Desperation, p.20
Desperation, page 20
David looked at him steadily, saying nothing.
“Yes, yes you are. You’ve just got that prayboy look about you, great-gosh-a’mighty eyes and a real jeepers-creepers mouth. A little prayboy in a baseball shirt! Gosh!” He put his head close to Ellen’s and looked slyly at the boy through the gauze of her hair.
“Do all the praying you want, David, but don’t expect it to do you any help. Your God isn’t here, any more than he was with Jesus when Jesus hung dying on the cross with flies in his eyes. Tak!”
Ellen saw it coming up the stairs. She screamed and tried to pull back, but Entragian held her where she was. The coyote oiled through the doorway. It didn’t even look at the screaming woman with her arm pinched in the cop’s fist but crossed calmly to the center of the room. Then it stopped, turned its head over one shoulder, and fixed its yellow stuffed-animal stare on Entragian.
“Ah lah,” he said, and let go of Ellen’s arm long enough to spank his right hand across the back of his left hand in a quick gesture that reminded David of a flat stone skipping across the surface of a pond. “Him en tow.”
The coyote sat down.
“This guy is fast,” Entragian said. He was apparently speaking to all of them, but it was David he was looking at. “I mean the guy is fast. Faster than most dogs. You stick a hand or foot out of your cell, he’ll have it off before you know it’s gone. I guarantee that.”
“You leave my mother alone,” David said.
“Son,” Entragian said regretfully, “I’ll put a stick up your mother’s twat and spin her until she catches fire, if I so decide, and you’ll not stop me. And I’ll be back for you.
He went Out the door, pulling David’s mother with him.
There was silence in the room, broken only by Ralph Carver’s choked sobs and the coyote, which sat panting and regarding David with its unpleasantly intelli-gent eyes.
Little drops of spittle fell from the end of its tongue like drops from a leaky pipe.
“Take heart, son,” the man with the shoulder-length gray hair said. He sounded like a guy more used to taking comfort than giving it. “You saw him-he’s got internal bleeding, he’s losing his teeth, one eye’s ruptured right out of his head. He can’t last much longer.”
“It won’t take him long to kill my mom, if he decides to,” David said. “He already killed my little sister. He pushed her down the stairs and broke… broke her n-n—neck.” His eyes abruptly blurred with tears and he willed them back. This was no time to get bawling.
“Yes, but The gray-haired man trailed off.
David found himself remembering an exchange with the cop when they had been on their way to this town—when they had still thought the cop was sane and normal and only helping them out. He had asked the cop how he knew their name, and the cop had said he’d read it on the plaque over the table. It was a good answer, there was a plaque with their name on it over the table… but Entra-gian never would have been able to see it from where he was standing at the foot of their RV’s stairs. I’ve got eagle eyes, David, he’d said, and those are eyes that see the truth from afar.
Ralph Carver came slowly forward to the front of his cell again, almost shuffling. His eyes were bloodshot, the lids puffy, his face ravaged. For a moment David felt almost blinded with rage, shaken by a desire to scream: This is all your fruIt! Y)ur fault that Pie’s dead! Your fault that he’s taken Mom off to kill her or rape her! You and your gambling! You and your stupid vacation ideas! He should have taken you, Dad, he should hai’e taken you!
Stop it, David. His thought, Gene Martin’s voice. That’s just the way it wants you to think.
It. The cop, Entragian, was that who the voice meant by it. And what way did he… or it… want him to think. For that matter, why would it care what way he thought at all.
“Look at that thing,” Ralph said, staring at the coyote. “How could he call it in here like that. And why does it stay.”
The coyote turned toward Ralph’s voice, then glanced at Mary, then looked back at David. It panted. More saliva fell to the hardwood floor, where a little puddle was forming.
“He’s got them trained, somehow,” the gray-haired man said. “Like the birds. He’s got some trained buzzards out there. I killed one of the scraggy bastards. I stomped it-”
“No,” Mary said.
“No,” Billingsley echoed. “I’m sure that coyotes can be 7 trained, but this is not training.”
