Reminded of Donella, he worries about her welfare. What might have happened to her among all the flying bullets? On the other hand, although she provides a convenient target, her fantastic bulk no doubt makes her more difficult to kill than are ordinary mortals.
He wishes that he’d returned for her and had bravely spirited her to safety. This is a ridiculously romantic and perhaps irrational notion. He’s just a boy of comparatively little experience, and she’s a grand person of great age and immeasurable wisdom. Nevertheless, he wishes he had been brave for her.
Helicopter rotors rattle the night again. Curtis tenses, half expecting gunfire to riddle the motor home, to hear the booted feet of winch-lowered SWAT officers thumping on the roof and demands for his surrender blasted on a loudspeaker. The chudda-chudda-chudda of air-slicing steel grows thunderous . . . but then diminishes and fades entirely away.
Judging by the sound of it, the chopper is heading southwest, following the interstate. This is not good.
Finished with the hot dogs, Curtis drinks orange juice from the container—and realizes that Old Yeller is thirsty, too.
Drawing upon the messy experience of giving the dog a drink from a bottle of water in the Explorer, he decides to search for a bowl or for something that can serve as one.
The motor home is rolling along at the speed limit or faster, and he assumes that the owners—the man and woman whose voices he heard earlier—are still in the cockpit, hashing over the excitement at the truck stop. If they’re sitting at the far end of the vehicle, facing away from the bedroom, they aren’t in a position to see any light that might leak under or around the door.
Curtis eases off the bed. He feels the wall beside the jamb, finds the switch.
His dark-adapted eyes sting briefly from the glare.
Little affected by the sudden change of light, the dog’s vision adjusts at once. Previously lying on the bed, she now stands upon it, following Curtis’s movements with curiosity, her tail wagging in expectation of either adventure or a share of the juice.
The bedroom is too small and too utilitarian for decorative bowls or for knickknacks that might be of use.
Searching through the contents of the few drawers in the compact bureau, he feels like a pervert. He’s not exactly sure what perverts do, or why they do whatever it is they do, but he knows that secretly poking through other people’s underwear is definitely a sign that you are a pervert, and there seems to be as much underwear in this bureau as anything else.
Flushed with embarrassment, unable to look at Old Yeller, the boy turns from the bureau and tries the top drawer on the nearest nightstand. Inside, among articles of no use to him, are a pair of white plastic jars, each four inches in diameter and three inches tall. Though small, either of these will be suitable as a dish for the dog; he will simply refill it with juice as often as the pooch requires.
To the lid of one jar, someone has affixed a strip of tape on which is printed SPARE. Curtis interprets this to mean that of the two jars, this is the one of less importance to the owners of the motor home, and so he decides to appropriate this spare in order to cause them as little inconvenience as possible.
The jar features a screw-top. When he twists off the lid, he is horrified to discover a full set of teeth inside. They grin at him, complete with pink gums, but purged of blood.
Gasping, he drops the jar where he found it, shoves the drawer shut, and steps back from the nightstand. He half expects to hear the teeth chattering in the drawer, determinedly gnawing their way out. He has seen movies about serial killers. These human monsters collect souvenirs of their kills. Some keep severed heads in the refrigerator or preserve their victims’ eyes in jars of formaldehyde. Others make garments from the skin of those they murder, or they create mobiles with weird arrangements of dangling bones.
None of those movies or books has introduced him to a homicidal psychopath who collects teeth still firmly fixed in carved-out chunks of jawbone, gums attached. Nevertheless, though just a boy, he is sufficiently well informed about the darker side of human nature to understand what he saw in that jar.
“Serial killers,” he whispers to Old Yeller. Serial killers. This concept is too complex for the dog to grasp. She lacks the cultural references to make sense of it. Her tail stops wagging, but only because she feels her brother-becoming’s distress.
Curtis still must find a bowl for the orange juice, but he’s not going to look in any more nightstand drawers. No way. Otherwise, only the closet remains unexplored. Movies and books warn that closets are problematical. The worst thing that you could dream up in a nightmare, no matter how hideous and fantastic and unlikely, might be waiting for you in a closet.
This is a beautiful world, a masterpiece of creation, but ii is also a dangerous place. Villains human and inhuman and supernatural lurk in basements and in cobweb-festooned attics. In graveyards at night. In abandoned houses, in castles inhabited by people with surnames of Germanic or Slavic origin, in funeral homes, in ancient pyramids, in lonely woods, under the surface of virtually any large body of water, even also on occasion under the soap-obscured surface of a full bathtub, and of course in spaceships whether they are here on Earth or cruising distant avenues of the universe.
