Desperation (3 page)

“Give me your keys.”

“If you just—”

“Are you deaf? Give me your keys.”

He only raised his voice a little, but it was enough to start Mary crying. Feeling like someone who is having an out-of-body experience, Peter dropped Deirdre's car-keys into the cop's waiting hand and then put his arm around his wife's shaking shoulders.

“ 'Fraid you folks are going to have to come with me,” the cop said. His eyes went from Peter to Mary and then back to Peter again. When they did, Peter realized what it was about them that bothered him. They were bright, like the minutes before sunrise on a foggy morning, but they were also dead, somehow.

“Please,” Mary said, her voice wet. “It's a mistake. His sister—”

“Get in the car,” the cop said, indicating his cruiser. The flashers were still pulsing on the roof, bright even in the bright desert daylight. “Right now, please, Mr. and Mrs. Jackson.”

4

The rear seat was extremely
cramped (of course it would be, Peter thought distractedly, a man that big would have the front seat back as far as it would go). There were stacks of paper in the footwell behind the driver's seat (the back of that seat was actually warped from the cop's weight) and more on the back deck. Peter picked one up—it had a dried, puckered coffee-ring on it—and saw it was a
DARE
flyer. At the top was a picture of a kid sitting in a doorway. There was a dazed, vacant expression on his face (he looked the way Peter felt right now, in fact), and the coffee-ring circled his head like a halo.
USERS ARE LOSERS
, the folder said.

There was mesh between the front of the car and the back, and no handles or window-cranks on the doors. Peter had begun to feel like a character in a movie (the one which came most persistently to mind was
Midnight Express
), and these details only added to that sensation. His best judgement was that he had talked too much about too many things already, and it would be well for him and Mary to stay quiet, at least until they got to wherever Officer Friendly meant to take them. It was probably good advice, but it was hard advice to follow. Peter found himself with a powerful urge to tell Officer Friendly that a terrible mistake had been made here—he was an assistant professor of English, his specialty was postwar American fiction, he had recently published a scholarly article called “James Dickey and the New Southern Reality” (a piece which had generated a great deal of controversy in certain ivied academic bowers), and, furthermore, that he hadn't smoked dope in years. He wanted to tell the cop that he might be a little bit overeducated by central Nevada standards, but was still, basically, one of the good guys.

He looked at Mary. Her eyes were full of tears, and he was suddenly ashamed of the way he had been thinking—all me, me, me and I, I, I. His wife was in this with him; he'd do well to remember that. “Pete, I'm so scared,” she said in a whisper that was almost a moan.

He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. The skin was as cool as clay beneath his lips. “It'll be all right. We'll straighten this out.”

“Word of honor?”

“Word of honor.”

After putting them into the back seat of the cruiser, the cop had returned to the Acura. He had been looking into the trunk for at least two minutes now. Not searching it, not even moving anything around, just staring in with his hands clasped behind his back, as if mesmerized. Now he jerked like a man waking suddenly from a nap, slammed the Acura's trunk shut and walked back to the Caprice. It canted to the left when he got in, and from the springs beneath there came a tired but somehow resigned groan. The back seat bulged a little further, and Peter grimaced at the sudden pressure on his knees.

Mary should have taken this side,
he thought, but it was too late now. Too late for a lot of things, actually.

The cruiser's engine was running. The cop dropped the transmission into gear and pulled back onto the road. Mary turned to watch the Acura drop behind them. When she faced front again, Peter saw that the tears which had been standing in her eyes had spilled down her cheeks.

“Please listen to me,” she said, speaking to the cropped blond hair on the back of that enormous skull. The cop had laid his Smokey Bear hat aside again, and to Peter the top of his head looked to be no more than a quarter of an inch from the Caprice's roof. “
Please,
okay? Try to understand.
That isn't our car.
You
have
to understand that much at least, I know you do, because you saw the registration. It's my sister-in-law's. She's a pothead. Half her brain-cells—”

“Mare—” Peter laid a hand on her arm. She shook it off.

“No! I'm not going to spend the rest of the day answering questions in some dipshit police station, maybe in a jail cell, because your sister's selfish and forgetful and . . . and . . . all fucked up!”

Peter sat back—his knees were still being pinched pretty severely but he thought he could live with it—and looked out the dust-coated side window. They were a mile or two east of the Acura now, and he could see something up ahead, pulled over on the shoulder of the westbound lane. Some sort of vehicle. Big. A truck, maybe.

