Desperation (60 page)

4

Steve and Cynthia joined them,
helped them to their feet.

“I feel like I'm a hundred and eight,” Mary said.

“Don't worry, you don't look a day over eighty-nine,” Steve said, and smiled when she made as if to pop him one. “Do you really want to try making Austin in that little car? What if it gets stuck in the sand?”

“One thing at a time. We're not even sure it'll start, are we, David?”

“No,” David said in a kind of sigh. He was going away from her again, Mary could feel it, but she didn't know what to do about it. He stood with his head bent, looking at the Acura's grille as if all the secrets of life and death were there, the emotion draining out of his face again, leaving it distant and thoughtful. One hand was wrapped loosely around the gray metal Magna-Cube with the spare key in it.

“If it
does
start, we'll caravan,” she told Steve. “Me behind you. If I get stuck, we'll hop into the truck. I don't think we will, though. It isn't such a bad car, actually. If my goddamned sister-in-law just hadn't used it as a dope-stash . . .” Her voice trembled and she closed her lips tightly.

“I don't think we'll have to go far to get in the clear,” David said without looking up from the Acura's grille. “Thirty miles? Forty? Then open road.”

Mary smiled at him. “I hope you're right.”

“There's a slightly more important question,” Cynthia said. “What are we going to tell the police about all this? The
real
police, I mean.”

No one said anything for a moment. Then David, still looking at the grille of the Acura, said: “The front part. Let them figure out the rest for themselves.”

“I don't get you,” Mary said. She actually thought she did, but wanted to keep him talking. Wanted him out here with the rest of them mentally as well as physically.

“I'll tell about how we had flat tires and the bad cop took us back to town. How he got us to go with him by saying there was a guy out in the desert with a rifle. Mary, you tell about how he stopped you and Peter. Steve, you tell about how you were looking for Johnny and Johnny phoned you. I'll say how we escaped after he took my mother away. How we went to the theater. How we called you on the phone, Steve. Then you can tell how you came to the theater, too. And that's where we were all night. In the theater.”

“We never went up to the pit at all,” Steve mused. Testing it.
Tasting
it.

David nodded. The bruises on his throat glared in the strengthening sun. Already the day was beginning to grow hot. “Right,” he said.

“And—sorry, David, I have to—your dad? What about him?”

“Went looking for my mom. He wanted me to stay with you guys in the theater, so I did.”

“We never saw anything,” Cynthia said.

“No. Not really.” He opened the Magna-Cube, took out the key inside, gave it to Mary. “Why don't you try the engine?”

“In a sec. What are the authorities going to think about what they
do
find? All the dead people and dead animals? And what will they say? What will they give out?”

Steve said: “There are people who believe a flying saucer crashed not too far from here, back in the forties. Did you know that?”

She shook her head.

“In Roswell, New Mexico. According to the story, there were even survivors. Astronauts from another world. I don't know if any of it's true, but it might be. The evidence suggests that
something
pretty outrageous happened in Roswell. The government covered it up, whatever it was. The same way they'll cover this up.”

Cynthia punched his arm. “Pretty paranoid, cookie.”

He shrugged. “As to what they'll
think
 . . . poison gas, maybe. Some weird shit that belched out of a pocket in the earth and made people crazy. And that's not so far wrong, is it? Really?”

“No,” Mary said. “I think the most important thing is that we all tell the same story, just the way that David outlined it.”

Cynthia shrugged, and a ghost of her old pert who-gives-a-shit look came over her face. “Like if we break down and tell them what
really
happened they're going to believe us, right?”

“Maybe they wouldn't,” Steve said, “but if it's all the same to you, I'd rather not spend the next six weeks taking polygraph tests and looking at inkblots when I could spend them looking at your exotic and mysterious face.”

She punched his arm again. A little harder this time. She caught David watching this byplay and nodded to him. “You think I got a mysterious and exotic face?”

David turned away, studied the mountains to the north.

Mary went around to the driver's door of the Acura and opened it, reminding herself she'd have to pull the seat up before she could drive—Peter had been a foot taller than she. The glovebox was open from when she'd been pawing around in it for the registration, but surely a bulb as small as the one in there couldn't draw more than a trickle of juice, could it? Well, it wasn't exactly life and death in any—

“Oh my Lord,” Steve said in a soft, strengthless voice. “Oh my dear Lord, look.”

