The Killing Moon: A Novel

because I couldn't figure out how to get you interested. Interested enough to kiss me.'

He started to say something else, then settled for, 'No, I never knew.'

'Of course you look at me now and you think, Thank God. But that's the thing. I would be different if I had wound up with you. So different. Not straitjacketed here. I always felt close to you, Donny. Like we had a connection. If only it weren't for that?that damn scholarship?'

She blotted her eyes with a knuckle, harshly. She watched him try to come up with something to say other than I'm sorry, fail, and glance at the porch door.

'I'm scaring you off, huh?' Her words came out on a weird laugh.

'No, no,' he said. 'It's just that, I have to get out to see Pinty.'

'Do you ever think about what your life would be like if I had won the scholarship? Your life in this town, what it would have been?'

He nodded, begrudging her nothing. 'Every day since I came back.'

'You'd have been a cop, right? Probably. And with you in there, maybe the Pail family wouldn't have taken over. Things might be a lot different. For everybody. Probably you would have married someone in town.'

'Maybe.'

'Maybe someone?like me.'

'But you wouldn't have been here, right? You would have won the scholarship.' He got to his feet as though afraid she would try to kiss him again. 'You'd be long gone.'

'That's right,' she said. 'Long gone.'

She reached for another cigarette, knowing that, as soon as the door shut behind him, she would begin spinning their conversation around and around inside her head, her mind like a spider threading a web so elaborate, it could catch even imaginary prey.

42

BUCKY

THE CLASSICAL MUSIC record popped and crackled on the old hi-fi turntable. The album was one of a boxed set of six that Bucky's mother had ordered from the television soon after he was born. She bought it to play for him and Eddie in the afternoons, hoping it would somehow calm them down. Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Play Your Timeless Classics, it was called, the cover showing a bloody sun setting behind the tuxedoed conductor, who was some Einstein-looking guy. Oh, how he and Eddie used to hate it. Used to jump around the room just to hear it skip. Tried scratching it up with the needle when they were big enough to reach. Played it on 78 rpm and whipped pillow cushions at the stereo. But those goddamn thick old wax discs were indestructible.

The records found their way back out of the cabinet after his mother died. Daddy played them at night to help him fall asleep in his chair. And if Eddie or Bucky ever turned it off, the man woke up in a rage. Daddy never slept in a bed again.

Now Daddy was gone and Eddie and Bucky had split up the albums, Bucky sticking Eddie with the faggy piano pieces and keeping the Apocalypse Now music for himself. They didn't live together. Pails had owned Jag Hill for almost as long as there was a town named Black Falls, two separate family homesteads set on opposite slopes of the otherwise undeveloped hill. Eddie stayed in the larger house a half mile away, the one they had grown up in, because Bucky preferred his uncle's old place, which had started out as a hunting lodge and still had a pair of antlers nailed to the front door. Still had the curing shed and the old camper out in back.

Bucky was cooking up a late lunch of toasted bologna, watching the edges curl off the browning bread through the window of his toaster oven, and thinking about that freak-ass Scarecrow. When Frond first turned up dead enough to bring the staties to town, Bucky had been pissed. Everything had to be put on hold, he figured. But now he welcomed the distraction. It was perfect. Everyone running around looking for Scarecrow, the town whipped into a frenzy. And once they found him and left, then Bucky's position in Black Falls would be stronger than ever. Pinty would be gone, along with his pet Maddox, leaving no obstacles in Bucky's way. Total freedom to finish his 'experiments' before moving on to the next stage.

This town was nothing more than a laboratory to him now. A proving ground. When he was through with Black Falls, he would toss it at Eddie's big feet like a bone gnawed clean. This was going to be a town full of zombies by the time Bucky was done.

They say summer colds are the worst, and a bad one was spreading through town. A cold that was to become a countywide flu, which would eventually burn through all of New England like an epidemic.

