Desperation (11 page)

Good. That doesn
't cross my eyes in the slightest.

The cop opened the driver's-side door, leaned in, and stared through the mesh between the front seat and the back. His nostrils flared as he sniffed. To Johnny, each one of them looked roughly the size of a bowling alley.

“Did you puke in the back of my cruiser, Lord Jim? Because if you did, the first thing you're gonna get when we hit town is a big old spoon.”

“No,” Johnny said. He could feel fresh blood trickling down his throat and his voice was fogging up again. “I dry-heaved, but I didn't puke.” He was actually relieved by what the cop had said.
The first thing you're gonna get when we hit town
indicated that he didn't intend to drag him out of the car, blow his brains out, and bury him next to his scoot.

Unless he's trying to lull me. Soothe me down, make it easier for him to do . . . well, to do whatever.

“You scared?” the cop inquired, still leaning in and looking through the mesh. “Tell me the truth, Lord Jimmy, I'll know a lie.
Tak!
”

“Of course I'm scared.” “Course” came out “gorse,” as if he had a bad cold.

“Good.” He dropped behind the wheel, took off the hat, looked at it. “Doesn't fit,” he said. “Folk-singing bitch ruined the one that did. Never sang ‘Leavin' on a Fucking Jet Plane,' either.”

“Too bad,” Johnny said, not having the slightest idea what the cop was talking about.

“Lips which lie are best kept silent,” the cop said, tossing the hat that wasn't his over into the passenger seat. It landed on a tangle of meshy stuff that appeared studded with spikes. The seat, bowed into a tired curve by the cop's weight, settled against Johnny's left knee, squeezing it.

“Sit up!”
Johnny yelled.
“You're crushing my leg! Sit up and let me pull it out! Jesus, you're killing me!”

The cop made no reply and the pressure on Johnny's already outraged left leg increased. He seized it in both hands and tore it free of the sagging seat-back with an indrawn hiss of effort that pulled blood down his throat and started him dry-heaving for real.

“Bastard!”
Johnny yelled, the word popping out in a red-misted coughing spasm before he could pull it back. The cop seemed not to notice that, either. He sat with his head lowered and his fingers tapping lightly on the wheel. His breath was wheezing in his throat, and for a moment Johnny wondered if the man was mocking him. He didn't think so.
I hope it'
s asthma,
he thought.
And I hope you choke on it.

“Listen,” he said, allowing none of that sentiment to enter his voice, “I need something for my dose . . .
nose.
It's killing me. Even an aspirin. Do you have an aspirin?”

The cop said nothing. Went on tapping the wheel with his head down, that was all.

Johnny opened his mouth to say something else, then closed it again. He was in terrible pain, all right, the worst he could remember, even worse than the gallstone he had passed in '89, but he still didn't want to die. And something in the cop's posture, as if he were very far away in his own head, deciding something important, suggested that death might be close.

So he kept silent and waited.

Time spun out. The shadows of the mountains grew a bit thicker and moved a bit closer, but the coyotes had fallen silent. The cop sat with his head lowered and his fingers tapping the sides of the wheel, seeming to meditate, not looking up when another semi went by headed east and a car passed them going west, swinging out to give the parked police-cruiser with the ticking roof-flashers a wide berth.

Then he picked up something which had been lying beside him on the front seat: an old-fashioned shotgun with a double-trigger setup. The cop looked at it fixedly. “I guess that woman wasn't really a folk-singer,” he said, “but she tried her best to kill me, no doubt about that. With this.”

Johnny said nothing, only waited. His heart was beating slowly but very hard in his chest.

“You have never written a truly spiritual novel,” the cop told him. He spoke slowly, enunciating each word with care. “It is your great unrecognized failing, and it is at the center of your petulant, self-indulgent behavior. You have no interest in your spiritual nature. You mock the God who created you, and by doing so you mortify your own
pneuma
and glorify the mud which is your
sarx.
Do you understand me?”

Johnny opened his mouth, then closed it again. To speak or not to speak, that was the question.

The cop solved the dilemma for him. Without looking up from the wheel, without so much as a glance into the rearview mirror, he placed the double barrels of the shotgun on his right shoulder and pointed them back through the wire mesh. Johnny moved instinctively, sliding to the left, trying to get away from those huge dark holes.

And although the cop still did not look up, the muzzles of the gun tracked him as precisely as a radar-controlled servomotor.

He might have a mirror in his lap,
Johnny thought, and then:
But what good would that do? He wouldn't see anything but the roof of the fucking car. What in the hell is going on here?

“Answer me,” the cop said. His voice was dark and brooding. His head was still bent. The hand not holding the shotgun continued to tap at the wheel, and another gust of wind hammered the cruiser, driving sand and alkali dust against the window in a fine spray. “Answer me
now.
I won't wait. I don't
have
to wait. There's always another one coming along. So . . . do you understand what I just told you?”

