If you see a toilet bowl without a ring, she thought, you know there’s a woman somewhere in the vicinity.
“Trume told me he got hold of the best shit ever, and he wasn’t lying,” Garth said, leading her toward the trailer. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, he was a maniac and he lied almost all the time, but this was the rare instance when he wasn’t.”
The trailer had a hole in the side that was surrounded by a corona of what looked like dried blood—but surely that wasn’t really there. She must be waking-dreaming, quite common among people who had been without sleep for a long time—so said a self-proclaimed expert in a NewsAmerica sidebar piece she’d seen before decamping for the green hills of her Appalachian home town.
“You don’t see a hole in the side of that trailer, do you?” she asked. Even her voice was dreamlike now. It seemed to be issuing from a loudspeaker in the top of Michaela’s head.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “It’s there, all right. Listen, Mickey, Trume called this new stuff Purple Lightning, and I got a sample before the wild woman came on the scene and offed Trume and his sidekick.” Garth was momentarily diverted into reverie. “The guy, he had the stupidest tattoo. That turd from South Park? The one that sings and stuff? It was on his Adam’s apple. Who gets a turd tattoo on his Adam’s apple? You tell me. Even if it’s a witty, singing and dancing turd, it’s still a turd. Everyone who looks at you sees a turd. Not my specialty, but I’ve consulted, and you would not believe what a pain it is to get something like that removed.”
“Garth. Stop. Rewind. The wild woman. Is that the woman people in town are talking about? The one they’re holding at the prison?”
“Uh-huh. She totally Hulked out. I was lucky to get away. But that’s water under the bridge, piss down the sewer pipe, last week’s news, so on and so forth. Doesn’t matter. And we should be grateful for that, trust me. What does matter is this superb crystal. Trume didn’t make it, he got it from Savannah or somewhere, but he was going to make it, dig? Analyze it and then create his own version. He had a two-gallon Baggie of the shit, and it’s in there somewhere. I’m going to find it.”
Michaela hoped so, because resupply was necessary. They had smoked up Garth’s reserves over the last few days, even smoked up the rug-bunnies and a couple of shards they’d found under the couch, Garth insisting that she brush her teeth after every session with the bong. “Because that’s why meth addicts have such bad teeth,” he’d told her. “They get high and forget basic hygiene.”
The stuff hurt her throat, and the euphoric effect had long since worn off, but it kept her awake. Michaela had been almost positive she would fall asleep on the ride out here—it had seemed interminable—but somehow she had managed to stay conscious. And for what? The trailer, balanced crooked on its cement blocks, didn’t exactly look like the Fountain of Awareness. She could only pray that the Purple Lightning wasn’t a fantasy of Garth Flickinger’s dope-addled brain.
“Go ahead,” she said, “but I’m not going in with you. There might be ghosts.”
He looked at her with disapproval. “Mickey, you’re a reporter. A news maven. You know there are no such things as ghosts.”
“I do know that,” Michaela said from the loudspeaker on top of her head, “but in my current state, I might see them anyway.”
“I don’t like leaving you on your own. I won’t be able to slap you if you start nodding off.”
“I’ll slap myself. Go get it. Just try not to be long.”
Garth trotted up the steps, tried the door, and put his shoulder to it when it wouldn’t give. It flew open and he stumbled inside. A moment later he poked his head out the maroon-stained hole in the side of the trailer, a big grin on his face. “Don’t go to sleep, you pretty thing! Remember, I’m going to touch up your nose one of these fine days!”
“In your dreams, buster,” she said, but Garth had already pulled his head back inside. Michaela heard thuds and crashes as he began his search for the elusive Purple Lightning. Which the cops had probably taken and stashed in the evidence locker at the sheriff’s station, if they hadn’t taken it home to their womenfolk.
Michaela wandered to the ruins of the meth-cooking shed. It was surrounded by charred bushes and blackened trees. No meth would be cooked here in the future, purple or otherwise. She wondered if the shed had blown up on its own, as meth-cooking facilities were wont to do, or if the woman who had killed the cookers had blown it up. It was a moot question at this late date, but the woman herself interested Michaela, piqued the natural, seeking curiosity that had made her investigate Anton Dubcek’s dresser drawers when she was eight and eventually led her into journalism, where you got to investigate everybody’s drawers—those in their houses, and those that they wore. That part of her mind was still active, and she had an idea it was keeping her awake as much as Flickinger’s methamphetamine. She had Qs with no As.
Qs like how this whole Aurora business got rolling in the first place. And why, assuming there was a why. Qs about whether or not the world’s women could come back, as Sleeping Beauty had. Not to mention Qs about the woman who had killed the meth dealers, and whose name was, according to some talk they’d overheard at the Squeaky Wheel and in town, either Eve or Evelyn or Ethelyn Black, and who could supposedly sleep and wake again, which made her like no other woman anywhere, unless another existed in Tierra del Fuego or the high Himalayas. This woman might only be a rumor, but Michaela tended to believe there was an element of truth to her. When rumors came to you from different directions, it was wise to pay attention.
If I wasn’t living with one foot in reality and the other in the Land of Nod, Michaela thought, starting up the path beyond the ruined meth shed, I would hie myself to the women’s prison and make some inquiries.
Another Q: Who was running the place up there, now that her mother was asleep? Hicks? Her mother said he had the brain of a gerbil and the spine of a jellyfish. If memory served, Vanessa Lampley was the senior officer on the staff. If Lampley wasn’t there anymore, or if she was snoozing, that left—
Was that humming just in her head? She couldn’t be completely sure, but she didn’t believe so. She thought it was the power lines that ran near here. No big deal. Her eyes, however, were reporting stuff that was harder to dismiss as normal. Glowing splotches like handprints on some of the tree trunks a few feet from the blasted shed. Glowing splotches that looked like footprints on the moss and mulch, as if saying, This way, m’lady. And clumps of moths on many of the branches, perched there and seeming to watch her.