The western end of Desperation appeared to be a residential section--dusty and dispirited, but maybe a cut or two above the trailer park. Through his watering eyes, Johnny saw a man in bluejeans and a cowboy hat standing in the center of the street. He had been looking at two bicycles which sat there upside down, with their wheels sticking up. There had been three, but the smallest--a candy-pink little girl's bike--had fallen over in the strengthening wind. The wheels of the other two spun madly. Now this fellow looked up, saw the cruiser, waved hesitantly, then started toward them.
The cop pulled his large square head back in. He turned to look at Johnny, who understood at once that the guy out there couldn't have gotten a good look at this particular officer of the law; if he had, he would be running in the other direction right now. The cop's mouth had the sunken, infirm look of lips with no teeth to back them up, and blood ran from the comers in little streams. One of his eyes was a cauldron of gore--except for an occasional gray flash from its swimming depths, it could have been a plucked socket. A shiny mat of blood covered the top half of his khaki shirt.
"That's Billy Rancourt," he confided happily. "He cuts my hair. I been looking for him." He lowered his voice to that register at which confidences are imparted and added, "He drinks a bit." Then he faced front, dropped the transmission into Drive,, and floored the accelerator. The rumbling engine howled; the tires squalled; Johnny was thrown backward, yelling with surprise. The cruiser shot forward.
Johnny reached out, hooked his fingers through the mesh, and hauled himself back to a sitting position. He saw the man in the jeans and cowboy hat--Big-Balls Billy Rancourt--just standing there in the street ten feet or so in front of the bikes, frozen, watching them come. He seemed to swell in the windshield as the cruiser ran at him; it was like watching some crazy camera trick.
"No!" Johnny shrieked, beating his left hand at the mesh behind the cop's head. "No, don't! Don't! MISTER, LOOK OUT!"
At the last minute, Billy Rancourt understood and tried to run. He broke to his right, toward a ramshackle house squatting tiredly behind a picket fence, but it was too little and too late. He yelled, then there was a crump as the cruiser struck him hard enough to make the frame shudder. Blood spattered the picket fence, there was a double thud from beneath the car as the wheels ran over the fallen man, and then the cruiser hit the fence and knocked it down. The big cop jammed on the brakes, bringing the cruiser to a stop in the bald dirt dooryard of the ramshackle house. Johnny was thrown forward into the mesh again, but this time he managed to get his arm up and his head down, protecting his nose.
"Billy, you bugger!" the cop cried happily. "Tak an lah!"
Billy Rancourt screamed. Johnny turned in the back seat of the cruiser and saw him crawling as fast as he could toward the north side of the street. That wasn't very fast; he was trailing a broken leg. There were tread-marks running across the back of his shirt and the set of his jeans. His cowboy hat was sitting on the pavement, now turned upside down like the bicycles. Billy Rancourt bumped it with one knee, knocking it aslant, and blood poured out over the brim like water. More blood was gushing from his split skull and broken face. He was badly hurt, but although he had been struck amidships and then run over, he didn't appear even close to dead. That didn't surprise Johnny much. Most times it took a lot to kill a man--he had seen it again and again in Vietnam. Guys alive with half their heads blown off, guys alive with their guts piled in their laps and drawing flies, guys alive with their jugulars spouting through their dirty fingers. People usually died hard. That was the horror of it.
"YeeHAW!" the cop yelled, and dropped the cruiser's transmission into Reverse. The tires screamed and smoked across the sidewalk, bounced back into the street, and ran over Billy Rancourt's cowboy hat. The cruiser's back deck hit one of the bikes (it made a hell of a bang, cracked the rear window, then flew out of sight for a moment before coming down in front). Johnny had time to see that Billy Rancourt had stopped crawling, that he was looking back over his shoulder at them, that his blood-streaked broken-nosed face wore an expression of unspeakable resignation. He can't even be thirty, Johnny thought, and then the man was borne under the reversing car. It lurched over the body and came to a stop, idling, against the far curb. The cop hit the horn with the point of his elbow, making it blip briefly, as he turned to face forward again. Ahead of the cruiser's nose, Billy Rancourt lay face-down in a huge splat of blood. One of his feet twitched, then stopped.
