They Thirst Part 1

They Thirst.

Robert R. McCammon.

PROLOGUE.

Tonight there were demons in the hearth.

They spun, arched, and spat at the eyes of the boy who sat at the fire's edge, his legs crossed under him in that unconscious way children have of being incredibly supple. Chin supported by palms, elbows supported by knees, he sat in silence, watching the flames gather, merge, and break into fragments that hissed with secrets. He had turned nine only six days ago, but now he felt very old because Papa wasn't home yet and those fire-demons were laughing. While I'm away, you must be head of the house, Papa had said as he coiled a line of thick rope around his bear's paw of a hand. You must take care of your mother and see that all goes well while I and your uncle are gone. Do you understand that?

Yes, Papa.

And see that you bring in the wood for her when she asks and stack it neatly along the wall so it can dry. And anything else she asks of you, you'll do, yes?

I will. He could still see his father's fissured, wind-ravaged face towering over him and feel the rough-as-hearthstones hand on his shoulder. The grip of that hand had conveyed an unspoken message: This is a serious thing I do, boy. Make no mistake about that. Watch out for your mother and be careful. The boy understood, and Papa had nodded with satisfaction. The next morning he watched through the kitchen window while Uncle Josef hitched the two old gray-and-white horses to the family's wagon. His parents had drawn away, standing across the room near the bolted slab of a door. Papa had put on his woolen cap and the heavy sheepskin coat Mama had made for him as a Christmas present years before, then slipped the coil of rope around one shoulder. The boy picked listlessly from a bowl of beef broth and tried to listen, knowing that they were whispering so that he would not hear. But he also knew that if he did hear, he really wouldn't know what they were whispering about, anyway. It's not fair! he told himself as he dipped his fingers into the broth and brought out a chunk of meat. If I'm to be the head of the house, shouldn't I know the secrets, too?

Across the room Mama's voice had suddenly surged up out of control. Let the others do it! Please! But Papa had caught her chin, tilted her face up, and looked gently into those morning-gray eyes. I have to do this thing, he'd said, and she looked like she wanted to cry but could not. She'd used up all her tears the night before, lying in the goosedown bed in the other room. The boy had heard her all through the night. It was as if the heavy hours were cracking her heart and no amount of time on the other side of twilight could ever heal it again. No, no, no, Mama was saying now, over and over again as if that word had some magic that would prevent Papa from stepping out into the snowy daylight, as if that word would seal the door, wood to stone, to keep him within and the secrets out.

And when she was silent, Papa had reached up and lifted the double-barreled shotgun from the gunrack beside the door. He cracked open the breech, loaded both chambers with sh.e.l.ls, and carefully laid the weapon down again. Then he had held her and kissed her and said I love you. And she had clung to him like a second skin. That was when Josef had knocked at the door and called out, Emil!

We're ready to leave!

Papa had hugged her a moment longer, then gripped the rifle he had bought in Budapest, and unlatched the door. He stood on the threshold, and snowflakes flew in around him. Andre! he had said, and the boy had looked up. You take care of your mother, and make sure this door stays bolted. Do you understand?

Yes, Papa.

In the doorway, framed against a bleached sky and the purple teeth of the distant mountain ranges, Papa had turned his gaze upon his wife and had uttered three softly spoken words. They were indistinct, but the boy caught them, his heart beating around a dark uneasiness.

Papa had said, "Watch my shadow."

When he stepped out, a whine of November wind filled the place he'd left. Mama stood at the threshold, snow blowing into her long dark hair, aging her moment by moment. Her eyes were fixed on the wagon as the two men urged the horses along the cobbled path that would take them to the others. She stood there for a long time, face gaunt against the false white purity of the world beyond that door. When the wagon had lumbered out of sight, she turned away, closed the door, and bolted it. Then she had lifted her gaze to her son's and had said with a smile that was more like a grimace, Do your schoolwork now. It was three days since he had gone. Now demons laughed and danced in the fire, and some terrible, intangible thing had entered the house to sit in the empty chair before the hearth, to sit between the boy and the woman at their evening meals, to follow them around like a gust of black ash blown by an errant wind.

The corners of the two-room house grew cold as the stack of wood slowly dwindled, and the boy could see a faint wraith of mist whirl from his mother's nostrils whenever she let out her breath.

"I'll take the axe and get more wood," the boy said, starting to rise from his chair.

"No!" cried his mother quickly, and glanced up. Their gray eyes met and held for a few seconds. "What we have will last through the night. It's too dark out now. You can wait until first light."

