The Juliet (3 page)

Nevertheless, she doubled down. “I’ve always lived here.” She stood and shook her skirt free of dust.

Rhys was disappointed with the situation.

“Lily Joy was special,” said Miranda. “That man in The Mystery House, I know why he’s here. There’s always a caretaker for Lily’s grave. It’s always a man, someone she calls to her side.” Very slowly she began to gather her hair into a single handful, smoothing it into a coil that she tucked into itself to form a loose bun.

She said, “You know, I’m thinking you were called. That you’re supposed to take over for that old man.” The drawstring on her blouse dangled like a dare. “He’ll be dead by morning is my bet.”

Whack-a-doodle
, Rhys’s mother would say, but this was no time for psychology. He had to get out of there—with Miranda, of course, despite her delusions.

“Okay, I’ll look into that. But in the meantime gather your things, love.” Rhys was stuffing his backpack with the clothes he’d laid out, taking time to fold each garment. He had his habits, and they weren’t worth breaking. “We need to make it down to 980, see if we can’t catch a ride.” Route 980 was a strip of fast, mostly empty road that led to civilization in both directions.

She approached him from behind and wrapped her arms around his waist, laying her cheek on his shoulder blade. “Come on, my turn. Stay with me.”

Rhys stepped out of her embrace to swing his pack onto his shoulders. He kissed the palms of her hands, one and then the other. “We have to get going.”

Miranda tried a different move. She slung her arms around his neck. Her breath smelled like moss. “The next scream you hear,” she said, “will be your own.”

“Cute.” Rhys reached back and took her by the wrists, untangling them. “I have a room in town.” He tried to make it sound like an invitation even though it wasn’t. He figured it was near four in the morning, and with luck he’d be back in his lumpy motel bed, alone, before breakfast.

He started to climb the hill to Centenary’s main street. From there it was downhill to 980.

“Stop,” Miranda said.

Rhys kept going. He even made a gesture for her to hurry up and join him.

“You can’t leave me here.”

Rhys turned. Miranda was posing, her arms out and head raised to a moon that wasn’t there.

“I’m not leaving you. You’re
staying
. There’s a difference.”

“I have to stay,” she said.

“Let me guess. You’re Lily Joy. Bound for eternity to roam the ruins of Centenary.” He regretted saying it out loud. No good could come from humiliating someone who should be in a mental hospital. “Come on now,” he said. “I’ll take care of you tonight, but you have to come with me.”

The static night crackled all around them. Miranda remained where she stood. She shook her hair loose and it fell to her shoulders. Then she lifted her blouse over her head and dropped it to the ground. Nothing underneath. Her breasts were large and glowed blue in the predawn, and there was a slight breeze that made a parachute of her discarded blouse, blowing it onto a creosote bush where it stuck. Miranda hooked her thumbs into the waist of her skirt, and soon she was completely naked, standing in the middle of a mining road that no longer had its own name.

“You’re dazzling, Lily, but we must go. Now.” When he took a step towards her he thought he heard the crunch of gravel from behind. Had Tony come back for them? Rhys turned but there was no one there.

And now Miranda was gone, too.

Her blouse moved a little on the bush, but she had vanished.

That was enough. No hide and seek for Rhys. Best thing to do was treat the girl like a bad dog—she’d either follow or not.

He marched up the hill, scuffing to scare off any beasties before he surprised them. He grew angrier and angrier with Tony, Larissa, and Ginger, as he imagined them laughing together about the naïve foreign boy they’d abandoned with a crazy girl. And that was even worse, leaving the poor thing on her own. Rhys had a feeling Miranda was just a kid, despite her womanly build. Only a kid could be so committed to the unreal.

A surprise greeted him as he reached the summit: the shape of a station wagon parked near a pile of stones that had once been the site of the Miners Union Hall. Rhys fished out his flashlight. Yes, he was right. He was looking at a real, functioning car.

With foggy windows.

