Desperation Read online

  He straightened up and saw Cynthia standing at the desk. The top of this one was much neater. There was a PowerBook on it, closed. Next to it was a telephone. Next to the phone was an answering machine with the red message-light blinking. Cynthia picked up the telephone, listened, then put it back. He was startled by the whiteness of her face. With that little blood in her head, she should be lying on the floor dead-fainted away, he thought. Instead of fainting, she reached a finger toward the PLAY MESSAGES button on the answering machine.

  "Don't do that!" he hissed. God knew why, and it was too late, anyway.

  There was a beep. A click. Then a strange voice--it seemed to be neither male nor female, and it scared the hell out of Steve--began to speak. "Pneuma," it said in a contemplative voice. "Soma. Sarx. Pneuma. Soma. Sarx. Pneuma. Soma. Sarx. " It went on slowly enunciating these words, seeming to grow louder as it spoke. Was that possible? He stared at the machine, fascinated, the words hitting into his brain (soma sarx pneuma)

  like tiny sharp carpet-tacks. He might have gone on staring at it for God knew how long if Cynthia hadn't reached past him and banged the STOP button hard enough to make the machine jump on the desk.

  "Sorry, nope, too creepy." She sounded both apologetic and defiant.

  They left the office. Farther down the corridor, in the workroom or lab or whatever it was. The Tractors were still singing about the boogie-woogie girl who had it stacked up to the ceiling and sticking in your face.

  How long is that fucking song? Steve wondered. It's been playing fifteen minutes already, got to've been.

  "Can we go now?" Cynthia asked. "Please?"

  He pointed down the hall toward the bright yellow lights.

  "Oh Jesus, you're nuts," she said, but when he started in that direction, she followed him.

  5

  "Where are you taking me?" Ellen Carver asked for the third time. She leaned forward, hooking her fingers through the mesh between the cruiser's front and back seats. "Please, can't you tell me?"

  At first she'd just been thankful not to be raped or killed ... and relieved that, when they got to the foot of the lethal stairs, poor sweet little Kirstie's body was gone. There had been a huge bloodstain on the steps outside the doors, however, still not entirely dry and only partially covered by the blowing sand which had stuck to it. She guessed it had belonged to Mary's husband. She tried to step over it, but the cop, Entragian, had her arm in a pincers grip and simply pulled her through it, so that her sneakers left three ugly red tracks behind as they went around the corner to the parking lot. Bad. All of it. Horrible. But she was still alive.

  Yes, relief at first, but that had been replaced by a growing sense of dread. For one thing, whatever was happening to this awful man was now speeding up. She could hear little liquid pops as his skin let go in various places, and trickling noises as blood flowed and dripped. The back of his uniform shirt, formerly khaki, was now a muddy red.

  And she didn't like the direction he had taken--south. There was nothing in that direction but the vast bulwark of the open-pit mine.

  The cruiser rolled slowly along Main Street (she assumed it was Main Street, weren't they always?), passing a final pair of businesses: another bar and Harvey's Small Engine Repair. The last shop on the street was a somehow sinister little shack with BODEGA written above the door and a sign out front which the wind had blown off its stand. Ellen could read it anyway: MEXICAN FOOD'S.

  The sun was a declining ball of dusty furnace-fire, and the landscape had a kind of clear daylight darkness about it that struck her as apocalyptic. It wasn't so much a question of where she was, she realized, as who she was. She couldn't believe she was the same Ellen Carver who was on the PTA and had been considering a run for school board this fall, the same Ellen Carver who sometimes went out to lunch with friends at China Happiness, where they would all get silly over mai-tais and talk about clothes and kids and marriages--whose was shaky and whose was not. Was she the Ellen Carver who picked her nicest clothes out of the Boston Proper catalogue and wore Red perfume when she was feeling amorous and had a funny rhinestone tee-shirt that said QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE? The Ellen Carver who had raised two lovely children and had kept her man when those all about her were losing theirs? The one who examined her breasts for lumps once every six weeks or so, the one who liked to curl up in the living room on weekend nights with a cup of hot tea and a few chocolates and paperbacks with titles like Misery in Paradise? Really? Oh really? Well, yes, probably; she was those Ellens and a thousand others: Ellen in silk and Ellen in denim and Ellen sitting on the commode and peeing with a recipe for Brown Betty in one hand; she was, she supposed, both her parts and more than her parts, when summed, could account for ... but could that possibly mean she was also the Ellen Carver whose well-loved daughter had been murdered and who now sat huddled in the back of a police-car that was beginning to stink unspeakably, a woman being driven past a fallen sign reading MEXICAN FOOD'S, a woman who would never see her home or friends or husband again? Was she the Ellen Carver being driven into a dirty, windy darkness where no one read the Boston Proper catalogue or drank mai-tais with little paper umbrellas poking out of them and only death awaited?

