her tail began switching restlessly from side to side. It was almost time. Her ears cocked forward, twitching, at the sound of someone entering the room behind the white glass. She looked up at it, all rapt attention, a net of measurement and focus. Her leap would have to be perfect to carry her through, and perfection was exactly what the voice in her head demanded.
She waited, that small, squalling growl once more rising up from her throat ... but now it came out of her mouth as well as from her nostrils, because her muzzle was wrinkled back to show her teeth. Little by little, she began to tense down on her haunches.
Almost time.
Almost time.
Tak ah ten.
4
Billingsley poked his head into the ladies' first, and shone his light at the window. The bottles were still in place. He had been afraid that a strong gust of wind might open the window wide enough to knock some of them off the ledge, causing a false alarm, but that hadn't happened and now he thought it very unlikely that it would. The wind was dying. The storm, a summer freak the likes of which he had never seen, was winding down.
Meantime, he had this problem. This thirst to quench.
Except, in the last five years or so, it had come to seem less and less like a thirst than an itch, as if he had contracted some awful form of poison ivy--a kind that affected one's brain instead of one's skin. Well, it didn't matter, did it? He knew how to take care of his problem, and that was the important thing. And it kept his mind off the rest, as well. The madness of the rest. If it had just been danger, someone out of control waving a gun around, that he thought he could have faced, old or not, drunk or not. But this was nothing so cut and dried. The geologist woman kept insisting that it was, that it was all Entragian, but Billingsley knew better. Because Entragian was different now. He'd told the others that, and Ellen Carver had called him crazy. But ...
But how was Entragian different? And why did he, Billingsley, somehow feel that the change in the deputy was important, perhaps vital, to them right now? He didn't know. He should know, it should be as clear as the nose on his face, but these days when he drank everything got swimmy, like he was going senile. He couldn't even remember the name of the geologist woman's horse, the mare with the strained leg--
"Yes I can," he murmured. "Yes I can, it was ..."
Was what, you old rummy? You don't know, do you?
"Yes I do, it was Sally!" he cried triumphantly, then walked past the boarded-up firedoor and pushed his way into the men's room. He shone his flashlight briefly on the potty. "Sally, that's what it was!" He shifted his light to the wall and the smoke-breathing horse which galloped there. He couldn't remember drawing it--he'd been in a blackout, he supposed--but it was indubitably his work, and not bad of its kind. He liked the way the horse looked both mad and free, as if it had come from some other world where goddesses still rode bareback, sometimes leaping whole leagues as they went their wild courses.
His memories suddenly clarified a little, as if the picture on the wall had somehow opened his mind. Sally, yes. A year ago, give or take. The rumors that the mine was going to be reopened were just beginning to solidify into acknowledged fact. Cars and trucks had started to show up in the parking lot of the Quonset hut that served as mining headquarters, planes had started to fly into the airstrip south of town, and he had been told one night--right here in The American West, as a matter of fact, drinking with the boys--that there was a lady geologist living out at the old Rieper place. Young. Single. Supposedly pretty.
Billingsley needed to pee, he hadn't lied, but that wasn't his strongest need right now. There was a filthy blue rag in one of the washbasins, the sort of thing you wouldn't handle without tongs unless you absolutely needed to. The old veterinarian now plucked it up, exposing a bottle of Satin Smooth, rotgut whiskey if ever rotgut whiskey had been bottled ... but any port in a storm.
He unscrewed the cap and then, holding the bottle in both hands because of the way they were shaking, took a long, deep drink. Napalm slid down his throat and exploded in his gut. It burned, all right, but what was that Patty Loveless song that used to play all the time on the radio? Hurt me, baby, in a real good way.
He chased the first gulp with a smaller sip (holding the bottle easier, now; the shakes were gone), then replaced the cap and put the bottle back in the sink.
"She called me," he muttered. Outside the window, the cougar's ears flicked at the sound of his voice. She tensed down a little more on her haunches, waiting for him to move closer to where she was, closer to where her leap would bring her. "Woman called me on the phone. Said her horse was a three-year-old mare named Sally. Yessir."
