The Orbit: The Online Drive-in of Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale

I think it’s about a number of things, but it’s mostly just a cool story about a strange being that changes things in a small town, and worldwide. Perhaps, universe-wide.

I love small-town and country stories, because that’s how I grew up. This one took a while to write. I write pretty fast most of the time, and the ideas come easy, but I believe the reason this took so long was I was exhausted.

I think it was Covid. My wife and I were in China, and she became pretty-crazy sick, and I felt tired beyond reason. We toughed out the trip, and it was wonderful despite her illness and my exhaustion. The Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terracotta Warriors, Panda Bears, too much food. But when we returned home, we were both beyond exhausted. I felt as if some kind of soul spider had latched onto me and was sucking out my very essence. I felt as if I had aged ten years overnight. It clung for weeks, and then months, occasionally washing away, then coming back as if on the tide.

I thought, Is this about getting old?

Well, I was sixty-nine, but I had felt fine before going, and then I didn’t. Same for Karen.

And then it was announced there was a dangerous disease going around called Covid. Its source was China.

When vaccines were available, we were among the first, and later we got the booster. I’ve never understood the vaccine controversy. It prevents disease. Not perfectly, but perfect enough. We lost friends and family who were not vaccinated, and nearly lost others. Turning a health problem into politics is as stupid as putting your arm in a lion’s cage to see if it will bite.

Bottom line is, this story took me longer than usual. I had been working on it before Larry asked for a story. It was one of those that woke me up in the night with imagery more than story. The story part came to me a little more slowly. Writing it first required I fan the brain-fog away, start early, and be content with a little bit of story at a time. I also did something I don’t normally do: I asked my friend Lewis Shiner, a super writer, to look at it. He told me what I knew, but it was good to hear. I was having so much brain-fog and exhaustion I didn’t quite trust myself.

Most of my energy has returned, and that’s good, but I wouldn’t wish the kind of exhaustion I experienced for almost three months on anyone. My wife was exhausted, had fever, aches, pains, confusion, you name it.

We survived.

And, I think the story turned out well.

Red Billie

This one is for Lewis Shiner. Thanks for the tips.

This happened back when I was a kid, during a scorching summer so hot it was rumored birds fell dead and smoking from the sky, and the clouds looked like unpleasant faces.

I don’t doubt it.

Those were the good old days, actually. I’ll come to that.

The girl we came to know as Red Billie moved into our town one night with who we assumed were her gray-faced parents, both of them stooped and homely as moldy sacks of old sin.

They arrived during a terrible hot spell in a coughing, clattering pickup that was made of rust and a bad promise. It was so worn out, neither model nor year of its production could be identified. It had one headlight, and that one looked tired, like a sick, one-eyed monster looking forward to retirement or a quick death from an auto crusher.

Billie and the withered adults showed up along with three slinking hound dogs in the bed of the truck. The dogs were dust-colored and bony. The dogs stayed close together, as if they had just recently been unglued from one another and were unaccustomed to independence.

Folks and hounds ended up stuffed into a sagging gray house with a leaky tar-paper roof with only candlelight at night and an outside shitter that leaked out of the side of the hill like radioactive honey, steamed in the heat, and carried its aroma, which was strong enough to part your hair and call you Bobby, down from the hill and into the edge of the Dirt Yard.

The Dirt Yard was the remains of an old quarry where the ground had given up stone and earth, and then had been shit on from above.

There was a light on a pole at the top of the hill, almost in the yard where Billie lived. From down in the pit, it looked like a second moon.

All us boys gathered in the Dirt Yard beneath where the light dropped its gold spot. It was cooler at night and more bearable against what was then record heat.

We played marbles, drank stolen beers, and talked about the girls we claimed to have screwed. Class was not our middle name, not even the name of a distant ancestor. We were fifteen, just a few years above booger-eating and knock-knock jokes.

From the Dirt Yard, when the moon was bright, you could see greasy smoke rising from the nearby factories. Farther along the hill were other houses, most of them built on the fly and constructed as if sacrifices to the wind.