Right now, he’d rather explore a graveyard or a scarab-infested pyramid with mummies on the march, or the chambers of any spaceship, instead of the closet in these serial killers’ motor home. He’s not in an Egyptian desert, however, and he’s not aboard a faster-than-light vessel beyond the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation of Orion. He’s here, like it or not, and if ever he has needed to draw strength from his mother’s courageous example, this is the moment.
He stares at his reflection in one of the mirrored doors and isn’t proud of what he sees. Pale face. Eyes wide and shining with fear. The posture of a fright-buckled child: tensed body, hunched shoulders, head tucked down as if he expects someone to strike him.
Old Yeller turns her attention from Curtis to the closet. She issues a low growl.
Maybe something hideous does lurk in there. Perhaps awaiting Curtis is a discovery far more disgusting and terrifying than the teeth.
Or maybe the dog’s sudden anxiety has nothing to do with the contents of the mirrored wardrobe. She might simply have absorbed Curtis’s mood.
The closet door rattles. Probably just road vibration.
Resolved to live up to his mother’s expectations, reminding himself of his remorse over failing to rescue Donella, determined to locate a suitable juice bowl for his thirsty dog, he grips the handle on one of the sliding doors. He draws a deep breath, clenches his teeth, and opens the closet.
As his reflection slides away from him and as the interior of the wardrobe is revealed, Curtis sighs with relief when he fails to find jars of pickled eyeballs arrayed on the one long shell. None of the garments hanging from the rod appears to be made of human skin.
Still wary but with growing confidence, he drops to his knees to search the closet floor for anything that might be used as a bowl. Lie finds only men’s and women’s shoes, and he’s grateful that they don’t contain a collection of severed feet.
A pair of men’s walking shoes appear new. He takes one of these from the closet, puts it on the floor near the bed, and fills it with orange juice from the plastic jug.
Ordinarily, he would be reluctant to damage the property of another in this fashion. But serial killers don’t deserve the same respect as law-abiding citizens.
Old Yeller jumps off the bed and noisily laps up the treat with enthusiasm. She doesn’t hesitate or pause to consider the taste—as though she has drunk orange juice before.
Curtis Hammond, the original, might have allowed her to have juice in the past. The current Curtis Hammond suspects, however, that he and the mutt are continuing to bond and that she recognizes the taste from his recent experience of it.
A boy and his dog can form astonishing, profound connections. He knows this to be true not entirely from movies and books, but from experience with animals in the past.
Curtis is “not quite right,” as Burt Hooper put it, and Old Yeller is neither yellow nor male, nor particularly old, but they are going to be a great team.
After refilling the shoe, he puts down the juice container and sits on the edge of the bed to watch the dog drink.
I’ll take good care of you, he promises.
He is pleased by his ability to function in spite of his fear. He’s also pleased by his resourcefulness.
Although they’re riding the Hannibal Lecter band bus and running from a pack of terminators who have more attitude than Schwarzenegger with a bee up his ass, although they’re wanted by the FBI and surely by other government agencies that have more-ominous initials and less-honorable intentions, Curtis remains optimistic about his chances of escape. The sight of his canine companion, happily drinking, draws a smile from him. He takes a moment to thank God for keeping him alive, and he thanks his mother for the survival training that so far has been an invaluable assist to God in this matter.
A siren arises in the distance. This could be a fire truck, an ambulance, a police vehicle, or a clown car. Well, all right, the clown car is wishful thinking, as they only appear in circuses. In fact, it’s certain to be the police.
Old Yeller looks up from the shoe, juice dripping off her chin.
The siren quickly grows louder until it’s close behind the motor home.
Chapter 21
JAWS CRACKED WIDE as if unhinged, backward-hooked fangs exposed to their full wicked arc, split tongue fluttering, the serpent swam through the air with the wriggle of an eel through water, but faster than any eel, as bottle-rocket fast as a fireworks snake, launched straight at Leilani’s face.
Although she juked, the viper must also have misaimed, because her reaction alone wouldn’t have been quick enough to spare her from a bite. She might have imagined the thin hiss as the thwarted snake sailed past her left ear, but the lash of smooth dry scales across her cheek was real. This caressing flick, cold or not, sent chills chasing chills along her spine, with such palpable shivers that she could almost believe the hateful serpent had slipped under the collar of her T-shirt and along the small of her back.
