He walked slowly to the rear of the van, running his hand lightly over the dented, paint-peeled surface, hearing and feeling the glass as it crunched under his feet. He stood at the far end of the driver’s side for a long time. He was afraid to turn the corner. He was afraid that, when he did, he would see the kid squatting on his hunkers, holding the knife in his left hand and grinning that empty grin. But he couldn’t just stand here, holding his head on top of his strained neck like a big bottle of nitroglycerine, while it got dark around him, so at last Hogan went around.
Nobody. The kid was really gone. Or so it seemed at first.
The wind gusted, blowing Hogan’s hair around his bruised face, then dropped away completely. When it did, he heard a harsh scraping noise coming from about twenty yards beyond the van. He looked in that direction and saw the soles of the kid’s sneakers just disappearing over the top of a dry-wash. The sneakers were spread in a limp V. They stopped moving for a moment, as if whatever was hauling the kid’s body needed a few moments’ rest to recoup its strength, and then they began to move again in little jerks.
A picture of terrible, unendurable clarity suddenly rose in Hogan’s mind. He saw the Jumbo Chattery Teeth standing on their funny orange feet just over the edge of that wash, standing there in spats so cool they made the coolest of the California Raisins look like hicks from Fargo, North Dakota, standing there in the electric purple light, which had overspread these empty lands west of Las Vegas. They were clamped shut on a thick wad of the kid’s long blonde hair.
The Chattery Teeth were backing up.
The Chattery Teeth were dragging Mr. Bryan Adams away to Nowhere, U.S.A.
Hogan turned in the other direction and walked slowly toward the road, holding his nitro head straight and steady on top of his neck. It took him five minutes to negotiate the ditch and another fifteen to flag a ride, but he eventually managed both things. And during that time, he never looked back once.
Nine months later, on a clear hot summer day in June, Bill Hogan happened by Scooter’s Grocery & Roadside Zoo again . . . except the place had been renamed. MYRA’S PLACE, the sign now said. GAS COLD BEER VIDEO’S. Below the words was a picture of a wolf — or maybe just a Woof — snarling at the moon. Wolf himself, the Amazing Minnesota Coydog, was lying in a cage in the shade of the porch overhang. His back legs were sprawled extravagantly, and his muzzle was on his paws. He did not get up when Hogan got out of his car to fill the tank. Of the rattlesnakes and the tarantula there was no sign.
‘Hi, Woof,’ he said as he went up the steps. The cage’s inmate rolled over onto his back and allowed his long red tongue to dangle enticingly from the side of his mouth as he stared up at Hogan.
The store looked bigger and cleaner inside. Hogan guessed this was partly because the day outside was not so threatening, but that wasn’t all; the windows had been washed, for one thing, and that made a big difference. The board walls had been replaced with pine-panelling that still smelled fresh and sappy. A snackbar with five stools had been added at the back. The novelty case was still there, but the cigarette loads, the joy-buzzers, and Dr. Wacky’s Sneezing Powder were gone. The case was filled with videotape boxes. A hand-lettered sign read X-RATED IN BACK
‘B 18 OR B GONE.’
The woman at the cash register was standing in profile to Hogan, looking down at a calculator and running numbers on it. For d moment Hogan was sure this was Mr. and Mrs. Scooter’s daughter — the female complement to those three boys Scooter had talked about raising. Then she lifted her head and Hogan saw it was Mrs. Scooter herself. It was hard to believe this could be the woman whose mammoth bosom had almost burst the seams of her NEVADA is GOD’S
COUNTRY tee-shirt, but it was. Mrs. Scooter had lost at least fifty pounds and dyed her hair a sleek and shiny walnut-brown. Only the sun-wrinkles around the eyes and mouth were the same.
‘Getcha gas?’ she asked.
‘Yep. Fifteen dollars’ worth.’ He handed her a twenty and she rang it up. ‘Place looks a lot different from the last time I was in.’
