Desperation (9 page)

“My God,” he murmured. “What's that? Is it a—”

“Coyote,” the cop said, pronouncing it
ki-yote.
“Some people out here call em desert wolves.”

That's what he said,
Johnny thought.
Something about seeing a coyote, a desert wolf. You just misunderstood.
This idea relieved him even though a part of his mind didn't believe it at all.

The cop took a step toward the coyote, then another. He paused, then took a third. The coyote stood its ground but began to shiver all over. Urine squirted from under its chewed-looking flank. A gust of wind turned the paltry stream into a scatter of droplets.

When the cop took a fourth step toward it, the coyote raised its scuffed muzzle and howled again, a long, ululating sound that made Johnny's arms ripple with goose-flesh and his balls pull up.

“Hey, don't get it going,” he said to the cop. “That's
très
creepy.”

The cop ignored him. He was looking at the coyote, which was now looking intently back at him with its yellow gaze.
“Tak,”
the cop said.
“Tak ah lah.”

The wolf went on staring at him, as if it understood this Indian-sounding gibberish, and the goosebumps on Johnny's arms stayed up. The wind gusted again, blowing his dropped notepad over onto the shoulder of the road, where it came to rest against a jutting chunk of rock. Johnny didn't notice. His pad and the autograph he'd intended to give the cop were, for the moment, the furthest things from his mind.

This goes in the book,
he thought.
Everything else I've seen is still up for grabs, but this goes in. Rock solid. Rock goddam solid.

“Tak,”
the cop said again, and clapped his hands together sharply, once. The coyote turned and loped away, running on those scrawny legs with a speed Johnny never would have expected. The big man in the khaki uniform watched until the coyote's gray pelt had merged into the general dirty gray of the desert. It didn't take long.

“Gosh, aren't they ugly?” the cop said. “And just lately they're thicker'n ticks on a blanket. You don't see em in the morning or early afternoon, when it's hottest, but late afternoon . . . evening . . . toward dark . . .” He shook his head as if to say
There you go.

“What did you
say
to it?” Johnny asked. “That was
amazing.
Was it Indian? Some Indian dialect?”

The big cop laughed. “Don't know any Indian dialect,” he said. “Hell, don't know any
Indians.
That was just baby-talk, like oogie-woogie, snookie-wookums.”

“But it was
listening
to you!”

“No, it was
looking
at me,” the cop said, and gave Johnny a rather forbidding frown, as if he were daring the other man to contradict him. “I stole its eyes, that's all. The holes of its eyes. I suppose most of that animal-tamer stuff is for the birds, but when it comes to slinkers like desert wolves . . . well, if you steal their eyes, it doesn't matter what you say. They're usually not dangerous unless they're rabid, anyway. You just don't want them to smell fear on you. Or blood.”

Johnny glanced at the big cop's right sleeve again and wondered if the blood on it was what had drawn the coyote.

“And you don't ever,
ever
want to face them when they're in a pack. Especially a pack with a strong leader. They're fearless then. They'll go after an elk and run it until its heart bursts. Sometimes just for the fun of it.” He paused. “Or a man.”

“Really,” Johnny said. “That's . . .” He couldn't say
très creepy,
he'd already used that one. “. . . fascinating.”

“It is, isn't it?” the big cop said, and smiled. “Desert lore. Scripture in the wasteland. The resonance of lonely places.”

Johnny stared at him, jaw dropping slightly. All at once his friend the policeman sounded like Paul Bowles on a bad-karma day.

He's trying to impress you, that's all—it's cocktail chatter without the cocktail party. You've seen and heard it all a thousand times before.

Maybe. But he still could have done without it in this context. Somewhere off in the distance another howl rose, trembling the air like an auditory heat-haze. It wasn't the coyote which had just run off, Johnny was sure of that. This howl had come from farther away, perhaps in answer to the first.

“Oh hey, time out!” the cop exclaimed. “You better stow that, Mr. Marinville!”