  "Oh God, please don't kill me," she said in a boneless, trembly voice she could not recognize as her own. "Please, sir, don't kill me, I don't want to die. I'll do whatever you say, but don't kill me. Please don't."

  He didn't answer. There was a thump from beneath them as the tar quit. The cop pulled the knob that turned on the headlights, but they didn't seem to help much; what she saw were two bright cones shining into a world of roiling dust. Every now and then a tumbleweed would fly in front of them, headed east. Gravel rumbled beneath the tires and pinged against the undercarriage.

  They passed a long, ramshackle building with rusty metal sides--a factory or some kind of mill, she thought--and then the road tilted up. They started to climb the embankment.

  "Please," she whispered. "Please, just tell me what you want."

  "Uck," he said, grimacing, and reached into his mouth like a man who's got a hair on his tongue. Instead of a hair he pulled out the tongue itself. He looked at it for a moment, lying limply in his fist like a piece of liver, and then tossed it aside.

  They passed two pickup trucks, a dumptruck, and a yellow-ghost backhoe, all parked together inside the first switchback the road made on its way to the top.

  "If you're going to kill me, make it quick," she said in her trembly voice. "Please don't hurt me. Do that much, at least, promise you won't hurt me."

  But the slumped, bleeding figure behind the wheel of the cruiser promised her nothing. It simply drove through the flying dust, guiding the car to the crest of the bulwark. The cop didn't hesitate at the top but crossed the rim and started down, leaving the wind above them as he did. Ellen looked back, wanting to see some last light, but she was too late. The walls of the pit had already hidden what remained of the sunset. The cruiser was descending into a vast lake of darkness, an abyss that made a joke of the headlights.

  Down here, night had already fallen.

  CHAPTER 2

  1

  You've hada conversion, Reverend Martin once told David. This was near the beginning. It was also around the time that David began to realize that by four o'clock on most Sunday afternoons, Reverend Gene Martin was no longer strictly sober. It would still be some months, however, before David realized just how much his new teacher drank. In fact, yours is the only genuine conversion I've ever seen, perhaps the only genuine one I'll ever see. These are not good times for the God of our fathers, David. Lot of people talking the talk, not many walking the walk.

  David wasn't sure that "conversion" was the right word for what had happened to him, but he hadn't spent much time worrying about it. Something had happened, and just coping with it was enough. The something had brought him to Reverend Martin, and Reverend Martin--drunk or not--had told him things he needed to know and set him tasks that he needed to do. When David had asked him
, at one of those Sunday-afternoon meetings (soundless basketball on the TV that day), what he should be doing, Reverend Martin had responded promptly. "The job of the new Christian is to meet God, to know God, to trust God, to love God. That's not like taking a list to the supermarket, either, where you can dump stuff into your basket in any order you like. It's a progression, like working your way up the math ladder from counting to calculus. You've met God, and rather spectacularly, too. Now you've got to get to know him."

  "Well, I talk to you," David had said.

  "Yes, and you talk to God. You do, don't you? Haven't given up on the praying?"

  "Nope. Don't often hear back, though."

  Reverend Martin had laughed and taken a sip from his teacup. "God's a lousy conversationalist, no question about that, but he left us a user's manual. I suggest you consult it."

  "Huh?"

  "The Bible," Reverend Martin had said, looking at him over the rim of his cup with bloodshot eyes.

