shoulder of Henry’s corduroy jacket. Because she knew too.
“Ruth,” he said, “I’m not telling you this to upset you—”
“Then stop!” she cried, her voice muffled.
David saw that all of them but Helen Palmer were looking at him with anger and
hostility. Helen was nodding and muttering between her husband and the Rhinehart
woman, whose first name was probably Sally. They were standing under the
the stranded passengers were just dim figures standing in the shattered moonlight that
managed to find its way in through the boarded-up windows. The Landers weren’t
sitting on a bench; they were sitting on a dusty floor near a little cluster of empty
crack vials—yes, it seemed that crack had managed to find its way even out here to
John Ford country—and there was a faded circle on one wall not far from the corner
where Helen Palmer squatted and muttered. Then David blinked again and the
fluorescents were back. So was the big clock, hiding that faded circle.
Henry Lander said, “Think you better go along now, David.”
“Listen a minute, Henry,” Willa said.
Henry switched his gaze to her, and David had no trouble reading the distaste that was
there. Any liking Henry might once have had for Willa Stuart was gone now.
“I don’t want to listen,” Henry said. “You’re upsetting my wife.”
“Yeah,” a fat young man in a Seattle Mariners cap said. David thought his name was
O’Casey. Something Irish with an apostrophe in it, anyway. “Zip it, baby girl!”
Willa bent toward Henry, and Henry recoiled from her slightly, as if her breath were
bad. “The only reason I let David drag me back here is because they are going to demolish this place! Can you say wrecking ball, Henry? Surely you’re bright enough
to get your head around that concept.”
“Make her stop!” Ruth cried, her voice muffled.
Willa leaned even closer, eyes bright in her narrow, pretty face. “And when the
wrecking ball leaves and the dump trucks haul away the crap that used to be this
railway station—this old railway station—where will you be?”
“Leave us alone, please,” Henry said.
“Henry—as the chorus girl said to the archbishop, denial is not a river in Egypt.”
Ursula Davis, who had disliked Willa from the first, stepped forward, leading with her
chin. “Fuck off, you troublesome bitch.”
Willa swung around. “Don’t any of you get it? You’re dead, we’re all dead, and the
longer you stay in one place, the harder it’s going to be to ever go anywhere else!”
“She’s right,” David said.
“Yeah, and if she said the moon was cheese, you’d say provolone,” Ursula said. She
was a tall, forbiddingly handsome woman of about forty. “Pardon my French, but
she’s got you so pussy-whipped it isn’t funny.”
Dudley let out that startling donkey bray again, and the Rhinehart woman began to
sniffle.
“You’re upsetting the passengers, you two.” This was Rattner, the little conductor
with the apologetic face. He hardly ever spoke. David blinked, the station lensed dark
and moonlit again for another moment, and he saw that half of Rattner’s head was
gone. The rest of his face had been burned black.
“They’re going to demolish this place and you’ll have nowhere to go!” Willa cried.
don’t you come to town with us? We’ll show you the way. At least there are
“Mumma, I want to hear some music,” Pammy Andreeson said.
“Hush,” her mother said.
“If we were dead, we’d know it,” Biggers said.
“He’s got you there, son,” Dudley said, and dropped David a wink. “What happened
to us? How did we get dead?”
a. Willa shrugged her shoulders and
shook her head.
the time, but that’s not true, even out here where the rail system needs a fair amount
of work, but every now and then, at one of the junction points—”
“We faw down,” Pammy Andreeson said. David looked at her, really looked, and for
a moment saw a corpse, burned bald, in a rotting rag of a dress. “Down and down and
down. Then—” She made a growling, rattling sound in her throat, put her small,
grimy hands together, and tossed them apart: every child’s sign language for