The man looked at all of us but especially Pia. The old up and down. “What can I do for you ladies?” His voice was surprisingly high and soft.
“Actually,” Pia said with her blinding Pia smile, “we’ve been driving since Millinocket and could really use a bathroom right now, if that’s okay.”
The mustache twitched. The man took a pen, tapped it twice on the counter, then pointed with it at a sign behind his right shoulder without turning his head. It read, BATHROOMS FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY.
“Oh!” Pia said. “Of course.” She glanced at the girlie mags, the bullets, the crossbow, and stepped back to the candy aisle, returning with a Snickers bar.
He rang up her purchase and, expressionless, head-gestured to a door in the shadows behind him. “Light’s outside on the right.”
Pia thanked him with embarrassing intensity as the rest of us pretended to be fascinated by rolls of duct tape and fishing tackle. She emerged a few moments later and nodded at Rachel, who visibly braced herself before heading to the bathroom.
“Excuse me?” the man said, staring at a point somewhere toward the top right corner of the ceiling, one pupil drifting skyward independently of the other.
Rachel halted in her tracks. Like a statue, arm out for the bathroom light.
“What did I just say?” he said flatly, curling a meaty thumb at the sign. “Customers only.”
“Oh . . . oh.” Rachel reached out for one of the magazines, her hand jumping back as if burned when she saw what kind they were.
Gravel crunched under tires outside. The muffled sound of men’s voices, citizens band radio, switched off. A truck door slammed. Through the greasy windows of the store, the dead eyes of a doe regarded us, its body roped to the bed of the truck, slender front legs crossed daintily. Its velvet black nose still glistened with moisture. Heavy footsteps and the creak and bang of the screen door.
A big young man in a John Deere cap blustered in, still full of the rush of killing. Head down, he muttered, “Hey, Vincent,” wrenched open the glass door of the case that held the sodas, and tipped back a bottle of Fresca, almost finishing it in one go. He wiped his mouth, heard the silence. Turned to look at us, his face long and wolfish. “Whoa, Vince, got yourself a party.”
Rachel’s hand still hovered near the magazines. She moved it a bit to the right. “I’ll have a . . . couple of scratch tickets.”
“What kind?” the fat man said.
“Whatever’s lucky.”
He rolled his eyes and swiveled in his mattress chair, its metal innards shrieking, then reached an arm as thick around as my waist up into the darkness and snapped off a couple of tickets. He tossed them on the counter as Rachel slipped into the bathroom. “Looks like you got yourself a real beaut out there, Graham. Need anything to dress ’er?”
The hunter took us in one by one, as if we were words in a sentence he was trying to understand. Greasy black hair stuck out crazily from under his cap. Blood clotted his fingernails and stained the ragged hem of the long underwear that poked out from under his shirt. His eyes came to rest on me and stayed there. “Tried to cut her, but my knife is for shit. Mind if I use your—”
“Kit’s out back. Knock yourself out. Where’d you bag ’er?” The fat man popped a caramel in his mouth from an open bag of candy.
“Up by the ridge. Got up in my lucky tree, looked down, and there she was. Like it was meant to be.”
Rachel, head down, emerged from the bathroom while I grabbed a couple of mealy apples from a bin and a miniature Mr. Goodbar and set them on the counter. The bathroom held its own horrors, but I wouldn’t let myself look at them. At that point I would have peed on a pile of body parts.
Old hands at this now, Sandra threw some Wrigley’s spearmint on the counter and sped by me as I headed out of the john. Laughing at something the hunter said, the fat man rang up our purchases and tossed them in a paper bag. Pia was bent over the case of bullets.
The hunter sidled up to her, puffing himself out in his red lumberjack vest.
“You hunt?”
She turned and folded her arms. “No. I don’t murder beautiful helpless animals.”
My stomach churned. Good God, Pia, don’t be an idiot.
The hunter smiled and took in her height, shape, and heft in a glance. “But I bet you go ahead and knock back a big juicy burger, right?”
“Actually, no. I’m a vegetarian.”
Such a lie.
Sandra skittered out of the bathroom. The hunter narrowed his eyes, reached into the soda case, and pulled out a can of Genesee cream ale. He snapped off the tab and mouthed off the foam. “So, where’re you muff munchers headed?”
“Ease up, Gray,” the fat man said, handing Pia the paper bag. “That’ll be $8.98.”
Pia paid, her hands shaking.
“Let’s go,” Sandra said, as if we needed encouragement. We stumbled over each other in our rush to the door, where the hunter had placed himself, blocking our exit.