The Hunt — Saturday, 28 July 1990, 8:19 PM

East Side Bar / The Torch / Miller Beach / Kendrick’s Auto Gary, Indiana

The water main had Broadway looking like a wound. Orange cones in standing water, utility trucks parked at angles that blocked two lanes, and the sodium lights out from Fifth to Ninth so the strip looked the way Gary would look if everyone finally gave up and left. Sable took Ridge Road east instead, and the city changed under the tires the way it always changed when you drove toward the lake – the buildings got smaller, the lots got wider, and the air coming through the cracked window carried something green and sandy that didn’t belong to the Gary she knew.

Reva’s bar didn’t have a name. It had a Hamm’s sign in the window and a painted number on the cinder block and a screen door that stuck halfway, and inside it smelled like fryer grease and Kool smoke and the pine cleaner somebody had used on the floor while the sun was still up. Three people. A box fan in the window moving the heat around. The bartender – Reva Watts, mid-forties, heavyset, coral nails, a gold chain that said her name in cursive – looked up when Sable walked in and did the quick inventory that women do when another woman enters a room and the math doesn’t add up.

The man at the bar wore a blue work polo with DALE embroidered over the pocket. Mid-thirties, built the way men were built in Gary, forearms and no definition, the kind of body that came from lifting things heavier than himself for money that was never enough. Wedding ring. An upside-down shot glass next to his Budweiser, which meant he’d been here long enough to have a history with the evening. He hadn’t looked up yet.

She took the table by the window. Ordered a beer she wouldn’t drink. Crossed her legs and didn’t look at him, which was the looking – the negative space of attention that her face turned into gravity. The fan clicked on every rotation. The game show audience laughed. Dale looked up when Reva walked past him, and then his eyes found Sable because she was the only new thing in the room, and he looked away, and he drank, and he looked again.

He came to the table with both bottles – the fresh one and the dead one, because he bused his own empties, because that was who Dale was, a man who cleaned up after himself even when he was three beers into a Saturday night and his wife was wherever his wife was.

“You waiting on somebody?”

She gave him three minutes. She smiled once – the real one, the one that said I see you and not the professional one that said I see what you’re worth. Then she stood up and walked to the door without looking back, and the screen door banged behind her, and she counted in the parking lot with the lake breeze on her neck.

He came out on seven.

The corner of the building made a shadow the sodium light couldn’t reach. She let the warmth go – not a push, not a performance, just the thing behind her face released like a breath held too long – and Dale stopped being a man with a decision to make and became a man standing in a current. He said his name. She took his hand. His skin was rough and warm and his pulse was right there in the wrist, hammering.

She put her mouth on his neck in the shadow by the dumpster and he made the sound they always made, the sound that wasn’t pain, and his weight leaned into her and she held all hundred and ninety pounds of him because she could, because that was what she was, and his blood tasted like Budweiser and cortisol and something sadder underneath – the long flavor of a man whose life had gotten smaller than he’d planned.

Five. She counted them. She always counted them.

She pulled off and held him up by the shoulders while his knees remembered how to work. Licked the punctures. Buttoned the top button of his polo, the one with DALE on the pocket. Walked him to his pickup truck – Ford Ranger, cracked toolbox, St. Christopher medal on the mirror – and sat him behind the wheel and tilted the seat back.

“You fell asleep,” she said. “You had too many.”

He nodded. His eyes were already closing. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and walked around the corner to the Buick and sat in the driver’s seat with the engine running and the taste of him in her teeth. Budweiser. Drywall dust. The sadness of a man who married too young and works too hard and sits at a bar on Saturday because the alternative is going home to the argument. She didn’t learn his last name. She didn’t ask what the fight was about. She fed on him like filling a tank and left him with a fake memory and a buttoned collar, and the buttoned collar was the part that would sit in her chest, because it was kind, and kindness after feeding was the lie she told herself to keep the numbers working.

Kendrick’s smelled like motor oil and cold Popeyes and the cinderblock dark that every Gary building shared like a family resemblance. DeShawn was cleaning a .38 he didn’t need to clean. Pete was on the couch with a water-damaged Jet. Spoon was at Tanya’s.

“Olds only shows Monday,” DeShawn said. “Told him stay close, stay sober, be back Sunday night.”

She sent them out. Pete to The Torch – he’d been inside before, he was young enough to pass for a customer. DeShawn to drive by the mansion in Coop’s Caprice. She waited at Kendrick’s with the oil smell and the cold chicken and the blood settling in her chest like a warm tide.

Pete called from a payphone at 10:15. She’s there. At the piano. Been back since Thursday. Playing like she used to. “She looked like she was waiting for somebody.”

