a headache.'
'It'd ache a lot worse if the wind wasn't blowin', I guess.'
Another lapse into utter nonsense. What in God's name was he doing here? And why did he feel so goddam jumpy?
'I feel like somebody slipped me a couple of bennies in my coffee.'
'Ayuh.'
Dugan looked at him. 'But you don't feel that way, do you? You're as cool as a goddam cucumber.'
'I'm scared, but I don't have the jitters, and I don't have a headache, neither.'
'Why would you have a headache?' Dugan asked crossly. The conversation had gotten decidedly Alice in Wonderland-ish. 'Headaches aren't catching.'
'If you and six other guys are painting a closed room, you are all apt to end up with headaches. Ain't that a true fact?'
'Yeah, I guess so. But this isn't - '
'No. It ain't. And we got lucky with the weather. Just the same, I guess that thing is putting out a powerful stink, because you feel it. I can see you do.' Hillman paused and then said another Alice in Wonderland thing. 'Had any good ideas yet, Trooper?'
'What do you mean?'
Hillman nodded, satisfied. 'Good. If you do, tell me. I got something in that sack for you.'
'This is crazy,' Dugan said. His voice wasn't quite steady. 'I mean, utterly nuts. Turn this thing around, Hillman. I want to go back.'
Ev suddenly focused a single phrase in his mind, as sharply and as clearly as he could. He knew from his last three days in Haven that Bryant, Marie, Hilly, and David were routinely reading each other's minds. He could sense it even though he couldn't pick it up. By the same token, he had come to realize they couldn't get into his head unless he let them. He had begun to wonder if it had something to do with the steel in his skull, a souvenir of that German grenade. He had seen the potato-masher with dreadful, ineluctable clarity, a gray-black thing spinning in the snow. He'd thought, Well, I'm dead. That's it for me. After, he remembered nothing until he'd awakened in a French hospital. He remembered how his head had hurt; he remembered the nurse who had kissed him, and how her breath had smelled like anise, and how she kept saying, shaping her words as if speaking to a very small child, 'Je t'aime, mon amour. La guerre est finie. Je t'aime. Je t'aime les Etats Unis.'
La guerre est finie, he thought now. La guerre est finie.
'What is it?' he asked Dugan sharply.
'What do you m -'
Ev swerved the Cherokee over to the side of the road, kicking up a spume of dust. They were a mile and a half over the town line now; it was another three or four miles to the old Garrick farm.
'Don't think, don't talk, just tell me what I was thinkin'.'
'Tout fini, you're thinking la guerre est finie, but you're crazy, people can't read minds, they c - '
Dugan stopped. He turned his head slowly and stared at Ev. Ev could hear the tendons in the man's neck creak. His eyes were huge.
'La guerre est finie,' he whispered. 'That's what you were thinking, and that she smelled like licorice - '
'Anise,' Ev said, and laughed, remembering. Her thighs had been so white, her cunt so tight.
and I saw a grenade in the snow, oh Jesus what's going on?'
Ev pictured a red old-fashioned tractor in his mind. 'What now?'
'Tractor,' Dugan husked. 'Farmall. But you got the wrong tires on it. My dad had a Farmall Those are Dixie Field-Boss tires. They wouldn't fit a Far - '
Dugan suddenly turned around, grappled for the Cherokee's door handle, leaned out, and threw up.
12
'Ruth once asked me if I would read the Beatitudes at her funeral if it should fall to me to preside over it,' the Rev. Goohringer was saying in a mellow Methodist voice the Rev. Donald Harley would have completely approved of, 'and I have honored her wishes. Yet - '
(la guerre you were thinking la guerre est)
Goohringer paused, a little expression of surprise and concern touching his face. A close observer might have thought a little gas had bubbled up, and he had paused to stifle an unseemly burp.
' - I think there is another set of verses she merits. They '
(tractor Farmall tractor)
There was another small hitch in Goohringer's delivery, and that frown touched his face again.
' - are not the sort of verses, I suppose, that any Christian woman would dare ask for, knowing that a Christian woman must earn them. Listen