A light rain's begun to fall outside and the man reaches and pulls the gla.s.s door closed. Cher lifts her head and makes a soft noise with her nose. The runaway smiles and feels warm in her blanket and knows she's safe here.

'Who are you?' she says to him.

'Charles P. Shoemaker the fourth, last in a long line of weirdoes.'

'You fix shoes?'

'Good guess. I fix horses. Try 'n' fix 'em, I suppose is a better way to say it.'

She looks at him, reaches for the gla.s.s and takes a drink. 'You ever fix a broken chick before?'

'Nope. Shoulda fixed my ex-wife, the tramp. Tied her tubes up like a balloon giraffe.'

The girl laughs and takes another drink of water and sets the gla.s.s back down. 'Well, there's a first time for everything,' she says.

'Yeah, that's what they say.'

After a moment she says, 'Thank you, Charles.'

'Chuck.'

'Thank you, Chuck-for helping me. I'm really all alone out here.'

'No family?'

'None that I care about.'

'A beau?'

'What?'

'A boyfriend.'

'He's who did this to me.'

Chuck doesn't know what to say to that.

'He's a critic for the LA Times,' she says softly, her mind going hazy again. 'I think he loves me. He just didn't like it 'cause I'm a rising star in the City Ballet and I-'

'Shhh,' says the man. 'You just rest. You're gonna need some real convalescing.'

'Fancy word,' she says through a broken smile.

'I'm a fancy guy,' he says and spits into the sink on the wall for effect. 'You got a cracked tibia. You're gonna need to keep your leg elevated and get some rest. You can stay here till you're better. Then you can climb on that ridiculous scooter of yours and sail the seven seas to your heart's content. Just don't be a G.o.dd.a.m.n daredevil.'

Days spent slowly walking the grounds on the crutches he gave her, out to the edge of the farm where an electric fence-line runs, horses in, wolves out. These jagged mountains in panorama, each breath of high desert air a weird miracle in her lungs. Charles P. comes and goes like a shadow. She sees him in the distance, hears his truck in the driveway, watches him pa.s.s by a window, or out in the field, they'll share a smile, a wave, a pa.s.sing word.

One afternoon she sits at the base of a big lonely tree, a ways from the house, her back against its trunk, her eyes shut against the bright sun on her face. A very pregnant mare makes its silent approach and now stands by and lowers its white head and touches its mouth to the stripper's brow.

'Huh,' she breathes, halfway lost in her sun-dazed head, opening her eyes to find the animal towering above.

Reaching her hand up to meet the mare, the girl sets to lightly stroking the crown of its head, the tight coa.r.s.e hair above its big dark eyes.

'Where'd you come from?' she asks and the horse shoots a breath of warm air from its wet nose, glad of her touch. 'I guess you should be wondering the same thing about me,' she says, still soothing its head, and looks past the white mare to some faraway point on the horizon. 'I was born on the coast of Maine, but somehow ended up in Venice Beach, sea to shining sea. My real name's Desiree, my stage name is Desire, and now I guess I'm Gloria. What's the difference anyway? This world will drink a girl dry and p.i.s.s you out and never even ask your name.'

Next night she wakes from a dream and gets dressed in the dark. She sits at the edge of the bed and stares out the gla.s.s door, her breath the only sound.

Shouldering her backpack she gets to her feet and works the aluminum crutch into her armpit. She makes for the door, parts the sliding gla.s.s and hobbles through the yard in silence towards the shed where her little black steed awaits. Now she's got her helmet on. Now she turns the key.

In her dream she walked along a rushing stream in a quiet wood, her naked feet landing easy on the moss and kicking up last year's leaves as she went. Smell of pine. Sun through the trees. Then by and by she came upon a girl no more than ten sitting on a rock at the water's edge, dangling her toes in the current. The dreamer smiled to see such a quaint sight. Just like a postcard. But when the child turned to her and their eyes met, her smile turned to cancer because she knew the little face as her own, knew the purple barrettes and how sad and f.u.c.ked-up the pa.s.sing of time is, knew the halting voice that asked just one thing as she woke, 'How could you let this happen to us?'

Late in the afternoon, Joe the Deputy pulls his white and red Ford into the Dairy Queen parking lot, whistling along to a Pink Floyd song on the radio. He checks his hair in the rear-view mirror and fixes his greasy part and opens the squad car door with a s...o...b..x in his hand and heads for the maze of tables under the blue tarps where he knows his big hot siren awaits.

