EDGAR SWAYS AND GRUNTS AND JABS AT THE FLIPPER BUTTONS on a pinball machine. Jesse’s at the bar. They’ve returned to the bowling alley after Jesse lay awake all day, buffeted by a flood of memories triggered by meeting Johona, memories he thought were lost to him for good.
There Claudine was, humming French songs in the moonlight; there she was sipping champagne in a San Francisco hotel, New Year’s Eve 1902; there she was, the shine of her hair, the swish of her skirts, the seaside rhythm of her breath in sleep.
Time devours memories, gnaws the meat off them and crunches the bones. Jesse’s always considered this a blessing. Better to be focused on the here and now when you’re forever on the hunt, forever being hunted. Better not to be daydreaming about Mama’s peach pie or a departed lover’s touch. But maybe he’s been wrong. Because tonight, for the first time in a long while, he doesn’t wish he was dead. In fact, after spending hours caught up in the torrent of reminiscence, he felt as if a crust of mud that’d been weighing him down had cracked and fallen away. That’s why, as soon as the sun set, he roused Edgar and said, “Let’s go back to that place we were last night.”
Johona was behind the bar, as he’d hoped. “Howdy, stranger,” she said, and he’d be damned if she didn’t even have the beauty mark on her lip Claudine had. He set Edgar up in front of the game and went back to the bar and ordered a beer. Johona’s been busy ever since, however. The place is packed, and there are drinks to be poured, jokes to be laughed at. Jesse doesn’t mind. It’s a thrill watching her scoop ice, watching her make change.
She stops by whenever she gets a chance, sighs and says, “You good?” and, “I’m about to lose my voice, screaming over all this noise.” She lights a cigarette, takes two quick puffs, and stubs it out in an ashtray with a conspiratorial wink. She shakes her hips to the beat of a song and glances over to make sure he saw. When her hand brushes his, time collapses in on itself, old feelings and new crashing head-on.
At ten she slaps the bar and says, “So where are we going?”
“What do you mean?” Jesse says.
“I’m off,” she says. “Where you taking me? And don’t you dare say another bar.”
Jesse hesitates. He should end this flirtation now. As much as he’s drawn to the girl, going any further will only be courting trouble. Nothing good ever comes of the turned consorting with the unturned. But then she smiles Claudine’s smile again, and a worry she’s misread him ripples across her face, and in the second between the needle of the jukebox dropping onto a record and the song starting to play, he throws caution to the wind.
“Are you hungry?” he asks.
“Always,” she replies.
“I’ve got my brother with me.”
“He can chaperone. Meet me in the parking lot in ten minutes.”
Edgar’s run out of quarters and so is pretending to play the pinball machine, making sounds with his mouth. He whines about having to leave but brightens at the mention of food.
“Now, listen. There’s a girl coming with us,” Jesse tells him.
“You gonna feed?” Edgar says.
“No. She’s a friend of mine.”
“You ain’t got any friends.”
“You best behave yourself.”
“I know how to act,” Edgar says. He stands up straight, clicks his heels, and bows like someone he’s seen on television. “May I kiss your hand?” he says.
“No fucking around, I mean it,” Jesse says.
They wait for Johona in the parking lot, Jesse so nervous that he’s bouncing on his toes. Johona comes through the door, laughing and waving goodbye to someone inside.
“You’re here,” she says to Jesse, kidding like she thought he wouldn’t be.
“This is Edgar,” Jesse says. “Edgar, this is Johona.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Johona,” Edgar says. “You sure are pretty.”
They walk to the Grand Prix.
“You ride in back, let Johona up front,” Jesse says to Edgar.
“I got shotgun,” Edgar says. “I always got shotgun.”
“It’s cool,” Johona says. “I like riding in back.”
“He has the mind of a child,” Jesse says as he opens the door for her.
“Me too,” Johona says. “We’ll get along great.”
She directs Jesse to a Mexican restaurant that’s the last business hanging on in a dying strip mall, says it makes the best chimichangas in the world. The hostess seats them in an orange vinyl booth. A menagerie of piñatas hangs from the ceiling, and the Coors sign on the wall has a moving waterfall. Jesse and Johona order beers. Edgar wants one too, but Jesse says, “He’ll have a Coke.”