He put the rag back over the bottle, not thinking about it, hiding by habit, his mind on that day last summer. He had gone out to the Rieper place, a nice adobe up in the hills, and a fellow from the mine--the black guy who later became the office receptionist, in fact--had taken him to the horse. He said Audrey had just gotten an urgent call and was going to have to fly off to company headquarters in Phoenix. Then, as they walked to the stable, the black fellow had looked over Billingsley's shoulder and had said....
"He said, 'There she goes now.' " Billingsley murmured. He had again focused the light on the horse galloping across the warped tiles and was staring at it with wide, remembering eyes, his bladder temporarily forgotten. "And he called to her."
Yessir. Hi, Aud! he'd called, and waved. She had waved back. Billingsley had also waved, thinking the stories were right: she was young, and she was goodlooking. Not moviestar-knockout goodlooking, but mighty fine for a part of the world where no single woman had to pay for her own drinks if she didn't want to. He had tended her horse, had given the black man a liniment sample to put on, and later she'd come in herself to buy more. Marsha had told him that; he'd been over near Washoe, looking after some sick sheep. He'd seen her around town plenty since, though. Not to talk to, nosir, not hardly, they ran with different crowds, but he'd seen her eating dinner in the Antlers Hotel or the Owl's, once at The Jailhouse in Ely; he'd seen her drinking in Bud's Suds or the Drum with some of the other mining folk, rolling dice out of a cup to see who'd pay; in Worrell's Market, buying groceries, at the Conoco, buying gas, in the hardware store one day, buying a can of paint and a brush, yessir, he had seen her around, in a town this small and this isolated you saw everybody around, had to.
Why are you running all this through your dumb head? he asked himself, at last starting toward the potty. His boots gritted in dirt and dust, in grout that had crumbled out from between decaying tiles. He stopped still a little bit beyond aiming-and-shooting distance, flashlight beam shining on the scuffed tip of one boot while he pulled down his fly. What did Audrey Wyler have to do with Collie? What could she have to do with Collie? He didn't recall ever seeing them together, or hearing that they were an item, it wasn't that. So what was it? Add why did his mind keep insisting it had something to do with the day he'd gone out to look at her mare? He hadn't even seen her that day. Well ... for a minute ... from a distance ...
He lined himself up with the potty and pulled out the old hogleg. Boy, he had to go. Drink a pint and piss a quart, wasn't that what they said?
Her waving ... hurrying for her car ... headed for the airstrip ... headed for Phoenix. Wearing a business-suity kind of rig, sure, because she wasn't going to any Quonset hut mining headquarters out in the desert, she was going someplace where there was a carpet on the floor and the view was from more than three stories up. Going to see the big boys. Nice legs she had ... I'm getting on but I ain't too old to appreciate a pretty knee ... nice, yessir, but--
And suddenly it all came together in his mind, not with a click but with a big loud ka-pow, and for a moment, before the cougar uttered her coughing, rising growl, he thought t
he sound of breaking glass was in his mind, that it was the sound of understanding.
Then the growl began, quickly rising to a howl that started him urinating in pure fear. For a moment it was impossible to associate that sound with anything which had ever walked on the earth. He wheeled, spraying a pin-wheel of piss, and saw a dark, green-eyed shape splayed out on the tiles. Bits of broken glass gleamed in the fur on its back. He knew what it was immediately, his mind quickly putting the shape together with the sound in spite of his startlement and terror.
The mountain lion--the flashlight showed it to be an extremely large female--raised her face to his and spat at him, revealing two rows of long white teeth. And the .30-.06 was back on the stage, leaned up against the movie screen.
"Oh my God no," Billingsley whispered, and threw the flashlight past the cougar's right shoulder, missing it intentionally. When the snarling animal snapped its head around to see what had been thrown at it, Billingsley broke for the door.
