"Did you?"
"Uh-huh. Brian's dad helped us a little, but mostly we did it ourselves. We'd stay up Saturday nights and watch old horror movies. The black-and-white ones? Boris Karloff was our favorite monster. Frankenstein was good, but we liked The Mummy even better. We were always going to each other, 'Oh shit, the mummy's after us, we better walk a little faster.' Goofy stuff like that, but fun. You know?"
Johnny smiled and nodded.
"Anyway, Brian was in an accident. A drunk hit him while he was riding to school. I mean, quarter of eight in the morning, and this guy is drunk on his ass. Do you believe that?"
"Sure," Johnny said, "you bet."
David gave him a considering look, nodded, then went on. "Brian hit his head. Bad. Fractured his skull and hurt his brain. He was in a coma, and he wasn't supposed to live. But--"
"Let me guess the rest. You prayed to God that your friend would be all right, and two days later, bingo, that boy be walkin n talkin, praise Jesus my lord n savior."
"You don't believe it?"
Johnny laughed. "Actually, I do. After what's happened to me since this afternoon, a little thing like that seems perfectly sane and reasonable."
"I went to a place that was special to me and Brian to pray. A platform we built in a tree. We called it the Viet Cong Lookout."
Johnny looked at him gravely. "You're not kidding about that?"
David shook his head. "I can't remember which one of us named it that now, not for sure, but that's what we called it. We thought it was from some old movie, but if it was, I can't remember which one. We had a sign and everything. That was our place, that's where I went, and what I said was--" He closed his eyes, thinking. "What I said was, 'God, make him better. If you do, I'll do something for you. I promise.' " David opened his eyes again. "He got better almost right away."
"And now it's payback time. That's the bad part, right?"
"No! I don't mind paying back. Last year I bet my dad five bucks that the Pacers would win the NBA championship, and when they didn't, he tried to let me off because he said I was just a kid, I bet my heart instead of my head. Maybe he was right--"
"Probably he was right."
"--but! I paid up just the same. Because it's bush not to pay what you owe, and it's bush not to do what you promise." David leaned toward him and lowered his voice ... as if he was afraid God might overhear. "The really bad part is that God knew I'd be coming out here, and he already knew what he wanted me to do. And he knew what I'd have to know to do it. My folks aren't religious--Christmas and Easter, mostly--and until Brian's accident, I wasn't, either. All the Bible I knew was John three-sixteen, on account of it's always on the signs the zellies hold up at the ballpark. For God so loved the world."
They were passing the bodega with its fallen sign now. The LP tanks had torn off the side of the building and lay in the desert sixty or seventy yards away. China Pit loomed ahead. In the starlight it looked like a whited sepulchre.
"What are zellies?"
"Zealots. That's my friend Reverend Martin's word. I think he's ... I think something may have happened to him." David fell silent for a moment, staring at the road. Its edges had been blurred by the sandstorm, and out here there were drifts as well as ridges spilled across their path. The ATV took them easily. "Anyway, I didn't know anything about Jacob and Esau or Joseph's coat of many colors or Potiphar's wife until Brian's accident. Mostly what I was interested in back in those days"--he spoke, Johnny thought, like a nonagenarian war veteran describing ancient battles and forgotten campaigns--"was whether or not Albert Belle would ever win the American League MVP."
He turned toward Johnny, his face grave.
"The bad thing isn't that God would put me in a position where I'd owe him a favor, but that he'd hurt Brian to do it."
"God is cruel."
David nodded, and Johnny saw the boy was on the verge of tears. "He sure is. Better than Tak, maybe, but pretty mean, just the same."
"But God's cruelty is refining ... that's the rumor, anyway. Yeah?"
"Well ... maybe."
"In any case, he's alive, your friend."
"Yes-"
"And maybe it wasn't all about you, anyway. Maybe someday your pal is going to cure AIDS or cancer. Maybe he'll hit in sixty straight games."
"Maybe."
"David, this thing that's out there--Tak--what is it? Do you have any idea? An Indian spirit? Something like a manitou, or a wendigo?"
