Desperation

  David shuffled through the boxes quickly--Sex--Starved Co-eds, Dirty Debutantes, Cockpit Honeys, Part 3--and then put them back. "You guys watch these?"

  Billingsley shrugged. He looked both tired and embarrassed. "We're too old to rodeo, son. Someday maybe you'll understand."

  "Hey, it's your business," David said, standing up. "I was just asking."

  "Steve, look at this," Cynthia said. She stepped back, raised her arms over her head, crossed them at the wrists, and wiggled them. A huge dark shape flapped lazily on the screen, which was dingy with several decades' worth of accumulated dust. "A crow. Not bad, huh?"

  He grinned, stepped next to her, and placed his hands together out in front of him with one finger jutting down.

  "An elephant!" Cynthia laughed. "Too cool!"

  David laughed with her. It was an easy sound, cheerful and free. His father turned his head toward it and smiled himself.

  "Not bad for a kid from Lubbock!" Cynthia said.

  "Better watch that, unless you want me to start in calling you cookie again."

  She stuck her tongue out, eyes closed, fingers twiddling in her ears, reminding Johnny so strongly of Terry that he laughed out loud. The sound startled, almost frightened him. He supposed that, somewhere between Entragian and sundown, he had pretty much decided that he would never laugh again ... not at the funny stuff, anyway.

  Mary Jackson, who had been walking around the onstage living room and looking at everything, now glanced up at Steve's elephant. "I can make the New York City skyline," she announced.

  "My ass!" Cynthia said, although she looked intrigued by the concept.

  "Let's see!" David said. He was looking up at the screen as expectantly as a kid waiting for the start of the newest Ace Ventura movie.

  "Okay," Mary said, and raised her hands with the fingers pointing up. "Now, let's see ... give me a second ... I learned this in summer camp, and that was a long time ago--"

  "What the fuck are you people doing?"

  The strident voice startled Johnny badly, and he wasn't the only one. Mary gave a little scream. The city skyline which had begun to form on the old movie screen went out of focus and disappeared.

  Audrey Wyler was standing halfway between the stage-left entrance and the living-room grouping, her face pale, her eyes wide and hot. Her shadow loomed on the screen behind her, making its own image, all unknown to its creator: Batman's cloak.

  "You guys're as insane as he is, you must be. He's out there somewhere, looking for us. Right now. Don't you remember the car you heard, Steve? That was him, coming back! But you stand here ... with the lights on ... playing party-games!"

  "The lights wouldn't show from the outside even if we had all of them on," Billingsley said. He was looking at Audrey in a way that was both thoughtful and intense ... as if, Johnny thought, he had the idea he'd seen her somewhere before. Possibly in Dirty Debutantes. "It's a movie theater, remember. Pretty much soundproof and light-proof. That's what we liked about it, my gang."

  "But he'll come looking. And if he looks long enough and hard enough, he'll find us. When you're in Desperation, there aren't that many places to hide."

  "Let him," Ralph Carver said hollowly, and raised the Ruger .44. "He killed my little girl and took my wife away. I saw what he's like as much as you did, lady. So let him come. I got some Express Mail for him."

  Audrey looked at him uncertainly for a moment. He looked back at her with dead eyes. She glanced at Mary, found nothing there to interest her, and looked at Billingsley again. "He could sneak up. A place like this must have half a dozen ways in. Maybe more."

  "Yup, and every one locked except for the ladies'-room window," Billingsley said. "I went back there just now and set up a line of beer-bottles on the windowledge inside. If he opens the window, it'll swing in, hit the bottles, knock em over, smash em on the floor. We'll hear him, ma'am, and when he walks out here we'll fill him so full of lead you could cut im up and use im for sinkers." He was looking at her closely as he uttered this grandiosity, eyes alternating between her face, which was okay, and her legs, which were, in John Edward Marinville's 'umble opinion, pretty fooking spectacular.

  She continued to look at Billingsley as if she had never seen a bigger fool. "Ever heard of keys, oldtimer? The cops have keys to all the businesses in these little towns."

