Desperation (33 page)

“Well . . . maybe. I can't say for sure. Everything seemed jake until he found the dope.”

Mary held her hands up. “Whoa, whoa, time out.”

Marinville looked at her.

“This dope you had—”

“It wasn't
mine,
don't go getting that idea. You think I'd try driving cross-country on a Harley with half a pound of grass in my saddlebag? My brains may be fried, but not
that
fried.”

Mary began to giggle. It made her need to pee worse, but she couldn't help it. It was all just too perfect, too wonderfully round. “Did it have a smile-sticker on it?” she asked, giggling harder than ever. She didn't really need an answer to this question, but she wanted it, just the same. “Mr. Smiley-Smile?”

“How did you know that?” Marinville looked astounded. He also looked remarkably like Arlo Guthrie, at least in the glow of the flashlights, and Mary's giggles became little screams of laughter. She realized that if she didn't get to the bathroom soon, she was going to wet her pants.

“B-Because it came from our t-t-
trunk,
” she said, holding her stomach. “It b-belonged to my sih-sih-
sister
-in-law. She's a total ding dong. Entragian may be c-c-crazy, but at least he r-r-recycles . . . excuse me, I'm about to h-have an accident.”

She hurried across the hall. What she saw when she opened the men's-room door made her laugh even harder. Set up like some comic-opera throne in the center of the floor was a portable toilet with a canvas bag suspended below the seat in a steel frame. On the wall across from it was another Magic Marker drawing, obviously from the same hand which had created the fish. This one was a horse at full gallop. There was orange smoke jetting from its nostrils and a baleful rose-madder glint in its eyes. It appeared to be headed out into an expanse of prairie somewhere east of the sun and west of the washbasins. None of the tiles had fallen out of this wall, but most had buckled, giving the stallion a warped and dreamish look.

Outside, the wind howled. As Mary unsnapped her pants and sat down on the cold toilet seat, she suddenly thought of how Peter sometimes put his hand up to his mouth when
he
laughed—his thumb touching one corner, his first finger touching the other, as if laughter somehow made him vulnerable—and all at once, with no break at all, at least none she could detect, she was crying. How stupid all this was, to be a widow at thirty-five, to be a fugitive in a town full of dead people, to be sitting in the men's room of an abandoned movie theater on a canvas Port-A-Potty, peeing and crying at the same time, pissing and moaning, you might say, and looking at a dim beast on a wall so warped that it seemed to be running underwater, how stupid to be so frightened, and to have grief all but stolen away by her mind's brute determination to survive at any cost . . . as if Peter had never meant anything anyway, as if he had just been a footnote.

How stupid to still feel so hungry . . . but she was.

“Why is this happening? Why does it have to be me?” she whispered, and put her face into her hands.

3

If either Steve or Cynthia
had had a gun, they probably would have shot her.

They were passing Bud's Suds (the neon sign in the window read
ENJOY OUR SLOTSPITALITY
) when the door of the next business up—the laundrymat—opened and a woman sprang out. Steve, seeing only a dark shape, drew back the tire iron to hit her.

“No!” Cynthia said, grabbing at his wrist and holding it. “Don't do that!”

The woman—she had a lot of dark hair and very white skin, but that was all Cynthia could tell at first—grabbed Steve by the shoulders and shoved her face up into his. Cynthia didn't think the laundrymat woman ever saw the upraised tire iron at all.
She
's gonna ask him if he's found Jeeeesus,
Cynthia thought.
It's never Jesus when they grab you like that, it's always Jeeeesus.

But of course that was not what she said.

“We have to get out.” Her voice was low, hoarse. “Right now.” She snatched a glance over her shoulder, flicked a look at Cynthia, then seemed to dismiss her entirely as she focussed on Steve again. Cynthia had seen this before and wasn't offended by it. When it got to be crunch-time, a certain kind of woman could only see the guy. Sometimes it was the way they had been raised; more often it seemed actually hard-wired into their cunning little Barbie Doll circuits.

Cynthia was getting a better look at her now, in spite of the dark and the blowing dust. An older woman (thirty, at least), intelligent-looking, not unsexy. Long legs poking out of a short dress that looked somehow gawky, as if the chick inside it wasn't accustomed to wearing dresses. Yet she was far from clumsy, judging from the way she moved with Steve when he moved, as if they were dancing. “Do you have a car?” she rapped.