He flicked the light off. Someone was inside the wagon, maybe sleeping.

“Hello?”

Nothing. Rhys wasn’t sure he wanted to meet the person who camped out in a station wagon in a ghost town. By the time he halved the distance between himself and the wagon, the vehicle rocked once. The unmistakable motion caused by someone climbing from the back seat to the front.

Now Rhys felt a prickle of fear. Not once during the evening had he been troubled by Centenary’s spooky mysteries, but now that he’d seen what he was hoping for—signs of life—he grew nervous.

A tiny red dot inside the wagon. Someone smoking. Then it went out.

Someone hiding.

Rhys thought he might be done with America, after all.

The car’s headlights blazed suddenly, Stephen King–style. Rhys cursed and began to run, cutting crossways between the roads, but the basin was steep, littered with boulders and a hundred years’ worth of rusted wire and cans. Forced to give up the direct route, he climbed onto Centenary’s high road, and as soon as he did, the wagon’s engine roared.

“Fucking ridiculous,” he breathed. At least he was running downhill, now.

Rhys expected the car to gun it—that’s how it worked in the movies. Instead, the wagon slowly ground its way
up
into Centenary and away from him. Thank the gods.

He stopped at a tourist information kiosk to catch his breath. He needed to exercise more.

The station wagon reached the end of the road where a cul-de-sac parking lot was ringed by another kiosk, the train depot, and a lone caboose. The vehicle idled there, headlights illuminating a graffiti-covered pit toilet no one in their right mind would ever use.

A passenger darted out to use the facilities and was gone for only a minute before returning. Then the wagon completed its circuit of the cul-de-sac and started down the road again.

Miranda had gotten under Rhys’ skin and made him jumpy. He was not being pursued by American maniacs, but he was parched and feeling foolish. Imagine going to the desert with whiskey but no water.

No more running. He might even stick his thumb out for a ride. As the wagon advanced, its chassis shuddered over the washboard ruts. Then the car stopped unexpectedly.

Someone stood in the road in front of the headlights. Miranda. Still nude. She looked like a Playboy magazine silhouette.

Well, shit
. Rhys called out to her: “Miranda, come here!”

She ignored him.

“Miranda!” Then, “Lily Joy!”

This was insane. Rhys began to run again. Uphill this time and damn, it hurt. The only thing for which he was grateful was that it was too dark to perceive the desert’s greatest deception: the illusion that everything was at least three times closer than it really was. That was one good thing about coming from a
real
mining town. At least in Pontypridd the air was shit enough you knew where you were in the world.

* *
*

This is what Tony saw from the driver’s seat of the AMC Eagle wagon he’d borrowed fr
om his uncle: that crazy chick, Miranda, stark naked in the middle of the road, and the Welshman running after her, looking like a bloodthirsty fiend. Had he raped her? Was he going to kill her now?

Larissa was asleep in the back of the car. Ginger sat up front with Tony, foggy from the drugs but leveling out quick. “So what are we looking at, Tony?” She was an undergraduate at the University of Southwestern Louisiana studying biology. She tested monkeys, she said. Nothing scared her.

Tony was scared, though he felt safe in the car. “Well, I think that’s our Miranda. And behind her would be your erstwhile lover, the Welshman.”

Ginger leaned forward and squinted. “He fixin’ to kill her?”

“I don’t know.”
      

“Huh.”

Rhys caught up to Miranda. By the end there, the final push to the top had him flailing like Jerry Lewis, but to be fair, no one looked good in headlights. He wrapped his arms around the naked girl in a tackle move. They dove to the side and fell into the rocky ditch together.

“Ew,” said Ginger.

“Ouch,” said Tony.

“You know what?”

“What.”

“They might be drunk, still. They’re acting like stone fools.”

“The Curse of Lily Joy takes two more victims?”

“I think so.”