Most of the boys in our group lived in those houses, which were only a couple of steps in quality above the one where Billie lived. That one was abandoned and no one wanted it. Billie and her folks, and those hounds, were squatters. No one rushed to throw them out, as my guess was the person who owned that house and property was either dead or had moved off, or had no more interest in that place than one might have in trying to give a rattlesnake a tonsillectomy with a pair of tweezers.

East side of town was known as Hell’s Five Acres. No one was thinking a lot of brain surgeons were coming out of that section. I lucked out in a lot of ways. My parents weren’t as poor as the others, and they had other interests besides beating a kid’s ass and drinking a twelve-pack nightly. At least my hopes and dreams didn’t wear chains and concrete boots.

One night, with the bugs swarming around the pole light thicker than the Milky Way, we saw Billie out on the sagging porch up there, sitting with her hounds, looking down on us like a hawk picking which mouse she was going to swoop down on. We kind of knew who she was, as we’d all observed her and her strange family for a couple weeks or so, but at that moment in time, of course, we didn’t know her name, and none of us had spoken to her. She watched us play marbles for a while, then came down, using a path to the Dirt Yard that would be precarious even for a mountain goat. She was carrying a bulging brown cloth bag. Billie was peculiar looking, about our age at first glance.

Because of her peculiarities, one of the meaner kids, Charlie, immediately thought of her as an object of fun, way she looked and acted.

Her short, fire-red hair made tufts on the sides of her head that stuck up high like horns, and she was ruddy-faced, and her skin appeared to have been pulled back tight to her ears by invisible wires and a serious winch. She had on jeans and a dirty brown sweatshirt that her breasts poked against like a couple of doorknobs. She had little feet in little black shoes.

She shook the cloth bag. It rattled like lug bolts and broken glass.

She said, “My name is Billie. Some call me Red Billie. Some call me Little Red Billie, some call me Bill, and some don’t call me at all. I’d like to play marbles.”

Charlie, who lived with his grandmother because his parents were in prison and his older brother had been shot dead in a washateria robbery, said, “Looks to me, girl, like you collected an ugly bill, and got paid in full.”

Billie hit him in the mouth with a sharp left jab that made Charlie sit down so quick you’d have thought he wanted to.

Billie said, “Don’t write a check your ass can’t cash.”

Charlie realized he didn’t even have a checkbook and stayed seated.

Billie broke open her bag of marbles then, and just to show she had style, unfastened the string that closed the bag, and dumped all the marbles into the circle we had drawn in the dirt. Those marbles were wonders of color, and some of those colors I had never seen before. There was one marble that looked clear. I noticed it when it fell out of the bag and rolled onto the packed earth. As it rolled it turned blue and green, then it sparked with orange and red lights, like tiny fires set by mischievous fairies.

We all studied those wonderous orbs for a bit, then Red Billie dropped her empty marble sack into the circle, said to Charlie, “You. Pick those up and bag them, then let’s get down to business.”

Charlie moved into the circle, still on his knees. He picked the marbles up, examining them as he put them in the bag with all the caution of a collector handling miniature Fabergé eggs.

There was only one shooter marble in her collection, bigger than the rest and black as a dead man’s eye. Just looking at that marble made my heart beat faster.

“Now,” Red Billie said, “which game do you pussies play? Straight marbles, or for keeps?”

We did a bit of both from time to time, but it was difficult to afford a bag of marbles on a regular basis, so normally we didn’t play for keeps.

Charlie, now fully indoctrinated with left-jab diplomacy, said, “How do you like to play?”

“I play for keeps or I don’t play. I was only pretending to ask. And we’re going to play, aren’t we, boys?”

We all agreed to play. It seemed better than a jab in the snout, possibly some lost teeth.

“Now,” she said, “we’ll play with your marbles, not mine. Not until I say so. Except the shooter. I’ll use my shooter.”