Mary had switched her gaze from the back of the cop's head to the rearview mirror, trying to make eye contact with him. “Half of Deirdre's brain-cells are fried and the other half are on permanent vacation in the Emerald City. The technical term is ‘burnout,' and I'm sure you've seen people like her, Officer, even out here. What you found under the spare tire probably is dope, you're probably right about that, but not
our
dope! Can't you see that?”

The thing up ahead, off the road with its tinted windshield pointed in the direction of Fallon and Carson City and Lake Tahoe, wasn't a truck after all; it was an RV. Not one of the real dinosaurs, but still pretty big. Cream-colored, with a dark green stripe running along the side. The words
FOUR HAPPY WANDERERS
were printed in the same dark green on the RV's blunt nose. The vehicle was road-dusty and canted over in an awkward, unnatural way.

As they neared it, Peter saw an odd thing: all the tires in his view appeared to be flat. He thought maybe the double set of back tires on the passenger side was flat, too, although he only caught the briefest glimpse of them. That many flat shoes would account for the land-cruiser's funny, canted look, but how did you
get
that many flat shoes all at once? Nails in the road? A strew of glass?

He looked at Mary, but Mary was still looking passionately up into the rearview mirror. “If we'd put that bag of dope under the tire,” she was saying, “if it was ours, then why in God's name would Peter have taken the spare out so you could see it? I mean, he could have reached around the spare and gotten the toolkit, it would have been a little awkward but there was room.”

They went past the RV. The side door was closed but unlatched. The steps were down. There was a doll lying in the dirt at the foot of them. The dress it was wearing fluttered in the wind.

Peter's eyes closed. He didn't know for sure if he had closed them or if they had closed on their own. Didn't much care. All he knew was that Officer Friendly had blown by the disabled RV as if he hadn't even seen it . . . or as if he already knew all about it.

Words from an old song, floating in his head:
Somethin happenin here . . . what it is ain't exactly clear . . .

“Do we impress you as stupid people?” Mary was asking as the disabled RV began to dwindle behind them—to dwindle as Deirdre's Acura had done. “Or stoned? Do you think we're—”

“Shut up,” the cop said. He spoke softly, but there was no way to miss the venom in his voice.

Mary had been sitting forward with her fingers curled into the mesh between the front and back seats. Now her hands dropped away from it, and she turned her shocked face toward Peter. She was a faculty wife, she was a poet who had published in over twenty magazines since her first tentative submissions eight years ago, she went to a women's discussion group twice a week, she had been seriously considering piercing her nose. Peter wondered when the last time was she had been told to shut up. He wondered if
anyone
had ever told her to shut up.

“What?” she asked, perhaps trying to sound aggressive, even threatening, and only sounding bewildered. “What did you tell me?”

“I'm arresting you and your husband on a charge of possession of marijuana with intent to sell,” the cop said. His voice was uninflected, robotic. Now staring forward, Peter saw there was a little plastic bear stuck to the dashboard, beside the compass and next to what was probably an LED readout for the radar speed-gun. The bear was small, the size of a gumball machine prize. His neck was on a spring, and his empty painted eyes stared back at Peter.

This is a nightmare,
he thought, knowing it wasn't.
It'
s got to be a nightmare. I know it feels real, but it's
got
to be.

“You can't be serious,” Mary said, but her voice was tiny and shocked. The voice of someone who knew better. Her eyes were filling up with tears again. “Surely you can't be.”

“You have the right to remain silent,” the big cop said in his robot's voice. “If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I'm going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?”

She was looking at Peter, her eyes huge and horrified, asking him without speaking if he had heard what the cop had mixed in with the rest of it, that robotic voice never varying. Peter nodded. He had heard, all right. He put a hand into his crotch, sure he would feel dampness there, but he hadn't wet himself. Not yet, anyway. He put an arm around Mary and could feel her trembling. He kept thinking of the RV back there. Door ajar, dollbaby lying face-down in the dirt, too many flat tires. And then there was the dead cat Mary had seen nailed to the speed-limit sign.

“Do you understand your rights?”

Act normally. I don
't think he has the slightest idea what he said, so act normally.

But what was normal when you were in the back seat of a police-cruiser driven by a man who was clearly as mad as a hatter, a man who had just said he was going to kill you?

“Do you understand your rights?” the robot voice asked him.

Peter opened his mouth. Nothing came out but a croak.

