He wasn't rocked by this voice--not very, anyway. He'd heard it before, perhaps first wrapped inside that strong impulse to give his folks the impression that he had called Brian back from the deep reaches of his coma. He heard it more clearly, more personally, during his daily prayers, and this had troubled him, but when he told Reverend Martin about how that voice would sometimes cut in as if it were on a telephone extension, Reverend Martin had only laughed. "Like God, Satan tends to speak to us most clearly in our prayers and meditations," he said. "It's when we're most open, most in touch with our pneuma."
"Pneuma? What's that?"
"Spirit. The part of you that yearns to fulfill its God-made potential and be eternal. The part that God and Satan are squabbling over even now."
He had taught David a little mantra to use at such times, and he used it now. See in me, be in me, he thought, over and over again. He was waiting for the voice of the other to fade, but he also needed to get above the pain again. It kept coming back like cramps. Thinking about what had happened to Pie hurt so deep. And yes, he did resent God for letting the insane cop push her down those stairs. Resented, hell, hated.
See in me, God. Be in me, God. See in me, be in me.
The voice of Satan (if it was indeed him; David didn't know for sure) faded away, and for awhile there was only the dark.
Tell me what to do, God Tell me what you want. And if it's your will that we should die here, help me not to waste time being mad or being scared or yelling for an explanation.
Distant, the howl of a coyote. Then, nothing.
He waited, trying to stay open, and still there was nothing. At last he gave up and spoke the prayer-ending words that Reverend Martin had taught him, muttering them into his clasped hands: "Lord, make me be useful to myself and help me to remember that until I am, I can't be useful to others. Help me to remember that you are my creator. I am what you made--sometimes the thumb on your hand, sometimes the tongue in your mouth. Make me a vessel which is whole to your service. Thanks. Amen."
He opened his eyes. As always, he first stared into the darkness in the center of his clasped hands, and as always, the first thing it reminded him of was an eye--a hole like an eye. Whose, though? God's? The devil's? Perhaps just his own?
He stood up, turned slowly around, looked at his parents. They were looking back at him, Ellie amazed, Ralph grave.
"Well thank heaven," his mother said. She gave him a chance to reply, and when he didn't she asked: "Were you praying? You were down on your knees almost half an hour, I thought you must have gone to sleep, were you praying?"
"Yes."
"Do you do it all the time, or is this a special case?"
"I do it three times a day. In the morning, at night, and once somewhere in the middle. The middle one I use to say thanks for the good things in my life and ask for help with the stuff I don't understand." He laughed--a small, nervous sound. "There's always plenty of that."
"Is this a recent development, or have you been doing it since you started going to that church?" She was still looking at him with a perplexity that made David feel self-conscious. Part of it was the black eye--she was developing a hell of shiner from where the cop had hit her--but that wasn't all of it, or even most of it. She was looking at him as if she had never seen him before.
"He's been doing it since Brian's accident," Ralph said. He touched the swollen place over his left eye, winced, and dropped his hand again. He stared at David through two sets of bars, looking as self-conscious as David felt. "I came upstairs to kiss you goodnight this one time--it was a few days after they let Brian go home--and I saw you down on your knees at the foot of your bed. At first I thought you might be ... well, I don't know, doing something else ... then I heard some of what you were saying, and understood."
David smiled, feeling a blush heat his cheeks. That was pretty absurd, under the circumstances, but there it was. "I do it in my head now. I don't even move my lips. A couple of kids heard me mumbling to myself one day in study-hall and thought I was going feeble."
"Maybe your father understands, but I don't," Ellen said.
"I talk to God," he said. This was embarrassing, but maybe if it was said once, and right out straight, it wouldn't have to be said again. "That's what praying is, talking to God. At first it feels like talking to yourself, but then it changes."
"Is that something you know for yourself, David, or is it something your new Sunday pal told you?"
"Something I know for myself."
"And does God answer?"
"Sometimes I think I hear him," David said. He reached into his pocket and touched the shotgun shell with the tips of his fingers. "And once I know I did. I asked him to let Brian be all right. After Dad took me to the hospital, I went to the Bear Street Woods and climbed to the platform me and Bri made in a tree there and asked God to let him be all right. I said that if he did that, I'd kind of give him an IOU. Do you know what I mean?"
