Desperation (19 page)

“What kind of deal did he make with you, this wonderful God? Was it like one of the baseball-card trades you do with your buds? Did he say ‘Hey, I'll trade you this neat Brian Ross '84 for this Kirstie Carver '88?' Was it like that? Or more like—”

“Lady, he's your boy and I don't mean to interfere, but why don't you give it a rest? I guess you lost your little girl; I lost my husband. We've all had a tough day.”

It was the woman who had shot at the cop. She was sitting on the end of the bunk. Her black hair hung against her cheeks like limp wings but did not obscure her face; she looked shocked and stricken and tired. Most of all tired. David couldn't remember ever having seen such a weary pair of eyes.

He thought for a moment that his mother would turn her rage on the dark-haired woman. It wouldn't have surprised him; she sometimes went nuclear with total strangers. He remembered once, when he'd been about six, she'd flamed a political candidate trolling for votes outside their neighborhood supermarket. The guy had made the tactical mistake of trying to hand her a leaflet when she had an armload of groceries and was late for an appointment. She had turned on him like some small, biting animal, asking him who he thought he was, what he thought he stood for, what his position was on the trade deficit, had he ever smoked pot, had he ever in his life converted the six-ten split, did he support a woman's right to choose. On that last one the guy had been emphatic—he
did
support a woman's right to choose, he told Ellen Carver proudly. “Good, great, because I choose right now to tell you to
GET THE HOLY HELL OUT OF MY FACE
!
” she had screamed, and that was when the guy had simply turned tail and fled. David hadn't blamed him, either. But something in the dark-haired woman's face
(Mary,
he thought,
her name is Mary)
changed his mother's mind, if blowing up had indeed been on it.

She focused on David again instead.

“So—any word from the big G on how we're supposed to get out of this? You were on your knees long enough, there must have been
some
sort of message.”

Ralph turned back to her. “Quit
riding
him!” he growled. “Just quit it! Do you think you're the only one who's hurting?”

She gave him a look which was perilously close to contempt, then looked back at David again. “Well?”

“No,” he said. “No message.”

“Someone's coming,” Mary said sharply. There was a window behind her bunk. She stood on the bunk and tried to look out. “Shit! Bars and frosted glass with goddam chicken-wire in it! But I hear it, I do!”

David heard it, too—an approaching motor. Suddenly it revved up, blatting at full power. The sound was accompanied by a scream of tires. He looked around at the old man. The old man shrugged and raised his hands, palms up.

David heard what might have been a yell of pain, and then another scream. Human, this time. It would be better to think it had been a scream of wind caught in a gutter or a downspout, but he thought it had almost certainly been human.

“What the hell?” Ralph said. “Jesus! Someone's screaming his head off! Is it the cop, do you think?”

“God I hope so!” Mary cried fiercely, still standing on the bunk and peering at the useless window. “I hope someone's pulling the son of a bitch's lungs right out of his chest!” She looked around at them. Her eyes were still tired, but now they looked wild, as well. “It could be help. Have you thought of that? It could be help!”

The engine—not too close but by no means distant—revved. The tires screamed again, screamed the way they did in the movies and on TV but hardly ever in real life. Then there was a crunching sound. Wood, metal, maybe both. A brief honk, as if someone had inadvertently struck the car's horn. A coyote howl rose, wavering and glassy. It was joined by another and another and another. They seemed to be mocking the dark-haired woman's idea of help. Now the motor was approaching, rumbling at a sedate level just above an idle.

The man with the white hair was sitting at the foot of the cell's bunk, his hands pressed together finger-to-finger between his thighs. He talked without raising his eyes from his hands. “Don't get your hopes up.” His voice sounded as cracked and dusty as the salt flats west and north of here. “Ain't nobody but him. I reckernize the sound of the motor.”

“I refuse to believe that,” Ellie Carver said flatly.

“Refuse all you want,” the old man said. “It don't matter. I was on the committee that approved the money for a new town cruiser. Just before I finished my term and retired from politics, that was. I went over to Carson City last November with Collie and Dick and we bought it at a DEA auction. That very car. I had my head under the hood before we bid on her and drove her halfway home at speeds varying from sixty-five to a hunnert n ten. I reckernize her, all right. It's our'n.”

