Desperation (32 page)

Chapter 5

1

“I think that's it.” Cynthia
pointed out her window. “See it?”

Steve, hunched over the wheel and squinting through the bloodsmeared windshield (although it was the sand sticking in the blood that was the real problem), nodded. Yes, he could see the old-fashioned marquee, held by rusty chains to the side of a weathered brick building. There was only one letter left on the marquee, a crooked
R.

He turned left, onto the tarmac of the Conoco station. A sign reading
BEST CIG PRICES IN TOWN
had fallen over. Sand had piled against the concrete base of the single pump-island like a snowdrift.

“Where you going? I thought the kid told you the movie theater!”

“He also told me not to park the truck near it. He's right, too. That wouldn't . . . hey, there's a
guy
in there!”

Steve brought the truck to a hard stop. There was indeed a guy in the Conoco station's office, rocked back in his chair with his feet on his desk. Except for something in his posture—mostly the awkward way his head was lying over on his neck—he could have been sleeping.

“Dead,” Cynthia said, and put a hand on Steve's shoulder as he opened his door. “Don't bother. I can tell from here.”

“We still need a place to hide the truck. If there's room in the garage, I'll open the door. You drive in.” There was no need to ask if she could do it; he hadn't forgotten the spiffy way she'd handled the truck out on Highway 50.

“Okay. But do it fast.”

“Believe me,” he said. He started to get out, then hesitated. “You
are
all right, aren't you?”

She smiled. It clearly took some effort, but it was a working smile, all the same. “For the time being. You?”

“Smokin.”

He got out, slammed the door behind him, and hurried across the tarmac to the gas station's office door. He was amazed at how much sand had accumulated already. It was as if the west wind were intent on burying the town. Judging from what he had seen of it so far, that wasn't such a bad idea.

There was a tumbleweed caught in the recessed doorway, its skeletal branches rattling. Steve booted it and it flew away into the night. He turned, saw that Cynthia was now behind the wheel of the truck, and gave her a little salute. She held her fists up in front of her, her face serious and intent, then popped the thumbs.
Mission Control, we are A-OK.
Steve grinned, nodded, and went inside. God, she could be funny. He didn't know if she knew it or not, but she could be.

The guy in the office chair needed a spot of burying. Inside the shadow thrown by the bill of his cap, his face was purple, the skin stretched and shiny. It had been stencilled with maybe two dozen black marks. Not snakebites, and too small even to be scorpion stings—

There was a skin magazine on the desk. Steve could read the title—
Lesbo Sweethearts
—upside down. Now something crawled over the edge of the desk and across the naked women on the cover. It was followed by two friends. The three of them reached the edge of the desk and stopped there in a neat line, like soldiers at parade rest.

Three more came out from under the desk and scurried across the dirty linoleum floor toward him. Steve took a step backward, set himself, then brought a workboot down, hard. He got two of the three. The other zigged to the right and raced off toward what was probably the bathroom. When Steve looked back at the desk, he saw there were now eight fellows lined up along the edge, like movie Indians on a ridge.

They were brown recluse spiders, also known as fiddle-back spiders, because the shape on their backs looked vaguely like a country fiddle. Steve had seen plenty in Texas, had even been stung by one while rooting in his Aunt Betty's woodpile as a boy. Over in Arnette, that had been, and it had hurt like a bastard. Like an ant-bite, only
hot.
Now he understood why the dead man smelled so spoiled in spite of the dry climate. Aunt Betty had insisted on disinfecting the bite with alcohol immediately, telling him that if you ignored a fiddleback's bite, the flesh around it was apt to start rotting away. It was something in their spit. And if enough of them were to attack a person all at once . . .

Another pair of fiddlebacks appeared, these two crawling out of the dark crease at the center of the gas-jockey's strokebook. They joined their pals. Ten, now. Looking at him. He knew they were. Another one crawled out of the pump-jockey's hair, journeyed down his forehead and nose, over his puffed lips, across his cheek. It was probably on its way to the convention at the edge of the desk, but Steve didn't wait to see. He headed for the garage, turning up his collar as he went. For all he knew, the goddam garage could be full of them. Recluse spiders liked dark places.

So be quick. Right?

