"He wanted me to suck his cock. I think that was supposed to start me gibbering and begging for mercy, but I didn't find the idea as shocking as Entragian maybe expected. Cocksucking's a pretty standard sexual demand in situations where authority's exceeded its normal bounds and restrictions, but it's not what it looks like. On the surface, rape is about dominance and aggression. Underneath, though, it's about fear-driven anger."
"Thank you, Dr. Ruth," Audrey said. "Next ve vill be discussink ze imberdence."
Johnny looked at her without rancor. "I did a novel on the subject. of homosexual rape. Tiburon. Not a big critical success, but I talked to a lot of people and got the basics down pretty well, I think. The point is, he made me mad instead of scaring me. By then I'd decided I didn't have a lot to lose, anyway. I told him that I'd take his cock, all right, but once it was in my mouth I'd bite it off. Then ... then..."
He thought harder than he had in at least ten years, nodding to himself as he did.
"Then I threw one of his own nonsense-words back at him. At least it seemed like nonsense to me, or something in a made-up language. It had a guttural quality ..."
"Was it tak?" Mary asked.
Johnny nodded. "And it didn't seem to be nonsense to the coyotes, or to Entragian, either. When I said it he kind of recoiled ... and that's when he called the buzzard bombing-strike down on me."
"I don't believe that happened," Audrey said. "I guess you're a famous writer or something, and you've got the look of a guy who isn't used to having doubt cast, so to speak, but I just don't believe it."
"It's what happened, though," he said. "You didn't see anything like that? Strange, aggressive animal behavior?"
"I was hiding in the town laundrymat," she said. "I mean, hello? Are we talking the same language here?"
"But--"
"Listen, you want to talk about strange and aggressive animal behavior?" Audrey asked. She leaned forward, eyes bright and fixed on Marinville's. "That's Collie you're talking about. Collie as he is now. He killed everyone he saw, everyone who crossed his path. Isn't that enough for you? Do we have to have trained buzzards, as well?"
"What about spiders?" Steve asked. He and the skinny girl were in the chair instead of sitting on the arms now, and Steve had his arm around her shoulders.
"What about them?"
"Did you see any spiders kind of ... well ... flocking together?"
"Like birds of a feather?" She was favoring him with a gaze that said CAUTION, LUNATIC AT WORK.
"Well, no. Wrong word. Travelling together. In packs. Like wolves. Or coyotes."
She shook her head.
"What about snakes?"
"Haven't seen any of them, either. Or coyotes in town. Not even a dog riding a bike and wearing a party hat. This is all news to me."
David came back onto the stage with a brown bag in his hands, the kind that convenience-store clerks put small purchases in--Twinkles and Slim Jims, cartons of milk, single cans of beer. He also had a box of Ritz crackers under his arm. "Found some stuff," he said.
"Uh-huh," Steve said, eyeing the box and the little bag. "That should certainly take care of hunger in America. What does it come to, Davey? One sardine and two crackers apiece, do you think?"
"Actually, there's quite a lot," David said. "More than you'd think. Um ..." He paused, looking at them thoughtfully, and a little anxiously. "Would anybody mind if I said a prayer before I hand this stuff around?"
"Like grace?" Cynthia asked.
"Grace, yeah."
"It works for me," Johnny said. "I think we can use all the grace we can lay our hands on."
"Amen," Steve said.
David put the bag and the box of crackers down between his sneakers. Then he closed his eyes and put his hands together again before his face, finger to finger. Johnny was struck by the kid's lack of pretension. There was a simplicity about the gesture that had been honed by use into beauty.
"God, please bless this food we are about to eat," David began.
"Yeah, what there is of it," Cynthia said, and immediately looked sorry that she had spoken. David didn't seem to mind, though; might not have even heard her.
"Bless our fellowship, take care of us, and deliver us from evil. Please take care of my mom, too, if it's your will." He paused, then said in a lower voice: "It's probably not, but please, if it's your will. Jesus' sake, amen." He opened his eyes again.
Johnny was moved. The kid's little prayer had touched him in the very place Entragian had tried and failed to reach.
