When we woke up the next morning, everybody wanted to act like nothing happened. Joe and Sally crawled out of their tents and broke them down. Afterward Joe went over to the little stove and started making some coffee. Sally walked down the slope a ways and took a moment to survey the landscape. The dunes were empty now; I couldn’t see any tracks where that giant creature had done its cavorting, and I suspected it had never left any to begin with. I waited for one of them to say something, but no one did.
“Well, ain’t we gonna talk about it?” I said.
Neither one of them acted like they’d heard me. It was as though I had taken up with a pair of vegetables.
“You saw that worm last night, right, Watson?”
Watson, who had kept vigil beside my tent all night, and who had found no cause to rouse me, confirmed that I had not dreamed it. “I saw the creature, though I don’t believe it was a worm.”
I knew he was right. In school we learned that the things people saw in the crater were reflections of what was in our minds, or echoes of things that had lived in some ancient time. But it was one thing to read about it and another to actually see it.
I walked over to the stove and waited for the coffee to get ready. Joe, having exhausted the small list of tasks with which he could busy himself before our trek resumed, sat cross-legged beside me, staring at the little flame beneath the pot. He would not look at me, nor did he look at Sally. He seemed to be in a different place entirely. I wanted to bring him back to where I was: cold, disoriented, uncertain.
“You ever seen anything like that before?” When he kept up his pretense of pretending I wasn’t there, I grabbed a handful of sand and threw it at him, in case he needed tactile evidence of my existence.
He blinked and rubbed the grit from his eyes with his thumbs. “Goddamn it, Anabelle!”
“You craving your whiskey?”
Something dark came into his face. “That’s not funny.”
“Neither’s acting like you can’t hear me when I’m speaking to you. I asked you a question.”
Before Joe had a chance to answer me, Sally came sauntering up, her thumbs hooked in her belt and a mean little smile on her face. “Who the hell you think you’re talking to, kid? Your dad let you sass him like that at home? Ain’t nobody whupped your ass for you yet?”
This was the second time someone had threatened to beat me for not tucking tail in deference to the idea they had of themselves. I recognized a signal moment unfolding here: Sally wanted to make plain her control. I wasn’t about to let her have it.
“Some have tried,” I said.
She threw her head back and laughed—a series of big, booming haws that flew like cannonballs over the open miles. “And what,” she said, “you snatched the leather from their hand and delivered a lesson of your own? Who was it tried to chasten you, a little rosy-cheeked cherub from the cradle?”
I felt my face flush. “You stay away from me.”
“Girl, I’m gonna knock you on your ass. You been acting like some queen bee ever since I first saw you. You think you’re something special because you can push a drunk around? Try me, brat. You think you scare me with your threats of the law? The law’s gonna hang your daddy for murder. The law sure as hell ain’t no friend of yours.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
She smiled at me. “No? Honey, I got all kinds of experience with the law. I know exactly what I’m talking about. Your daddy killed a man. What did you think they were going to do?”
“Come on now, Sally,” said Joe.
“You shut up, Joe. You didn’t feel like you had a thing to say when she was laying into you, don’t start finding your gumption now. You know I’m right, anyhow.”
I waited for Joe to argue with her—prayed for him to do it, reduced once again to hoping a grown-up would come to my rescue—but he just turned back to the stove, lifting the pot off the flame and pouring coffee into his mug. Steam billowed from inside it, clouding in the cold air. I wondered suddenly if my father would ever drink another cup of coffee.
I was paralyzed by my fears, by the impossibility of the situation. Both my parents needed me to save them. Both were slipping out of my grasp, leaving me stranded in this haunted place on my own, surrounded by criminals and by a madness that blew out of the very ground.
I must have looked like quite the fool, standing there while these terrors ran loose across my face, because Sally laughed. “First step out of the playpen is rough, ain’t it, honey?”
“I hope you die out here, you bitch,” I said. And so I surrendered, resorting to simple name-calling, the basest of retorts—and one that played on her womanhood as well. Mother would have been ashamed of me.
And yet it found its mark. “I told you what I’d do,” Sally said, and she stepped toward me with her arm cocked for a backhanded blow. I braced for it, but there was no need. Watson, moving with a speed I did not think him capable of, lurched forward and interposed himself between Sally and myself. He inched forward, his huge metal bulk pressing Sally backward.
“Desist,” he said.
Sally retreated a few steps, and Watson kept pace. After about five feet he stopped, allowing her to create some distance between them. She stared at him with a kind of grim acceptance. I, on the other hand, felt both terrified and elated; I had not thought Watson capable of anything like this. Joe rose from his place by the stove, the coffee cup still in his right hand. They both looked more affected by this development than they had been by the glittering centipede of the night before.
“You’ll refrain from laying hands upon Miss Crisp.”
“You don’t talk to me,” Sally said, her tone diminished.
She fixed a baleful glare first on Watson, then on me. The moment stretched. I felt compelled to offer an explanation, even an apology, for this unprecedented behavior; but there was no explanation. And she deserved no apology.
She turned away from us and finished packing her tent. After a moment, Joe followed her cue. He tossed the rest of the coffee into the sand and started breaking down the stove. I stood beside Watson, unsure how to feel about anything. The world had slipped its tracks and was careening in a dark direction.
Soon, we were packed. Sally led us off without a word. The rest of us fell in behind her.