There was a light-switch to the left of the door. He turned it. Half a dozen dirty fluorescents buzzed to life above the garage area. There were actually two bays, he saw. In one was a pickup which had been raised on oversized tires and customized into an all-terrain vehicle—silky blue metal-flake paint,
THE DESERT ROVER
written in red on the driver's side of the cab. The other bay would do for the Ryder truck, though, if he moved a pile of tires and the recapping machine.

He waved to Cynthia, not knowing if she could actually see him or not, and crossed to the tires. He was bending over them when a rat leaped out of the dark hole in the center of the stack and sank its teeth into his shirt. Steve cried out in surprise and revulsion and hit himself in the chest with his right fist, breaking its back. The rat began to wriggle and pedal its back legs in the air, squealing through its clenched teeth, trying to bite him.

“Ah, fuck!”
Steve scream.
“Ah, fuck, you fuck, let go, you little fuck!”

Not so little, though—it was almost the size of a full-grown cat. Steve leaned forward, bowing so his shirt would bell out (he did this without thinking, any more than he was aware he was screaming and cursing), then grabbed the rat's hairless tail and yanked. There was a harsh ripping sound as his shirt tore open, and then the rat was doubling over on the lumpy knuckles of its broken spine, trying to bite his hand.

Steve swung it by its tail like a lunatic Tom Sawyer, then let it fly. It zoomed across the garage, a ratsteroid, and smacked into the wall beyond
THE DESERT ROVER
. It lay still with its clawed feet sticking up. Steve stood watching it, making sure it wasn't going to get up and come at him again. He was shuddering all over, and the noise that came out of his mouth made him sound cold—
Brr-rrrr-ruhhh.

There was a long, tool-littered table to the right of the door. He snatched up a tire iron, holding it by the pry-bar end, and kicked over the stack of tires. They rolled like tiddlywinks. Two more rats, smaller ones, ran out, but they wanted no part of him; they sprinted, squeaking, toward the shadowy nether regions of the garage.

He couldn't stand the sick ratblood heat against his skin another second. He tore his shirt the rest of the way open and then pulled it off. He did it one-handed. There was no way he was going to drop the tire iron.
You'll take my tire iron when you pry it from my cold dead fingers
, he thought, and laughed. He was still shuddering. He examined his chest carefully, obsessively, for any break in the skin. There was none. “Lucky,” he muttered to himself as he pulled the recapper over to the wall and then hurried to the garage door. “Lucky, goddam lucky, fucking goddam rat-in-the-box.”

He pushed the button by the door and it began trundling up. He stepped to one side, giving Cynthia room, looking everywhere for rats and spiders and God knew what other nasty surprises. Next to the worktable was a gray mechanic's coverall hanging from a nail, and as Cynthia drove the Ryder truck into the garage, engine roaring and lights glaring, Steve began to beat this coverall with the tire iron, working from the legs up like a woman beating a rug, watching to see what might run out of the legs or armholes.

Cynthia killed the truck's engine and slid down from the driver's seat. “Whatcha doin? Why'd you take your shirt off? You'll catch your death of cold, the temperature's already started to—”

“Rats.” He had reached the top of the coverall without spooking any wildlife; now he started working his way back down again. Better safe than sorry. He kept hearing the sound the rat's spine had made when it broke, kept feeling the rat's tail in his fist. Hot, it had been.
Hot.

“Rats?” She looked around, eyes darting.

“And spiders. The spiders are what got the guy in th—”

He was suddenly alone, Cynthia out the open garage door and on the tarmac, standing in the wind and blowing sand with her arms wrapped around her thin shoulders. “Spiders, ouug, I hate spiders! Worse'n snakes!” She sounded pissed, as if the spiders were
his
fault. “Get out of there!”

He decided the coverall was safe. He pulled it off the hook, started to toss the tire iron away, then changed his mind. Holding the coverall draped over one arm, he pushed the button beside the door and then went over to Cynthia. She was right, it was getting cold. The alkali dust stung his bare shoulders and stomach. He began to wriggle his way into the coverall. It was going to be a little baggy in the gut, but better too big than too small, he supposed.

