“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter. Point is, people lie a lot. Sometimes out of habit. Not many people are good at telling the truth. But what I meant just now was that nearly everybody who comes back from the Ruin, lies about what they’ve seen. ”
“What kind of people?”
“You see? That’s the kind of question that makes me think you’ve actually been there. Most people would ask, ‘What kind of lies?’ You see the difference?”
Benny thought he did. “Tom says that people here in town want to believe their own version of the truth. ”
“Yes, they do. They don’t want to know the truth and even when they say that they do, they don’t ask the right questions. ”
“What do you mean?”
“There are a lot of very obvious questions about our world that nobody around here seems to want to ask. ”
“Like why we don’t expand the town?” suggested Benny.
“Uh-huh. ”
“And … why don’t we try and—what’s the word?—reclaim what we lost. I know. Since we got back I’ve been thinking a lot about that. ”
“I’ll bet you have. You’re Tom’s brother after all. ”
“Okay, now what about that? After what happened, I guess my opinion about Tom has changed a bit. ”
“But … ?”
“But I still don’t understand why everyone thinks Tom is so tough. He’s even on one of the Zombie Cards. ”
“You haven’t seem him in action?”
“All I saw was him do was hog-tie one skinny zom. ”
“That’s it?”
“Sure. He ran away from the three bounty hunters. ”
“‘Ran away,’” echoed the artist, looking amused. “Tom Imura, running away. ” He suddenly threw his head back and laughed for a whole minute, his thin body shaking, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. He slapped the tabletop over and over again until the cold coffee in Benny’s cup jumped and spilled.
“Holy crap, kid. ” Sacchetto gasped when he could talk. “God! I haven’t laughed that hard since Mayor Kirsch’s outdoor shower blew away in the Santa Ana, leaving him standing stark naked with soap dripping off his—”
“What’s so freaking funny?” interrupted Benny.
The artist held up his hands in a “sorry” gesture, palms out. “It’s just that anyone who knows your brother, I mean, really knows him, is going to react the same way if you tell them that Tom Imura was afraid of anything. ”
“He ran away. …”
“He ran away because you were there, kid. Believe me, if he’d been alone …” He left the rest unsaid.
“You don’t live with him,” Benny said irritably. “You don’t know what I know. You don’t know what I’ve seen. ”
Sacchetto shrugged. “That pretty much goes both ways. You don’t know what I know. Or what I’ve seen. ”
They sat there for half a minute, both of them re-evaluating things and trying to find a doorway back into the conversation.
Finally, the artist said, “The Lost Girl. My end of the bargain. ”
“The Lost Girl,” Benny agreed. “Tell me that she’s real. ”