dim figures standing in the shattered moonlight that managed to find its way in through the boarded-up windows. The Landers weren’t sitting on a bench; they were sitting on a dusty floor near a little cluster of empty crack vials-yes, it seemed that crack had managed to find its way even out here to John Ford country-and there was a faded circle on one wall not far from the corner where Helen Palmer squatted and muttered. Then David blinked again and the fluorescents were back. So was the big clock, hiding that faded circle.
Henry Lander said, “Think you better go along now, David.”
“Listen a minute, Henry,” Willa said.
Henry switched his gaze to her, and David had no trouble reading the distaste that was there. Any liking Henry might once have had for Willa Stuart was gone now.
“I don’t want to listen,” Henry said. “You’re upsetting my wife.”
“Yeah,” a fat young man in a Seattle Mariners cap said. David thought his name was O’Casey. Something Irish with an apostrophe in it, anyway. “Zip it, baby girl!”
Willa bent toward Henry, and Henry recoiled from her slightly, as if her breath were bad. “The only reason I let David drag me back here is because they are going to demolish this place! Can you say wrecking ball, Henry? Surely you’re bright enough to get your head around that concept.”
“Make her stop!” Ruth cried, her voice muffled.
Willa leaned even closer, eyes bright in her narrow, pretty face. “And when the wrecking ball leaves and the dump trucks haul away the crap that used to be this railway station-this old railway station-where will you be?”
“Leave us alone, please,” Henry said.
“Henry-as the chorus girl said to the archbishop, denial is not a river in Egypt.”
Ursula Davis, who had disliked Willa from the first, stepped forward, leading with her chin. “Fuck off, you troublesome bitch.”
Willa swung around. “Don’t any of you get it? You’re dead, we’re all dead, and the longer you stay in one place, the harder it’s going to be to ever go anywhere else!”
“She’s right,” David said.
“Yeah, and if she said the moon was cheese, you’d say provolone,” Ursula said. She was a tall, forbiddingly handsome woman of about forty. “Pardon my French, but she’s got you so pussy-whipped it isn’t funny.”
Dudley let out that startling donkey bray again, and the Rhinehart woman began to sniffle.
“You’re upsetting the passengers, you two.” This was Rattner, the little conductor with the apologetic face. He hardly ever spoke. David blinked, the station lensed dark and moonlit again for another moment, and he saw that half of Rattner’s head was gone. The rest of his face had been burned black.
“They’re going to demolish this place and you’ll have nowhere to go!” Willa cried. “Fucking…nowhere!” She dashed angry tears from her cheeks with both fists. “Why don’t you come to town with us? We’ll show you the way. At least there are people…and lights…and music.”
“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 fucking 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.”
David went over to the juke at the end of the bar, dropped a quarter, and played D19-“Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” the Freddy Fender version. Out in the parking lot, Chester Dawson, who had decided to lay over here a few hours before resuming his journey to Seattle with a load of electronics, raised his head, thinking he heard music, decided it was part of a dream he’d been having, and went back to sleep.
David and Willa moved slowly around the empty floor, sometimes reflected in the mirror wall and sometimes not.
“Willa-”
“Hush a little, David. Baby wants to dance.”
David hushed. He put his face in her hair and let the music take him. He thought they would stay here now, and that from time to time peo ple would see them. 26 might even get a reputation for being haunted, but probably not; people didn’t think of ghosts much while they were drinking, unless they were drinking alone. Sometimes when they were closing up, the bartender and the last waitress (the one with the most seniority, the one responsible for splitting the tips) might have an uneasy sense of being watched. Sometimes they’d hear music even after the music had stopped, or catch movement in the mirror next to the dance floor or the one in the lounge. Usually just from the tail of the eye. David thought they could have finished up in better places, but on the whole, 26 wasn’t bad. Until closing there were people. And there would always be music.
He did wonder what would become of the others when the wrecking ball tore apart their illusion-and it would. Soon. He thought of Phil Palmer trying to shield his terrified, howling wife from falling debris that couldn’t hurt her because she was not, properly speaking, even there. He thought of Pammy Andreeson cowering in her shrieking mother’s arms. Rattner, the soft-spoken conductor, saying, Just be calm, folks, in a voice that couldn’t be heard over the roar of the big yellow machines. He thought of the book salesman, Biggers, trying to run away on his bad leg, lurching and finally falling while the wrecking ball swung and the dozers snarled and bit and the world came down.
He liked to think their train would come before then-that their combined expectation would make it come-but he didn’t really believe it. He even considered the idea that the shock might extinguish them and they’d simply whiff out like candle flames in a strong gust of wind, but he didn’t believe that, either. He could see them too clearly after the bulldozers and dump trucks and back-end loaders were gone, standing by the rusty disused railway tracks in the moonlight while a wind blew down from the foothills, whining around the mesa and beating at the broomgrass. He could see them huddled together under a billion High Country stars, still waiting for their train.
“Are you cold?” Willa asked him.
“No-why?”
“You shivered.”
“Maybe a goose walked over my grave,” he said. He closed his eyes, and they danced together on the empty floor. Sometimes they were in the mirror, and when they slipped from view there was only a country song playing in an empty room lit by a neon mountain range.