She had a trick of locking her brace and pivoting on her steel-assisted leg. Even as she heard the hiss or dreamed it, she twisted around in time to see the “treasure out of Eden” as it raveled in a long arc to the floor, the brighter fraction of its scales glinting like sequins in the red light.
The snake wasn’t huge, between two and three feet long, about as thick as a man’s index finger, but when it struck the floor and tumbled, lashing angrily, as though mistaking its own whipping coils for those of a predator, it couldn’t have been scarier if it had been a massive python or a full-grown rattlesnake. After that brief moment of frenzy, the viper slithered loose of its own tangles and flowed swiftly across the squashed-shag carpet, as if it were a quickness of water following the course of a rillet. Encountering the baseboard under the window, it reeled itself into a coiled pile once more and raised its head to assess the situation, ready to strike again.
Leading with her good leg, dragging her left, long-practiced grace abandoned, hard-won dignity lost, Leilani clumped in a panicked stagger toward the hallway. Though off-balance with every step, she managed to remain upright, lurching all the way to the door, where she clutched at the knob for support.
She had to escape from the snake. Get to her bedroom. Try to barricade that door against her mother’s intrusion.
Sinsemilla was highly amused. Words whooped from her on peals of laughter. “It’s not poisonous, you ninny! It’s a pet-shop snake. You should’ve seen the look on your face!”
Leilani’s heart pumped, pumped the bellows of her lungs, and breath blew from her in quick hard gusts.
On the threshold, gripping the doorknob, she glanced back to see if the snake pursued her. It remained coiled under the window.
Kneeling on the mattress, her mother bounced like a schoolgirl, making the springs sing and the bedrails rattle, laughing, shiny-eyed with delight over a prank well played. “Don’t be such a goof! It’s just a little slippery thingy, not a monster!”
Here’s the deal: If she fled to her room and barricaded the door, she still wouldn’t be safe, because sooner or later she’d have to come out. To get food. To use the bathroom. They were going to be here a few more days, and if the creature was loose in the house, it could be anywhere, and once she came out of her room to go to the toilet or to get something to eat, then it could slip in her room, too, through the one-inch gap under the poorly hung door, or because Sinsemilla let it into her room and then it could be waiting under Leilani’s bed, in her bed. She’ll have no sanctuary, no peace. Every place will belong to the snake; no place will belong to Leilani, no smallest place. Usually she had only a corner, a nook, a precious retreat; though Sinsemilla might invade any room without warning, Leilani could at least pretend her nook was a private place. But the snake won’t allow even a pretense of privacy. She’ll have no respite from torment, no relief from the expectation of attack, not even when Sinsemilla is
asleep, because the snake is essentially sleepless. This wasn’t a way Leilani could live, not a situation she could endure, this was too much, too much, intolerable.
Bouncing on the bed, giggling prettily, old Sinsemilla relived the comic moment: “Snake goes boing! straight in the air, and Leilani goes yikes! just about straight in the air herself, and then she’s makin’ for the door like two drunk kangaroos in a three-legged sack race!”
Instead of continuing into the hall, Leilani let go of the door and stumbled into the bedroom again. Fear kept her from regaining her usual ease of movement, but also anger; she remained unbalanced by a sense of injustice that quaked through her with 1906 San Francisco intensity, rocking her from good leg to bad, rolling through her in nauseating waves.
“Cute little slippery thingy won’t kill you, Leilani. Little thingy just wants what we all want, baby. Little thingy just wants love,” Sinsemilla said, drawing out love until it was longer than a twelve-syllable word, and she laughed with strange delight.
Poisonous or not, the snake had struck at Leilani’s face, her face, which was the best thing she had going for her, the best thing she might ever have going for her, because in truth she’d probably never develop great bouncing bosoms, regardless of what she had told Micky. When she was sitting in a restaurant or somewhere, with her clatter-clank leg under a table, with her poster-child hand tucked out of sight in her lap, people looked at her face and often smiled, treated her like any other kid, with no sorrow in their eyes, no pity, because nothing in her face said cripple. The snake had struck at her face, and she didn’t give a rat’s ass whether it was poisonous or not, because it could have changed her life if it had gotten those fangs in her cheek or her nose. Then people would never think of her as sassy, but would always think, What a sad little crippled girl she is, with her little twisted leg and her little gnarled hand and her snake-gnawed face and her snake-chomped nose.