"Yes, David, I know what an IOU is. And has he collected on it? This God of yours?"
"Not yet. But when I got up to climb back down the tree, God told me to put my EXCUSED EARLY pass on a nail that was sticking out of the bark up there. It was like he wanted me to turn it in, only to him instead of Mrs. Hardy in the office. And something else. He wanted me to find out as much as I could about him--what he is, what he wants, what he does, and what he won't do. I didn't exactly hear that in words, but I heard the name of the man he wanted me to go to--Reverend Martin. That's why I go to the Methodist church. I don't think the brand name matters much to God, though. He just said to do church for my heart and spirit, and Reverend Martin for my mind. I didn't even know who Reverend Martin was at first."
"But you did," Ellie Carver said. She spoke in the soft, soothing voice of a person who suddenly understands that the person she's talking with is having mental problems. "Gene Martin has come to the house two or three years in a row to collect for African Relief."
"Really? I didn't see him. I guess I must have been in school when he came."
"Nonsense," his mother said, now in tones of absolute finality. "He would have come around near Christmas, so you wouldn't have been in school. Now listen to me, David. Very carefully. When the stuff with Brian happened, you must have ... well, I don't know ... thought you needed outside help. And your subconscious dredged up the only name it knew. The God you heard in your moment of bereavement was your. subconscious mind, looking for answers." She turned to Ralph and spread her hands. "The obsessive Bible-reading was bad enough, but this ... why didn't you tell me about this praying business?"
. "Because it looked private." He shrugged, not meeting her eyes. "And it wasn't hurting anybody."
"Oh no, praying is great, without it the thumbscrews and the Iron Maiden probably never would have been invented." This was a voice David had heard before, a nervous, hectoring voice that his mother adopted when she was trying to keep from breaking down completely. It was the way she'd spoken to him and his dad when Brian had been in the hospital; she had gone on in that vein for a week or so even after Brian came around.
David's father turned away from her, stuffing his hands in his pockets and looking nervously down at the floor. That seemed to make her more furious than ever. She swung back to David, mouth working, eyes shiny with new tears.
"What kind of deal did he make with you, this wonderful God? Was it like one of the baseball-card trades you do with your buds? Did he say 'Hey, I'll trade you this neat Brian Ross '84 for this Kirstie Carver '88?' Was it like that? Or more like--"
"Lady, he's your boy and I don't mean to interfere, but why don't you give it a rest? I guess you lost your little girl; I lost my husband. We've all had a tough day."
It was the woman who had shot at the cop. She was sitting on the end of the bunk. Her black hair hung against her cheeks like limp wings but did not obscure her face; she looked shocked and stricken and tired. Most of all tired. David couldn't remember ever having seen such a weary pair of eyes.
/> He thought for a moment that his mother would turn her rage on the dark-haired woman. It wouldn't have surprised him; she sometimes went nuclear with total strangers. He remembered once, when he'd been about six, she'd flamed a political candidate trolling for votes outside their neighborhood supermarket. The guy had made the tactical mistake of trying to hand her a leaflet when she had an armload of groceries and was late for an appointment. She had turned on him like some small, biting animal, asking him who he thought he was, what he thought he stood for, what his position was on the trade deficit, had he ever smoked pot, had he ever in his life converted the six-ten split, did he support a woman's right to choose. On that last one the guy had been emphatic--he did support a woman's right to choose, he told Ellen Carver proudly. "Good, great, because I choose right now to tell you to GET THE HOLY HELL OUT OF MY FACE!" she had screamed, and that was when the guy had simply turned tail and fled. David hadn't blamed him, either. But something in the dark-haired woman's face (Mary, he thought, her name is Mary) changed his mother's mind, if blowing up had indeed been on it.
She focused on David again instead.
"So--any word from the big G on how we're supposed to get out of this? You were on your knees long enough, there must have been some sort of message."
Ralph turned back to her. "Quit riding him!" he growled. "Just quit it! Do you think you're the only one who's hurting?"
