Desperation, p.53
Desperation, page 53
“I’m not, believe me,” David said. “I’ve seen enough bodies to last me a lifetime.”
“I think that’s good enough.” Johnny started toward the driver’s side of the ATV and tripped over something. David grabbed his arm, although he, Johnny, hadn’t come especially close to falling. “Watch it, Gramps.”
“You got a mouth on you, kid.”
It was the hammer he’d tripped on. He picked it up, turned to toss it back onto the worktable, then reconsid-ered and stuck the rubber-sleeved handle into the belt of his chaps. The chaps now had enough blood and dirt grimed into them to look almost like the real thing, and the hammer felt right there, somehow.
There was a control-box set to the right of the metal door. Johnny pushed the blue button marked up, mentally prepared for more problems, but the door rattled smoothly along its track. The air that came in, smelling faintly of Indian paintbrush and sage, was fresh and sweet-like heaven. David filled his chest with it, turned to Johnny, and smiled. “Nice.”
“Yeah. Come on, hop in this beauty. Take you for a spin…, David climbed into the front passenger seat of the vehicle, which looked like a high—slung, oversized golf—cart. Johnny turned the key and the engine caught at once. As he ran it out through the open door, it occurred to him that none of this was happening. It was all just part of an idea h&d had for a new novel. A fantasy tale, perhaps even an outright horror novel. Something of a departure for John Edward Marinville, either way.
Not the sort of stuff of which serious literature was made, but so what. He was getting on, and if he wanted to take himself a little less seriously, surely he had that right. There was no need to shoulder each book like a backpack filled with rocks and then sprint uphill with it.
That might be okay for the kids, the bootcamp recruits, but those days were behind him now. And it was sort of a relief that they were.
Not real, none of this, nah, no way. In reality he was just out for a ride in the old convertible, out for a ride with his son, the child of his middle years. They were going to Milly’s on the Square. They’d park around the side of the ice-cream stand, eat their cones, and maybe he’d tell the kid a few war stories about his own boyhood, not enough to bore him, kids had a low tolerance for tales that started “When I was a boy,” he knew that, he guessed every dad who didn’t have his head too far up his own ass did, so maybe just one or two about how he’d tried out for base-ball more or less as a lark, and goddamned if the coach hadn’t—“Johnny. Are you all right.”
He realized he had backed all the way to the edge of the street and was now just sitting here with the clutch in and the engine idling.
“Huh. Yeah. Fine.”
“What were you thinking about.”
“Kids. You’re the first one I’ve been around in… Christ, since my youngest went off to Duke. You’re okay, David. A little God-obsessed, but otherwise quite severely cool.”
David smiled. “Thanks.”
Johnny backed out a little farther, then swung around and shifted into first. As the ATV’s high-set headlights swept Main Street, he saw two things: the leprechaun weathervane which had topped Bud’s Suds was now lying in the street, and Steve’s truck was gone.
“If they did what you wanted, I guess they’re on their way up there,” Johnny said.
“When they find Mary they’ll wait for us.”
“Will they find her, do you think.”
“I’m almost positive they will. And I think she’s okay. It was close, though.” He glanced over at Johnny and this time he smiled more fully. Johnny thought it was a beau—tiful smile. “You’re going to come out of this all right, too, I think. Maybe you’ll write about it.”
“I usually write about the stuff that happens to me. Dress it up a little and it does fine.
But this… I don’t know.”
They were passing The American West. Johnny thought of Audrey Wyler, lying in there under the ruins of the bal-cony. What was left of her.
“David, how much of Audrey’s story was true. Do you know.”
“Most of it.” David was looking at the theater, too, craning his neck to keep it in view a moment or two longer as they passed. Then he turned back to Johnny. His face was thoughtful… and, Johnny thought, sad. “She wasn’t a bad person, you know. What happened to her was like being caught in a landslide or a flood, something like that.”
“An act of God.”
“Right.”
“Our God. Yours and mine.”
“Right.”
“And God is cruel.”