“I'm sorry,” she said, wincing and holding a hand to the side of her face as the wind gusted, driving a sheet of sand at them. “It's just, spiders, ouug, so bad, I can't . . . what kind?”

“You don't want to know.” He zipped the coverall up the front, then put an arm around her. “Did you leave anything in the truck?”

“My backpack, but I guess I can do without a change of underwear tonight,” she said, and smiled wanly. “What about your phone?”

He patted his left front jeans pocket through the coverall. “Don't leave home without it,” he said. Something tickled across the back of his neck and he slapped at it madly, thinking of the brown recluses lined up so neatly along the edge of the desk, soldiers in some unknown cause out here in nowhere.

“What's wrong?”

“I'm just a little freaked. Come on. Let's go to the movies.”

“Oh,” she said in that prim little no-nonsense voice that just cracked him up. “A date. Yes, thanks.”

2

As Tom Billingsley led Mary,
the Carvers, and America's greatest living novelist (at least in the novelist's opinion) down the alley between The American West and the Desperation Feed and Grain, the wind hooted above them like air blown across the mouth of a pop bottle.

“Don't use the flashlights,” Ralph said.

“Right,” Billingsley said. “And watch out here. Garbage cans, and a pile of old crap. Lumber, tin cans.”

They skirted around the huddle of cans and the pile of scrap lumber. Mary gasped as Marinville took her arm, at first not sure who it was. When she saw the long, somehow theatrical hair, she attempted to pull free. “Spare me the chivalry. I'm doing fine.”

“
I'm
not,” he said, holding on. “I don't see for shit at night anymore. It's like being blind.” He sounded different. Not humble, exactly—she had an idea that John Marinville could no more be humble than some people could sing middle C off a pitch-pipe—but at least
human.
She let him hold on.

“Do you see any coyotes?” Ralph asked her in a low voice.

She restrained an urge to make a smart come-back—at least he hadn't called her “ma'am.” “No. But I can barely see my own hand in front of my face.”

“They're gone,” David said. He sounded completely sure of himself. “At least for now.”

“How do you know?” Marinville asked.

David shrugged in the gloom. “Just do.”

And Mary thought they could probably trust him on it. That was how crazy things had gotten.

Billingsley led them around the corner. A rickety board fence ran along the backside of the movie theater, leaving a gap of about four feet. The old man walked slowly along this path with his hands held out. The others followed in single file; there was no room to double up. Mary was just starting to think Billingsley had gotten them down here on some sort of wild-goose chase when he stopped.

“Here we are.”

He bent, and Mary saw him pick something up—a crate, it looked like. He put it on top of another one, then stepped up onto the makeshift platform with a wince. He was standing in front of a dirty frosted-glass window. He put his hands on this, the fingers spread like starfish, and pushed. The window slid up.

“It's the ladies',” he said. “Watch out. There's a little drop.”

He turned around and slid through, looking like a large, wrinkled boy entering the Over-the-Hill Gang's clubhouse. David followed, then his father. Johnny Marinville went next, first almost falling off the crate platform as he turned around. He really
was
close to blind in the dark, she thought, and reminded herself never to ride in a car this man was driving. And a motorcycle? Had he really crossed the country on a
motorcycle
? If so, God must love him a lot more than she ever would.

She grabbed him by the back of the belt and steadied him. “Thanks,” he said, and this time he did sound humble. Then he was wriggling through the window, puffing and grunting, his long hair hanging in his face.

Mary took one quick look around, and for a moment she heard ghost-voices in the wind.

Didn'
t you see it?

See what?

On that sign. That speed-limit sign.

What about it?

There was a dead cat on it.

Now, standing on the crate, she thought:
The people who said those things really are ghosts, because they're dead. Me as much as him—certainly the Mary Jackson who left on this trip is gone. The person back here behind this old movie house, she's someone new.

She passed her gun and flashlight through the window to the hands held up to take them, then turned around and slid easily over the sill and into the ladies'.