"I don't think so. I think it's more like a disease than a spirit, or even a demon. The Indians may not have even known it was here, and it was here before they were. Long before. Tak is the ancient one, the unformed heart. And the place where it really is, on the other side of the throat at the bottom of the well ... I'm not sure that place is on earth at all, or even in normal space. Tak is a complete outsider, so different from us that we can't even get our minds around him."
The boy was shivering a little, and his face looked even paler. Maybe that was just the starlight, but Johnny didn't like it. "We don't need to talk about it anymore, if you don't want to. All right?"
David nodded, then pointed up ahead. "Look, there's the Ryder van. It's stopped. They must have found Mary. Isn't that great?"
"It sure is," Johnny said. The truck's headlights were half a mile or so farther on, shining out in a fan toward the base of the embankment. They drove on toward it mostly in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. For Johnny, those questions were mostly concerned with identity; he wasn't entirely sure who he was any longer. He turned to David, meaning to ask if David knew where there might be a few more sardines hiding--hungry as he was, he wouldn't even turn his nose up at a plate of cold lima beans--when his head suddenly turned into a soundless, brilliant airburst. He jerked backward in the driver's seat, shoulders twisting. A strangled cry escaped him. His mouth was drawn down so radically at the corners that it looked like a clown's mask. The ATV swerved toward the left side of the road.
David leaned over, grabbed the wheel, and corrected their course just before the vehicle could nose over the edge and tumble into the desert. By then Johnny's eyes were open again. He braked instinctively, throwing the boy forward. Then they were stopped, the ATV idling in the middle of the road not two hundred feet from the Ryder van's taillights. They could see people standing back there, red-stained silhouettes, watching them.
"Holy shit," David breathed. "For a second or two there--"
Johnny looked at him, dazed and amazed, as if seeing him for the first time in his life. Then his eyes cleared and he laughed shakily.
"Holy shit is right," he said. His voice was low, almost strengthless-the voice of a man who has just received a walloping shock. "Thanks, David."
"Was it a God-bomb?"
"What?"
"A big one. Like Saul in Damascus, when the cataracts or whatever they were fell out of his eyes and he could see again. Reverend Martin calls those God-bombs. You just had one, didn't you?"
All at once he didn't want to look at David, was afraid of what David might see in his eyes. He looked at the Ryder's taillights instead.
Steve hadn't used the extraordinary width of the road to turn around, Johnny noticed; the rental truck was still pointed south, toward the embankment. Of course. Steve Ames was a clever old Texas boy, and he must have suspected this wasn't finished yet. He was right. David was right, too--they had to go up to the China Pit--but the kid had some other ideas that were maybe not so right.
Fix your eyes, Johnny, Terry said. Fix your eyes so you can look at him without a single blink. You know how to do that, don't you?
Yes, he certainly did. He remembered something an old literature prof of his had said, back when dinosaurs still walked the earth and Ralph Houk still managed the New York Yankees. Lying is fiction, this crusty old reptile had proclaimed with a dry and cynical grin, fiction is art, and therefore all art is a lie.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, stand back as I prepare to practice art on this unsuspecting you
ng prophet.
He turned to David and met David's concerned gaze with a rueful little smile. "No God-bombs, David. Sorry to disappoint you."
"Then what just happened?"
"I had a seizure. Everything just came down on me at once and I had a seizure. As a young man, I used to have one every three or four months. Petit mal. Took medication and they went away. When I started drinking heavily around the age of forty--well, thirty-five, and there was a little more involved than just booze, I guess--they came back. Not so petit by then, either. The seizures are the main reason I keep trying to go on the wagon. What you just saw was the first one in almost"--he paused, pretending to count back--"eleven months. No booze or cocaine involved this time, either. Just plain old stress."
He got rolling again. He didn't want to look around now; if he did he would be looking to see how much of it David was buying, and the kid might pick up on that. It sounded crazy, paranoid, but Johnny knew it wasn't. The kid was amazing and spooky ... like an Old Testament prophet who has just come striding out of an Old Testament desert, skinburned by the sun and brainburned by God's inside information.
