• • •
LUCAS’S CABIN WAS less than twenty miles from the Juggalo campground and Letty knew the route well. She’d started north an hour or so behind Skye and closed the gap on the way up, arriving forty-five minutes after Skye had.
When she pulled the Benz into the campground, she gave a guy standing next to a barrel five dollars to park, got a date-stamped ticket, put it on the dashboard, and said, “Thanks,” when the guy said, “Nice ride.”
When she’d parked and got out, a tough-looking, bare-faced guy in work clothes, who was probably a cop, walked by and muttered, “Not a place for college girls.”
Letty winced: the ticket seller and the cop, if he was a cop, had picked her out in seconds. She made a quick circuit of the field, looking for Skye, then drove back to Hayward, found a yoga place, bought a pair of black yoga tights and a bright red crop top and black jacket, went over to the Walmart for a pair of high-top hunting boots and cotton socks.
She changed out of her Neiman Marcus jeans, blouse, and wedge sandals in the car, into the new stuff, drove back to the campground, reparked, got out, and decided she more or less fit, except for her hairdo and bare face. When she walked onto the field, where the crowd was still a little sparse, a short, thin, balding man with a box said, “You need a face. I’ll paint your face for free if you show your tits.”
Letty grabbed the front of his shirt and said, “You’ll paint my face for free or I’ll beat the shit out of you.”
“Violence. That’s so hot,” the guy said. “Gives me a little woody.”
“‘Little’ being the key word,” Letty said. “Now, you gonna paint or get beat up?”
“Can we do both?” he asked.
• • •
DESPITE THE PAINT—a dog face with a droopy red tongue—Skye picked Letty out instantly.
Had nothing to do with the way Letty dressed, or the face paint: had something to do with the way she walked, like she owned the place. She said to Lucy, “Watch my bag again, okay? You see that girl over there? The one with the red nose in the black tights? I gotta stay away from her. She’s gonna come here and she’ll see my pack. Tell her that I went to Hayward with a friend.”
“Whatever,” Lucy said, in a voice that sounded like a gravel road. “Gimme a last good hit.”
“Finish it,” Skye said, passing the joint. “Tell her I won’t be back until after dark.”
• • •
LETTY SPOTTED THE TRAVELERS, but nobody shaped like Skye. She went that way, and asked for her, and Lucy said, “She’s gone off to that . . . that town, I can’t remember it. She went off with Carl, they’re not coming back until night.”
“Hayward? She went to Hayward?”
“Who?” Lucy was confused. “Man, that shit just crawled right over me.”
“Skye. Skye went to Hayward?”
“Who?”
Letty knew that Skye would be back, because she’d left her pack, and all her gear, with her friend. It was a matter of waiting, but the waiting nearly drove her to distraction: nothing to do. Even the Juggalos seemed uninteresting, after she’d seen a few dozen of them. A really bad rap band got going on the stage and a guy ran past wearing nothing but a jockstrap. She began to feel stupid in the face paint. The hours crawled by, until dinnertime; she got two hot dogs with lots of onions.
Then Weather called: “I don’t want to pry, but are you in Hayward?”
“Not exactly,” Letty said.
She heard her mother turn and tell Lucas, “She says, ‘Not exactly.’”
Lucas said, “Goddamnit, she is. That Juggalo thing is east of town, that’s why it’s ‘not exactly.’”
Weather asked, “At this Juggalo thing, right? Looking for Skye?”
“Maybe,” Letty said.
Weather said, “Your father is seriously annoyed.”
“I believe it,” Letty said. “Not for the first time, though. He’ll get over it.”
“Yeah, well . . . he just went steaming out of here. I think he’ll be telling you how annoyed he is, personally, in about two hours.”
“He doesn’t have to—”
“He thinks he does,” Weather said.
When Letty got off the phone, something in her spine relaxed. Lucas was on the way up: that was a good thing. A Juggalo went by, looking for volunteers: “We’re putting up the fire and we need somebody to help. Could you help?”
She was doing nothing else, so she went to help. The Juggalos were building a fire stack out of cardboard boxes stuffed with stove-length pine logs. From the fire site, Letty could keep an eye on the travelers, and Skye’s backpack.
• • •
LUCAS WAS BOTH furious and frightened. Letty thought she was tougher than she actually was, and she didn’t know enough about crazy. He changed clothes, got his gun, climbed into the Porsche and took off. He drove the route so many times during the year that he could almost do it with his eyes closed. He stopped once to pee and stuff the footwell cooler with Diet Cokes, and flew on into the evening.
• • •
SKYE GOT BACK to the campground just after dark, looked for Letty, didn’t see her in the milling mass of bodies. When she’d left that morning, there might have been dozens of people. Now there were hundreds, and at the far end of the field, a moderately good rap group was performing, the music pounding over the heads of the crowd. The organizers had strung long lines of Christmas lights down the length of the field, on both sides. A dozen campfires were going on the edges of the field, and the smell of roasting meat mixed with the odor of marijuana.
Lucy was lying on her sleeping bag, staring at the stars. Skye crouched next to her and asked, “That chick show up? Letty?”
“Who? Oh . . . yeah. Just for a minute.”
At that moment, Letty walked up: “Skye.”
And Skye looked up and said, “Ah, shit.”
Letty: “What are you doing? Are you looking for Pilate? And if you find him, then what?”
“I’ll figure that out when I find him,” Skye said. She didn’t look toward Pilate’s encampment. She squared off with Letty, and added, “Letty, I owe you, I appreciate the help, but you’re not my mom.”
“I know I’m not your mom, but if you try to go up against Pilate and those guys who had you . . . I mean, Skye, that’s crazy,” Letty said. “You can’t do that. You’ll get hurt. My dad’s coming up here. If you can spot Pilate, he’ll bring in the cops—”
“Yeah, yeah, and then what’ll happen? There’ll be some kind of bullshit legal stuff and Pilate will blame everybody else and he’ll walk. You watch, you’ll see. He’s the devil.”
“He’s just an asshole,” Letty began. “My dad’s handled a lot worse than him.”
“There is no worse than him,” Skye said. “That’s what nobody gets.”
She turned and looked out at the growing crowd and then asked, “You bring your car? Could you lock up my pack?”
“Yeah, sure. I’m just down the field.”
Skye picked up her pack, said, “Thanks,” to Lucy, and to Letty, “Let’s go. This stuff is too good to get ripped off.”
They dropped the pack at the car and Letty asked, “So you’ll wait for Dad?”
Skye shrugged. “Might as well. What are they doing over there? Building a teepee?”
“Fire stack. They’re going to torch it off at midnight,” Letty said.
“Jeez, you’ll be able to see that from outer space,” Skye said.
“Not done yet. Once they get it built up to the point, they start another ring of boxes and build that up. They got a lot of boxes left. I was over helping to build it.”
“Then let’s go help . . . at least until your dad gets here.”
• • •
THEY WORKED STACKING fire boxes for ten minutes, then Letty turned away, caught up in the construction, and when she turned back, Skye was gone. She looked around, like a mother for a lost child, then stepped outside the ring of workers, still didn’t see her. Stepped farther outside and looked down the field, and caught a flash of Skye’s face, forty yards away, looking back at her. Their eyes touched, then Skye juked and disappeared into the crowd.