“That sounds good,” Charlie said. In that moment he would have spit-polished Billie’s little shoes with his tongue and wiped her ass with a silk handkerchief. He might have even reversed that order.

The wind was kicking up the usual stink of sewage and foundry, but I could smell Billie, too. She smelled like charred-wood smoke and burnt pork ribs coated in a mist of sulphur fumes and the residue from a sticky bean fart. She added strong tobacco stench to her scent by pulling a black cheroot out of her pocket, poking it between her thin lips, and lighting it with a match she popped to fire with her long, black thumbnail. Her thumb knuckle was as big as a willow-tree knot and dark with grime.

Charlie poured his bag of marbles into the center, letting them roll every which way.

Red Billie was so short she could have walked under a kitchen table with a hat on, but she threw a bigger shadow than her height deserved. That shadow lay over the circle of marbles like a raincloud.

We all squatted around the circle to watch Billie attempt to hit her first marble. She crouched low, and the smoke from her cheroot veiled her head in a Vesuvius cloud. She eyed her target. Then with a slow release of tobacco breath, she flexed her thumb against that big, black shooter marble and let it fly.

Her shooter was a tumbling shadow. It hit a green and blue cat’s-eye so hard it shattered it. Fragments flew about like shrapnel.

You could hear all of us let out our breath. You might run over a marble with a truck tire and crush it like that, but a thumb shot? It could happen, but not the way that happened.

Billie’s shooter didn’t go out of the ring. It spun about for a moment in the center of it like a happy drunk in a four-wheeler.

Since she had destroyed the cat’s-eye, she was up for another shot.

“I’ll go light,” she said.

And so it went. Each shot banging a marble, knocking it out of the ring, but not shattering it like the first. She had been showing off, but I didn’t doubt she could explode other marbles as easily as the first. Her shooter never once went out of the ring, so she kept on shooting. She shot fast, and by the end of it, all of Charlie’s marbles, by standard rule, belonged to her.

When Billie completed her run, her face was popped with sweat and one got the strong impression that the only thing that might satisfy her as well as shooting marbles was stomping kittens.

Billie wanted us to shoot, so more marbles were dumped, and without her participating, normal games were played with marbles being bumped out of the ring. It seemed lethargic after her performance.

No doubt, I played the best. I could shoot hard and had a good eye, though my results were far less dramatic.

Even as the time for me to be home ticked by on my genuine used Timex watch, I didn’t inch my way away from there. I was hoping to see Billie shoot again.

But that was it for the night. Her family dogs had begun to howl, and this seemed to be like a siren call for her. She smiled and told Charlie he could keep his marbles she had won. She took her bag of marbles, said, Goodnight, motherfuckers, and made her way back up the hill, never faltering as she went.

We couldn’t have been more in awe than if Santa Claus had turned out to be real and was living as our next-door neighbor and spent his spare time fucking a stray dog in public.

When I got home, I eased into the house, past the living room where Mom and Dad were watching some sort of variety show. They nodded at me, and my dad tapped his watch to signify I was late. I nodded back. I wasn’t that late, and they weren’t so strict as to lose a lung over it, but they hadn’t lost sight of the time. A reminder they cared about me.

On TV, cloggers, men and women dressed in cowboy shirts, jeans and boots, were dancing what is sometimes referred to as the Ignorant White Folk Dance, or Irish dancing without the good parts. Someone was playing a fiddle. I like a good fiddle. This wasn’t one.

I eased into my room, which I shared with my eight-year-old brother, Lenny. He was in the process of dismantling his transistor radio with a hammer.

“Can’t get the batteries out,” he said.

“That’s okay. You aren’t going to need them.”

I lay on my back on the bottom bunk and listened to Lenny hammering away. He was destroying everything but the hammer. I could hear the TV going, and the variety show was over by then, and the news was on, and the main topic was the weather. Unseasonably hot. Tar and roofing shingles melting like chocolate, dripping off and onto the ground. That was one reason my parents weren’t too hard on me about being late. During the day it was almost too hot to breathe. The air conditioner panted in the house like a dying dog, sucked that Freon as if with a straw.

