(41) Dead Like A River

Want to cheer up a girl? Take her shopping.

We got back on the 68, south to Highway 7 and headed toward downtown. We hit a Goodwill first, where Moira bought two vintage hippie shirts and a seashell necklace, then a dollar store where she got all excited by a pair of dungarees with quilt-like patches on the thighs. Next we pulled in to a supermarket, a Safeway or Kroger's, I forget which, and I bought horseradish, a block of sharp cheddar cheese, and beef sticks. After that we went to a park to snack and drink our beverages, until a security guard sauntered over to tell me that it was not permissible to drink beer in the park. I held the bottle out to him. "You want to finish this off then?" He didn't think that was funny, so we left.

I took Moira around town, its streets narrow and congested, where again I marveled at the elevated monorail system that links together the various university sites. Everywhere were clumps of college girls. The police there have a special unit whose duty is to keep an eye on the welfare of the co-eds. I wondered if the girls found that comforting or a nuisance. I didn't wonder how the men felt about it.

I settled the rat in a greenway by the M River as the sun was about to touch the canopy of green and warm-colored hills. The water was molten gold in places and dark like blued oil in others, oozing past half-submerged roots and stalks of cattails, sliding past us, a current of murmuring blood, so like a warning without words. I put on my leather jacket against the increasing chill. I left it unzipped so Moira could snuggle with her back to my stomach and I could feel her heat and the pulse of her breathing. And the river kept sliding past, going where it must go, having a voice but no choices, forever reaching its end, never dying and never free.

"Where do things go when they die?" she asked.

"Either up or down," I said, recalling my sister's friend, a nurse, who had turned from a patient to prepare an injection, and suddenly felt something go through her from behind, through and then upward. She knew, she absolutely knew, that the patient had died. She turned around to check on him, and sure enough he was dead. Dead like a river.

"I hope sort of sideways," Moira said, pressing a cheek to my chest, "if Alicia is to come. Come and look like me. Or like Roberta. And what would that mean? Why would she look like me? Or like Joe's mom? I can't figure."

"Top talk," I said and linked my hands under her bosom. "But I think it's about changing your past in some way. That's what you want, isn't it?"

"But how? I don't see how. What she did has been done. How could it be undone? She doesn't know anything about how I really felt then, or feel now. She doesn't know what happened to Nightie, her little black cat. She doesn't know how Joe feels, either. She wants him to be normal, but what about me? She just doesn't know how unnormal she made me."

"She doesn't have to," I said. "I don't know what Top thinks he can do to put this right. But whatever it is he's planning, it won't be any more normal than you or Joe, or that witch mother. And it's certain, I think, that the ghost, if there is one, will be something from Top's mind, a manifestation of something within himself, a part of himself. It will personify his idea. If it does anything at all, it will do what is within himself to do."

Moira shivered theatrically. "That's spooky, and I don't even know what you mean exactly. I'll just have to wait and see. You're right, I'm not bored! Even if... well, even if nothing happens I won't be bored. Maybe if it doesn't happen tonight it'll happen later. Tomorrow or whenever. You said there's more than one way..."

She wriggled around and breathed hotly on the hollow of my throat. "I heard you tell Neal that I was a little crazy. You made it sound like we are all crazy. But it's not us who're crazy, it's the crazy things that happen to us, and we just have to be crazy in return. Right?"

"That's as good a philosophy as any. Look, I don't want to have to put up with those four old fuckers at the cabin at dinner. I know this cheap but nice little restaurant. I'll order a double gin and tonic, empty out my water glass, and pour half the drink in it and give it to you with my compliments. We'll order some finger food and just...laugh about things."

"Let's!"

And so fifteen minutes later we were sitting at a corner table that had a red-and-white checkered plastic cloth and a slim glass jar with plastic flowers in it. The lighting in our corner was so dim that we looked like pale shadows with diamonds for eyes.

Moira talked of knowing four guitar chords that were good for any rock song I could name. I said I had ten thumbs that could sort of play the piano. Our mouths were happy with the hot greasy crunchy fish sticks and zucchini; with words that were loosely connected with dreams we had dreamed for years past counting. Mine and hers were not too dissimilar, but mine were aged and tasted like wine that was turning into vinegar, while hers were still fresh with the tang of the grapes.

And the clock ticked above the diner counter where the old men sat flirting with the waitress; the thin red second-hand dropping downward like a troubled scar.

(40) Dead Like A River

"Do you like butter with your ginger ale?"

She held the glass pressed against her stomach. "I think we should take a shower," she said in a quiet disinterested voice.

I set the saucer on a chair by the hot sunny window. "I have a better idea. Let's take a ride. Come on. Put that down on the sill. There's something I want to show you, at the lake. Don't argue."

She didn't. Without any sign of enthusiasm she followed me downstairs. I ignored the two widows who were saying something to me as I crossed the front room with my arm around Moira's shoulders. Neither Top nor Neal were anywhere to be seen, and though I wondered about that I was glad to note their absence.

I put the bottles in a saddlebag, then went back inside to fill a plastic sack with ice, saying to Stella "We'll be back in a couple hours; tell Top the guests will be here at nine," then back outside to set the ice on the bottles, buckling the saddlebag.

Moira watched me like a little girl absorbed in the most ordinary activity. "Where are we going?" she asked. I replied: "You'll see." I put the helmet on her head and adjusted the chin strap while she stared at me quizzically. She said: "You're always taking me to places where you shouldn't."

"I don't know where else to take you. Hop on. You'll like this."

First there was the pungent leaf smell of the woods as we rode fast to Cheat Road, then the faint smell of deep water that grew muskier as we approached the causeway that bridged the dark gloaming lake.

Crossing it I slowed a bit and hoped that Moira was content to breathe in the sights and the freshness of the big blue thing and the greens and reds that bordered it. There wasn't much traffic.  A park ranger in a Ford Bronco waved at us as we passed each other.

I got on the 43 and made the long looping turn that put us on the road to the boat harbor. The parking lot was hard white earth. I chose a spot near the walkway to the dock.

Moira was smiling as I led her down to the whitewashed dock and along the finger piers where big ungainly powerboats and sleek sailboats lay snugly in their niches. There was a cool damp breeze off the lake that stirred Moira's hair and made her eyes look sleepy. We stood at the end of the dock. It was one of those spots where you believe you can stand there forever and never get tired.

"Do you believe in mermaids?" I asked her.

"Some people do," she said happily.

"But do you?"

"Sometimes."

"It's only important that you believe in them now, here, in this place."

"Suppose I do, then. Don't mermaids drown sailors?"

"No, those are Sirens who do that. Mermaids rescue swimmers and take them to shore."

"I'm a Siren, then, I must be."

I looked at her to see if she was still smiling. She was, but I put that down to the view and the effects of the breeze.

"No, you're a mermaid," I said. "You were abducted by an evil witch who tried to turn you into a Siren, but she failed."

"She didn't."

"Ultimately she did. You just need to claim your true identity."

She shucked her shoes off, rolled up her pantlegs to her knees, and sat down, dangling her feet in the water. "Ooh! Cold. I know what you're trying to do."

"No you don't."

"I do. And I don't mind. I'm glad you brought me here. To the lake, I mean. I like it that it's so big. So much water. But not too big, not like Lake Superior. That's TOO big. You can't think of it as anything but an ocean. But this is just right, I think. It's not too small, like a pond is, or a little lake that freezes in the winter and can be ice-skated on."

I was rolling a smoke. "Why does it matter how big or small it is?"

She shrugged, splashing the water with a foot. "I don't know."

"Pretend you do."

"Well, okay. It's too small to be a scary ocean that pulls you away from the land until you are lost. And it's too big to be a bathtub where evil witches can hurt you. Alright, can curse you. It's not a secret hidden place where you can drown a kitten and not be seen."

"That was the curse," I said. She looked up at me as if I was a stranger she wasn't sure she could trust. Then she shook her head. "Yeah. Maybe."

She splashed with both feet for a little while. "The only way to end the curse is to kill the evil witch, Mr Hangman, and that's what Top wants to do. He does. I know he does. But he has to protect himself from Neal, the bad man." She looked up at me again. "So there's not much chance he'll be able to get rid of her, is there?"

I said, as confidently as I could, "There are other ways of getting rid of her that don't require mystics and seances."

"Right! Just put an axe through her head. I wish... but I wouldn't do that. Joe wouldn't want..."

"Why are you calling him Joe?"

"I don't know."

"Pretend you do."

"Help me up. I want a smoke."

I got her on her feet and she gathered up her shoes while I lit the roll and held it out to her. "Don't dodge my question."

She blew smoke in my face and laughed. "I hate questions. Well I don't hate ALL of them but some I do. Hadley."

"Hadley what?"

"Hadley hates it that I call him Josie. She thinks I perverted him. She says I pervert people. Have I perverted you, William? Have I? Should I give up trying to find you, and go home to find somebody I know?"

The happy mood was gone.

(39) Dead Like A River

Two things happened at once, and I felt as if I were suddenly awakened. More than that; like I had escaped something. I had been freed. But...temporarily.

Moira was talking about renting a canoe, if there were any to rent, and paddling across the lake. Neal came out to the wooden porch and stood with one hand on his hip socket and the other hanging at his side, flexing its fingers. He was staring at nothing, and so was Moira. It was as though the three of us were in three different places; and that I was the only one who was 'awake.'

I had felt that I wanted to avoid Neal, but now I wanted nothing more than to go talk to him. I got up from the bench. I resisted the urge to sit back down. It was Top, using his mind on me. He didn't want me talking to Neal. He didn't want Neal to reveal a certain thing to me, and Neal himself was resisting this idea of silence, realizing that it was not his idea, but Top's. Neither was it Moira's idea to glide across the lake in a canoe, but, again, the devious Top's. He was trying to overcome her pathological attraction to bodies of water.

Neal didn't see me until I stood in front of him. He focused on me gradually. Then he offered me a Prince Edward cigar, a long slender one.