  "To the open ones, that's so," Billingsley replied quietly. "But The American West hasn't been open for a long time. The doors ain't just locked, they're boarded shut. The kids used the fire escape to get in up front, but that ended last March, when it fell down. Nope, I reckon we're as safe here as anywhere."

  "Probably safer than out on the street," Johnny said.

  Audrey turned to him, hands on her hips. "Well, what do you intend to do? Stay here and amuse yourselves by making shadow-animals on the goddam movie screen?"

  "Take it easy," Steve said.

  "You take it easy!" she almost snarled. "I want to get out of here! "

  "We all do, but this isn't the time," Johnny said. He looked around at the others. "Does anyone disagree?"

  "It'd be insanity to go out there in the dark," Mary said. "The wind's got to be blowing fifty miles an hour, and with the sand flying the way it is, he'd be apt to pick us off one by one."

  "What do you think's going to change tomorrow, when the storm ends and the sun comes out?" Audrey asked. It was Johnny she was asking, not Mary.

  "I think that friend Entragian may be dead by the time the storm ends," he said. "If he's not already."

  Ralph looked over and nodded. David hunkered by the TV, hands loosely clasped between his knees, looking at Johnny with deep concentration.

  "Why?" Audrey asked. "How?"

  "You haven't seen him?" Mary asked her.

  "Of course I have. Just not today. Today I only heard him driving around ... walking around ... and talking to himself. I haven't actually seen him since yesterday."

  "Is there anything radioactive around here, ma' am?" Ralph asked Audrey. "Was it ever, like, some sort of dumping ground for nuclear waste, or maybe old weapons? Missile warheads, or something? Because the cop looked like he was falling apart."

  "I don't think it was radiation sickness," Mary said. "I've seen pictures of that, and--"

  "Whoa," Johnny said, raising his hands. "I want to make a suggestion. I think we should sit down and talk this out. Okay? It'll pass the time, if nothing else, and an idea of what we should do next may come out of it." He looked at Audrey, gave her his most winning smile, and was delighted to see her relax a little, if not exactly melt. Maybe not all of the old charm had departed after all. "At the very least, it will be more constructive than making shadows on the movie screen."

  His smile faded a little and he turned to look at them: Audrey, standing on the edge of the rug in her gawky-sexy dress; David, squatting by the TV; Steve and Cynthia, now sitting on the arms of an overstuffed easy chair that looked like it might also have come from the old Circle Ranch; Mary, standing by the screen and looking schoolteacherly with her arms folded under her breasts; Tom Billingsley, now inspecting the open upper cabinet of the bar, with his hands tightly clasped behind his back; Ralph in the wing-chair at the edge of the light, with his left eye now puffed almost completely shut. The Collie Entragian Survival Society, all present and accounted for.

  What a crew, Johnny thought. Manhattan Transfer in the desert.

  "There's another reason we have to talk," he said. He glanced at their shadows bobbing on the curtainless movie screen. For a moment they all looked to him like the shadows of giant birds. He thought of Entragian, telling him buzzards farted, they were the only birds that did. Of Entragian saying Oh shit, we're all beyond why, you know that. Johnny thought that might well be the scariest thing anyone had said to him in his whole life. Mostly because it rang true.

  Johnny nodded slowly, as if in agreement with some interior speaker, then went on.

  "I've seen some extraordinary things in my life, but I've never had what
I could in any way characterize as a supernatural experience. Until--maybe--today. And what scares me the most about it is that the experience may be ongoing. I don't know. All I can say for sure is that things have happened to me in the last few hours that I can't explain."

  "What are you talking about?" Audrey sounded close to tears. "Isn't what's happening bad enough without turning it into some kind of a ... a campfire story?"

  "Yes," Johnny said, speaking in a low, compassionate voice that he hardly recognized. "But that doesn't change things."

  "I listen and talk better when I'm not starving to death," Mary remarked. "I don't suppose there's anything to eat in this place, is there?"

  Tom Billingsley shuffled his feet and looked embarrassed. "Well, no, not a whole lot, ma'am. Mostly we came here in the evenings to drink and talk over the old days."

  She sighed. "That's what I thought."

