Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
steps, rapped once, and let herself in. Nut was standing with Big Mo and Apron Annie, Grampa’s two<br />
reluctant nurses. Crow was sitting on the end of the bed. He stood up when Rose came in. He was<br />
showing his age this evening. Lines bracketed his mouth, and there were a few threads of white silk in<br />
his black hair.<br />
We need to take steam, Rose thought. And when this is over, we will.<br />
Grampa Flick was cycling rapidly now: first transparent, then solid again, then transparent. But<br />
each transparency was longer, and more of him disappeared. He knew what was happening, Rose saw.<br />
His eyes were wide and terrified; his body writhed with the pain of the changes it was going through.<br />
She had always allowed herself to believe, on some deep level of her mind, in the True Knot’s<br />
immortality. Yes, every fifty or a hundred years or so, someone died—like that big dumb Dutchman,<br />
Hands-Off Hans, who had been electrocuted by a falling powerline in an Arkansas windstorm not long<br />
after World War II ended, or Katie Patches, who had drowned, or Tommy the Truck—but those were<br />
exceptions. Usually the ones who fell were taken down by their own carelessness. So she had always<br />
believed. Now she saw she had been as foolish as rube children clinging to their belief in Santa Claus<br />
and the Easter Bunny.<br />
He cycled back to solidity, moaning and crying and shivering. “Make it stop, Rosie-girl, make it<br />
stop. It hurts—”<br />
Before she could answer—and really, what could she have said?—he was fading again until there<br />
was nothing left of him but a sketch of bones and his staring, floating eyes. They were the worst.<br />
Rose tried to contact him with her mind and comfort him that way, but there was nothing to hold<br />
onto. Where Grampa Flick had always been—often grumpy, sometimes sweet—there was now only a<br />
roaring windstorm of broken images. Rose withdrew from him, shaken. Again she thought, This can’t<br />
be happening.<br />
“Maybe we should put him out of his miz’y,” Big Mo said. She was digging her fingernails into<br />
Annie’s forearm, but Annie didn’t seem to feel it. “Give him a shot, or something. You got something<br />
in your bag, don’t you, Nut? You must.”<br />
“What good would it do?” Walnut’s voice was hoarse. “Maybe earlier, but it’s going too fast now.<br />
He’s got no system for any drug to circulate in. If I gave him a hypo in the arm, we’d see it soaking<br />
into the bed five seconds later. Best to just let it happen. It won’t be long.”<br />
Nor was it. Rose counted four more full cycles. On the fifth, even his bones disappeared. For a<br />
moment the eyeballs remained, staring first at her and then rolling to look at Crow Daddy. They hung<br />
above the pillow, which was still indented by the weight of his head and stained with Wildroot<br />
Cream-Oil hair tonic, of which he seemed to have an endless supply. She thought she remembered<br />
Greedy G telling her once that he bought it on eBay. eBay, for fuck’s sweet sake!<br />
Then, slowly, the eyes disappeared, too. Except of course they weren’t really gone; Rose knew she’d<br />
be seeing them in her dreams later tonight. So would the others in attendance at Grampa Flick’s<br />
deathbed. If they got any sleep at all.<br />
They waited, none of them entirely convinced that the old man wouldn’t appear before them again<br />
like the ghost of Hamlet’s father or Jacob Marley or some other, but there was only the shape of his<br />
disappeared head, the stains left by his hair tonic, and the deflated pee- and shit-stained boxers he had<br />
been wearing.<br />
Mo burst into wild sobs and buried her head in Apron Annie’s generous bosom. Those waiting<br />
outside heard, and one voice (Rose would never know whose) began to speak. Another joined in, then a<br />
third and a fourth. Soon they were all chanting under the stars, and Rose felt a wild chill go<br />
zigzagging up her back. She reached out, found Crow’s hand, and squeezed it.<br />
Annie joined in. Mo next, her words muffled. Nut. Then Crow. Rose the Hat took a deep breath<br />
and added her voice to theirs.