While I was stripping off the wrapper he said that someone was going to "come out, or get honest, get real," but that he didn't know if this unidentified person was to arrive later or was already here. He added that something was going to "fall, to impact on someone," but that he could not know whether this power was here, now, or was still on its way, from a far distance.

I lit the cigar and tried to make sense of what he was saying in his cool, collected manner. He remarked that he didn't see much use in the terms Good and Evil, since each was simply the reverse image of the other, like holding an orange in your right hand and seeing your image in a mirror holding the orange in its left.

"The more Good is different from Evil, the more it is like it," he explained in a self-satisfied tone. "Differences cause problems, but major differences solve them. Better that everything be alike in the end, after starting out very, very different."

I remembered Top saying that Neal had no disciplined philosophy. Either Neal's view was acquired and thus a philosophy, or it was an expression of a character quality, or flaw. I didn't agree with him but I didn't argue. I just wanted to know what he was expecting to happen.  "You wanted Alicia Grimes to kill herself."

"There is no law against wanting someone to die."

"That wasn't my question. Why did you want her dead?"

He said pompously: "The age-old tragedy of unfaithfulness."

"She was insane, not unfaithful."

"It was her unfaithfulness that drove her mad."

"Not her abuse at the hands of her parents?"

"That's Everett's view," he replied, meaning Top.

"And he's next on your shit list."

"Yes, and I on his, because we are not different enough. I am the orange in the right hand, he the orange in the left. It is time to smash the mirror, and to unify the orange."

"In which hand?"

He made no reply to that. He was looking at Moira, who was blowing over the bottleneck of her ginger ale, making a sound like an oboe.

"If anything harmful happens to her tonight," I said, flicking ash, "I'm going to kill you. And not with my mind."

This didn't seem to bother him. "Why should she be harmed? Is she unfaithful?"

"No, she's just a little crazy. Probably not nearly as crazy as you and I, though."

He turned and went back into the cabin.

"William, look!" Moira was holding something in her cupped hands, standing at the tree line, not far past the picnic table. So I went over to see what it was, the cigar in my teeth.

It was a baby bird, apparently fallen from a nest in the branches above us. "It's still alive," she said tenderly. "What should we do with it? What if the mama bird doesn't come for it in time? I think if I wet some bread crumbs it would eat them. They have to eat a lot, and often, you know. Should we try it?"

I had nothing better to do, so I shrugged and we walked back to the cabin. I recall thinking how absurd this whole thing was; the absurdity brought into sharp contrast by Moira's little act of mercy in a place that hardly knew the meaning of the word.

Stella and Edna were shoulder-to-shoulder at the counter, chopping and seasoning steaks. Top was in a rockingchair by the bookshelves writing in a ledger. Neal was reclining on a couch with an architecture magazine, but not reading; rather staring at whatever was coming together in his mind.

I filled a glass with water, tore a piece off a loaf of French bread, and led Moira upstairs to our attic bedroom while she cooed to the baby bird.

She made a nest of socks for it. I watched her roll bits of bread into a worm shape, dampen them, and try to coax the fuzzy fledgling to eat them but nothing doing. "Maybe a little grease will help," I suggested in response to her panicky eyes. "I'll get some butter."

"Bring us back something to drink too," she called as I started down the stairs.

I was delayed about fifteen minutes by Top, first, who inquired about Roberta and "Josie," as to what time would be best for them to come ("I'll find out from Moira"), and then by the widows, who put a pad of butter on a saucer for me and talked about birdwatching while I stood there holding a beer and ginger ale in one hand, holding out the other in hope that they would shut up and give me the saucer.

When finally I got back upstairs Moira was standing by the window, lit up by the sunlight shining through it like an act of God. She was holding up the glass of water. Floating in it was the baby bird. It took me a moment to realize that.

She looked over at me and said: "Is there a lock on the door? Let's lie down on the bed and talk."

(38) Dead Like A River

There are a number of large and fine houses in this neck of the woods, outside the state park. Top's cabin was an exception; but on the other hand it was an improvement. It was not a violation of Nature, like the big residences are, rather a sort of mutant growth, a thing that seemed to have sprung up among the trees, not something hauled in and put together by what didn't understand the natural habitat. The cabin was slowly rotting away like a hoary old birch, but while it still lasted it was comfortably uncomfortable, as any offshoot of the earth should be.

Even the cement-slab porch looked like a levelled outcrop of granite; the steeply slanting awning of lashed branches surfaced with thick grainy tar-paper. The A frame roof was shingled with slate and the squat chimney made of grey and yellow brick.

The cramped front room doubled as a kitchen. The dining table necessarily stood a little too close to the beat-up furniture, pieces that didn't match; standing there like an uninvited guest that the two scruffy couches tried to ignore.

A brick oven was built into the fireplace. Above the fire itself hung an iron kettle on a rod that could be swiveled outward. On the counter next to the fireplace were modern conveniences, such as a toaster, blender, and microwave. In one corner a stairway led up to the attic where there were two bedrooms. In the back wall were the sinks and faucets. Behind that, the bathroom. And that was it, except for the back door.

I have bothered to describe this because my impression of the place that day was of simple and relaxed camaraderie; a Lodge Hall in miniature, where old friends meet to talk old times and play dominoes or checkers. There was no hint of anything eerie or cold-blooded, unless you put it there in your imagination. Of course I did, but it was incongruous, having just one feeble toe-hold: the dining table where the seance would take place, when only the snickering logs in the fireplace and a candle on the mantle would resist the darkness.

Moira and I went upstairs and chose the attic bedroom that faced the back of the property. There was some idea of maybe spending the night. Looking out the window I saw that a new picnic table had been brought out. Moira, I suppose mindful of what might happen in the night, changed into faded blue jeans and her grey hooded sweatshirt.

I wanted nothing to do with Neal, so when Edna and Stella gave us our metal trays of noodles and toasted garlic bread, I carried the trays outside to the picnic table, Moira following with a beer for me and a ginger ale for herself. We sat down across from each other.

"Wouldn't it be fun to live here," she said and blew on her forkful of steaming egg noodles. "William, do you like to fish?" I said I found it boring unless I could get my mind involved in something else.

"Well, I know what that would be," she said.

Her smile started out wistful and then became just a shade angry; really more like a sadness that was rankled. "Top had a word with me when you were in the bathroom," she began, whispering at first. "I can't remember exactly how he put it. Big words with strange meanings, I guess strange, I don't know. But he said that if a spirit appeared to me it would probably look like me...or maybe like Josie's mom. Top called her Roberta. It was like he knew her, like he's known her for a long time. Kinda like he knew me too, I mean like he's known me forever."

"Why are you upset about it?"

I wasn't surprised by what Top had told her, I had expected something like it. But Moira's frowning face went against what I believed was festering in her head. She bit down on her slice of garlic bread, tasting it with her tongue, then set it back on her tray. She was trying to formulate an answer. Meanwhile there was no wind. The trees stood like Buckingham Palace guards. The smell of leaves gave a queer taste to the noodles. All was calm and natural.

"She's a bitch but she's Joe's mom. She's Joe's mom." Moira glared at me. She had never looked at me that way before. "I tried to tell Top that I was all right with Roberta. That guy Neal was right behind me, with Stella, so what could I say, 'Kill him instead'? And, you know, its weird, but I had no feelings for anybody except Joe. I didn't feel anything for Neal or for Roberta, except that I hate her, but you know what I mean. I don't want Joe hurt. He loves his mom. Well, maybe not that, but he's close to her, even when he wants to get away from her. I'm not making a lot of sense, am I?"

"This kind of thing doesn't make the sort of sense we're used to. Look, you're going to see some kind of spirit tonight. It may look like someone you know or it may not. We are all going to see what we think we see. If Neal believes that Alicia has come to haunt him, if he fears that it's really her and not a figment dreamed up by Top, then Top just might be able to take advantage of that, and stop the man's heart."

"And then what? Will you do it? Will you drop him in the water? You're not worried about Roberta and Joe seeing you...? and seeing me? You mustn't worry about that. Roberta won't tell, she wouldn't dare tell on me. And Joe won't. And the servants are going home after dinner, right?"

"Goddamn it, Moira. I don't know what the hell I'd do. I'm not one for planning ahead much. Anyway I think Neal would be dead as shit by the time I tossed him in the drink."

"No no no! He's out by the bridge, his heart gives out, and he tumbles into the stream. Unconscious. And drowns. We're not there. We find his body later. That's all. I'm not hungry. Do you want this?"

Did I want this?

(37) Dead Like A River

Stella smiled at us and said, "They'll be here in a flash and a half, and then we'll serve lunch. Chinese noodles. His companion's bringing a sack lunch with him, 'cause he's finicky." She left unsaid what she thought about that, and I had my own ideas. Neal was afraid that Top would slip a drug into his food or drink. I said as much to Stella as I took the dust bag from her. There was a small dumpster where the cars parked.

"Oh surely no," Stella said, amused, "he wouldn't do anything so underhanded." But she knew better, and laughed going back inside the cabin.

Moira asked, "Is there a bathroom? I mean a flush toilet and everything?"

I assured her that the cabin, as rustic as it looked, had electrical power, running water, and a sewer connection. She went with me up the drive.  "Josie's mom doesn't want to be here until just before the seance. Do you know when?"

I told her probably around nine; not too early, not too late. We would have dinner first, but Top would abstain from eating an evening meal, and likely Neal as well. Moira remarked that they must be friendly to each other in a way, if Top was bringing Neal with him on the motorcycle. She watched my expression as she said that, but I gave nothing away.

We crossed the bridge. Then she said, "So how close is the lake from here?" and paused to look over the guard rail of the bridge, down at the dark sluggish water. "Is the stream very deep?" She turned and gave me a look of innocent inquiry.

I kept walking, my loins stirring with a mix of arousal and a strange sort of anger. I wondered if she was serious or just teasing me. I had thought she decided to drop the whole business and content herself with maybe seeing a ghost, the real thing or an illusion. She hurried to my side and hooked an arm around mine, telegraphing her tenseness, and I sensed then that although she might not be serious about it in a conscious way, in the depth of her mind she was earnest. Or was I sensing what I wanted to be true?