“Huh?” For one exceedingly strange moment he had the idea the cop was talking about his thoughts, as if he practiced telepathy as well as elliptical pretentiousness, but the big man had turned back to the motorcycle again, and was pointing at the lefthand saddlebag. Johnny saw that one sleeve of his new poncho—bright orange for safety in bad weather—was hanging out of it like a tongue.

How come I didn't see that when I stopped to take a leak?
he wondered.
How could I have missed it?
And there was something else. He'd stopped for gas in Pretty Nice, and after he'd topped the Harley's tanks, he'd unbuckled that saddlebag to get his Nevada map. He had checked the mileage from there to Austin, then refolded the map and put it back. Then he had rebuckled the saddlebag. He was sure he had, but it was certainly unbuckled now.

He had been an intuitive man all his life; it was intuition, not planning, that had been responsible for his best work as a writer. The drinking and the drugs had dulled those intuitions but not destroyed them, and they had come back—not all the way, at least not yet, but some—since he'd gotten straight. Now, looking at the poncho dangling out of the unbuckled saddlebag, Johnny felt alarm bells start going off in his head.

The cop did it.

That was completely senseless, but intuition told him it was true just the same. The cop had unbuckled the saddlebag and pulled his orange poncho partway out of it while Johnny had been north of the road with his back turned, taking a piss. And for most of their conversation, the cop had deliberately stood so Johnny couldn't see the hanging poncho. The guy wasn't as starry-eyed about meeting his favorite author as he had seemed. Maybe not starry-eyed at all. And he had an agenda here.

What agenda? Would you mind telling me that?
What
agenda?

Johnny didn't know, but he didn't like it. He didn't like that weird Yoda shit with the coyote much, either.

“Well?” the cop asked. He was smiling, and here was another thing not to like. It wasn't a goony I'm-just-a-fan-in-love smile anymore, if it ever had been; there was something cold about it. Maybe contemptuous.

“Well, what?”

“Are you going to take care of it or not?
Tak!
”

His heart jumped. “
Tak,
what does that mean?”

“I didn't say
tak,
you did.
You
said
tak.
”

The cop crossed his arms and stood smiling at him.

I want out of here,
Johnny thought.

Yes, that was pretty much the bottom line, wasn't it? And if that meant following orders, so be it. This little interlude, which had started off being funny in a nice way had suddenly gotten funny in a way that wasn't so nice . . . as if a cloud had gone over the sun and a previously pleasant day had darkened, grown sinister.

Suppose he means to hurt me? He's pretty clearly a beer or two short of a sixpack.

Well,
he answered himself,
suppose he does? What are you going to do about it? Complain to the local ki-yotes?

His overtrained imagination served up an extremely ugly image: the cop digging a hole in the desert, while in the shade of his cruiser lay the body of a man who had once won the National Book Award and fucked America's most famous actress. He negated the image while it was little more than a sketch, not so much out of fear as by virtue of an odd protective arrogance. Men like him weren't murdered, after all. They sometimes took their own lives, but they weren't murdered, especially by psychotic fans. That was pulp-fiction bullshit.

There was John Lennon, of course, but—

He moved to his saddlebag, catching a whiff of the cop as he went by. For one moment Johnny had a brilliant but unfocused memory of his drunken, abusive, crazily funny father, who had always seemed to smell exactly as this cop did now: Old Spice on top, sweat underneath the aftershave, plain old black-eyed meanness under everything, like the dirt floor in an old cellar.

Both of the saddlebag's buckles were undone. Johnny raised the fringed top, aware that he could still smell sweat and Old Spice. The cop was standing right at his shoulder. Johnny reached for the hanging arm of the poncho, then stopped as he saw what was lying on top of his pile of Triple-A maps. Part of him was shocked, but most of him wasn't even surprised. He looked at the cop. The cop was looking into the saddlebag.

“Oh, Johnny,” he said regretfully. “This is disappointing. This is
très
disappointing.”