She turned. On the horizon, looking small at this distance, was the north face of the China Pit embankment. Above it was a gigantic cloud of dark gray dust. It hung in the sky, still connected to the pit by a hazy umbilicus of rising dust and powdered earth: the remains of a mountain rising into the sky like poisoned ground after a nuclear blast. It made the shape of a wolf, its tail pointing toward the newly risen sun, its grotesquely elongated snout pointed west, where the night was still draining sullenly from the sky.

The snout hung open. Protruding from it was a strange shape, amorphous but somehow reptilian. There was something of the scorpion in that shape, and of the lizard as well.

Can tak, can tah.

Mary screamed through raised hands. Looked up at the shape in the sky, eyes bulging over her dirty fingers, head shaking from side to side in a useless gesture of negation.

“Stop,” David said, and put his arm around her waist. “Stop, Mary. It can't hurt us. And it's going away already. See?”

It was true. The hide of the skywolf was tearing open in some places, appearing to melt in others, letting the sun shine through in long, golden rays that were both beautiful and somehow comical—the sort of shot you expected to see at the end of a Bible epic.

“I think we ought to go,” Steve said at last.

“I think we never should have come in the first place,” Mary said faintly, and got into the car. Already she could smell the aroma of her dead husband's aftershave.

5

David stood watching as she
pulled the seat forward and slipped the key into the ignition. He felt distant from himself, a creature floating in space somewhere between a dark star and a light one. He thought of sitting at the kitchen table back home, sitting there and playing slap-jacks with Pie. He thought he would see Steve and Mary and Cynthia, nice as they were, dead and in hell for just one more game of Slap-jacks in the kitchen with her—Pie with a glass of Cranapple juice, him with a Pepsi, both of them giggling like mad. He would see himself in hell, for that matter. How far could it be, after all, from Desperation?

Mary turned the key in the ignition. The engine cranked briskly and started almost at once. She grinned and clapped her hands.

“David? Ready to go?”

“Sure. I guess.”

“Hey?” Cynthia put a hand on the back of his neck. “You all right, my man?”

He nodded, not looking up.

Cynthia bent over and kissed his cheek. “You have to fight it,” she whispered in his ear. “You have to
fight
it, you know?”

“I'll try,” he said, but the days and weeks and months ahead looked impossible to him.
Go to your friend Brian,
Johnny had said.
Go to your friend and make him your brother.
And that might be a place to start, yes, but after that?

There were holes in him that cried out in pain, and would go on crying out for so much of the future. One for his mother, one for his father, one for his sister. Holes like faces. Holes like eyes.

In the sky, the wolf had gone except for a paw and what might have been—perhaps—the tip of a tail. Of the reptilian thing in its mouth there was no sign.

“We beat you,” David whispered, starting around to the passenger side of the car. “We beat you, you son of a bitch, there's that.”

Tak,
whispered a smiling, patient voice far back in his mind.
Tak ah lah. Tak ah wan.

He turned his mind and heart from it with an effort.

Go to your friend and make him your brother.

Maybe. But Austin first. With Mary and Steve and Cynthia. He intended to stay with them as long as possible. They, at least, could understand . . . and in a way no one else would ever be able to. They had been in the pit together.

As he reached the passenger-side door, he closed the small metal box and slipped it absently into his pocket. He stopped suddenly, free hand frozen in midair as it reached for the doorhandle.

Something was gone; the shotgun shell.

Something had been put in its place: a piece of stiff paper.

“David?” Steve called from the open window of the truck. “Something wrong?”

He shook his head, opening the car door with one hand and taking the folded paper from his pocket with the other. It was blue. And there was something familiar about it, although he couldn't remember having a paper like this in his pocket yesterday. There was a ragged hole in it, as if it had been punched onto something. As if—

Leave your pass.

