3
The Kozy Kampground owner and his wife had their own trailer, a permanent job set up on painted concrete blocks. April showers had brought lots of May flowers, and Mr. and Mrs. Kozy’s front yard was full of them. Andrea Steiner paused a moment to admire the tulips and pansies before mounting the three steps to the door of the big Redman trailer, where she knocked.
Mr. Kozy opened up eventually. He was a small man with a big belly currently encased in a bright red strappy undershirt. In one hand he held a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. In the other was a mustard-smeared brat wrapped in a slice of spongy white bread. Because his wife was currently in the other room, he paused for a moment to do a visual inventory of the young woman before him, ponytail to sneakers. “Yeah?”
Several in the True had a bit of sleeper talent, but Andi was by far the best, and her Turning had proved of enormous benefit to the True. She still used the ability on occasion to lift cash from the wallets of certain older rube gentlemen who were attracted to her. Rose found this risky and childish, but knew from experience that in time, what Andi called her issues would fade away. For the True Knot, the only issue was survival.
“I just had a quick question,” Andi said.
“If it’s about the toilets, darlin, the caca sucker don’t come until Thursday.”
“It’s not about that.”
“What, then?”
“Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to go to sleep?”
Mr. Kozy immediately closed his eyes. The beer and the brat tumbled out of his hands, leaving a mess on the rug. Oh well, Andi thought, Crow fronted the guy twelve hundred. Mr. Kozy can afford a bottle of carpet cleaner. Maybe even two.
Andi took him by the arm and led him into the living room. Here was a pair of chintz-covered Kozy armchairs with TV trays set up in front of them.
“Sit,” she said.
Mr. Kozy sat, eyes shut.
“You like to mess with young girls?” Andi asked him. “You would if you could, wouldn’t you? If you could run fast enough to catch them, anyway.” She surveyed him, hands on hips. “You’re disgusting. Can you say that?”
“I’m disgusting,” Mr. Kozy agreed. Then he began to snore.
Mrs. Kozy came in from the kitchen. She was gnawing on an ice cream sandwich. “Here, now, who are you? What are you telling him? What do you want?”
“For you to sleep,” Andi told her.
Mrs. Kozy dropped her ice cream. Then her knees unhinged and she sat on it.
“Ah, fuck,” Andi said. “I didn’t mean there. Get up.”
Mrs. Kozy got up with the squashed ice cream sandwich sticking to the back of her dress. Snakebite Andi put her arm around the woman’s mostly nonexistent waist and led her to the other Kozy chair, pausing long enough to pull the melting ice cream sandwich off her butt. Soon the two of them sat side by side, eyes shut.
“You’ll sleep all night,” Andi instructed them. “Mister can dream about chasing young girls. Missus, you can dream he died of a heart attack and left you a million-dollar insurance policy. How’s that sound? Sound good?”
She snapped on the TV and turned it up loud. Pat Sajak was being embraced by a woman with enormous jahoobies who had just finished solving the puzzle, which was NEVER REST ON YOUR LAURELS. Andi took a moment to admire the mammoth mammaries, then turned back to the Kozys.
“When the eleven o’clock news is over, you can turn off the TV and go to bed. When you wake up tomorrow, you won’t remember I was here. Any questions?”
They had none. Andi left them and hurried back to the cluster of RVs. She was hungry, had been for weeks, and tonight there would be plenty for everybody. As for tomorrow . . . it was Rose’s job to worry about that, and as far as Snakebite Andi was concerned, she was welcome to it.
4
It was full dark by eight o’clock. At nine, the True gathered in the Kozy Kampground’s picnic area. Rose the Hat came last, carrying the canister. A small, greedy murmur went up at the sight of it. Rose knew how they felt. She was plenty hungry herself.
She mounted one of the initial-scarred picnic tables and looked at them one by one. “We are the True Knot.”
“We are the True Knot,” they responded. Their faces were solemn, their eyes avid and hungry. “What is tied may never be untied.”
“We are the True Knot, and we endure.”
“We endure.”
“We are the chosen ones. We are the fortunate ones.”
“We are chosen and fortunate.”
“They are the makers; we are the takers.”
“We take what they make.”
“Take this and use it well.”
“We will use it well.”
Once, early in the last decade of the twentieth century, there had been a boy from Enid, Oklahoma, named Richard Gaylesworthy. I swear that child can read my mind, his mother sometimes said. People smiled at this, but she wasn’t kidding. And maybe not just her mind. Richard got A’s on tests he hadn’t even studied for. He knew when his father was going to come home in a good mood and when he was going to come home fuming about something at the plumbing supply company he owned. Once the boy begged his mother to play the Pick Six lottery because he swore he knew the winning numbers. Mrs. Gaylesworthy refused—they were good Baptists—but later she was sorry. Not all six of the numbers Richard wrote down on the kitchen note-minder board came up, but five did. Her religious convictions had cost them seventy thousand dollars. She had begged the boy not to tell his father, and Richard had promised he wouldn’t. He was a good boy, a lovely boy.