  So he had read the Bible, starting in March and finishing Revelation ("The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen") just a week or so before they had left Ohio. He had done it like homework, twenty pages a night (weekends off), making notes, memorizing stuff that seemed important, skipping only the parts Reverend Martin told him he could skip, mostly the begats. And what he remembered most clearly now, as he stood shivering at the sink in the jail cell, dousing himself with icy water, was the story of Daniel in the lions' den. King Darius hadn't really wanted to throw Danny in there, but his advisers had mousetrapped him somehow. David had been amazed at how much of the Bible was politics.

  "You STOP THAT!" his father screamed, startling David out of his thoughts and making him look around. In the growing gloom Ralph Carver's face was long with terror, his eyes red with grief. In his agitation he sounded like an eleven-year-old himself, one having a hell of a tantrum. "Stop that RIGHT NOW, do you hear me?"

  David turned back to the sink without answering and began to splash water on his face and in his hair. He remembered King Darius's parting advice to Daniel before Daniel was led away: "Thy God whom thou servest in your days and nights will deliver thee." And something else, something Daniel had said the next day about why God had shut the lions' mouths--

  "David! DAVID!"

  But he wouldn't look again. Couldn't. He hated it when his father cried, and he had never seen or heard him cry like this. It was awful, as if someone had cut open a vein in his heart.

  "David, you answer me!"

  "Put a sock in it, pal," Marinville said.

  "You put a sock in it." Mary told him.

  "But he's getting the coyote riled!"

  She ignored him. "David, what are you doing?"

  David didn't answer. This wasn't the kind of thing you could discuss rationally, even if there was time, because faith wasn't rational. This was something Reverend Martin had told him over and over again, drilling him with it like some important spelling rule, i before e except after c: sane men and women don't believe in God. That was all, that was flat. You can't say it from the pulpit, because the congregation'd run you out of town, but it's the truth. God isn't about reason; God is about faith and belief. God says, "Sure, take away the safety net. And when that's gone, take away the tightrope, too. "

  He filled his hands with water once more and splashed it over his face and into his hair. His head. That would be where he succeeded or failed, he knew that already. It was the biggest part of him, and he didn't think there was much give to a person's skull.

  David grabbed the bar of Irish Spring and began to lather himself with it. He didn't bother with his legs, there would be no problem there, but worked from the groin on up, rubbing harder and generating more suds as he went. His father was still yelling at him, but now there was no time to listen. The thing was, he had to be quick ... and not just because he was apt to lose his nerve if he stopped too long to think about the coyote sitting out there. If he let the soap dry, it wouldn't serve to grease him; it would gum him up and hold him back instead.

  He gave his neck a fast lube-job, then did his face and hair. Eyes slitted, soap still clutched in one hand, he padded to the cell door. A horizontal bar crossed the vertical ones about three feet off the floor. The gap between the vertical bars was at least four inches and maybe five. The cells in the holding area had been built to hold men--brawny miners, for the most part--not skinny eleven-year-old boys, and he didn't expect much trouble slipping through.

  At least until he got to his head.

  Quick, hurry, don't think, trust God.

  He knelt, shivering and covered with green soapslime from the hips on up, and began rubbing the cake of soap up and down, first on the inside of one white-painted vertical bar, then on the other.

  Out by the desk, the coyote got to its feet. Its growl rose to a snarl. Its yellow eyes were fixed intently on David Carver. Its muzzle wrinkled back in an unpleasantly toothy grin.

  "David, no! Don't do it, son! Don't be crazy!"

  "He's right, kid." Marinville was standing at the bars of his cell now, hands wrapped around them. So was Mary. That was embarrassing but probably natural enough, considering the way his father was carrying on. And it couldn't be helped. He had to go, and go now. He hadn't been able to draw any hot water from the tap, and he thought the cold would dry the soap on his skin even quicker.

