than scissors. The blades were gummy with blood. She didn’t want to think how Ross Humbolt of Poughkeepsie might have used that tool, or how she herself might now use it.
Nevertheless, she closed her hand around it.
“Come here, I said,” Ross told her. “Now, bitch.” Hauling on her foot.
She twisted and shoved herself back at him, with Natalie Humbolt’s manicure scissors in one fist. She struck him in the face, once, twice, three times, before he began to scream. It was a scream of pain, even if, before she was done with him, it had turned into great, sobbing guffaws of laughter. She thought, The kid laughed, too. Then for quite a while she thought nothing. Not until after moonrise.
⟶
In the last of the day’s light, Cal sat in the grass, brushing tears off his cheeks.
He never gave way to full-on weeping. He only dropped onto his butt, after who knew how much fruitless wandering and calling for Becky—she had long since stopped replying to him—and then for a while his eyes were tingling and damp and his breath a little thick.
Dusk was glorious. The sky was a deep, austere blue, darkening almost to black, and in the west, behind the church, the horizon was lit with the infernal glow of dying coals. He saw it now and then, when he had the energy to jump and look and could persuade himself there was some point in looking around.
His sneakers were soaked through, which made them heavy, and his feet ached. The insides of his thighs itched. He took off his right shoe and dumped a dingy trickle of water from it. He wasn’t wearing socks, and his bare foot had the ghastly white, shriveled look of a drowned thing.
He removed the other sneaker, was about to dump it, then hesitated. He brought it to his lips, tipped back his head, and let gritty water—water that tasted like his own stinking foot—run over his tongue.
He had heard Becky and the Man, a long way off in the grass. Had heard the Man speaking to her in a gleeful, inebriated voice, lecturing her almost, although Cal had not been able to make out much of what was actually said. Something about a rock. Something about dancing men. Something about being thirsty. A line from some old folk song. What had the guy been singing? “Twenty years of writing and they put you on the night shift.” No—that wasn’t right. But something close to that. Folk music wasn’t an area of expertise for Cal; he was more of a Rush fan. They’d been surfing on Permanent Waves all the way across the country.
Then he heard the two of them thrashing and struggling in the grass, heard Becky’s choked cries and the man ranting at her. Finally there came screams—screams that were terribly like shouts of hilarity. Not Becky. The Man.
By that point Cal had been hysterical, running and jumping and screaming for her. He shouted and ran for a long time before he finally got himself under control, forced himself to stop and listen. He had bent over, clutching his knees and panting, his throat achy with thirst, and had turned his attention to the silence.
The grass hushed.
“Becky?” he had called again, in a hoarsened voice. “Beck?”
No reply except for the wind slithering in the weeds.
He walked a little more. He called again. He sat. He tried not to cry.
And dusk was glorious.
He searched his pockets, for the hundredth hopeless time, gripped by the terrible fantasy of discovering a dry, linty stick of Juicy Fruit. He had bought a package of Juicy Fruit back in Pennsylvania, but he and Becky had shared it out before they reached the Ohio border. Juicy Fruit was a waste of money. That citrus flash of sugar was always gone in four chews and—
—he felt a stiff paper flap and withdrew a book of matches. Cal did not smoke, but they had been giving them away free at the little liquor store across the street from the Kaskaskia Dragon in Vandalia. It had a picture of the thirty-five-foot-long stainless-steel dragon on the cover. Becky and Cal had paid for a fistful of tokens and spent most of the early evening feeding the big metal dragon, to watch jets of burning propane erupt from its nostrils. Cal imagined the dragon set down in the field and went dizzy with pleasure at the thought of it exhaling a gassy plume of fire into the grass.