Just After Sunset(8)

"Mumma, I want to hear some music," Pammy Andreeson said.

"Hush," her mother said.

"If we were dead, we'd know it," Biggers said.

"He's got you there, son," Dudley said, and dropped David a wink. "What happened to us? How did we get dead?"

"I...don't know," David said. He looked at Willa. Willa shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.

"You see?" Rattner said. "It was a derailment. Happens...well, I was going to say all the time, but that's not true, even out here where the rail system needs a fair amount of work, but every now and then, at one of the junction points-"

"We faw down," Pammy Andreeson said. David looked at her, really looked, and for a moment saw a corpse, burned bald, in a rotting rag of a dress. "Down and down and down. Then-" She made a growling, rattling sound in her throat, put her small, grimy hands together, and tossed them apart: every child's sign language for explosion.

She seemed about to say something more, but before she could, her mother suddenly slapped her across the face hard enough to expose her teeth in a momentary sneer and drive spit from the corner of her mouth. Pammy stared up for a moment in shocked disbelief, then broke into a strident, one-note wail even more painful than her hopscotch chant.

"What do we know about lying, Pamela?" Georgia Andreeson yelled, grabbing the child by her upper arm. Her fingers sank in almost out of sight.

"She's not lying!" Willa said. "We went off the tracks and into the gorge! Now I remember, and you do too! Don't you? Don't you? It's on your face! It's on your f**king face!"

Without looking in her direction, Georgia Andreeson flipped Willa the bird. Her other hand shook Pammy back and forth. David saw a child flop in one direction, a charred corpse in the other. What had caught fire? Now he remembered the drop, but what had caught fire? He didn't remember, perhaps because he didn't want to remember.

"What do we know about lying?" Georgia Andreeson shouted.

"It's wrong, Mama!" the child blubbered.

The woman dragged her off into the darkness, the child still screaming that one monotonous note.

There was a moment of silence in their wake-all of them listening to Pammy being dragged into exile-and then Willa turned to David. "Had enough?"

"Yes," he said. "Let's go."

"Don't let the doorknob hitcha where the good Lord splitcha!" Biggers advised, madly exuberant, and Dudley yodeled laughter.

David let Willa lead him toward the double doors, where Phil was leaning just inside, his arms still crossed on his chest. Then David pulled free of Willa's hand and went to Helen Palmer sitting in the corner, rocking back and forth. She looked up at him with dark, bewildered eyes. "We got fish for supper," she said in what was little more than a whisper.

"I don't know about that," he said, "but you were right about the smell of the place. Old dirty crackers." He looked back and saw the rest of them staring at him and Willa in the moonlit dimness that could be fluorescent light if you wanted it to be badly enough. "It's the smell places get when they've been closed up a long time, I guess," he said.

"Better buzz, cuz," Phil Palmer said. "No one wants to buy what you're selling."

"Don't I know it," David said, and followed Willa into the moonlit dark. Behind him, like a rueful whisper of wind, he heard Helen Palmer say, "First one t'ing an' den anudder."

The miles back to 26 made their score nine for the night, but David wasn't a bit tired. He supposed ghosts didn't get tired, just as they didn't get hungry or thirsty. Besides, it was a different night. The moon was full now, shining like a silver dollar high in the sky, and 26's front parking lot was empty. In the gravel lot around to the side, a few semis stood silent, and one rumbled sleepily with its running lights glowing. The marquee sign now read: COMING THIS WEEKEND THE NIGHTHAWKS BRING YOUR HONEY SPEND YOUR MONEY.

"That's cute," Willa said. "Will you bring me, Wolf Frightener? Am I not your honey?"

"You are and I will," David said. "The question is what do we do now? Because the honky-tonk is closed."

"We go in anyway, of course," she said.

"It'll be locked up."

"Not if we don't want it to be. Perception, remember? Perception and expectation."

He remembered, and when he tried the door, it opened. The barroom smells were still there, now mixed with the pleasant odor of some pine-scented cleaner. The stage was empty and the stools were on the bar with their legs sticking up, but the neon replica of the Wind River Range was still on, either because the management left it that way after closing or because that was the way he and Willa wanted it. That seemed more likely. The dance floor seemed very big now that it was empty, especially with the mirror wall to double it. The neon mountains shimmered upside down in its polished depths.

Willa breathed deep. "I smell beer and perfume," she said. "A hot rod smell. It's lovely."

"You're lovely," he said.

She turned to him. "Then kiss me, cowboy."

He kissed her there on the edge of the dance floor, and judging by what he was feeling, lovemaking wasn't out of the question. Not at all.

She kissed both corners of his mouth, then stepped back. "Put a quarter in the jukebox, would you? I want to dance."