Two months or so after the lottery win that wasn’t, Mrs. Gaylesworthy was shot to death in her kitchen and the good and lovely boy disappeared. His body had long since rotted away beneath the gone-to-seed back field of an abandoned farm, but when Rose the Hat opened the valve on the silver canister, his essence—his steam—escaped in a cloud of sparkling silver mist. It rose to a height of about three feet above the canister, and spread out in a plane. The True stood looking up at it with expectant faces. Most were trembling. Several were actually weeping.
“Take nourishment and endure,” Rose said, and raised her hands until her spread fingers were just below the flat plane of mist. She beckoned. The mist immediately began to sink, taking on an umbrella shape as it descended toward those waiting below. When it enveloped their heads, they began to breathe deeply. This went on for five minutes, during which several of them hyperventilated and swooned to the ground.
Rose felt herself swelling physically and sharpening mentally. Every fragrant odor of this spring night declared itself. She knew that the faint lines around her eyes and mouth were disappearing. The white strands in her hair were turning dark again. Later tonight, Crow would come to her camper, and in her bed they would burn like torches.
They inhaled Richard Gaylesworthy until he was gone—really and truly gone. The white mist thinned and then disappeared. Those who had fainted sat up and looked around, smiling. Grampa Flick grabbed Petty the Chink, Barry’s wife, and did a nimble little jig with her.
“Let go of me, you old donkey!” she snapped, but she was laughing.
Snakebite Andi and Silent Sarey were kissing deeply, Andi’s hands plunged into Sarey’s mouse-colored hair.
Rose leaped down from the picnic table and turned to Crow. He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, grinning back at her.
Everything’s cool, that grin said, and so it was. For now. But in spite of her euphoria, Rose thought of the canisters in her safe. Now there were thirty-eight empties instead of thirty-seven. Their backs were a step closer to the wall.
5
The True rolled out the next morning just after first light. They took Route 12 to I-64, the fourteen RVs in a nose-to-tail caravan. When they reached the interstate they would spread out so they weren’t quite so obviously together, staying in touch by radio in case trouble arose.
Or if opportunity knocked.
Ernie and Maureen Salkowicz, fresh from a wonderful night’s sleep, agreed those RV folks were just about the best they’d ever had. Not only did they pay cash and bus up their sites neat as a pin, someone left an apple bread pudding on the top step of their trailer, with a sweet thank-you note on top. With any luck, the Salkowiczes told each other as they ate their gift dessert for breakfast, they’d come back next year.
“Do you know what?” Maureen said. “I dreamed that lady on the insurance commercials—Flo—sold you a big insurance policy. Wasn’t that a crazy dream?”
Ernie grunted and splooshed more whipped cream onto his bread pudding.
“Did you dream, honey?”
“Nope.”
But his eyes slid away from hers as he said it.
6
The True Knot’s luck turned for the better on a hot July day in Iowa. Rose was leading the caravan, as she always did, and just west of Adair, the sonar in her head gave a ping. Not a head-blaster by any means, but moderately loud. She hopped on the CB at once to Barry the Chink, who was about as Asian as Tom Cruise.
“Barry, did you feel that? Come back.”
“Yuh.” Barry was not the garrulous type.
“Who’s Grampa Flick riding with today?”
Before Barry could answer, there was a double break on the CB and Apron Annie said, “He’s with me and Long Paul, sweetie. Is it . . . is it a good one?” Annie sounded anxious, and Rose could understand that. Richard Gaylesworthy had been a very good one, but six weeks was a long time between meals, and he was beginning to wear off.
“Is the old feller compos, Annie?”
Before she could answer, a raspy voice came back, “I’m fine, woman.” And for a guy who sometimes couldn’t remember his own name, Grampa Flick did sound pretty much okay. Testy, sure, but testy was a lot better than befuddled.
A second ping hit her, this one not as strong. As if to underline a point that needed no underlining, Grampa said, “We’re going the wrong fuckin way.”
Rose didn’t bother answering, just clicked another double break on her mike. “Crow? Come back, honeybunch.”
“I’m here.” Prompt as always. Just waiting to be called.
“Pull em in at the next rest area. Except for me, Barry, and Flick. We’ll take the next exit and double back.”
“Will you need a crew?”
“I won’t know until we get closer, but . . . I don’t think so.”
“Okay.” A pause, then he added: “Shit.”
Rose racked the mike and looked out at the unending acres of corn on both sides of the fourlane. Crow was disappointed, of course. They all would be. Big steamheads presented problems because they were all but immune to suggestion. That meant taking them by force. Friends or family members often tried to interfere. They could sometimes be put to sleep, but not always; a kid with big steam could block even Snakebite Andi’s best efforts in that regard. So sometimes people had to be killed. Not good, but the prize was always worth it: life and strength stored away in a steel canister. Stored for a rainy day. In many cases there was even a residual benefit. Steam was hereditary, and often everyone in the target’s family had at least a little.