Johona talks nonstop, flitting from subject to subject so quickly that Jesse gets lost sometimes. When he does, he just smiles and nods, content to let her enthusiasm wash over him without worrying about keeping up. “You’ve never heard of Neil Young?” she says. He hasn’t, nor Led Zeppelin, Slaughterhouse Five, Charlie’s Angels, or any of the other things she chatters about. When she asks, “What TV shows do you watch?” he’s embarrassed not to have an answer.
“I like wrestling,” he says. “I see Dragnet sometimes. The Lone Ranger.”
“The Lone Ranger?” Johona says. “Okay, Pops.”
Edgar is pretending his straw wrapper is a snake, slithering it between the salt shaker and the basket of tortilla chips. He doesn’t like spicy food, so Jesse orders him a hamburger.
Johona moves on to stories about her friends—Tracy and Pam and Eddie and Carlos. One of them was busted for a joint, but his dad knew the judge and got him off. Another works at a drugstore where the pharmacist keeps cornering her in the back room and telling her he and his wife have an open marriage.
“He’s so gross,” Johona says. “He looks like Jackie Gleason. You know who that is, don’t you?”
Edgar pipes up with, “To the moon, Alice.”
Johona laughs and says to him, “Well, you know, anyway.”
When the food comes, she sits back and claps a hand over her mouth.
“I haven’t shut up since we got here,” she says.
“I don’t mind,” Jesse says. “My life’s boring compared to yours.”
“I don’t believe you,” Johona says. “Tell me about it.”
“There’s not much to tell.”
“You do construction?”
“Sometimes.”
“What about the other times?”
Jesse makes up something new. “I sell cars.”
“Man,” Johona says. “I really wanted you to be a bank robber.”
“How come?”
“So when I’m an old lady I can say I went out with one. I’ll say, ‘We only had one night together, but it was glorious.’”
She’s trying to be funny, but Jesse hears something sad in her voice. For the first time since they sat down, there’s a silence. She sips her beer and avoids looking him in the eye.
“Why’d you ask me out if you’re taking off for Denver?” she says.
“I believe it was you who asked me out,” Jesse says.
“Which was a totally slutty thing to do.”
“You aren’t a slut.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
Johona scoffs at this. “Anyhow, why’d you say yes then?” she says.
“You remind me of someone,” Jesse says.
“A girlfriend?”
“More than that. You could be her twin.”
“So she was super foxy.”
“She was beautiful.”
Johona wasn’t expecting a serious reply. She pauses, then says, “What was her name?”
Claudine. Claudine Dejardin. Though the night Jesse met her, she called herself Pythia.
SEES ALL, KNOWS ALL promised the signboard on her booth, one of many lining the midway of a traveling fair set up in a pasture on the edge of Monongah. A month earlier the same field had been the site of a weeklong outdoor revival meeting, which hadn’t interested Jesse in the least. The fair, though, with its faintly sinister, faintly salacious air and maze of colorful wagons and patched canvas tents, strummed a restless chord in him. So one Saturday, after ten hours of drudgery at the sawmill where he’d been working since he’d been old enough to work, he hurried over to see what he could see.
The encampment was lit by flaming torches and strings of electric bulbs that shone like little suns. A steam calliope whistled out “A Picture No Artist Could Paint” and “My Wild Irish Rose,” the music so loud, you stopped trying to be heard over it after a while and pointed instead. Pointed at the sword swallower and the fat lady, pointed at the shooting gallery and Jacob’s ladder, pointed at the horse that could count. The lights, music, and frenzied whirl of strangeness worked magic on the crowd. Normally stoic farmers grinned around penny cigars, their stone-faced wives tittered like young girls, and their kids gaped goggle-eyed at the spectacle of an honest-to-God African Pygmy sitting on the shoulder of the World’s Tallest Cowpoke.
Jesse bought popcorn and watched folks ride the pleasure wheel and the roundabout. He blew two bits throwing baseballs, trying to win a vase for Mama but walking away with only a Chinese finger trap. A barker spieled him into laying down a nickel to see a flicker projected onto the wall of a tent, ghostly footage of a parade in New York City. In another tent—GENTLEMEN ONLY—two sleepy girls danced the hoochie-coochie in peekaboo harem getups for most of the male parishioners of the First Baptist Church.
