THE NEXT MORNING was Sunday, and Ray got up early, restless and fidgety. He took a shower and went out to his car and pulled out, not knowing where he was heading until he found himself on 611 going north toward Doylestown. He cranked the window down, and the warm air felt good after all the rain of the days before. When he reached the town he parked and sat for a minute. As soon as he stopped the car, the air inside began to heat up and he began to sweat. He thought about putting on his jacket anyway, the better to carry the little.32 he had with him, but in the end he just left the pistol in the jacket and the jacket in the car. He walked by the bookstore again, but the dark- haired girl wasn’t there. He prowled around the aisles for a while and bought himself a book on classic horror films, the kind of movie he hadn’t been able to stay away from when he was a kid, even though thoughts of the monsters kept him awake at night.
He took his book and walked up the street, stopping at a Starbucks and buying a cup of coffee and then walking aimlessly past craft shops and jewelry stores. He liked the town. There were gaslights on the street and nice old buildings with a little character in the details. He walked and sipped at the coffee and sweated till he came to a bench in the shade of a tree and sat down and paged through the book. He was trying to find a reference to the movie the girl had recommended when he looked up and there she was. She was walking along with a paper cup of coffee and stopped to sip out of it, wearing a blue oxford shirt with long sleeves and what he thought of as a peasant skirt that hung almost to her ankles, some kind of reddish- brown print from India or someplace. He smiled and watched her walk toward him and almost didn’t say anything as she got closer, until she was right beside him, looking distracted.
“Hey,” he said, and held a hand up. She looked at him for a minute with a frown, and he began to feel nervous and maybe a little disreputable, and then her faced changed and she cocked her head and gave him that crooked smile again.
“Hey, Night of the Demon.” She laughed and shook her head. “I’m sorry! I don’t remember your name.”
“No, I’ve been called worse. Anyway, I don’t think I ever said it.”
“No, but still. I could have said the cute guy who was looking for a movie, or something.” Her teeth were white and even, and he felt the levers moving in him again, wheels spinning and metal balls dropping and rolling through the hollow pipes inside him.
“I’m Ray.”
“Michelle.” She shook her head. “This is wild. Do you live nearby?” She looked away, and then back at him.
“No, actually down near Willow Grove. This is the second time I’ve been here, and I’ve seen you both times. Are you like the mayor or something?”
“The official greeter. How are you enjoying your stay in our little town?”
“Swell. You should have a sash and a top hat for a job like that.” He should have been nervous and distracted, with his head on a swivel for trouble and unfamiliar faces, but he was relaxed and warm inside, and he let himself focus on the girl. On Michelle. She laughed and sat down next to him, and he moved over to make room. She reached over and put her hand in the book, took glimpses of him out of the corner of her eye. He could smell that sweet, fruity smell again.
“Horror movies, I love it.”
“Not just any horror movies.” He opened the page to show her the entry he had been reading, on Night of the Demon. “Also called Curse of the Demon, 1957. Dana Andrews.”
“I’m impressed. You know your stuff.”
“Ah, that’s all I know, and I just read it. Anyway, everyone looks smart holding a book. I should carry one around all the time.” She looked directly into his eyes, and he made himself look back. It was like looking at the sun, and he had to get used to it. “So, you must live around here, then.”
She pointed up the street. “Right around the corner, on Mary Street. I was just on my way to Meeting.”
“A meeting? For work?”
“Not a meeting, just Meeting. Quaker Meeting, the Society of Friends?”
“Oh, right.” He had known a few Quakers. One of his social workers had been a Quaker, and one of his public defender lawyers, and there were plenty of old meeting houses around the county, but he didn’t really know anything about what it meant to be a Quaker. It was a religion, he got that, but what they believed or what went on inside the meeting houses, he couldn’t say.
“I’m not a member, just an attender.” She said it like it had capital letters. “I’m not really religious, that’s not my thing. It’s just, I don’t know. It’s just nice. There’s no priest or minister or anything. You just sit in silence, and if someone wants to say something, they do. Sometimes the whole hour goes by and nobody says anything, but usually someone’ll say something about, you know, the war or how they’re trying to work something out for themselves. It’s like antichurch, you know? Church without all the bullshit.”
He laughed a little. “That would be something to see. I grew up Catholic. All my friends are Catholic. I stopped going when I was eight. I had an argument with the nuns about pagan babies going to hell.”
“Me, too! I love it.” He picked up that this was something she said, that she loved things. Of all the ways you could go through life, was looking for things to love all that bad?
She shook her head. “They’d make these ridiculous sweeping statements about who was going to hell, which was pretty much everybody, and I’d sit there thinking about special circumstances where it didn’t make any sense to me to send somebody to hell just because they were gay or had an abortion or were mad at God or had just never gotten the word about Catholicism before they, you know. Shuffled off this mortal coil.” She moved her arms when she talked, making arcs and swoops in the air with her hands.
Ray said, “I never got the religion thing at all, to be honest. I’ve been, you know, around some pretty bad guys, and everyone always talks about God, or has to have some special diet or something because of their religion and meanwhile they’re fucking everyone over for’” He almost said for a pack of cigarettes. Why not just roll up his sleeves and start showing her the tats? “For a nickel.”
He had to be careful, but he didn’t want to be. “Being in a church seems like, I don’t know. Like just painting everything a certain color. You’re still a, you know, a jerk, you do what ever the hell you want, because everyone does. But if you’re a Catholic you paint everything red, if you’re a Jew everything gets a coat of yellow, if you’re Muslim it’s something else. Does that make sense?”
“I think so. Like the fact of being in a religion means something more than it really does. Like you don’t have to do the right thing or help anyone or think about your actions. As long as you say the right prayer.”
He nodded but then shook his head. “Like I know shit from Shinola. Like I’m in the deep thinking business.”
“I have to ask.” He braced himself, waiting for the just- what-is- your- business question, and his mind raced for the right thing to say. “I’ve heard that expression a million times, but what the hell is Shinola, anyway?”
He breathed out. “Shoe polish.”
She looked up at the sky, waggled her head. “Okay, I can buy that. But I think you do.”
“I do?”
“Know shit from Shinola.” She got up. “And with that, she headed off to church.”
“Have dinner with me.” He didn’t know where that had come from. He felt like he was in some twilight zone, off from his real life, and he could go back and forth between the world where girls wore peasant dresses and he sat on the street drinking coffee and the world where he was being hunted for money and dope. Was he out of his fucking mind?
“I can’t do dinner, but how about coffee? Tomorrow night, like seven?”
“Okay.” He smiled. “At Starbucks?” He pointed back up the street.
She lowered her voice. “Fuck no. I hate their coffee. There’s a little place around the corner, Coffee and Cream. They have great homemade ice cream, too.”
“Tomorrow night.” He stuck out his hand, and she took it. Her fingers were long and cool to the touch.
“Seven.” And she moved away, waving over her shoulder.
He thought, if I still have my head.
AT TWO HE woke himself up trying to scream. A man with a misshapen head had been standing over him, staring down at him, eyes dark and hard. He opened his mouth and couldn’t force anything out. No sound, no breath. When he opened his eyes he forced out a croak and started coughing. He got up and moved around the apartment with the Colt in his hand checking locks. Put the TV on and fell asleep to muted infomercials about no- money- down real estate.
