“Where’s the fire?” Tony asked.
“I—” Pete slithered down to sit in the dust. He peered up and up and up at Tony’s face, barely visible in the dying light, lit only by the porch lights. “Fire?”
“It’s an expression. Kid, you’re so straight you make rulers look bad. I meant, why were you running?”
“I think I almost died!”
“Me, too,” Tony said. “Of boredom.”
But the two were not displeased to see each other, for no reason apart from familiarity. Tony sat down, arranging himself cross-legged in a scrubby field that cows and calves had eaten down to bare earth. Slouching, he hooked one elbow on the top of the tractor beside him. The bottom of his shoeless foot was quite filthy from all his walking around on it.
“Gosh.” Pete looked all the way from Tony’s dirty foot up to his face. “You really haven’t shrunk at all.”
“Neither have you,” Tony said.
“I guess not. What’s it like being … like that?”
“I can’t smoke,” Tony said. “Cigarettes are over before they begin.”
Pete did not smoke, but he attempted to look sympathetic. “Well, is there anything I can do for you now?”
“Yeah, beat it,” Tony said. But it was habit. Pete’s company briefly took his mind off his restlessness. Ordinarily on nights like this, he would’ve put on the radio or taken the Mercury out across Sure-Kill Crawlway after all the traffic was gone. There were no highways here, though, and he was a long way off from fitting in the Mercury. “No, wait, kid. Take my Mercury to the closest town and get me a goddamn radio before I go insane. You’ve still got the keys, right?”
“Really?”
“Did I stutter? Here, take some—” Tony began to swear long and loud, because when he reached into his pocket to get some cash for Pete, he discovered that his money had become giant-size as well. He waved a dollar bill the size of a hand towel at Pete. Owls lifted off, startled by the movement. Tony railed, “Get a miracle, they said—here’s your miracle! This isn’t money—it’s a magic carpet.”
“I’ll cover it,” Pete said hurriedly. “Until you get normal again. I’ve got enough for a radio, I think.”
“Look under the passenger seat,” Tony said tragically. “Use that. Only the money. Leave the other stuff there.”
Pete’s mind filled with possibilities of what might be under the seat that he was not supposed to tamper with, but because he was an innocent sort, he was wrong about nearly all of them. “Any particular kind of radio?”
“A loud one,” Tony said.
“I’ll ask Antonia if I can take some time off tomorrow,” Pete promised. “Where is your car, anyway?”
“Oh, yeah,” Tony said, and moved slightly to reveal the Mercury behind him, the dry scrub flattened behind it.
Pete found that looking at the vehicle next to Tony produced an unusual vertigo. The Mercury, just a little too large to appear as an ordinary car. And Tony, rather too large to appear as an ordinary man. “How’d it get there?”
“I dragged it,” Tony said.
“No way.”
Tony gave the vehicle a little shove to demonstrate it, the contents of the interior rattling as he did, the car moving as easily as if three men had been pushing it. It was a magic trick that so delighted Pete that he covered a hand with his mouth and backed up several steps, kicking the ground to release some of his thrill.
“Gosh,” he said.
“Gosh,” mimicked Tony primly, but without malice. He was a performer, after all, and this small performance made him happy. He pushed the Mercury in a slow circle so that it came to rest in front of Pete. Dust swirled around the vehicle and the boy. “Some advantage to size. Hey. How’s your work? Breaking your back yet?”
“It’s good,” Pete said. “Real good.”
Tony waited, leaving a silence, as if testing the words for veracity, waiting for Pete to renege, but of course Pete had meant it. He had found the stage-building intensely satisfying, and he liked imagining the future celebrations that might make use of his day’s work. Pete patted the Mercury appreciatively, still pleased at its previous journey under Tony’s grip.
“God, kid. I can’t decide if I hate or love what a square you are.”
Pete grinned for the first time. “Better love it, because it’s not changing, buddy.”
This was the moment they became friends. They became even better friends after this, because time improves on these things, but this was the moment it began. Tony sensed it, because he rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Okay, now beat it.”
“Beat it? Why?”
“Because I’m starting to think you’re all right, and I don’t want to give you a chance to say something that’ll change my mind back again.”
“Okay,” said Pete, but he didn’t go. Instead, he tapped on one of the Mercury’s windows. “I wasn’t looking through your stuff or anything, but when I was sleeping back there, I kept hitting my head on that box, so I looked in it to make sure I hadn’t hurt anything in it. I’ve never seen that many records in my life!”
Tony had forgotten that he had the promotional records in the back of the Mercury, though, and now he felt a little bad about it. Not because he thought the station would miss them—he’d only taken ones that were duplicates or singles his producers would never play—but because it wasn’t good for them to be subjected to direct sunlight. “That’s because you haven’t lived very long. You got a record player?”
“You saw everything I came here with. How’d you end up with all them, anyway?”
“Pass,” Tony said. “Hard pass. Not answering.”
“Pass? Why? Wait, did you kill someone over them?”
Tony burst out laughing. “Kid, you really have got more corners than a box full of boxes. I work in radio. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Why not?”
Tony was impatient with this question, as he felt it was the kind of question only asked by someone who had never experienced either fame or notoriety. “Because I said so.”
“Sure, whatever you say. Like a DJ?”
Because Pete didn’t seem too awed, Tony grudgingly answered, “Yeah.”
“You’d think a DJ would be the last person to break the radio in their own car.”
“Yeah, you’d think, wouldn’t you? Now seriously, flake off before I regret telling you.”
Tony had been watching Pete closely to see if this confession had changed anything, but Pete was less interested in Tony’s past career than he was in his own future safety. “I oughta get some sleep anyway. Is the coast clear?”
“Of what? Those damn dogs?”
“No, a girl,” Pete said. It had not occurred to Pete that he had actually weaponized Beatriz’s appearance by avoiding her the way that he had; if only he had approached her calmly during the day, he would have been fine.
“You mean that girl?” Tony asked.
Pete turned.
“I need to talk to you,” Beatriz said.
Not a lot of people know that there is a great salt lake and accompanying salt plain in Oklahoma; most folks are only familiar with the famous one in Utah. But the one in Oklahoma is no shoddy thing. Just a spit north of Jet, Oklahoma, the great salt flats start, the enormous and impressive remainder of a massive saline lake. Like the salt flats in Utah, they are white as snow and as flat as a board, but unlike the salt flats in Utah, Oklahoma’s salt flats have treasure buried beneath them. Tiny crystals known as hourglass crystal grow here and nowhere else in the world, and if you are the sort to dig for treasure, you can bring your whole family to dig them up. Just make sure you hose your vehicle down afterward, because salt’s not good for any set of wheels.
Pete’s family had gone to dig up these rare selenite crystals one spring not long ago, and Pete remembered the unrelenting sun, the grit of salt and sand caught in his pants legs, the intimate joy of finding a crystal and holding it to the light to see the hourglass of time within it.