“Right again.”
“You’ve got some damned tough ideas for a kid, you know it.”
Passing the Municipal Building now. The place where the boy’s sister had been killed and his mother snatched away into some final darkness. David looked at it with eyes Johnny couldn’t read, then raised his hands and scrubbed at his face with them. The gesture made him look his age again, and Johnny was shocked to see how young that was.
“More of them than I ever wanted to have,” David said. “You know what God finally told Job when he got tired of listening to all Job’s complaints.”
“Pretty much told him to fuck off, didn’t he.”
“Yeah. You want to hear something really bad.”
“Can’t wait.”
The ATV was riding over ridges of sand in a series of toothrattling jounces. Johnny could see the edge of town up ahead. He wanted to go faster, but anything beyond second gear seemed imprudent, given the short reach of the headlights. It might be true that they were in God’s hands, but God reputedly helped those who helped them-selves. Maybe that was why he had kept the hammer.
“I have a friend. Brian Ross, his name is. He’s my best friend. Once we made a Parthenon entirely out of bottlecaps.”
“Did you.”
“Uh-huh. Brian’s dad helped us a little, but mostly we did it ourselves. We’d stay up Saturday nights and watch old horror movies. The black-and-white ones. Boris Karloff was our favorite monster. Frankenstein was good, but we liked The Mummy even better.
We were always going to each other, ‘Oh shit, the mummy’s after us, we better walk a little faster.’ Goofy stuff like that, but fun. You know.”
Johnny smiled and nodded.
“Anyway, Brian was in an accident. A drunk hit him while he was riding to school. I mean, quarter of eight in the morning, and this guy is drunk on his ass. Do you believe that.”
“Sure,” Johnny said, “you bet.”
David gave him a considering look, nodded, then went on. “Brian hit his head. Bad.
Fractured his skull and hurt his brain. He was in a coma, and he wasn’t supposed to live.
But-”
“Let me guess the rest. You prayed to God that your friend would be all right, and two days later, bingo, that boy be walkin n talkin, praise Jesus my lord n savior.”
“You don’t believe it.”
Johnny laughed. “Actually, I do. After what’s happened to me since this afternoon, a little thing like that seems perfectly sane and reasonable.”
“I went to a place that was special to me and Brian to pray. A platform we built in a tree.
We called it the Viet Cong Lookout.”
Johnny looked at him gravely. “You’re not kidding about that.”
David shook his head. “I can’t remember which one of us named it that now, not for sure, but that’s what we called it. We thought it was from some old movie, but if it was, I can’t remember which one. We had a sign and everything. That was our place, that’s where I went, and what I said was-” He closed his eyes, thinking. “What I said was, ‘God, make him better. If you do, I’ll do some—thing for you. I promise.’ “David opened his eyes again. “He got better almost right away.”
“And now it’s payback time. That’s the bad part, right.”
“No! I don’j mind paying back. Last year I bet my dad five bucks that the Pacers would win the NBA champion-ship, and when they didn’t, he tried to let me off because he said I was just a kid, I bet my heart instead of my head. Maybe he was right-”
“Probably he was right.”
“-but I paid up just the same. Because it’s bush not to pay what you owe, and it’s bush not to do what you promise.” David leaned toward him and lowered his voice… as if he was afraid God might overhear. “The really bad part is that God knew I’d be coming out here, and he already knew what he wanted me to do. And he knew what I’d have to know to do it. My folks aren’t reli-gious-Christmas and Easter, mostly-and until Brian’s accident, I wasn’t, either. All the Bible I knew was John three-sixteen, on account of it’s always on the signs the zellies hold up at the ballpark. For God so loved the world.”
They were passing the bodega with its fallen sign now. The LP tanks had torn off the side of the building and lay in the desert sixty or seventy yards away. China Pit loomed ahead.
In the starlight it looked like a whited sepulchre.
“What are zellies.”
