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 fault! Your 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 have 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 grayhaired 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 trained, but this is not training."
"Of course it is," the grayhaired 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 grayhaired 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 grayhaired 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 grayhaired 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 lrish 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 growling, 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. "Whatever 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.
4
"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 DESPERATION' 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 DESPERATION 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 Desatoya 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 windows 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 disappeared 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 Desperation 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 tumbleweed 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, listened, 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.
This is fucked. You know that, don't you?
He knew. There was a radio. There was the wind, loaded with sour alkali grit, now hitting the building's metal sides hard enough to sound like a Montana blizzard. But where were the voices? Men talking, joking, shooting the shit? The men who went with the vehicles parked out front?
He started slowly down the corridor, thinking that he should call out something like Hey! Anybody home? and not quite daring to. The place felt simultaneously empty and somehow not empty, although how it could be both things at the same time was--
Cynthia yanked on the back of his shirt. The tug was so hard and so sudden that he almost screamed.
"What?" he asked--exasperated, heart pounding--and realized that now he was whispering.
"Do you hear that?" she asked. "Sounds like ... I dunno ... a kid bubbling Kool-Aid through a straw."
At first he could only hear The Tractors--"She said her name was Emergency and asked to see my gun, She said her telephone number was 911 "--and then he did hear it, a fast liquid sound. Mechanical, not human. A sound he almost knew. "Yeah, I hear it."
"Steve, I want to get out of here."
"Go back to the truck, then."
"No."
"Cynthia, for Christ's sake--"
He looked at her, at her big eyes looking back up at him, her pursed, anxious mouth, and quit it. No, she didn't want to go back to the Ryder van by herself, and he didn't blame her. She'd called herself a hard-headed babe, and maybe she was, but right now she was also an almost-
scared-to-death babe. He took her by her thin shoulders, pulled her toward him, and planted a loud smackeroo on her forehead, right between the eyes. "Do not worry, little Nell," he said in a very passable Dudley Do-Right imitation, "for I will protect you."
She grinned in spite of herself. "Fuckin dork."
"Come on. Stay close. And if we do have to run, run fast. Or else I might trample you."
"You don't need to worry about that," Cynthia said. "I'll be out the door and gone before you even get it in gear."
The first door on the right was an office. Empty. There was a cork-board on the wall covered with Polaroid shots of an open-pit mine. That was the big wall of earth they'd seen looming behind the town, Steve assumed.
The first door on the left, also an office. Also empty. The bubbling sound was louder now, and Steve knew what it was even before he looked into the next door on the right. He felt a measure of relief. "It's an aquarium," he said, "that's all it is."
This was a much nicer office than the first two they'd peeped into, with a real rug on the floor. The aquarium was on a stand to the left of the desk, under a photograph of two men in boots, hats, and Western-style business suits shaking hands by a flagpole--the one out back, most likely. It was a well-populated aquarium; he saw tigers, angelfish, goldfish, and a couple of black beauties. There was also some strange geegaw lying on the sand at the bottom, one of the things people put into their aquariums to decorate them, he assumed, except this one wasn't a sunken ship or a pirate chest or King Neptune's castle. This one was something else, something that looked like--
"Hey Steve," Cynthia whispered in a strengthless little voice. "That's a hand."
"What?" he asked, honestly not understanding, although later he would think he must have known what it was, lying there at the bottom of the aquarium, what else could it have been?
"A hand," she almost moaned. "A fuckin hand."
And, as one of the tigers swam between the second and third fingers (the third had a slim gold wedding ring on it), he saw that she was right. There were fingernails on it. There was a thin white thread of scar on the thumb. It was a hand.
He stepped forward, ignoring her grab at his shoulder, and bent down for a better look. His hope that the hand was fake despite the wedding ring and the realistic thread of scar glimmered away. There were shreds of flesh and sinew rising from the wrist. They wavered like plankton in the currents generated by the tank's regulator. And he could see the bones.