14

There were only three other passengers on the bus, and it pulled into the darkness while I slid into a depression. I felt as if I had been suspended in a colorless, odorless solution. The bus nosed its way toward the freeway, then picked up speed, carrying me away from Westwater, away from Boyd.

I shrugged up my shoulders until the padded shell of overcoat arose about my ears, and I pressed the back of my hand to the fogged window as telephone poles whipped past in the night. My pack was on the seat next to me. A black soldier smoked a foul-­smelling cigarette in the very rear seat; a middle-­aged woman dozed in the safe seat directly behind the driver. The cavernous emptiness of our passenger tube echoed around me. This was not how freedom was supposed to feel.

I thought momentarily about Lewis. He and I were surely members of different species. I had great respect for Lewis; I admired his ideals, his drive, the all-­around tidiness of his affairs, but there was noth­ing the two of us had in common at all. Nothing at all.

My mind was filled with Boyd, my whole being was filled with Boyd. He pulled on me like the tides. I thought I needed to escape him, to get farther away, and farther still, out of his range of influence.

But that was silly. The influence was in me, not in him, not in the air. Nevertheless, the pull was real, and I felt it all night long.

Dawn soothed the desert and I had just enough energy left to admire it before I nodded off. I slept through the day and awakened at twilight, refreshed, alive and tired of the bus. I disembarked at the next rest stop and took a look at Red Creek, New Mexico. Impulsively, I told the driver he would be going on without me. I washed up in the cafeteria facilities and had a bite to eat before hitching up my pack and heading back out to the road.

The blacktop stretched forever in both direc­tions. I had no need to imagine which way we had come. To the northwest lay Westwater. Its force still pulled on me. I began walking east, the sound of my boots a comforting, familiar sound on the shoulder of the road. I had not known I had mourned that sound until now; there was no other sound like it.

I took long, rapid strides in the early evening air, getting my energy up, pumping hot blood through my muscles. I breathed deeply and swung my arms. It felt good. The flush of freedom was beginning to come back again; maybe I had snapped the string that held me to Westwater, had finally outrun the magnetic influence.

The moon rose over the low hills; there was barely any traffic. The desert gleamed in the moon­shine. I walked down the middle of the deserted road, tapping out a pattern with my boot heels, feeling the light of the moon bathing me in its cool warmth as it gleamed off the wide stripe of road ahead. I imagined I was walking down a canal, clicking my heels along on top of the water.

My thoughts returned to Boyd. What made him so different from Lewis? I wasn’t thinking about individual differences, like hair color and tastes in furniture. I meant fundamental differences—the way I was different from my classmates, the way I was different from everybody else. Boyd had that differ­ence as well. He and I were different from each other, yet there was some common . . . there was something similar . . .

We were in the vast minority, Boyd and I. Most people were basically the same, showing healthy ex­pressions of their individual differences. They mar­ried, had best friends, served on committees, and played bridge. All those activities seemed so foreign, their motivations so alien, to me.

My freedom fled. Frustration loomed before me, showing me an eternal search, a quest as hopeless as that for the Holy Grail. I would search for inner peace, for a common bond, normalcy, and never find any of it. It seemed my destiny was to be a futile search for answers to questions that were barely asked.

My frustration seemed as endless as the road that stretched before me, silvery and shining in the moonlight. As endless as the path of my life, as endless as the fence that stretched alongside the road, as endless as the herd of sheep that bedded on the other side of the fence.

As soon as I conceived the idea, blood raced to each capillary in my body. My whole being flushed. It had been weeks. Weeks. Suddenly, right here, was an antidote to my frustration. I could feel the relief already, creeping in around the edges. How could I have ever forgotten? The music was my companion­ship, my eternal friend. I needed only to evoke it.

I jumped the fence and caught up a lamb from next to its mother. I ripped at it furiously and drank, knowing at the time that it tasted wrong, it tasted . . . bad, but I was helpless to stop myself.

When I was finished, I was disgusted with my behavior. There was no relief in the act at all. I found the sheep’s trough and washed myself, noticing the thick medicinal smell in the water and then the official quarantine sign posted nearby. I noticed how oddly calm the entire flock seemed to be. They had hardly reacted, even as the little one bleated in the face of its death. I had thought it peculiar how little noise and struggle the lamb had put up—and there was none at all from its mother. I found myself faintly amused but too wrapped up in my own loneliness to pay much attention. I washed and anticipated the sleepiness—and the music, the heavenly music—that always accompanied a kill. It didn’t come.

A mile farther down the road, the sickness struck. I vomited until there was nothing left, and still I heaved. By sunrise, my eyes had swollen shut and my fingers were as thick as stuffed sausages. I could barely lift my head. I lay in a shady dry drainage ditch all day, feeling my skin stretch tighter and tighter until I thought it would pop, thirst overwhelming me, wait­ing to die.

As evening cooled the air, I felt slightly better, and by moonrise I could stand. I propped myself against a signpost, and when a car finally came along, I staggered to the side of the road. It was a young woman with a child. She stopped for me. When she saw my face in the interior light of her car, she gasped, then took me home with her, fed me, bathed me, and put me to bed.

Her name was Sarah.

I stayed with her for three days while the allergic reaction to the medicated lamb passed. The opening of her home to me was an act of charity and selfless­ness that was to follow me for a long, long time.

Sarah Monroe. She was a swarthy-­skinned, tight­ly muscled dance instructor. Sarah lived with Samuel, her three-­year-­old son, in a tiny one-­bedroom house. The boy’s large brown eyes were curious and ques­tioning, calm and patient; I had never before met such a child.