And, as David turned to look at the old man, the still, small voice—the one he had first heard in Brian's hospital room—spoke to him. As usual, its arrival came pretty much as a surprise, and the two words it spoke made no immediate sense.

The soap.

He heard the words as clearly as he had heard
You're praying already
while he'd been sitting in the Viet Cong Lookout with his eyes closed.

The soap.

He looked into the left rear corner of the cell he was sharing with old Mr. White Hair. There was a toilet with no seat. Beside it was an ancient rust-stained porcelain sink. Sitting beside the righthand spigot was a green bar of what could only be Irish Spring soap.

Outside, the engine-sound of the Desperation police-cruiser grew fatter and closer. A little farther off, the coyotes howled. To David that howling had begun to sound like the laughter of lunatics after the keepers have decamped the asylum.

4

The Carver family had been
too distraught and too focused on their captor to notice the dead dog hung from the welcome-to-town sign, but John Marinville was a trained noticer. And in truth, the dog was now hard to miss. Since the Carvers had passed this way, the buzzards had found it. They sat on the ground below the carcass, the ugliest birds Johnny had ever seen, one pulling on Old Shep's tail, the other gnawing at one of his dangling feet. The body swung back and forth on the rope twisted around its neck. Johnny made a sound of disgust.

“Buzzards!” the cop said. “Gosh, aren't they something?” His voice had thickened a great deal. He had sneezed twice more on the ride in from town, and the second time there had been teeth in the blood he sprayed out of his mouth. Johnny didn't know what was happening to him and didn't care; he only wished it would hurry up. “I'll tell you something about buzzards,” the cop continued. “They wake to sleep and take their waking slow. They learn by going where they have to go. Wouldn't you agree,
mon capitaine?
”

A lunatic cop who quoted poetry. How Sartre.

“Whatever you say, Officer.” He had no intention of antagonizing the cop again, if he could help it; the guy seemed to be self-destructing, and Johnny wanted to be around when the process was over.

They rolled past the dead dog and the grisly skinned-looking things dining on it.

What about the coyotes, Johnny? What was up with them?

But he wouldn't let himself think about the coyotes, lined up along both sides of the road at neat intervals like an honor guard, or of how they had peeled off like the Blue Angels as soon as the cruiser passed, running back into the desert as if their heads were on fire and their asses were catching—

“They fart, you know,” the cop said in his bloodsoaked voice. “Buzzards fart.”

“No, I didn't know that.”

“Yessir, only birds that do. I tell you so you can put it in your book. Chapter 16 of
Travels with Harley.
”

Johnny thought the putative title of his book had never sounded so quintessentially stupid.

They were now passing a trailer park. Johnny saw a sign in front of one rusty, roof-sagging doublewide which read:

I'M A GUN-TOTIN' SNAPPLE-DRINKIN'

BIBLE-READIN' CLINTON-BASHIN' SON OF A BITCH
!

NEVER MIND THE DOG, BEWARE OF THE
OWNER
!

Welcome to country music hell,
Johnny thought.

The cruiser rolled past a mining-company building. There were quite a few cars and pickups in the parking lot, which struck Johnny as peculiar. It was past quitting time now, and not by a little. Why weren't these cars in their own driveways, or down in front of the local watering hole?

“Yep, yep,” the cop said. He lifted one hand, as if to frame a picture. “I can see it now. Chapter 16: The Farting Buzzards of Desperation. Sounds like a goddam Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, doesn't it? Burroughs was a better writer than you, though, and do you know why? Because he was a hack without pretensions. One with
priorities.
Tell the story, do the work, give people something they can enjoy without feeling too stupid, and stay out of the gossip columns.”

“Where are you taking me?” Johnny asked, striving for a neutral tone.

“Jail,” the big cop said in his stuffy, liquid voice. “Where anything you bray will be abused against you in a sort of caw.”

He leaned forward, wincing at the pain in his back where the cop had kicked him. “You need help,” he said. He tried to keep his voice non-accusatory, even gentle. “Do you know that, Officer?”

“
You're
the one who needs help,” the cop replied. “Spiritual, physical, and editorial.
Tak!
But no help is going to come, Big John. You've eaten your last literary lunch and fucked your last culture cunt. You're on your own in the wilderness, and this is going to be the longest forty days and forty nights of your entire useless life.”

