Desperation

“You’re drunk, Mr. Billingsley,” she said coldly.

“No,” he said. “I wish I was, but I ain’t. Excuse me, ladies and gents. I get yarning and I get the whizzies. It never damn fails.”

He crossed the stage, head down, shoulders slumped, weaving slightly. The shadow which followed him was ironic both in its size and its heroic aspect. His hootheels clumped. They watched him go.

There was a sudden flat smacking sound that made them all jump. Cynthia smiled guiltily and raised her sneaker. “Sorry,” she said. “A spider. I think it was one of those fiddleheads.”

“Fiddlebacks,” Steve said.

Joh

“Nope, what.” Steve asked. “Not a fiddleback.”

“Not a singleton,” Joh

Tak! Can ah wan me. Ah lah.

The cougar’s eyes opened. She got up. Her tail began switching restlessly from side to side. It was almost time. Her ears cocked forward, twitching, at the sound of someone entering the room behind the white glass. She looked up at it, all rapt attention, a net of measurement and focus. Her leap would have to be perfect to carry her through, and perfection was exactly what the voice in her head demanded.

She waited, that small, squalling growl once more rising up from her throat… but now it came out of her mouth as well as from her nostrils, because her muzzle was wrinkled back to show her teeth. Little by little, she began to tense down on her haunches.

Almost time.

Almost time. Tak ah ten.

Billingsiey poked his head into the ladies’ first, and shone his light at the window. The bottles were still in place. He had been afraid that a strong gust of wind might open the window wide enough to knock some of them off the ledge, causing a false alarm, but that hadn’t happened and now he thought it very unlikely that it would. The wind was dying.

The storm, a summer freak the likes of which he had never seen, was winding down.

Meantime, he had this prohlem. This thirst to quench.

Except, in the last five years or so, it had come to seem less and less like a thirst than an itch, as if he had con-tracted some awful form of poison ivy-a kind that affected one’s brain instead of one’s skin. Well, it didn’t matter, did it. He knew how to take care of his problem, and that was the important thing. And it kept his mind off the rest, as well. The madness of the rest. if it had just been danger, someone out of control waving a gun around, that he thought he could have faced, old or not, drunk or not. But this was nothing so cut and dried. The geologist woman kept insisting that it was, that it was all Entragian, but Billingsley knew better. Because Entragian was different now. He’d told the others that, and Ellen Carver had called him crazy. But.

But how was Entragian different. And why did he, Billingsley, somehow feel that the change in the deputy was important, perhaps vital, to them right now. He didn’t know.

He should know, it should be as clear as the nose on his face, but these days when he drank everything got swimmy, like he was going senile. He couldn’t even remember the name of the geologist woman’s horse, the mare with the strained leg—“Yes I can,” he murmured. “Yes I can, it was Was what, you old rummy. You don’t know, do you.

“Yes I do, it was Sally!” he cried triumphantly, then walked past the boarded-up firedoor and pushed his way into the men’s room. He shone his flashlight briefly on the potty. “Sally, that’s what it was!” He shifted his light to the wall and the smoke-breathing horse which galloped there. He couldn’t remember drawing it-he’d been in a blackout, he supposed-but it was indubitably his work, and not bad of its kind. He liked the way the horse looked both mad and free, as if it had come from some other world where goddesses still rode bareback, sometimes leaping whole leagues as they went their wild courses.

His memories suddenly clarified a little, as if the pic-ture on the wall had somehow opened his mind. Sally, yes. A year ago, give or take. The rumors that the mine was going to be reopened were just begi

Suppos-edly pretty.

Billingsley needed to pee, he hadn’t lied, but that wasn’t his strongest need right now.

There was a filthy blue rag in one of the washbasins, the sort of thing you wouldn’t handle without tongs unless you absolutely needed to. The old veterinarian now plucked it up, exposing a bottle of Satin Smooth, rotgut whiskey if ever rotgut whiskey had been bottled… but any port in a storm.

He unscrewed the cap and then, holding the bottle in both hands because of the way they were shaking, took a long, deep drink. Napalm slid down his throat and exploded in his gut. It burned, all right, but what was that Patty Loveless song that used to play all the time on the radio. Hurt me, baby, in a real good way.

He chased the first gulp with a smaller sip (holding the bottle easier, now; the shakes were gone), then replaced the cap and put the bottle back in the sink.

“She called me,” he muttered. Outside the window, the cougar’s ears flicked at the sound of his voice. She tensed down a little more on her haunches, waiting for him to move closer to where she was, closer to where her leap would bring her. “Woman called me on the phone. Said her horse was a three-year-old mare named Sally. Yessir.”

He put the rag back over the bottle, not thinking about it, hiding by habit, his mind on that day last summer. He had gone out to the Rieper place, a nice adobe up in the hills, and a fellow from the mine-the black guy who later became the office receptionist, in fact-had taken him to the horse. He said Audrey had just gotten an urgent call and was going to have to fly off to company head-quarters in Phoenix. Then, as they walked to the stable, the black fellow had looked over Billingsley’s shoulder and had said…

“He said, ‘There she goes now,’” Billingsley mur-mured. He had again focused the light on the horse gal-loping across the warped tiles and was staring at it with wide, remembering eyes, his bladder temporarily for-gotten. “And he called to her.”

Yessir. Hi, Aud! he’d called, and waved. She had waved back. Billingsley had also waved, thinking the sto-ries were right: she was young, and she was goodlooking. Not moviestar-knockout goodlooking, but mighty fine for a part of the world where no single woman had to pay for her own drinks if she didn’t want to. He had tended her horse, had given the black man a liniment sample to put on, and later she’d come in herself to buy more. Marsha had told him that; he’d been over near Washoe, looking after some sick sheep. He’d seen her around town plenty since, though. Not to talk to, nosir, not hardly, they ran with different crowds, but he’d seen her eating di

Why are you ru