That disturbing mix of feelings intensified. "Deep enough," I said.

Her arm tightened its hold on me. I freed my arm when we came to the dumpster. When I had dropped the lid back down the sound of Top's BMW bike reached us, a purring whine, then the popping noise of tires on the patches of gravel.

Top parked at a spot near the bridge, as far from us as he could. There would be no handshake or anything like a courteous greeting between me and the step-father of an Undertaker. I exchanged an appraising look with Neal as he stepped away from the bike.

He was shorter than Top, round-shouldered and paunchy, with tightly curled grey hair and a white wisp of a chin-beard. He had a round cheeky face and close-set eyes under spidery eyebrows. He wore a black windbreaker and dark blue canvas jeans, brand new, and shiny slip-on shoes with fringed laces. Sunlight winked from his wristwatch.

He gazed a moment at Moira. She twiddled her fingers at him and smiled tentatively. He smiled back and nodded. Top was silent. He had an uncharacteristically sullen expression. He said something to Neal and they headed off across the bridge.

"This is weird," Moira whispered.

"It's about time you said that." I was rolling a smoke, to let Top and Neal get well ahead of us before we started back.

"No I've always thought it was weird I just didn't say it."

"We're here to make it weirder, aren't we?"

The corners of her lips twitched with an uncertain smile. "Maybe but maybe not. I just want to be ready in case, you know, it happens the way...Top wants it to."

I could hardly believe we were discussing this. I played along. "If it happens that way then I'm to carry the unconscious bastard to the edge of the stream and drop him in." I said this in an argumentative tone, as if it were the chore of carrying a man, and not the evil of the act itself, that ruffled my feathers.

"Look how close it is," Moira said with every sign of encouragement. "It wouldn't take a minute if you hurried. I know you're not afraid. I know you want it to happen. But it's got to be me who does it. You drop him in the water and I go down there to hold his head under."

She was so convincing that I half believed she was sincere. I lit the cig and studied her face through the veil of smoke from my nostrils. She came up to me and reached to lay her hands on my shoulders, then to press them to either side of my neck. She went up on tiptoe, and I lowered my head, so she could kiss me, fully expecting her to laugh and to admit that she had been joking. Well, she laughed, a little, more like a gusty sigh, but there was no admitting anything. I was hard as a rock.

She stepped back, her arms crossed tightly below her small bosom. "I'd rather it be Roberta," she said. "That's the only thing that would satisfy me, really. I mean, that would end it. I'd for sure never forget the feeling. Not ever."

I said, "You're dreaming. Neal might bite it tonight, but there's no chance of Roberta going down in his place."

She waved that away and this time she really did laugh. "You're just too crazy, Hangman! And I'm starving for lunch."

I watched her sasshay off toward the bridge, bobbing her hands like a maestro. I felt a curious disappointment, and an even more curious hope.

(36) Dead Like A River

"I'm keeping Hadley very well informed," Moira said, as though they were the best of friends. "She doesn't always answer, but I know she reads it." With everything settled, she went around to the back porch to do her phone thing, singing as she went.

I found Top at his desk computer in his study. He had been checking his investments and sending emails to his stockbroker, acting just as ordinary as any other wealthy person, even in his choice of clothing: a polo shirt and corduroy slacks. "There ye be," he said absently, clicking his mouse so that homey news of his extended family popped up. He had been married decades ago and his one child, a daughter, was a professor of economics at a college out West. His ex-wife had died of pneumonia, a fate that rankled him inasmuch as the disease can be easily curable, but they had not caught hers in time. He swiveled his chair around to face me as I sat in the armchair next to a decorative pot of dried bamboo stalks.

"Juliette wants to buy the cabin property," he remarked, meaning his daughter, "and build something 'decent' on it. No sense of adventure, that girl, and no appreciation for the crudely simple things in life. Too sophisticated. How is Moira?"

"Skeptical," I replied. I had helped myself to an apple almond muffin he had neglected to eat, and to a bottle of mango wine cooler from the small fridge.

"Is her friend and his mother coming?"

"Probably. And Neal?"

"I spoke with him. He will meet me here, and I'll take him on my Beemer bike."

"You can't really be serious about this thing, Top."

He spread his hands. "Of course I'm not serious about it. You can't be serious and expect this sort of thing to work. You must just relax and have fun with it. No, I mean it. I've explained this to you before. I don't care if Neal drops dead or walks away with a swagger. Well, no, I don't want to see him swaggering. But he and I see it the same way. Indeed. Neither of us cares a whit about the other, beyond a certain grudging respect. The fact is, we have nothing left of our feelings for one another except an intolerable irritation. Yes, I acknowledge his talent, and he mine. I despise his use of it, though. He lacks a sense of propriety. He has always been impulsive to a fault. He doesn't consider ramifications, has no disciplined philosophy. For awhile he did, years ago, when I had some influence over him. But it goes against his nature to abide by a particular world view. He says he doesn't like being enslaved to routine. Doesn't have any habits, he says. He ticks like a clock that has been taken all apart and keeps its own weird time. Such a person doesn't deserve to live. Not in my book."

After a speech like that I couldn't argue with him. I always found his rhetoric convincing. But I had to say: "It's just a game you and Neal are playing. That bugs Moira. You can't blame her if she thinks it's supposed to be serious."

Top smiled, nodding and patting his armrests. "She's correct up to a point. Think of a baseball game. It's a fun sport for those who play it, and yet both teams are serious about winning. I've heard it said that 'Winning isn't everything, but losing is nothing.' I won't be inconsolable if Neal survives, nor will I be quite content to call it a day if he dies in his chair."

"Moira hopes to see Alicia's ghost," I said, changing to a subject that had struck me when I came into the study and saw Top scanning the stock market. "It's about seeing the past and feeling that it still lives, and can be fixed."

"Ah," he said. He stared at the mural on the ceiling: a circle of tigers chasing one another's tail. "Indeed," he added. He reached for his pipe and tobacco bowl. I got up and left the room. I didn't
want to interfere with whatever scheme was evolving in his sparsely-haired noggin.

Two hours later the rat was cruising along Cheat Road, the smell of the lake blowing in my face and Moira's hands gently slapping my stomach to the rhythm of a song on her tongue.

We followed the easy curves of the shoreline, the forest on our left rolling by in greens and browns and reds, an occasional house peeking out from the paved slashes in the woods and the lake sparkling bluely, broad and serpentine.

We passed the causeway bridge and turned off on a narrow private road that plunged between cliffs of trees and through hazy golden beams of a high morning sun. The Ram pickup passed us, going in the opposite direction. A large brown hand waved at me. I gave Ricardo the biker salute with my clutch hand.

I was watching for a tree stump with a rusty mailbox on it. When we approached it I slowed and made a sharp tilting left turn onto a dirt drive strewn with gravel. After about a hundred yards we came to a wide spot on the right where vehicles were to park; Top didn't like anyone parking near the cabin, it spoiled the look of the place.

Up ahead was a wooden bridge that crossed a stream bed, run-off from the lake. We rode across it, the echo of the motor rumbling under the heavy planks. The drive curved gradually to the right. Now we could see the dark wood of the cabin behind a stand of pines, a slope coming steeply down behind it. And we were there.

I parked the rat at the foot of the slope. Moira swung a leg over the sissy bar and danced backwards until she bumped into a tree, laughing. She looked so beautiful in the mix of shade and light, smiling brighteyed at the cabin.

"Hi!" she called when Stella came out on the cement slab that passed for a porch, carrying the dust bag of a vacuum cleaner.

(35) Dead Like A River

Moira was standing just inside the kitchen when Top and I came in from the porch.

She wore her red jeans, a purplish blouse with a ruffled elastic collar and puffed short sleeves. She had rolled up one of my bandannas, a dark red one, and tied it around her head; her hair loose along her cheeks and gathered in a low knot. She had put on make-up: eyeliner and a pale blue eyeshadow, pink gloss on her lips.

She smiled at Top and gave a little wave of her fingers. He greeted her cheerfully. Then she gestured to me to follow her into the living room.

She turned to me and said in her parental voice, "I want a talk with you, William."

I suggested we go out to the front lawn. I sent her on ahead and went back to the kitchen. Top was lifting a square of waffle from the skillet. I leaned over and said, "She may be getting cold feet. She may ask me to take her away from here. She's dressed for a ride."

Top didn't want to hear this. He shifted in his chair, gave me a disapproving look, and said, "She knows we're going to the cabin for lunch, doesn't she? I mentioned it last night, after the movie. I'm having two of my Mexicans" (He meant groundskeepers) "take Stella and Edna shopping for what we need. Don't play up the seance too much to her, now Hangman, you know how these games work. Indeed. We do it for fun really. Ease her mind, won't you?"

Of course he was right to talk me back down to earth. The odds were that the seance would end with guffaws and head shaking and better luck next time. But still, this was not the usual pseudo drama that Top was fond of cooking up. I could not shake the feeling that things would be coming to a head; resulting not in a death, necessarily, but in a resolution that would leave me empty and cold. I couldn't really explain it to myself. I didn't want to.

I glanced out at the Tibetan demon mask, and when I was going out the front door I thought of Gwen, her forlorn face dark and ghostly in the window.

Moira was staring at the water fountain. She noticed me come up to her and she forced a big smile that was gone the next instant. "Josie wants me to text him directions to the cabin when we get there," she said, "so he and...Roberta will be sure to find it." She spoke as if recounting a bad dream. "I know what you think of me. But I don't really want her-- I mean his mother-- to come. I mean 'her' mother. Roberta is so fake. She acts like she likes me and that nothing wrong happened. She always puts her hand on my arm when she talks to me. I want to tell Josie that if her mother's coming then I'd rather they both stay away."

I had an urge to insist that she tell Josie exactly that. But I merely said it was up to her. She was staring at me in a critical manner. "You want me to do it."

I knew what she meant. "I doubt you'll have the opportunity."

"Is it just a joke then? Is Top a fake, too? You said I wouldn't be bored here. Is that all there is to it? Ghost stories and a tea party by the lake?"