"But what we have isn't enough-"

"I said you'll wait until morning!" She looked away almost at once, as if ashamed. Her knitting needles glinted in the firelight, slowly shaping a sweater for the boy. As he sat down again, he saw the shotgun in the far corner of the room. It glowed a dull red in the firelight, like a watchful eye in the gloom. And now the fire flared, spun, cracked; ashes churned, whirled up the chimney and out.

The boy watched, heat striping his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, while his mother rocked in the chair behind him, glancing down occasionally at her son's sharp profile.

In that fire the boy saw pictures coming together, linking into a living mural: he saw a black wagon drawn by two white horses with funeral plumes, their cold breath coming out in clouds. In that wagon a simple, small coffin. Men and women in black, some shivering, some sobbing. Others following the wagon, boots crunching through a crust of snow. Muttered sounds. Faces layered with secrets.

Hooded, fearful eyes that stared out toward the gray and purple rise of the Jaeger Mountains. The Griska boy lay in that coffin, and what remained of him was now being carried by the procession to the cemetery where the lelkesz waited.

Death. It had always seemed so cold and alien and distant to the boy, something that belonged not to his world, nor to the world of his mama and papa, but rather to the world that Grandmother Elsa had lived in when she was sick and yellow-fleshed. Papa had used the word then-dying. When you're in the room with her, you must be very quiet because she can't sing to you anymore, and all she wants to do now is sleep. To the boy death was a time when all songs ceased and you were happy only when your eyes were closed. Now he stared at that funeral wagon in his memory until the log collapsed and the tendrils of flame sprang up in a different place. He remembered hearing whispers among the black-garbed villagers of Krajeck: A terrible thing. Only eight years old. G.o.d has him now.

G.o.d? Let us hope and pray that it is indeed G.o.d who has Ivon Griska. The boy remembered. He had watched the coffin being lowered by a rope and pulley into the dark square in the earth while the lelkesz stood intoning blessings and waving his crucifix. The casket had been nailed shut and then bound with barbed wire. Before the first shovelful of dirt was thrown, the lelkesz had crossed himself and dropped his crucifix into the grave. That was a week ago, before the Widow Janos had disappeared; before the Sandor family vanished on a snowy Sunday night, leaving all their possessions behind; before Johann the hermit reported that he had seen naked figures dancing on the windswept heights of Mount Jaeger and running with the big timber wolves that stalked that haunted mountain. Soon after that Johann had vanished along with his dog, Vida. The boy remembered the strange hardness in his father's face, a flicker of some deep secret within his eyes. Once he had heard Papa tell Mama, They're on the move again.

In the fireplace, wood shifted and sighed. The boy blinked and drew away. Behind him his mother's needles were still; her head was c.o.c.ked toward the door, and she was listening. The wind roared, bringing ice down from the mountain. The door would have to be forced open in the morning, and the hard glaze would shatter like gla.s.s.

Papa should be home by now, the boy told himself. It's so cold out tonight, so cold . . . surely Papa won't be gone much longer. Secrets seemed to be everywhere.

Just yesterday night someone had gone through the Krajeck cemetery and dug up twelve graves, including Ivon Griska's. The coffins were still missing, but it was rumored that the lelkesz had found bones and skulls lying in the snow. Something pounded at the door, a noise like a hammer falling upon an anvil. Once. And again. The woman jumped in her chair and twisted around.

"Papa!" the boy shouted joyfully. When he stood up, the flame-face was forgotten. He started toward the door, but his mother caught his shoulder.

"Hush!" she whispered, and together they waited, their shadows filling the far wall.

More hammering on the door-a heavy, leaden sound. The wind screamed, and it was like the wail of Ivon Griska's mother when the sealed coffin was lowered into the frozen dirt.

"Unbolt the door!" Papa said. "Hurry! I'm cold."

"Thank G.o.d!" Mama cried out. "Oh, thank G.o.d!" She moved quickly to the door, threw back the bolt, and flung it open. A torrent of snow ripped at her face, the wind distorting eyes, nose, and mouth. Papa, a huddled shape in his hat and coat, stepped into the dim firelight, and diamonds of ice sparkled in his eyebrows and beard. He took Mama into his arms, his ma.s.sive body almost engulfing her. The boy leapt forward to embrace his father, grateful that he was home because being the man of the house was much more difficult than he had imagined. Papa reached out, ran a hand through the boy's hair, and clapped him firmly on the shoulder.

