Desperation (21 page)

PART II

DESPERATION:

IN THESE SILENCES

SOMETHING MAY RISE

Chapter 1

1

“Steve?”

“What?”

“Is that what I think it is?”

She was pointing out her window, pointing west.

“What do you
think
it is?”

“Sand,” she said. “Sand and wind.”

“Yep. I'd say that's what it is.”

“Pull over a minute, would you?”

He looked at her, questioning.

“Just for a minute.”

Steve Ames pulled the Ryder van over to the side of the road which led south from Highway 50 to the town of Desperation. They had found it with no trouble at all. Now he sat behind the wheel and looked at Cynthia Smith, who had tickled him even in his unease by calling him her nice new friend. She wasn't looking at her nice new friend now; she was looking down at the bottom of her funky Peter Tosh shirt and plucking at it nervously.

“I'm a hard-headed babe,” she said without looking up. “A little psychic, but hard-headed just the same. Do you believe that?”

“I guess.”

“And practical. Do you believe
that
?”

“Sure.”

“That's why I made fun of your intuition, or whatever. But you thought we'd find something out there by the road, and we did.”

“Yes. We did.”

“So it was a good intuition.”

“Would you get to the point? My boss—”

“Right. Your boss, your boss, your boss. I know that's what you're thinking about and practically
all
you're thinking about, and that's what's got me worried. Because I have a bad feeling about this, Steve. A bad
intuition.
”

He looked at her. Slowly, reluctantly, she raised her head and looked back at him. What he saw in her eyes startled him badly—it was the flat shine of fear.

“What is it? What are you afraid of?”

“I don't know.”

“Look, Cynthia . . . all we're going to do is find a cop—lacking that, a phonebooth—and report Johnny missing. Also a bunch of people named Carver.”

“Just the same—”

“Don't worry, I'll be careful. Promise.”

“Would you try 911 on your cellular again?” She asked this in a small, meek voice that was not much like her usual one.

He did, to please her, expecting nothing, and nothing was what he got. Not even a recording this time. He didn't know for sure, but he thought the oncoming windstorm, or duststorm, or whatever they called them out here, might be screwing things up even worse.

“Sorry, no go,” he said. “Want to give it a try yourself? You might have better luck. The woman's touch, and all that.”

She shook her head. “Do
you
feel anything? Anything at all?”

He sighed. Yes, he felt something. It reminded him of the way he had sometimes felt in early puberty, back in Texas. The summer he turned thirteen had been the longest, sweetest, strangest summer of his life. Toward the end of August, evening thunderstorms had often moved through the area—brief but hellacious convulsions the old cowboys called “benders.” And in that year (a year when it seemed that every other pop song on the radio was by The Bee Gees), the hushed minutes before these storms—black sky, still air, sharpening thunder, lightning jabbing at the prairie like forks into tough meat—had somehow turned him on in a way he had never experienced since. His eyes felt like globes of electricity in chrome sockets, his stomach rolled, his penis filled with blood and stood up hard as a skillet-handle. A feeling of terrified ecstasy came in those hushes, a sense that the world was about to give up some great secret, to play it like a special card. In the end, of course, there had never been a revelation (unless his discovery of how to masturbate a year or so later had been it), only rain. That was how he felt now, only there was no hardon, no tingling armhairs, no ecstasy, and no sense of terror, not really. What he had been feeling ever since she had uncovered the boss's motorcycle helmet was a sense of low foreboding, a sense that things had gone wrong and would soon go wronger. Until she had spoken up just now, he'd pretty much written that feeling off. As a kid, he'd probably just been responding to changes in the air-pressure as the storm approached, or electricity in the air, or some other damned thing. And a storm was coming now, wasn't it? Yes. So it was probably the same thing, déjà vu all over again, as they said, perfectly understandable. Yet—

“Yeah, okay, I
do
feel something. But what in the hell can I do about it? You don't want me to turn back, do you?”

“No. We can't do that. Just be careful. 'Kay?”

A gust of wind shook the Ryder truck. A cloud of tawny sand blew across the road, turning it into a momentary mirage.

“Okay, but you've got to help.”

He got the truck moving again. The setting sun had touched the rising membrane of sand in the west now, and its bottom arc had gone as red as blood.

“Oh yeah,” she said, grimacing as a fresh blast of wind hit the truck. “You can count on that.”

2

The bloodsoaked cop locked the
newcomer into the cell next to David Carver and Tom Billingsley. That done, he turned slowly on his heels in a complete circle, his half-peeled, bleeding face solemn and contemplative. Then he reached into his pocket and brought out the keyring again. He selected the same one as before, David noticed—square, with a black mag-strip on it—so it was probably a master.