“Yes,” Johnny said in a trembling voice. “
Pneuma
is the old Gnostic word for spirit.
Sarx
is the body. You said, correct me if I'm wrong—”
Just not with the shotgun, please don'
t correct me with the shotgun.
“—that I've ignored my spirit in favor of my body. And you could be right. You could very well be.”

He moved to the right again. The shotgun muzzles tracked his movements precisely, although he could swear that the springs of the back seat made no sound beneath him and the cop could not see him unless he was using a television monitor or something.

“Don't toady to me,” the cop said wearily. “That will only make your fate worse.”

“I . . .” He licked his lips. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—”

“
Sarx
is not the body;
soma
is the body.
Sarx
is the
flesh
of the body. The body is made of flesh—as the word was reputedly made flesh by the birth of Jesus Christ—but the body is more than the flesh that makes it. The sum is greater than the parts. Is that so hard for an intellectual such as yourself to understand?”

The shotgun barrel, moving and moving. Tracking like an autogyro.

“I . . . I never . . .”

“Thought of it that way? Oh please. Even a spiritual
naïf
like you must understand that a chicken dinner is not a chicken.
Pneuma . . . soma . . . and s-s-s—
”

His voice had thickened and now he was hitching in breath, trying to talk as a person does only when trying to finish his thought before the sneeze arrives. He abruptly dropped the shotgun onto the seat again, gasped in a deep breath (the abused seat creaked backward, almost pinning Johnny's left knee again), and let fly. What came out of his mouth and nose was not mucus but blood and red filmy stuff that looked like nylon mesh. This stuff—raw tissue from the big cop's throat and sinuses—hit the windshield, the steering wheel, the dashboard. The smell was awful, the smell of rotted meat.

Johnny clapped his hands to his face and screamed. There was no way not to scream. He could feel his eyeballs pulsing in their sockets, could feel adrenaline roar into his system as the shock-reaction set in.

“Gosh, there's nothing worse than a summer cold, is there?” the cop asked in his dark, musing voice. He cleared his throat and spat a clot the size of a crabapple onto the face of the dashboard. It hung where it was for a moment, then oozed down the front of the police-radio like an unspeakable snail, leaving a trail of blood behind. It hung briefly from the bottom of the radio, then dropped to the floormat with a plop.

Johnny closed his eyes behind his hands and moaned.

“That
was
sarx,”
the cop said, and started the engine. “You might want to keep it in mind. I'd say ‘for your next book,' but I don't think there's going to
be
a next book, do you, Mr. Marinville?”

Johnny didn't answer, only kept his hands over his face and his eyes closed. It occurred to him that quite possibly none of this was happening, that he was in a nuthouse some-place, having the world's ugliest hallucination. But his better, deeper mind knew that wasn't true. The
stench
of what the man had sneezed out—

He's dying, he's got to be dying, that'
s infection and internal bleeding, he's sick, his mental illness is only one symptom of something else, some radiation thing, or maybe rabies, or . . . or . . .

The cop hauled the Caprice cruiser around in a U, pointing it east. Johnny kept his hands over his face a little longer, trying to get himself under control, then lowered them and opened his eyes. What he saw out the right-hand window made his jaw drop.

Coyotes sat along the roadside at fifty-foot intervals like an honor guard—silent, yellow-eyed, tongues lolling. They appeared to be grinning.

He turned and looked out the other window, and here were more of them, sitting in the dust, in the blazing sun of late afternoon, watching the police-cruiser go by.
Is
that
a symptom, too?
he asked himself.
What you're seeing out there, is
that
a symptom, too? If so, how come I can see it?

He looked out the cruiser's back window. The coyotes were peeling away as soon as they passed, he saw, loping off into the desert.

“You'll learn, Lord Jim,” the cop said, and Johnny turned back toward him. He saw gray eyes staring from the rearview mirror. One was filmed with blood. “Before your time is up, I think you'll understand a great deal more than you do now.”

Ahead was a sign by the side of the road, an arrow pointing the way toward some little town or other. The cop put on his turnblinker, although there was no one to see it.

“I'm taking you to the classroom,” the big cop said. “School will be in shortly.”

He made the right turn, the cruiser lifting onto two wheels and then settling back. It headed south, toward the cracked bulwark of the open-pit mine and the town huddled at its base.

Chapter 4

1

Steve Ames was breaking one
of the Five Commandments—the last one on the list, as a matter of fact.

The Five Commandments had been given to him a month ago, not by God but by Bill Harris. They had been sitting in Jack Appleton's office. Appleton had been Johnny Marinville's editor for the last ten years. He was present for the handing down of the commandments but did not participate in this part of the conversation until near the end—only sat back in his desk chair with his exquisitely manicured fingers spread on the lapels of his suitcoat. The great man himself had left fifteen minutes before, head up and studly gray hair flying out behind him, saying he had promised to join someone at an art gallery down in SoHo.

“All these commandments are thou shalt nots, and I don't expect you to have any trouble remembering them,” Harris had said. He was a tubby little guy, and there probably wasn't much harm in him, but everything he said came out sounding like the decree of a weak king. “Are you listening?”