She gave him a look which was perilously close to contempt, then looked back at David again. "Well?"
"No," he said. "No message."
"Someone's coming," Mary said sharply. There was a window behind her bunk. She stood on the bunk and tried to look out. "Shit! Bars and frosted glass with goddam chicken-wire in it! But I hear it, I do!"
David heard it, too--an approaching motor. Suddenly it revved up, blatting at full power. The sound was accompanied by a scream of tires. He looked around at the old man. The old man shrugged and raised his hands, palms up.
David heard what might have been a yell of pain, and then another scream. Human, this time. It would be better to think it had been a scream of wind caught in a gutter or a downspout, but he thought it had almost certainly been human.
"What the hell?" Ralph said. "Jesus! Someone's screaming his head off! Is it the cop, do you think?"
"God I hope so!" Mary cried fiercely, still standing on the bunk and peering at the useless window. "I hope someone's pulling the son of a bitch's lungs right out of his chest!" She looked around at them. Her eyes were still tired, but now they looked wild, as well. "It could be help. Have you thought of that? It could be help!"
The engine--not too close but by no means distant--revved. The tires screamed again, screamed the way they did in the movies and on TV but hardly ever in real life. Then there was a crunching sound. Wood, metal, maybe both. A brief honk, as if someone had inadvertently struck the car's horn. A coyote howl rose, wavering and glassy. It was joined by another and another and another. They seemed to be mocking the dark-haired woman's idea of help. Now the motor was approaching, rumbling at a sedate level just above an idle.
The man with the white hair was sitting at the foot of the cell's bunk, his hands pressed together finger-to-finger between his thighs. He talked without raising his eyes from his hands. "Don't get your hopes up." His voice sounded as cracked and dusty as the salt flats west and north of here. "Ain't nobody but him. I reckernize the sound of the motor."
"I refuse to believe that," Ellie Carver said flatly.
"Refuse all you want," the old man said. "It don't matter. I was on the committee that approved the money for a new town cruiser. Just before I finished my term and retired from politics, that was. I went over to Carson City last November with Collie and Dick and we bought it at a DEA auction. That very car. I had my head under the hood before we bid on her and drove her halfway home at speeds varying from sixty-five to a hunnert n ten. I reckernize her, all right. It's our'n."
And, as David turned to look at the old man, the still, small voice--the one he had first heard in Brian's hospital room--spoke to him. As usual, its arrival came pretty much as a surprise, and the two words it spoke made no immediate sense.
The soap.
He heard the words as clearly as he had heard You're praying already while he'd been sitting in the Viet Cong Lookout with his eyes closed.
The soap.
He looked into the left rear comer of the cell he was sharing with old Mr. White Hair. There was a toilet with no seat. Beside it was an ancient rust-stained porcelain sink. Sitting beside the righthand spigot was a green bar of what could only be Irish Spring soap.
Outside, the engine-sound of the Desperation police-cruiser grew fatter and closer. A little farther off, the coyotes howled. To David that howling had begun to sound like the laughter of lunatics after the keepers have decamped the asylum.
4
The Carver family had been too distraught and too focused on their captor to notice the dead dog hung from the welcome-to-town sign, but John Marinville was a trained noticer. And in truth, the dog was now hard to miss. Since the Carvers had passed this way, the buzzards had found it. They sat on the ground below the carcass, the ugliest birds Johnny had ever seen, one pulling on Old Shep's tail, the other gnawing at one of his dangling feet. The body swung back and forth on the rope twisted around its neck. Johnny made a sound of disgust.
"Buzzards!" the cop said. "Gosh, aren't they something?" His voice had thickened a great deal. He had sneezed twice more on the ride in from town, and the second time there had been teeth in the blood he sprayed out of his mouth. Johnny didn't know what was happening to him and didn't care; he only wished it would hurry up. "I'll tell you something about buzzards," the cop continued. "They wake to sleep and take their waking slow. They learn by going where they have to go. Wouldn't you agree, mon capitaine?"
A lunatic cop who quoted poetry. How Sartre.
"Whatever you say, Officer." He had no intention of antagonizing the cop again, if he could help it; the guy seemed to be self-destructing, and Johnny wanted to be around when the process was over.