The cop turned his head then. His face, pinkish with sun when he had stopped them, had gone pale. His eyes were very large, seeming to bulge out of his face like marbles. He had bitten his lip, like a man trying to suppress some monstrous rage, and blood ran down his chin in a thin stream.

“Do you understand your rights?”
the cop screamed at them, head turned, bulleting blind down the deserted two-lane at better than seventy miles an hour.
“Do you understand your fucking rights or not? Do you or not? Do you or not? Do you or not? Answer me, you smart New York Jew!
”

“I do!” Peter cried. “We both do, just watch the road, for Christ's sake watch where you're going!”

The cop continued staring back at them through the mesh, face pale, blood dripping down from his lower lip. The Caprice, which had begun to veer to the left, almost all the way across the westbound lane, now slid back the other way.

“Don't worry about
me,
” the cop said. His voice was mild again. “Gosh, no. I've got eyes in the back of my head. In fact, I've got eyes just about everywhere. You'd do well to remember that.”

He turned back suddenly, facing front again, and dropped the cruiser's speed to an easygoing fifty-five. The seat settled back against Peter's knees with painful weight, pinning him.

He took Mary's hands in both of his own. She pressed her face against his chest, and he could feel the sobs she was trying to suppress. They shook through her like wind. He looked over her shoulder, through the mesh. On the dashboard, the bear's head nodded and bobbed on its spring.

“I see holes like eyes,” the cop said. “My mind is full of them.” He said nothing else until they got to town.

5

The next ten minutes were
very slow ones for Peter Jackson. The cop's weight against his pinned knees seemed to increase with each circuit of his wristwatch's second hand, and his lower legs were soon numb. His feet were dead asleep, and he wasn't sure that he would be able to walk on them if this ride ever ended. His bladder throbbed. His head ached. He understood that he and Mary were in the worst trouble of their lives, but he was unable to comprehend this in any real and meaningful way. Every time he neared comprehension, there was a short circuit in his head. They were on their way back to New York. They were expected. Someone was watering their plants. This couldn't be happening, absolutely could not.

Mary nudged him and pointed out her window. Here was a sign, reading simply
DESPERATION
. Under the word was an arrow pointing to the right.

The cop slowed, but not much, before making the right. The car started to tip and Peter saw Mary drawing in breath. She was going to scream. He put a hand over her mouth to stop her and whispered in her ear, “He's got it, I'm pretty sure he does, we're not going to roll.” But he
wasn't
sure until he felt the cruiser's rear end first slide, then catch hold. A moment later they were racing south along narrow patched blacktop with no centerline.

A mile or so farther on, they passed a sign which read
DESPERATION'S CHURCH
&
CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS WELCOME YOU
! The words
CHURCH
&
CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS
were readable, although they had been coated with yellow spray-paint. Above them, in the same paint, the words
DEAD DOGS
had been added in ragged caps. The churches and civic organizations were listed beneath, but Peter didn't bother to read them. A German Shepherd had been hanged from the sign. Its rear paws tick-tocked back and forth an inch or two above a patch of ground that was dark and muddy with its blood.

Mary's hands were clamped on his like a vise. He welcomed their pressure. He leaned toward her again, into the sweet smell of her perfume and the sour smell of her terrified sweat, leaned toward her until his lips were pressed against the cup of her ear. “Don't say a word, don't make a sound,” he murmured. “Nod your head if you understand me.”

She nodded against his lips, and Peter straightened up again.

They passed a trailer park behind a stake fence. Most of the trailers were small and looked as if they had seen better days—around the time
Cheers
first went on the air, perhaps. Dispirited-looking laundry flapped between a few of them in the hot desert wind. In front of one was a sign which read:

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

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

NEVER MIND THE DOG, BEWARE OF THE
OWNER
!

Mounted on an old Airstream which stood near the road was a large black satellite dish. On the side of it was another sign, white-painted metal down which streaks of rust had run like ancient bloody tears:

THIS TELACOMMUNICATIONS

PROPERTY RATTLESNAKE TRAILER PARK

NO TRESSPASSING! POLICE PATROLED
!

Beyond the Rattlesnake Trailer Park was a long Quonset hut with rusty, corrugated sides and roof. The sign out front read
DESPERATION MINING CORP
. To one side was a cracked asphalt parking lot with a dozen cars and pickups in it. A moment later they passed the Desert Rose Cafe.

