Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices: A Novel

III: Actress

ACTRESS Couldn't fool her. Shoppingcenter and gas stations and motels to the contrary—sprawl of business. Banks are taking over the world—money fortresses. Car wash, what not. A place to make you eat your heart out, devour you to the dust. She knew towns, grew up in one just like it. The one Joan Gallant came from sprawled for a longer distance along the highway. More package stores and salvage shops with silver hubcaps in rows along the sheds like buttons, more drive-ins and used-car outfits. Here, the usual highway junk, then adowntown that must have been there forever, dingy and depressed, the life leaking out of it drip by drop. Stores sitting empty, the names of the owners fading into the sides of the buildings. And here a star is born. Welcome back, Roselle, batting the breeze. Well, they were trying. And Roselle was coming back for reasons best known to herself.To all the little boys and girls who'd settled down here to raise their brats and make a go of it selling auto parts and clothing and gifts for the entire family.Joan could see it. Could see Roselle throwing off the Chloride of the mind, isolation and ugliness and the numbness of routine and the hard lines of practicality—the real world, that is—and going off to glory, the eyes of the town following her, glued to her career. Watching her failure. Seewhat it gets you: climbing up there on the rooftops, thinking you're such hot stuff. That's what people always said after the fact. But they liked feeling sorry for you. Now that she'd been through the school of hard knocks and drawn down to scale, they'd hug her to their bosoms. Welcome to the prodigal. Then release her back into the clouds once 59 III more, their fantasies a halo around her, envy and desire a burning dust, as they imagined mansions and wild parties around swimming pools and all the tinsel of fame. Joan knew all about it. Pin your fantasies to the stars. The glittering galaxy. All the affairs, marriages, jealousies, divorces. You wove your stories out of their imagined excesses. Screaming up a fact till it stood black in headlines above a photograph that took up the rest of the page, a little article buried below. But that wasn't what she'd come for. She wanted to look at the real thing. Come on, Roselle, we've got an old score to settle. And here she was, poking around the town as if she herself had grown up in it. She might as well have. Changed, of course— things you wouldn't recognize if you'd been away. See that shopping center, Roselle. New since your time. What d'you think? Progress? And they've pavedthe streets, put the highway through all the way to Cal-i-for-ni-ay. But the cars still park up on the hill where the first boy pulled down your panties. Only you don't dare turn your back on anything, because once you do, it all goes up in smoke. She parked her car near the end of the main street across from a deserted bank building. A cafe stood catty-corner. Next to it a bookstore. Racks of magazines, used paperbacks. She walked in—the place was empty—picked up a local paper from the counter. From behind it a man rose up from where he'd been roosting, barely visible. His eyes held a certain vagueness, as though he'd just been recalled from another plane. He could have been sitting there for hours. At the back, the slightly parted curtain suggested a living space beyond. Joan imagined a hot plate and a cot—nothing fancy—a couple of hooks for clothes, a shelf. "New in town?" he asked her, looking at her in a puzzled way, as though he should know her. "You might say." She paid for the paper. "Seems like I've seen you around." Pale like the salamanders that live in caves. Did he ever venture out into the sunlight? Lanky—thin arms and skinny hips and no more butt than a pencil. Long, stringy hair in a kind of ponytail at the back. But something intense in his expression. Too much for the exchange of paperbacks or the sale of maga60 zines. Throwback to...