Desperation (8 page)

“Right, nothing.” She paused. “Johnny,
are
you all right? Cause you sound like you're hardly there.”

“Fine. Say hello to the kids for me.”

“I always do. They usually respond with what my ma used to call potty-words, but I always do. Bye.”

He hung up without looking at the telephone, and when it fell off the edge of the desk and onto the floor, he still didn't look around. John Steinbeck had crossed the country with his dog in a makeshift camper. Johnny had a barely used 1340-cc Harley-Davidson Softail stored out in Connecticut. Not
American Heart.
She was wrong about that, and not just because it was the name of a Jeff Bridges movie from a few years back. Not
American Heart
but—

“Travels with Harley,”
he murmured.

It was a ridiculous title, a
laughable
title, like a
Mad
magazine parody . . . but was it any worse than an essay titled “Death on the Second Shift” or “Feeding the Flames”? He thought not . . . and he felt the title would work, would rise above its punny origins. He had always trusted his intuitions, and he hadn't had one as strong as this in years. He could cross the country on his red-and-cream Softail, from the Atlantic where it touched Connecticut to the Pacific where it touched California. A book of essays that might cause the critics to entirely rethink their image of him, a book of essays that might even get him back on the bestseller lists, if . . .
if
 . . .

“If it was bighearted,” he said. His heart was thumping hard in his chest, but for once the feel of that didn't scare him. “Bighearted like
Blue Highways.
Bighearted like . . . well, like Steinbeck.”

Sitting there in his office chair with the telephone burring harshly at his feet, what Johnny Marinville had seen was nothing less than redemption. A way out.

He had scooped the telephone up and called his agent, his fingers flying over the buttons.

“Bill,” he said, “it's Johnny. I was just sitting here, thinking about some essays I wrote when I was a kid, and I had a fantastic idea. It's going to sound crazy at first, but hear me out . . .”

4

As Johnny made his way
up the sandy slope to the highway, trying not to pant too much, he saw that the guy standing behind his Harley and writing down the plate number was the biggest damned chunk of cop he had ever seen—six-six at least, and at least two hundred and seventy pounds on the hoof.

“Afternoon, Officer,” Johnny said. He looked down at himself and saw a tiny dark spot on the crotch of his Levi's.
No matter how much you jump and dance,
he thought.

“Sir, are you aware that parking a vehicle on a state road is against the law?” the cop asked without looking up.

“No, but I hardly think—”

—it can be much of a problem on a road as deserted as U.S. 50
was how he meant to finish, and in the haughty “How dare you question my judgement?” tone that he had been using on underlings and service people for years, but then he saw something that changed his mind. There was blood on the right cuff and sleeve of the cop's shirt, quite a lot of it, drying now to a maroon glaze. He had probably finished moving some large piece of roadkill off the highway not very long ago—likely a deer or an elk hit by a speeding semi. That would explain both the blood and the bad temper. The shirt looked like a dead loss; that much blood would never come out.

“Sir?” the cop asked sharply. He had finished writing down the plate number now but went on looking at the bike, his blond eyebrows drawn together, his mouth scrimped flat. It was as if he didn't want to look at the bike's owner, as if he knew that would only make him feel lousier than he did already. “You were saying?”

“Nothing, Officer,” Johnny said. He spoke in a neutral tone, not humble but not haughty, either. He didn't want to cross this big lug when he was clearly having a bad day.

Still without looking up, his notepad strangled in one hand and his gaze fixed severely on the Harley's taillight, the cop said: “It's also against the law to relieve yourself within sight of a state road. Did you know
that
?”

“No, I'm sorry,” Johnny said. He felt a wild urge to laugh bubbling around in his chest and suppressed it.

“Well, it is. Now, I'm going to let you go . . .” He looked up for the first time, looked at Johnny, and his eyes widened. “. . . go with a warning this time, but . . .”

He trailed off, eyes now as wide as a kid's when the circus parade comes thumping down the street in a swirl of clowns and trombones. Johnny knew the look, although he had never expected to see it out here in the Nevada desert, and on the face of a gigantic Scandahoovian cop who looked as if his reading tastes might run the gamut from
Playboy
's Party Jokes to
Guns and Ammo
magazine.

A fan,
he thought.
I'm out here in the big nowhere between Ely and Austin, and I've found a by-God fan.

He couldn't wait to tell Steve Ames about this when they met up in Austin tonight. Hell, he might call him on the cellular later on this afternoon . . . if the cellulars worked out here, that was. Now that he thought about it, he supposed they didn't. The battery in his was up, he'd had it on the charger all last night, but he hadn't actually talked to Steve on the damned thing since leaving Salt Lake City. In truth he wasn't all that crazy about the cellulars. He didn't think they actually
did
cause cancer, that was probably just more tabloid scare-stuff, but . . .