“Eeenie-meenie-miney-moe,” he said. “Catch a tourist by the toe.” He walked toward the cell which held David's mother and father. As he approached they drew back, arms around each other again.

“You leave them alone!” David cried, alarmed. Billingsley took his arm above the elbow, but David shook it off. “Do you hear me?
Leave them alone!
”

“In your dreams, brat,” Collie Entragian said. He poked the key into the cell's lock and there was a little thump as the tumblers turned. He pulled the door open. “Good news. Ellie—your parole came through. Pop on out here.”

Ellen shook her head. Shadows had begun to gather in the holding area now and her face swam in them, pale as paper. Ralph put his other arm around her waist and drew her back even farther. “Haven't you done enough to our family?” he asked.

“In a word, no.” Entragian drew his cannon-sized gun, pointed it at Ralph, and cocked it. “You come out of here right now, little lady, or I'll shoot this no-chin pecker-checker spang between the eyes. You want his brains in his head or drying on the wall? It's all the same to me either way.”

God, make him quit it,
David prayed.
Please make him quit it. If you could bring Brian back from wherever he was, you can do that. You can make him quit it. Dear God, please don't let him take my mother.

Ellen was pushing Ralph's hands down, pushing them off her.

“Ellie, no!”

“
I have
to. Don't you see that?”

Ralph let his hands fall to his sides. Entragian dropped the hammer on his gun and slid it back into his holster. He held one hand out to Ellen, as if inviting her to take a spin on the dance floor. And she went to him. When she spoke, her voice was very low. David knew she was saying something she didn't want him to hear, but his ears were good.

“If you want . . . that, take me where my son won't have to see.”

“Don't worry,” Entragian said in that same low, conspirator's voice. “I don't want . . . that. Especially not from . . . you. Now come on.”

He slammed the cell door shut, giving it a little shake to make sure it was locked, while he held onto David's mother with the other hand. Then he led her toward the door.

“Mom!”
David screamed. He seized the bars and shook them. The cell door rattled a little, but that was all.
“Mom, no! Leave her alone, you bastard!
LEAVE MY MOTHER ALONE
!”

“Don't worry, David, I'll be back,” she said, but the soft, almost uninflected quality of her voice scared him badly—it was as if she were already gone. Or as if the cop had hynotized her just by touching her. “Don't worry about me.”

“
No!”
David screamed.
“Daddy, make him stop! Make him stop!”
In his heart was a growing certainty: if the huge, bloody cop took his mother out of this room, they would never see her again.

“David . . .” Ralph took two blundering steps backward, sat on the bunk, put his hands over his face, and began to cry.

“I'll take care of her, Dave, don't worry,” Entragian said. He was standing by the door to the stairs and holding Ellen Carver's arm above the elbow. He wore a grin that would have been resplendent if not for his blood-streaked teeth. “I'm sensitive—a real
Bridges of Madison County
kind of guy, only without the cameras.”

“If you hurt her, you'll be sorry,” David said.

The cop's smile faded. He looked both angry and a little hurt. “Perhaps I will . . . but I doubt it. I really do. You're a little prayboy, aren't you?”

David looked at him steadily, saying nothing.

“Yes, yes you are. You've just got that prayboy look about you, great-gosh-a'mighty eyes and a real jeepers-creepers mouth. A little prayboy in a baseball shirt! Gosh!” He put his head close to Ellen's and looked slyly at the boy through the gauze of her hair. “Do all the praying you want, David, but don't expect it to do you any help. Your God isn't here, any more than he was with Jesus when Jesus hung dying on the cross with flies in his eyes.
Tak!
”

Ellen saw it coming up the stairs. She screamed and tried to pull back, but Entragian held her where she was. The coyote oiled through the doorway. It didn't even look at the screaming woman with her arm pinched in the cop's fist but crossed calmly to the center of the room. Then it stopped, turned its head over one shoulder, and fixed its yellow stuffed-animal stare on Entragian.

“Ah lah,
”
he said, and let go of Ellen's arm long enough to spank his right hand across the back of his left hand in a quick gesture that reminded David of a flat stone skipping across the surface of a pond.
“Him en tow.”

The coyote sat down.

“This guy is fast,” Entragian said. He was apparently speaking to all of them, but it was David he was looking at. “I mean the guy is
fast.
Faster than most dogs. You stick a hand or foot out of your cell, he'll have it off before you know it's gone. I guarantee that.”

“You leave my mother alone,” David said.

“Son,” Entragian said regretfully, “I'll put a stick up your mother's twat and spin her until she catches fire, if I so decide, and you'll not stop me. And I'll be back for
you.
”

He went out the door, pulling David's mother with him.

3

There was silence in the
room, broken only by Ralph Carver's choked sobs and the coyote, which sat panting and regarding David with its unpleasantly intelligent eyes. Little drops of spittle fell from the end of its tongue like drops from a leaky pipe.

