a-Hunting (Closing)

They march past clots of cars and trucks haphazardly parked under the buzzing lights, many of them heading on foot up the curve of the ramp and out to the surface and the night above. The boy with the big-bellied guitar slung across his back is helping a red-headed man load a large white drum into the back of a van adorned with a candy-colored pin-up girl, holding a massive snake above her body with both hands. The side door’s open. Marfisa in a soft blue robe sits slumped, a cloth to her face, her greaves stacked on the pavement by her bare feet, her hair the color of clotted cream hanging like a curtain before her face. Agravante kneels before her, reaching up to brush the hair out of her eyes. “He’s loose,” she says, her voice slurred. One side of her face is puffy, mottled red and white and yellow, the eye swollen shut. “He’s out there, somewhere.”

“The Duke’s problem,” says Agravante, gently. “Not ours.”

Across the garage, halfway up the ramp, Pyrocles pauses to look back at them. His blue jacket draped across his shoulders, his bare chest wrapped in a white bandage. His expression masked by those long grey mustaches. Becker, unlocking the door of a little red hatchback, looks up to see Pyrocles trudging away up the ramp. “I don’t,” he says, looking about the parking garage, at the people marching past, a pickup truck with wood-framed plastic wings stashed in the back, a sedan topped by a monkey-faced stone idol strewn with ivy, spitting water on the windshield. “I don’t want to forget this,” says Becker, but Guthrie over on the other side of the car is looking down at his thin hands wrapped around each other. “Do you,” he says, “need a ride? Anywhere?”

“Anywhere,” says the woman swaddled in those skirts and sweaters. “Anywhere that isn’t.” She’s pointing at a black car parked a couple of spaces over from them, a powerful black thing standing empty. Meticulous lines of hand-painted white letters whorl up and over the sides and hood and roof.