The first night, I slept. I woke frequently, but the illness was still with me, and I soon slipped back into the healing sleep my body demanded.

I slept until nightfall, when Sarah came home from work. She encouraged me to sit up and talk.

This was my first real view of Sarah, Samuel, and their environment. Her house was furnished with Indian-­print cloths as wall hangings, window covers, bedspreads—one even billowed down from the ceil­ing. The brightly patterned cloths comprised her wardrobe as well. She wrapped them around her body and her short dark hair in comfortable fashion. The effect was slightly claustrophobic, but colorful and lively. Pillows of all sizes and descriptions were scat­tered about the carpeted floor and piled into mounds in the corner. Shelves of raw wood were separated by bricks; these shelves were filled with books on dance, movement, therapy, and mysticism. In one corner of the small living room was a mattress, neatly covered with a flowered fabric.

Sarah looked like an exotic mix of nationalities. I watched her move about her tiny kitchen as she brewed tea for us. She propped me up against the wall, helped me get comfortable; Samuel sat on the mattress and quietly watched us. His eyes were the same dark color as hers.

Sarah unwound her sarong to reveal a yellow leotard and tights. She sat on the carpeting in the middle of the room and began stretching exercises. I’d never seen anything so beautiful or fascinating in my life.

As she worked, she talked. She was thirty-­four, taught dance in the high school, movement in the preschool, and spent two afternoons a week with the elderly in town, giving them gentle exercises to keep the ravages of age to a minimum. On Saturdays she helped in the physical-­therapy clinic.

The local high school had put on a dance exhibi­tion four years earlier and Sarah’s classes had danced, and so had Sarah. She danced with an invited guest: a handsome boy from San Francisco, who had come to dance and left behind a child growing in her womb.

“It was quite a scandal,” Sarah laughed as she lowered her throat to one knee, fingers gracefully holding one foot.

She spoke of raising a son, of teaching high­ school girls; with sidelong glances at my reactions, spoke of her love of life and the freedom of commit­ment to one’s own beliefs.

I could follow her for only moments at a time, and then my mind would sprint away, chasing a thought or an idea, and upon returning, the topic would be different and I would have to pretend I was following, until I caught up and she said something else that sent me running after a new concept.

It was exhausting work. I slumped in the corner, sick, still feverish, weak and unhappy, while in front of me a healthy, happy, well-­adjusted woman exer­cised with a flushed face and a feminine sheen of perspiration covering her face and chest. She stopped and looked at me.

“Drink your tea,” she said. “It will help you heal.”

With a clap of thunder in my bowels, I realized I was not only different—I was inferior. I drank my tea and weakly made my way back to bed—Sarah’s bed, which she had generously given up for my use. She bedded down in the front room, on the mattress, with her son.

On the third day, we followed the same routine—I slept through the day and arose at dusk, when she came home from work. I reclined against pillows, and Samuel sat on his mattress and we both watched his mother end her professional day stretching. Only this time, because I was obviously better, Sarah began asking me of my life.

I told her lies.

She knew I lied, I could tell it by her movements, and it became a sort of a game to me, to tell her something terribly untrue and go on to the next question, my imagination taking me into strange realms. I didn’t even care if my stories conflicted with one another.

Sarah stopped asking questions. Samuel turned from me and put his thumb in his mouth. It was this action that made me stop. I stood and stretched, then showered while Sarah finished her exercises. She showered then, while I tried to play with Samuel, but he only looked at me with those liquid brown eyes and made it obvious he would rather amuse himself. So I packed, feeling vague resentment and remorse. She had been so kind to me and I had only lied to her. When Sarah had finished in the bathroom, I was ready to move on.

She saw me to the door, her eyes understanding and forgiving, and said, “When you learn to be true to yourself, Angelina, let me know.” I turned and walked away.

“It was at least six months, maybe closer to a year, before I got all the information about those three deaths in Westwater. When I found out the truth—like that the teeth marks were human—there was no doubt in my mind about Angelina being the one. The police were so freaked out that they concocted the wild-­dog theory on the night that Danny’s body was found. They thought it better that the community believe there was a pack of murderous dogs roaming the streets than a homicidal maniac. When in truth, they’d found a towel tucked neatly around his wounds. Jesus.

“I couldn’t believe it, though. I mean, I knew it was true—if it was anybody, it was Angelina . . . but how could any person do something like that? God.

“Anyway, she was long gone by the time I put it all together. I was the only one who could know. No one else knew her attitudes, her . . . personality twist, I guess I’d have to call it. She was just a little bit different. No one else knew about the towel. I saw it right out of her closet, and then saw it again, covered with Mr. Simpson’s blood.

“I began to think about her. I wrote down every­thing I could remember about her, everything she said, and I began to subscribe to different newspapers, looking for something suspicious, some murder with her M.O., any lead to follow up on, any clue to her whereabouts. I stashed money and kept a suitcase packed and ready, just waiting for a lead. I slacked off at work, even took a demotion from construction foreman to flunkie so I could cut out at the whistle and go hang out at the police station. The cops kind of enjoyed the fact that I was so fascinated with the case.

“I knew that Angelina and I’d meet up again someday. And every morning when I woke up, I wondered if this would be the day, and I’d look at that suitcase waiting there by my bedroom door, and I prayed for it.

“But it didn’t happen. For almost a year, I waited.

“The more I thought about her, though, the more I began to dream about her, the more my imagination got carried away. There were times when I could have sworn I was with her . . .”