The words rang in his head like the peal of some sickly bell. Johnny closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. They were in the town proper now, passing Gail's Beauty Bar on one side and True Value Hardware on the other. There was nobody on the sidewalks—absolutely nobody. He'd never seen a small Western town that was actually
bustling,
but this was ridiculous. No one at
all
? As they passed the Conoco station he saw a guy in the office, rocked back in his chair with his feet up on the desk, but that was it. Except . . . up ahead . . .

A pair of animals went trotting lazily across what appeared to be the town's only intersection, moving on a diagonal beneath the blinker-light. Johnny tried to tell himself they were dogs, but they weren't dogs. They were coyotes.

It's not all the cop, Johnny, don't you think it is. Something not normal is going on here. Something very much not normal.

As they reached the intersection, the cop slammed on the brakes. Johnny, not expecting it, was thrown forward into the mesh between the front and back seats. He hit his nose and bellowed with surprised pain.

The cop took no notice of him. “Billy Rancourt!” he cried, delighted. “Damn, that's Billy Rancourt! I
wondered
where he got off to! Drunk in the basement of The Broken Drum, I bet you that's where he was! Dollars to doughnuts! Big-Balls Billy, damn if it's not!”

“My
dose
!” Johnny cried. It had started bleeding again, and he once more sounded like a human foghorn. “Oh Christ, it
hurts
!”

“Shut up, you baby,” the cop said. “Gosh, aren't you spleeny?”

He backed up a little, then turned the cruiser so it was facing west on the cross-street. He cranked his window down and poked his head out. The nape of his neck was now the color of age-darkened bricks, badly blistered, crisscrossed with cracks. Bright lines of blood filled some of these.
“Billy!”
the cop yelled. “Yo, you Billy Rancourt!
Hey,
you old cuss!”

The western end of Desperation appeared to be a residential section—dusty and dispirited, but maybe a cut or two above the trailer park. Through his watering eyes, Johnny saw a man in bluejeans and a cowboy hat standing in the center of the street. He had been looking at two bicycles which sat there upside down, with their wheels sticking up. There had been three, but the smallest—a candy-pink little girl's bike—had fallen over in the strengthening wind. The wheels of the other two spun madly. Now this fellow looked up, saw the cruiser, waved hesitantly, then started toward them.

The cop pulled his large square head back in. He turned to look at Johnny, who understood at once that the guy out there couldn't have gotten a good look at this particular officer of the law; if he had, he would be running in the other direction right now. The cop's mouth had the sunken, infirm look of lips with no teeth to back them up, and blood ran from the corners in little streams. One of his eyes was a cauldron of gore—except for an occasional gray flash from its swimming depths, it could have been a plucked socket. A shiny mat of blood covered the top half of his khaki shirt.

“That's Billy Rancourt,” he confided happily. “He cuts my hair. I been
looking
for him.” He lowered his voice to that register at which confidences are imparted and added, “He drinks a bit.” Then he faced front, dropped the transmission into Drive, and floored the accelerator. The rumbling engine howled; the tires squalled; Johnny was thrown backward, yelling with surprise. The cruiser shot forward.

Johnny reached out, hooked his fingers through the mesh, and hauled himself back to a sitting position. He saw the man in the jeans and cowboy hat—Big-Balls Billy Rancourt—just standing there in the street ten feet or so in front of the bikes, frozen, watching them come. He seemed to swell in the windshield as the cruiser ran at him; it was like watching some crazy camera trick.

“No!”
Johnny shrieked, beating his left hand at the mesh behind the cop's head.
“No, don't! Don't!
MISTER, LOOK OUT
!
”

At the last minute, Billy Rancourt understood and tried to run. He broke to his right, toward a ramshackle house squatting tiredly behind a picket fence, but it was too little and too late. He yelled, then there was a crump as the cruiser struck him hard enough to make the frame shudder. Blood spattered the picket fence, there was a double thud from beneath the car as the wheels ran over the fallen man, and then the cruiser hit the fence and knocked it down. The big cop jammed on the brakes, bringing the cruiser to a stop in the bald dirt dooryard of the ramshackle house. Johnny was thrown forward into the mesh again, but this time he managed to get his arm up and his head down, protecting his nose.

“Billy, you
bugger
!” the cop cried happily.
“Tak an lah!”