Better to tuck his gaze away, keep it to himself, at least for the time being.
From the comer of his right eye he could see David studying him uncertainly. "Is that really the truth, Johnny?" he asked finally. "No bullshit?"
"Really the truth," Johnny said, still not looking directly at him. "Zero bullshit."
David asked no more questions ... but he kept glancing over at him. Johnny discovered he could actually feel that glance, like soft, skilled fingers patting their way along the top of a window, feeling for the catch that would unlock it.
CHAPTER 5
1
Tak Sat on the north side of the rim, talons digging into the rotted hide of an old fallen tree. Now literally eagle-eyed, it had no trouble picking out the vehicles below. It could even see the two people in the ATV: the writer behind the wheel, and, next to him, the boy.
The shitting prayboy.
Here after all.
Both of them here after all.
Tak had met the boy briefly in the boy's vision and had tried to divert him, frighten him, send him away before he could find the one that had summoned him. It hadn't been able to do it. My God is strong, the boy had said, and that was clearly true.
It remained to be seen, however, if the boy's God was strong enough.
The ATV stopped short of the yellow truck. The writer and the boy appeared to be talking. The boy's dama started walking toward them, a rifle in one hand, then stopped as the open vehicle began moving forward again. Then they were together once more, all those who remained, joined again in spite of its efforts.
Yet all was not lost. The eagle's body wouldn't last long--an hour, two at the most--but right now it was strong and hot and eager, a honed weapon which Tak grasped in the most intimate way. It ruffled the bird's wings and rose into the air as the dama embraced his damane. (It was losing its human language rapidly now, the eagle's small can toi brain incapable of holding it, and reverting back to the simple but powerful tongue of the unformed.)
It turned, glided out over the well of darkness which was the China Pit, turned again, and spiraled down toward the black square of the drift. It landed, uttering a single loud quowwwk! as its talons sorted the scree for a good grip. Thirty yards down the drift, pallid reddish-pink light glowed. Tak looked at this for a moment, letting the light of the an tak fill and soothe the bird's primitive marble of a brain, then hopped a short distance into the tunnel. Here was a little niche on the left side. The eagle worked its way into it and then stood quiet, wings tightly folded, waiting.
Waiting for all of them, but mostly for Prayboy. It would rip Prayboy's throat out with one of the golden eagle's powerful talons, his eyes with the other; Prayboy would be dead before any of them knew what had happened. Before the os dam himself knew what had happened, or even realized he was dying blind.
2
Steve had brought a blanket--an old faded plaid thing--along to cover the boss's scoot with in the event that he did end up having to transport the Harley to the West Coast in the back of the truck. When Johnny and David pulled up in the ATV, Mary Jackson had this blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a tartan shawl. The truck's rear door had been run up and she was sitting there with her feet on the bumper, holding the blanket together in front of her. In her other hand was one of the few remaining bottles of Jolt. She thought she had never tasted anything sweeter in her whole life. Her hair was plastered flat against her head in a sweaty helmet. Her eyes were huge. She was shivering in spite of the blanket, and felt like a refugee in a TV newsclip. Something about a fire or an earthquake. She watched Ralph give his son a fierce one-armed hug, the Ruger .44 in his other hand, actually lifting David up off his feet and then setting him down again.
Mary slid to the ground, and staggered a little. The muscles of her legs were still trembling from her run. I ran for my life, she thought, and that's something I'll never be able to explain, not by talking, probably not even in a poem--how it is to run not for a meal or a medal or a prize or to catch a train but for your very fucking life.
Cynthia put a hand on her arm. "You okay?"
"I'll be fine," she said. "Give me five years and I'll be in the goddam pink."
Steve joined them. "No sign of her," he said--meaning Ellen, Mary supposed. Then he went over to David and Marinville. "David? All right?"
"Yes," David said. "So's Johnny."
Steve looked at the man he had been hired to shepherd, his face noncommittal. "That so?"
"I think so," Marinville said. "I had ..." He glanced at David. "You tell him, cabbage. You got the head on you."
David smiled wanly at that. "He had a change of heart. And if it was my mother you were looking for ... the thing that was inside my mother ... you can stop. She's dead."
