Desperation (57 page)

4

At the bottom of the
slope, twenty yards below the ragged yawn that was China Shaft, Johnny stopped them and told them to tie the drawstrings of the bags together in pairs. He slipped one of these pairs around his own neck, the sacks hanging down on either side of his chest like the counterweights of a cuckoo clock. Steve took another pair, and Johnny made no objection when David took the last set from his father and slipped the joined drawstrings around his own neck. Ralph, troubled, looked at Johnny. Johnny glanced at David, saw David was staring up at the drift opening, then looked back at the boy's father, shook his head, and tapped a finger against his lips. Quiet, Dad.

Ralph looked doubtful but said nothing.

“Everybody all right?” Johnny asked.

“What's going to happen?” Mary asked. “I mean, what's the plan?”

“We do what God tells us,” David said. “That's the plan. Come on.”

It was David who led, going up the slope sidesaddle to keep from falling. There was no wide gravel road here, not even a path, and the ground was evil. Johnny could feel it trying to crumble out from under his boots at every upward lurch. Soon his heart was pounding and his battered nose was throbbing in sync. He had been a good boy over the last few months, but a lot of chickens (not to mention some roast ducks and a few caviar-stuffed quail) were now coming home to roost nevertheless.

Yet he felt good. Everything was simple now. That was sort of wonderful.

David was in the lead, his father behind him. Steve and Cynthia next. Johnny and Mary Jackson brought up the rear.

“Why have you still got that motorcycle helmet?” she asked.

Johnny grinned. She reminded him of Terry, in an odd way. Terry as she had been back in the old days. He held the helmet up, stuck on his hand like a puppet. “Ask not for whom the Bell tolls,” he said. “It tolls for thee, thou storied honeydew.”

She gave a small, breathless laugh. “You're nuts.”

If it had been forty yards uphill instead of twenty, Johnny wasn't sure he could have made it. As it was, the pounding of his heart had become so rapid it seemed like one steady thrum in his chest by the time David reached the ragged tunnel opening. And his thighs felt like spaghetti.

Don't weaken now,
he told himself.
You're into the final straightaway.

He made himself move a little faster, suddenly afraid that David might simply turn and go into the shaft before he could get there. It was possible, too. Steve thought the boss knew what was going on, but in fact the boss knew precious little. He was being handed the script a page ahead of the rest of them, that was all.

But David waited, and soon they were all clustered on the slope in front of the opening. A dank smell issued from it, chilly and charred at the same time. And there was a sound Johnny associated with elevator shafts: a faint, windy whisper.

“We ought to pray,” David said, sounding timid. He held his hands out to either side of him.

His father took one of his hands. Steve put down the .30-.06 and took the other. Mary took Ralph's, Cynthia took Steve's. Johnny stepped between the two women, dropped the helmet between his boots, and the circle was complete.

They stood in the darkness of China Pit, smelling the dank exhaled breath of the earth, listening to that faint roar, looking at David Carver, who had brought them here.

“Whose father?” David asked them.

“Our father,” Johnny said, stepping easily onto the road of the old prayer, as if he had never been away. “Who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come—”

The others joined in, Cynthia, the minister's daughter, first, Mary last.

“—thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.”

Through the amen, Cynthia continued on: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen.” She looked up with the little twinkle Johnny had come to like quite a lot. “That's the way I learned it—kind of a Protestant dance-mix, y'know?”

David was looking at Johnny now.

“Help me do my best,” Johnny said. “If you're there, God—and I now have reason to believe you are—help me to do my best and not weaken again. I want you to take that request very seriously, because I have a long history of weakening. David, what about you? Anything to say?”

David shrugged and shook his head. “Said it already.” He let go of the hands holding his, and the circle broke.

Johnny nodded. “Okay, let's do it.”

“Do
what
?” Mary asked. “Do
what
? Will you please tell me?”

“I'm supposed to go in,” David said. “Alone.”

Johnny shook his head. “Nope. And don't start in with your God-told-me-to stuff, because right now he's not telling you
anything.
Your TV screen has got a
PLEASE STAND BY
sign on it, am I right?”

David looked at him uncertainly and wet his lips.

Johnny lifted a hand toward the waiting darkness of the drift and spoke in the tone of a man conveying a large favor. “You
can
go first, though. How's that?”

“My dad—”

“Right behind you. He'll catch you if you fall.”

“No,” David said. He suddenly looked scared—terrified. “I don't want that. I don't want him in there at
all.
The roof might cave in, or—”

“David! What you want doesn't matter.”

Cynthia grabbed Johnny's arm. She would have been digging into him if she hadn't nibbled her nails to the quick. “Leave him alone! Christ, he saved your fucking
life
! Can't you quit badgering him?”

“I'm not,” Johnny said. “At this point he's badgering himself. If he'll just let go, remember who's in charge . . .”

He looked at David. The boy muttered something under his breath, far too low to hear, but Johnny didn't have to hear it to know what he had said.

“That's right, he's cruel. But you knew that. And you have no control over the nature of God anyway. None of us do. So why won't you relax?”

David made no reply. His head was bowed, but not in prayer this time. Johnny thought it was resignation. In some way, the boy knew what was coming, and that was the worst part. The
cruelest
part, if you liked.
It's not going to be that easy for him,
he had told Steve in the powder magazine, but back there he hadn't really understood how hard hard could be. First his sis, then his mother; now—

“Right,” he said in a voice that sounded as dry as the ground they were standing on. “First David, then Ralph, then you, Steve. I'll be behind you. Tonight—sorry, this morning—it's a case of ladies last.”

“If we have to go in, I want to go in with Steve,” Cynthia said.

“Okay, fine,” Johnny said at once—it was as if he had been expecting this. “You and I can switch places.”

“Who put you in charge, anyway?” Mary asked.