“Holy shit,” the cop muttered. His right hand, the one below the bloodstained cuff and sleeve, went up to his right cheek. For one bizarre moment he looked to Johnny like a pro football lineman doing a Jack Benny riff. “Ho-lee
shit.
”

“What's the trouble, Officer?” Johnny asked. He was, with some difficulty, suppressing a smile. One thing hadn't changed over the years: he loved to be recognized. God, how he loved it.

“You're . . . JohnEdwardMarinville!” the cop gasped, running it all together, as if he really had only one name, like Pelé or Cantinflas. The cop was now starting to grin himself, and Johnny thought,
Oh Mr. Policeman, what big teeth you have.
“I mean, you
are,
aren't you? You wrote
Delight
! And, oh shit,
Song of the Hammer
! I'm standing
right next
to the guy who wrote
Song of the Hammer
!” And then he did something which Johnny found genuinely endearing: reached out and touched the sleeve of his motorcycle jacket, as if to prove that the man wearing it was actually real. “Ho-lee
shit
!”

“Well, yes, I'm Johnny Marinville,” he said, speaking in the modest tones he reserved for these occasions (and these occasions only, as a rule). “Although I have to tell you that I've never been recognized by someone who's just watched me take a leak by the side of the road.”

“Oh, forget
that,
” the cop said, and seized Johnny's hand. For just a moment before the cop's fingers closed over his, Johnny saw that the man's hand was also smeared with half-dried blood; both lifeline and loveline stood out a dark, liverish red. Johnny tried to keep his smile in place as they shook, and thought he did pretty well, but he was aware that the corners of his mouth seemed to have gained weight.
It'
s getting on me,
he thought.
And there won't be anyplace to wash it off before Austin.

“Man,” the cop was saying, “you are one of my favorite writers! I mean, gosh,
Song of the Hammer
 . . . I know the critics didn't like it, but what do they know?”

“Not much,” Johnny said. He wished the cop would let go of his hand, but the cop was apparently one of those people who shook for punctuation and emphasis as well as greeting. Johnny could feel the latent strength in the cop's grip; if the big guy squeezed down, his favorite writer would be keyboarding his new book lefthanded, at least for the first month or two.

“Not much, damned straight!
Song of the Hammer's
the best book about Vietnam I ever read. Forget Tim O'Brien, Robert Stone—”

“Well, thank you, thanks very much.”

The cop finally loosened his grip and Johnny retrieved his hand. He wanted to look down at it, see how much blood was on it, but this clearly wasn't the time. The cop was sticking his abused notepad into his back pocket again and staring at Johnny in a wide-eyed, intense way that was actually a little disturbing. It was as if he feared Johnny would disappear like a mirage if he so much as blinked.

“What are you doing out here, Mr. Marinville? Gosh! I thought you lived back East!”

“Well, I do, but—”

“And this is no kind of transportation for a . . . a . . . well, I've got to say it: for a
national resource.
Why, do you realize what the ratio of drivers-to-accidents on motorcycles is? Computed on a road-hours basis? I can tell you that because I'm a wolf and we get a circular every month from the National Safety Council. It's one accident per four hundred and sixty drivers per day. That sounds good, I know, until you consider the ratio of drivers-to-accidents on passenger vehicles. That's one in
twenty-seven thousand
per day. That's some big difference. It makes you think, doesn't it?”

“Yes.” Thinking,
Did he say something about being a wolf, did I hear that?
“Those statistics are pretty . . . pretty . . .”
Pretty
what?
Come on, Marinville, get it together. If you can spend an hour with a hostile bitch from
Ms.
magazine and still not take a drink, surely you can deal with this guy. He's only trying to show his concern for you, after all.
“They're pretty impressive,” he finished.

“So what
are
you doing out here? And on such an unsafe mode of transportation?”

“Gathering material.” Johnny found his eyes dropping to the cop's blood-stiffened right sleeve and forcibly dragged them back up to his sunburned face. He doubted if many of the people on this guy's beat gave him a hard time; he looked like he could eat nails and spit razor-wire, even though he really didn't have the right skin for this climate.

“For a new novel?” The cop was excited. Johnny looked briefly at the man's chest, hunting for a name-tag, but there was none.

“Well, a new book, anyway. Can I ask you something, Officer?”