Sure it did. Because he believes it. In his own humble way, this kid makes Pope John Paul in his fancy clothes and Las Vegas hat look like an Easter-and-Christmas Christian.
David bent over and picked up the stuff he'd found, seeming as cheerful as a soup-kitchen tycoon presiding over Thanksgiving dinner as he rummaged in the bag.
"Here, Mary." He took out a can of Blue Fjord Fancy Sardines, and handed it to her. "Key's on the bottom."
"Thank you, David."
He grinned. "Thank Mr. Billingsley's friend. It's his food, not mine." He handed her the crackers. "Pass em on."
"Take what you need and leave the rest," Johnny said expansively. "That's what us Friends of the Circle say ... right, Tom?"
The veterinarian gave him a watery gaze and didn't reply.
David gave a can of sardines to Steve and another to Cynthia.
"Oh, no, honey, that's okay," Cynthia said, trying to give hers back. "Me'n Steve can share."
"No need to," David said, "there's plenty. Honest."
He gave a can to Audrey, a can to Tom, and a can to Johnny. Johnny turned his over twice in his hand, as if trying to make sure it was real, before pulling off the wrapper, taking the key off the back, and inserting it in the tab of metal at the end of the can. He opened it. As soon as he smelled the fish, he was savagely hungry. If anyone had told him he would ever have such a reaction to a lousy can of sardines, he would have laughed.
Something tapped him on the shoulder. It was Mary, holding out the box of crackers. She looked almost ecstatic. Fish-oil ran down from the corner of her mouth to her chin in a shiny little runnel. "Go on," she said. "They're wonderful on crackers. Really!"
"Yep," Cynthia said cheerfully, "everything tastes better when it shits on a Ritz, that's what I always say."
Johnny accepted the box, looked in, and saw there was only a single cylinder of waxed paper left, half-full. He took three of the round dark orange crackers. His growling stomach protested this forbearance, and he found himself unable to keep from taking three more before passing the box to Billingsley. Their eyes met for a moment, and he heard the old man saying not even Houdini could have done it that way. Because of the head. And of course there was the phone--three transmission-bars showing when it had been in the kid's hands, none at all when he had held it in his own.
"This settles it once and for all," Cynthia said, her mouth full. She sounded the way Mary looked. "Food is way better than sex."
Johnny looked at David. He was sitting on one arm of his father's chair, eating. Ralph's can of sardines sat in his lap, unopened, as the man continued to look out over the rows of empty seats. David took a couple of sardines from his own can, laid them carefully on a cracker, and gave them to his dad, who began to chew mechanically, doing it as if his only goal was to clear his mouth again. Seeing the boy's expression of attentive love made Johnny uncomfortable, as if he were violating David's privacy. He looked away and saw the box of crackers on the floor. Everyone was busy eating, and no one paid Johnny any particular attention when he picked up the box and looked into it.
It had gone all the way around the group, everyone had at least half a dozen crackers (Billingsley might have taken even more; the old goat was really cramming them in), but that cylinder of waxed paper was still in there, and Johnny could have sworn that it was still half-full; that the number of crackers in it had not changed at all.
4
Ralph recounted the crash of the Carver
family as clearly as he could, eating sardines between bursts of talk. He was trying to clear his head, trying to come back--for David's sake more than his own--but it was hard. He kept seeing Kirstie lying motionless at the foot of the stairs, kept seeing Entragian pulling Ellie across the holding area by the arm. Don't worry, David, I'll be back, she had said, but to Ralph, who believed he had heard every turn and lift of Ellie's voice in their fourteen years of marriage, she had sounded already gone. Still, he owed it to David to try and be here. To come back himself, from wherever it was his shocked, over-stressed--and guilty, yes, there was that, too--mind wanted to take him.
But it was hard.
When he had finished. Audrey said: "Okay, no revolt from the animal kingdom, at least. But I'm very sorry about your wife and your little girl, Mr. Carver. You too, David."
"Thanks," Ralph said, and when David added, "My mom could still be okay," he ruffled the boy's hair and told him yes, that was right.
Mary went next, telling about the Baggie under the spare tire, the way Entragian had mixed "I'm going to kill you" into the Miranda warning, and the way he had shot her husband on the steps, completely without warning or provocation.
