NEAL STEPHENSON
that Squeaky was looking at last night. They are scattered about like cigarette butts behind a bar. When the footpads of her wheels pass over these vials, they tiddlywink out from underneath and skitter across the pavement.
People are lined up out the door, waiting to get in. Y.T. jumps the line and goes inside.
___________ The front room of the Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates is, of course, like all the others. A row of padded vinyl chairs where worshippers can wait for their number to be called, with a potted plant at each end and a table strewn with primeval magazines. A toy corner where kids can kill time, reenacting imaginary, cosmic battles in injection-molded plastic. A counter done up in fake wood so it looks like something from an old church. Behind the counter, a pudgy high school babe, dishwater blond hair that has been worked over pretty good with a curling iron, blue metal-flake eyeshadow, an even coat of red makeup covering her broad, gelatinous cheeks, a flimsy sort of choir robe thrown over her T-shirt.
When Y.T. comes in, she is right in the middle of a transaction. She sees Y.T. right away, but no three.ring binder anywhere in the world allows you to flag or fail in the middle of a transaction.
Styinied, Y.T. sighs and crosses her arms to convey impatience. In any other business establishment, she’d already be raising hell and marching around behind the counter as if she owned the place. But this is a church, damn it.
There’s a little rack along the front of the counter bearing religious tracts, free for the taking. donation requested. Several slots on the rack are occupied by the Reverend Wayne’s famous bestseller, How America Was Saved from Communism: ELVIS SHOT JFK.
She pulls out the envelope that the man with the glass eye stuck into her pocket. It is not thick and soft enough to contain a lot of cash, unfortunately.
It contains half a dozen snapshots. All of them feature Uncle Enzo. He is on the broad, fiat horseshoe driveway of a large house, larger than any house Y.T. has ever seen with her own two