"Whoa," the cop said. "What a damn mess, huh?"
"Yeah, you killed him," Johnny said. Suddenly he didn't care anymore about playing this guy up, outlasting him. He didn't care about the book, or his Harley, or where Steve Ames might be. Maybe later--if there was a later--he would care about some of those things, but not now. Now, in his shock and dismay, an earlier draft of himself had come out from someplace inside; a pre-edited version of Johnny Marinville who didn't give a shit about the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award or fucking actresses, with or without emeralds. "Ran him over in the street like a damn rabbit. Brave boy!"
The cop turned, gave him a considering look with his one good eye, then turned back to face the windshield again. "'I have taught thee in the way of wisdom,'" he said, "'I have led thee in right paths. When thou goest, thy steps shall not be straitened; and when thou run-nest, thou shalt not stumble.' That's from the Book of Adverbs, John. But I think old Billy stumbled. Yes, I do. He was always a gluefoot. I think that was his basic problem."
Johnny opened his mouth. For one of the few times in his entire life, nothing came out. Maybe that was just as well.
"'Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go: keep her; for she is thy life.' That's a little advice you could afford to take, Mr. Marinville, sir. Excuse me a minute."
He got out and walked to the dead man in the street, his boots seeming to shimmer as the strengthening wind blew sand across them. There was a large bloody patch on the seat of his uniform pants now, and when he bent to pick up the late Billy Rancourt, Johnny saw more blood oozing out through the ripped seams under the cop's arms. It was as if he were literally sweating blood.
Maybe so. Probably so. I think he's on the verge of crashing and bleeding out, the way hemophiliacs sometimes do. If he wasn't so Christing big, he'd probably be dead already. You know what you have to do, don't you?
Yes, of course he did. He had a bad temper, a horrible temper, and it seemed that not even getting the shit kicked out of him by a homicidal maniac had changed that. What he had to do now was keep that temper of his under control. No more cracks, like calling the cop a brave boy just now. That had earned him a look Johnny hadn't liked at all. A dangerous look.
The cop carried Billy Rancourt's body across the street, stepping between the two fallen bikes and past the one with its wheels still whirring and its spokes shining in the evening light. He tromped over the knocked-down piece of picket fence, climbed the steps of the house behind it, and shifted his burden so he could try the door. It opened with no trouble. Johnny wasn't surprised. He supposed that people out here did not, as a rule, bother locking their doors.
He'll have to kill the people inside, he thought. That's pretty much automatic.
But the cop only bent, offloaded his burden, then backed out onto the porch's little stoop again. He closed the door and then wiped his hands above it, leaving smears of blood on the lintel. He was so tall he didn't even have to reach to do this. The gesture gave Johnny a deep chill--it was like something out of the Book of Exodus, instructions for the Angel of Death to pass on by ... except this man was the Angel of Death. The destroyer.
The cop walked back to the cruiser, got in, and drove sedately back toward the intersection.
"Why'd you take him into there?" Johnny asked.
"What did you want me to do?" the cop asked. His voice was thicker than ever; now he seemed almost to be gargling his words. "Leave him for the buzzards? I'm ashamed of you, mon capitaine. You've been living so long with so-called civilized folk that you'
re starting to think like them."
"The dog--"
"A man is not a dog," the cop said in a prim, lecturely voice. He turned right at the intersection, then almost immediately hung a left, turning into a parking lot next to the town's Municipal Building. He killed the engine, got out, and opened the righthand rear door. That at least spared Johnny the pain and effort of sliding his banged-up body out past the sagging driver's seat. "A chicken is not a chicken dinner and a man is not a dog, Johnny. Not even a man like you. Come on. Get out. Alley-zoop."