“Of course it is,” the gray-haired man snapped. “That cop.” David said. “Mr. Billingsley says he’s taller than he used to be. Three inches, at least.”
“That’s insane.” The gray-haired man was wearing a motorcycle jacket. Now he unzipped one of the pockets, took out a battered roll of Life Savers, and put one in his mouth.
“Sir, what’s your name.” Ralph asked the gray—haired man.
“Marinville. Johnny Marinville. I’m a-”
“What you are is blind if you can’t see that something very terrible and very out of the ordinary is going on here.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t terrible, and I certainly didn’t say it was ordinary,” the gray-haired man replied. He went on, but then the voice came again, the outside voice, and David lost track of their conversation.
The soap. David, the soap.
He looked at it-a green bar of Irish Spring sitting beside the spigot-and thought of Entragian saying I’ll be back for you.
The soap.
Suddenly he understood… or thought he did. Hoped he did.
I better be right. I better be right, or—He was wearing a Cleveland Indians tee-shirt. He pulled it off, dropped it by the cell door. He looked up and saw the coyote staring at him.
Its ragged ears were all the way up again, and David thought he could hear it growl-ing, low and far back in its throat.
“Son.” his father asked. “What do you think you’re doing.”
Without answering, he sat down on the end of the bunk, took off his sneakers, and tossed them over to where his shirt lay. Now there was no question that the coyote was growling. As if it knew what he was planning to do. As if it meant to stop him if he actually tried it.
Don’t be a dope, of course it means to stop you if you try it, why else did the cop leave it there. You just have to trust. Trust and have faith.
“Have faith that God will protect me,” he murmured. He stood up, unbuckled his belt, then paused with his fingers on the snap of his jeans. “Ma’am.” he said.
“Ma’am.” She looked at him, and David felt himself blush. “I wonder if you’d mind turning around,” he said, “I have to take off my pants, and I guess I better take off my underwear, too… ’ “What in God’s name are you thinking about.” his father asked. There was panic in his voice now. “What-ever it is, I forbid it! Absolutely!”
David didn’t reply, only looked at Mary. Looked at her as steadily as the coyote was looking at him. She returned his look for a moment, then, without saying a word, turned her back. The man in the motorcycle jacket sat on his bunk, crunching his Life Saver and watching him. David was as body-shy as most eleven-year-olds, and that steady gaze made him uncomfortable… but as he had already pointed out to himself, this was no time to be a dope. He took another glance at the bar of Irish Spring, then thumbed down his pants and undershorts.
“Nice,” Cynthia said. “I mean, that’s class.”
“What.” Steve asked. He was sitting forward, watching the road carefully. More sand and tumbleweeds were blowing across it now, and the driving had gotten tricky.
“The sign. See it.”
He looked. The sign, which had originally read DES-PERATION ’s CHURCH & civic ORGANIZATIONS WELCOME You! had been changed by some wit with a spraycan; it now read DESPERATION’s DEAD DOGS WELCOME you! A rope, frayed at one end, flapped back and forth in the wind. Old Shep himself was gone, however. The buzzards had gotten their licks in first; then the coyotes had come Hungry and not a bit shy about eating a first cousin, they had snapped the rope and dragged the Shepherd’s carcass away, pausing only to squabble and fight with one another. What remained (mostly bones and toenails) lay over the next rise. The blowing sand would cover it soon enough.
“Boy, folks around here must love a good laugh,” Steve said.
“They must.” She pointed. “Stop there.”
It was a rusty Quonset hut. The sign in front read DES-PERATION MINING CORP.
There was a parking lot beside it with ten or twelve cars and trucks in it.
He pulled over but didn’t turn in to the lot, at least not yet. The wind was blowing more steadily now, the gusts gradually merging into one steady blast. To the west, the sun was a surreal red-orange disc hanging over the Desa-toya Mountains, as flat and bloated as a photo of the planet Jupiter. Steve could hear a fast and steady tink-tink-tink-tink coming from somewhere nearby, possibly the sOund of a steel lanyard-clip banging against a flagpole.
“What’s on your mind.” he asked her.
“Let’s call the cops from here. There’s people; see the lights.”
