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suggested a locomotive. Body angled left to right as if leaning into a stiff wind, he appeared to be pushing one of the enormous drive wheels, as if caught up in the machine and pressing forward with as much panic as determination, as though if he rested for an instant he would slip out of sync and be torn to pieces.
    None of the animated mural’s moving parts was yet operational; nevertheless, it fostered a convincing illusion of movement, speed.
    On commission, a famous artist with a single name—Valis—had designed the thing and had built it with a crew of sixteen.
    The mural was meant to symbolize the hectic pace of modern life, the harried individual overwhelmed by the forces of society.
    On the day when the resort opened for business, Valis himself would set the thing afire and burn it to the ground to symbolize the freedom from the mad pace of life that the new resort represented.
    Most locals in Vineyard Hills and the surrounding territory mocked the mural, and when they called it
art,
they pronounced the word with quotation marks.
    Billy rather liked the hulking thing, but burning it down didn’t make sense to him.
    The same artist had once fixed twenty thousand helium-filled red balloons to a bridge in Australia, so it appeared to be supported by them. With a remote control, he popped all twenty thousand at once.
    In that case, Billy didn’t understand either the “art”
or
the point of popping it.
    Although not a critic, he felt this mural was either low art or high craftsmanship. Burning it made no more sense to him than would a museum tossing Rembrandt’s paintings on a bonfire.
    So many things about contemporary society dismayed him that he wouldn’t lose sleep over this small issue. But on the night of burning, he wouldn’t come to watch the fire, either.
    He went into the tavern.
    The air carried such a rich scent that it almost seemed to have flavor. Ben Vernon was cooking a pot of chili.
    Behind the bar, Jackie O’Hara conducted an inventory of the liquor supply. “Billy, did you see that special on Channel Six last night?”
    “No.”
    “You didn’t see that special about UFOs, alien abduction?”
    “I was carving to zydeco.”
    “This guy says he was taken up to a mothership orbiting the earth.”
    “What’s new about that? You hear that stuff all the time.”
    “He says he was given a proctological exam by a bunch of space aliens.”
    Billy pushed through the bar gate. “That’s what they all say.”
    “I know. You’re right. But I don’t get it.” Jackie frowned. “Why would a superior alien race, a thousand times more intelligent than we are, come trillions of miles across the universe just to look up our butts? What are they—perverts?”
    “They never looked up mine,” Billy assured him. “And I doubt they looked up this guy’s, either.”
    “He’s got a lot of credibility. He’s a book author. I mean, even before this book, he published a bunch of others.”
    Taking an apron from a drawer, tying it on, Billy said, “Just publishing a book doesn’t give anyone credibility. Hitler published books.”
    “He did?” Jackie asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “
The
Hitler?”
    “Well, it wasn’t
Bob
Hitler.”
    “You’re jerking my chain.”
    “Look it up.”
    “What did he write—like spy stories or something?”
    “Something,” Billy said.
    “This guy wrote science fiction.”
    “Surprise.”
    “
Science
fiction,” Jackie emphasized. “The program was really disturbing.” Picking up a small white dish from the work bar, he made a sound of impatience and disgust. “What—am I gonna have to start docking Steve for condiments?”
    In the dish were fifteen to twenty maraschino-cherry stems. Each had been tied in a knot.
    “The customers find him amusing,” Billy said.
    “Because they’re half blitzed. Anyway, he pretends to be a funny type of guy, but he’s not.”
    “Everyone has his own idea of what’s funny.”
    “No, I mean, he pretends to be