Joe's spent his whole life in Gay Paris. His father was a full-blooded Mohawk who made his living playing a wild Indian at the Carson City Western theme park down on Route 32. There he shot arrows and led the rain dance and threw tomahawks into trees and rode a sad horse bareback and drank himself to sleep in the dark when the gates were locked. When business dried up and the place closed down, it's said the old diabetic left his insulin in the refrigerator of his camper one night and walked into the woods and never came out. A half-hearted search party gave it a week before they ruled him dead. And to this day Joe's old mother Bea swears his father comes to her as a hawk at the window of her little room in the nursing home up the road, Serenity Grove. And with the home shopping network blasting on the TV and a black feather in her pale braid and a cup of Earl Grey in her thin, bony hand she'll tell her son the hawk came with secrets last night, news from the other side, a message from Auntie Arleen, a warning from so-and-so, don't work the night shift next week, Joe Boy, something will happen, don't drive past the c.o.ke house so slow, they've got your number, and so on. And though he loves her like crazy, the Deputy has never taken much stock in the old lady's voodoo. He grinds his teeth when she talks this way and his high brown cheekbones tell the story of his heart: Man, I wish I could believe in this s.h.i.t, maybe if I did I wouldn't be fifty-six years old and so alone.

But all that changed the morning he came upon Debbie's burning trailer and she pulled him into the bushes and whispered in his ear and gave him a weird handjob to the crackling of vinyl and particle board so he'd not call the fire truck just yet and so he'd hide the gas can she used to light the fire in the trunk of his car and never tell.

Now here he is, ducking his head under the tarp to find her blind son teetering slowly in his creaky rocker back and forth beside a small chest of drawers with ceramic frogs on top. The cop takes off his hat and says, 'Hi Black Jesus.'

'Hi Joe.'

'Brought you a present, man.'

'Why?'

'I don't know, figur'd it'd cheer you up. It's nothin' really, just somethin' I had when I's a kid. Found it in the closet and thought you might like it.'

Joe squats down before the rocker and puts the s...o...b..x in the soldier's hand. Lionel takes it and sets it on his lap and starts to lift the top but stops as he hears his mom kick open the screen door she hung in the DQ entry. She strides out with lipstick on her mouth and a violet ribbon in her dirty-blonde hair.

Her uniformed stud looks her up and down and says, 'Well, look at you.'

'Ditto. Whatchu bring my baby?'

'I was in the process of finding out,' huffs Lionel, 'till you two honeymooners got goin'.'

'Well, open it,' she says.

'Yeah,' says Joe. 'Open it.'

The blind boy takes the top of the s...o...b..x in both hands and lifts it and drops it on the gravel. Then he reaches in and feels the worn wooden handle, follows it up till it turns to metal, smells the metal, smells the age, feels the cool sharp head.

'An axe?'

'Close,' says Joe. 'It's a tomahawk.'

'What's he gonna do with that?' says Debbie.

'I thought I'd teach him to throw it.'

'Throw it at what?'

'Trees.'

'How the h.e.l.l's he-'

'Mom,' Lionel breaks in.

'Yes, honey?'

'I like it. Thanks, Joe.'

'It just looks dangerous,' she raves. 'You know he's on painkillers. Plus I bet you anything we could get thirty bucks for it if we put a tag on it. At least thirty, it's a antique, maybe even-'

'Mom!'

'Yes, honey?'

'It ain't for sale.'

As he speaks, a hybrid rent-a-car pulls up and two good-looking men step out and approach the country bazaar.

Joe eyes them and whispers, 'Check out these two h.o.m.os.'

'I don't give a rat's a.s.s if they're eff-in' Jihadis so long as they buy somethin',' snaps Debbie in a whisper and Joe shuts his trap.

'Can we help you?' she calls to them in her sweetest voice.

The taller one answers in an English accent, something as remote to Gay Paris, New York, as a white tiger, 'We saw the sign for the flea market.'

'Indeed you did. I a.s.sure you gentlemen we got somethin' for everybody.'

'Yeah, I think I saw a b.u.t.t plug in the bin,' whispers Joe and Black Jesus chuckles, his hands on the hatchet.

'Lovely,' says the tall one in leather pants who's picked up a cold war era globe and begun to spin it round.

'In London we call this sort of thing a car boot sale.'

'That's a globe,' say Debbie.

'No, this,' he makes a sweeping gesture with his hand. 'When people try to sell their junk.'