“That's no good,” Steve said. “The road out of town is blocked.”

“Blocked? Blocked how?”

“A couple of house trailers,” he said.

“Where?”

“Near the mining company,” Cynthia said, “but that's not the only problem. There are a lot of dead people—”

“Tell me about it,” she said, and laughed shrilly. “Collie's gone nuts. I saw him kill half a dozen myself. He drove after them in his cruiser and shot them down in the street. Like they were cattle and Main Street was the killing-floor.” She was still holding onto Steve, shaking him as she spoke, as if scolding him, but her eyes were everywhere. “We have to get off the street. If he catches us . . . come in here. It's safe. I've been in here since yesterday forenoon. He came in once. I hid under the desk in the office. I thought he'd follow the smell of my perfume and find me . . . come around the desk and find me . . . but he didn't. Maybe he had a stuffy nose!”

She began to laugh hysterically, then abruptly slapped her own face to make herself stop. It was funny, in a shocking way; the sort of thing the characters in old Warner Brothers cartoons sometimes did.

Cynthia shook her head. “Not the laundrymat. The movie theater. There are other people there.”

“I saw his shadow,” the woman said. She was still holding Steve by the shoulders and her face was still turned confidentially up to his, as if she thought he was Humphrey Bogart and she was Ingrid Bergman and there was a soft filter on the camera. “I saw his shadow, it fell across the desk and I was sure . . . but he didn't, and I think we'll be safe in the office while we think about what to do next—”

Cynthia reached out, took the woman's chin in her hand, and turned it toward her.

“What are you
doing
?” the dark-haired woman asked angrily. “Just what in the hell do you think you're
doing
?”

“Getting your attention, I hope.”

Cynthia let go of the woman's face, and be damned if she didn't immediately turn back to Steve, every bit as brainless as a flower turning on its stalk to follow the sun, and resume her speed-rap.

“I was under the desk . . . and . . . and . . . we have to . . . listen, we have to . . .”

Cynthia reached out again, grasped the woman's lower face again, turned it back in her direction again.

“Hon, read my lips.
The theater. There are other people there.
”

The woman looked at her, frowning as if she were trying to get the sense of this. Then she looked past Cynthia's shoulder at the chain-hung marquee of The American West.

“The old movieshow?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure? I tried the door last night, after it got dark. It's locked.”

“We're supposed to go around to the back,” Steve said. “I have a friend, that's where he told me to go.”

“How'd he do that?” the dark-haired woman asked suspiciously, but when Steve started walking in that direction, she went along. Cynthia fell in next to her, walking on the outside. “How
could
he do that?”

“Cellular phone,” Steve said.

“They don't work very well around here as a rule,” the dark-haired woman said. “Too many mineral deposits.”

They walked under the theater's marquee (a tumbleweed caught in an angle between the glassed-in ticket-booth and the lefthand door rattled like a maraca) and stopped on the far side. “There's the alley,” Cynthia said. She started forward but the woman stayed where she was, frowning from Steve to Cynthia and then back to Steve again.

“What friend, what other people?” she asked. “How did they get here? How come that fuck Collie didn't kill them?”

“Let's save all that for later.” Steve took her arm.

She resisted his tug, and when she spoke this time, there was a catch in her voice. “You're taking me to him, aren't you?”

“Lady, we don't even know who you're talking about,” Cynthia said. “Just for Christ's sake will you come
on
!”

“I hear a motor,” Steve said. His head was cocked to one side. “Coming from the south, I think. Coming in this direction for sure.”

The woman's eyes widened. “Him,” she whispered.
“Him.”
She looked over her shoulder, as if longing for the safety of the laundrymat, and then made her decision and bolted down the alley. By the time they got to the board fence running along the back of the theater, Cynthia and Steve were hurrying just to keep up.

4

“Are you
sure . . . ”
the woman
began, and then a flashlight flicked, once, from farther down the building. They were in single-file, Steve between the women, the one from the laundrymat ahead of him. He took her hand (very cold) in his right and reached back to Cynthia's (marginally warmer) with his left. The dark-haired woman led them slowly down the path. The flashlight blinked on again, this time pointed down at two stacked crates.

“Climb up and get on in here,” a voice whispered. It was one Steve was delighted to hear.

“Boss?”

“You bet.” Marinville sounded as if he might be smiling. “Love the coverall look—it's so
masculine.
Get on in here, Steve.”

