As the Fury covers the eternal matrix of streets, blackened figures track alongside, separating like fish from the school into shadows and narrow spaces, always heading elsewhere, forever moving forward.
At St John and DeSiard Mac pumps the brakes. A shadow stops, looks back, then walks very quickly down the alley. Mac feels a spark of recognition, heart leaping. He guns the Fury up and around on Grand, crossing back at the parish courthouse. He stops in the middle of the street.
Glasseye emerges from the mouth of the alley, eyes fixed straight ahead, and slams into the rear door. He recovers, considers the roadblock as if it were inadmissable evidence, and skirts quickly across the street to the park in front of the Catholic hospital. "Hey," Mac calls repeatedly.
The Fury takes off again. On the other side of the park Mac glides into place, cocking the passenger door open between a light post and fire hydrant where Glasseye's path comes to an end.
He's fixed between the post, hydrant, and door handle, reverse like some physical impossibility.
"Hey, little Buddy. I ain't worried about you cutting me. I swear."
Gaze fixed on the roof of the car, hands in pockets, emitting a hum approximating music between the normal frequencies. The massive Catholic hospital looms past the east end of the park.
"Get on in. I'll give you a ride. And, I promise, I won't say nothing to Ret because I know that was some kind of mixup about your grandmother's shoulder getting busted. Had to have been."
Glasseye shifts his vision as far as he can in all directions without moving his face at all.
Mac lets the engine idle with the patience of a dynastic palace guard.
"Shoot. I aint doing nothing. Looks like the same deal for you tonight. Might as well check some things out together."
Somewhere off a siren increases, and with an airy moan Glasseye morphs inside the car without seeming to bend at the waist, perching inflexibly on the bench seat. "All right," Mac chimes victoriously. He jogs around to close the door, and back. "Now, let's just take it easy and cruise around."
Mac wheels behind the hospital, past the blown-clouds of steam and the mysterious furnace device, cuts across at the police station and through the civic center parking lot and on to the abandoned railroad station. Here begins territories of roam and building debris and inexplicable grass fields and the friend of a friend and the search for the pill that was effective and effective again and always effective.
After a long period with no attempt to communicate, Mac begins to tell a story that happened about a week ago.
"I was at the Fill-A-Bill across from the Honda-On-A-Stick, you know where I mean? the place where the Icee machine breaks down a lot. I was thinking about an Icee and whether it was going to be good or not, or if the thing was broke again, or mainly that if I spent my money on a Icee I definitely wouldn't get one the next day. I was just sitting in my Fury. In the parking lot. And this Firebird comes up next to me. There's this guy driving, and I'm just sitting there looking over and he looks over and cuts the engine and he looks right at me. He sees me. And I go like, Hey. And what happens next is what I'm telling you about.
"He looks right at me and sees me and I say Hey and he looks at me. Just looks. And he turns his head. And he gets out and goes in the store. He doesn't even say hey or anything. It's real apparent, too.
"And I never done anything to him. Not a thing. You know what I'm saying? You know how it feels when somebody don't even say hey back to you. I don't know, maybe it never happened to you, but it does to me. A lot, it seems like."
God, is what Mac thinks Glasseye says.
"Yeah. Just like that. I know. Gets you right there. It can happen and you go on and it happens again."
They glided down St John again under the overpass and came to a stop at Texas, where the street was foreshortened by a waist-high hedge and beyond that a closely cropped yard and gardens, a plot that filled an entire block. "That's the Castle," Mac said, indicating the ediface with red brick towers and turret bays. "I aint never been there. Have you? I didn't think so. People live in it. Just regular people. They rent, but I don't know how you get in." Glasseye visibly writhed, like something liquid inside a cured skin. "I would take you cruising through there, but I saw a cop parked last week at night, and didn't stop. I think they watch the place."
Mac turned north and drove until he came to Jackson, on to the curve and Winnsboro road. "You probly know this area pretty good. I come through a lot, nobody ever gives me trouble."
A high whine, the way a nervous puppy sounds on the first car ride.
"You got anyplace I can take you? I'd just drop you off, you know, you need me to."
Glasseye's head cocks over—at Sixth street? Is that where he wants to go?
"I can show you that Church where the Reverend Sarah preaches, you want me to turn here?" Mac wheels around, and before he can even slow down the door flies open and Glasseye is out of the seat. Mac watches him roll log-style off the tar and gravel street across a grassy shoulder and into a ditch. By the time Mac throws it into park and jumps out he can barely see Glasseye up and running through a sideyard and past a dark house.
Mac gets back in the car. The sign today at the Reverend's Church says "God Has A Big Eraser." Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
He shoots down the block and around, coming up the opposite way on South Seventh, but no Glasseye. He continues circling the area for half an hour or so.Mac swings by the charity hospital ER; "He fell outta my car." They can't tell him anything. It's a violation of patient rights to release information to anyone not specified. "That's OK, I don't even know his real name. Does that make it all right?" The guy, studying some pressed-open textbook, shakes his head, but indicates to Mac no story like that's come through lately.
The smell of the ER. It takes him back. To what, he can't say.
In the Fury a cassette tape sat on the floorboard of the passenger side. How? Did Glasseye drop it? Mac couldn't figure out how he was going to give it back to him.
Losing Glasseye, and driving around not finding him, grew into a sheet pulled over everything: absolute failure. He had to get out, away. Across the river.
He took Jackson and Eighth all the way down to Louisville, where he turned west and shot the red light, speeding across the drawbridge, over the metal mesh.
He had never used the tape player in the car, had never owned a tape; the radio always worked fine. He descended into the ominous sleep of the west city, sliding Glasseye's music in. There sounded an organ like a church organ, but edgy, extreme; then a voice:
Dearly Beloved
We are gathered here todayAnd a pandemonium of bass drums and fuzz-bent guitars. Let's go crazy.
The tires on the drawbridge grating droned with the immensity of some natural disaster gaining ground from behind.