  He recalled the story of Daniel and the lions again as he dropped to one knee, gathering himself. Not very surprising, given the circumstances. When King Darius arrived the next day, Daniel had been fine. "My God hath sent his anger, and hath shut the lions' mouths," Daniel told him, "forasmuch as innocency was found in me." That wasn't exactly right, but David knew the word "innocency" was. It had fascinated him, chimed somewhere deep inside him. Now he spoke it to the being whose voice he sometimes heard--the one he identified as the voice of the other: Find innocency in me, God. Find innocency in me and shut that fleabag's mouth. Jesus' name I pray, amen.

  He turned sideways, then propped his whole weight on one arm, like Jack Palance doing pushups at the Academy Awards. In this fashion he was able to stick both feet out through the bars at the same time. He wriggled backward, now out to his ankles, now his knees, now his thighs ... which was where he first felt the painted bars press their soapslick coolness against him.

  "No!" Mary screamed. "No, get away from him, you ugly fuck! GET AWAY FROM HIM!"

  There was a clink. It was followed by a thin rolling-marble sound. David turned his head long enough to see Mary with her hands now outside the bars of her cell. The left was cupped. He saw her pick another coin out of it with her right hand and throw it at the coyote. This time it barely paid attention, although the quarter struck it on the flank. The animal started toward David's bare feet and legs instead, head lowered, snarling.

  2

  Oh Christ almighty, Johnny thought. Goddam kid must have checked his brains at the door.

  Then he yanked the belt out of the bottom of his motorcycle jacket, stuck his arm as far out through the bars as he could, and brought the buckle end down on the coyote's scant flank just as it was about to help itself to the kid's right foot.

  The coyote yelped in pain as well as surprise this time. It whirled, snatching at the belt. Johnny yanked it away--it was too thin, too apt to give out in the coyote's jaws before the kid could get out ... if the kid actually could get out, which Johnny doubted. He let the belt go flying over his shoulder and yanked off the heavy leather jacket itself, trying to hold the coyote's yellow gaze as he did so, willing it not to look away. The animal's eyes reminded him of the cop's eyes.

  The kid shoved his butt through the bars with a gasp, and Johnny had time to wonder how that felt on the old family jewels. The coyote started to turn toward the sound and Johnny flung the leather jacket out at it, holding on by the collar. If the animal hadn't taken two steps forward to snatch at the belt, the jacket wouldn't have reached it ... but the coyote had and the jacket did. When it brushed the animal's sh
oulder, it whirled and seized the jacket so fiercely that it was almost snapped out of Johnny's hands. As it was he was dragged head-first into the bars. It hurt like a mother and a bright red rocket went off behind his eyes, but he still had time to be grateful that his nose had gone between the bars rather than into one.

  "No, you don't," he grunted, winding his hands into the leather collar and pulling. "Come on, hon ... come on, you nasty gopher-eating bugger ... come on over ... and say howdy."

  The coyote snarled bitterly at him, the sound muffled through its mouthful of jacket--twelve hundred bucks at Barneys in New York. Johnny had never quite pictured it like this when he had tried it on.

  He bunched his arms--not as powerful as they'd been thirty years ago, but not puny, either--and dragged the coyote foward. Its claws slid on the hardwood floor. It got one front leg braced against the desk and shook the jacket from side to side, trying to yank it out of Johnny's. hands. His collection of Life Savers went flying, his maps, his spare set of keys, his pocket pharmacy (aspirin, codeine caps, Sucrets, a tube of Preparation-H), his sunglasses, and his goddam cellular phone. He let the coyote take a step or two backward, trying to keep it interested, to play it like a fish, then yanked it forward again. It bonked its head on the corner of the desk this time, a sound that warmed Johnny's heart. "Arriba!" he grunted. "How'd that feel, honey?"

  "Hurry up!" Mary screamed. "Hurry up, David!" Johnny glanced over at the kid's cell. What he saw made his muscles relax with fear--when the coyote yanked on the jacket this time, the animal came very close to pulling it free.

  "Hurry UP!" the woman screamed again, but Johnny saw that the kid couldn't hurry up. Soaped up, naked as a peeled shrimp, he had gotten as far as his chin, and there he was stuck, with the whole length of his body out in the holding area and his head back inside the cell. Johnny had one overwhelming impression, mostly called to mind by the twist of the neck and the stressed line of the jaw.