I nearly laughed. "Is that what you want me to tell you? Or do you want to hear that Top is a ruthless old bastard who has more than one notch on his Samurai sword?"

"You're not scaring me. Tell me the truth. Is anything really going to happen? I don't think this is a haunted house. If this seance thing at the cabin is just a silly game between two blowhard old men, then there's no reason for Josie and... her mother to come."

I advised her to take it all in stride. I confess that I was aroused by her exasperated attitude. And she knew it, for when I asked her if she wanted to carry it out, she said tersely, "You want me to." Then, looking away: "I think I told you those things last night so you'd, you know, make love to me like you do when I tease you that way."

I considered that, but I didn't believe she was just making it all up last night, with her eyes marbled and the nervous twisting of her fingers in her lap. It had been no different from the other times. I said, "If that's how it is, then we'll pack up and leave. Now."

She seemed alarmed at my suggestion. "It wouldn't be fair to Top if we leave now. He's been so nice to us. We can't just run off."

"Then tell Josie not to come. Tell him to go home with his mother."

She closed her eyes and ran her tongue along her upper lip. She was trying to make up her mind. To help her, I walked over to a tree and leaned against it, taking out my tobacco and papers.

A double-cab Ram pickup came up the pebbled drive and stopped at the side of the house. It was the two groundskeepers. One got out and nodding to me he went to the door and rang the bell. Moira came over and said to me, "Make me a cigarette. I don't feel hungry. I'll wait for lunch."

"Where?" I asked.

"At the fucking cabin. What's it like?"

"Haunted."

The two widows came out of the house chatting to the groundskeeper. They were so chipper and so obviously enjoying the idea of a day at the cabin that it seemed contrived, arranged by Top to put Moira at ease. She noted it and looked up at me with a smirk. I asked, "What about Josie and his mother?"

She examined the roll, then put it between her lips. I held the butane to its twisted end. She coughed smoke and said, "If they really want to come, they can come. But I'm not letting Roberta put her hand on me."

(34)

I woke just before dawn broke. The shower was too hot and I stood butt naked at the open window shivering in the chill draft, rubbing my stomach and chest muscles. On an impulse I touched my toes until I could press my knuckles to the floor. Then it occurred to me that if Moira was lying in bed with her eyes open she could see right up my hairy ass. So I pulled on one of my two pairs of jeans, the cleanest one, put on a red-and-black flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a sock cap, and grabbing my boots and socks went down stairs.

Top was an early riser. Sure enough I saw him through a kitchen window sitting in one of the fan-back wicker chairs on the back porch, in his black felt overcoat, drinking coffee.

The hunchbacked Stella was whipping up some waffle batter and smiled at me. We once played Chinese Checkers, so I was her favorite. I sat at the kitchen table putting my boots on, telling her some biker anecdotes that made her laugh. At the pit of my gut was Moira's strange behavior, which by contrast was floating my sense of humor. It was like an inflatable raft that gives a man lost at sea a sense of security, even though he suspects that the air is leaking out of it.

Stella gave me a toasted biscuit with marmalade, and a cup for the coffee urn. I went out to the porch, filled the cup, Top saying "There ye be," and sat next to him. I wanted to know more about this Neal fellow.

I knew about Top's animosity toward Shovel, and why they were at odds, but all I knew about Neal was that he and Top had taken architectural classes together ages ago, where they met, and that they had kept in touch over the years due mainly to Neal living in Pittsburg, not far from Top's sister, Esther.  But there was something else that bound them, something about "the evil eye," and this is what I inquired after, there on the misty porch with the sky like pale blue smoke to the east.

Top, usually so quick to respond, sat silent for a minute while he went through the antics of lighting his pipe. I couldn't just wait and do nothing, so I rolled a fat smoke. Then he began talking. He started at the end of the story and worked his way backwards.

In Neal he found a kindred spirit too familiar for him to like. Top was amoral. He never considered good and evil, just the legal equivalents of right and wrong. Neal was the same way. They say rules are meant to be broken. For Top, laws were accepted or rejected based on what he felt was the best course of action. He always wanted to set things right, in accordance with his view of how the world should turn, and if the best course, that which was the simplest and quickest way to solve a problem, should happen to be illegal, he dismissed the illegality as inapplicable or superfluous. He was several years older than Neal, had a keener intellect, and was thus the dominant influence on his erstwhile friend. They were more or less equal in psychic talent, something they were slow to recognize in each other. They had each tried to read the other's mind and to manipulate the other's attitudes and actions.

Then one day when they were both bidding for a contract, they suddenly realized that they shared this mysterious power and had been canceling out each other's attempts to control the other. At first the telegnosis was about urging the other to "do right," to make sound decisions, to be a better friend. But over the years it became a tool of the ego, an expression of pride, and gradually their friendship morphed into a dark desire to conquer the other.

Top was not ashamed of this. He called his and Neal's ability "the evil eye," but put no moral weight on it. Evil just sounded better than "the wrong eye." Besides, this power wasn't wrong unless it was stupidly or unproductively used. Violating a person's innermost privacy was nothing to Top, nothing to Neal. There was one reason why Top wanted to avenge Alicia. He wanted to prove once and for all that he was more powerful than Neal, that he understood the mind, and the obscurities of life, better than Neal, better than anybody.

I don't think he felt sorry for Alicia, but he did feel that she had been mistreated, or wronged, by her parents and, of course, by her lover, Neal. I asked how much Neal knew about his, Top's, belief in his guilt. "I told him everything," Top said. "He sensed it anyway. He doesn't care. The Law can't touch him. He is not coming to silence me out of fear that I would bring evidence against him. He simply wants to put an end to my vaunted superiority."

The inflatable raft at the pit of my gut was about ready to explode, so I told him all I knew, or understood, about Moira's deviant urge, her phobia, her outrageous desire to drown Neal if his heart should stop beating; and told him also that behind this was her greater need: to drown Josie's mother instead. Top was fascinated by this. He kept repeating "Indeed?" and clacking his teeth on the pipe stem. Compared to Moira's desires, Neal was insignificant. After all, destroying Neal would not bring Alicia back. But destroying Roberta would most effusively "set things right," as far as Top was concerned.  He was mulling this over when Stella came out and said that breakfast was ready, and that "the pretty thing" was up.

Top smiled at that. He gave me a wink.

(33)

Moira said that Josie had not taken a Greyhound to Morgantown. His mother drove him. Roberta was with him at the motel. She wasn't going to leave until he agreed to go home. He hadn't made up his mind but he was a mama's boy and Moira expected him to give in to his mother.

I had asked Moira earlier why Josie was so interested in Top. She had told him about The Lord of the Roads before she herself knew much about the bizarre element in Top's nature and in what our visit involved. She couldn't put her answer into words very well. It had to do with what Josie had read about the mysterious power of the mind.

He wanted to be a woman. He felt he was a female in a male's body and hoped that somehow he could shape-change into what he felt himself to be, through a psychic means. Anything is possible if one has the appropriate attitude and the confidence to express, and to expect, the desired outcome. What Moira had told him about Top intrigued him greatly. He wanted to see Top at work. He wanted to see what the mind could do. For Moira, it was all about ghosts, of spirits past that could be brought back and fashioned into a new past, a remedied past. She wanted to change the past into something tolerable, something she could live with. But for Josie it was about changing the present, changing himself into something closer to what he felt inside of him.

I remember thinking how accommodating Fate was, pulling a handful of strings to bring together a group of people whose collective desire could birth a fulfillment of each individual need. Ominously, Roberta was a part of this group. She wanted to accompany her son to the seance.

The relationship Roberta had with her husband Edgar was a dark twisted ugly thing that Moira could only hint at. She sensed something hideous in it, like a third person between the couple, a devil who perverted their affection into a mutual hate that masqueraded as love.

This idea has obsessed me for years now, the idea that there is a dark side to love that turns acts of grief into acts of cruelty. It was my experience of Moira and her acquaintances that started this obsession. I was beginning to see this darkness in everyone I knew, including myself. "Love me so I can hate you," or "feel my pain, let me show you what it's like."

In the guest room with Moira gazing coldly at the bathroom door I saw a seed of this darkness. What she wanted, far in the back of her mind, was to plant in the atmosphere of the seance a desire that it not be Neal whose heart stopped, but Roberta's. I knew that Moira was thinking that. When our eyes met I could see it, and she could see that I saw it. But she could not admit to it. Roberta was Josie's mother. Neal was hardly more than a name to her. And yet in her eyes I could see the face of Neal, whom I had never met, changing into the face of another unmet person: Roberta.

I took Moira down to the kitchen for danishes and coffee.

The two widows were in their room watching television. Top was in his study, which he had furnished with Oriental artifacts like his den in the Laramie house. At dinner he had suggested watching the Japanese version of 'The Ring.' He had a wide-screen plasma and Dolby surround-sound in his study. While brewing coffee I asked Moira if she wanted to see the movie. It would be the closest she would come to seeing a ghost that night, so she said yes.

After the movie I wanted to speak with Top in private, but Moira wouldn't go to our room by herself, not even into the living room. So we went to bed.

I opened the window, and getting into bed naked with Moira I sat up rolling a smoke while she chatted like her normal self. We kept away from the seance topic and didn't mention Josie or his mother. All of that was taboo. I got around to asking why she and Hadley Colt were at odds. Why were they so antagonistic toward each other? What had happened?

Without knowing it I had breached the taboo. Moira clammed up. It would be awhile before I learned that Hadley had dated Joe in high school. She had been very fond of him and still was. She blamed Moira for transforming him into Josie. The accusation had gestated in Hadley's head for some time before she vented it. Moira going off with Josie on their hitchhiking trip to Tennessee was what did it.

Moira dodged the subject by recounting why a redneck truck driver, with whom they had gotten a ride in Indianapolis, had stranded her and Josie in Kansas. He had wanted company on his haul to Witchita, and promised to take them on to Topeka where he was to pick up another load. All went well until he discovered that the girl Josie was not really what she made herself out to be. He pulled over on the 70 and told Joe to get the hell out of his truck. So they both got out; and now I knew why Moira had ignored my question about how they came to be under a tree in the middle of nowhere when I came by an hour after the truck driver had dumped them off.