Bucky saw now that Ibbits had come to him as a kind of prophet. A hobo prophet, appearing out of the desert as they often do, living in his car, on the run from California. A carrier of the disease, and yet, at the same time, a doctor, a medicine man. But a prophet first and foremost. Of doom. Bearing scripture, in the form of a prescription?in the form of a recipe. A simple little recipe with simple, everyday ingredients.

A recipe for plague.

Ibbits said meth was the perfect drug if you only did it once. Trick was: How? How do you win a fortune with one pull of the slot machine lever?and never walk into a casino again? Fuck the hottest chick on TV?and never expect to touch her again? Learn the most mind-shattering truth of the universe?and never allow yourself to think it again?

And yet, Bucky did. He had. One time only. Or rather, nine times over the course of one bullet-fast three-day weekend. One seventy-two-hour run. Nine smoked foils. No sleep. No food. No need.

Most of the rush of the first day he had spent working on his cars. Pure gear-head heaven, twenty-four hours straight through without a break, compulsively immersed in the hobby of all hobbies. Mind and hand and wrench and engine: one. Connected. It was all-American nirvana. It was bliss.

Nothing would ever be anything like that first blaze. When eventually he got horny, he'd called Wanda and smoked a foil with her and she went off like a comet. They fucked for hours, a fuckfest beyond human capability, superhuman sex, orgasm upon orgasm, each exploding with intensity. Universe-creating orgasms. Big motherfucking bangs.

That were so good, so right, so complete, so out there, that he couldn't be bothered now to fuck without it. They had tried a couple of times, Wanda tweaking up alone and then begging him, pleading for his dick. But meth turned him from the ultimate pussy hound into what he thought of as a meth monk. It just wasn't there for him anymore. You go to the moon, you visit the fucking stars: What was left in Black Falls that could please him? He didn't need it now, not the way he used to. Or rarely, anyway. Certainly not from bony Wanda. Meth had messed with the switchboard in his head. He was getting off on something else besides sex now. Something?the Idea?had taken its place.

The Idea was what he had caught on to that third day. What the meth had showed him. What it revealed.

A clarity.

Everyday people, he had realized, would kill to feel the way he did. Would slaughter their own parents for a taste of this. Would trade away their kids.

That was when he saw his future. That was when he knew.

Knew immediately that he had found the thing he had been looking for all his life. Not a drug to get high on?no. Every drug that had come through town, that had found its way into lockup, he had test-driven like an impounded car. Even regular speed?nothing was like this shit. Nothing came close. Nothing had this cosmic giddyup.

What he had found here, without searching for it, without even knowing it existed, was a tool. What in other hands was a toy, was in his hands a sharp knife. A cunning weapon.

A low-priced alternative to cocaine, even cheaper than heroin. A high that lasts longer and burns hotter than 'shrooms or acid or anything else out there. A drug that doesn't take you out of the world but, like a great fuck, plunges you deeper into it. That makes you invincible, immortal, and that's better to screw on even than coke.

Meth is a blow job for the brain, a hand job for the ego. It writhes naked and moaning in the swelling lap of your soul, bouncing on your hard-on, squeezing your balls, making you come and come and beg for more.

That first high, anyway.

The virgin ride of pure intensity, which Ibbits said you never quite get back to again, but which many people devote the rest of their lives to chasing. Ibbits told him about the effects of the drug on people out west, where he was from: men walking away from their jobs, women from their children, losing houses and cars and selling off everything, including themselves. Religion promises you something glorious just around the corner? Meth actually lets you glimpse it. Lets you hear the angels sing.

Bucky still felt tempted all the time. Especially working these long hours cooking up the stuff. But he saw now another thing the meth had showed him: this was what life is. Chasing your virginities. Chasing your infant satisfactions. That pure bliss of first love (mother). The bewildering, earth- shuddering majesty of your first orgasm. You want it all back. You want to be born again. Life as pure nostalgia.

Everybody everywhere is looking for transcendence, for deliverance, something to devote themselves to. And meth gives you that. At first. Then it starts to reduce you.