I thought about what I had seen out at the Dirt Yard. I could still smell Red Billie’s aroma on my clothes. It had soaked into them like dye. I finally undressed and showered and put on my pajamas and went to bed.

I dreamed that night of Billie and her odd hair tufts, her enormous thumb and jet-black nail, the big, black shooter, and that exploding marble. Its fragments blowing out in slow motion, tinkling to the sun-dried earth like hailstones.

* *. *

I considered not going back the next night, as the whole thing had both amazed and spooked me, but, then again, I had never seen such a thing, met such a person, and I had once seen a drunk guy who could dance barefoot on broken glass.

Next summer night, the moon and stars were bagged up in wet-cloud darkness, and what should have been a cool, late-night breeze had turned humid. At the Dirt Yard, something swift and flickering moved inside the light on the pole at the top of the hill. Beat at it like a moth captured in a jar.

Now and again, Billie would pause, look up at the light, sigh, bend down again, and thump her shooter and knock another marble out of the ring. She even busted one or two to show she could.

* *. *

One late afternoon, the sun bleeding between houses, I was walking on the little oozing-blacktop road set slightly above Red Billie’s house.

I was going to buy some milk and cereal, maybe a comic book. I was thinking that night I would definitely skip the marble show. I had begun to feel odd about it, as if I were waiting for something not-so-pleasant to happen, and I needed to abandon ship.

As I was passing Billie’s house, I saw she had gone out to sit on a bench near the edge of the hill so she could look down on the Dirt Yard. She was surrounded by her dogs. Little dust-colored shadows that slinked close to her feet.

She turned her head in time to catch me walking by, called out to me.

“Hey, come sit with me a while.”

There was a plaintive tone in her voice, like a child that had thrown a birthday party only to have no one show up. I thought about an excuse, decided against it, and went over.

The dogs gathered around me as I walked into the yard. They were a bedraggled bunch. With hotspot patches where fur had been. Maybe a touch of mange. One had a phlegmy eye, and that was the good one. The larger dog had two peckers.

“They won’t bite you,” Billie said. “Unless I tell them to. Come. Sit.”

I sat on the bench beside her. One of the hounds licked my ear, like a chef testing the specialty of the house right before it was served; a chef with hot breath that smelled like a rotting carcass, and with a tongue like sandpaper.

“Are you happy?” she asked me.

Not a question I would have expected.

“I think so. Nothing hurts and I’m okay.”

“I’ve never been happy. Not where I come from.”

“Where’s that?”

“South.”

“What was it like to make you so unhappy there?”

“Where I’m from, time crawls like a slug. Sometimes, though, it wobbles and comes loose. There are cracks through which you can escape. My life is like a dream in a trashcan.”

I was as confused as a Martian tourist, but I said nothing. The air crackled and snapped slightly. In the distance I could see dry lightning dancing and the air began to taste of ozone and turn even warmer than it had been. Sweat dripped off of me.

“I slipped through the cracks. But they’ll be looking.”

“Who will be looking?”

“Her. It won’t be long. She comes cold and snowy.” Looking at Billie and her surroundings, those horrid dogs, I couldn’t figure what she was talking about. Someone looking for her? Cold and snowy? What the hell?

I said, “You have your parents to look after you?”

“The dogs do a better job. And those two are not my parents. Guardians.”

I certainly had questions, but I was afraid to ask them.

As we sat there and the summer night ticked onward with the stars swarming above like the bugs at the pole light, I was possessed with a sudden thought.

Looking at Red Billie, I found I was looking past her peculiar hairdo, her strange clothes, her little feet, and I saw a girl there, scared and almost pretty if you squinted just right. Admittedly, at the age I was then, the old gear shift had a tendency to switch out of Park and into Drive at the vaguest hint of sexual attractiveness.

I said, “Would you like to go get an ice cream cone?”

It wasn’t a pick-up line on the equal to, How about a trip to Paris?, but it’s all I had. My cousin used to ask girls to wrestle. That worked pretty well, he said.

