The Dancers of Noyo (16 page)

             
I remembered something
Pomo
Joe had said to me once: "Don't ever let yourself get too tired—dumb-tired—if you can help it. That's when people have accidents and make mistakes."

             
"OK," I said finally. The bow slung across my shoulders—it must have been a considerable annoyance to Franny, riding behind me—gave me confidence. "We'll stay here tonight. What shall we do with the bike?"

             
"Let's take it in the house with us."

             
It seemed a good idea. With me pushing the bike, Franny and I started up the inconspicuous gravel drive that led up to the house.

             
The house was a small one, relatively new, with a big
uncurtained
picture window looking out over the road. It had probably been built not long before the outbreak of the plagues. And it certainly seemed deserted; even in the bad light I could see weeds coming up through the gravel of the drive, and when we got closer I saw that the tiny front lawn was a mass of dead weed stalks.

             
I left the bike beside the drive, went up the few steps softly, and gently tried the front door. It didn't open. I hadn't thought it would.

             
"Try the back door," Francesca suggested softly. "It'll surely be unlocked."

             
I felt a twinge of suspicion. How could she be sure the back door would be unlocked? And why, if she thought the
house were
deserted, did she keep on speaking in such a low tone? Still, she might be right. People do leave a back door unlocked even when they're careful to secure the front one.

             
We went around to the back. To the left there was a small garage, plainly much older than the house. Its doors sagged on their hinges, and it plainly hadn't been used for years.

             
I tried the back door. Yes, it was unlocked. I pushed it open gently, put my head inside and sniffed. There were no funny smells, only a general smell of dust and mildew. I beckoned to Franny and, with me still pushing the stolen bike, we stepped inside.

             
We seemed to be in some sort of a kitchen. There were draperies on the windows, and the room was extremely dark. We groped our way from the kitchen into a room with a round table, and from there into the room with the picture window. Nobody
anywhere,
and everywhere the smell of mildew and dust.

             
Yes, it seemed to be all right. "Let's look for the bedroom," Franny said in my ear. "I'd rather sleep on a bed than on the floor."

             
We found a bedroom on the other side of a little hall. A noise of scurrying as I opened the door made me hesitate. But it was probably only a mouse or a pack rat.

             
Still I hesitated. There was a smell in the room I couldn't identify, something besides the usual dust and mold, and it made me uneasy. "What's the smell?" I asked Franny, who was pressed up against me in the doorway.

             
"I don't know," she said. "I don't think it's dangerous." She pushed past me and began feeling over the surface of the bed with both hands. After a moment she straightened. "It's OK," she said. "There's nobody in the bed." She giggled. "There's not even a mattress pad on it." She
giggled again. Her voice was high, and I realized that hunger and fatigue were making her light-headed.

             
I leaned the bike up against what seemed to be a dresser. "You lie down on the bed," I told her. "I'll sleep on the floor."

             
"No! Lie down beside me." I heard the creak of springs as she sat down on the bed. "I don't want to sleep by myself," she went on. "I'd have nightmares about that rock all night."

             
She meant, of course, the rock where she had been chained to drown. And plainly she didn't intend a sexual invitation. "All right," I said. I put my bow and quiver on the floor beside the bed, where they would be close to my right hand if I needed them in the night. Then I lay down beside her and took her hand.

             
It was icy cold, and I thought her whole body was trembling. I wondered whether I should dose her with something from my medicine bag. But I didn't have any safe, quick-acting hypnotics, and what I did have required to be infused in boiling water. Not much help.

             
Gradually her hand grew warm and her trembling quieted. Her breathing became even and deep. I found the sound soothing, and began to drift
sleepward
myself. My last conscious thought was a fear that if Mike, the Avenger whose bike we had taken, knew how much fuel there'd been in the tank, he'd be able to predict just about how many miles from Mallo Pass we'd be when we ran out of juice.

             
The sun, pouring in through
uncurtained
windows, woke me. It was about five. I had slept only a few hours, but I felt much better, though very hungry. Should I wake Franny—we ought to get started—or let her sleep a little longer? She had been exhausted last night.

             
She settled the question by sitting up on the bed and yawning. "Hello," she said. She grinned at me. "Boy, what a lot of dust!" she went on, looking around the little room. "I wonder how long it's been since anybody was here." She sniffed. "—I know what that smell that bothered us last night is," she said. "Look."

             
She dived over the side of the bed and came up with two dusty, empty bottles that had once held Scotch. "There are fifty or sixty more of them under there," she reported.
"A regular cache.
Somebody has done a lot of heavy drinking in this room, and a little of the smell has stayed.