“There are three of us.”

“The more the merrier.”

The dark-haired woman hiked her skirt in order to get up on the crates, and Steve could see the boss helping himself to an eyeful. Even the apocalypse couldn't change some things, apparently.

Steve helped Cynthia up next, then followed. He turned around, slid partway in, then reached down and pushed the top crate off the one underneath. He didn't know if it would be enough to fool the guy the dark-haired woman was so afraid of if he came back here sniffing around, but it was better than nothing.

He slid into the room, a wino-hideout if he had ever seen one, then grabbed the boss and hugged him. Marinville laughed, sounding both surprised and pleased. “Just no tongue, Steve, I insist.”

Steve held him by the shoulders, grinning. “I thought you were dead. We found your scoot buried in the sand.”

“You found it?” Now Marinville sounded delighted. “Son of a bitch!”

“What happened to your face?”

Marinville held the lens of the flashlight under his chin, turning his lumpy, discolored face into something out of a horror movie. His nose looked like roadkill. His grin, although cheerful, made matters even worse. “If I made a speech to PEN America looking like this, do you think the assholes would finally listen?”

“Man,” Cynthia said, awed, “someone put a real hurt on you.”

“Entragian,” Marinville said gravely. “Have you met him?”

“No,” Steve said. “And judging from what I've heard and seen so far, I don't want to.”

The bathroom door swung open, squalling on its hinges, and a kid stood there—short hair, pale face, blood-smeared Cleveland Indians tee-shirt. He had a flashlight in one hand, and he moved it quickly, picking out the newcomers' faces one at a time. Things came together in Steve's mind as neatly as jigsaw-puzzle pieces. He supposed the kid's shirt was the key connection.

“Are you Steve?” the boy asked.

Steve nodded. “That's me. Steve Ames. This is Cynthia Smith. And you're my phone-pal.”

The boy smiled wanly at that.

“That was good timing, David. You'll probably never know
how
good. It's nice to meet you. David Carver, isn't it?”

He stepped forward and shook the boy's free hand, enjoying the look of surprise on his face. God knew the kid had surprised him, coming through on the phone that way.

“How do you know my last name?”

Cynthia took David's hand when Steve let it go. She shook it once, firmly. “We found your Humvee or Winnebago or whatever it is. Steve there checked out your baseball cards.”

“Be honest,” Steve said to David. “Do you think Cleveland's
ever
gonna win the World Series?”

“I don't care, just as long as I'm around to see them play another game,” David said with a trace of a smile.

Cynthia turned toward the woman from the laundrymat, the one they might have shot if they'd had guns. “And this is—”

“Audrey Wyler,” the dark-haired woman said. “I'm a consulting geologist for Diablo Mining. At least, I was.” She scanned the ladies' room with large dazed eyes, taking in the carton of liquor bottles, the bins of beercans, the fabulous fish swimming on one dirty tiled wall. “Right now I don't know what I am. What I feel like is meatloaf three days left over.”

She turned, little by little, toward Marinville as she spoke, much as she had turned toward Steve outside the laundrymat, and took up her original scripture.

“We have to get out of town. Your pal here says the road out is blocked, but I know another one. It's goes from the staging area down at the bottom of the embankment out to Highway 50. It's a mess, but there are ATVs in the motor-pool, half a dozen of them—”

“I'm sure your knowledge will come in very handy, but I think we ought to pass that part by, for the time being,” Marinville said. He spoke in a professionally soothing voice, one Steve recognized right away. It was how the boss talked to the women (it was invariably women, usually in their fifties or early sixties) who set up his literary lectures—what he called his cultural bombing runs. “We had better talk things over a little, first. Come on into the theater. There's quite a setup there. I think you'll be amazed.”

“What are you, stupid?” she asked. “We don't need to talk things over, we need to
get out of here.
” She looked around at them. “You don't seem to grasp what has happened here. This man, Collie Entragian—”

Marinville raised his flashlight and shone it full into his face for a moment, letting her get a good look. “I've met the man, as you can see, and I grasp plenty. Come on out front, Ms. Wyler, and we'll talk. I see you're impatient with that idea, but it's for the best. The carpenters have a saying—measure twice, cut once. It's a good saying. All right?”

She gave him a reluctant look, but when he started toward the door, she followed. So did Steve and Cynthia. Outside, the wind screamed around the theater, making it groan in its deepest joints.