depths.
Willa breathed deep. “I smell beer and perfume,” she said. “A hot rod smell. It’s
lovely.”
“You’re lovely,” he said.
She turned to him. “Then kiss me, cowboy.”
He kissed her there on the edge of the dance floor, and judging by what he was feeling, lovemaking wasn’t out of the question. Not at all.
She kissed both corners of his mouth, then stepped back. “Put a quarter in the jukebox, would you? I want to dance.”
David went over to the juke at the end of the bar, dropped a quarter, and played
D19—“Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” the Freddy Fender version. Out in the
parking lot, Chester Dawson, who had decided to lay over here a few hours before
resuming his journey to Seattle with a load of electronics, raised his head, thinking he heard music, decided it was part of a dream he’d been having, and went back to sleep.
David and Willa moved slowly around the empty floor, sometimes reflected in the
mirror wall and sometimes not.
“Willa—”
“Hush a little, David. Baby wants to dance.”
David hushed. He put his face in her hair and let the music take him. He thought they
would stay here now, and that from time to time peo ple would see them. 26 might
even get a reputation for being haunted, but probably not; people didn’t think of
ghosts much while they were drinking, unless they were drinking alone. Sometimes
when they were closing up, the bartender and the last waitress (the one with the most
seniority, the one responsible for splitting the tips) might have an uneasy sense of
being watched. Sometimes they’d hear music even after the music had stopped, or
catch movement in the mirror next to the dance floor or the one in the lounge. Usually
just from the tail of the eye. David thought they could have finished up in better
places, but on the whole, 26 wasn’t bad. Until closing there were people. And there
would always be music.
He did wonder what would become of the others when the wrecking ball tore apart
their illusion—and it would. Soon. He thought of Phil Palmer trying to shield his
terrified, howling wife from falling debris that couldn’t hurt her because she was not, properly speaking, even there. He thought of Pammy Andreeson cowering in her
shrieking mother’s arms. Rattner, the soft-spoken conductor, saying, Just be calm,
folks, in a voice that couldn’t be heard over the roar of the big yellow machines. He
thought of the book salesman, Biggers, trying to run away on his bad leg, lurching and
finally falling while the wrecking ball swung and the dozers snarled and bit and the
world came down.
He liked to think their train would come before then—that their combined expectation
would make it come—but he didn’t really believe it. He even considered the idea that
the shock might extinguish them and they’d simply whiff out like candle flames in a
strong gust of wind, but he didn’t believe that, either. He could see them too clearly
after the bulldozers and dump trucks and back-end loaders were gone, standing by the
rusty disused railway tracks in the moonlight while a wind blew down from the
foothills, whining around the mesa and beating at the broomgrass. He could see them
huddled together under a billion High Country stars, still waiting for their train.
“Are you cold?” Willa asked him.
“No—why?”
“You shivered.”
“Maybe a goose walked over my grave,” he said. He closed his eyes, and they danced
together on the empty floor. Sometimes they were in the mirror, and when they
slipped from view there was only a country song playing in an empty room lit by a
neon mountain range.