‘Been a lot of changes since Scooter died, all right,’ she agreed, and pulled a five out of the register. She started to hand it over, really looked at him for the first time, and hesitated. ‘Say . . .
ain’t you the guy who almost got killed the day we had that storm last year?’
He nodded and stuck out his hand. ‘Bill Hogan.’
She didn’t hesitate; simply reached over the counter and gave his hand a single strong pump.
The death of her husband seemed to have improved her disposition . . . or maybe it was just that her change of life was finally over.
‘I’m sorry about your husband. He seemed like a good sort.’
‘Scoot? Yeah, he was a fine fella before he took ill,’ she agreed. ‘And what about you? You all recovered?’
Hogan nodded. ‘I wore a neck-brace for about six weeks — not for the first time, either — but I’m okay.’
She was looking at the scar, which twisted down his right cheek. ‘He do that? That kid?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Stuck you pretty bad.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I heard he got busted up in the crash, then crawled into the desert to die.’ She was looking at Hogan shrewdly. ‘That about right?’
Hogan smiled a little. ‘Near enough, I guess.’
‘J.T. — he’s the State Bear around these parts — said the animals worked him over pretty good. Desert rats are awful impolite that way.’
‘I don’t know anything about that part.’
‘J.T. said the kid’s own mother wouldn’t have reckanized him.’ She put a hand on her reduced bosom and looked at him earnestly. ‘If I’m lyin, I’m dyin.’
Hogan laughed out loud. In the weeks and months since the day of the storm, this was something he found himself doing more often. He had come, it sometimes seemed to him, to a slightly different arrangement with life since that day.
‘Lucky he didn’t kill you,’ Mrs. Scooter said. ‘You had a helluva narrow excape. God musta been with you.’
‘That’s right,’ Hogan agreed. He looked down at the video case. ‘I see you took out the novelties.’
‘Them nasty old things? You bet! That was the first thing I did after — ‘ Her eyes suddenly widened. ‘Oh, say! Jeepers! I got sumpin belongs to you! If I was to forget, I reckon Scooter’d come back and haunt me!’
Hogan frowned, puzzled, but the woman was already going behind the counter. She stood on tiptoe and brought something down from a high shelf above the rack of cigarettes. It was, Hogan saw with absolutely no surprise at all, the Jumbo Chattery Teeth. The woman set them down beside the cash register.
Hogan stared at that frozen, insouciant grin with a deep sense of deja vu. There they were, the world’s biggest set of Chattery Teeth, standing on their funny orange shoes beside the Slim Jim display, cool as a mountain breeze, grinning up at him as if to say, Hello, there! Did you forget me? I didn’t forget YOU, my friend. Not at all.
‘I found ’em on the porch the next day, after the storm blew itself out,’ Mrs. Scooter said. She laughed. ‘Just like old Scoot to give you somethin for free, then stick it in a bag with a hole in the bottom. I was gonna throw ’em out, but he said he give ’em to you, and I should stick ’em on a shelf someplace. He said a traveling man who came in once’d most likely come in again . . . and here you are.’
‘Yes,’ Hogan agreed. ‘Here I am.’
He picked up the teeth and slipped his finger between the slightly gaping jaws. He ran the pad of the finger along the molars at the back, and in his mind he heard the kid, Mr. Bryan Adams from Nowhere, U.S.A., chanting Bite me! Bite me! Biiiiite me!
Were the back teeth still streaked with the dull rust of the boy’s blood? Hogan thought he could see something way back in there, but perhaps it was only a shadow.
‘I saved it because Scooter said you had a boy.’
Hogan nodded. ‘I do.’ And, he thought, the boy still has a father. I’m holding the reason why.
The question is, did they walk all the way back here on their little orange feet because this was home . . . or because they somehow knew what Scooter knew? That sooner or later, a traveling man always comes back to where he’s been, the way a murderer is supposed to revisit the scene of his crime?