And then Silencio sees Playboy’s fingers close, on nothing, and open. And the man’s right hand comes up to push Playboy back, and the thin black thing is pulled out of Playboy’s chest, and Silencio wonders how long it could have been hidden there, and Playboy falls back over the wood and the rolls of plastic.
Silencio hears someone say pinche madre and this is Raton. When Raton uses the black and fights, he is very fast and you do not know 30 what he will do; he hurts people and then shakes, laughing, sucking air through his mouth. Now he comes over the rolls of plastic like he is flying, with his knife shining in his hand, and Silencio sees the picture of a man with dog teeth and wings, and Raton’s teeth are like that, his snake eyes wide. And the black thing, like a long wet thumb, goes through Raton’s neck. And everything stops again.
Then Raton tries to speak, and blood comes on his lips. He swings his knife at the man, but the knife cuts only air, and Raton’s fingers can no longer hold it.
The man pulls the black thing from Raton’s throat. Raton sways on loose knees, and Silencio thinks of how it is when Raton uses too much white, then tries to walk. Raton puts his hands up to cover his throat on both sides. His mouth moves, but no words come out. One of Raton’s snake eyes falls out. The eye behind it is round and brown.
Raton falls down on his knees, with his hands still on his throat. His snake eye and his brown eye look up at the man, and Silencio feels they look from different distances, seeing different things.
Then Raton makes a small, soft sound in his throat and falls over backward, still on his knees, so that he lies on his back with his knees spread wide and his legs twisted back, and Silencio watches Raton’s gray pants go dark between his legs.
Silencio looks at the man. Who is looking at him.
Silencio looks at the black knife, how it rests in the man’s hand. He feels that the knife holds the man. That the knife may decide to move.
Then the man moves the knife. Its point is almost square, like the real point has been snapped off. It only moves a little. Silencio understands this means he must move.
He steps sideways, so the man can see him.
The point moves again. Silencio understands.
Closer. ALL TOMORROW S PARTIES 31 I 7. SHAREHOUSE
LEAVE a house empty in Malibu, Tessa told Chevette, and you get the kind of people come down from the hills and barbecue dogs in your fireplace.
Hard to get rid of, those kind of people, and locks wouldn’t keep them out. That was why the people who used to live here, before the Spill, were willing to rent them out to students.
Tessa was Australian, a media sciences student at USC and the reason Chevette was out here now, couching it.
Well, that and the fact that she, Chevette, didn’t have a job or any money, now she’d split with Carson.
Tessa said Carson was a piece of work.
And look where it had all gotten her, Chevette thought, pumping her way up the trainer’s illusion of a Swiss mountain road and trying to ignore the reek of moldy laundry from the other side of the drywall partition. Someone had left a wet load in the machine, probably last Tuesday, before the fire, and now it was rotting in there.
Which was too bad, because that made it hard to get into riding the trainer. You could configure it for a dozen different bikes, and as many terrains, and Chevette liked this one, an old-fashioned steel-frame ten-speed you could take up this mountain road, wildflowers blurring in your peripheral vision. Her other favorite was a balloon-tired cruiser you rode along a beach, which was good for Malibu because you couldn’t ride along the beach, not unless you wanted to climb over rusty razor wire and ignore the biohazard warnings every hundred feet.
But that gym-sock mildew reek kept catching in the back of her sinuses, nothing alpine meadow about it at all, telling her she was broke and out of work and staying in a sharehouse in Malibu.