Moira turned her back to me and pretended to go to sleep. But when my hands got friendly with her she rolled over on her back and smiled. Her eyes were bright, warm, sexual, and it was not until the passing of her orgasm that I saw again that seed of darkness.

(32) Dead Like A River

When I had questioned Top on some salient points that had troubled me for the past week, I went back into the house and upstairs to the guest room. Moira was sitting up in bed, propped with tasseled black cushions from the sectional sofa in a corner.

She wore a silk nightgown of red and gold dragons prowling through a bamboo forest. She held her phone as though prepared to type, but her opaque blue eyes were staring into space, her expression dull and pale.

I tossed my jacket on the sofa. By force of habit I began to unbutton my denim shirt. As I stood looking down at Moira my fingers came to their senses and left the button at my navel alone. It was the slow rising of her eyelids that did it.

I went over to the armchair near a side of the bed and sat down. "What are you thinking, Moira?"  She shook her head.

Then with a whining sigh she curled her legs behind her, turning on her side to gaze at me through the cold marble eyes that I knew too well. "Is it true about what happened? You said Top likes to play games."

"He does. But this game has a twist to it. Here's the thing. Alicia kept a diary. In it she wrote that she was going to kill her parents and then kill herself. She died of a slit throat, just deep enough to open her trachea, to drown in her own blood."

Drown. I had used the wrong word. Moira's eyes widened. Her cheeks glowed redly. I went on: "The coroner ruled it a suicide in light of the fact that the two victims suffered deep and gruesome knife wounds. First the mother, then maybe an hour or so later, the father. Had someone other than Alicia stabbed the parents so brutally, this person would have done the same to her. But her wound was almost gentle. Of course, Neal was a suspect and was interrogated. But he had an air-tight alibi. Logic says you can't be in two places at once. So the case was closed, pending any further evidence."

Moira scooted over to the edge of the bed and put her bare feet on the floor. "So he didn't kill her."

I explained to her that Top believed Neal encouraged Alicia, maybe even directed her, to slit her own throat. Neal told the police that he had distanced himself from her several days before the event. He was alarmed by her irrational behavior, so he says, but he didn't know about her diary. Top is certain that Neal used telegnosis to influence her. This is an intense, or extreme, form of hypnosis, and it can be applied from any distance. It's a psychic phenomenon, authenticated through research, as much as any such phenomena can be authenticated. No jury would buy it, of course. You can't use magic tricks for evidence. So Top gets a wild hair up his ass and challenges Neal to a showdown, in the context of a seance. Each will try to induce a heart attack in the other. Actually, to stop the heart from beating. It can be done, especially if you can distract and frighten your opponent with 'ghosts,' or whatever they are. Top and Neal had known one another for a number of years, with no love lost. I think it was mostly ego, but the more intelligent the man the crazier he is; or eccentric. Einstein once said, 'If an idea isn't absurd, it's not worth bothering with.' Top, I told her, would agree.

I had thought this explanation would soften and brighten Moira's eyes; a mundane account of an extraordinary game. But my use of the word 'drown' had struck that maniacal chord in her, and it was still vibrating. I felt then that she was relating the seance and its intended result to her need to 'remember.' I no longer thought that the drowning of Roberta's cat was an act of revenge. Rather, it was a case of Moira wanting to drown Roberta, but having to use a substitute. Apparently the substitution was not adequate. Her anger, or whatever the feeling was that fed her neurosis, would rise again once her memory of the drowning dulled a little too much.

I stared intently at her face as she sat there picking at a gold thread of her nightgown. In my imagination I could hear the tinkling of the fountain and see a dead black cat floating in the rippling water.

She looked up at me suddenly. "Take a shower with me? Let's take a shower."

"Stop it!" I said sternly. But it didn't faze her. She was making up her mind to tell me how she could keep the remembrance of the substitution fresh and strong forever.  She asked me, "When a man's heart stops, does he die immediately?" I said no, but he loses consciousness within twenty seconds or less. Death occurs gradually.

She put her hands to her cheeks, as though what I had said shocked her. "Then there's time," she whispered. I could guess what she was suggesting, but I made no comment. After a minute she mused aloud, "If he had a heart attack and fell into a pool, or... the lake. Well, it would be assumed he drowned because his heart stopped and he lost consciousness."

"It wouldn't be assumed," I said drolly, "it would be ruled an accident or a natural cause."

She sat up straight, twisting her fingers in her lap. "Is the cabin near the lake?"

"Within walking distance," I replied.

She closed her eyes, her tongue playing with her upper lip. "Will Top win, do you think?" I didn't know what to do about this. I didn't know what to think or how to act. I just sat there staring at her closed eyes.

(31) Dead Like A River

Dinner was in the elegant formal dining room, lit by an electric-candle chandelier. I didn't care for the chairs. The backrests of crisscross bamboo reached higher than our heads, so that the three of us, at one end of the long teakwood table, looked like an odd trio of midgets. The dishes were Thai and Hunan. The drinks were rice wine with snakes coiled at the bottom of the bottles; a harsh and potent saki, and iced tea (which Top knew I would appreciate).

It was an enjoyable dinner; the widows soft-stepping into the room every five minutes to see what we might want; Moira having a difficult time chewing with her mouth closed due to an excess of excited smiles.

Top was never at a loss for words. He suited the conversation to things related to the main topic of interest, so as not to wear it threadbare, but keep it tantalizingly out of reach.

Moira and I were not sure how to react to the news Top gave us that Neal, the Undertaker's step-dad and supposed slayer of Alicia, could not make it over that night, but would be there tomorrow evening for the planned seance. Furthermore, Top had decided to switch venues. The seance (a ploy to attract the alleged murderer) was now to take place at his cabin.

That was fine with me but I knew that Moira worried that the postponement might jeopardize her chances of seeing the ghost. She didn't say it, but I could see it clearly enough in her expression. So, of course, could Top. As he was refilling her wine glass he said, "A ghost exists within the emotion that characterized the trauma that ended its life. This emotion is drawn up by the seance, wherever the seance happens to be."

After a dessert of custard pie, Moira went upstairs to our room turning on every light she came to, hoping to dispell a little of the spookiness she felt; just enough of it to be alone without jumping in fright at every snap of noise in the old walls and floorboards. She wanted to try on the silky outfits that hung in the walk-in closet, she said; but I suspected her motive was to call or text Josie. (Top had no objections to inviting Josie to the cabin, but he would have to arrange his own transportation.)

I took a packet of cheroots and went outside in my brown leather jacket, Top following with his pipe and a black felt overcoat. We walked down the drive to the expansive front lawn and into the silvered moon shadows between the trees. "We're going to kill this Neal fellow, aren't we," I remarked matter-of-factly.

"He will die of a guilty conscience."

"You mean of a heart attack, one that you'll induce."

"Indeed. If he gets in a high enough pitch of stress. And I think he will. Alicia will show herself. You do believe that, don't you?"

"I'm open to it. I've seen apparitions."

Top chuckled. "She's in my head, if nowhere else. Do you believe in coincidence?" I said no I didn't. He replied, "Of course not. Neal rented this house from Esther and was living here when he had the affair with Alicia; when the murders took place. And just before that, when I was with Esther in Pittsburg, where Neal is from, I recruited his step-son for the Roadents. This was not long before you joined us. He didn't get along well with Johnny Bee."

I grunted. "Redbone fucked the Bee Man's bitch. And she liked it. She liked it plenty and she told Johnny as much." (I had heard this from Squaw, always a ready and eager source of gossip.)

"Our loss and Shovel's gain," Top said with a satisfied puff on his pipe. "Better that Neal is the step-dad of an Undertaker than of a Roadent."

I turned to light a second cheroot, and blowing a lungful of smoke I watched Moira's silhouette on the blind of the gable window up above, her finger tapping furiously on the keypad of her phone. This meant, and I was right, that she was texting her ex-roommate's sister, Hadley Colt. They hated each other so much that they couldn't get their fill of texting.

Below, in a plot of those noxious flowers, was a fountain pedestal that reminded me of the bird bath at Marcia's apartment complex in Memphis. Then something like a premonition came over me as I listened to the cascading overflow. I suppose it might have been the bowl of rippling water and how the light from a ground-floor window danced on the surface of it that brought on the feeling that the girl upstairs would do something I wouldn't be able to handle very well, if at all. For an intense moment it chilled me.

Top stood beside me, clacking his teeth on the pipe stem as he stared up at the second-floor window.  "She does realize the intended fate of Neal, would you say?"

"I don't think that's soaked in yet. All she can think of is getting a thrill in a haunted house, or during a seance. She probably thinks Neal will be scared out of his wits and run. Or confess and be arrested."

I said that without conviction. It would have been sincere had I not felt that brief chill.

(30) Dead Like A River

Top then turned his attention to Moira. He was 83 at the time but he didn't look a day over 82. Even so he was a charmer. He had a way with women. He was every girl's favorite grandfather.

He knew everything there was to know about life, and could explain it in ways that would confuse and irritate a sociologist. I should say that it wasn't so much what he knew but how he expressed it that was impressive. He was that way with any topic, from the profound to the profane. He could read aloud the nutrition facts on a box of cereal and you would feel that a mystery of the universe had revealed its secrets and you were enlightened. Book-learned professors might snicker at his philosophy, but those of us who had experienced the grassroots of life's versatile and various facets knew that Top was on to something quintessential. He knew what he was talking about.

Moira was charmed by him, but did she give two shits about his quirky intellectual musings on that walk back to the house? No, it was the reputed hauntings, and the murders that had set it all in motion, that captured her imagination; and by the time Moira and I were settled in a second-floor guest room and had returned to the extravagance of the living-room, Top knew what was uppermost in her mind.

