And considering that the social begins in hardly more than half an hour, I’d bet my whole bankroll-by which I mean three fives, ten ones, ten more ones, and three more ones-that they aren’t coming home until after.”
“Betting is wicked.”
Closing the pantry door, Mr. Lyss said, “He probably keeps them in the study, if there is a study.”
“Keeps what?” Nummy asked.
“A minister needs a study to write his sermons,” Mr. Lyss said, and he found the study along the hall that led from the kitchen.
The room was all leather furniture, pictures of horses, statues of horses, and a big desk.
Nummy thought the desk was what Mr. Lyss wanted, so he could find and read the preacher’s sermons, but it wasn’t the desk at all. Along one wall stood a big cabinet with four tall doors that had glass in them. Beyond the glass were guns, and the sight of them made Mr. Lyss happy.
“A week ago, the first time I looked through the good reverend’s mail, there was a magazine from the National Rifle Association. So back at the LaPierre dump, I figured this was where I could weaponize myself to defend against the Martians.”
Mr. Lyss tried the cabinet doors, but they were locked. Instead of using his picks, he took a horse statue from the desk and used it to smash the four panes.
“You got to pay for that from the lottery,” Nummy said.
“No problem. It’ll be a lot of money.”
Watching Mr. Lyss take different guns and boxes of bullets from the cabinet, Nummy grew nervous.
Instead of watching, he went around the room, looking at all the photographs of horses. Some were just horses alone, some were people standing beside horses, and some were people sitting on horses, but none of the people was Jesus.
Nummy heard the creaking again.
“There it is,” he said.
“There what is?”
“You heard.”
“You spook too easy.”
“Now it’s stopped.”
Mr. Lyss was wearing a long heavy coat that he’d borrowed from Poor Fred, and after he loaded the guns, he put one in each of the two big pockets of the coat. He dropped bullets in other pockets, handfuls of them like they were butterscotch candies he was going to suck on later. He had a long gun, too, one that wouldn’t fit in a pocket, and you could tell he liked it because of how it made him smile.
“I’m scared,” Nummy said.
“As long as you don’t spook too easy, being scared is a good thing. There’s something meaner than Satan’s snot loose in this town. If you weren’t afraid, you’d be the biggest dummy in the world, and you’re not the biggest by far. Fact is, there are a lot of people who aren’t dummies at all, but they’re way dumber than you. The world is full of high-IQ, well-educated idiots.”
“I don’t know about that,” Nummy said.
“Well, I do. Come on, you need a coat.”
Following the old man out of the study, Nummy said, “What coat?”
“Whatever’s warm and fits.”
In the coat closet near the front door, Mr. Lyss found a blue coat quilted like a bedspread. It had a hood lined with fur that you could put up or down, and Nummy counted six zippered pockets.
“This here is a nice coat,” Nummy said.
“And it fits you well enough.”
“But I can’t steal me a preacher’s coat.”
“Will you stop accusing me of stealing? I’m going to write out an I-owe-you for the glass damage, the guns, the bullets, the coat, the use of the toilet before we leave, for breathing their house air, all of it, and put it right here on the reverend’s desk, promising to pay with my lottery money.”
“And you really will pay?”
“I’m more afraid by the minute that I likely will.”
“Thank you, sir,” Nummy said. “I like my coat. I like it better than any coat I ever did have.”
“You look handsome in it.”
Nummy looked down at the floor. “Well, no, I don’t.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t, because you do. And you even make the coat look better just by being in it. Now, come on.”
Mr. Lyss started up the stairs.
“Where you going?” Nummy asked.
“Upstairs to have a look around.”
Nummy didn’t want to go upstairs in the preacher’s house when the preacher wasn’t there. But he didn’t want to stay downstairs alone, either, with all the flowery furniture, with the hallway painting of cowboy angels doing rope tricks, with the broken glass in the study and the grandfather clock ticking like a bomb. Reluctantly, he followed Mr. Lyss.
“What is it you want to look around for?”
“For whatever I might want to buy from the reverend and add to my I-owe-you.”
“There’s just gonna be beds and stuff upstairs.”
“Then maybe I’ll buy a bed.”
“We can’t carry no bed, sir.”
“Then maybe I’ll just buy the stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“The stuff you said was up here with the beds.”
“I don’t know what stuff is up here.”
“Then why’d you get me all excited about seeing it? Now I’ll probably be disappointed.”
“I’m sorry to say it, but sometimes you don’t make no sense at all to me.”
Turning on the upstairs hall lights, Mr. Lyss said, “Sometimes I don’t make any sense at all to me, either. But I keep on keeping on. You know how many days of his life the average person wastes by making no sense?”
“How many?”
“Most of them.”
Mr. Lyss went into a bedroom, turned on the lights, and said the bad word again without the “kicking” part.
When Nummy went into the bedroom, he saw three big gray sacks hanging from the ceiling. They were kind of like the cocoons that moths and butterflies came out of, except any moths or butterflies that came out of these would be as big as people.
chapter 55
Deucalion stepped out of Erika’s kitchen and into the park in the center of town. After nightfall, he could reconnoiter without drawing too much attention to himself.
He had studied a map of Rainbow Falls laid out on a grid of fractional seconds of latitude and longitude, which Erika downloaded from the Internet. Although he’d never been in this town before, he would be able from the start to navigate confidently from principal point to principal point. As always, the more frequently he traveled within a particular area, the easier and the more precisely he could transition from place to place. He would quickly acquire an intuitive awareness of the coordinates of every square foot in Rainbow Falls.
He started in the park because on a cold night it would be all but deserted. The footpath lamps revealed no one, and the benches that he passed were not occupied.
In the center of the park stood a statue of a soldier holding his helmet over his heart, his head tipped back, his