Red Billie turned her head and looked at me. In her eyes there was movement. I could almost see thoughts drive by like cars on the interstate. Then her eyes went soft, and her face turned soft as well.

“You don’t have ideas, do you?”

“About what?” I said, and I felt my gear shift back into Park. “It’s not marble time yet. We got a couple hours or so before we play?”

She smiled at me.

“Just thought you might want an ice cream cone,” I said. “I’m getting one.”

I stood up. “Okay,” she said.

* *. *

We walked down the street to the ice cream shop. When we went in, the older teenagers turned to look at us. Of course, it was Billie’s curious looks that drew their attention.

At the counter we ordered. Billie went for a hot fudge sundae and I ordered a banana split. I paid for it all, just like I had money to spare. I wouldn’t be buying cereal and milk this night. We sat in the back at a lone table separated from the others.

As Billie ate her ice cream, it steamed little pale clouds out of her mouth and nose.

“Are you embarrassed?” she asked.

“About what?”

“Being with me.”

“No. I’m not embarrassed.”

“My mom always says I was the peach that fell off the tree and lay too long on the ground.”

“Your mom said that?”

“Not good for the confidence, you know,” Billie said. “I run off whenever I can. But she always comes for me, and I always have to go back. I really hate it there. I keep trying to stay away.”

“Your father?”

“No one mentions his name. It’s not to be said. He pretty much ignores me. I don’t know if that’s better or worse.”

We ate our ice cream, and by the time we had stepped back out into the street, the air had been touched with a chill, which made no sense.

Red Billie trembled, looked up at the sky. I couldn’t see much up there because of the street and store lights. Billie seemed to see well enough, though.

She said, “The universe has shifted.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. All manner of this and that from then and now are coming loose of their regions.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

We walked slowly back to her house. She took my hand. It felt like a hot water bottle freshly filled. Other than that, we were just two teenagers on a cool, soft night with the universe having shifted and something coming loose of their regions.

When we arrived at her house, the dogs came out to see us. Billie slowly let go of my hand, turned to look at me, said, “Go home. Don’t come back. Go home.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It’s best. You being there or not won’t change a thing. Thanks for being kind.”

* *. *

My parents were on the couch in front of the TV. I went over to acknowledge I was home.

I left them there, had a sandwich, and went to the bedroom. My little brother had worn himself out early beating an old record player to pieces with his hammer. At least I wouldn’t have to hear the goddamn singing chipmunks anymore.

He lay on the floor, hunched over his damage, asleep from physical exhaustion. The hammer was next to his hand. I was going to recommend to Mom and Dad that for Christmas they buy him an anvil or some angle iron to beat on. His toys were just about extinct.

I picked up the hammer, went outside and flung it into the shrubbery. The air was warmer again, and the stars had lost their sense of wonder. Pollution from the foundry floated in front of the moon.

“Don’t come back,” Billie had said, but I started walking back to the Dirt Yard.

* *. *

A number of the kids had shown up, as Billie was still the number one attraction in our section of town. They stood, hands in pockets, heads bent, waiting for Billie and a display of her phenomenal marbling shooting. Charlie seemed more anxious than any of us.

Down from the hill she came. Tonight, she wore a dark leather jacket. Her hair had been brushed and the red tufts on the sides of her head had been combed back. A bit of hair dangled on her forehead in a spit curl. She looked quite fetching, if overdressed for a summer night. That coat would have smothered me.

Following her came the hound dogs, as well as her guardians, walking like sticks in shoes. Billie came to stand by the circle. She looked at me.

“I told you not to come back.”

“I know.”

She gave me a thin smile that hit me in my back pocket.

Some of the kids were looking away from Billie, in the other direction.

I turned. Coming down the back trail was a tall wisp of a woman in white shirt and pants, white tennis shoes, no socks. She had night-black hair, skin like porcelain, eyes like fire. She had a white purse; the long strap that supported it was slung over her shoulder.