Too shy himself to stare openly at the dancers, Jesse pretended to look at the ground, sneakily raising his eyes to watch without lifting his head. He was starting to enjoy the show when a coworker of his, Wade Finney, sidled up with his tongue hanging out.
“The redhead’ll suck your pecker for three bucks,” he whispered like someone who knew something.
“That so?” Jesse said.
The notion of sticking his pecker anywhere Wade’s had been held no appeal. He waited until the fool was absorbed in the show again and slipped back out onto the midway. Claudine was standing outside her booth.
“You want me to tell your fortune, Monsieur?” she called to him, playing up her French accent.
Her eyes were rimmed with kohl, her lips painted red. Wild black hair spilled down her back, and silver stars decorated the blue robe she wore, stars that glittered under the torches like the real thing. Right then and there Jesse’s map was redrawn. All roads would lead to her forever after.
He sat across from her in her candlelit stall. Sweet smoke curled out of a brass incense burner shaped like a dragon. Claudine gestured at the deck of tarot cards and the crystal ball on the table between them.
“What is your question?” she said.
“Are you really a gypsy?” Jesse said.
“Among other things.”
“We got an old woman around here who about drowned when she was a girl. She can tell your future by looking in a teacup.”
“There are many ways to lift the veil.”
Jesse pointed at the crystal ball. “You can see the future in that?”
“Those with the gift of prophecy can,” Claudine said.
Jesse leaned forward to peer into the ball. “It’s true,” he said. “I see it clear as day: You and me are gonna fall madly in love.”
Claudine told him later that she tried to call a roustabout to bounce him for his sass but couldn’t get her mouth to work right.
“You’d already laid me low,” she said.
A mariachi band approaches the booth where Jesse, Johona, and Edgar are sitting. A man wearing a sombrero and strumming a guitar asks if they’d like to hear anything special. Johona makes a request.
“What’s this?” Jesse says when the band starts to play.
“‘Paloma Negra,’” Johona says. “My dad always asks for it.”
“What’s it about?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Johona gives the musicians a dollar when they finish, and they move on to the next table. Edgar is done eating and getting restless.
“I want to play more pinball,” he says.
“We’ll get a move on soon,” Jesse says. “Hold your horses.”
“I know something else fun we could do,” Johona says.
“What?” Edgar says.
“It’s a surprise,” Johona says. “You up for a surprise?”
“I guess I am,” Edgar says, like he’s accepting a challenge.
“What about you?” Johona says to Jesse.
He feels uneasy, as if he’s wandered too far out onto thin ice. At the same time he’s not yet ready to end the night. So he’s going to ignore his misgivings and take Johona where she wants to go, spend a while longer courting Claudine’s ghost.
As they get up to leave, Edgar sings softly.
“‘I’ve been to Hollywood, I’ve been to Redwood.’”
“Hey!” Johona says.
“I know Neil Young,” Edgar says. “Jesse don’t, but I do.”
They drive out of town and wind along a narrow road up the side of a mountain. Johona has Jesse take a turnoff that ends at a wide, flat overlook with a view of the city.
“Park in the bushes in case the cops cruise by,” she says.
Jesse pulls into a hollow in a mesquite thicket where the Grand Prix will be hidden from view. He, Johona, and Edgar get out and walk back to the viewpoint. The ground is littered with cigarette butts, crushed beer cans, and McDonald’s wrappers. Broken glass glints in the uncannily bright light of a bit of moon blazing overhead. Edgar bends and comes up with an empty shotgun shell.
“People party here,” Johona says.
She leads the brothers up a short trail to a natural bench on top of a boulder. The three of them sit against the rock, which even now is still warm from the sun. Phoenix sparkles below like diamonds strewn across the desert. The night is perfectly calm, not even a tickle of a breeze. A helicopter hovers silently above downtown, tethered to the earth by the beam of its spotlight.
“I can see all the way to Monongah,” Edgar says. He tosses a rock, another, another.
“Quit it,” Jesse says.
Johona lights a cigarette. Jesse can smell the bowling alley on her behind the perfume she’s wearing.
“Tell me more about Claudine,” she says.