He ran with his head down, tucking himself back into his pants with the hand that had been holding the flashlight. The cougar loosed another of its screaming, distraught cries--the shriek of a woman being burned or stabbed, deafening in the closed bathroom--and then launched herself at Billingsley, front paws splayed, long claws out. These sank through his shirt and into his back as he groped for the doorhandle, slicing through scant muscle, flaying him in bloodlines that came together like a V. Her big paws snagged in the waistband of his pants and held for a moment, pulling the old man--who was screaming himself now--back into the room. Then his belt broke and he went tumbling backward, actually landing on top of the cougar. He rolled, hit the glass-littered floor on his side, got to one knee, and then the cougar was on him. She knocked him onto his back and went for his throat. Billingsley got his hand up and she bit off the side of it. Blood beaded on her whiskers like skarn-garnets. Billingsley screamed again and shoved his other hand under the shelf of her chin, trying to push her back, trying to make her let go. He felt her breath on his cheek, pushing like hot fingers. He looked past her shoulder and saw the horse on the wall, his horse, prancing wild and free. Then the cougar lunged forward again, shaking his hand in her jaws, and there was only pain. It filled the world.
5
Cynthia was pouring herself a fresh glass of spring-water when the cougar let go its first cry. The sound of it unwound all her nerves and muscles. The plastic bottle slipped from her relaxing fingers, hit the floor between her sneakers, and exploded like a balloon water-bomb. She knew the sound for what it was--the yowl of a wildcat--immediately, although she had never heard such a sound outside of a movie theater. And, of course--weird but true--that was still the case.
Then it was a man screaming. Tom Billingsley screaming.
She turned, saw Steve stare at Marinville, saw Marinville look away, cheeks leaden, lips pressed together but trembling all the same. In that moment the writer looked weak and lost and oddly female with his long gray hair, like an old woman who's lost track not only of where she is but of who she is.
Still, what Cynthia felt most for Johnny Marinville in that moment was contempt.
Steve looked to Ralph, who nodded, grabbed his gun, and ran toward the stage-left opening. Steve caught up with him and they disappeared that way, running abreast. The old man screamed again, but this time the cry had a gruesome liquid quality, as if he were trying to gargle and scream at the same time, and it didn't last long. The cougar yowled again.
Mary went to Steve's boss and held out the shotgun she had up until then barely let go of. "Take it. Go help them."
He looked at her, biting his lip. "Listen," he said. "I have lousy night-vision. I know how that sounds, but--"
The wildcat screamed, the sound so loud it seemed to drill into Cynthia's ears. Gooseflesh danced up her back.
"Yeah, like a gutless blowhard, that's how it sounds," Mary said, and turned away. That got Marinville moving, but slowly, like someone who has been roused from a deep sleep. Cynthia saw Billingsley's rifle leaning against the movie screen and didn't wait for him. She grabbed the gun and sprinted across the stage, going with it held high over her head like a freedom fighter in a poster--not because she wanted to look romantic but because she didn't want to run into something and risk having the gun go off. She might shoot someone up ahead of her.
She ran past a couple of dusty chairs standing by what looked like a defunct lighting control-panel, then down the narrow hall they had taken to get to the stage in the first place. Brick on one side, wood on the other. A smell of old men with too much time on their hands. And too much jizz, judging from their video library.
There was another animal scream--much louder now--but no more noise from the old man. Not a good sign. A door banged open not far ahead, the sound slightly hollow, the sound only a public restroom door can make when it's banged against tile. So, she thought. The men's or the women's, and it must be the men's, 'cause that's where the toilet is.
"Look out!" Ralph's voice, raised in a near-scream. "Jesus Christ, Steve--"
From the cat there came a kind of spitting roar. There was a thud. Steve yelled, although whether in pain or surprise she couldn't tell. Then there were two deafening explosions. The muzzle-flashes washed the wall outside the men's room, for a moment revealing a fire extinguisher on which someone had hung a ratty old sombrero. She ducked instinctively, then turned the corner into the bathroom. Ralph Carver was holding the door propped open with his body. The bathroom was lit only by the old man's flashlight, which lay in the corner with the lens pointed at the wall, spraying light up the tiles and kicking back just enough to see by. That faint light and the rolling smoke from Ralph's discharged rifle gave what she was looking at a sultry hallucinatory quality that made her think of her half a dozen experiments with peyote and mescaline.