7
While most of the True Knot waited in a pleasantly shady rest area forty miles east of Council Bluffs, the RVs containing the three finders turned around, left the turnpike at Adair, and headed north. Once away from I-80 and out in the toolies, they spread apart and begin working the grid of graveled, well-maintained farm roads that parceled this part of Iowa into big squares. Moving in on the ping from different directions. Triangulating.
It got stronger . . . a little stronger still . . . then leveled off. Good steam but not great steam. Ah, well. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.
8
Bradley Trevor had been given the day off from his usual farm chores to practice with the local Little League All-Star team. If his pa had refused him this, the coach probably would have led the rest of the boys in a lynch party, because Brad was the team’s best hitter. You wouldn’t think it to look at him—he was skinny as a rake handle, and only eleven—but he was able to tag even the District’s best pitchers for singles and doubles. The meatballers he almost always took deep. Some of it was plain farmboy strength, but by no means all of it. Brad just seemed to know what pitch was coming next. It wasn’t a case of stealing signs (a possibility upon which some of the other District coaches had speculated darkly). He just knew. The way he knew the best location for a new stock well, or where the occasional lost cow had gotten off to, or where Ma’s engagement ring was the time she’d lost it. Look under the floormat of the Suburban, he’d said, and there it was.
That day’s practice was an especially good one, but Brad seemed lost in the ozone during the debriefing afterward, and declined to take a soda from the tub filled with ice when it was offered. He said he thought he better get home and help his ma take in the clothes.
“Is it gonna rain?” Micah Johnson, the coach, asked. They’d all come to trust him on such things.
“Dunno,” Brad said listlessly.
“You feel okay, son? You look a little peaked.”
In fact, Brad didn’t feel well, had gotten up that morning headachey and a bit feverish. That wasn’t why he wanted to go home now, though; he just had a strong sense that he no longer wanted to be at the baseball field. His mind didn’t seem . . . quite his own. He wasn’t sure if he was here or only dreaming he was—how crazy was that? He scratched absently at a red spot on his forearm. “Same time tomorrow, right?”
Coach Johnson said that was the plan, and Brad walked off with his glove trailing from one hand. Usually he jogged—they all did—but today he didn’t feel like it. His head still ached, and now his legs did, too. He disappeared into the corn behind the bleachers, meaning to take a shortcut back to the farm, two miles away. When he emerged onto Town Road D, brushing silk from his hair with a slow and dreamy hand, a midsize WanderKing was idling on the gravel. Standing beside it, smiling, was Barry the Chink.
“Well, there you are,” Barry said.
“Who are you?”
“A friend. Hop in. I’ll take you home.”
“Sure,” Brad said. Feeling the way he did, a ride would be fine. He scratched at the red spot on his arm. “You’re Barry Smith. You’re a friend. I’ll hop in and you’ll take me home.”
He stepped into the RV. The door closed. The WanderKing drove away.
By the next day the whole county would be mobilized in a hunt for the Adair All-Stars’ centerfielder and best hitter. A State Police spokesman asked residents to report any strange cars or vans. There were many such reports, but they all came to nothing. And although the three RVs carrying the finders were much bigger than vans (and Rose the Hat’s was truly huge), nobody reported them. They were the RV People, after all, and traveling together. Brad was just . . . gone.
Like thousands of other unfortunate children, he had been swallowed up, seemingly in a single bite.
9
They took him north to an abandoned ethanol-processing plant that was miles from the nearest farmhouse. Crow carried the boy out of Rose’s EarthCruiser and laid him gently on the ground. Brad was bound with duct tape and weeping. As the True Knot gathered around him (like mourners over an open grave), he said, “Please take me home. I’ll never tell.”
Rose dropped to one knee beside him and sighed. “I would if I could, son, but I can’t.”
His eyes found Barry. “You said you were one of the good guys! I heard you! You said so!”
“Sorry, pal.” Barry didn’t look sorry. What he looked was hungry. “It’s not personal.”
Brad shifted his eyes back to Rose. “Are you going to hurt me? Please don’t hurt me.”
Of course they were going to hurt him. It was regrettable, but pain purified steam, and the True had to eat. Lobsters also felt pain when they were dropped into pots of boiling water, but that didn’t stop the rubes from doing it. Food was food, and survival was survival.
Rose put her hands behind her back. Into one of these, Greedy G placed a knife. It was short but very sharp. Rose smiled down at the boy and said, “As little as possible.”
The boy lasted a long time. He screamed until his vocal cords ruptured and his cries became husky barks. At one point, Rose paused and looked around. Her hands, long and strong, wore bloody red gloves.
“Something?” Crow asked.
“We’ll talk later,” Rose said, and went back to work. The light of a dozen flashlights had turned a piece of ground behind the ethanol plant into a makeshift operating theater.
Brad Trevor whispered, “Please kill me.”
Rose the Hat gave him a comforting smile. “Soon.”
But it wasn’t.
Those husky barks recommenced, and eventually they turned to steam.
At dawn, they buried the boy’s body. Then they moved on.