Supposedly pretty.
Billingsley needed to pee, he hadn’t lied, but that wasn’t his strongest need right now.
There was a filthy blue rag in one of the washbasins, the sort of thing you wouldn’t handle without tongs
unless you absolutely needed to. The old veterinarian now plucked it up, exposing a bottle of Satin Smooth, rotgut whiskey if ever rotgut whiskey had been bottled.., but any port in a storm.
He unscrewed the cap and then, holding the bottle in both hands because of the way they were shaking, took a long, deep drink. Napalm slid down his throat and exploded in his gut. It burned, all right, but what was that Patty Loveless song that used to play all the time on the radio? Hurt me, baby, in a real good way.
He chased the first gulp with a smaller sip (holding the bottle easier, now; the shakes were gone), then replaced the cap and put the bottle back in the sink.
“She called me,” he muttered. Outside the window, the cougar’s ears flicked at the sound of his voice.
She tensed down a little more on her haunches, waiting for him to move closer to where she was, closer to where her leap would bring her. “Woman called me on the phone. Said her horse was a three-year-old mare named Sally. Yessir.”
He put the rag back over the bottle, not thinking about it, hiding by habit, his mind on that day last summer. He had gone out to the Rieper place, a nice adobe up in the hills, and a fellow from the mine-the black guy who later became the office receptionist, in fact-had taken him to the horse. He said Audrey had just gotten an urgent call and was going to have to fly off to company head-quarters inPhoenix .
Then, as they walked to the stable, the black fellow had looked over Billingsley’s shoulder and had said…
“He said, ‘There she goes now,’” Billingsley murmured. He had again focused the light on the horse gal-loping across the warped tiles and was staring at it with wide, remembering eyes, his bladder temporarily for-gotten. “And he called to her.”
Yessir. Hi, Aud! he’d called, and waved. She had waved back. Billingsley had also waved, thinking the sto-ries were right: she was young, and she was good looking. Not moviestar-knockout good looking, but mighty fine for a part of the world where no single woman had to pay for her own drinks if she didn’t want to. He had tended her horse, had given the black man a liniment sample to put on, and later she’d come in herself to buy more. Marsha had told him that; he’d been over near Washoe, looking after some sick sheep. He’d seen her around town plenty since, though. Not to talk to, no sir, not hardly, they ran with different crowds, but he’d seen her eating dinner in the Antlers Hotel or the Owl’s, once at The Jailhouse in Ely; he’d seen her drinking in Bud’s Suds or the Drum with some of the other mining folk, rolling dice out of a cup to see who’d pay; in Worrell’s Market, buying groceries, at the Conoco, buying gas, in the hardware store one day, buying a can of paint and a brush, yessir, he had seen her around, in a town this small and this isolated you saw everybody around, had to.
Why are you running all this through your dumb head? he asked himself, at last starting toward the potty.
His boots gritted in dirt and dust, in grout that had crumbled out from between decaying tiles. He stopped still a little bit beyond aiming-and-shooting distance, flashlight beam shining on the scuffed tip of one boot while he pulled down his fly. What did Audrey Wyler have to do with Collie? What could she have to do with Collie? He didn’t recall ever seeing them together, or hearing that they were an item, it wasn’t that.
So what was it? And why did his mind keep insisting it had something to do with the day he’d gone out to look at her mare? He hadn’t even seen her that day. Well . . . for a minute.. . from a distance…
He lined himself up with the potty and pulled out the old hogleg. Boy, he had to go.
Drink a pint and piss a quart, wasn’t that what they said?
Her waving… hurrying for her car… headed for the airstrip.. . headed forPhoenix .
Wearing a business-suity kind of rig, sure, because she wasn’t going to any Quonset hut mining headquarters out in the desert, she was going someplace where there was a carpet on the floor and the view was from more than three stories up. Going to see the big boys.
Nice legs she had m get-ting on but I am ‘t too old to appreciate a pretty knee… nice, yessir, but- And suddenly it all came together in his mind, not with a click but with a big loud ka-pow, and for a moment, before the cougar uttered her coughing, rising growl, he thought the sound of breaking glass was in his mind, that it was the sound of understanding.
Then the growl began, quickly rising to a howl that started him urinating in pure fear. For a moment it was impossible to associate that sound with anything which had ever walked on the earth. He wheeled, spraying a pin-wheel of piss, and saw a dark, green-eyed shape splayed out on the tiles. Bits of broken glass gleamed in the fur on its back. He knew what it was immediately, his mind quickly putting the shape together with the sound in spite of his startlement and terror.
The mountain lion-the flashlight showed it to be an extremely large female-raised her face to his and spat at him, revealing two rows of long white teeth. And the .30-.06 was back on the stage, leaned up against the movie screen.
“Oh my God no,” Billingsley whispered, and threw the flashlight past the cougar’s right shoulder, missing it intentionally. When the snarling animal snapped its head around to see what had been thrown at it, Billingsley broke for the door.
Cynthia was pouring herself a fresh glass of spring-water when the cougar let go its first cry. The sound of it unwound all her nerves and muscles. The plas tic bottle slipped from her relaxing fingers, hit the floor between her sneakers, and exploded like a balloon water bomb. She knew the sound for what it was-the yowl of a wildcat-immediately, although she had never heard such a sound outside of a movie theater.
And, of course- weird but true-that was still the case.
He ran with his head down, tucking himself back into his pants with the hand that had been holding the flash-light. The cougar loosed another of its screaming, distraught cries-the shriek of a woman being burned or stabbed, deafening in the closed bathroom and then launched herself at Billingsley, front paws splayed, long claws out. These sank through his shirt and into his back as he groped for the doorhandle, slicing through scant muscle, flaying him in bloodlines that came together like a V. Her big paws snagged in the waistband of his pants and held for a moment, pulling the old man-who was screaming himself now-back into the room. Then his belt broke and he went tumbling backward, actually landing on top of the cougar. He rolled, hit the glass- littered floor on his side, got to one knee, and then the cougar was on him. She knocked him onto his back and went for his throat. Billingsley got his hand up and she bit off the side of it. Blood beaded on her whiskers like skarn-garnets. Billingsley screamed again and shoved his other hand under the shelf of her chin, trying to push her back, trying to make her let go.
He felt her breath on his cheek, pushing like hot fingers. He looked past her shoulder and saw the horse on the wall, his horse, prancing wild and free. Then the cougar lunged forward again, shaking his hand .in her jaws, and there was only pain. It filled the world.
Then it was a man screaming. Tom Billingsley screaming.
She turned, saw Steve stare at Marinville, saw Marinville look away, cheeks leaden, lips pressed together but trembling all the same. In that moment the writer looked weak and lost and oddly female with his long gray hair, like an old woman who’s lost track not only of where she is but of who she is.
Still, what Cynthia felt most for Johnny Marinville in that moment was contempt.
Steve looked to Ralph, who nodded, grabbed his gun, and ran toward the stage-left opening. Steve caught up with him and they disappeared that way, running abreast. The old man screamed again, but this time the cry had a gruesome liquid quality, as if he were trying to gargle and scream at the same time, and