He glanced toward the Quonset and saw five or six golden squares of brightness toward the rear of the building. In the dusty gloom they looked like lighted win-dows in a train—car. He looked back at Cynthia and shrugged. “Why from here, when we could just drive to the local cop-shop. The middle of town-such as it is—can’t be far.”
She rubbed one hand across her forehead as if she were tired, or getting a headache. “You said you’d be careful. I said I’d help you be careful. That’s what I’m trying to do now. I sort of want to see how things are hanging before someone in a uniform sits me down in a chair and starts shooting questions. And don’t ask me why, because I don’t really know.
If we call the cops and they sound cool, that’s fine. They’re cool, we’re cool. But… where the fuck were they. Never mind your boss, he disap-peared almost clean, but an RV parked beside the road, the tires flat, door unlocked, valuables inside. I mean, gimme a break. Where were the cops.”
“It goes back to that, doesn’t it.”
“Yeah, back to that.” The cops could have been at the scene of a road-accident or a ranch-fire or a convenience—store stickup, even a murder, and she knew it-all of them, because there just weren’t that many cops out in this part of the world. But still, yeah, it came back to that. Because it felt more than funny. It felt wrong.
“Okay,” Steve said mildly, and turned in to the parking lot. “Might not be anybody at what passes for the Des-peration P.D… anyhow. It’s getting late. I’m surprised there’s anyone still here, tell you the truth. Must be money in minerals, huh.”
He parked next to a pickup, opened the door, and the wind snatched it out of his hand. It banged the side of the truck. Steve winced, half-expecting a Slim Pickens type to come running toward him, holding his hat on with one hand and yelling Hey thar, boy! No owner did. A tumble-weed zoomed by, apparently headed for Salt Lake City, but that was all. And the alkali dust was flying-plenty of it. He had a red bandanna in his back pocket.
He took it out, knotted it around his neck, and pulled it up over his mouth.
“Hold it, hold it,” he said, tugging her arm to keep her from opening her door just yet. He leaned over so he could open the glove compartment. He rummaged and found another bandanna, this one blue, and handed it to her. “Put that on first.”
She held it up, examined it gravely, then turned her wide little-girl eyes on him again.
“No cootiebugs.”
He snorted and grinned behind the red bandanna. “Airy a one, ma am, as we say back in Lubbock. Put it on.”
She knotted it, then pulled it up. “Butch and Sundance,” she said, her voice a little muffled.
“Yeah, Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Omar and Sharif,” she said, and giggled.
“Be careful getting out. The wind’s really getting cranked up.”
He stepped out and the wind slapped him in the face, making him stagger as he reached the front of the van. Flying grit stung his forehead. Cynthia was holding onto her doorhandle, head down, the Peter Tosh shirt flapping out behind her skinny midriff like a sail. There was still some daylight left, and the sky overhead was still blue, but the landscape had taken on a strange shadowless quality. It was stormlight if Steve had ever seen it.
“Come on!” he yelled, and put an arm around Cynthia’s waist. “Let’s get out of this!”
They hurried across the cracked asphalt to the long building. There was a door at one end of it. The sign bolted to the corrugated metal beside it read DESPERATION MINING CORP… like the one out front, but Steve saw that this one had been painted over something else, some other name that was starting to show through the white paint like a red ghost. He was pretty sure that one of the painted—over words was DIABLO, with the I modified into a devil’s pitchfork.
Cynthia was tapping the door with one bitten fingernail. A sign had been hung on the inside from one of those little transparent suction cups. Steve thought there was something perfectly, irritatingly, showily Western about the message on the sign.
IF WE’re OPEN, WE’re OPEN IF WE’re CLOSED, Y’ALL COME BACK
“They forgot son,” he said.
“Huh.”
“It should say ‘Y’all come back, son.’ Then it would be perfect.” He glanced at his watch and saw that it was twenty past seven. Which meant they were closed, of course. Except if they were closed, what were those cars and trucks doing in the parking lot.
He tried the door. It pushed open. From inside came the sound of country music, broken by heavy static. “I built it one piece at a time,” Johnny Cash sang, “And it didn’t cost me a dime.”