  He pointed vaguely across toward the stage-right entrance. "Marty Ives brought in a little bag of somethin a couple of nights ago. Probably sardines. Marty loves sardines and crackers."

  "Yuck," Mary said, but she looked interested almost in spite of herself. Johnny supposed that in another two or three hours even anchovies would look good to her.

  "I'll take a peek, maybe he brought in something else," Billingsley said. He didn't sound hopeful.

  David got up. "I'll do it, if you want."

  Billingsley shrugged. He was looking at Audrey again and seemed to have lost interest in Marty Ives's sardines. "There's a light-switch to the left just as you get offstage. Straight ahead you'll see some shelves. Anything people brought to eat, they most generally put it on those. You might find some Oreos, too."

  "You guys might've drunk a tad too much, but at least you kept the minimum nutrition needs in mind," Johnny said. "I like that." The vet gave him a glance, shrugged, and went back to Audrey Wyler's legs. She seemed not to notice his interest in them. Or to care.

  David started across the stage, then went back and picked up the 45. He glanced at his father, but Ralph was staring vacantly out into the house again, at red plush seats which faded back into the gloom. The boy put the gun carefully into the pocket of his jeans so that only the handle stuck out, then started offstage. As he passed Billingsley he said, "Is there running water?"

  "This is the desert, son. When a building goes vacant, they turn the water off."

  "Crud. I've still got soap all over me. It itches."

  He left them, crossed the stage, and leaned into the opening over there. A moment later the light came on. Johnny relaxed slightly--only realizing as he did that part of his mind had expected something to jump the boy--and realized Billingsley was looking at him.

  "What that kid did back there--the way he got out of that cell--that was impossible," Billingsley said.

  "Then we must still be back there, locked up," Johnny said. He thought he sounded all right--pretty much like himself--but what the old veterinarian was saying had already occurred to him. Even a phrase to describe it had occurred to him--unobtrusive miracles. He would have written it down in his notebook, if he hadn't dropped it beside Highway 50. "Is that what you think?"

  "No, we're here, and we saw him do what he did," Billingsley said. "Greased himself up with soap and squeezed out through the bars like a watermelon seed.

  Looked like it made sense, didn't it? But I tell you, friend, not even Houdini could have done it that way. Because of the head. He shoulda stuck at the head, but he didn't." He looked them over, one by one, finishing with Ralph. Ralph was looking at Billingsley now instead of at the seats, but Johnny wasn't sure he understood what the old guy was saying. And maybe that was for the best.

  "What are you driving at?" Mary asked.

  "I'm not sure," Billingsley replied. "But I think we'd do well to kind of gather 'round young Master Carver." He hesitated, then added: "The oldtimers say that any campfire does on a cold night."

  2

  It picked the dead coyote up and examined it. "Soma dies; pneuma departs; only sarx remains," it said in a voice that was a paradox: both sonorous and entirely without tone. "So it has always been; so shall it always be; life sucks, then you die."

  It carried the animal downstairs, paws and shattered head dangling, body swaying like a bloody fur stole. The creature holding it stood for a moment inside the main doors of the Municipal Building, looking out into the blowy dark, listening to the wind.

  "So cah set!" it exclaimed, then turned away and took the animal into the Town Office. It looked at the coathooks to the right of the door and saw immediately that the girl--Pie, to her brother--had been taken down and wrapped in a drape.

  Its pale face twisted in anger as it looked at the child's covered form.

  "Took her down!" it told the dead coyote in its arms. "Rotten boy took her down! Stupid, troublemaking boy!"

  Yes. Feckless boy. Rude boy. Foolish boy. In some ways that last was the best, wasn't it? The truest. Foolish prayboy trying to make at least some part of it come right, as if any part of a thing like this ever could be, as if death were an obscenity that could be scrubbed off life's wall by a strong arm. As if the closed book could be reopened and read again, with a different ending.

  Yet its anger was twisted through with fear, like a yellow stitch through red cloth, because the boy was not giving up, and so the rest of them were not giving up. They should not have dared to run from

  (Entragian her it them)

  even if their cell doors had been standing wide open. Yet they had. Because of the boy, the wretched overblown prideful praying boy, who had had the insolence to take down his little cunt of a sister and try to give her something approximating a decent burial--

  A kind of dull warmth on its fingers and palms. It looked down and saw that it had plunged Ellen's hands into the coyote's belly all the way to the wrists.