It was the last thing the voice had said on that day last fall when he had prayed for God to make Brian better. He hadn't understood, but he had obeyed, had hung the blue pass on a nailhead. The next time he'd shown up at the Viet Cong Lookout—a week later? two?—it had been gone. Taken by some kid who wanted to write down a girl's telephone number, maybe, or blown off by the wind. Except . . . here it was.

All I want is lovin', all I need is lovin'.

Felix Cavaliere on vocal, most severely cool.

No,
he thought.
This can't be.

“David?” Mary. Far away. “David, what is it?”

Can't be,
he thought again, but when he unfolded it, the words printed at the top were completely familiar:

WEST WENTWORTH MIDDLE SCHOOL

100 Viland Avenue

Then, in big black tabloid type:

EXCUSED EARLY

And, last of all:

Parent of excused student must sign this pass.

Pass must be returned to attendance office.

Except now there was more. A brief scrawled message below the last line of printing.

Something moved inside him. Some huge thing. His throat closed up, then opened to let out a long, wailing cry that was only grief at the top. He swayed, clutching at the Acura's roof, lowered his forehead to his arm, and began to sob. From some great distance he heard the truck doors opening, heard Steve and Cynthia racing toward him. He wept. He thought of Pie, holding her doll and smiling up at him. He thought of his mother, dancing to the radio in the laundry room with the iron in one hand, laughing at her own foolishness. He thought of his father, sitting on the porch with his feet cocked up on the rail, a book in one hand and a beer in the other, waving to him as he came home from Brian's, pushing his bike up the driveway toward the garage in the thick twilight. He thought of how much he had loved them, how much he would always love them.

And Johnny. Johnny standing on the dark edge of the China Shaft, saying
Sometimes he makes us live.

David wept with his head down and the
EXCUSED EARLY
pass now crumpled in his closed fist, that huge thing still moving inside him, something like a landslide . . . but maybe not so bad.

Maybe, in the end, not so bad.

“David?” It was Steve, shaking him.
“David!”

“I'm all right,” he said, raising his head and wiping his eyes with a shaking hand.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I'm okay. Go on. We'll follow you.”

Cynthia was looking at him doubtfully. “Sure?”

He nodded.

They went back, looking over their shoulders at him. David was able to wave. Then he got into the Acura and closed the door.

“What was it?” Mary asked. “What did you find?”

She reached for the folded piece of stiff blue paper, but David held it in his own hand for the time being. “Do you remember when the cop threw you into the holding area where we were?” he asked. “How you went for the gun?”

“I'll never forget it.”

“While you were fighting with him, a shotgun shell fell off the desk and rolled over to me. When I had a chance, I picked it up. Johnny must have stolen it out of my pocket when he was hanging onto me. In the mineshaft. After my dad was killed. Johnny used the shell to set off the ANFO. And when he took it out of my pocket, he put this in.”

“Put what in? What is it?”

“It's an
EXCUSED EARLY
pass from my school back in Ohio. Last fall I poked it on a nail in a tree and left it there.”

“A tree back in Ohio. Last fall.” She was looking at him thoughtfully, her eyes very large and still. “Last
fall
!”

“Yes. So I don't know where he got it . . . and I don't know where he
had
it. When he was in the powder magazine, I made him empty out all his pockets. I was afraid he might have picked up one of the
can tahs.
He didn't have it then. He stripped right down to his underwear, and he didn't have it then.”

“Oh, David,” she said.

He nodded and handed the blue pass over to her. “Steve will know if this is his handwriting,” he said. “I bet you a million dollars it is.”

David—

Stay ahead of the mummy

I John 4/8 Remember!

She read the scrawled message, her lips moving. “I'd bet a million of my own that it's his, if I had a million,” she said. “Do you understand the reference, David?”

David took the blue pass. “Of course. First John, chapter four, verse eight. ‘God is love.' ”

She looked at him for a long time. “Is he, David? Is he love?”

“Oh, yes,” David said. He folded the pass along its crease. “I guess he's sort of . . . everything.”

Cynthia waved. Mary waved back and gave her a thumbs-up. Steve pulled out and Mary followed him, the Acura's wheels rolling reluctantly through the first ridge of sand and then picking up speed.

David put his head back against the seat, closed his eyes, and began to pray.

Bangor, Maine

November 1, 1994–December 5, 1995