jerking crazily, those gauntleted hands flying up and down into the sky as if it's trying to say, 'What can you do ? What can you do with these damned sodbusters?'
The other three wheel their mounts as neatly as a drill-team of cavalry soldiers and race bach toward them. Molly pries the dish from her own dead fingers, then falls backward, engulfed in fire.
'Stand, Pokey!'Jamie cries hysterically as their death rushes toward them under the burning steel sky, 'Stand, gods damn you!' And still that feeling of grace as he smells the charring flesh of the Doolins. This is what they should have done all along, aye, all of them, for the Wolves can be brought down, although they'll probably not live to tell and these will take their dead compadre with them so none will know .
There's a twang as Pokey fires another bolt and then a sneetch strikes him dead center and he explodes inside his clothes, belching blood and torn flesh from his sleeves, his cuffs, from the busted buttons of his fly. Again Jamie is drenched, this time by the hot stew that was his friend. He fires his own bah, and sees it groove the side of a gray horse. He knows it's useless to duck but he ducks anyway and something whirs over his head. One of the horses strikes him hard as it passes, knocking him into the ditch where Eamon proposed they hide. His bah flies from his hand. He lies there, open-eyed, not moving, knowing as they wheel their horses around again that there is nothing for it now but to play dead and hope they pass him by. They won't, of course they won't but it's the only thing to do and so he does it, trying to give his eyes the glaze of death. In another few seconds, he knows, he won't have to pretend. He smells dust, he hears the crickets in the grass, and he holds onto these things, knowing they are the last things he will ever smell and hear, that the last thing he sees will be the Wolves, bearing down on him with their frozen snarls.
They come pounding back.
One of them turns in its saddle and throws a sneetch from its gloved hand as it passes. But as it throws, the rider's horse leaps the body of the downed Wolf, which still lies twitching in the road, although now its hands barely rise. The sneetch flies above Jamie, just a little too high. He can almost feel it hesitate, searching for prey. Then it soars on, out over the field.
The Wolves ride east, pulling dust behind them. The sneetch doubles back and flies over Jamie again, this time higher and slower. The gray horses sweep around a curve in the road fifty yards east and are lost to view. The last he sees of them are three green cloaks, pulled out almost straight and fluttering.
Jamie stands up in the ditch on legs that threaten to buckle beneath him. The sneetch makes another loop and comes back, this time directly toward him, but now it is moving slowly, as if whatever powers it is almost exhausted. Jamie scrambles back into the road, falls to his knees next to the burning remains of Pokey's body, and seizes his bah. This time he holds it by the end, as one might hold a Points mallet. The sneetch cruises toward him. Jamie draws the bah to his shoulder, and when the thing comes at him, he bats it out of the air as if it were a giant bug. It falls into the dust beside one of Pokey's torn-off shor'boots and lies there buzzing malevolently, trying to rise.
'There, you bastard!' Jamie screams, and begins to scoop dust over the thing. He is weeping. 'There, you bastard! There! There!' At last it's gone, buried under a heap of white dust that buzzes and shakes and at last becomes still.
Without rising —he doesn't have the strength to find his feet again, not yet, can still hardly believe he is alive —Jamie Jaffords knee-walks toward the monster Molly has killed… and it is dead now, or at least lying still. He wants to pull off its mask, see it plain. First he kicks at it with both feet, like a child doing a tantrum. The Wolfs body rocks from side to side, then lies still again. A pungent, reeky smell is coming from it. A rotten-smelling smoke is rising from the mask, which appears to be melting .
Dead, thinks the boy who will eventually become Gran-fere, the oldest living human in the Calla . Dead, aye, never doubt it. So gam, ye gutless! Garn and unmask it!
He does. Under the burning autumn sun he takes hold of the rotting mask, which feels like some sort of metal mesh, and he pulls it off, and he sees …
EIGHT For a moment Eddie wasn't even aware that the old guy had stopped talking. He was still lost in the story, mesmerized. He saw everything so clearly it could have been him out there on the East Road, kneeling in the dust with the bah cocked to his shoulder like a baseball bat, ready to knock the oncoming sneetch out of the air.
Then Susannah rolled past the porch toward the barn with a bowl of chickenfeed in her lap. She gave them a curious look on her way by. Eddie woke up. He hadn't come here to be entertained. He supposed the fact that he could be entertained by such a story said something about him.
'And?' Eddie asked the old man when Susannah had gone into the barn. 'What did you see?'
'Eh?' Gran-pere gave him a look of such perfect vacuity that Eddie despaired.
'What did you see! When you took off the mask?'
For a moment that look of emptiness—the lights are on but no one's home—held. And then (by pure force of will, it seemed to Eddie) the old man came back. He looked behind him, at the house. He looked toward the black maw of the barn, and the lick of phosphor-light deep inside. He looked around the yard itself.
Frightened , Eddie thought. Scared to death .
Eddie tried to tell himself this was only an old man's paranoia, but he felt a chill, all the same.
'Lean close,' Gran-pere muttered, and when Eddie did: 'The only one Ah ever told was my boy Luke… Tian's Da', do'ee ken. Years and years later, this was. He told me never to speak of it to anyone else. Ah said, 'But Lukey, what if it could help? What if it could help't'next time they come?' '
Gran-pere's lips barely moved, but his thick accent had almost entirely departed, and Eddie could understand him perfectly.
'And he said to me, 'Da', if'ee really b'lieved knowin c'd help, why have'ee not told afore now?' And Ah couldn't answer him, young fella, cos 'twas nothing but intuition kep' my gob shut. Besides, what good could it do? What do it change?'
'I don't know,' Eddie said. Their faces were close. Eddie could smell beef and gravy on old Jamie's breath. 'How can I, when you haven't told me what you saw?'
' 'The Red King always finds 'is henchmen,' my boy said. 'It'd be good if no one ever knew ye were out there, better still if no one ever heard what ye saw out there, lest it get back to em, aye, even in Thunderclap.' And Ah seen a sad thing, young fella.'
Although he was almost wild with impatience, Eddie thought it best to let the old guy unwind it in his