He reached in and picked up the gallon-sized Baggie lying on the pile of maps. Johnny didn't have to sniff to know that the stuff inside wasn't Cherry Blend. Stuck on the front of the Baggie, like someone's idea of a joke, was a round yellow smile sticker.

“That's not mine,” Johnny Marinville said. His voice sounded tired and distant, like the message on a very old phone answering machine. “That's not mine and you know it's not, don't you? Because you put it there.”

“Oh yeah, blame the cops,” the big man said, “just like in your pinko-liberal books, right? Man, I smelled the dope the second you got close to me. You
reek
of it!
Tak!
”

“Look—” Johnny began.

“Get in the car, pinko! Get in the car, fag!” The voice indignant, the gray eyes full of laughter.

It's a joke,
Johnny thought.
Some kind of crazy practical joke.

Then, from somewhere off to the southwest, more howls rose—a tangle of them, this time—and when the cop's eyes rolled in that direction and he grinned, Johnny felt a scream rising in his throat and had to press his lips together to keep it in. There was no joke in the big cop's expression as he looked toward that sound; it was the look of a man who is totally insane. And Jesus, he was so fucking
big.

“My children of the desert!” the cop said. “The
can toi
! What music they make!”

He laughed, looked down at the Baggie of dope in his big hand, shook his head, and laughed even harder. Johnny stood watching him, his assurance that men like him were never murdered suddenly gone.

“Travels with Harley,”
the cop said. “Do you know what a stupid name for a book that is? What a stupid
concept
it is? And to plunder the literary legacy of
John Steinbeck
 . . . a writer whose shoes you aren't fit to lick . . . that makes me
mad.
”

And before Johnny knew what was happening, a huge silver flare of pain went off in his head. He was aware of staggering backward with his hands clapped over his face and hot blood gushing through his fingers, of flailing his arms, of thinking
I'm all right, I'm not going to fall over, I'm all right,
and then he was lying on his side in the road, screaming up at the blue socket of the sky. The nose under his fingers no longer felt on straight; it seemed to be lying against his left cheek. He had a deviated septum from all the coke he had done in the eighties, and he remembered his doctor telling him he ought to get that fixed before he ran into a sign or a swinging door or something and it just exploded. Well, it hadn't been a door or a sign, and it hadn't exactly exploded, but it had certainly undergone a swift and radical change. He thought these things in what seemed to be perfectly coherent fashion even while his mouth went on screaming.

“In fact, it makes me
furious,
” the cop said, and kicked him high up on the left thigh. The pain came in a sheet that sank in like acid and turned the big muscles in his leg to stone. Johnny rolled back and forth, now clutching his leg instead of his nose, scraping his cheek against the asphalt of Highway 50, screaming, gasping, pulling sand down his throat and coughing it harshly back out when he tried to scream again.

“The truth is it makes me
sick with rage,
” the cop said, and kicked Johnny's ass, high up toward the small of his back. Now the pain was too enormous to be borne; surely he would pass out. But he didn't. He only writhed and crawdaddied on the broken white line, screaming and bleeding from his broken nose and coughing out sand while in the distance coyotes howled at the thickening shadows stretching out from the distant mountains.

“Get up,” the cop said. “On your feet, Lord Jim.”

“I can't,” Johnny Marinville sobbed, pulling his legs up to his chest and crossing his arms over his belly, this defensive posture dimly remembered from the '68 Democratic convention in Chicago, and from even before that, from a lecture he had attended in Philadelphia, prior to the first Freedom Rides down into Mississippi. He had meant to go along on one of those—not only was it a great cause, it was the stuff of which great fiction was made—but in the end, something else had come up. Probably his cock, at the sight of a raised skirt.

“On your feet, you piece of shit. You're in
my
house now, the house of the wolf and the scorpion, and you better not forget it.”

“I can't, you broke my leg, Jesus Christ you hurt me so
bad
—”

“Your leg's not broken and you don't know what being hurt is yet. Now get up.”