Ralph caught her around the hips and eased her down. David was shining his flashlight around, holding one hand over the top of the lens in a kind of hood. The place had a smell that made her wrinkle her nose—damp, mildew, booze. There was a carton filled with empty liquor bottles in one corner. In one of the toilet-stalls there were two large plastic bins filled with beer-cans. These had been placed over a hole where, once upon a time, she supposed, there had been an actual toilet.
Around the time James Dean died, from the look of the place,
she thought. She realized she could use a toilet herself, and that no matter how the place smelled, she was hungry, as well. Why not? She hadn't had anything to eat for almost eight hours. She felt guilty about being hungry when Peter would never eat again, but she supposed the feeling would pass. That was the hell of it, when you thought it over. That was the exact hell of it.

“Holy shit,” Marinville said, pulling his own flashlight out of his shirt and shining it into the beer-can repository. “You and your friends must party hearty, Thomas.”

“We clean the whole place out once a month,” Billingsley said, sounding defensive. “Not like the kids that used to run wild upstairs until the old fire escape finally fell down last winter. We don't pee in the corners, and we don't use drugs, either.”

Marinville considered the carton of liquor empties. “On top of all that J. W. Dant, a few drugs and you'd probably explode.”

“Where
do
you pee, if you don't mind me asking?” Mary said. “Because I could use a little relief in that direction.”

“There's a Port-A-Potty across the hall in the men's. The kind they have in sickrooms. We keep that clean, too.” He gave Marinville a complex look, equal parts truculence and timidity. Mary supposed that Marinville was preparing to tee off on Billingsley. She had an idea Billingsley felt it coming, too. And why? Because guys like Marinville needed to establish a pecking order, and the veterinarian was clearly the most peckable person in attendance.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Might I borrow your flashlight, Johnny?”

She held out her hand. He looked at it dubiously, then handed it over. She thanked him and headed for the door.

“Whoa—neat!” David said softly, and that stopped her.

The boy had focused his flashlight on one of the few sections of wall where the tiles were still mostly intact. On it someone had drawn a gloriously rococo fish in various Magic Marker colors. It was the sort of flippy-tailed, half-mythological beast that one sometimes found disporting atop the wavelets of very old sea-maps. Yet there was nothing fearsome or sea-monsterish about the fellow swimming on the wall above the broken Towl-Master dispenser; with its blue Betty Boop eyes and red gills and yellow dorsal fin, there was something sweet and exuberant about it—here in the fetid, booze-smelling dark, the fish was almost miraculous. Only one tile had fallen out of the drawing, eradicating the lower half of the tail.

“Mr. Billingsley, did you—”

“Yes, son, yes,” he said, sounding both defiant and embarrassed. “I drew it.” He looked at Marinville. “I was probably drunk at the time.”

Mary paused in the doorway, bracing for Marinville's reply. He surprised her. “I've been known to draw a few drunkfish myself,” he said. “With words rather than coloring pens, but I imagine the principle is the same. Not bad, Billingsley. But why here? Of all places, why here?”

“Because I like this place,” he said with considerable dignity. “Especially since the kids cleared out. Not that they ever bothered us much back here; they liked the balcony, mostly. I suppose that sounds crazy to you, but I don't much care. It's where I come to be with my friends since I retired and quit the Town Committee. I look forward to the nights I spend with them. It's just an old movie theater, there's rats and the seats are full of mildew, but so what? It's our business, ain't it? Our own business. Only now I suppose they're all dead. Dick Onslo, Tom Kincaid, Cash Lancaster. My old pals.” He uttered a harsh, startling cry, like the caw of a raven. It made her jump.

“Mr. Billingsley?” It was David. The old man looked at him. “Do you think he killed
everyone
in town?”

“That's crazy!” Marinville said.

Ralph yanked his arm as if it were the stop-cord on a bus. “Quiet.”

Billingsley was still looking at David and rubbing at the flesh beneath his eyes with his long, crooked fingers. “I think he may have,” he said, and glanced at Marinville again for a moment. “I think he may have at least tried.”

“How many people are we talking about?” Ralph asked.

“In Desperation? Hundred and ninety, maybe two hundred. With the new mine people starting to trickle in, maybe fifty or sixty more. Although it's hard to tell how many of em would've been here and how many up to the pit.”

“The pit?” Mary asked.

“China Pit. The one they're reopening. For the copper.”

“Don't tell me one man, even a moose like that, went around town and killed
two hundred people,
” Marinville said, “because, excuse me very much, I don't believe it. I mean, I believe in American enterprise as much as anyone, but that's just nuts.”

