and dropped to my knees to get under the flame, shredding the plastic raincoat as I ripped it off me, and succeeded in tossing it a few feet, and kneeling with my spine curled tightly against the flame of death, I heard Wilton Hoxley say, above and behind me, “Simeon. What terrible clothes.”
“Don’t,” I said, convulsing into an even smaller ball. The automatic clattered from my fingers, bounced once, hitting my knee, and then landed behind me.
“Don’t what?” Hoxley said. He lit another match. “Ah, of course. Don’t burn little Simeon. Well, I’ve heard that before. And what’s this?” I heard the gun scrape the ground as he picked it up. “Well,” he said, “this is an unfair advantage, is what it is. Is this how a couple of guys talk?” His hand touched my back. “Do you know that you’re all wet?” He waited.
“I know,” I said hopelessly, just biting air and spitting it out again.
“Well, this is something new,” Wilton Hoxley said, sounding pleased. “Up until now, I’ve always felt that I was the one who was wet. All wet. The wet blanket. Wetback. To wet one’s pants. Wet behind the ears. Not a very nice word, is it?” The match guttered and died, and my lungs collapsed, releasing enough air to inflate the Goodyear blimp.
“I guess not,” I said over the torrent of air.
“And that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Hoxley said serenely. “I mean, in a purely linguistic sense. What’s life, after all, except a little pocket of wet, a little envelope of wet that’s trained itself to move around? ‘Don’t dehydrate,’ life says to itself. ‘If you dehydrate, you’ll die.’ Not fish, of course. Fish don’t worry. But the terrestrials. What are they afraid of, hmmm? All these little dirt-dwelling bags of water, what are they afraid of? That the sun will dehydrate them? Or are they afraid- hold on a moment”-a match bloomed behind me- “of this?”
“Yes,” I said instantly, cravenly. The gasoline fumes clogged my nose.
“And what’s this?” he asked dispassionately, addressing some debating team from the moon. “A spark. A drop of the sun’s sweat. Are you sweating, Simeon? I can think of only one phrase that addresses the issue.” He touched the cold end of the match to my ear, and my reflexes yanked me away from it. “ ‘No sweat,’ kids say to each other, don’t they? ‘Dry up.’ Do you think this is what they mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my lips so dry that they made popping sounds as they slid over my teeth.
“Did anyone ever tell you to dry up?”
“Oh, come on, Wilton.”
He poked the match against my ear again. “Not my name,” he chided. “You haven’t earned the right to call me by my name. Did they ever tell you to dry up?”
“Sure,” I said, “sure they did.”
“I doubt it,” he said. I heard him take a step back, and then a little puddling sound, and then a stream of something hit my neck, and the smell of more gasoline crowded into my skull. “Half a liter,” he said conversationally as the stream trickled down the center of my back, “not much, considering the relative abundance of fossil fuels, but it should be enough. Do you know how often people told me to dry up? How many men and women told Wilton to dry up? Well, they’d all want to be wet now, wouldn’t they?” I was waiting for the match, but even so it was impossible to miss the note of self-pity that threw his tone of triumph into a minor key, and I knew that I’d been playing the wrong card.
I forced myself back onto my knees and turned my head toward him. “They didn’t say it often enough,” I said. “Dry up, asshole.”
There was a silence. Outside I heard the remote music of the carnival, a recording giving evidence of life on another planet, as I waited for the match. When the scraping sound came, it was his voice instead.
“A new tack.” He sounded like he was being held together with baling wire.
“Oh,” I said, driving my fingernails through my palms and trying for a note of command, “just light the fucking match, you pathetic slug.”
“You don’t know who I am.” His tone was almost plaintive.
“Listen up, Wilton,” I said, counting down to my last moment, “who gives a shit?”
There was a booming sound, some bold soul hurling himself against the pair of doors that opened out.
And Hoxley laughed. “We never know, do we?” he said.
“You never know,” I said, waiting for the match. “Most of us do.”
“We never know,” he said, “how important we are to others. The slightest thing we do or say, something we forget a minute later, can take root in the other person’s soul. You clown. You never think about me?”
“About as often as I think about the United Arab Emirates.”
He jostled me with his knee. “On your feet,” he said. “Time to think about Wilton.”
22
The back door to the Haunted Castle slammed shut behind us with a deceptively solid sound, and Hoxley located my sacroiliac with the barrel of the automatic and nudged. “Servants’ entrance,” he said, with a wobbly giggle that suddenly veered off in the direction of a sob. It was a new, and not particularly encouraging, giggle. He shoved the gun into me aggressively enough to make imaginary exit wounds bloom on either side of my naval like softballs hit into a screen. “Straight ahead,” he said.
The gun, poised between where I thought my kidneys might be, shook more than his voice did. The portion of the fairgrounds behind the castle was untended and untransformed, a desiccated southern California field of brittle brown weeds. The pageantry, and the comfort of the crowd, were behind us.
“To the catering truck?”
“Don’t get cute,” he said, kicking a heavy shoe against my ankle and clipping my Achilles’ tendon. I stumbled drunkenly. “This isn’t the Age of Cute yet. We’re still poised on the edge of the Age of Discovery.”
“The thirteenth?” I guessed, knowing it was wrong, just wanting to keep him talking, to keep his foot slamming my ankle, if necessary, and his hands away from the trigger and the matches. In my own nostrils, I smelled like a trillion shares of Exxon stock.
“Late fifteenth,” he corrected me pedantically. He came up beside me, one hand still trying to bore the gun barrel- my gun barrel-into my back and out through my navel, and I glanced over at his face, a sweating skull with the death’s-head makeup dripping into vertical smears. He was limping along, perspiring profusely, the sweat carrying the greasepaint along with it in pewter-gray rivulets, and he didn’t seem to be able to keep his eyes focused steadily in front of him. “America hasn’t been discovered yet,” he said, his voice rising in pitch, “and stop looking at me.” I did. “Isn’t that nice, no America? No truncating the rhythms of life into patterns of convenience, no convenience stores, no convenience restaurants, no one-hour dry cleaning, or even wet cleaning, to return to an earlier theme. And yes, the catering truck, perspicacious of you, the late Mr. Moreno’s catering truck. Poor Mr. Moreno. An enterprising gentleman. Catering trucks and a convenient concession license for the wonderland through which we now stroll, although Mr. Moreno didn’t know about the concession license.” He licked his lips with a pink tongue. “It’s amazing, here in America, what you can do with a phone, a checkbook, and the number of someone else’s business license. Mr. Moreno was even more of an entrepreneur than he knew. And newly arrived in the Land of the Free, too. Isn’t immigration wonderful? One of the dynamics that drives America, I always say. Well, I don’t always say it, of course. Wouldn’t that be boring? On the other hand, he served microwaved burritos, Mr. Moreno did, and to his own countrymen.”
We were most of the way to the catering truck by now, and although there were a few people in sight, here on the wrong side of the attractions, no one had even glanced at us. We were just Death and his good buddy Imminent Death hiking through the scraggle of weeds, and Death’s little gun was hidden inside his long black sleeve. Whoever had banged on the door of the Haunted Castle hadn’t followed us.
“So what happened to Mr. Moreno?”
“He got microwaved.” The gun wiggled upward, seeking a soft space between my ribs, and found one. “And now shut up and walk.” Hoxley fell back a step behind me, and I concentrated on doing what I was told.
“How’s life in a catering truck?” I asked as we neared it.
“All the conveniences of home,” Hoxley said from behind me. “Look at the light shining through the window.
