Crawlers Read Free Page B

was a big ol’ earthquake crack formed the first day they were here.”
    “Oh, great. Now I live in a town named after a fucking crack in the ground. What’s Spanish for
butt crack
?”
    She rolled her eyes. “Ex-
cuse
me? Um, shut
up
?”
    “Earthquakes, huh. Hey, where’s the earthquake crack?”
    Adair shrugged. “Gone, I
guess
, probably. Filled up. I think it was over in the next town anyway, probably, in Pinole. Anyway, we’re closer here to San Francisco than you were to New York City. We’re right across the bay. San Francisco is cool.”
    “Yeah, right, the town of Queer-Bait across the bay from fucking
San Francisco
, home of gay parades and shit.”
    But he said it in a way that made her smile, because he was laughing at himself as he said it. The familiar shade of irony people put on everything. You knew he was the kind of guy who could have a friend who was gay and maybe give him a little shit about it, but neither of them taking it seriously. That’s why she liked him, and almost trusted him.
    He was the kind of guy who’d make fun of Latino people sometimes, too—but she’d seen him be really nice to Suzie Jalesca, who was Mexican and a flagrant lesbo, and you could tell it was the way he really felt about it: Like there was an obligation to make fun of people of every kind. Make fun of them for being trailer-park whites, ghetto gangbangers, low-rider cholos, white Republican drones, knee-jerk liberals, computer nerds, football fanatics, gays, whatever. Just make fun of them all because that made them all equal. People were more the same than different, and guys like Waylon knew that.
    She looked at a TV light shining, blinking web-colored onto the darkened lawn of the house they were passing. “I’d like to do some photography of that . . . just get that glow.”
    “You into cameras and shit?” It was a gruff way of asking, but he seemed really interested.
    “Yeah, I took an after-school class, and I’m sort of hooked on it. It’d be hard to do something like colored lights from a window at night—I mean, to get it the way it really should look. I’m still learning—and I’ve got a kind of half-assed Canon my mom got me for Christmas last year.”
    “I always wanted to do that. Photography or movie cameras or something. I can play some guitar, is all.”
    “My brother plays guitar. Not very good, but he plays. My dad used to sing, but he gave it up.” She tried to peer through the half-curtained picture window of a ranch-style house; past the small saguaro in a cactus garden and under a season flag that showed a simplified harvest cornucopia. “Huh. You can’t see the actual, like, TV sets most of the time. You can really tell what they’re watching from the glow?”
    “Those people are watching
The Simpsons
reruns. I just saw some colors that means Bart threw something at Lisa.”
    “You know too much about television. You should go on that show,
Beat the Geeks.
”
    “It’s true,” he said. “My mom . . . watching TV’s about all we do together. Watch TV when she’s—”
    He seemed about to say something more, but broke off. Another touchy area. But she knew what it was. Maybe they had something in common.
    They came to a corner, followed it around till they were walking down Birdsong toward Owlswoop Avenue.
    Quiebra was right on the edge of a wilderness preserve. The coyotes were somewhere near, hoping a fat, slow old cat would get restless enough to come up into the hills that crowded the street.
    There were rattlers up there, too. They’d come down from the hills and canyons to ease soundlessly through the ivy between houses. Raccoons raided garbage cans, and there were so many horned owls some nights it sounded, Adair’s mom said, “like an owl convention.”
    Adair smiled, seeing jack-o’-lanterns still on people’s porches, starting to sag like they were elderly people beginning to fall in on themselves. There was still a Halloween feeling in the air. The