“Listening,” Steve had agreed.

“First, thou shalt not drink with him. He's been on the wagon for awhile—five years, he claims—but he's stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous, and that's not a good sign. Also, for Johnny the wagon's always had a nonstick surface, even
with
AA. But he doesn't like to drink alone, so if he asks you to join him for a few after a hard day on the old Harley, you say no. If he starts bullying you, telling you it's part of your job, you still say no.”

“Not a problem,” Steve had said.

Harris ignored this. He had his speech, and he intended to stick to it.

“Second, thou shalt not score drugs for him. Not so much as a single joint.

“Third, thou shalt not score women for him . . . and he's apt to ask you, particularly if some good-looking babes show up at the receptions I'm setting up for him along the way. As with the booze and the drugs, if he scores on his own, that's one thing. But don't help him.”

Steve had thought of telling Harris that he wasn't a pimp, that Harris must have confused him with his own father, and decided that would be fairly imprudent. He opted for silence instead.

“Fourth, thou shalt not cover up for him. If he starts boozing or drugging—particularly if you have reason to think he's doing coke again—get in touch with me at once. Do you understand?
At once.
”

“I understand,” Steve replied, and he had, but that didn't mean he would necessarily comply. He had decided he wanted this gig in spite of the problems it presented—in part
because
of the problems it presented; life without problems was a fairly uninteresting proposition— but that didn't mean he was going to sell his soul to keep it, especially not to a suit with a big gut and the voice of an overgrown kid who has spent too much of his adult life trying to get some payback for real or imagined slights he had suffered in the elementary-school playground. And although John Marinville was a bit of an asshole, Steve didn't hold that against him. Harris, though . . . Harris was in a whole other league.

Appleton had leaned forward at this point, making his lone contribution to the discussion before Marinville's agent could get to the final commandment.

“What's your impression of Johnny?” he asked Steve. “He's fifty-six years old, you know, and he's put a lot of hard mileage on the original equipment. Especially in the eighties. He wound up in the emergency room three different times, twice in Connecticut and once down here. The first two were drug ODs. I'm not telling tales out of school, because all that's been reported—exhaustively—in the press. The last one may have been a suicide attempt, and that
is
a tale out of school. I'd ask you to keep it to yourself.”

Steve had nodded.

“So what do you think?” Appleton asked. “Can he really drive almost half a ton of motorcycle cross-country from Connecticut to California, and do twenty or so readings and receptions along the way? I want to know what you think, Mr. Ames, because I'm frankly doubtful.”

He had expected Harris to come busting in then, touting the legendary strength and iron balls of his client—Steve knew suits, he knew agents, and Harris was both—but Harris was silent, just looking at him. Maybe he wasn't so stupid after all, Steve thought. Maybe he even cared a little for this particular client.

“You guys know him a lot better than I do,” he said. “Hell, I only met him for the first time two weeks ago and I've
never
read one of his books.”

Harris's face said that last didn't surprise him at all.

“Precisely why I'm asking you,” Appleton replied. “We
have
known him for a long time. Me since 1985, when he used to party with the Beautiful People at 54, Bill since 1965. He's the literary world's Jerry Garcia.”

“That's unfair,” Harris said stiffly.

Appleton shrugged. “New eyes see clear, my grandmother used to say. So tell me, Mr. Ames, do you think he can do it?”

Steve had seen the question was serious, maybe even vital, and thought it over for almost a full minute. The two other men sat and let him.

“Well,” he had said at last, “I don't know if he can just eat the cheese and stay away from the wine at the receptions, but make it across to California on the bike? Yeah, probably. He looks fairly strong. A lot better than Jerry Garcia did near the end, I'll tell you that. I've worked with a lot of rockers half his age who don't look as good.”

Appleton had looked dubious.

“Mostly, though, it's a look he gets on his face. He
wants
to do this. He wants to get out on the road, kick some ass, take down some names. And . . .” Steve had found himself thinking of his favorite movie, one he watched on tape every year or so:
Hombre,
with Paul Newman and Richard Boone. He had smiled a little. “And he looks like a man who's still got a lot of hard bark left on him.”

“Ah.” Appleton had looked downright mystified at that. Steve hadn't been much surprised. If Appleton had ever come equipped with hard bark, Steve thought it had probably all rubbed off by the time he was a sophomore at Exeter or Choate or wherever he'd gone to wear his blazers and rep ties.

Harris had cleared his throat. “If we've got that out of the way, the final commandment—”

Appleton groaned. Harris went on looking at Steve, pretending not to hear.

“The fifth and final commandment,” he had repeated. “Thou shalt not pick up hitchhikers in thy truck. Neither male nor female shalt thou pick them up, but especially not female.”

Which was probably why Steve Ames never hesitated when he saw the girl standing beside the road just outside Ely—the skinny girl with her nose bent and her hair dyed two different colors. He just pulled over and stopped.