Billy Rancourt screamed. Johnny turned in the back seat of the cruiser and saw him crawling as fast as he could toward the north side of the street. That wasn't very fast; he was trailing a broken leg. There were tread-marks running across the back of his shirt and the set of his jeans. His cowboy hat was sitting on the pavement, now turned upside down like the bicycles. Billy Rancourt bumped it with one knee, knocking it aslant, and blood poured out over the brim like water. More blood was gushing from his split skull and broken face. He was badly hurt, but although he had been struck amidships and then run over, he didn't appear even close to dead. That didn't surprise Johnny much. Most times it took a lot to kill a man—he had seen it again and again in Vietnam. Guys alive with half their heads blown off, guys alive with their guts piled in their laps and drawing flies, guys alive with their jugulars spouting through their dirty fingers. People usually died hard. That was the horror of it.

“Yee
HAW
!
” the cop yelled, and dropped the cruiser's transmission into Reverse. The tires screamed and smoked across the sidewalk, bounced back into the street, and ran over Billy Rancourt's cowboy hat. The cruiser's back deck hit one of the bikes (it made a hell of a bang, cracked the rear window, then flew out of sight for a moment before coming down in front). Johnny had time to see that Billy Rancourt had stopped crawling, that he was looking back over his shoulder at them, that his blood-streaked broken-nosed face wore an expression of unspeakable resignation.
He can't even be thirty,
Johnny thought, and then the man was borne under the reversing car. It lurched over the body and came to a stop, idling, against the far curb. The cop hit the horn with the point of his elbow, making it blip briefly, as he turned to face forward again. Ahead of the cruiser's nose, Billy Rancourt lay face-down in a huge splat of blood. One of his feet twitched, then stopped.

“Whoa,” the cop said. “What a damn mess, huh?”

“Yeah, you killed him,” Johnny said. Suddenly he didn't care anymore about playing this guy up, outlasting him. He didn't care about the book, or his Harley, or where Steve Ames might be. Maybe later—if there
was
a later—he would care about some of those things, but not now. Now, in his shock and dismay, an earlier draft of himself had come out from someplace inside; a pre-edited version of Johnny Marinville who didn't give a shit about the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award or fucking actresses, with or without emeralds. “Ran him over in the street like a damn rabbit. Brave boy!”

The cop turned, gave him a considering look with his one good eye, then turned back to face the windshield again. “ ‘I have taught thee in the way of wisdom,' ” he said, “ ‘I have led thee in right paths. When thou goest, thy steps shall not be straitened; and when thou runnest, thou shalt not stumble.' That's from the Book of Adverbs, John. But I think old Billy stumbled. Yes, I do. He was always a gluefoot. I think that was his basic problem.”

Johnny opened his mouth. For one of the few times in his entire life, nothing came out. Maybe that was just as well.

“ ‘Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go: keep her; for she is thy life.' That's a little advice you could afford to take, Mr. Marinville, sir. Excuse me a minute.”

He got out and walked to the dead man in the street, his boots seeming to shimmer as the strengthening wind blew sand across them. There was a large bloody patch on the seat of his uniform pants now, and when he bent to pick up the late Billy Rancourt, Johnny saw more blood oozing out through the ripped seams under the cop's arms. It was as if he were literally sweating blood.

Maybe so.
Probably
so. I think he's on the verge of crashing and bleeding out, the way hemophiliacs sometimes do. If he wasn't so Christing big, he'd probably be dead already. You know what you have to do, don't you?

Yes, of course he did. He had a bad temper, a
horrible
temper, and it seemed that not even getting the shit kicked out of him by a homicidal maniac had changed that. What he had to do now was keep that temper of his under control. No more cracks, like calling the cop a brave boy just now. That had earned him a look Johnny hadn't liked at all. A
dangerous
look.

The cop carried Billy Rancourt's body across the street, stepping between the two fallen bikes and past the one with its wheels still whirring and its spokes shining in the evening light. He tromped over the knocked-down piece of picket fence, climbed the steps of the house behind it, and shifted his burden so he could try the door. It opened with no trouble. Johnny wasn't surprised. He supposed that people out here did not, as a rule, bother locking their doors.

He'll have to kill the people inside,
he thought.
That's pretty much automatic.