Four white cats, their fur touched with frost, strolled after her. The air was not only bite-ass cold all of a sudden, there were flecks of snow blowing about. What the hell?

Up close, the woman smelled of jasmine, damp earth, and gentle decay.

“It’s time to come home,” she said to Red Billie, facing her across the circle.

“I don’t have to,” Billie said.

“I believe you do. Things are out of whack. I see you took our dog.”

Dogs, I thought, there were three of them. But when I looked, the hounds were pushed up tight to one another and I couldn’t see where they separated. The guardians had bent their long bodies so that their hands touched the earth. They had the appearance of insects. Enormous white crickets ready to hop. Out of their backs grew transparent wings.

I hadn’t seen that coming.

When I turned to look at the Wisp, the cats were no longer there. In their place were long, cool women, silver-haired, bare and pale with expressionless faces. There was nothing sexy about them. No gears shifted from Park to Drive. They might as well have been marble statues in a cemetery.

One of the women licked out with her tongue and touched her nose, giving it a wipe.

“You’re over your time,” said the Wisp. “It’s time to catch the boat, honey. I have your fare.”

The insects around the light buzzed like harpies, cast shadow dots on the poorly lit ground.

“I’d rather not,” Billie said. “I’ll take my chances with the game.”

“You know how that turns out before you start.”

“Not always. Remember that time in Death Valley?”

“I’ve always suspected you cheated.”

“And Krakatoa.”

“Don’t talk to me about Krakatoa. Definitely a cheat, Billie.”

“And Chernobyl.”

“I give you that one. I wasn’t feeling myself that day.”

“I think I have to be home,” Charlie said, his attachment to Red Billie having faded during the transformation of the dogs and guardians. I was about to suggest I go with him.

“Everyone will stay,” said the Wisp. “The night is sealed.”

“Sealed?” Charlie said.

“That means you can’t go,” the Wisp said, “and if you try to, they’ll find you inside a block of ice. Go that way, you’ll be ash. So, I suggest you stay.”

“Okay,” Charlie said, and looked at me.

I shrugged. I was kind of hoping he’d make a run for it. I was curious which direction he might go, and how he’d turn out. Ash or ice.

“Shall we play?” the Wisp said.

“We always do,” Billie said.

“I have brought the coins for your eyes,” said the Wisp. She flipped two large, silver coins onto the ground. They rattled and wobbled before becoming still. “Flip it.”

Billie eyed the two coins. It was obvious there was a ritual here we didn’t understand, and it had been happening for quite some time.

“What’s going on?” Charlie said. “What is this?”

“Shush,” said the Wisp. “I don’t like my concentration bothered. Understand, you little worthless shit?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Charlie said.

Billie picked up one of the coins, and flipped it, said, “Heads.”

In those moments the Dirt Yard was all there was of the world. Hot wind blew, and cold wind followed. Snow flecked, and insects caught fire. The air swirled with Billie’s smell, the sewer, the pollution, and the sick sweetness from the Wisp. The three-headed dog growled. The women mewed and swayed. Between heat and ice, I shivered and swooned.

The flipped coin sailed up high, catching the light, the edge of it sparkling like a diamond, spinning, seeming to hang for a moment, then it dropped fast.

Billie stuck out her palm and caught it. She stepped into the circle, extended her hand, showed it so all could see. Tails.

The Wisp smiled, removed her purse and dumped her marbles on the ground outside the circle. The marbles steamed like dry ice. Her shooter was a ball of blue ice. She picked it up and rolled it across her fingers, turned her hand and let it fall into her palm. She curled her fingers, straightened them, and now she held the marble between thumb and index finger.

Billie emptied her sack of marbles into the circle. The Wisp, having won the right to first shot, bent forward with her ice-blue shooter, and with her thumb, delicate and long, her nail like a chip of ice, she thumped her shot at a bright red marble.

The shooter-marble tumbled in the air, dipped within the circle, made a little mushroom cloud of dirt as it struck the ground. It smacked the red marble. There was a scratchy streak of tiny lightning and Billie’s marble blew apart. Fragments rattled about like scarlet hail.