“Zealots. That’s my friend Reverend Martin’s word. I think he’s… I think something may have happened to him.” David fell silent for a moment, staring at the road. Its edges had been blurred by the sandstorm, and out here there were drifts as well as ridges spilled across their path. The ATV took them easily. “Anyway, I didn’t know anything about Jacob and Esau or Joseph’s coat of many colors or Potiphar’s wife until Brian’s accident.
Mostly what I was interested in back in those days”-he spoke, Johnny thought, like a nonagenarian war veteran describing ancient battles and forgotten campaigns-”was whether or not Albert Belle would ever win the American League MVP.”
He turned toward Johnny, his face grave.
“The bad thing isn’t that God would put me in a posi-tion where I’d owe him a favor, but that he’d hurt Brian to do it.”
“God is cruel.”
David nodded, and Johnny saw the boy was on the verge of tears. “He sure is. Better than Tak, maybe, but pretty mean, just the same.”
“But God’s cruelty is refining… that’s the rumor, anyway. Yeah.”
“Well… maybe.”
“In any case, he’s alive, your friend.”
“Yes-”
“And maybe it wasn’t all about you, anyway. Maybe someday your pal is going to cure AIDS or cancer. Maybe he’ll hit in sixty straight games.”
“Maybe.”
“David, this thing that’s out there-Tak-what is it. Do you have any idea. An Indian spirit. Something like a manitou, or a wendigo.”
“I don’t think so. I think it’s more like a disease than a spirit, or even a demon. The Indians may not have even known it was here, and it was here before they were. Long before. Tak is the ancient one, the unformed heart. And the place where it really is, on the other side of the throat at the bottom of the well… I’m not sure that place is on earth at all, or even in normal space. Tak is a complete outsider, so different from us that we can’t even get our minds around him.”
The boy was shivering a little, and his face looked even paler. Maybe that was just the starlight, but Johnny didn’t like it. “We don’t need to talk about it anymore, if you don’t want to. All right.”
David nodded, then pointed up ahead. “Look, there’s the Ryder van. It’s stopped. They must have found Mary. Isn’t that great.”
“It sure is,” Johnny said. The truck’s headlights were half a mile or so farther on, shining out in a fan toward the base of the embankment. They drove on toward it mostly in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. For Johnny, those questions were mostly concerned with identity; he wasn’t entirely sure who he was any longer. He turned to David, meaning to ask if David knew where there might be a few more sardines hiding—hungry as he was, he wouldn’t even turn his nose up at a plate of cold lima beans-when his head suddenly turned into a soundless, brilliant airburst. He jerked backward in the driver’s seat shoulders twisting. A strangled cry escaped him. His mouth was drawn down so radically at the corners that it looked like a clown’s mask. The ATV swerved toward the left side of the road.
David leaned over, grabbed the wheel, and corrected their course just before the vehicle could nose over the edge and tumble into the desert. By then Johnny’s eyes were open again. He braked instinctively, throwing the boy forward. Then they were stopped, the ATV idling in the middle of the road not two hundred feet from the Ryder van’s taillights. They could see people standing back there, red-stained silhouettes, watching them.
“Holy shit,” David breathed. “For a second or two there-”
Johnny looked at him, dazed and amazed, as if seeing him for the first time in his life.
Then his eyes cleared and he laughed shakily.
“Holy shit is right,” he said. His voice was low, almost strengthless-the voice of a man who has just received a walloping shock. “Thanks, David.”
“Was it a God-bomb.”
“What.”
“A big one. Like Saul in Damascus, when the cataracts or whatever they were fell out of his eyes and he could see again. Reverend Martin calls those God-bombs. You just had one, didn’t you.”
All at once he didn’t want to look at David, was afraid of what David might see in his eyes. He looked at the Ryder’s taillights instead.
Steve hadn’t used the extraordinary width of the road to turn around, Johnny noticed; the rental truck was still pointed south, toward the embankment. Of course. Steve Ames was a clever old Texas boy, and he must have sus pected this wasn’t finished yet. He was right. David was right, too-they had to go up to the China Pit-but the kid had some other ideas that were maybe not so right.