Johnny got out. He was very aware of the silence; the sounds he could hear--wind, the spick-spack of alkali hitting the brick side of the Municipal Building, a monotonous squeaking sound from somewhere nearby--only emphasized that silence, turned it into something like a dome. He stretched, wincing at the pain in his back and leg but needing to do something for the rest of his muscles, which were badly cramped. Then he forced himself to look up into the ruin of the cop's face. The man's height was intimidating, somehow disorienting. It wasn't just that at six-three Johnny was used to looking down into people's faces instead of up; it was the amount of the height differential, not an inch or two but at least four. Then there was the breadth of the man. The sheer breadth. He didn't just stand; he loomed.
"Why didn't you kill me like you did that guy back there? Billy? Or does it even make any sense to ask? Are you beyond why?"
"Oh shit, we're all beyond why, you know that," the cop said, exposing bloody teeth in a smile Johnny could have done without. "The important thing is ... listen closely ... I could let you go. Would you like that? You must have at least two more stupid, pointless books left in your head, maybe as many as half a dozen. You could write a few before that thunderclap coronary that's waiting for you up the road finally takes you off. And I'm sure that, given time, you could put this interlude behind you and once more convince yourself that what you are doing somehow justifies your existence. Would you like that, Johnny? Would you like me to let you go free?"
Erin go bragh, Johnny thought for no reason at all, and for one nightmarish moment felt he would laugh. Then the urge was gone and he nodded. "Yes, I'd like that very much."
"Free! Like a bird out of a cage." The cop flapped his arms to demonstrate, and Johnny saw that the bloody patches under his arms had spread. His uniform shirt was now stained crimson along the torn side-seams almost all the way down to his beltline.
"Yes." Not that he believed his new playmate had the slightest intention in the world of letting him free; oh no. But said playmate was shortly going to be nothing but blood-sausage held together by the casing of his uniform, and if he could just remain whole and functional himself until that happened ...
"All right. Here's the deal, bigshot: suck my cock. Do that and I'll let you go. Straight trade."
He unzipped his fly and pulled down the elastic front of his shorts. Something that looked like a dead whitesnake fell out. Johnny observed the thin stream of blood drizzling from it without surprise. The cop was bleeding from every other orifice, wasn't he?
"Speaking in the lit'ry sense," the cop said, grinning, "this particular blowjob is going to be a little more Anne Rice than Armistead Maupin. I suggest you follow Queen Victoria's advice--close your eyes and think of strawberry shortcake."
Johnny Marinville looked at the maniac's prick, then up at the maniac's grinning face, then back at his prick again. He didn't know what the cop expected--screams, revulsion, tears, melodramatic pleading--but he had a clear sense that he wasn't feeling what the cop wanted him to feel, what the cop probably thought he was feeling.
You don't seem to understand that I've seen a few worse things in my time than a cock dripping blood. Not just in Vietnam, either.
He realized that the anger was creeping up on him again, threatening to take him over. Oh shit, of course it was. Anger had always been his primary addiction, not whiskey or coke or 'ludes. Plain old rage. It didn't have anything to do with what the cop had taken out of his pants, and that might be what the guy didn't understand. It wasn't a sex issue. The thing was, Johnny Marinville had never liked anything stuck in his face.
"I'll get down on my knees in front of you if you want," he said, and although his voice was mild, something in the cop's face changed--really changed for the first time. It blanked out somehow, except for the good eye, which narrowed suspiciously.
"Why are you looking at me that way? What in the hell gives you the right to look at me that way? Tak!"
"Never mind how I'm looking at you. Just hear me out, motherfucker: three seconds after I put that trouser-rat of yours into my mouth, it's going to be lying on the pavement. You got that? Tak!"
He spat this last word up into the cop's face, standing on tiptoe to do it, and for a moment the big man looked more than surprised--he looked shocked. Then the expression tightened into a cramp of rage, and he shoved Johnny away from him so hard that for a moment he felt as if he were flying. He hit the side of the building, saw stars as the back of his head connected with rough brick, bounced back, then went sprawling when his feet tangled together. New places hurt and old places howled, but the expression he had seen on the cop's face made it all worthwhile. He looked up to see if it was still there, wanting to sample it again like a bee sampling the sweet heart of a flower, and his heart staggered in his chest.