DeShawn twelve minutes later. Mansion quiet. One car, Modius’s Lincoln. Lights downstairs.

The Torch on a Saturday was sixty bodies and Motown bass and cigarette smoke thick enough to taste. Victor behind the bar gave her the nod and nothing else. She took a stool at the dark end and ordered a whiskey she wouldn’t touch and watched Allicia play through the gaps between shoulders and raised glasses and the backs of men who didn’t know what was ten feet from them.

Allicia in white. Hair pinned up. Playing something slow and minor-key that lived underneath the jukebox like a second conversation nobody else could hear. Her fingers hesitated on a chord when Sable walked in, and that hesitation said everything about who she’d been waiting for.

Three songs. A man tried to buy Sable a drink and she smiled him away. The jukebox played Bobby Brown and the piano disappeared under it. Allicia closed the fallboard with both hands and walked toward the back hallway without looking at her.

Sable gave it thirty seconds and followed.

The service door was propped open with a crate. Allicia was outside leaning against the wall where the shadow cut the sodium light in half. Up close and alone she was thinner. Eight days at the mansion had taken something out of her – not blood, not weight, but the quality of presence that comes from choosing where you stand. She looked like a woman who’d been carefully maintained by someone who thought maintenance was love. Her skin was perfect. Her eyes were tired.

Sable touched the side of her face. Thumb along the cheekbone. Allicia closed her eyes and leaned into it – two ounces of pressure that said more than three spoken conversations – and when she opened them they were wet, and she pressed her lips to the heel of Sable’s palm in the gesture that meant thank you for coming.

Then two taps on her own sternum. A point at Sable. A touch to her lips and a shake of her head. I need to tell you something. I can’t say it here.

Five fingers. Two miles east. She slipped back inside and the white dress vanished into the hallway and Sable was alone with the dumpster.

Miller Beach didn’t look like Gary. Old trees, privacy fences, houses that belonged to people who remembered when the money was real. Allicia’s house was two stories behind a gate, and the front door was unlocked, and inside it smelled like dust and lemon polish and recording equipment. A grand piano in the living room better than the one at The Torch. Photographs on the walls of Gary in the 1940s – men at ribbon cuttings, women in furs, and Allicia in every frame, the same face, the same stillness, standing next to people who aged and died around her.

When Allicia arrived she locked the door – deadbolt and chain, two more locks than she’d used on the way out. She crossed the room and took both of Sable’s hands and held them hard, the way you hold onto something in rough water. Then she got a notepad and a pen with a light in the cap and wrote the words that changed the shape of the summer.

He knows about the blood. Mine in you. He can taste it when he feeds on me. He asked who. I didn’t answer. He will ask again.

They went back and forth on the notepad in the dark living room with the clock ticking and the lake breathing through the walls. Four options, all terrible. Kill the prince. Outlast a fifty-two-year bond through willpower she’d already proven she didn’t have. Find someone who’d trade one cage for another. Or find the woman in Milwaukee who’d offered to help nineteen years ago, when Allicia had been too afraid to let her try.

She offered because she believes the bond is an obscenity.

Sable named the truth neither of them wanted to hear: it was a long shot, it was months away at minimum, and they weren’t positioned for it. Allicia nodded the way someone nods who has waited fifty-two years and can wait longer because waiting is the only thing she’s ever been allowed to be good at.

I am not asking you to save me tonight. I am asking you to know what I need so that when the moment comes you do not hesitate.

She folded the pages into Sable’s hand and closed her fingers around them. Burn these. Then she touched Sable’s wrist one more time – two fingers on the pulse point where there was no pulse – and walked out the door without looking back.

Sable drove to Kendrick’s with the folded pages in her jacket pocket and the taste of Dale’s blood still in her teeth and the knowledge of what Allicia needed sitting in her chest where the blood sat, warm and heavy and not enough.

She burned the pages in an empty Quaker State can behind the garage. The pen-light paper curled and the words went – the bond, every night, a tourniquet – and the smoke smelled like nothing because there was nothing on those pages anyone would ever read again.

Inside, she ran the Monday brief. Spoon back Sunday. DeShawn overwatch. Coop on call. Sable on foot. Watching first.

“Monday. Eleven sharp. Nobody’s late.”

The ghouls nodded. The garage was quiet. Outside, the burned pages cooled in the can and the lake made its patient sound through the Gary night, and somewhere on the other side of the city Allicia was playing the piano for a room full of people who would never know what she’d written in the dark, or what it cost her to fold it up and hand it to someone and say burn these and mean remember.