Chapter 8: Bunny's Boneyard

I walked up to her.

She tipped her rhinestone sunglasses down her nose and looked me over from boots to hair.

"Well, can you?"

"Bend glass?"

"No, sweetheart, tap dance. Yes, bend glass."

"Since I was nine."

"Then get in the truck, kid. I don't want your name. Names are for people who plan on staying the same."

Her truck was a red pickup older than me with a cracked dashboard and a hula girl stuck to it.

She drove like she was late for a fire.

"Bunny LaRue," she said, running a yellow light. "That one's real. I picked it in 1986, so it's been real longer than the first one."

"You picked it?"

"In the ladies' room of a Greyhound station in Kansas."

She lit a cigarette and cracked her window.

"I was twenty-seven. I had a husband in Providence with fists like canned hams."

"So I walked into a pawnshop on Atwells Avenue and asked for a ride across the river."

I turned and stared at her.

"You're from the Hill?"

"I was from the Hill. Now I'm from here." She blew smoke out the window. "I never went back. Not once. You won't either, if you're smart."

The city went by in a smear of light.

Then the light thinned out and we turned onto a dirt lot behind a chain-link fence.

She cut the engine.

"Welcome to the Boneyard."

It was an acre of dead signs under the stars.

A cowboy forty feet tall lay on his back with his hat in the dirt.

A martini glass the size of a car stood on its stem by the fence.

Giant letters leaned against each other in rows, spelling nothing.

There was a trailer with a porch light and a tin shop shed.

A ladder ran up the side of the shed to a little apartment on its roof.

"Sheets are clean," Bunny said. "Water's hot if you run it long enough. Coyotes are mostly polite."

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