“He took Jo Anne for five hundred dollars. That’s why I’m asking y’all not to hurt her any more than she’s been hurt.”
“Fuck you. We don’t hurt anybody,” Moon Child said.
As I looked at Moon Child, with her round pie-plate face and cavernous eyes, and at Orchid, with her clean purple and green hair, and Lindsey Lou, the rodeo girl with pigtails and western shirt and figure like a whip, I wondered if they dreamed of an ancient stone bowl that contained magical properties, perhaps carved from the rock in a Judaic mountain and brimming with water that had been snow only yesterday, a balm that rinsed away the injustice done the innocent and made all things new. The bruises on their souls hovered in their eyes, and I was sure that each of them shared a commonality they would pay any cost to forget. The commonality I mean was the moment the father figure in the home placed his hand on top of his daughter’s head and looked into her eyes and said, Be gone from my sight.
But if my speculation was correct, I did not want to show it. “Can y’all give Jo Anne a break?”
“We like her,” Lindsey Lou said. “She’s a sister.”
“See, we own nothing,” Orchid said. Her drooping eyelid gave the affect of someone aiming down a rifle barrel. “By owning nothing, we’re allowed to share in everything. One day we’re going to a tropical place where the people eat the fruit from the trees and the fish from the sea and nothing else. They don’t die, either.”
“Who taught you this?” I said.
“Ours to know,” she said. “Why don’t you and Jo Anne join us?”
“I have to make a living,” I said.
“Poor you,” she said. She pursed her lips. “We share everything.”
“I see,” I said.
“You don’t see anything,” Moon Child said. “And here’s something else for you to chew on, asshole. What we do is none of your fucking business.”
“Don’t be hard on him, Moon Child,” Lindsey Lou said. “We’ve been living off his girlfriend.” She looked at me. “Did you see the holy man who just left?”
“Holy man?” I said. “No, I don’t think I did. Does he glow with blue fire?”
“We’re talking about Bible-thumping Bob,” Marvin said.
I was starting to lose attention.
“His face got fried, so he wears a veil or a black hood,” Marvin said. “Depending on the venue.”
“Nice seeing y’all,” I said.
“There’s more,” Marvin said. “The hood doesn’t have eyeholes in it.”
The girls were smiling now.
“Y’all taking me over the hurdles?” I said.
“No. Hang around,” Orchid said. “We’ll introduce you.”
“Hey, ice cream guy,” Stoney said, suddenly erect, as though someone had just clicked a switch on his back. “Stay away from… stay away from… stay away from…” He couldn’t finish the sentence. He started twitching, pulling at his shirt as he had done before. Then he wept. The girls put their hands on him.
“What’s wrong, partner?” I said. “What should I stay away from?”
“Don’t go near the hills. Where all those miners and children and women got killed.”
I couldn’t take it any longer. The drug culture had just commenced its long slog across the country, but I was convinced these kids had already dipped their brains in hallucinogens and probably would never undo the damage. I left the bus and went into the hamburger joint. I could see Jo Anne in the kitchen, cooking a wire basket full of french fries, her face bright with sweat, her eyes watering in the smoke. She wiped her eyes on her forearm and blew me a kiss.
I wanted to lift her on my shoulder and pack her over the mountains into a place where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where men do not break through and steal, maybe the same imaginary kingdom a sad kid like Orchid had described, a haven I had just derided, silently, perhaps, but derided just the same.
Chapter Fourteen
DURING HER BREAK, Jo Anne and I had some ice cream in a booth in back. “Ever hear of a holy man named Bible-thumping Bob?” I asked. “A fellow who wears a black hood with no eyeholes??
?