“What do you want to know?” Jesse says.
“How long’s it been since you two were together?”
They met at the fair in June 1900. Jesse was twenty-four, Claudine looked to be twenty or so but said she’d been born in 1727 or ’28 somewhere in France. She’d once carried a baptism certificate as a reminder but lost it on one of the many occasions she’d had to run for her life. “What does it matter now anyway?” she said. A birthdate was important to someone plotting a course across time, but since turning, she drifted in eternity, a sea without shores.
Johona blows a smoke ring, waiting for an answer.
“It’s been a long time since I last saw her,” Jesse says.
“Were you in love?”
“I’d say so.”
Every turning is a love story. Love for a woman, a man, a child, for life itself, for darkness and the things found only there. Jesse fell for Claudine the moment he saw her. She fell for him just as quickly. They made love that first night in a bed of tall grass on the bank of Booth’s Creek.
Jesse had been with other girls, but it was nothing like being with Claudine. She breathed fire into him that raced through his body, burning every dead tree and tumbledown shack, every briar patch and bog inside him. After he came white hot, he lay beside her gloriously empty, gloriously free, for the first time in his life.
Claudine hurried away before dawn that morning and the next and the next. He asked to see her during the day, but she refused. He knew she was hiding something, thought it might be a husband or a child. “Tell me,” he urged her again and again. “Tell me what’s wrong,” and on what was supposed to be their last night together—the fair moving on the next day—she finally revealed her secret.
They were down by the creek again, but she wouldn’t let him touch her this time. Many years earlier, she said, she’d made a choice. In exchange for eternal life and health, she’d infected herself with a sickness—an unholy, incurable sickness, the pain of which was dulled only by drinking the blood of other humans. She and others like her were called rovers. They lived like nomads, keeping constantly on the move in order to avoid detection and surreptitiously stalking victims in the night.
Jesse wonders still how she knew he wouldn’t raise an alarm or kill her himself after hearing her story, how she sensed the despair and loneliness plaguing him and his intense, near-violent desire to escape the drudgery and hopelessness of Monongah. He wasn’t frightened or repulsed when she finished her confession; he was buzzing with strange excitement.
“You’ve witched me somehow,” he said.
“Why?” Claudine replied.
“Because none of what you told me changes how I feel about you.”
“If I was a witch, I’d make you disappear,” Claudine said. “I’d fix it so I’d never met you.”
Jesse grabbed her hand and pulled it to his chest. “I want to come with you,” he said.
“You’ll have to leave everything behind, your whole life,” Claudine said. “You’ll be an outcast. You’ll live by new laws.”
“Your law,” Jesse said. “I’ll live by your law.”
Claudine turned him that night. He remembers her blood trickling down his throat, the heat of it, the stink of it. He remembers the thunder in his brain and the lightning in his veins as he was destroyed and reborn.
“How long did you go out?” Johona says.
“Not long,” he says.
“Did you break up with her, or did she break up with you?”
More memories come, memories Jesse doesn’t want to revisit. “Tell me something about you now,” he says.
Johona puffs on her cigarette. “I’ve been thinking I’d like being a chef,” she says. “Not a cook, a real chef.”
“You any good in the kitchen?”
“I burn water, but I could learn. My plan is to go to cooking school somewhere cool like L.A. or New York, somewhere something’s happening. Have you ever been to L.A.?”
“Lots of times,” Jesse says.
“Isn’t it bitchin’? My old boyfriend and me went once. Venice Beach, Universal Studios. We got stoned with this old hippie and walked all the way down Hollywood Boulevard.”
“L.A.’s too big for me,” Jesse says. “I’m a country boy.”
“I love that it’s big. I love that you can get lost there.”
Edgar stands and points.
“Skunk,” he says.
Johona stands too.
“Where?”
“Down in them bushes.”
Johona squints.
“It’s too dark,” she says.
“A mama and a baby.”
“Can you see them?” Johona says to Jesse.
Jesse gets up to look. The disgruntled mutter of powerful engines held in check catches his attention instead. Someone’s coming up the road. Headlight beams bounce across the overlook.
“Duck,” Johona says. “If it’s cops, they’ll bust us.”
Jesse crouches and pulls Edgar down with him.