Frankenstein

cabernet sauvignon; because whatever Victor the clone might be up to, he wasn’t likely to detonate a nuclear device at the intersection of Cody Street and Beartooth Avenue later this evening or commit an equivalent atrocity requiring them to be abstinent and ready. Assuming the clone was as drunk with pride and as given to vainglory as his cloner had been, his experiments would be fraught with setbacks, resulting in the perpetual revision of his schedule for world domination.
    “I kind of like Rainbow Falls,” Michael said.
    “It’s quaint,” she agreed.
    Indicating two different couples, he said, “We could have worn our storm suits.”
    Referring to a few other customers, she said, “Or cowboy hats.”
    “They don’t seem to go in for the goth look around here.”
    “Or motorcycle-gang chic.”
    “There’s definitely less nostril jewelry.”
    “I don’t have a problem with that,” she said.
    “If we lived here, Scout could grow up to be a rodeo cowgirl.”
    “Fine with me, as long as there’s a way she can transition from that to the presidency.”
    “Her campaign slogan could be, ‘No bull ever threw me, and I won’t throw any bull.’”
    “Now if the country can just survive until she’s old enough to run for office.”
    They ordered the same thing: homemade meat loaf with green chiles and cheese sauce, which came with a glistening mound of paper-thin home fries, baked corn, pepper slaw, cornbread, and enough whipped butter to grease an eighteen-wheeler.
    Everything was so delicious that neither of them spoke for a minute or two, until Michael said, “Do you remember—on the menu, do they give the name and number of a cardiologist?”
    “They don’t have cardiologists in towns as small as this. You just call up Roto-Rooter.”
    After the dishes had been taken away and as Carson and Michael were lingering over the last of the wine, a young woman entered the café and crossed the room to a table near the wall, without waiting for the hostess to seat her. She might have been such a regular that she had privileges, but there was something odd about her behavior that suggested otherwise.
    “Pretty girl,” Michael said.
    “Anything else, Casanova?”
    “She’s stiff.”
    “By which you don’t mean drunk.”
    “By which I mean wooden—the way she moves.”
    The woman sat with her arms slack, hands in her lap. Motionless, she stared not at anything or anyone in the room but as if at some distant curiosity.
    “Michael, there’s something wrong with her.”
    “Maybe she’s just had a rotten day.”
    “Look how pale she is.”
    “What’s that face jewelry?” he asked.
    “Where? On her temple?”
    A waitress approached the woman’s table.
    “I’ve never seen jewelry like that before.”
    “How’s it held on?” Carson wondered.
    “Are people now
gluing
things to their faces?”
    “Life’s getting too weird for me,” she said, and her words were like an incantation that summoned more weirdness into the world.

    
chapter
58

    The ceiling had knotty-pine beams with plaster between, and the different-shades-of-gray cocoons hung from the beams on thick, lumpy gray ropes. At first they seemed wet, greasy wet like spoiled cabbage leaves or lettuce, but then Nummy saw they weren’t really wet. They only looked wet because they were twinkling, not twinkling bright like Christmas-tree lights, but twinkling dimly, darkly, like … like nothing else he’d ever seen.
    Nummy stayed just inside the doorway, but Mr. Lyss took a step toward the dark-twinkling sacks. He said, “We have something very special here, boy, something big.”
    “You can have them,” Nummy said. “I don’t want none.”
    The cocoons were apart from one another, so when Mr. Lyss walked all the way around the first one, he had his back to the other two, which made Nummy nervous.
    “They look wet, but they’re not,” Mr. Lyss said. “It’s something else happening on the surface.”
    “I like movies where people they laugh a lot and nice things happen,” Nummy said.
    “Don’t babble nonsense at me, Peaches. I’m trying to think this through.”
    Jamming his hands in the pockets of his new blue coat and making fists of them to stop them from shaking, Nummy said, “I mean, I don’t like them movies where people they get eaten by anything. I shut them off or change the channel.”
    “This is reality, boy. We only have one channel, and the only way we change it is die.”
    “That don’t