“Take heart, son,” the man with the shoulder-length gray hair said. He sounded like a guy more used to taking comfort than giving it. “You saw him—he's got internal bleeding, he's losing his teeth, one eye's ruptured right out of his head. He can't last much longer.”

“It won't take him long to kill my mom, if he decides to,” David said. “He already killed my little sister. He pushed her down the stairs and broke . . . broke her n-n-neck.” His eyes abruptly blurred with tears and he willed them back. This was no time to get bawling.

“Yes, but . . .” The gray-haired man trailed off.

David found himself remembering an exchange with the cop when they had been on their way to this town—when they had still thought the cop was sane and normal and only helping them out. He had asked the cop how he knew their name, and the cop had said he'd read it on the plaque over the table. It was a good answer, there
was
a plaque with their name on it over the table . . . but Entragian never would have been able to see it from where he was standing at the foot of their RV's stairs.
I've got eagle eyes, David,
he'd said,
and those are eyes that see the truth from afar.

Ralph Carver came slowly forward to the front of his cell again, almost shuffling. His eyes were bloodshot, the lids puffy, his face ravaged. For a moment David felt almost blinded with rage, shaken by a desire to scream:
This is all your fault! Your fault that Pie's dead! Your fault that he's taken Mom off to kill her or rape her! You and your gambling! You and your stupid vacation ideas! He should have taken you, Dad, he should have taken
you!

Stop it, David.
His thought, Gene Martin's voice.
That's just the way it wants you to think.

It?
The cop, Entragian, was that who the voice meant by
it?
And what way did he . . . or it . . .
want
him to think? For that matter, why would it care what way he thought at all?

“Look at that thing,” Ralph said, staring at the coyote. “How could he call it in here like that? And why does it stay?”

The coyote turned toward Ralph's voice, then glanced at Mary, then looked back at David. It panted. More saliva fell to the hardwood floor, where a little puddle was forming.

“He's got them trained, somehow,” the gray-haired man said. “Like the birds. He's got some trained buzzards out there. I killed one of the scraggy bastards. I stomped it—”

“No,” Mary said.

“No,” Billingsley echoed. “I'm sure that coyotes can be trained, but this is not training.”

“Of course it is,” the gray-haired man snapped.

“That cop?” David said. “Mr. Billingsley says he's taller than he used to be. Three inches, at least.”

“That's insane.” The gray-haired man was wearing a motorcycle jacket. Now he unzipped one of the pockets, took out a battered roll of Life Savers, and put one in his mouth.

“Sir, what's your name?” Ralph asked the gray-haired man.

“Marinville. Johnny Marinville. I'm a—”

“What you are is blind if you can't see that something very terrible and very out of the ordinary is going on here.”

“I didn't say it wasn't terrible, and I certainly didn't say it was ordinary,” the gray-haired man replied. He went on, but then the voice came again, the outside voice, and David lost track of their conversation.

The soap. David, the soap.

He looked at it—a green bar of Irish Spring sitting beside the spigot—and thought of Entragian saying
I'll be back for you.

The soap.

Suddenly he understood . . . or thought he did.
Hoped
he did.

I better be right. I better be right, or—

He was wearing a Cleveland Indians tee-shirt. He pulled it off, dropped it by the cell door. He looked up and saw the coyote staring at him. Its ragged ears were all the way up again, and David thought he could hear it growling, low and far back in its throat.

“Son?” his father asked. “What do you think you're doing?”

Without answering, he sat down on the end of the bunk, took off his sneakers, and tossed them over to where his shirt lay. Now there was no question that the coyote was growling. As if it knew what he was planning to do. As if it meant to stop him if he actually tried it.

Don't be a dope, of course it means to stop you if you try it, why else did the cop leave it there? You just have to trust. Trust and have faith.

“Have faith that God will protect me,” he murmured.

He stood up, unbuckled his belt, then paused with his fingers on the snap of his jeans. “Ma'am?” he said. “Ma'am?” She looked at him, and David felt himself blush. “I wonder if you'd mind turning around,” he said, “I have to take off my pants, and I guess I better take off my underwear, too.”

“What in God's name are you thinking about?” his father asked. There was panic in his voice now. “Whatever it is, I forbid it! Absolutely!”

David didn't reply, only looked at Mary. Looked at her as steadily as the coyote was looking at him. She returned his look for a moment, then, without saying a word, turned her back. The man in the motorcycle jacket sat on his bunk, crunching his Life Saver and watching him. David was as body-shy as most eleven-year-olds, and that steady gaze made him uncomfortable . . . but as he had already pointed out to himself, this was no time to be a dope. He took another glance at the bar of Irish Spring, then thumbed down his pants and undershorts.