"Thank G.o.d you're home!" Mama said, clutching onto him. "It's over, isn't it?"

"Yes," he said. "It's over." He turned and closed the door, letting the bolt fall.

"Here, step over by the fire. G.o.d in Heaven, your hands are cold! Take off your coat before you catch your death!" She took the coat as he shrugged it from his shoulders, then his hat. Papa stepped toward the fire, palms outward to receive the heat. Flames glittered briefly in his eyes, like the glitter of rubies. And as he pa.s.sed his son, the boy crinkled up his nose. Papa had brought home a funny smell. A smell of ... what was it? Think hard.

"Your coat is filthy!" Mama said, hanging it on a hook near the door. She brushed at it with a trembling hand. She felt the tears of relief about to flood from her, but she didn't want to cry in front of her son.

"It's so cold in the mountains," Papa said softly, standing at the rim of the firelight. He kicked out with the toe of one scarred boot, and a log shifted, revealing a finger of flame. "So cold."

The boy watched him, seeing a glaze of ice from Papa's snow-whitened face begin to melt in droplets. Papa suddenly closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and shivered. "Ohhhhhhhhm," he breathed, and then his head came around, eyes opening, looking into his son's face for silent seconds. "What are you staring at, boy?"

"Nothing." That smell. So funny. What was it?

Papa nodded. "Come over here beside me."

The boy took a single step forward and then stopped. He thought of horses and coffins and sobbing mourners.

"Well? Come over here, I said."

Across the room the woman was standing with one hand still on the coat. There was a crooked smile on her face, as if she'd been slapped by a hand that had snaked from the shadows. "Is everything all right?" she asked. In her voice a note quavered like a pipe organ in the Budapest cathedral.

"Yes," Papa said, reaching out for his son. "Everything is fine now because I'm home with my loved ones, where I belong."

The boy saw a shadow touch his mother's face, saw it darken in an instant. Her mouth was half-open, and her eyes were widening pools of bewilderment. Papa took his son's hand. The man's flesh was hard and welted with rope burns. And so terribly cold. The man drew his son nearer. The fire undulated like a serpent uncoiling. "Yes," he whispered, "that's right." His gaze found the woman. "You've let it get very cold in my house!"

"I'm . . . sorry," she whispered. She began to tremble now, and her eyes were deep pits of terror.

"Very cold," Papa said. "I can feel ice in my bones. Can't you, Andre?" The boy"

nodded, looking into his father's shadowy firelight-sculpted face and seeing himself suspended within eyes that were darker than he remembered. Yes, much darker, like mountain caverns, and rimmed with eruptions of silver. The boy blinked, dragged his gaze away with an effort that made his neck muscles throb.

He was trembling like Mama. He was beginning to be afraid but didn't know why. All he knew was that Papa's skin and hair and clothes smelled like the room where Grandmother Elsa had gone to sleep forever.

"We did a bad thing," Papa murmured. "Me, your uncle Josef, all the men from Krajeck. We shouldn't have climbed into the mountains . . ." Mama gasped, but the boy couldn't turn his head to look at her.

". . . because we were wrong. All of us, wrong. It's not what we thought it was . . ."

Mama moaned like a trapped animal.

". . . you see?" And Papa smiled, his back to the flames now, his white face piercing the shadows. His grip tightened on his son's shoulder, and he suddenly shivered as if a north wind had roared through his soul. Mama was sobbing, and the boy wanted to turn to her and find out what was wrong, but he couldn't move, couldn't make his head turn or his eyes blink. Papa smiled and said, "My good little boy. My good little Andre . . ." And he bent down toward his son.J But in the next instant the man's head twisted up, his eyes filled with bursts of silver. "DON'T DO THAT!" he shrieked. And in that instant the boy cried out and pulled away from his father, and then he saw that Mama had the shotgun cradled in her shaking arms, and her mouth was wide open and she was screaming, and even as the boy ran for her, she squeezed both triggers.. The shots whistled high over the boy, striking the man in the face and throat. Papa screamed-a resounding scream of rage-and was flung backward to the floor, where he lay with his face in shadow and his boots in red embers. Mama dropped the shotgun, the strangled sobbing in her throat turning to stutters of mad laughter. The recoil had nearly broken her right arm, and she had fallen back against the door, her eyes swimming with tears. The boy stopped, his heart madly hammering. The smell of gunpowder was rank in his nostrils as he stared at the crazed woman who'd just shot down his father-saw her face contorting, lips bubbling with spittle, eyes darting from shadow to shadow.

