Without a word Calliope blew out the candles and pulled Sam down on top of her on the bed. Outside, the sounds of Nina screaming down from the top of the stairs, Yiffer pounding on Lonnie's door, and J. Nigel crying for attention faded into white noise.

"You must find a place on the woman's body and live there." In the dark, the noise far away, Sam ran his hands over Calliope's body and the world of work and worry seemed to move away.

He found two depressions at the bottom of her back where sunlight collected, and he lived there, out of the wind and the noise. He grew old there, died, and ascended to the Great Spirit, found heaven in her cheek on his chest, the warm wind of her breath across his stomach carried sweet grass and sage, and…

In another lifetime he lived on the soft skin under her right breast, his lips riding light over the ridge and valley of every rib, shuffling through downy, dew-damp hairs like a child dancing through autumn leaves. On the mountain of her breast, he fasted at the medicine wheel of her aureole, received a vision that he and she were steam people, mingled wet with no skin separating them. And there he lived, happy. And for the first time in years he felt that he was home. She followed, traveled, lived with him and in him as he was in her. They lived lifetimes and slept and dreamed together.

It was swell.

CHAPTER 18

Shadowphobia

Saturday morning Josh Spagnola was sleeping in and dreaming of putting shampoo into bunnies' eyes when the Harley-Davidson crashed through his front door carrying a 270-pound, pissed-off, speed-crazed biker named Tinker. With the crash and thunder of the bike in his living room, Spagnola sat up in his nest of satin sheets thinking earthquake, listening for the sounds of his burglar alarms, which did not come. Spagnola's house was wired six ways to stop an elegant picklock or spry cutpurse from entering by stealth, sneak, or cat's-paw; he had, in fact, protected himself against someone exactly like himself. That anyone would break in on a battering ram of Milwaukee iron, in broad daylight, had never occurred to him.

Tinker, on the other hand, took the words breaking and entering quite literally, and found entering a rather empty experience without substantial breaking. He carried on his belt a policeman's riot baton, a blackjack, two hunting knives, and a set of brass knuckles. In a rare moment of sanity he had left his guns at home. His lawyer had advised against guns while on probation.

Tinker had received an early-morning call from Lonnie Ray, one of his brothers in the Guild.

"You want him dead?" Tinker had asked Lonnie.

"No, just fuck him up. And don't wear your colors. I don't want any connection to me."

"Is he big?" Tinker had a deep-seated fear of someday meeting someone as large and violent as himself.

"I don't know. Just wait until I call. You'll see the black Mercedes."

"You got it, bro," Tinker said, and hung up.

Tinker tried to wait for Lonnie's call, but he'd been up all night cooking up a batch of methedrine in the Guild's lab, and had lost his patience after sampling the product in order to take the edge off the case of beer he'd drunk. At daybreak his bloodlust got the better of him and he left.

In the bedroom, hearing a Harley do burnouts on his Berber carpet, Spagnola finally realized that something was seriously wrong. He leapt from bed and began searching through a trail of clothes he had left last night on the way to bed with the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday masseuse from the Cliffs. He remembered kicking his gun belt away from the bedroom door when he sent her home at midnight and scrambled to the door. He was bending to unholster the gun when Tinker kicked the door open, catching Spagnola square in the forehead, knocking him cold.

Tinker looked down at the naked, unconscious little man and let out a sigh. The absence of terror was wildly unsatisfying for him. As a gesture of brotherhood to Lonnie he pulled the baton from his belt and with two vicious blows broke both of Spagnola's legs, then he sulked out of the bedroom, mounted his bike, and rode to the Guild's clubhouse to watch Saturday-morning cartoons.

Sam awoke to Yiffer yelling, "Get down! Don't let them see you!"

Sam looked around the room. Calliope and Grubb were gone. He got up and reached for his watch on the dresser while shouts and whispers continued from the living room. Six in the morning. It must have gone on all night: the shouting, the pounding, the babies crying. He was lucky to have slept at all. He dressed and walked into the living room.

"Get down," Yiffer said. "Don't let them see you." Sam dropped to a crouch in the doorway. Nina and Calliope were huddled under the front windows holding the babies. Yiffer was crouched by the door that led to the balcony. He rose up to peek out the window, then instantly dropped to cover.

"What is it?" Sam said. "Is someone shooting?"

Nina said, "No, it's the garage sale people. Stay down."

"Good morning," Calliope said. "Did you sleep well?"

"Fine. Who are the garage sale people?"

"They're fucking predators," Yiffer said. "They keep circling like sharks. Look." Yiffer gestured to the window.

Sam duck-walked to the window and peeked over the edge. Dodge Darts and Ford Escorts were cruising slowly by, stopping in front of the house, then moving slowly on.

Nina said, "Yiffer put the ad in the paper for our yard sale with the wrong date. They're all looking for us."

"Five of them have been to the door already," Yiffer said. "Whatever you do, don't answer it. They'll tear us apart."

"Probably ten of them went to Lonnie's door and left when he didn't answer," Calliope said.

"What happened with Lonnie?" Sam said.

Yiffer rose up and peeked out the window. "Christ! There's a whole van full of them outside." He dropped to a sitting position, his back to the door. To Sam he said, "Lonnie didn't answer when I went down there last night. As soon as he heard me come back upstairs he got on his bike and left."

Nina said, "How long are they going to circle? I have to go to work today."

"They're never going to leave," Yiffer wailed hopelessly. "They're going to just wait and pick us off one by one. We're doomed. We're doomed."

Nina slapped Yiffer across the face. "Get a grip."

Sam could think of only one thing, the cigarettes on the seat of his car. He had gone sixteen hours without a smoke and was feeling as if he would snap like Yiffer in a few minutes if he didn't get some nicotine into his system. "I'm going out there," he said. He felt like John Wayne — before the lung cancer.

"No, dude. Don't do it," Yiffer pleaded.

"I'm going." Sam stood up and Yiffer covered his head as if expecting an explosion. Sam picked up Grubb's plastic donut on wheels. "Can I borrow this?"

"Sure," Calliope said. "Are you coming back?"

Sam paused for a minute, then smiled and took her hand. "Definitely," he said. "I just need to take a shower and handle a few things. I'll call you, okay?" Calliope nodded.

"You'll never see him alive again," Yiffer whined.

Nina looked up apologetically. "He had a lot to drink last night. I'm sorry if our fighting disturbed you."

"No problem," Sam said. "Nice meeting you both." He turned and walked through the kitchen and out the door.

As he went down the steps, the van that Yiffer had spotted screeched to a halt in front of the duplex and a dozen gray-haired ladies piled out and rushed him. They met at the bottom of the steps.

"Where's the sale?" one said.

"This is the right address. We checked it twice."

"Where's the bargains? The ad said bargains."

Sam held the plastic donut up before them. "This is it, ladies. I'm sorry, but everything was gone but this when I got here. We were all too late. The quick and the dead, you know."