NOS4A2(157)

“You get the cab number?”

“And the license,” Bilbo said, and told him both.

Daltry nodded and opened his cell phone. He pressed a single button and put it to his ear, then half turned away from Bilbo.

“Yep. He’s moving,” he said to whoever was on the other end of the line. “Hutter says just watch him, so we watch him. See where he goes and be ready to step in if the fat bastard starts to vapor-lock again.”

Daltry hung up, pitched his smoke, and started moving away, into the parking lot. Bilbo trotted after him and tapped his shoulder. The old guy looked back. His brow furrowed, and his expression suggested he recognized Bilbo but already couldn’t quite remember who he was or how they knew each other.

“That it, man?” Bilbo said. “Where’s the love?”

“Oh. Oh, right.” Daltry dug around in his pocket and came up with a ten-dollar bill and stuck it in Bilbo’s hand. “There you go. Live long and prosper. Isn’t that what you Trekkers say?”

Bilbo looked from the grimy ten-dollar bill—he’d been expecting at least a twenty—to the tattoo of Serenity on his hairy arm. “Yeah. I guess. But I’m not a Star Trek fan. My tattoo here? This is Serenity, not the Enterprise. I’m a Browncoat, man.”

“More like turncoat,” Daltry said, and laughed. Flecks of spittle hit Bilbo in the face.

Bilbo wanted to throw the ten dollars at his feet and walk away, show the ugly, loudmouthed f*ck what he thought of his money, but then he reconsidered and stowed the cash in his pocket. He was saving for a Buffy tattoo on the other arm. Ink wasn’t cheap.





Here, Iowa


WHEN MAGGIE CAME AWAKE, HER ARM WAS SLUNG OVER VIC’S WAIST and Vic’s head was resting against her breastbone. She was the most goshdarn pretty woman that Maggie had ever been in bed with, and Maggie wanted to kiss her but wouldn’t. What Maggie really wanted to do was comb Vic’s snarled, windblown hair, straighten it out, make it shine. She wanted to wash Vic’s feet and rub them with oil. Maggie wished they had had more time together and a chance to talk about something besides Charlie Manx. Not that Maggie really wanted to talk. She wanted to listen. Maggie dreaded that moment in any conversation when it was her turn to open her big, dumb m-m-mouth.

Maggie sensed she hadn’t been asleep for long and had a pretty good idea she wouldn’t be able to sleep again for hours. She untangled herself from Vic, smoothed her hair back from her face, and slipped away. It was time to spell, and now that Vic was asleep, Maggie could do what she needed to do to make the tiles behave.

She lit a smoke. She lit a candle. Arranged her fedora just so. Maggie set her Scrabble bag before her and loosed the golden thread. She considered the darkness within for a time, inhaling deeply on her cigarette. It was late, and she wanted to crush some Oxy and have a snort, and she couldn’t do it until she had done this one thing for Vic. She reached up and found the collar of her white muscle shirt and pulled it down, exposing her left breast. She removed her cigarette and shut her eyes and put it out. She held it against the top of her breast for a long time, grinding it into the tender flesh, letting out a thin, whining breath through her clenched teeth. She could smell herself burning.

She flicked the extinguished cigarette away and bent over the desk, wrists pressed against its edge, blinking at tears. The pain in her breast was sharp and intense and wonderful. Sacred.

Now, she thought, now, now. She had a brief window in which to use the tiles, to force sense out of gibberish: a minute or two at most. It seemed to her sometimes that this was the only fight that mattered: the struggle to take the world’s chaos and make it mean something, to put it to words.

She took a fistful of letters, dumped them before her, and began to sort. She moved tiles here and there. She had played this game for her entire adult life, and soon enough she had it. In a few minutes, the spelling was done, no trouble at all this time.

When she saw she had it, she let out a long, satisfied breath, as if she had just set down a great weight. She didn’t have any idea what the message meant. It had an epigrammatic quality about it, seemed less like a fact, more like the closing line of a lullaby. But Maggie was sure she had it right. She always knew when she had it right. It was as sure and simple a thing as a key clicking into a lock and turning a bolt. Maybe Vic could glean some meaning from it. She would ask her when she was awake.

She copied out the message from the Great Scrabble Bag of Fate on a sheet of water-stained Here Public Library stationery. She read it over. It was good. She was conscious of an unfamiliar glow of satisfaction, was unused to being happy with herself.

She collected her letters one at a time and returned them to the velvet bag. Her breast throbbed, nothing transcendent about the pain now. She reached for her cigarettes, not to burn herself again but just for a smoke.

A boy walked through the children’s library carrying a sparkler.

She saw him through the clouded glass of the old fish tank, a black figure against the paler darkness of the room beyond. As he walked, he swung his right arm and the sparkler spit a hot copper spray, drew red lines in the gloom. He was there for only a moment and then moved out of sight, carrying his sputtering torch with him.

Maggie leaned toward the fish tank to bang on the glass, scare the shit out of him and run him off, then remembered Vic and caught herself. Kids broke in to throw firecrackers and smoke cigarettes and cover the walls in graffiti, and she hated it. She had once come across a squad of teenagers down in the stacks, passing a jay around a campfire made of old hardcovers, and she had turned into a crazy woman, chasing them out with a busted chair leg, aware that if the peeling wallpaper caught fire, she would lose her last, best home. Book burners! she had screamed at them, and for once she had not stuttered at all. Book burners! I’ll cut off your balls and rape your women! It was five to one, but they had fled before her as if they’d seen a ghost. Sometimes she thought she was a ghost, that she had really died in the flood, died with the library and just hadn’t realized it yet.