And then a slow, sc.r.a.ping noise from the other side of the room. The boy spun around to look.

Papa was rising to his feet. Half of his face was gone, leaving his chin and jaw and nose hanging by white, bloodless strings. The remaining teeth glittered with light, and the single pulped eye hung on one thick vein across the ruined cavern where the cheekbone had been. White nerves and torn muscles twitched in the hole of the throat. The man staggered up, crouched with his huge hands twisted into claws. When he tried to grin, only one side of the mouth remained to curve grotesquely upward.

And in that instant both boy and woman saw that he did not bleed.

"Szornyeteg!" Mama screamed, her back pressed against the door. The word ripped through the boy's mind, tearing away huge chunks that left him as mute and frozen as a scarecrow in winter. Monster, she'd screamed. Monster.

"Oh, nooooooo," the hideous face whispered. And the thing shambled forward, claws twitching in hungry expectation. "Not so easily, my precious wife . . ." She gripped her son's arm, then turned and unbolted the door. He was almost upon them when a wall of wind and snow screamed into the house; he staggered back a step, one hand over his eye. The woman wrenched the boy out after her into the night. Snow clutched at their legs and tried to hold them. "Run!" Mama cried out over the roar of the wind. "We've got to run!" She tightened her grip on his wrist until her fingers melded to his bones, and they fought onward through whiplash strikes of snow.

Somewhere in the night, a woman screamed, her voice high-pitched and terrified.

Then a man's voice, babbling for mercy. The boy looked back over his shoulder as he ran, back at the huddled houses of Krajeck. He could see nothing through the storm. But mingled with the hundred voices of the wind, he thought he could hear a chorus of hideous screams. Somewhere a ragged cacophony of laughter seemed to build and build until it drowned out the cries for G.o.d and mercy. He caught a glimpse of his house, receding into the distance now. Saw the dim red light spilling across the threshold like a final dying ember of the fire he'd so carefully tended. Saw the hulking half-blinded figure stumble out of the doorway and heard the bellow of rage from that mangled, bloodless throat-"I'LL FIND YOU!" And then Mama jerked him forward, and he almost tripped, but she pulled him up, urging him to run. Wind screamed into their faces, and already Mama's black hair was white with a coating of snow, as if she'd aged in a matter of minutes, or gone mad like some lunatic in an asylum who sees nightmares as grinning, shadowless realities.

A figure suddenly emerged from the midst of a stand of snow-heavy pines, frail and thin and as white as lake ice. The hair whipped around in the wind; the rags of its worm-eaten clothes billowed. The figure stood at the top of a snow mound, waiting for them, and before Mama saw it, it had stepped into their path, grinning a little boy's grin and holding out a hand sculpted like ice.

"I'm cold," Ivon Griska whispered, still grinning. "I have to find my way home."

Mama stopped, screamed, thrust out a hand before her. For an instant the boy was held by Ivon Griska's gaze, and in his mind he heard the echo of a whisper.

Won't you be my playmate, Andre? And he'd almost replied, Yes, oh yes, when Mama shouted something that was carried away by the wind. She jerked him after her, and he looked back with chilled regret. Ivon had forgotten about them now and began walking slowly through the snow toward Krajeck.

After a while, Mama could go no farther. She shuddered and fell into the snow. She was sick then, and the boy crawled away from the steaming puddle and stared back through waving pines toward home. His face was seared by the cold, and he wondered if Papa was going to be all right. Mama had no reason to hurt him like that. She was a bad woman to hurt his father, who loved them both so dearly.

"Papa!" he called into the distance, hearing only the wind reply in frozen mockery of a human voice. His eyelashes were heavy with snow. "Papa!" His small, tired voice cracked. But then Mama struggled to her feet, pulling him up again even though he tried to fight her and break free of her grip. She shook him violently, ice tracks lacing her face like white embroidery, and shouted, "He's dead! Don't you understand that? We've got to run, Andre, and we've got to keep on running!" And as she said that, the boy knew she was insane. Papa was badly hurt, yes, because she had shot him, but Papa wasn't dead. Oh, no. He was back there. Waiting.