This room had a lofty ceiling. At night the few lamps gave off a mustard yellow glow and made the Victorian furniture look like hard hairless creatures frozen in positions of lethargy, or of fear, depending on the topic under discussion. The rugs were a dark red with patterns that suggested the aftermath of a blood bath. Here and there were bronze idols from Asian myths, vessels bristling with incense sticks, gaudy prayer-wheels like little paper carousels, attached to the bottom frames of water-color paintings of misty sugarloaf mountains in China, captioned with chicken-scratch lettering in vertical rows that I supposed were poems.

Top did a good job creating this atmosphere. His live-in servants, two elderly widows who shared a ground-floor room, spent the afternoons dusting and polishing all this stuff and replacing the noxious-looking flowers with fresh specimens. He had mentioned that his sister hated his taste in decor.

The smells of an exotic cuisine were drifting up to our noses when Moira, sitting next to me on a scrolled-arm love seat, asked Top point blank to tell her if the house was haunted.

True to his character, Top had changed into a dark grey robe belted at the waist, had put on a turban and sandals. He answered her while lounging in a similar love seat, a leg bent under the other and a hand absently rubbing an ankle. "A haunting," he said, "is the personification of a trauma." (I had heard this spiel many times.) "It touches us at a deep emotional level and engages our psyche. This results in visual and auditory phenomena that might possibly be a revealing of true entities, or might just be illusions constructed by our excited minds. In either case, a haunting is something we truly experience."

"Who are the ghosts?" asked Moira bluntly. She wanted to get to the heart of the matter and just never mind the explanations. "Are they the parents? Or the daughter?"

Top leaned toward us, very serious. "Oh, the daughter, of course. Indeed. She is the one who is so restless and seeks vengeance against her betrayer, her lover who slit her throat out there in the dry summer woods while she stood staring down at the bloody remains of her victims. Parents don't seek revenge against their offspring, they just lie tormented in their graves. But Alicia! You should see her!"

Moira gasped excitedly and scrunched up against me. "Will I? You think I might? When? Tonight?"

Top sat back, beaming with enthusiasm. "Of course. You are certain to. Indeed. After he arrives. Later. In the deeper hours of the night."  This was what had my interest. "Are you talking about Johnny Bee?" I asked.

Top turned his hollowed-out eyes to me and let me dwell a moment on their curious glimmer. "You remember that night in Laramie, after your initiation, when the Bee Man came to the house? He believed you to be his challenger, an Undertaker pulling a ruse."

I had told Moira about the fight, so I just said, "I straightened his ass out on that deal."  Top chuckled. "And so did the real Undertaker the next day," he said. "I lost a K, but in you I gained a good solid Roadent. No, it's not Johnny Bee who's coming by tonight, but the Undertaker's step-father. You and Moira will find him interesting. But more to our purposes, it will be Alicia who finds him the MOST interesting one of all."

Moira sat up rigidly straight. "He killed her?"  For dramatic effect Top linked his fingers and stared up at the high shadowy ceiling.

I listened to the sounds coming from the kitchen. The food was being emptied from pots and placed in bowls and saucers. The two widows were chatting in muted voices. For them this was just another in a long series of orchestrated drama; Top's occasional theatrics that invariably ended in drunken slumber with nothing to show for it but hangovers in the morning and discussions over coffee about what is real and what isn't. But I had a feeling that this time...

(29) Dead Like A River

From the 79 we turned off on 68, near a bend of the M River (forget it, it's unspellable) and shortly after that onto the access road to Cheat Road. This would take you in a round about way through stretches of forests to the snakey Cheat Lake; but the small cabin Top had in those autumn acres was not our goal just yet, but rather the house off a private drive that split from Cheat Road maybe two miles from Josie's motel room.

The private drive was gated, but a quick swerve around and down a rutted trail led us up to the drive and past a couple of modest homes.

Top's place was set off from the neighbors by a wooded lawn the length of two football fields. It was a two-storey grey house with a green roof and brown-eaved gables, their windows like predatory eyes watching our approach. Moira was squeezing my stomach hard in spasms of excitement. I grinned at that.

There were no vehicles in sight. The broad olive-green garage had its three doors shut; two tabbies lying side by side with their forepaws folded under their white chests, warily watching us cruise in neutral around a garden statue and brake gently to a stop beside a raised porch that faced its twin across beds of withering flowers.

At first I smelled only the oily heat of the hot engine and warm rubber; but walking past the flower beds to the opposite porch was freshened by the mix of tree types, the musky tang of leaf and branch.

The passing of a small commuter plane marred the otherwise quiet scene; that and the soft lazy tinkle of windchimes hanging from the ceramic nose of a Tibetan buddhist demon mask. It hung above a steel coffee urn on a sideboard of the porch, near fan-back wicker chairs.

Top had asked me to wait there until he came to fetch me. I told him on the phone that the girl might, or might not, be with me. I had discussed with Moira the idea of her staying with Josie that first night, but she would not hear of it. "After all this build up? No way am I not coming with you today!"

I considered the coffee urn, but the reckless feeling was still with me. Without a word of explanation to Moira I left the porch and went off across the back lawn, she right behind me, and into the woods.

Does a falling tree make a noise when no one's there to hear it? No, but neither are there any trees to fall when no human consciousness is witness. The forest existed there and then for my benefit; mine and Moira's, who took hold of my wrist as she looked around at the beautiful evil of the woods.

The call of the primal drifted through us. You can not be a civilized man in the woods. You either revert to the base animal nature or that of a native lost in the crudities of his world. I knew something of this spot, this little piece of the woods. A place to drink and piss and lure the willing miss. A place where a man and his wife were murdered by their daughter, who then took her own life, according to the coroner's report; but not according to Top.

He said the daughter was killed by her boyfriend. What evidence? All in his mind. But I knew what his mind could do. He wasn't just a biker enthusiast who played games with human weaknesses and human cruelty. He sought the elusive wisp of justice. "Setting things right by doing things wrong" was his motto. He might just as well say, "The end always justifies the means."

He intended to get even with Shovel (I will eventually explain why and how), and he intended to avenge the murdered daughter. I had remarked, "But she murdered her parents. Fate was the avenger. It arranged for her punishment. Why do you dispute it?" His answer was disarming: "Her parents deserved it."

How did he know that? Well, he just did. He just knew. In my experience, his knowledge of things he could only preternaturally know was always correct. I had come to his house on this occasion to see what he promised to show me: the avenging of the Deadly Daughter by the methods of the Game. I had asked him to explain. But he just chuckled and said, "When you get here. Don't be later than next week."

And so I made sure I got there in time, with or without a troubled but lovable hitchhiker.

"What's here?" whispered Moira. "Is this the scary part?"

The tease devil in me said, "It's the beginning of it."

When she said in a breathless voice, "What's the end? I think we're here to see it," I looked at her as I had often looked at Top, with a mildly amazed surprise. For people like Moira and Top, and I think maybe myself too, there is a parallel road following a little ahead of the road one has chosen to walk, or ride. At spontaneous moments one is on the parallel road, the mystic road that threads the present to the future. Here things are experienced on the emotional level that will be experienced later, on the chosen road.

We called Top 'the Lord of the Roads' not just because our oath to him demanded the designation, but also because he knew the mystic maps of the future and could traverse them at odd times; could somehow merge them with the ordinary map of our lives. This is not an easy thing to grasp or to explain, and I fumbled badly in trying to explain it to Moira. But I think she had an intuitive feel for it. She smiled, even as her eyes grew distant and dark.

Footsteps behind us. "There ye be," said Top. He came jovially, swinging his arms grandly, dressed in faded blue overalls and a fuzzy brown sweater. I introduced him to Moira but at the moment he was only interested in this: "You got in touch with Johnny Bee three or four days ago?"

I said yeah and asked "Why?"

He replied, "Why. It's the one question that we can never really know the answer to."

(28) Dead Like A River

I overslept in Charleston.

We had stayed up late, thanks to our afternoon nap; watched a movie and wrestled through a series of mock rape attempts for the next two or three movies, and, after a snack of Pringles and a shared meatball sub, had finally fallen asleep.

I planned to be up at nine and on the road by ten. As it happened, my trak phone said ten-fifteen when my groping hand found it under a sheet of greasy wax paper.

I lay there with my arm hanging over the edge of the bed thinking there was no hurry about leaving. This led into thoughts of Top and the house his sister had bequeathed to him in the woods near Cheat Lake. I had been telling Moira about my initiation into the Roadents, when I guess I drifted to sleep licking tomato sauce off the fringe of my mustache. The initiation wasn't exactly a complicated business. I smoked a joint and swore allegiance to the charter and to Top. The final test was a game of nine-ball in his garage. I barely qualified, beating him once in four tries. But then, I'm not all that swift with a cue stick. I'm better at Cricket, but Top didn't go in for darts.

What I hadn't gotten around to telling Moira, but which I had intended to, was that Top was a mystic, a spiritualist, and an honest-to-God psychic; in other words, all fucked up. She had asked me earlier if the Cheat Lake house really was haunted or if I was just trying to spook her. I said, Who knows? It's not something you can prove one way or the other; although I wouldn't want to bet it wasn't. Top put it down to a double-murder suicide that occurred not far behind the house, in the woods, and that this was why his sister never stayed at the house and ended up giving it to him for his eightieth birthday.

I rolled over, reaching a hand out to shake Moira awake. But she wasn't there.

I looked at the dresser and saw her backpack. At first I supposed she had gone to the lobby to collect the free Continental breakfast for us. Then I heard the unmistakeable sound of palms slapping water. She was in the bath.

I got my nakedness out of bed, crusty in the loins and smelling like a warmed-over corpse, and went into the dressing room where I stood staring at Moira sitting hunched over in the steamy water of the bathtub, her hands holding something black under the water between her thighs. She looked at me with the cold blue marble eyes, smiling faintly. She said: "I couldn't really remember it anymore. I had forgotten what it was like. I tried to remember. I did try to."

"Show me." I said. She looked away, blinking and touching her tongue to her upper lip. Then she yawned, and that seemed to break the spell. She held up in one hand a sopping wet wad of black cloth.

I went in and gently took it from her. As I did so she said, "Take a shower with me? Let's take a shower." The object was a folded pair of my woolen socks wrapped up in one of my three sleeveless black t-shirts. I asked: "What's this supposed to be?"