“Sure, yeah, but I ought to be asking
you
the questions, I got about a gajillion of em. I never thought . . . out in the middle of nowhere and I meet . . . ho-lee
shit
!”

Johnny grinned. It was hotter than hell out here and he wanted to get moving before Steve was on his ass—he hated looking into the rearview and seeing that big yellow truck back there, it broke the mood, somehow—but it was hard not to be moved by the man's artless enthusiasm, especially when it was directed at a subject which Johnny himself regarded with respect, wonder, and yes, awe.

“Well, since you're obviously familiar with my work, what would you think of a book of essays about life in contemporary America?”

“By you?”

“By me. A kind of loose travelogue called”—he took a deep breath—“
Travels with Harley
”?

He was prepared for the cop to look puzzled, or to guffaw the way people did at the punchline of a joke. The cop did neither. He simply looked back down at the tail-light of Johnny's bike, one hand rubbing his chin (it was the chin of a Bernie Wrightson comic-book hero, square and cleft), brow furrowed, considering carefully. Johnny took the opportunity to peek surreptitiously at his own hand. There was blood on it, all right, quite a lot. Mostly on the back and smeared across the fingernails. Uck.

Then the cop looked up and stunned him by saying exactly what Johnny himself had been thinking over the last two days of monotonous desert driving. “It
could
work,” he said, “but the cover ought to be a photo of you on your drag, here. A
serious
picture, so folks'd know you weren't trying to make fun of John Steinbeck . . . or your own self, for that matter.”

“That's
it
!” Johnny cried, barely restraining himself from clapping the big cop on the back. “That's the great danger, that people should go in thinking it's some kind of . . . of weird
joke.
The cover should convey seriousness of purpose . . . maybe even a certain
grimness
 . . . what would you think of just the bike? A photo of the bike, maybe sepia-toned? Sitting in the middle of some country highway . . . or even out here in the desert, on the centerline of Highway 50 . . . shadow stretching off to the side . . .” The absurdity of having this discussion out here, with a towering cop who had been about to issue him a warning for pissing on the tumbleweeds, wasn't lost on him, but it didn't cut into his excitement, either.

And once again the cop told him exactly what he wanted to hear.

“No! Good gosh, no. It's got to be you.”

“Actually, I think so, too,” Johnny said. “Sitting on the bike . . . maybe with the kickstand down and my feet up on the pegs . . . casual, you know . . . casual, but . . .”

“. . . but
real,
” the cop said. He looked up at Johnny, his gray eyes forbidding, then back down at the bike again. “Casual but
real.
No smile. Don't you
dare
smile, Mr. Marinville.”

“No smile,” Johnny agreed, thinking,
This guy is a genius.

“And a little distant,” the cop said. “Looking off. Like you were thinking of all the miles you'd been—”

“Yeah, and all the miles I've still got to go.” Johnny looked up at the horizon to get a feel for that look—the old warrior gazing west, a Cormac McCarthy kind of deal—and again saw the vehicle parked off the road a mile or two up. His long-range vision was still pretty good, and the sunglare had shifted enough for him to be almost sure it was an RV. “Literal and metaphorical miles.”

“Yep, both kinds,” this amazing cop said. “
Travels with Harley.
I like it. It's ballsy. And of course, I'd read
anything
you wrote, Mr. Marinville. Novels, essays, poems . . . hell, your laundry list.”

“Thanks,” Johnny said, touched. “I appreciate that. You'll probably never know how much. The last year or so has been difficult for me. A lot of doubt. Questioning my own identity, and my purpose.”

“I know a little about those things myself,” the cop said. “You might not think so, guy like me, but I do. Why, if you knew the day I've put in already . . . Mr. Marinville, could I possibly have your autograph?”

“Of course, it would be a pleasure,” Johnny said, and took his own pad out of his back pocket. He opened it and paged past notes, directions, route numbers, fragments of map in blurred soft pencil (these latter had been drawn by Steve Ames, who had quickly realized that his famous client, although still able to ride his cycle with a fair degree of safety, ended up lost and fuming in even small cities without help). At last he found a blank page. “What's your name, Offi—”

He was interrupted by a long, trembling howl that chilled his blood . . . not just because it was clearly the sound of a wild animal but because it was
close.
The notepad dropped from his hand and he turned on his heels so quickly that he staggered. Standing just off the south edge of the road, not fifty yards away, was a mangy canine with thin legs and scanty, starved-looking sides. Its gray pelt was tangled with burdocks and there was an ugly red sore on its foreleg, but Johnny barely noticed these things. What fascinated him was the creature's muzzle, which seemed to be grinning, and its yellow eyes, which looked both stupid and cunning.