And then lights broke the curtain of darkness. Smoke ripped from a chimney. They glimpsed a snow-weighted roof. They raced toward those lights, stumbling, half-frozen. The woman muttered to herself, laughing hysterically and urging the boy on. He fought the fingers of cold that clutched at his throat. Lie down, the wind whispered across the back of his head. Stop right here and sleep. This woman has done a bad thing to your papa, and she may hurt you, too. Lie down right here for a little while and be warm, and in the morning your papa will come for you. Yes. Sleep, little one, and forget. A weather-beaten sign creaked wildly back and forth above a heavy door. He saw the whitened traces of words: THE GOOD SHEPHERD INN. Mama hammered madly at the door, shaking the boy at the same time to keep him awake. "Let us in, please let us in!" she shouted, pounding with a numbed fist. The boy stumbled and fell against her, his head lolling to the side.

When the door burst open, long-armed shadows reached for them. The boy's knees buckled, and he heard Mama moan as the cold-like the touch of a forbidden, loving stranger-gently kissed him to sleep.

Friday, October 25

I

THE CAULDRON.

A star-specked night, black as the highway asphalt that bubbled like a cauldron brew beneath the midday sun, now lay thickly over the long dry stretch of Texas 285 between Fort Stockton and Pecos. The darkness, as still and dense as the eye of a hurricane, was caught between the murderous heat of dusk and dawn. In all directions the land, stubbled with thornbrush and pipe-organ cactus, was frying-pan flat. Abandoned hulks of old cars, gnawed down to the bare metal by the sun and occasional dust storms, afforded shelter for the coiled rattlesnakes that could still smell the sun's terrible track across the earth.

It was near one of these hulks-rusted and vandalized, windshield long shattered, engine carried away by some hopeful tinkerer-that a jackrabbit sniffed the ground for water. Smelling distant, buried coolness, the jackrabbit began to dig with its forepaws; in another instant it stopped, nose twitching toward the underside of that car. It tensed, smelling snake. From the darkness came a dozen tiny rattlings, and the rabbit leapt backward. Nothing followed. The rabbit's instincts told it that a nest had been dug under there, and the noise of the young would bring back the hunting mother. Sniffing the ground for the snake's trail, the jackrabbit moved away from the car and ran nearer to the highway, crunching grit beneath its paws. It was halfway across the road, moving toward its own nest and young in the distance, when a sudden vibration in the earth froze it. Long ears twitching for a sound, the rabbit turned its head toward the south.

A gleaming white orb was slowly rising along the highway. The rabbit watched it, transfixed. Sometimes the rabbit would stand atop its dirt-mound burrow and watch the white thing that floated high overhead; sometimes it was larger than this one; sometimes it was yellow; sometimes it wasn't there at all; sometimes there were tendrils across it, and it left in the air the tantalizing scent of water that never fell. The rabbit was unafraid because it was familiar with that thing in the sky, but the vibration it now felt rippled the flesh along its spine. The orb was growing larger, bringing with it a noise like the growl of thunder. In another instant the rabbit's eyes were blinded by the white orb; its nerves shot out a danger signal to the brain. The rabbit scurried for safety on the opposite side of the highway, casting a long scrawl of shadow beyond it.

The jackrabbit was perhaps three feet away from a protective clump of thornbrush when the night-black Harley-Davidson 1200cc "chopper," moving at almost eighty miles an hour, swerved across the road and directly over the rabbit's spine. It squealed, bones splintering, and the small body began to twitch in the throes of death. The huge motorcycle, its shocks barely registering a shudder of quick impact, roared on to the north.

A few moments later a sidewinder began to undulate toward the rabbit's cooling carca.s.s.

And on the motorcycle, enveloped in a coc.o.o.n of wind and thunder, the rider stared along the cone of white light his single high-intensity beam afforded, and with a fractional movement he guided the machine to the center of the road.

His black-gloved fist throttled upward; the machine growled like a well-fed panther and kicked forward until the speedometer's needle hung at just below ninety. Behind a battered black crash helmet with visor lowered, the rider was grinning. He wore a sleek, skin-tight, black leather jacket and faded jeans with leather-patched knees. The jacket was old and scarred, and across the back rose a red Day-Glo king cobra, its hood fully swollen. The paint was flaking off, as if the reptile were shedding its skin. The machine thundered on, parting a wall of silence before it, leaving desert denizens trembling in its wake. A garishly painted sign-blue music notes floating above a pair of tilted red beer bottles, the whole thing pocked with rust-edged bullet holes-came up on the right. The rider glanced quickly at it, reading JUST AHEAD! THE WATERIN' HOLE! and below that, FILL 'ER up, PARDNER! Yeah, he thought. Time to fill up.