For a good minute she stared up at me off-and-on, making up her mind. Her lips were slightly parted and they kept faltering in the act of smiling. I knew that a patient but expectant expression on my part worked best in getting an answer from her.

She said, "It's, like, Roberta's cat."

I asked if Josie's mother knew what had happened. She shook her head. "I told Josie. But I don't think he's ever said a peep about it to his mom, or his dad. William, it's crazy I know but it makes me feel better, I don't know why, it just does. Whenever I remember I just feel okay. Help me up--" I took her under the arms and got her up out of the tub and hugged her hot wet body. And then we took a shower and tasted the soap on each other's mouth.

We were on the 79 by noon, tooling toward Morgantown.

Normally I don't hot-dog it, but that day I felt especially reckless. I tore between the lanes and red-lined the RPM's, screaming past the traffic at better than a hundred. This gave Moira a thrill. It was her introduction, I was thinking, to what was to come in the witching hours at the house that brooded in the ghostly woods.

(27) Dead Like A River

Whitey and Squaw came out with me to the bikes. Johnny Bee stayed put in his chair like Wild Bill Hickcock, with one significant difference: he kept his back to the wall.

I could not walk a straight line. Twice, at least, I misstepped and almost tripped over Whitey's spurs. I had three Fuzzy Navels and a double Sailor Jack under my belt, not to mention the tap beer, and they were all doing the see-saw thing with my equilibrium. This didn't bother Whitey or Squaw, who weren't the steadiest bipeds on the planet themselves.

We bumped fists and I mounted the rat. I knew from experience that once I was on the road I would feel as sober as a Puritan. I can't account for it, but there it is. So with memorized directions to Top's house on East Kearney Street I burbled my way down 2nd.

Squaw had described Top to me, but then said, "You won't know what to expect until you get there." I liked how she talked. Her eyes would grow big and bright whenever she spoke, and if she strung more than a half dozen sentences together her eyes would be virtually popping out of her head. Whitey talked as if he were trying to keep from laughing. Reticent Johnny had a deep voice, like rocks hitting the bottom of a dry well. He had a deadpan expression and when he smiled, which wasn't often, you knew something was especially bothering him. He was tall and slender, but with a slight potbelly. His mustache grew into his sideburns, a dirty grayish brown, with a dark triangle of whiskers under his bottom lip that pointed to the cleft in his small rounded chin. To some men he was intimidating in appearance, to others he was mildly ridiculous.

I thought about the three of them until I came to the first signal light, then I concentrated on finding East Kearney Street. It was your average middle-class neighborhood of single story houses. Top's had an elm in the front yard near the curb that leaned out over the street. There was a plain wooden slat fence along the side of the yard. I parked in the driveway next to an impressive BMW motorcycle. A minivan was parked on the other side of it.

I sat on the rat for a minute or two debating whether I wanted to go through with this or not. So far I had just gone with the flow, and I was intrigued by the game. I decided, what the hell, it was an interesting way to get a windfall and it would not impede my footloose ways. The Roadents, as well as the Undertakers, were not to run in a pack but to be lone wolves, spreading themselves out across the country with the idea that a challenge would take you to places you hadn't been before. Every so often there would be a rally, a get-together, wherever Top decided to hole up for a while. But otherwise it was every man for himself.

I rang the doorbell. A woman of middle age who looked like she had been put through the wringer a few times opened the door; a short-haired blonde, stout, no make-up, dressed like a safari guide. A little girl with two fingers in her mouth stood behind her, peeking around a leg of her mother and pointing a potato chip at me.

"You must be Hangman," the woman said. She gave me a hard thin smile and stepped to the side. "Come in. Kelva, get out of the way for the man."

This turned out to be Top's niece and her kid; the Pittsburg sister's daughter and granddaughter. The woman's name was Heather. She had left an abusive husband and was looking to get a fresh start. She had the living room smelling like cream of wheat, a little too warm and stuffy for my liking. Toys were strewn over the floor and on the furniture. But I wasn't there long.

Heather escorted me down a hall to a den that had been added on to the house, reached by going through Top's immaculate bedroom. She blocked the den's doorway and said to a cloud of incense, "You were right, he showed up." And a low grainy voice answered: "You ought not to be surprised by now."

As she turned to leave she said to me, "I'll be back in a jiff with some refreshments."

I nodded and stepped into the den, trying not to sway too much. Squaw had prepared me for the incense and the general look of an Oriental temple, but she had not caught the essence of Top's appearance; admittedly hard to put into words effectively.

He sat crossed-legged in the lotus position on a low and cushioned table at the back of the room, in the light of two lampstands to either side of the table. His skinny hairy body was naked except for a black loincloth and a red shawl over his shoulders. He wore a turban. His beard was white and fanned out. He had very little in the way of eyebrows, but large, deep eyes in dark hollows crowding close to his thin pointy nose.

"Hello," he said genially, "very glad to meet you." Then, in an altogether different voice: "I am the Lord of the Roads."

(26) Dead Like A River

For motorcycle clubs that engage in activities intended to be under the radar of law enforcement there is always the suspicion that a new prospect might be an undercover cop of some sort. There is no way  to be certain about it, since no amount of checking the background of a prospect can yield anything other than a sense of authenticity ("This dude's all right") or of deception ("I don't trust this bastard").

I sat there and talked with Whitey and Squaw (hardly a word with Johnny Bee) for three hours. I really had no particular desire to join their club or any other, and by the time we were pretty well drunk but still coherent Whitey and Squaw believed it; I was just having a good time and didn't give much of a shit whether they bumped fists with me in friendship or shut me out. Whitey told me months later that it was my unwillingness to discuss certain private matters that won me over to him. An undercover cop doesn't want to give the impression that he's hiding something. But I was no choir boy then or now, and there are some things I keep in my back pocket, not on my sleeve.

It was while I was munching through my second burger that Whitey opened up about Top and his game with an M.C. called the Undertakers. There was a time when Top had just one group of two-wheeler tramps. But being the crazy eccentric he was, he divided the guys into two separate groups; the Roadents and the Undertakers. The latter was under the leadership of a man Top had come to hate, for a reason I might explain later. This man, like Top, was more or less rich. I mean he had enough money in savings and investments to live any way he chose to live, with money to burn any way he wanted to burn it. His name was Shovel, which implied a guy who shoves people around and digs a nice little hole for them to lie down in. He lived in Prescott Arizona. At that time he had, Whitey thought, six or seven hardcore members, and several more who were not to be counted on to play the game, and dropped in and out. Not so with Top. He would rather have just one bonafide Roadent than a hundred halfhearted wanna-be's.

And so we numbered four, counting myself, on that July evening in '95. There was one other prospect, a bar bouncer named Reb; but he hadn't quite made up his mind yet and was maybe a little too attached to the strip scene in Tucson and, it was thought, a little too close to Prescott and the lure of the Undertakers. But he favored Top over Shovel, so hope still lingered that Reb would opt for the Roadents.

Top had an older sister who lived in Pittsburg. She owned two properties in Morgantown. At her house near Cheat Lake, in 1981, Top met with Shovel to iron out the rules of the game. The best way to explain it is to put myself in the picture.

Once every month I send word to Shovel that I'm in a certain place, say, Redding California, or wherever I happen to be at the time. Shovel then gets the word out to his Undertakers that a Roadent has challenged them, and which of you bastards wants to meet with Hangman and beat his ass? The window of opportunity is ten days. If no Undertaker shows up to face me, Shovel must wire me two hundred dollars within four days after the deadline. If an Undertaker comes to fight me and I beat him into submission, Shovel must pay me a thousand. If I lose, then Top must pay the victor a thousand. If I kill the guy, I get only a hundred. That's the theory. What usually happens is this: Let's say I take up the challenge and face off with an Undertaker in, say, Billings Montana. He throws an intimate party, we swap bitches and play three rounds of poker. If I win, word is sent to Shovel that I whipped his boy's ass. I get the thousand and pay the poker losses to the Undertaker. Everybody goes away happy.

But sometimes the theory becomes the practical. That was the case with Johnny Bee. He knew his challenger. There was bad blood between them. He had been waiting in Laramie five days for this asshole to show up. Word was, the Undertaker would arrive in time. My problem with Johnny Bee was that he strongly suspected that I was an Undertaker who had come in place of the asshole. Whitey and Squaw tried to disabuse him of this suspicion. I simply said that no, I had never heard of the Undertakers, nor of the Roadents either, until that day. He kept staring at me. I stared back.

What temporarily diffused the situation was a call Whitey got from Top. I was to go to Top's house for the final interview and the initiation. I was to be there within the hour.

(25) Dead Like A River

I had come down from Caspar after parting ways with Consuela. She wasn't hispanic, as the name might suggest, but a pure blooded German who had married a GI. Divorced, she lived with a succession of losers, male and female, until I met her and redefined the meaning of the term.

She liked me plenty. But in the end she liked her girlfriend better. For a short time the three of us shared an apartment. We often shared the same bed, and though the nights were so incredibly erotic that nothing like regrets or scruples entered my mind, in the mornings I felt soured and empty. Two weeks of that was enough when I found myself locked out of the communal bedroom one night. I was gone in the dawn before the garbage truck showed up.

My destination was south on the 25 to Cheyenne. But as often happens a whim took me off on a lonesome highway. This one angled west and gradually south through Great Plains country and down past the backdrop of the Rockies, following green-banked creeks and old wagon trails. Altogether I went about two hundred miles and rolled into Laramie in the early afternoon.

I was not familiar with the town. I found myself on 2nd Street, rejecting the first bar and grill I came to, the Crowbar, as too refined for my taste. The Buckhorn was more like it; the walls thorny with antlers and busy with dead moose heads. There was a general dirtiness lying around that apologizes by way of cheap beer prices.

I came in with a young woman in appropriate buckskin and embroidered denim, her butt-length raven hair in a thick braid. Her name was Squaw. I met her when I pulled in to a parking place out front of the green building and she was bending over a saddlebag of an old school Harley. I jerked the key out of my rat's ignition before I had come to a complete stop, my right foot on the ground at the same moment I braked hard; this, because I had glimpsed a squad car turning the corner up ahead.