Then they were in the town proper. Desperation, Nevada, consisted of two streets that crossed at right angles (a blinker-light, currently flashing yellow on all four sides, hung over the intersection) and two blocks of business buildings. Most seemed to have false fronts. There was an Owl's Club casino and cafe, a grocery, a laundrymat, a bar with a sign in the window reading
ENJOY OUR SLOTSPITALITY
, hardware and feed stores, a movie theater called The American West, a few others. None of the businesses looked as if they were booming, and the theater had the air of a place that has been closed a long time. A single crooked
R
hung from its dirty, bashed-in marquee.

Going the other way, east and west, were some frame houses and more trailers. Nothing seemed to be in motion except for the cruiser and one tumbleweed, which moved down Main in large, lazy lopes.

I'd get off the streets, too, if I saw this guy coming,
Peter thought.
You're goddamned tooting I would.

Beyond the town was an enormous curving bulwark with an improved dirt road at least four lanes wide running up to the top in a pair of wide switchbacks. The rest of this curved rampart, which had to be at least three hundred feet high, was crisscrossed by deep runoff trenches. To Peter they looked like wrinkles in old skin. At the foot of the crater (he assumed it was a crater, the result of some sort of mining operation), trucks that looked like toys compared to the soaring, wrinkled wall behind them were clustered together by a long, corrugated building with a conveyor belt running out of each end.

Their host spoke up for the first time since telling them his mind was full of holes, or whatever it was he'd said.

“Rattlesnake Number Two. Sometimes known as the China Pit.” He sounded like a tourguide who still enjoys his job. “Old Number Two was opened in 1951, and from '62 or so right through the seventies, it was the biggest open-pit copper mine in the United States, maybe in the world. Then it played out. They opened it up again year before last. They got some new technology that makes even the tailings valuable. Science, huh? Gosh!”

But there was nothing moving up there now, not that Peter could see, although it was a weekday. Just the huddle of trucks by what was probably some kind of sorting-mill, and another truck—this one a pickup—parked off to the side of the gravel highway leading to the summit. The conveyors at the ends of the long metal building were stopped.

The cop drove through the center of town, and as they passed beneath the blinker, Mary squeezed Peter's hands twice in rapid succession. He followed her gaze and saw three bikes in the middle of the street which crossed Main. They were about a block and a half down and had been set on their seats in a row, with their wheels sticking up. The wheels were turning like windmill blades in the gusty air.

She turned to look at him, her wet eyes wider than ever. Peter squeezed her hands again and made a “Shhh” sound.

The cop signalled a left turn—pretty funny, under the circumstances—and swung into a small, recently paved parking lot bordered on three sides by brick walls. Bright white lines were spray-painted on the smooth and crackless asphalt. On the wall at the rear of the lot was a sign which read:
MUNICIPAL EMPLOYEES AND MUNICIPAL BUSINESS ONLY PLEASE RESPECT THIS PARKING LOT
.

Only in Nevada would someone ask you to respect a parking lot,
Peter thought.
In New York the sign would probably read
UNAUTHORIZED VEHICLES WILL BE STOLEN AND THEIR OWNERS EATEN
.

There were four or five cars in the lot. One, a rusty old Ford Estate Wagon, was marked
FIRE CHIEF
. There was another police-car, in better shape than the Fire Chief's car but not as new as the one their captor was driving. There was a single handicapped space in the lot. Officer Friendly parked in it. He turned off the engine and then just sat there for a moment or two, head lowered, fingers tapping restlessly at the steering wheel, humming under his breath. To Peter it sounded like “Last Train to Clarksville.”

“Don't kill us,” Mary said suddenly in a trembling, teary voice. “We'll do whatever you want, just please don't kill us.”

“Shut your quacking Jew mouth,” the cop replied. He didn't raise his head, and he went on tapping at the wheel with the tips of his sausage-sized fingers.

“We're
not
Jews,” Peter heard himself saying. His voice sounded not afraid but querulous, angry. “We're . . . well, Presbyterians, I guess. What's this Jew thing?”

Mary looked at her husband, horrified, then back through the mesh to see how the cop was taking it. At first he did nothing, only sat with his head down and his fingers tapping. Then he grabbed his hat and got out of the car. Peter bent down a little so he could watch the cop settle the hat on his head. The cop's shadow was still squat, but it was no longer puddled around his feet. Peter glanced at his watch and saw it was a few minutes shy of two-thirty. Less than an hour ago, the biggest question he and his wife had had was what their accommodations for the night would be like. His only worry had been his strong suspicion that he was out of Rolaids.

The cop bent and opened the left rear door. “Please get out of the vehicle, folks,” he said.