Two minutes later there was the first faint glimmer of blue neon against the blackness. The rider began to cut his speed; the speedometer's needle fell quickly to eighty, seventy, sixty. Ahead there was a blue neon sign-THE WAT RIN'.

H LE -above the doorway of a low wooden building with a flat, dusty red roof. Cl.u.s.tered around it like weary wasps around a sun-bleached nest were three cars, a jeep, and a pickup truck with most of its dull blue paint scoured down to the muddy red primer. The motorcycle rider turned into a tumbleweed-strewn parking lot and switched off his engine; immediately the motorcycle's growl was replaced with Freddy Fender's nasal voice singing about "wasted days and wasted nights."

The rider put down the kickstand and let the black Harley ease back, like a crouching animal. When he stood up and off the machine, his muscles were as taut as piano wires; the erection between his legs throbbed with heat. He popped his chin strap and lifted the helmet off, exposing a vulpine, sharply chiseled face that was as white as new marble. In that bloodless face the deep pits of his eyes bore white pupils, faintly veined with red. From a distance they were as pink as a rabbit's, but up close they became snakelike, glittering coldly, unblinking, hypnotizing. His hair was yellowish-white and closely cropped; a blue trace of veins at the temples pulsed an instant behind the jukebox's beat. He left his helmet strapped around the handlebars and moved toward the building, his gaze flickering toward the cars: there was a rifle on a rack in the truck's cab, a "Hook 'Em Horns!" sticker on a car's rear fender, a pair of green dice dangling from the jeep's rearview mirror. When he stepped through the screen door into a large room layered with smoky heat, the six men inside-three at a table playing cards, two at a light bulbhaloed pool table, one behind the bar-instantly looked up and froze. The albino biker met each gaze in turn and then sat on one of the bar stools, the red cobra on his back a scream of color in the murky light. After another few seconds of silence, a pool cue cracked against a ball like a gunshot. "Aw, s.h.i.t!" one of the pool players-a broad-shouldered man wearing a red checked shirt and dusty Levis that had been snagged a hundred times on barbed wire-said loudly with a thick Texas drawl. "At least that screwed up your shot, didn't it, Matty?"

"Sure did," Matty agreed. He was about forty, all arms and legs, short red hair, and a lined forehead half-covered by a sweat-stained cowboy hat. He was chewing slowly on a toothpick, and now he stood where he could consider the lie of the b.a.l.l.s, do some more chewing, and watch that strange-looking white dude from the corner of his eye.

The bartender, a hefty Mexican with tattooed forearms and heavy-lidded black eyes, came down the bar following the swirls of a wet cloth. "Help you?" he asked the albino and looked up into the man's face; instantly he felt as if his spine had been tapped with an ice pick. He glanced over toward where Slim Hawkins, Bobby Hazelton and Ray Cope sat in the third hour of their Friday night poker game; he saw Bobby did an elbow into Ray's ribs and grin toward the bar.

The albino said quietly, "Beer."

"Sure, coming up." Louis the bartender turned away in relief. The biker looked bizarre, unclean, freakish. He was hardly a man, probably nineteen or twenty at the most. Louis picked up a gla.s.s mug from a shelf and a bottle of Lone Star from the stuttering refrigerator unit beneath the bar. From the jukebox, Dolly Parton began singing about "burning, baby, burning." Louis slid the mug across to the albino and then quickly moved away, swirling the cloth over the polished wood of the bar. He felt as if he were sweating in the glare of a midday sun.

b.a.l.l.s cracked together on the green-felt pool table. One of them thunked into a corner pocket. "There you go, Will," Matty drawled. "That's thirty-five you owe. me, ain't it?"

"Yeah, yeah. d.a.m.n it. Louis, why don't you turn that f.u.c.kin' music box down so a man can concentrate on his pool playin'!"

Louis shrugged and motioned toward the poker table.

"I like it that loud," Bobby Hazelton said, grinning over kings and tens. He was a part-time rodeo bronco-buster with a crew cut and a prominent gold tooth.

Three years ago he'd been on his way to a Texas t.i.tle when a black b.a.s.t.a.r.d of a horse called Twister had thrown him and broken his collarbone in two places.

"Music helps me think. Will, you oughta come on over here and lemme take some of that heavy money you're carrying around."

"h.e.l.l, naw! Matty's doing too good a job at that tonight!" Will put his cue stick away in the rack, glancing quickly over at the albino and then at Bobby.

"You boys best watch old Bobby," he warned. "Took me for over fifty bucks last Friday night."