“Well, he might have missed a few on the first pass,” Mary said. “Didn't you say he ran over a guy when he was bringing you in? Ran him over and killed him?”

Marinville turned and favored her with a weighty frown. “I thought you had to take a leak.”

“I've got good kidneys. He did, didn't he? He ran someone down in the street. You said so.”

“All right, yeah. Rancourt, he called him. Billy Rancourt.”

“Oh Jesus.” Billingsley closed his eyes.

“You knew him?” Ralph asked.

“Mister, in a town the size of this one, everybody knows everybody. Billy worked at the feed store, cut some hair in his spare time.”

“All right, yeah, Entragian ran this Rancourt down in the street—ran him down like a dog.” Marinville sounded upset, querulous. “I'm willing to accept the idea that Entragian may have killed a
lot
of people. I know what he's capable of.”

“Do you?” David asked softly, and they all looked at him. David looked away, at the colorful fish floating on the wall.

“For one guy to kill hundreds of people . . .” Marinville said, and then quit for a moment, as if he'd temporarily lost his train of thought. “Even if he did it at night . . . I mean,
guys
 . . .”

“Maybe it wasn't just him,” Mary said. “Maybe the buzzards and the coyotes helped.”

Marinville tried to push this away—even in the gloom she could see him trying—and then gave up. He sighed and rubbed at one temple, as if it hurt. “Okay, maybe they did. The ugliest bird in the universe tried to scalp me when he told it to, that I
know
happened. But still—”

“It's like the story of the Angel of Death in Exodus,” David said. “The Israelites were supposed to put blood on their door-tops to show they were the good guys, you know? Only here,
he's
the Angel of Death. So why did he pass over
us
? He could have killed us all just as easy as he killed Pie, or your husband, Mary.” He turned to the old man. “Why didn't he kill you, Mr. Billingsley? If he killed everyone else in town, why didn't he kill
you
?”

Billingsley shrugged. “Dunno. I was laying home drunk. He came in the new cruiser—same one I helped pick out, by God—and got me. Stuck me in the back and hauled me off to the
calabozo.
I asked him why, what I'd done, but he wouldn't tell me. I
begged
him. I cried. I didn't know he was crazy, not then, how could I? He was quiet, but he didn't give any signs that he was
crazy.
I started to get that idea later, but at first I was just convinced I'd done something bad in a blackout. That I'd been out driving, maybe, and hurt someone. I . . . I did something like that once before.”

“When did he come for you?” Mary asked.

Billingsley had to think about it in order to be sure. “Day before yesterday. Just before sundown. I was in bed, my head hurting, thinking about getting something for my hangover. An aspirin, and a little hair of the dog that bit me. He came and got me right out of bed. I didn't have anything on but my underwear shorts. He let me dress.
Helped
me. But he wouldn't let me take a drink even though I was shaking all over, and he wouldn't tell me why he was taking me in.” He paused, still rubbing the flesh beneath his eyes. Mary wished he would stop doing that, it was making her nervous. “Later on, after he had me in a cell, he brought me a hot dinner. He sat at the desk for a little while and said some stuff. That's when I started to think he must be crazy, because none of it made sense.”

“ ‘I see holes like eyes,' ” Mary said.

Billingsley nodded. “Yeah, like that. ‘My head is full of blackbirds,' that's another one I remember. And a lot more I don't. They were like Thoughts for the Day out of a book written by a crazy person.”

“Except for being in town to start with, you're just like us,” David said. “And you don't know why he let you live any more than we do.”

“I guess that's right.”

“What happened to you, Mr. Marinville?”

Marinville told them about how the cop had pulled up behind his bike while he had been whizzing and contemplating the scenery north of the road, and how he had seemed nice at first. “We talked about my books,” he said. “I thought he was a fan. I was going to give him a fuckin autograph. Pardon my French, David.”

“Sure. Did cars go by while you were talking? I bet they did.”

“A few, I guess, and a couple of semis. I didn't really notice.”

“But he didn't bother any of them.”

“No.”

“Just you.”

Marinville looked at the boy thoughtfully.

“He picked you out,”
David persisted.