“Will we?”
“Oh,” he cried, face blazing with revelation. “Yeah!”
“Is that all you got to say? Not what went on in the graveyard, not what you saw? Just, oh yeah?”
“Oh,” said Roy, turning to gaze back across at the graveyard. “Yeah.”
The church lights in the tiled patio went out. The church was dark. The street was dark. The lights on the face of my friend were gone. The graveyard was filled with night shadowing toward dawn.
“Yeah,” whispered Roy.
And drove us toward home.
“I can hardly wait to get to my clay,” he said.
“No!”
Shocked, Roy turned to look at me. Rivers of street light ran over his face. He looked like someone underwater, not to be touched, reached, saved.
“You telling me, positively, I can’t use that face for our film?”
“It’s not just the face. I got this feeling … if you do it, we’re dead. God, Roy, I’m really scared. Someone wrote you to come find him tonight, don’t forget. Someone wanted you to see him. Someone told Clarence to come there tonight, too! Things are running too fast. Pretend we were never at the Brown Derby.”
“How,” asked Roy, “could I possibly do that?”
He drove faster.
The wind ripped in the windows, tore at my hair and my eyelids and my lips.
Shadows ran across Roy’s brow and down his great hawk’s nose and over his triumphant mouth. It seemed like Groc’s mouth, or The Man Who Laughs.
Roy felt me looking at him and said: “Busy hating me?”
“No. Wondering how I could have known you all these years and still not know you.”
Roy lifted his left hand full of the Brown Derby sketches. They flapped and fluttered in the wind outside the window.
“Shall I let go?”
“You know and I know, you got a box-brownie in your head. Let those fly and you got a whole new roll, waiting, behind your left eyeball.”
Roy waved them. “Yeah. The next set will be ten times better.” The pad pages flew off in the night behind us.
“Doesn’t make me feel any better,” I said.
“Does me. The Beast is ours now. We own him.”
“Yeah, who gave him to us? Who sent us to see? Who’s watching us watching him?”
Roy reached out to draw half a terrible face on the moisture inside the window.
“Right now, just my Muse.”
Nothing more was said. We rode in cold silence, all the rest of the way home.
17
The telephone rang at two in the morning.