“One,” the Wisp said.

I looked at Billie. Her face was a wad of wrinkled flesh. In that moment she looked ancient and less confident or attractive than before; had the look of an unwrapped mummy.

Wisp moved around the circle, and her women followed. She found a spot where she could lean down and shoot again, the player having to shoot where the marble landed.

She thumped her shooter. Like a heat missile, it found a marble the color of a harvest moon. Another explosion and a rip of lightning, and the golden marble blew apart.

“Two,” Wisp said.

Charlie said, “Aww.”

When I looked at him, he was touching his face. A piece of the marble had cut his cheek. Blood ran out from under his fingers.

“Damn,” he said.

“Shut up, little boy,” said the Wisp.

The walls of the pit were no longer visible. Looking up, there was only the light on the pole. No stars. No moon. For a brief instant I saw something move up there, a crack of light, as if night’s curtain was being parted by a nervous thespian taking a peek at the audience.

On the third shot, the Wisp broke another marble. It had been all the colors in a crayon box.

“Three,” she said.

The Wisp’s success finally turned sour. Her shooter rested in a really bad spot, and she had to reach pretty far to thump it. Her arm stretched slightly, or seemed to in that overhead pole light, but as she reached, the circle grew wider, and the marbles were farther away from her. She missed her shot.

Red Billie stepped forward, having kicked off her shoes to show hooves, like those of a goat. By this time, I would have expected no less.

“Dump yours,” Billie said.

One of the women had collected all of the Wisp’s marbles and put them back into her purse.

The Wisp nodded. The woman dumped the purse again. The marbles rolled into the ring and wobbled about. These two played their own way. Perhaps somewhere they had a kind of rule book tucked away.

Billie pushed her fingers together, cracked her knuckles. Her face looked like a drama mask, the one where the lips drooped. She eyed an icy-white marble, and thumped.

I can’t describe the impact, because the sound of it brought me to my knees. I felt dazed and confused. My thoughts felt as if they returned to me by rickshaw. When they did, I saw that Billie had been shooting for a while. She had destroyed half a dozen of Wisp’s marbles.

Billie was examining her possibilities for a shot. Billie took a deep breath. The corners of her lips turned up. She saw a shot, and it was easy to see that she felt she would make it.

And then I knew. I can’t say how. But I knew. My mind was so wide open you could have driven a train to it. The world had shifted again.

It was as if the answers, or at least some of them, were in the air. Truthfully, I merely felt something. It’s only now, much later, that I understand it more. A truth is first felt before realized.

If Billie won, the earth would grow warmer, and even the air would burn. But if Wisp won, Billie would return to where she had escaped from, and the weather would balance, or at least hold on. I still can’t explain how I knew these things, but in that moment, I felt a cosmic truth move through me like a dose of laxative.

And the way it looked now, Billie was going to run the circle, destroy all the marbles.

Billie looked at me.

“You’ll be all right. I can take you with me,” she said. Take me? Where?

I don’t know what made me do it, but just as Billie was about to shoot, I looked down at the blue-and-green marble she was aiming for, and stepped into the circle.

I knew then I wasn’t in East Texas anymore. I was floating in the black of space and there were marbles and fragments of marbles whirling in the void, some were like stars, others appeared to be worlds. They were bigger than marbles, but I was bigger than they were. I was a cosmic parade float hung in space and time.

And then I saw one of the marbles swirling closer. Or was I coming closer to it?

It was blue and green, and when it was about to pass me by, I saw it for what it really was.

Earth.

I grabbed it. I clung to it. Hugged it like a life-preserver. I felt the heat slipping from my body like water running down a drain. The only thing that mattered to me then was clinging to that marble—clinging to Earth.

A moment later. A century later. I couldn’t tell you for sure, my body felt as if it were being grated with sandpaper. Still, I clung. A piece of light cracked open the darkness.