Billingsley was crawling, dazed, toward the urinals, his head down so far it was dragging on the tiles. His shirt and undershirt had been torn open down the middle. His back was pouring blood. He looked as if he had been flogged by a maniac.
In the middle of the floor, a bizarre waltz was going on. The cougar was up on her hind legs, paws on Steve Ames's shoulders. Blood was pouring down her flanks, but she did not seem to be seriously hurt. One of Ralph's shots must have missed her entirely; Cynthia saw that half of the horse on the wall had been blown to smithereens. Steve had his arms crossed in front of his chest; his elbows and forearms were against the cougar's chest.
"Shoot it!" he screamed. "For Christ's sake, shoot it again!"
Ralph, his face a drawn mask of shadows in the faint light, raised the rifle, aimed it, then lowered it again with an anguished expression, afraid of hitting Steve.
The cat shrieked and darted its triangular head forward. Steve snapped his own head back. They tangoed drunkenly that way, the cat's claws digging deeper into Steve's shoulders, and now Cynthia could see blood-blossoms spreading on the coverall he wore, around the places where the cat's claws were dug in. Its tail was lashing madly back and forth.
They did another half-turn, and Steve collided with the potty in the middle of the floor. It crashed over on its side and Steve tottered on the edge of balance, frantically holding off the lunging cougar with his crossed arms. Beyond them, Billingsley had reached the far comer of the men's room yet continued trying to crawl, as if the wildcat's attack had turned him into some sort of windup toy, doomed to go on until he finally ran down.
"Shoot this fucking thing!" Steve yelled. He managed to get one foot between the lower part of the potty's frame and its canvas catchbag without falling, but now he was out of backing room; in a moment or two the cougar would push him over. "Shoot it, Ralph, SHOOT IT!"
Ralph raised the rifle again, eyes wide, gnawing at his lower lip, and then Cynthia was slammed aside. She reeled across the room and caught the middle washbasin in a line of three just in time to keep herself from smashing face-first into the wall-length steel mirror. She turned and saw Marinville stride into the room with the st
ock of Mary's gun laid against the inside of his right forearm. His matted gray hair swung back and forth, brushing his shoulders. Cynthia thought she had never seen anyone in her life who looked so terrified, but now that he was in motion, Marinville didn't hesitate; he socked the shotgun's double muzzle against the side of the animal's head.
"Push!" he bellowed, and Steve pushed. The cat's head rocked up and away from him. Its luminous eyes seemed to be lit from within, as if it were not a living thing at all but some sort of jack-o'-lantern. The writer winced, turned his head slightly away, and pulled both triggers. There was a deafening roar that dwarfed the sound of Carver's rifle. Bright light leaped from the barrel, and then Cynthia smelled frying hair. The cougar fell sideways, its head mostly gone, the fur on the back of its neck smouldering.
Steve waved his arms for balance. Marinville, dazed, made only a token effort to catch him, and Steve--her nice new friend--went sprawling.
"Oh Christ, I think I shit myself," Marinville said, almost conversationally, and then: "No, I guess it was just the wind in the willows. Steve, you okay?"
Cynthia was on her knees beside him. He sat up, looked around dazedly, and winced as she tentatively pressed a finger to one of the blood-blossoms on the shoulder of the coverall.
"I think so." He was trying to get up. Cynthia put an arm around his waist, braced, hauled. "Thanks, boss."
"I don't believe it," Marinville said. He sounded completely natural to Cynthia for the first time since she'd met him, like a man living a life instead of playing a role. "I don't believe I did it. That woman shamed me into it. Steven, are you all right?"
"He's got punctures," Cynthia said, "but never mind that now. We have to help the old guy."
Mary came in with Marinville's gun--the one that was unloaded--held up by one shoulder. Her hands were wrapped around the end of the barrel. To Cynthia her face looked almost eerily composed. She surveyed the scene--even more dreamlike now, not just tinged with gunsmoke but hazed with it--and then hurried across the room toward Billingsley, who made two more tired efforts to crawl into the wall and then collapsed from the knees upward, his face going last, first tilting and then sliding down the tiles.