The cop's face had tautened. The skin on it now looked like makeup, or a thin coat of paint--unreal. Even the blood-filled eye looked unreal. It was as if there was another face beneath the one Johnny could see, pushing at the overlying flesh, trying to get out.
The cop's good eye fixed on him for a moment, and then his head lifted. He pointed at the sky with all five fingers of his left hand. "Tak ah lah, " he said in his guttural, gargling voice. "Timoh. Can de lach! On! On!"
There was a flapping sound, like clothes on a line, and a shadow fell over Johnny's face. There was a harsh cry, not quite a caw, and then something with scabrous, flapping wings dropped on him, its crooked claws gripping his shoulders and folding themselves into the fabric of his shirt, its beak digging into his scalp as it uttered its inhuman cry again.
It was the smell that told Johnny what it was--a smell like meat gone feverish with rot. Its huge, unkempt wings flapped against the sides of his face as it solidified its position, driving that stench into his mouth and nose, jamming it in, making him gag. He saw the Shepherd on its rope, swinging as the peeled-looking bald things pulled at its tail and feet with their beaks. Now one of them was roosting on him--one which had apparently never heard that buzzards were fundamental cowards that only attacked dead things--and its beak was plowing his scalp in furrows, bringing blood.
"Get it off!" he screamed, completely unnerved. He tried to grab the wide, beating wings, but got only two fistfuls of feathers. Nor could he see; he was afraid that if he opened his eyes, the buzzard would shift its position and peck them out. "Jesus, please, please get it off me!"
"Are you going to look at me properly if I do?" the cop asked. "No more insolence? No more disrespect?"
"No! No more!" He would have promised anything. Whatever had leaped out of him and spoken against the cop was gone now; the bird had plucked it out like a worm from an ear of corn.
"You promise?"
The bird, flapping and squalling and pulling. Smelling like green meat and exploded guts. On him. Eating him. Eating him alive.
"Yes! Yes! I promise!"
"Fuck you," the cop said calmly. "Fuck you, os pa, and fuck your promise. Take care of it yourself. Or die."
Eyes squeezed to slits, kneeling, head lowered, Johnny gripped blindly for the bird, caught its wings where they joined its body, and tore it off his head. It spasmed wildly in the air above him, shitting white streams that the wind pulled away in banners, uttering its rough cry (only there was pain in it now), its head whipping from side to side. Sobbing--mostly what he felt was revulsion--Johnny ripped one of its wings off and threw the buzzard against the wall. It stared at him with eyes as black
as tar, its bloodstained beak popping open and then snapping closed with liquid little clicks.
That's my blood, you bastard, Johnny thought. He dropped the wing he'd torn off the bird and got to his feet. The buzzard tried to lurch away from him, flapping its one good wing like an oar, stirring up dust and feathers. It went in the direction of the Desperation police-cruiser, but before it managed more than five feet, Johnny brought one motorcycle boot down on it, snapping its back. The bird's scaly legs splayed out to either side, as if it were trying to do the split. Johnny put his hands over his eyes, convinced for one moment that his mind was going to snap just as the bird's back had snapped.
"Not bad," the cop said. "You got him, pard. Now turn around."
"No." He stood, trembling all over, hands to his face.
"Turn around."
There was no denying the voice. He turned and saw the cop pointing up, once again with all five splayed fingers. Johnny raised his head and saw more buzzards--two dozen at least--sitting in a line along the north side of the parking lot, looking down at them.
"Want me to call them?" the cop asked in a deceptively gentle tone of voice. "I can, you know. Birds are a hobby of mine. They'll eat you alive, if that's what I want."
"N-N-No." He looked back at the cop and was relieved to see his fly was zipped again. There was a bloodstain spreading across the front of his pants, though. "No, d-don't."
"What's the magic word, Johnny?"
For a moment--a horrible moment--he had no idea what the cop wanted him to say. Then it came to him. "Please."
"Are you ready to be reasonable?"
"Y-Yes."
"I wonder about that," the cop said. He seemed to be speaking to himself. "I just wonder."
Johnny stood looking at him, saying nothing. The anger was gone. Everything felt gone, replaced by a kind of deep numbness.