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Excerpt
December 1985
Caney switched on the light over his bed and reached for the last of last night's coffee... one cold oily swallow at the bottom of a chipped stoneware mug.
He'd been trying to convince himself he was still asleep ever since he'd heard the rattle of trash cans behind the cafe sometime around three. At least he supposed it was three. Molly O had unplugged the clock on his dresser so she could plug in two sets of lights she'd strung around a scrawny Christmas tree standing in the corner.
Caney had told her he didn't want a tree in his room. He said the one she put up out front beside the jukebox was one too many, but telling Molly O not to do something was like telling a four-year-old not to stick a bean up her nose. So when she started dragging in sacks of pinecones and tangled strands of red tinsel, Caney kept his mouth shut and stayed out of her way. He'd lost enough battles to know when to give up.
Encouraged by his silence, Molly O had thrown herself into a decorating frenzy. After she finished with the trees, she hung aluminum stars from the ceiling fan, but they got tangled around the blades, causing the motor to short out.
She draped silver icicles over a length of clothesline stretched across the center of the room, but every time the door opened, icicles slipped off the line and drifted down onto plates of spaghetti or bowls of vegetable stew.
She brought in a box of old frizzy-haired Barbies that had belonged to her daughter, adorned each one with mistletoe and perched them on top of all the napkin holders. She had to position them straddle legged, as if they were doingsplits, the only way she could manage to tape them down, but the ungainly pose brought lewd comments from a drilling crew that came in for breakfast each morning.
Undaunted by minor flaws and small minds, Molly O pressed on. She carted in candy canes, holiday plants and plastic elves. She hung wreaths, strung popcorn and tacked up cardboard bells.
Finally, she made a trip to Wal-Mart where she found a nativity scene made in Taiwan. She arranged it in the center of the lunch counter and placed the tiny baby Jesus, who looked oddly Oriental, into the bamboo manger.
Finished, Molly O surveyed the Honk and said it looked like a Christmas wonderland. Caney said it looked like a Chinese carnival.
But Christmas was not on his mind as he squirmed, then threw back the covers, sending a paperback sailing off the bed. After a mumbled apology to Louis L'Amour, Caney rubbed at his temples where a headache was just beginning to build.
He thought once again about sleep, but figured it was useless. He knew if he turned off the light and sank back into his pillow, the same old pictures would play in his head, reruns in which he was the only performer... a one-man show.
* * *
Three hundred miles away, at a rest stop near Kansas City, Vena Takes Horse cracked the window of the passenger door, lit a Winston and blew the smoke into the cold predawn air. The driver of the eighteen-wheeler, a shriveled little man who called himself Cobweb, was asleep in the bed behind the seat. He had tried to get Vena to crawl into the back with him, but when she told him to go to hell, he hadn't insisted. He said he reckoned sleep would do him more good than sex, then left her sitting alone up in the front.
He'd picked her up on Interstate 59 just south of Sioux Falls, but they hadn't said much to each other. Cobweb spent most of his talk on his CB, which was fine with Vena. She didn't care much for conversation anyway.
She tossed the last of her cigarette out the window, then put her head back and closed her eyes. She hadn't slept since South Dakota and hoped, now, that sleep would take her, but each time a truck rolled by on the highway, something tightened in her chest that caused her heart to quicken. She wasn't good at staying still.
She thought of trying to get another lift, but a hard rain had begun to fall just before they stopped and she had seen specks of ice in the drops that smacked against the windshield. The cold didn't bother her much, but she didn't like the rain. She didn't like the rain at all.
When she finally decided to give up on sleep, she lifted her duffel bag onto the seat beside her and fished out a half-eaten Hershey, but before she could peel back the wrapper, she heard a noise, a strange sound she couldn't identify.
At first she thought it might have come from Cobweb, a whimpering sound men sometimes make when they dream, when they're not afraid to be afraid. But when she heard it again, she knew it came from outside, from somewhere in the dark.
If she could have convinced herself that what she heard was the whine of tires hugging the wet road or the ping of ice pellets ricocheting off the truck... if she could have made herself believe that, then she wouldn't have crawled out of the cab and climbed to the ground, wouldn't have felt the sting of rain and sleet pelting her face, plastering her hair to her head.
She started toward the light poles ringing the rest stop, but when she heard the sound again, certain it came from the highway, she turned and headed in that direction.
She could hear it more clearly now, a high-pitched mournful wail. As she crossed the grassy strip separating the rest stop from the interstate, a car rounded a curve, headlights sweeping across the darkness as it veered suddenly toward the median, and in a brief slice of light, a moment before the car's passing, she saw something lying on the highway.
She started to run then, but when she reached the shoulder of the road, when she saw what was out there, she slowed, the way people do when dread needs an extra breath.
In the middle of the far lane was a small black dog, one leg ripped off at the bend of a knee where a tendril of slick gray vein protruded, leaking blood onto the wet pavement. The dog, flattened on its side, was trying to lick life into five lifeless pups, vapors of steam rising from their still-warm bodies... and as Vena started across the road, the dog looked up, found her face with its eyes and managed one weak wag of its limp black tail.