They stepped in. The door closed on a pneumatic arm. Outside, the wind played rattle and hum along the ridged metal sides of the building. They were in a reception area. To the right were four chairs with patched vinyl seats. They looked like they were mostly used by beefy men wearing dirty jeans and workboots. There was a long coffee-table in front of the chairs, piled with magazines you didn’t find in the doctor’s office: Guns and Ammo, Road and Track, MacLean ’s Mining Report, Metallurgy Newsletter, Arizona Highways. There was also a very old Penthouse with Tonya Harding on the cover.
Straight ahead of them was a field-gray receptionist’s desk, so dented that it might have been kicked here all the way from Highway 50. It was loaded down with papers, a crazily stacked set of volumes marked MSHA Guidelines (an overloaded ashtray sat on top of these), and three wire baskets full of rocks. A manual typewriter perched on one end of the desk; no computer that Steve could see, and a chair in the kneehole, the kind that runs on casters, but nobody sitting in it. The air conditioner was running, and the room was uncomfortably cool.
Steve walked around the desk, saw a cushion sitting on the chair, and picked it up so Cynthia could see it. PARK YER ASS had been crocheted across the front in old—fashioned Western-style lettering.
“Oh, tasteful,” she said. “Operators are standing by, use Tootie.”
On the desk, flanked by a joke sign (LEAD ME NOT INTO TEMPTATION, FOR I SHALL FIND IT MYSELF) and a name—plaque (BRAD JOSEPHSON), was a stiff studio photo of an overweight but pretty black woman flanked by two cute kids. A male receptionist, then, and not exactly Mr. Neat. The radio, an old cracked Philco, sat on a nearby shelf along with the phone. “Right about then my wife walked out,” Johnny Cash bawled through wild cannonades of static, “And I could see right away that she had her doubts, But she opened the door and said ‘Honey, take me for a-’ Steve turned off the radio. The hardest gust of wind yet hit the building, making it creak like a submarine under pressure. Cynthia, still with the bandanna he’d given her pulled up over her nose, looked around uneasily. The radio was off, but-very faintly-Steve could still hear Johnny Cash singing about how he’d smuggled his car out of the GM plant in his lunchbucket, one piece at a time. Same station, different radio, way back. Where the lights were, he guessed.
Cynthia pointed to the phone. Steve picked it up, lis—tened, dropped it back into its cradle again. “Dead. Must be a line down somewhere.”
“Aren’t they underground these days.” she asked, and Steve noticed an interesting thing: they were both talking in low tones, really not more than a step or two above a whisper.
“I think maybe they haven’t gotten around to that in Desperation just yet.”
There was a door behind the desk. He reached for the handle, and she grabbed his arm.
“What.” Steve asked.
“I don’t know.” She let go of him, reached up, pulled her bandanna down. Then she laughed nervously. “I don’t know, man, this is just so… wacky.”
“Got to be someone back there,” he said. “The door’s unlocked, lights on, cars in the parking lot.”
“You’re scared, too. Aren’t you.”
He thought it over and nodded. Yes. It was like before the thunderstorms-the benders—when he’d been a kid, only with all the strange joy squeezed out of it. “But we still ought to…
“Yeah, I know. Go on.” She swallowed, and he heard something go click in her throat.
“Hey, tell me we’re gonna be laughin at each other and feelin stupid in a few seconds.
Can you do that, Lubbock.”
“In a few seconds we’re gonna be laughing at each other and feeling stupid.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” he said, and opened the door. A narrow hallway ran down it, thirty feet or so. There was a double run of fluorescent bars overhead and all-weather carpet on the floor. There were two doors on one side, both open, and three on the other, two open and one shut. At the end of the corridor, bright yellow light filled up what looked to Steve like a work area of some kind-a shop, maybe, or a lab. That was where the lighted windows they’d seen from the outside were, and where the music was coming from.
Johnny Cash had given way to The Tractors, who claimed that baby liked to rock it like a boogie-woogie choo-choo train. Sounded like typical brag and bluster to Steve.
