Camper squeezed the rattling glass knob between his fingers, pushed, shielded by all he carried, leaned into the dust and mold. “No,” he whispered, staring a moment, “not this one, either.”
The lamp, beside a card table with a hole ripped in its center, worked, but the lock catch dangled from the door jamb.
“Keep the shades down,” he told her after each trip to the car, “there’s no sense letting everyone know we’re here.”
“Everyone! You got a nerve.” She sat on a campstool, stretched herself, blew down the front of her blouse. As soon as Camper had set up the cots and slipped the small revolver under one pillow, settled the boy in his mother’s bed and untangled the mosquito netting, he stooped and plied quickly, methodically, through his own valise. He removed the delicate rod, the clock-like reel, the green and yellow dun flies.
“The best fishing in the world is right here, Lou,” he mumbled and collected the bright and pointed gear.
She stood up, wet with silk. “You think I’ll swallow that? You got eyes, you’ve driven across it as well as me. After five hundred miles they wouldn’t dump garbage on and not a spot to get a drink in, you think I’m going to believe there’s water in this place? Let alone a fish!” She watched him pin the flies to his flowing collar, stick the collapsed rod in a pocket above his wide and boneless hip. She considered the smile on his face, the flipping hands.
Suddenly she rose still higher, spit, shouted after him down the rank and hollow hall: “You dirty little dog,” laughing, trembling at her own intuition, “you been here before!”
She was alone. She listened, pulled the sheet across the boy, went immediately to the window and raised the shade. And, breasts half thrust, half fallen against the screen, she found herself unable to move as she stared into a watchful, silent figure pressed close to the other side.
The creature continued to watch. It was made of leather. Straps, black buckles and breathing hose filled out a face as small as hers, stripped of hair and bound tightly in alligator skin. It was constructed as a baseball, bound about a small core of rubber. The driving goggles poked up from the shiny cork top and a pair of smoked glasses fastened in the leather gave it malevolent and overflowing eyes. There was a snapped flap on one side that hid an orifice drilled for earphones. Its snout was pressed against the screen, pushing a small bulge into the room.
The snout began to move. It poked without sight toward the flattened slippery flesh of Camper’s wife. And with that first sound of scraping she turned her back, swayed, stepped quickly from the room.