before eleven,” David said, “and often one free-for-all inside just before last call.”
She laughed, pointed her forefingers at him like guns. “Good! I want to see!”
“And I want us to go back,” he said. “If you want to go honky-tonking in San
Francisco, I’ll take you. It’s a promise.”
She stuck out her lower lip and shook back her sandy-blond hair. “It wouldn’t be the
same. It wouldn’t, and you know it. In San Francisco they probably drink…I don’t
That made him laugh. As with the idea of an investment banker named Wolf
Frightener, the idea of macrobiotic beer was just too rich. But the anxiety was there,
under the laughter; in fact, wasn’t it fueling the laughter?
“We’re gonna take a short break and be right back,” the lead singer said, wiping his
brow. “Y’all drink up, now, and remember—I’m Tony Villanueva, and we are The
Derailers.”
“That’s our cue to put on our diamond shoes and depart,” David said, and took her
hand. He slid out of the booth, but she didn’t come. She didn’t let go of his hand,
either, though, and he sat down again feeling a touch of panic. Thinking he now knew
how a fish felt when it realized it couldn’t throw the hook, that old hook was in good
and tight and Mr. Trout was bound for the bank, where he would flop his final flop.
She was looking at him with those same killer blue eyes and deep dimples: Willa on
the edge of a smile, his wife-to-be, who read novels in the morning and poetry at night
“Look at us,” she said, and turned her head away from him.
He looked at the mirrored wall on their left. There he saw a nice young couple from
the East Coast, stranded in Wyoming. In her print dress she looked better than he did,
but he guessed that was always going to be the case. He looked from the mirror-Willa
to the real thing with his eyebrows raised.
“No, look again,” she said. The dimples were still there, but she was serious now—as serious as she could be in this party atmosphere, anyway. “And think about what I
told you.”
It was on his lips to say, You’ve told me many things, and I think about all of them,
but that was a lover’s reply, pretty and essentially meaningless. And because he knew
what thing she meant, he looked again without saying anything. This time he really
looked, and there was no one in the mirror. He was looking at the only empty booth in
“Didn’t you even wonder how a presentable female could be sitting here all by herself
when the place is juiced and jumping?” she asked.
He shook his head. He hadn’t. There were quite a few things he hadn’t wondered, at
least until now. When he’d last had something to eat or drink, for instance. Or what
time it was, or when it had last been daylight. He didn’t even know exactly what had
happened to them. Only that the Northern Flyer had left the tracks and now they were
by some coincidence here listening to a country-western group called—
“I kicked a can,” he said. “Coming here I kicked a can.”
“Yes,” she said, “and you saw us in the mirror the first time you looked, didn’t you?
Perception isn’t everything, but perception and expectation together?” She winked,
then leaned toward him. Her breast pressed against his upper arm as she kissed his
cheek, and the sensation was lovely—surely the feel of living flesh. “Poor David. I’m
sorry. But you were brave to come. I really didn’t think you would, that’s the truth.”
“We need to go back and tell the others.”
Her lips pressed together. “Why?”
“Because—”
Two men in cowboy hats led two laughing women in jeans, Western shirts, and
ponytails toward their booth. As they neared it, an iden tical expression of
puzzlement—not quite fear—touched their faces, and they headed back toward the
bar instead. They feel us, David thought. Like cold air pushing them away—that’s
what we are now.
“Because it’s the right thing to do.”
Willa laughed. It was a weary sound. “You remind me of the old guy who used to sell