It was the pole light. I was on my back. I had the marble—the Earth—clutched in my fist. My shoulders burned. My clothes were flecked with fragments of ice. There were hands on my shoulders.

Wisp’s hands.

Wisp leaned down and looked at me. That sweet smell of hers wrapped me up like mummy bandages. She smiled. It was a shiny smile of straight white teeth, reminiscent of the sheen on a glass marble.

I knew then why my shoulders burned. Frostbite. Wisp had yanked me out of the circle.

In the next moment, her minions were lifting me to my feet, holding me steady until I could stand on my own. The Wisp took the marble out of my hand, dropped it into her purse, which a minion was holding for her, wide open.

And there was Billie. A crooked smile on her face. She was crouched, the ebony shooter-marble resting against her thumb and forefinger. The three-headed dog growled at me and the stick guardians stood up and were old folks again.

Billie had refused to take her shot.

She had refused to shoot with me in that circle. She had refused to destroy me and our planet. Was it respect for what I did, though I had no real idea what I was doing at the time? Or was she suddenly thinking about our ice-cream date, that moment when we had connected?

Slowly Billie stood up straight. The marble rolled from her hand and plopped onto the dirt outside the circle.

One of the guardians snapped it up, bagged it in Billie’s sack. When I looked into the circle, there were no longer marbles there, just perfectly round gray rocks.

The walls of the pit became apparent. The stars and the moon were bright in the heavens. The air had cooled. I could smell shit from the sewage radiating out of the wall of the pit.

The Wisp stared across the circle. Her minion women were gone. White cats had once again replaced them. They leaned against her legs and purred.

“You have defaulted, Billie,” Wisp said. “You didn’t shoot. You refused your shot.”

Billie nodded.

She looked at me. The expression on her face was hard to identify. Disappointment? Desire? A bit of anger. A bit of admiration. It all seemed to be there in that look.

“It would have been less lonely for me,” Billie said, looking at me.

“It really is time,” the Wisp said.

Billie found the coins the Wisp had tossed at her, placed them over her eyes, and then, as if those coins were bifocals, she turned and trudged up the hill, followed now by three hounds and the Guardians. When she was at the peak of the hill, she threw up her hand and extended her middle finger.

Not long after, we heard that old truck starting up. One cyclopean light blazed momentarily over the hill, then swung around. There was a rumble and an engine cough, and then the truck, Billie, and her companions, were gone.

I turned to look at the Wisp. Her cats were gone. Her purse was gone. There was only her. She smiled at me. Her hair lifted on the cool wind and came apart like ripped-away shadows. Her clothes jumped away. She stood naked and beautiful and translucent in the glow of the pole light before she faded into thin air.

“Now that was the shit,” Charlie said.

I went over and picked up Billie’s shoes. They fell apart in my hands.

* *. *

We left the pit then. As you might guess, we were all done with marbles. I threw all of mine away the next day.

My brother grew up and went into the business of demolition. Knocking down old buildings, blowing holes in the earth for mining. He never lost that gleam in his eyes when something came apart and fell down.

Me. Environmentalist. I might as well have gone into trying to catch cicada farts in a jar, for all the good I’ve done.

You only get to dance so much, and then the music stops and the lights go out. My music had stopped and my lights were flickering.

But maybe, I had done something. Something big. I had to ask myself that now and again. Had I saved the world? Part of the universe with an ice-cream date?

Well, not completely. Billie hadn’t totally lost. She’d knocked some things out of whack. Outside my window on the land where great pines had been, there is only a stretch of sandy earth. No birds fly. No bees buzz. Outside the air is heavy and thick, like breathing wool socks. Inside, the central air only manages to skim the edge off the heat, but not remove it.

Somewhere, between the cracks, Billie waits. Thinking how she missed her shot, building her strength, wanting all the marbles, looking for a way to escape.

If she does, this time there’ll be no stopping her. It occurs to me, the way we humans treat our Mother Ship, we may be responsible for the widening of those cracks. Giving her enough room to slip through.