They slid out, Peter first. They stood in the hot light, looking uncertainly up at the man in the khaki uniform and the Sam Browne belt and the peaked trooper-style hat.

“We're going to walk around to the front of the Municipal Building,” the cop said. “That'll be a left as you reach the sidewalk. And you look like Jews to me. The both of you. You have those big noses which connote the Jewish aspect.”

“Officer—” Mary began.

“No,” he said. “Walk. Make your left. Don't try my patience.”

They walked. Their footfalls on the fresh black tar seemed very loud. Peter kept thinking of the little plastic bear on the dashboard of the cruiser. Its jiggling head and painted eyes. Who had given it to the cop? A favorite niece? A daughter? Officer Friendly wasn't wearing a wedding ring, Peter had noticed that while watching the man's fingers tap against the steering wheel, but that didn't mean he had never been married. And the idea that a woman married to this man might at some point seek a divorce did not strike Peter as in the least bit odd.

From somewhere above him came a monotonous
reek-reek-reek
sound. He looked down the street and saw a weathervane turning rapidly on the roof of the bar, Bud's Suds. It was a leprechaun with a pot of gold under one arm and a knowing grin on his spinning face. It was the weathervane making the sound.

“To your
left,
Dumbo,” the cop said, sounding not impatient but resigned. “Do you know which way is your left? Don't they teach hayfoot and strawfoot to you New York Homo Presbyterians?”

Peter turned left. He and Mary were still walking hip to hip, still holding hands. They came to a set of three stone steps leading up to modern tinted-glass double doors. The building itself was much less modern. A white-painted sign hung on faded brick proclaimed it to be the
DESPERATION MUNICIPAL BUILDING
. Below, on the doors, were listed the offices and services to be found within: Mayor, School Committee, Fire, Police, Sanitation, Welfare Services, Department of Mines and Assay. At the bottom of the righthand door was printed:
MSHA FRIDAYS AT 1 PM AND BY APPOINTMENT
.

The cop stopped at the foot of the steps and looked at the Jacksons curiously. Although it was brutally hot out here, probably somewhere in the upper nineties, he did not appear to be sweating at all. From behind them, monotonous in the silence, came the
reek-reek-reek
of the weathervane.

“You're Peter,” he said.

“Yes, Peter Jackson.” He wet his lips.

The cop shifted his eyes. “And you're Mary.”

“That's right.”

“So where's Paul?” the cop asked, looking at them pleasantly while the rusty leprechaun squeaked and spun on the roof of the bar behind them.

“What?” Peter asked. “I don't understand.”

“How can you sing ‘Five Hundred Miles' or ‘Leavin' on a Jet Plane' without
Paul
?” the cop asked, and opened the righthand door. Machine-cooled air puffed out. Peter felt it on his face and had time to register how nice it was, nice and cool; then Mary screamed. Her eyes had adjusted to the gloom inside the building faster than his own, but he saw it a moment later. There was a girl of about six sprawled at the foot of the stairs, half-propped against the last four risers. One hand was thrown back over her head. It lay palm-up on the stairs. Her straw-colored hair had been tied in a couple of tails. Her eyes were wide open and her head was unnaturally cocked to one side. There was no question in Peter's mind about whom the dolly lying at the foot of the RV's steps had belonged to.
FOUR HAPPY WANDERERS
, it had said on the front of the RV, but that was clearly out of date in these modern times. There was no question in his mind about that, either.

“Gosh!” the cop said genially. “Forgot all about her! But you can never remember everything, can you? No matter how hard you try!”

Mary screamed again, her fingers folded down against her palms and her hands against her mouth, and tried to bolt back down the steps.

“No you don't, what a bad idea,” the cop said. He caught her by the shoulder and shoved her through the door, which he was holding open. She reeled across the small lobby, revolving her arms in a frantic effort to keep her balance, not wanting to fall on top of the dead child in the jeans and the
MotoKops 2200
shirt.

Peter started in toward his wife and the cop caught him with both hands, now using his butt to keep the righthand door open. He slung an arm around Peter's shoulders. His face looked open and friendly. Most of all,
best
of all, it looked
sane
—as if his good angels had won out, at least for now. Peter felt an instant's hope, and at first did not associate the thing pressing into his stomach with the cop's monster handgun. He thought of his father, who would sometimes poke him with the tip of his finger while giving him advice—using the finger to sort of tamp his aphorisms home—things like
No one ever gets pregnant if one of you keeps your pants on, Petie.