"Still no wildlife," Audrey said. This now seemed to be her central concern. She tilted her sardine-can up to her mouth and drank the last of the fish oil without so much as a flicker of embarrassment.
"You either didn't hear the part about the coyote he brought upstairs to guard us or you don't want to hear it," Mary said.
Audrey dismissed this with a wave of her hand. She was sitting down now, providing Billingsley with at least another four inches of leg to look at. Ralph was looking, too, but he felt absolutely nothing about what he was seeing. He had an idea there was more juice in some old car batteries than there was in his emotional wiring right now.
"You can domesticate them, you know," she said. "Feed them Gaines-burgers and train them like dogs, in fact."
"Did you ever see Entragian walking around town with a coyote on a leash?" Marinville asked politely.
She gave him a look and set her jaw. "No. I knew him to speak to, like anyone else in town, but that was all. I spend most of my time in the pit or the lab or out riding. I'm not much for town life."
"What about you, Steve?" Marinville asked. "What's your tale?"
Ralph saw the rangy fellow with the Texas accent exchange a glance with his girlfriend--if that was what she was--and then look back at the writer. "Well, first off, if you tell your agent I picked up a hitchhiker, I guess I'll lose my bonus."
"I think you can consider him the least of your worries at this point. Go on. Tell it."
They both told it, alternating segments, both clearly aware that the things they had seen and experienced upped the ante of belief considerably. They both expressed frustration at their inability to articulate how awful the stone fragment in the lab/ storage area had been, how powerfully it had affected them, and neither seemed to want to come out and say what had happened when the wolf (they agreed that that was what it had been, not a coyote) brought the fragment out of the lab and laid it before them. Ralph had an idea it was something sexual, although what could be so bad about that he didn't know.
"Still a doubting Thomas?" Marinville asked Audrey when Steve and Cynthia had finished. He spoke mildly, as if he did not want her to feel threatened. Of course he doesn't want her to feel threatened, Ralph thought. There's only seven of us, he wants us all on the same team. And he's really not too bad at it.
"I don't know what I am." She sounded dazed. "I don't want to believe any of this shit--just considering it freaks me severely--but I can't imagine why you'd lie." She paused, then said thoughtfully: "Unless seeing those people hung up in Hernando's Hideaway ... I don't know, scared you so badly that..."
"That we started seeing things?" Steve asked.
She nodded. "The snakes you saw in the house--that at least makes sense of a sort. They feel this kind of weather coming as much as three days in advance sometimes, and go for any sheltered place. As for the rest... I don't know. I'm a scientist, and I can't see how--"
"Come on, lady, you're like a kid pretending her mouth is stitched shut so she won't have to eat the broccoli," Cynthia said. "Everything we saw dovetails with what Mr. Marinville there saw before us, and Mary saw before him, and the Carvers saw before them. Right down to the knocked-over piece of picket fence where Entragian greased the barber, or whoever he was. So quit the I'm-a-scientist crap for awhile. We're all on the same page; you're the one that's on a different one."
"But I didn't see any of these things!" Audrey almost wailed.
"What did you see?" Ralph asked. "Tell us."
Audrey crossed her legs, tugged at the hem of her dress. "I was camping. I had four days off, so I packed up Sally and headed north, into the Copper Range. It's my favorite place in Nevada." Ralph thought she looked defensive, as if she had taken a ribbing for this sort of behavior in the past.
Billingsley looked as if he had just wakened from a dream ... one of having Audrey's long legs wrapped around his scrawny old butt, perhaps. "Sally," he said. "How is Sally?"
Audrey gave him an uncomprehending look for a moment, then grinned like a girl. "She's fine."
"Strain all better?"
"Yes, thanks. It was good liniment."
"Glad to hear it."
"What're you talking about?" Marinville asked.
"I doctored her horse a year or so back," Billingsley said. "That's all."
Ralph wasn't sure he would let Billingsley work on his horse, if he had one; he wasn't sure he would let Billingsley work on a stray cat. But he supposed the vet might have been different a year ago. When you made drinking a career, twelve months could make a lot of changes. Few of them for the better.