Johnny turned on her like a snake, startling her into a precarious step backward. “Do
you
want to have a go?” he asked with a kind of dangerous good cheer. “Because if you do, lass, I'd be happy to turn it over to you. I asked for this no more than David did. So what do you think? Want to put-um on Big Chief's headdress?”

She shook her head, confused.

“Easy, boss,” Steve murmured.

“I'm easy,” Johnny said, but he wasn't. He looked at David and his father, standing side by side, heads down, hands entwined, and wasn't easy. He could barely believe the enormity of what he was allowing. Could
barely
believe? Couldn't believe at all, was more like it. How else could he go on, except with merciful incomprehension held before him like a shield? How could anyone?

“Want me to take those bags, Johnny?” Cynthia asked timidly. “You still sound pretty out of breath, and you look all in, if you don't mind me saying.”

“I'll be fine. It's not far now. Is it, David?”

“No,” David said in a small, trembling voice. He appeared not to be just holding his father's hand now but caressing it as a lover might do. He looked at Johnny with hopeless, pleading eyes. The eyes of someone who
almost
knows.

Johnny looked away, sick in his stomach, feeling simultaneously hot and cold. He met Steve's bewildered, concerned eyes and tried to send him another message:
Just hold him. When the time comes.
Out loud he said: “Give David the flashlight, Steve.”

For a moment he didn't think Steve would do it. Then he pulled the flashlight out of his back pocket and handed it over.

Johnny lifted his hand to the blackness of the shaft again. Toward the dead cold smell of old fire and the faint roaring sound from deep in the middle of the murdered mountain. He listened for some comforting word from Terry, but Terry had split the scene. Maybe just as well.

“David?” His voice, trembling. “Will you light us on our way?”

“I don't want to,” David whispered. Then, pulling in a deep breath, he looked up at a sky in which the stars were just beginning to pale and screamed:
“I don't want to! Haven't I done enough? Everything you asked? This isn't fair!
THIS ISN'T FAIR AND I DON'T WANT TO
!”

The last four words came out in a desperate, throat-tearing shriek. Mary started forward. Johnny grabbed her arm.

“Take your hand off me,” she said, and started forward again.

Johnny yanked her back again. “Be still.”

She subsided.

Johnny looked at David and silently raised his hand to the drift again.

David looked up at his father with tears running down his cheeks. “Go away, Dad. Go back to the truck.”

Ralph shook his head. “If you go in, I go in.”

“Don't. I'm telling you. It won't be good for you.”

Ralph simply stood his ground and looked patiently at his son.

David looked back up at him, then at Johnny's outstretched hand (a hand which now did not simply invite but demanded), and then turned and walked into the drift. He clicked on the light as he went, and Johnny saw motes dancing in its bright beam . . . motes and something else. Something that might have caused the heart of an old prospector to beat faster. A glint of gold, there and then gone.

Ralph followed David. Steve came next. The light moved in the boy's hand, tracing first along a rock wall, then an ancient support with a trio of symbols carved into it—some long-dead Chinese miner's name, perhaps, or the name of his sweetheart, left far behind in the marsh-side huts of Po Yang—and then to the floor, where it picked out a litter of bones: cracked skulls and ribcages that curved like ghastly Cheshire cat grins. It shifted upward again and to the left. The gold-gleam came again, this time brighter and more defined.

“Hey, look out!” Cynthia cried. “Something's in here with us!”

There was a fluttering explosion in the dark. It was a sound Johnny associated with his Connecticut childhood, pheasant exploding out of the underbrush and into the air as twilight drew down toward dark. For a moment the smell of the mine was stronger, as unseen wings drove the ancient air against his face in pulses.

Mary screamed. The flashlight beam jagged upward at an angle, and for just one moment it pinpointed a nightmarish midair apparition, something with wings and glaring golden eyes and outstretched talons. It was David the eyes were glaring at, David it wanted.

“Look out!”
Ralph yelled, and threw himself over David's back, driving him down to the bone-littered floor of the shaft.

The flashlight fell from the boy's hand as he went down, kicking up just enough light to be confusing. Unclear shapes strove together in its reflected glow: David under his father, and the shadow of the eagle flexing and swelling above them both.

“Shoot it!”
Cynthia screamed.
“Steve, shoot it, it'
s gonna tear his head off!”

Johnny grabbed the barrel of the .30-.06 as Steve brought it up. “No. A gunshot'll bring the whole works down on top of us.”

The eagle screeched, wings battering Carver's head. Ralph tried to fend the bird off with his left hand. It seized one of his fingers in the hook of its beak and tore it off. And then its talons plunged into Ralph Carver's face like strong fingers into dough.

“
DADDY, NO
!”
David shrieked.

Steve shoved into the tangle of shadows, and when the side of his foot kicked the downed flashlight, Johnny was treated to a better view than he wanted of the bird with Ralph's head in its grip. Its wings sent furious skirls of dust in motion from the floor and the old shaft walls. Ralph's head wagged wildly from side to side, but his body covered David almost completely.

Steve drew the rifle back, meaning to swing it, and the butt cracked against the wall. There wasn't room. He jabbed it forward instead, like a lance. The eagle turned its gimlet gaze on him, talons shifting their grip on Ralph. Its wings were soft thunder in the closed space. Johnny saw Ralph's finger jutting from the side of its beak. Steve jabbed forward again, this time catching the eagle squarely and knocking the finger out of the beak. Its head was driven back against the wall. Its talons flexed. One drove deeper into Ralph's face. The other lifted, plunged into his neck, and ripped it open. The bird screamed, perhaps in rage, perhaps in triumph. Mary screamed with it.

“
GOD, NO
!”
David howled, his voice cracking.
“
OH GOD, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP HURTING MY DADDY
!”