He turned back to the toilet door. It was gone. A wall of dust had erased it, and suddenly he was lost and alone.
The barn-door kept slamming. Voices called to each other in the worsening storm. Where was the Saloon and the Sheriffs office? They too had been obscured. Ricky tasted something he hadn’t experienced since childhood: the panic of losing the hand of a guardian. In this case the lost parent was his sanity.
Somewhere to his left a shot sounded in the depths of the storm, and he heard something whistle in his ear, then felt a sharp pain. Gingerly he raised his hand to his ear-lobe and touched the place that hurt. Part of his ear had been shot away, a neat nick in his lobe. His ear-stud was gone, and there was blood, real blood, on his fingers. Someone had either just missed blowing off his head or was really playing silly fuckers.
‘Hey, man,’ he appealed into the teeth of this wretched fiction, whirling around on his heel to see if he could locate the aggressor. But he could see no one. The dust had totally enclosed him: he couldn’t move backwards or forwards with any safety. The gunman might be very close, waiting for him to step in his direction.
‘I don’t like this,’ he said aloud, hoping the real world would hear him somehow, and step in to salvage his tattered mind. He rummaged in his jeans pocket for a pill or two, anything to improve the situation, but he was all out of instant sunshine, not even a lowly Valium was to be found lurking in the seam of his pocket. He felt naked. What a time to be lost in the middle of Zane Grey’s nightmares.
A second shot sounded, but this time there was no whistling. Ricky was certain this meant he’d been shot, but as there was neither pain nor blood it was difficult to be sure.
Then he heard the unmistakable flap of the saloon door, and the groan of another human being somewhere near. A tear opened up in the storm for a moment. Did he see the saloon through it, and a young man stumbling out, leaving behind him a painted world of tables, mirrors, and gunslingers? Before he could focus properly the tear was sewn up with sand, and he doubted the sight. Then, shockingly, the young man he’d come looking for was there, a foot away, blue-lipped with death, and falling forward into Ricky’s arms. He wasn’t dressed for a part in this movie anymore than Ricky was. His bomber jacket was a fair copy of a fifties style, his tee-shirt bore the smiling face of Mickey Mouse.
Mickey’s left eye was bloodshot, and still bleeding. The bullet had unerringly found the young man’s heart.
He used his last breath to ask: ‘What the fuck is going on?’ and died.
As last words went, it lacked style, but it was deeply felt. Ricky stared into the young man’s frozen face for a moment, then
the dead weight in his arms became too much, and he had no
choice but to drop him. As the body hit the ground the dust seemed to turn into piss-stained tiling for an instant. Then the fiction took precedence again, and the dust swirled, and the tumble-weed tumbled, and he was standing in the middle of Main Street, Deadwood Gulch, with a body at his feet.
Ricky felt something very like cold turkey in his system. His limbs began a St Virus’ dance, and the urge to piss came on him, very strong. Another half-minute, he’d wet his pants.
Somewhere, he thought, somewhere in this wild world, there is a urinal. There is a graffiti-covered wall, with numbers for the sex-crazed to call, with ‘This is not a fallout shelter’ scrawled on the tiles, and a cluster of obscene drawings. There are water-tanks and paperless toilet-roll holders and broken seats. There is the squalid smell of piss and old farts. Find it! in God’s name find the real thing before the fiction does you some permanent damage.
If, for the sake of argument, the Saloon and the General Stores are the toilet cubicles, then the urinal must be behind me, he reasoned. So step back. It can’t do you any more harm than staying here in the middle of the street while someone takes potshots at you.