  It had intended to hang the coyote on one of the hooks, simply because that was what it had done with some of the others, but now another idea occurred. It carried the coyote across to the green bundle on the floor, knelt, and pulled the drape open. It looked down with a silent snarling mouth at the dead girl who had grown inside this present body.

  That he should have covered her!

  It pulled Ellen's hands, now dressed in lukewarm blood-gloves, out of the coyote and laid the animal down on top of Kirsten. It opened the coyote's jaws and placed them around the child's neck. There was something both grisly and fantastic about this tableau de la mort; it was like a woodcut illustration from a black fairy-tale.

  "Tak," it whispered, and grinned. Ellen Carver's lower lip split open when it did. Blood ran down her chin in an unnoticed rill. The rotten, presumptuous little boy would probably never view this revision of his revision, but how nice it was to imagine his reaction to it if he did! If he saw how little his efforts had come to, how easily respect could be snatched back, how naturally zero reasserted itself in the artificially concocted integers of men.

  It pulled the drape up to the coyote's neck. Now the child and the beast almost seemed to be lovers. How it wished the boy were here! The father, too, but especially the boy. Because it was the boy who so badly needed instruction.

  It was the boy who was the dangerous one.

  There was scuttering from behind it, a sound too low to be heard ... but it heard it anyway. It pivoted on Ellen's knees and saw the recluse spiders returning. They came through the Town Office door, turned left, then streamed up the wall, over posters announcing forthcoming town business and soliciting volunteers for this fall's Pioneer Days extravaganza. Above the one announcing an informational meeting at which Desperation Mining Corporation officials would discuss the resumption of copper mining at the so-called China Pit, the spiders re-formed their circle.

  The tall woman in the coverall and the Sam Browne belt got up and approached them. The circle on the wall trembled, as if expressing fear or ecstasy or perhaps both. The woman put bloody hands together, then opened them to the wall, palms out. "Ah lah?"

/>   The circle dissolved. The spiders scurried into a new shape, moving with the precision of a drill-team putting on a halftime show. T, they made, then broke up, scurried, and made an H. An E followed, an A, another T, another E--

  It waved them off while they were still scrambling around up there, deciding how to fall in and make an R.

  "En tow," it said. "Ras."

  The spiders gave up on their R and resumed their faintly trembling circle.

  "Ten ah?" it asked after a moment, and the spiders formed a new figure. It was a circle, the shape of the ini. The woman with Ellen Carver's fingerprints looked at it for several moments, tapping Ellen's fingers against Ellen's collarbones, then waved Ellen's hand at the wall. The figure broke up. The spiders began to stream down to the floor.

  It walked back out into the hall, not looking at the spiders streaming about its feet. The spiders would be available if it needed them, and that was all that mattered.

  It stood at the double doors, once more looking out into the night. It couldn't see the old movie house, but that was all right; it knew where The American West was, about an eighth of a mile north of here, just past the town's only intersection. And, thanks to the fiddlebacks, she now knew where they were, as well.

  Where he was. The shitting little prayboy.

  3

  Johnny Marinville told his story again--all of it, this time. For the first time in a good many years he tried to keep it short--there were critics all over America who would have applauded, partly in disbelief. He told them about stopping to take a leak, and how Entragian had planted the pot in his saddlebag while he was doing it. He told them about the coyotes--the one Entragian had seemed to talk to and the others, posted along the road at intervals like a weird honor guard--and about how the big cop had beaten him up. He recounted the murder of Billy Rancourt, and then, with no appreciable change in his voice, about how the buzzard had attacked him, seemingly at Collie Entragian's command.

  There was an expression of frank disbelief on Audrey Wyler's face at this, but Johnny saw Steve and the skinny little girl he'd picked up somewhere along the way exchange a look of sick understanding. Johnny didn't glance around to see how the others were taking it, but instead looked down at his hands on his knees, concentrating as he did when he was trying to work through a tough patch of composition.