Tony and Ginger got out of the car, and Larissa awoke from the commotion. Tony shined a flashlight down into the rut where Rhys and Miranda had tumbled. Rhys bore the brunt like a gent, falling first and cushioning Miranda with his bony frame, but she suffered her share of scrapes. She sat up and put her fingers in her mouth. Blood was pouring out, and when she realized she’d lost a tooth she began to bawl. Beneath her, Rhys looked like a broken pretzel, with each of his limbs forming different angles. Under the beam of Tony’s flashlight, Rhys blinked. He opened and closed his wrecked palms. At first Tony thought Rhys was paralyzed, but then he noticed that the Welshman was solemnly contemplating the large, sharp boulder next to his head.

“Whoa, Scottie. You just missed that rock with your skull.”

“Oh, I didn’t miss it,” Rhys said. “Bounced right off it in fact.”

Ginger brought Miranda to her feet, and Larissa came out of the car with a bent roll of toilet paper in hand. “Be prepared,” she said, and they began to pick the stones out of the girl’s scrapes. Miranda tried to fend off the women’s attentions. She had to find her tooth.

Tony helped Rhys up before thinking to ask if he might have broken any bones. “What the hell were you doing?”

“I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t know? Man, she’s only sixteen.”

“No, I mean I didn’t know it was you.”

Tony shined the light directly into Rhys’s eyes.

“Jesus Christ, cut it out!”

Tony grinned. “It’s how you check for brain damage.”

Miranda could not be calmed. Apparently she had just had her braces removed. “My dad is going to kill me.”

Ginger finally got the girl to hold still. “Really, over a tooth? You don’t think he’d have much of a problem with you boozing and running around naked with strangers?”

“In a ghost town,” added Larissa.

“I need to find my tooth.” By now the girl was fading, exhausted by the trauma. No one asked her where her clothes were.

Tony worked on Rhys. “You’re a wild man. What were you going to do to her?”

“I was saving her. From
you.
”

“Seriously? Oh man, that’s hilarious. All this Lily Joy shit got to you after all.”

Miranda said, “All the candles went out.”

Tony said, “Mandy, shut up. I’m going to have a hell of a time explaining this to your old man.” He peeled some tissue off the roll and stuck squares wherever it looked like Rhys was bleeding. “Her dad and I play cards once in a while. He’s likely to go ape shit about the tooth, seeing as it’s the one part of this whole mess he’d understand.”

“Why’d you leave her here?” Rhys looked like a scarecrow with patches everywhere.

Tony didn’t seem to think it was a big deal. “Walter and Neil wanted a ride back to their car. We were gone ten minutes tops, and it’s not like we left her alone. How was I supposed to know you’re the kind of guy who’d abandon a naked teenager in the desert? Hey man, you’re shaking.”

They always said desert nights were cold, but Rhys hadn’t felt it until that moment.

“All right,” Tony said. “Everyone in the car. Let’s get these lambs back to the barn.”

Larissa found a child-sized crocheted poncho in the back of the wagon, and she slipped it over Miranda’s head. It was pieced together out of pink blocks framing white daisies, and the front tip only barely reached the top of her pubic hair. The girl tugged it down but had to hold it in place. She sucked on a wad of toilet paper to slow the bleeding from her lost tooth, and she refused to make eye contact with anyone.

No one felt like making jokes any more. They all piled into the station wagon in relative silence, and Rhys was given the front seat.

In the back, Ginger and Larissa made maternal noises around Miranda, arranging her between them for maximum comfort. Tony watched the women in the rearview, waiting for them to settle before he turned the key. Rhys stared out at the remaining bit of road leaving Centenary. It was warmer in the car, and his tremors subsided, but Tony still asked him, “You okay there, buddy?”

Rhys was silent as he lifted one crooked finger from where his hands rested on his lap, low and out of sight from Larissa, Ginger, and Miranda.

Then Tony saw it: a vertical silhouette down the road by the kiosk. A man. He wasn’t moving.