"Getting Rattlesnake back on its feet has been pretty stressful," she said. "Lately it's been the switchover from rainbirds to emitters. A few eagles died--"
"A few?" Billingsley said. "Come now. I'm no treehugger, but you can do better than that."
"All right, about forty, in all. No big deal in terms of the species; there's no shortage of eagles in Nevada. As you know, Doc. The greens know it, too, but they treat each dead eagle as if it were a boiled baby, just the same. What it's really about--and all it's about--is trying to stop us from mining the copper. God, they make me so tired sometimes. They come out here in their perky little foreign cars, fifty pounds of American copper in each one, and tell us we're earth-raping monsters. They--"
"Ma'am?" Steve said softly. "Pardon, but ain't a one of us folks from Greenpeace."
"Of course not. What I'm saying is that we all felt bad about the eagles--the hawks and the ravens too, for that matter--in spite of what the treehuggers say." She looked around at them, as if to evaluate their impression of her honesty, then went on. "We leach copper out of the ground with sulfuric acid. The easiest way to apply it is with rainbirds--they look like big lawn-sprinklers. But rainbirds can leave pools, The birds see them, come down to bathe and drink, then die. It's not a nice death, either."
"No," Billingsley agreed, blinking at her with his watery eyes. "When it was gold they were taking out of China Pit and Desatoya Pit--back in the fifties--it was cyanide in the pools. Just as nasty. No greenietreehuggers back then, though. Must have been nice for the company, eh, Miss Wyler?" He got up, went to the bar, poured himself a finger of whiskey, and swallowed it like medicine.
"Could I have one about the same?" Ralph asked.
"Yessir, I b'lieve you could," Billingsley said. He handed Ralph his drink, then set out more glasses. He offered warm soft drinks, but the others opted for spring-water, which he poured out of a plastic jug.
"We pulled the rainbirds and replaced them with distribution heads and emitters," Audrey said. "It's a drip-system, more expensive than rainbirds--a lot--but the birds don't get into the chemicals."
"No," Billingsley agreed. He poured himself another tot. This he drank more slowly, looking at Audrey's legs again over the
rim of his glass.
5
A problem?
Maybe not yet ... but there could be, if steps weren't taken.
The thing that looked like Ellen Carver sat behind the desk in the now-empty holding area, head up, eyes gleaming lustrously. Outside, the wind rose and fell, rose and fell. From closer by came the pad-click of paws ascending the stairs. They stopped outside the door. There came a coughing growl. Then the door swung open, pushed by the snout of a cougar. She was big for a female--perhaps six feet from snout to haunches, with a thick, switching tail that added another three feet to her overall length.
As the cougar came through the door and into the holding area, slinking low to the board floor, her ears laid back against her wedgeshaped skull, the thing cored into her head a little further, wanting to experience a bit of what the cougar was feeling as well as to draw her. The animal was frightened, sorting through the smells of the place and finding no comfort in any of them. It was a human den-place; but that was only part of her problem.
The cougar smelled a lot of trouble here. Gunpowder, for one thing; to the cougar, the smell of the fired guns was still sharp and acrid. Then there was the smell of fear, like a mixture of sweat and burned grass. There was the smell of blood, too--coyote blood and human blood, mixed together. And there was the thing in the chair, looking down at her as she slunk toward it, not wanting to go but not able to stop. It looked like a human being but didn't smell like one. It didn't smell like anything the cougar had ever scented before. She crouched by its feet and voiced a low whining, mewing sound.
The thing in the coverall got out of the chair, dropped to Ellen Carver's knees, lifted the cougar's snout, and looked into the cougar's eyes. It began to speak rapidly in that other language, the tongue of the unformed, telling the cougar where she must go, how she must wait, and what she must do when the time came. They were armed and would likely kill the animal, but she would do her job first.
As it spoke. Ellen's nose began to trickle blood. It felt the blood, wiped it away. Blisters had begun to rise on Ellen's cheeks and neck. Fucking yeast infection! Nothing more than that, at least to start with! Why was it some women simply could not take care of themselves?