             
"Let's go see if we can find some canned goods. There might be something in the kitchen. I'm so hungry I could eat a broiled slug, Pomo style."

             
"OK," I said. "Keep back from the windows, Fran. There's always
a
chance one of your tribesmen might be going by."

             
An upper cupboard in the kitchen held quinine water, several cans of tomato juice, and some bottles of Seven Up. Franny kept rooting around, and eventually she came up with a can of Boston brown bread, a package of cheese wafers, and a can of shrimp. Everything was dusty, but
none of the cans had rusted; with these things and the tomato juice we had the makings of
a
fine breakfast, but Franny didn't seem satisfied.

             
I opened the cans—the thought of the brown bread made me ravenous—and we sat down to eat. Franny divided the shrimp, which she plainly considered
a
delicacy, between us. Our mouths were soon full.

             
"Has the Mallo Pass Dancer got itself a chemical-conscience man?" I asked as I munched on a cheese cracker.

             
"No, it hasn't. Why would it?"

             
"Oh, there seems to
be
a sort of tendency for Dancers and the
chem
-con men to get together as the Dancers get older. I wondered if it had happened in your tribe."

             
"Un-unh, not yet."

             
"It might be only a chance coincidence," I said. "I don't suppose the chemical-conscience people are all the same."

             
"No,
but
they're more alike than you'd think," she said. "I used to work in a clinic in SF where they came in for their shots, and I saw a lot of them.

             
"They all talk in that funny, precise way, for one thing. And they're the biggest gossips in the world. If one of them knows anything, all the others know it too. They can't keep their mouths shut about what happens to them. They get together in groups and twitter like birds, all in those finicky voices. I suppose it's the chemical that makes them act alike. They certainly haven't all committed the same crimes.

             
"They'll even talk to outsiders, if they can't find any of the
ir
own
sort
to talk to. I've listened to yards of talk from them."

             
We had eaten everything in sight. I was still thirsty and, since there wasn't any water in the sink, I opened a bottle of quinine water. Franny gathered up the remains of our meal and put them in a garbage can by the back door.

             
She still had the
dissatisfied
air I had noticed before. She began opening drawers and poking around in the back of them. She even rooted around in the space under the sink.

             
"What's the matter?" I said at last. "What are you looking for?"

             
"Liquor," she answered. "He must have some scotch stashed away somewhere. Nobody would do all that drinking without having a reserve. And the house hasn't been looted. The liquor must be around somewhere."

             
"What do we want with li—" I began, and then stopped myself, realizing I had been about to say something foolish. Scotch contains enough alcohol that it could be burned as fuel for the bike. If we could locate the reserve Franny suspected, we'd be in business again.

             
She stood for a moment, thinking. Then she went in the bedroom and began looking there. She opened dresser drawers and looked under the dresser. She kept tossing her long black ha
ir
back over her shoulders. I enjoyed watching her as she
searched,
intent and absorbed. She seemed pretty well recovered from her ordeal of yesterday.

             
From the bedroom she went to the bath. It was plainly no longer functional, the tub being filled with bottles, but she didn't find any unopened ones. The medicine chest contained only a package of hangover pills. The dining room was equally blank.

             
She went into the living room. Here, under the big, high divan (the largest piece of furniture in the little house) she found what she was looking for.
Two bottles of scotch.

             
It was all she could find, though she kept on looking a little while longer. She wheeled the bike out from the bedroom while I opened the bottles. I poured their contents into the bike's fuel tank. The bike was no longer a gutless wonder. It would go again.

             
"Where to?"
I asked her.

             
"How far can we get on two bottles of scotch?"

             
I considered. "I don't know how well the stuff will burn," I answered. "Probably to Point Arena, if the detour isn't too long.
Pretty certainly not to Boonville.
Going to Boonville means a long walk in the hot sun, pushing the bike, with plenty of opportunities for your tribe's Avengers to catch up with us. On the other hand, we'd probably be a good deal safer on 101 than on the coast highway, once we get there."

             
"You mean at Ukiah?
Um."

             
I had a feeling the choice was very important, and an equally strong feeling that no matter what choice we made, it would be wrong. I was still weighing probabilities when Franny gave a sort of start.
She listened. Then she put her li
ps to my ear and whispered, "Somebody's coming."

             
"Where?"
I answered equally softly.

             
"Up the drive.
We'd better hide."

             
I shoved the bike under the divan. Fran had already taken cover behind the big piece of furniture and I hurriedly joined her, crouching low as I remembered we could probably be seen from outside.