Page 31 (1/2)

Sooner or later you are I just don’t want you to be standin next to irl

Not really

I know

She can feel his gaze on her, and she doesn’t want toin the asphalt that listen under the streetlaet Point Comfort? Come with me to California instead We’ll take the train to Dallas--and we’ll ride west froot whole cities under protection You could walk in a straight line for an hour and never come to a blockade Like civilization restored

What about Niagara Falls? Is that inside the blockade?

He sits back against the bench, defeated

You get old, Te time, it’s true But then one day you wake up and you just want to drink a cup of coffee without thinking about livin or dyin

Yeah, well, I ain’t there yet

Goddas to tell You could tell me

Maybe so, she says But I ain’t there yet either

ON THE road south, Maury is silent He plays with his fingers and looks out the , his eyes focusing on nothing in particular In the rays out the sky and falls in speckles on the windshield--but an hour out of Longview, the rain clears and the sky breaks apart into clouds that look like rag piles against the brilliant blue

All around is flatland--desert waste dotted with tufts of pricking weeds and dry grass Along the road, cars are pulled off to the shoulder or half rolled over in ditches She peers into each as she goes by, looking for sheltered survivors and being relieved to find none At the wheels of some of the cars are corpses, most of theround clean and white by sandstors or locked away behind doors that slugs can’t open, are untouched, their skin leathery, burned brown, shrunk taut over the bones of the fingers and the face

Otherwise nothing She stops the car and shuts down the engine, she rolls down the s to listen Barren and e to her This is a world of deafness

Her thoughts go to sorry places She thinks of God and of the angels ill decide whether or not she enters heaven She thinks of all her crimes--of all the blood she has spilled on the earth She thinks of the Todd brothers, one of whoood as throttling his windpipe, and the other of whom she let die by the hands of others when she could have saved him She thinks of Ruby and her pretty dresses and the pink nail polish that is cos too, like record players and pianos and randfather clocks and polishedof the Griersons alsohouse, sorrowful James Grierson, and Richard Grierson, whose horizons were always beyond fences he wouldn’t dare clied in the basement confused about what he was Him too she stole the life from

It’s true she uished by their touch

And she thinks about an iron giant of a man, and a boy called Malcolm who may have been her actual blooden brother, and the shape of his body, so loose in her arht like he was doches when she begins to see signs for the 59 There, fraainst the ruins of a derelict carnival, she discovers an old woets out of the car and approaches the woht, ma’am?

Mis hijos tendrán haathering them in an apron wrapped around her waist

I don’t speak nothin but English Do you speak English?

Mis hijos necesitarán coresen

Do you live around here?

The old woa Usted taestures for Temple to follow Temple fetches Maury froh sturdy fence surrounding the old carnival They follow the length of the fence until they coate closed with a chain and a lock The old woate and ushers thee colorfulnecks and lines of colored bulbs and torn vinyl seats and twisting tracks