'That's cute,' smiles Debbie. 'But as you can see, we've got a whole h.e.l.l of a lot more than boots to offer. Generally we say garage sale. Or yard sale. But we figur'd flea market had a more worldly ring to it.'

'A little cla.s.sier,' adds Joe.

'Yeah,' says Black Jesus.

The Englishmen look down at the strange soul in the rocking chair, his dark shades, his stoned grimace, his sweatpants, his army boots untied and his big thumb petting the hatchet blade.

'No arguing with that,' says the tall one and sets the globe back on the table.

'I think it's time to go, Roger,' says the other.

If the map of her country were a paint-by-numbers kit she bought to distract herself from pain, the battered square that is Missouri would be halfway colored in with a dull metallic gray because she would have dropped her paintbrush on the table in disgust by now and gone upstairs to bed.

It's been raining since yesterday and she's holed up in an all-night gas station/restaurant, sitting in a faded red booth with her knapsack in her lap and her head against the window. Outside, a man tries his credit card at the pump and is denied. He takes the card out and looks at it and tries again but is twice denied. He kicks the pump. He spits. He curses it and gets back in his truck and drives out into the rain. Strange, but everything beyond the window takes place in the most provocative silence, every horn blast, every semi roaring by. Even the wind. Even the pouring rain. Knives sc.r.a.pe plates and gla.s.ses clink and sometimes the people in the place exchange words in a language that's become remote to her somehow, though it's the only one she knows. The big clock by the door says 6:49 and she can hear it tick as her broken heart keeps its own funny time. She thinks of a day long ago when her mom picked her up outside 4th grade in their rusty little escort and instead of driving home they found the highway and spanned the entire state of Maine before she fell asleep to the radio and the hum of wheels, the hiss of the motor. All to escape her bad dad. Some things never change.

Next morning she woke in the pa.s.senger seat and her mom was still out cold, the faded Madonna t-shirt she wore catching the morning light, her nipples showing through, her teeth grinding to a dream it would take the girl another ten years to understand. She opened the door very quietly and stepped out into the parking lot they'd spent the night in. It was cold at that hour. And there was only one other car, some old red thing with a square of cardboard in the windshield that read '$850 or Best Offer'.

They were on a quiet highway she'd never seen. A garage in the distance, a white trailer across the road and woods all around. When she spun herself back towards the trees they'd parked under her eyes met a big wooden sign: 'Mystery Spot'.

Time and weather had worked at the paint but she could still read it easy. And what a thing to behold when you're nine. Before life on man's earth has siphoned all the fine mystery away like so much gas from a chainsaw. And walking towards it, the girl felt hot inside and drawn to it somehow. Mystery Spot. And coming close she found a tin box that said 'Take One' and there were pamphlets inside and she took one and folded it into the back pocket of her jeans and then she heard her mom yell, 'Get back in the car-it's time to go.'

Now Gloria looks into her cold coffee. Now she closes her eyes and breathes slowly and opens them back up and unzips her pack and rummages inside and pulls out a brittle paper and lays it on the table. Mystery Spot.

With the rain streaming sideways down the window and a man coughing in the booth behind her and the painkiller she took not helping her leg at all, she sits in this depressed waystation and opens the pamphlet, this relic of her past she's carried with her through all the moves, all the tears and changes: A phone rings in the lobby of the Tigris Hotel but the man at the desk can't answer it because he's dead. The plastic flowers by his hand are just as still as he is and PFC Lionel White is in the stairwell, his black machine gun crossed at his chest, his back to the plaster wall.

That G.o.dd.a.m.n phone.

A paranoid silence coats the second floor like spray paint. Even the dust mites in the sliver of light above the boy's helmet linger and wait in the drum-tight air.

And that terrible phone.

Then gunshots and wholesale mayhem on the landing, six steps up. All h.e.l.l loose in Room 213. All in a day's work. But our Marine is heading downstairs, somebody's gotta answer that phone.

That it's his own voice waiting at the other end of the line is a thing made no less chilling by the simple fact that this is only a dream. Just another square in the quilt of hurt and color and stink that's been st.i.tching itself nightly in his attic room since first he came home from that desert. Babar in his bed.

'h.e.l.lo.'

'Hi Lionel.'

'Who's this?'

'You know who it is.'

'Why are you calling me? There's people dying upstairs.'

'I'm afraid.'

'Afraid of what?'

'I don't know.'

'Say it, p.u.s.s.y!'

'I can't.'

'Say it!'