The True was standing around Grampa’s RV in a silent circle. Rose (now wearing her hat at its accustomed gravity-defying angle) cut through them, pausing to give Andi a hug, then went up the steps, rapped once, and let herself in. Nut was standing with Big Mo and Apron Annie, Grampa’s two reluctant nurses. Crow was sitting on the end of the bed. He stood up when Rose came in. He was showing his age this evening. Lines bracketed his mouth, and there were a few threads of white silk in his black hair.
We need to take steam, Rose thought. And when this is over, we will.
Grampa Flick was cycling rapidly now: first transparent, then solid again, then transparent. But each transparency was longer, and more of him disappeared. He knew what was happening, Rose saw. His eyes were wide and terrified; his body writhed with the pain of the changes it was going through. She had always allowed herself to believe, on some deep level of her mind, in the True Knot’s immortality. Yes, every fifty or a hundred years or so, someone died—like that big dumb Dutchman, Hands-Off Hans, who had been electrocuted by a falling powerline in an Arkansas windstorm not long after World War II ended, or Katie Patches, who had drowned, or Tommy the Truck—but those were exceptions. Usually the ones who fell were taken down by their own carelessness. So she had always believed. Now she saw she had been as foolish as rube children clinging to their belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
He cycled back to solidity, moaning and crying and shivering. “Make it stop, Rosie-girl, make it stop. It hurts—”
Before she could answer—and really, what could she have said?—he was fading again until there was nothing left of him but a sketch of bones and his staring, floating eyes. They were the worst.
Rose tried to contact him with her mind and comfort him that way, but there was nothing to hold onto. Where Grampa Flick had always been—often grumpy, sometimes sweet—there was now only a roaring windstorm of broken images. Rose withdrew from him, shaken. Again she thought, This can’t be happening.
“Maybe we should put him out of his miz’y,” Big Mo said. She was digging her fingernails into Annie’s forearm, but Annie didn’t seem to feel it. “Give him a shot, or something. You got something in your bag, don’t you, Nut? You must.”
“What good would it do?” Walnut’s voice was hoarse. “Maybe earlier, but it’s going too fast now. He’s got no system for any drug to circulate in. If I gave him a hypo in the arm, we’d see it soaking into the bed five seconds later. Best to just let it happen. It won’t be long.”
Nor was it. Rose counted four more full cycles. On the fifth, even his bones disappeared. For a moment the eyeballs remained, staring first at her and then rolling to look at Crow Daddy. They hung above the pillow, which was still indented by the weight of his head and stained with Wildroot Cream-Oil hair tonic, of which he seemed to have an endless supply. She thought she remembered Greedy G telling her once that he bought it on eBay. eBay, for fuck’s sweet sake!
Then, slowly, the eyes disappeared, too. Except of course they weren’t really gone; Rose knew she’d be seeing them in her dreams later tonight. So would the others in attendance at Grampa Flick’s deathbed. If they got any sleep at all.
They waited, none of them entirely convinced that the old man wouldn’t appear before them again like the ghost of Hamlet’s father or Jacob Marley or some other, but there was only the shape of his disappeared head, the stains left by his hair tonic, and the deflated pee- and shit-stained boxers he had been wearing.
Mo burst into wild sobs and buried her head in Apron Annie’s generous bosom. Those waiting outside heard, and one voice (Rose would never know whose) began to speak. Another joined in, then a third and a fourth. Soon they were all chanting under the stars, and Rose felt a wild chill go zigzagging up her back. She reached out, found Crow’s hand, and squeezed it.
Annie joined in. Mo next, her words muffled. Nut. Then Crow. Rose the Hat took a deep breath and added her voice to theirs.