Fix your eyes, Johnny, Terry said. Fix your eyes so you can look at him without a single blink. You know how to.2 do that, don’t you.
Yes, he certainly did. He remembered something an old literature prof of his had said, back when dinosaurs still walked the earth and Ralph Houk still managed the New York Yankees. Lying is fiction, this crusty old reptile had proclaimed with a dry and cynical grin, fiction is art, and therefore all art is a lie.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, stand back as I prepare to practice art on this unsuspecting young prophet.
He turned to David and met David’s concerned gaze with a rueful little smile. “No God—bombs, David. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Then what just happened.”
“I had a seizure. Everything just came down on me at once and I had a seizure. As a young man, I used to have one every three or four months. Petit mal. Took medica-tion and they went away. When I started drinking heavily around the age of forty-well, thirty—five, and there was a little more involved than just booze, I guess-they came back. Not so petit by then, either. The seizures are the main reason I keep trying to go on the wagon.
What you just saw was the first one in almost”-he paused, pre-tending to count back-”eleven months. No booze or cocaine involved this time, either. Just plain old stress.”
He got rolling again. He didn’t want to look around now; if he did he would be looking to see how much of it David was buying, and the kid might pick up on that. It sounded crazy, paranoid, but Johnny knew it wasn’t. The kid was amazing and spooky… like an Old Testament prophet who has just come striding out of an Old Testa-ment desert, skinburned by the sun and brainburned by God’s inside information.
Better to tuck his gaze away, keep it to himself, at least for the time being.
From the corner of his right eye he could see David studying him uncertainly. “Is that really the truth, Johnny.” he asked finally. “No bullshit.”
“Really the truth,” Johnny said, still not looking directly at him. “Zero bullshit.”
David asked no more questions… but he kept glancing over at him. Johnny discovered he could actually feel that glance, like soft, skilled fingers patting their way along the top of a window, feeling for the catch that would unlock it.
Tak sat on the north side of the rim, talons digging into the rotted hide of an old fallen tree. Now literally eagle-eyed, it had no trouble picking out the vehicles below. It could even see the two people in the ATV: the writer behind the wheel, and, next to him, the boy.
The shitting prayboy.
Here after all.
Both of them here after all.
Tak had met the boy briefly in the boy’s vision and had tried to divert him, frighten him, send him away before he could find the one that had summoned him. It hadn’t been able to do it. My God is strong, the boy had said, and that was clearly true.
It remained to be seen, however, if the boy’s God was strong enough.
The ATV stopped short of the yellow truck. The writer and the boy appeared to be talking. The boy’s dama started walking toward them, a rifle in one hand, then stopped as the open vehicle began moving forward again. Then they were together once more, all those who remained, joined again in spite of its efforts.
Yet all was not lost. The eagle’s body wouldn’t last long-an hour, two at the most-but right now it was strong and hot and eager, a honed weapon which Tak grasped in the most intimate way. It ruffled the bird’s wings and rose into the air as the dama embraced his damane. (It was losing its human language rapidly now, the eagle’s small can toi brain incapable of holding it. and reverting back to the simple but powerful tongue of the unformed.) It turned, glided out over the well of darkness which was the China Pit, turned again, and spiraled down toward the black square of the drift. It landed, uttering a single loud quowwwk! as its talons sorted the scree for a good grip. Thirty yards down the drift, pallid reddish-pink light glowed. Tak looked at this for a moment, letting the light of the an tak fill and soothe the bird’s primitive marble of a brain, then hopped a short distance into the tunnel. Here was a little niche on the left side. The eagle worked its way into it and then stood quiet, wings tightly folded, waiting.
Waiting for all of them, but mostly for Prayboy. It would rip Prayboy’s throat out with one of the golden eagle’s powerful talons, his eyes with the other; Prayboy would be dead before any of them knew what had happened. Before the os dam himself knew what had hap-pened, or even realized he was dying blind.