"You're sure?"
David pointed. "We'll find her body about halfway up the embankment." Then, in a voice which struggled to be matter-of-fact and failed, he added: "I don't want to look at her. When you move her out of the way, I mean. Dad, I don't think you should, either."
Mary walked over to them, rubbing the backs of her thighs, where the ache was the worst. "The Ellen-body is finished, and it couldn't quite catch me. So it's stuck in its hole again, isn't it?"
"Ye-es ..."
Mary didn't like the doubtful sound of David's voice. There was more guessing than knowing in it.
"Did it have anyone else it could get into?" Steve asked. "Is there anyone else up here? A hermit? An old prospector?"
"No," David said. More certain now.
"It's fallen and it can't get up," Cynthia said, and pumped her fist at the star-littered sky. "Yesss!"
"David?" Mary asked.
He turned to her.
"We're not done, even if it is stuck in there. Are we? We're supposed to close the drift."
"First the an tak," David said, nodding, "then the drift, yeah. Seal it in, like it was before." He glanced at his father.
Ralph put an arm around him. "If you say so, David."
"I'm up for it," Steve said. "I can't wait to see where this guy takes his shoes off and puts his feet up on the hassock."
"I was in no particular hurry to get to Bakersfield, anyway," Cynthia said.
David looked at Mary.
"Of course. It was God that showed me how to get out, you know. And there's Peter to think about. It killed my husband. I think I owe it a little something for Peter."
David looked at Johnny.
"Two questions," Johnny said. "First, what happens when this is over? What happens here? If the Desperation Mining Corporation comes back in and starts working the China Pit again, they'll most likely reopen the China Shaft. Won't they? So what good is it?"
David actually grinned. To Mary he looked relieved, as if he had expected a much tougher question. "That's not our problem--that's God's problem. Ours is to close the an tak and the tunnel
from there to the outside. Then we ride away and never look back. What's your other question?"
"Could I take you out for an ice cream when this is over? Tell you some high school war stories?"
"Sure. As long as I can tell you to stop when they get, you know, boring."
"Boring stories are not in my repertoire," Johnny said loftily.
The boy walked back to the truck with Mary, slipping his arm around her waist and leaning his head against her arm as if she were his mother. Mary guessed she could be that for awhile, if he needed her to be. Steve and Cynthia took the cab; Ralph and Johnny Marinville sat on the floor of the box a across from Mary and David.
When the truck stopped halfway up the grade, Mary felt David's grip on her waist tighten and put an arm around his shoulders. They had come to the place where his mother--her shell, anyway--had finished up. He knew it as well as she did. He was breathing rapidly and shallowly through his mouth. Mary put a hand on the side of his head and urged him wordlessly with it. He came willingly enough, putting his face against her breast. The light, rapid mouth-breathing went on, and then she felt the first of his tears wetting her shirt. Across from her, David's father was sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest and his hands over his face.
"That's all right, David," she murmured, and began stroking his hair. "That's all right."
Doors slammed. Feet crunched on the gravel. Then, faintly, Cynthia Smith's voice, full of horror: "Oh jeez, look at her!"
Steve: "Be quiet, stupid, they'll hear you."
Cynthia: "Oh sugar. Sorry."
Steve: "Come on. Help me."
Ralph took his hands away from his face, wiped a sleeve across his eyes, then came across to Mary's side of the truck and put his arm around David. David groped for his father's hand and took it. Ralph's stricken, streaming eyes met Mary's, and she began to cry herself.
She could now hear shuffling steps from outside as Steve and Cynthia carried Ellen out of the road. There was a pause, a little grunt of effort from the girl, and then the footsteps came back to the truck. Mary was suddenly sure that Steve would walk around to the back and tell the boy and his father some outrageous lie--foolishness about how Ellen looked peaceful, like she was maybe just taking a nap out here in the middle of nowhere. She tried to send him a message: Don't do it, don't come back here and tell well-meaning lies, you can only make things worse. They've been in Desperation, they've seen what's there, don't try to kid them about what's out here.