I fully expected to see a dried up prune of a face as the woman turned to greet me, a typical biker moll. No, this one still had dew on the blossom; a round rosy-dark face with intense bright eyes and finely sculptured lips. I guessed her age to be maybe 30.

She commented on the rat and smiled with genuine appreciation at the tramp gear tied to the sissy bar. She asked with a perky enthusiasm, "What parts you headed for?" My answer was a shrug and an invitation: "Any ideas?"

I don't want to give the impression that I was always bumping into damsels ready to jump off the parapet. Before Consuela I had languished through a long dry spell of strictly masculine company and usually no company at all. Meeting the Squaw Woman so soon after leaving the dubious affections of the semi-lez Consuela was something of a novelty; especially so at that time, when I had been on the road for only four years. This girl's personality was the type that erased bad memories. I was almost desperate to get a grip on her, though I didn't show it. I didn't have to. When she asked if I was a clubber or a loner, and I said the latter, she nearly burst out crying for joy. Well, I exaggerate; but as I was shortly to learn, her club was in bad need of prospects. I could tell that she didn't want me getting away either.

Squaw was anxious to take me over to a table near the pool hall and introduce me to a couple members of her club, but I forestalled her at the bar to order my standby, a cheeseburger with horseradish, onion rings, and the cheapest beer on tap. It gave me a breath strong enough to knock over a bank teller; so potent, in fact, that I have the habit of turning my head a little to the side when I speak to someone up close. I asked what she and her buddies were drinking. (My wallet was fat from a three-week stretch of work in Caspar.) She carried the bottles over to the table as I waited for my order, talking to the bartender, a glitzy blond butterball.

The place was friendly. At night, I was told, it got rowdy. But if I was still there by nightfall I wouldn't be in a condition to mind how rowdy it got. The two guys at the table, in their colors, matched the rowdy description. Best of all they had tramp written all over them. There was none of the polish that lingers in the carefully contrived roughness of the weekend warrior type. These two bucks lived on their bikes. It was their kickstands that staked their property for the night.

They eyed me narrowly at first, as I came up with my plate and mug, but one good whiff of me and what Squaw had told them about me was accepted. "Have a chair, brother," said the one called Whitey. I sat across from him. Bone white skin was stretched tautly over his skull face and frizzy silver hair had at some point exploded from his rotting brown bandanna. He was a smiler. He never ever stopped smiling. He jerked his head toward the younger man to my right, who sat with his chair tilted back at a precarious angle. "This here's Johnny Bee," Whitey said.


I sensed right away that the Bee Man was going to be a problem.

(24) Dead Like A River

There are two things I vividly remember about our 5-hour ride to Charleston West Virginia: that we crossed the Kanawha River three times, and that I kept telling myself  "I'll never do that again." No, not crossing the same river three times in an hour, but crossing a woman's heart with my boots on. I kept seeing Gwen's last look; not in the kitchen where she said goodbye, but looking out the living room window at us as I was backing the rat away from the porch. She was holding the envelope that Moira had left for her on the coffee table, with how much money in it I don't know. I never asked.

Moira sensed my depression. She kept trying to cheer me up on the ride by shouting things like, "Oh look at that!" when it was just so many trees, or an antique car all shined up, or the bend of the Ohio River when we were crossing a tributary bridge just before our second stop. It was that stop where she finally got a smile out of me, at a roadside eatery.

Maybe it was the distance I had put between there and the hillbilly house where Larry would be making himself at home by now, that helped relieve me of the cold weight in my chest; but more likely it was the amusing story she told about Joe coming down the stairs all dressed up as Josie, shocking his dad, Edgar, who was entertaining a prospective investor. Moira said she had talked Joe into it, meaning, I think, that she dared him.

What was funny about it was her choosing outfits for him to try on that she had brought over from her house next door, clothes too big for her now that she had lost x-number of pounds. He was as fussy as any girl in deciding what looked best on him. Added to that was her news that Josie had checked into a Super 8 motel off the 68 in Morgantown, in the direction of Cheat Lake. This puzzled her until Josie texted back with the explanation that Super 8 and Motel 6 were owned by the same company. But that was of no interest to me compared to the fact that Josie's motel wasn't far from Top's place. It was in the same general area, away from the college-town hustle and the quaint sprawl of the suburb.

At a park in Charleston I called Top. I had not talked to him since Salt Lake City. He was in Pittsburg but would be back in Morgantown by noon tomorrow. He chuckled all through the two-minute conversation. I asked him how the "game" was going. He said Whitey and Squaw were at the house keeping an eye on things, and were anxious to tool away to Columbus Ohio, just as soon as he got back. So that was settled. I'd see Top tomorrow afternoon, with Moira in tow if she didn't get cold feet; but tonight we would stay in Charleston. I didn't want Josie interfering with anything I might choose to do with Moira, and when I told her that she nodded, her face alight with anticipation.

We didn't bother with vouchers. We got a room for less than 50 bucks, double occupancy. We fell almost immediately into bed and talked ourselves to sleep before the afternoon was half over.

She was firing questions at me about my family ties in California and Texas, as if she had not heard anything of it before. I tried to grill her about Josie's dad, about what he might have let on concerning what he knew, or thought he knew, about his wife, the sinister Roberta. Moira, so voluminous in her questioning of me, had little to say when the subject was her relationship with Josie's family. She kept butting Hadley Colt into the increasingly drowsy conversation, until I just didn't care; until even her blowing into my ear couldn't keep me awake.

And now I need to digress a bit and bring up how it was that I met Top, and what his game was all about. It began in Laramie Wyoming, in 1995, in the dog days of summer, in the midst of a heat-wave that had the temp hovering between hades and hell.

The roads were soft and the air tasted like chalk. The rodeo had ended a few days before and every saloon seemed tired, as though every patron was a cowboy with rope-burned hands and a sunken chest from bull riding.

It was in Laramie, and by extension Cheyenne, where I joined the Roadents. My prospect status lasted the whole of one day and the initiation was anything but brutal. Even so I thought it was hardly worth the effort, being the fourth member of a club whose nature is to disperse in any and all directions individually, usually, without rhyme or reason, except that going nowhere in particular takes a determined will. But the upshot was meeting Top.

That made it all seem worth it.

(23) Dead Like A River

I took Moira's arm and pulled her out of the tub, across the hall and into the dark bedroom, switching on the standing lamp by the door. I had seen Gwen pouring water in the coffee maker in the lit-up kitchen as the clock clanged five times. "Get dressed," I said to Moira. "Nobody's going to bed now."

"My clothes are in the bathroom, Hangman."

That reminded me. I went into Gwen's bedroom and finished putting my duds on.

Gwen was staring at the fridge shelves, an arm cocked on the fridge door, in her terrycloth bathrobe, her black hair held back by a clip. "Would you like some eggs with the ham?" she asked without looking at me. "I sent a text to Larry. He'll be up before sunrise." She took out a carton of brown eggs and a bottle of whole milk. She set the items on the counter by the stove and said, "What's wrong with her?"

"I don't know, some masochistic hydrophobia. I thought she'd got over it."

"She wanted attention, wanted you to find her like that. She's jealous."

"What about Larry?"

"Am I allowed to have a life?"

"Yeah, one man at a time."

"How d'you like your eggs?"

"Just scramble them like everything else."

"She's right, you know, you shouldn't have come here."

That shut me up. I went back down the hall to check on Moira and to tell her: "You're right as rain. We leave after breakfast."

She was tying her shoelaces, sitting on the bed with a foot up on an opened drawer of a chest. She had put on snug black sweatpants and a hooded grey sweatshirt. "Is she mad?"

She whispered that twice, the second time a little louder. I said, "She's just mad enough to see us on our way."

Moira shut the drawer. "I'm not hungry," she said in a normal voice.

"I'll fix it." I went back into the kitchen feeling like an overworked and underpaid errand boy. "She'll just have coffee and toast," I said, adding pointedly: "on the front porch."

Gwen drew back the cup that she was about to give me and asked in a tired manner, "How does she like it?"

I said: "Cream, with sugar and coffee." "Let the dogs out for me." They were at the stove sniffing and licking their chops as the eggs began sizzling in the skillet.

Errand Boy crossed the living room, calling and whistling to the dogs. They tore past me when I swung open the screen door of the porch. I turned on the porch light, and had just finished rolling a smoke when Gwen came out and set an insulated lidded cup on the stool by a basket chair, and a saucer of toast. "I hope she likes apple butter," she said, sighing. I predicted she'd eat it.

She patted her bathrobe pockets and smiled at me. It wasn't the happiest smile but I was sure glad to see it. "I'm sorry about what I said, about you... shouldn't have come. I'm glad you came. I got all that out of my system now. I'll tell Larry about you, and I'll bet anything he gets a motorcycle. We'll take trips. Maybe I can get him to be bad, too." We laughed at that.

Moira was looking at us through the screen door of the house. Gwen turned her smiling face to her and said cheerfully, "Come on out and watch the sun come up. There's coffee here and toast."

Moira came out like a bashful girl at her first party and eased down in the chair by the stool. "We're such a bother," she said in a wee small voice.

Gwen put her hands on her hips in a matronly fashion. "Y'all sure are," she said jokingly. Then to me, "Them eggs are burning." So we hurried back to the kitchen.

The eggs were well scorched. I scrambled them with a fork. There was just one plate on the table. Gwen said, "They're all for you." So I dumped them on the plate and put the hot skillet in the sink where it hissed up a puff of steam.

I hardly dared to turn around. When I did Gwen put her arms around my neck, kissed my confused lips, and said with her face pressed to my right arm, at the shoulder, "I'm going to my room, and I'm not coming out til I hear you ride off."

I saw a painting once of a young woman sitting on a short stone fence, shading her eyes as she stared into the distance. I couldn't tell if she was watching someone coming up the road to her, or going away. Her face kept the secret of her heart, and neither the dappling of shade, nor the sunlight fractured by the leaves overhead, knew anything of the pathos in her eyes.