They rolled past the dead dog and the grisly skinned-looking things dining on it.
What about the coyotes, Johnny? What was up with them?
But he wouldn't let himself think about the coyotes, lined up along both sides of the road at neat intervals like an honor guard, or of how they had peeled off like the Blue Angels as soon as the cruiser passed, running back into the desert as if their heads were on fire and their asses were catching--
"They fart, you know," the cop said in his bloodsoaked voice. "Buzzards fart."
"No, I didn't know that."
"Yessir, only birds that do. I tell you so you can put it in your book. Chapter 16 of Travels with Harley."
Johnny thought the putative title of his book had never sounded so quintessentially stupid.
They were now passing a trailer park. Johnny saw a sign in front of one rusty, roof-sagging doublewide which read: I'M A GUN-TOTIN' SNAPPLE-DRINKIN'
BIBLE-READIN' CLINTON-BASHIN' SON OF A BITCH!
NEVER MIND THE DOG, BEWARE OF THE OWNER!
Welcome to country music hell, Johnny thought.
The cruiser rolled past a mining-company building. There were quite a few cars and pickups in the parking lot, which struck Johnny as peculiar. It was past quitting time now, and not by a little. Why weren't these cars in their own driveways, or down in front of the local watering hole?
"Yep, yep," the cop said. He lifted one hand, as if to frame a picture. "I can see it now. Chapter 16: The Farting Buzzards of Desperation. Sounds like a goddam Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, doesn't it? Burroughs was a better writer than you, though, and do you know why? Because he was a hack without pretensions. One with priorities. Tell the story, do the work, give people something they can enjoy without feeling too stupid, and stay out of the gossip columns."
"Where are you taking me?" Johnny asked, striving for a neutral tone.
"Jail," the big cop
said in his stuffy, liquid voice. "Where anything you bray will be abused against you in a sort of caw."
He leaned forward, wincing at the pain in his back where the cop had kicked him. "You need help," he said. He tried to keep his voice non-accusatory, even gentle. "Do you know that, Officer?"
"You're the one who needs help," the cop replied. "Spiritual, physical, and editorial. Tak! But no help is going to come, Big John. You've eaten your last literary lunch and fucked your last culture cunt. You're on your own in the wilderness, and this is going to be the longest forty days and forty nights of your entire useless life."
The words rang in his head like the peal of some sickly bell. Johnny closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. They were in the town proper now, passing Gail's Beauty Bar on one side and True Value Hardware on the other. There was nobody on the sidewalks--absolutely nobody. He'd never seen a small Western town that was actually bustling, but this was ridiculous. No one at all? As they passed the Conoco station he saw a guy in the office, rocked back in his chair with his feet up on the desk, but that was it. Except ... up ahead ...
A pair of animals went trotting lazily across what appeared to be the town's only intersection, moving on a diagonal beneath the blinker-light. Johnny tried to tell himself they were dogs, but they weren't dogs. They were coyotes.
It's not all the cop, Johnny, don't you think it is. Something not normal is going on here. Something very much not normal.
As they reached the intersection, the cop slammed on the brakes. Johnny, not expecting it, was thrown forward into the mesh between the front and back seats. He hit his nose and bellowed with surprised pain.
The cop took no notice of him. "Billy Rancourt!" he cried, delighted. "Damn, that's Billy Rancourt! I wondered where he got off to! Drunk in the basement of The Broken Drum, I bet you that's where he was! Dollars to doughnuts! Big-Balls Billy, damn if it's not!"
"My dose!" Johnny cried. It had started bleeding again, and he once more sounded like a human foghorn. "Oh Christ, it hurts!"
"Shut up, you baby," the cop said. "Gosh, aren't you spleeny?"
He backed up a little, then turned the cruiser so it was facing west on the cross-street. He cranked his window down and poked his head out. The nape of his neck was now the color of age-darkened bricks, badly blistered, crisscrossed with cracks. Bright lines of blood filled some of these. "Billy!" the cop yelled. "Yo, you Billy Rancourt ! Hey, you old cuss!"