Kozy opened up eventually. He was a small man with a big belly currently encased in a bright red strappy undershirt. In one hand he held a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. In the other was a mustard-smeared brat wrapped in a slice of spongy white bread. Because his wife was currently in the other room, he paused for a moment to do a visual inventory of the young woman before him, ponytail to sneakers. “Yeah?”
Several in the True had a bit of sleeper talent, but Andi was by far the best, and her Turning had proved of enormous benefit to the True. She still used the ability on occasion to lift cash from the wallets of certain older rube gentlemen who were attracted to her. Rose found this risky and childish, but knew from experience that in time, what Andi called her issues would fade away. For the True Knot, the only issue was survival.
“I just had a quick question,” Andi said.
“If it’s about the toilets, darlin, the caca sucker don’t come until Thursday.”
“It’s not about that.”
“What, then?”
“Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to go to sleep?”
Mr. Kozy immediately closed his eyes. The beer and the brat tumbled out of his hands, leaving a mess on the rug. Oh well, Andi thought, Crow fronted the guy twelve hundred. Mr. Kozy can afford a bottle of carpet cleaner. Maybe even two.
Andi took him by the arm and led him into the living room. Here was a pair of chintz-covered Kozy armchairs with TV trays set up in front of them.
“Sit,” she said.
Mr. Kozy sat, eyes shut.
“You like to mess with young girls?” Andi asked him. “You would if you could, wouldn’t you? If you could run fast enough to catch them, anyway.” She surveyed him, hands on hips. “You’re disgusting. Can you say that?”
“I’m disgusting,” Mr. Kozy agreed. Then he began to snore.
Mrs. Kozy came in from the kitchen. She was gnawing on an ice cream sandwich. “Here, now, who are you? What are you telling him? What do you want?”
“For you to sleep,” Andi told her.
Mrs. Kozy dropped her ice cream. Then her knees unhinged and she sat on it.
“Ah, fuck,” Andi said. “I didn’t mean there. Get up.”
Mrs. Kozy got up with the squashed ice cream sandwich sticking to the back of her dress. Snakebite Andi put her arm around the woman’s mostly nonexistent waist and led her to the other Kozy chair, pausing long enough to pull the melting ice cream sandwich off her butt. Soon the two of them sat side by side, eyes shut.
“You’ll sleep all night,” Andi instructed them. “Mister can dream about chasing young girls. Missus, you can dream he died of a heart attack and left you a million-dollar insurance policy. How’s that sound? Sound good?”
She snapped on the TV and turned it up loud. Pat Sajak was being embraced by a woman with enormous jahoobies who had just finished solving the puzzle, which was NEVER REST ON YOUR LAURELS. Andi took a moment to admire the mammoth mammaries, then turned back to the Kozys.
“When the eleven o’clock news is over, you can turn off the TV and go to bed. When you wake up tomorrow, you won’t remember I was here. Any questions?”
They had none. Andi left them and hurried back to the cluster of RVs. She was hungry, had been for weeks, and tonight there would be plenty for everybody. As for tomorrow . . . it was Rose’s job to worry about that, and as far as Snakebite Andi was concerned, she was welcome to it.
4
It was full dark by eight o’clock. At nine, the True gathered in the Kozy Kampground’s picnic area. Rose the Hat came last, carrying the canister. A small, greedy murmur went up at the sight of it. Rose knew how they felt. She was plenty hungry herself.
She mounted one of the initial-scarred picnic tables and looked at them one by one. “We are the True Knot.”
“We are the True Knot,” they responded. Their faces were solemn, their eyes avid and hungry. “What is tied may never be untied.”
“We are the True Knot, and we endure.”
“We endure.”
“We are the chosen ones. We are the fortunate ones.”
“We are chosen and fortunate.”
“They are the makers; we are the takers.”
“We take what they make.”
“Take this and use it well.”
“We will use it well.”
Once, early in the last decade of the twentieth century, there had been a boy from Enid, Oklahoma, named Richard Gaylesworthy. I swear that child can