Desperation Read online

  He pointed at the big hole, and David felt an unpleasant, debilitating coldness begin to creep through him. The hole seemed to stare up at him with a kind of idiot invitation.

  "What is it?" he whispered, but he supposed he knew.

  "Rattlesnake Number One. Also known as the China Mine or the China Shaft or the China Drift. The last series of shots uncovered it. To say the crew was surprised would be an understatement, because nobody in the Nevada mining business really believes that old story. By the turn of the century, the Diablo Company was claiming that Number One was simply shut down when the vein played out. But it's been here, David. All along. And now--"

  "Is it haunted?" David asked, shivering. "It is, isn't it?"

  "Oh yes," the man in the Yankees cap said, turning his silvery no-eyes on David. "Yes indeed."

  "Whatever you brought me up here for, I don't want to hear it!" David cried. "I want you to take me back! Back to my dad! I hate this! I hate being in the Land of the--"

  He broke off as a horrible thought struck him. The Land of the Dead, that was what the man had said. He'd called David an exception. But that meant--

  "Reverend Martin ... I saw him on my way to the Woods. Is he ..."

  The man looked briefly down at his old-fashioned radio, then looked back up again and nodded. "Two days after you left, David."

  "Was he drunk?"

  "Toward the end he was always drunk. Like Billingsley."

  "Was it suicide?"

  "No," the man in the Yankees cap said, and put a kindly hand on the back of David's neck. It was warm, not the hand of a dead person. "At least, not conscious suicide. He and his wife went to the beach. They took a picnic. He went in the water too soon after lunch, and swam out too far."

  "Take me back," David whispered. "I'm tired of all this death."

  "The poisoned field is an affront to God," the man said. "I know it's a bummer, David, but--"

  "Then let God clean it up!" David cried. "It's not fair for him to come to me after he killed my mother and my sister--"

  "He didn't--"

  "I don't care! I don't care! Even if he didn't, he stood aside and let it happen!"

  "That's not true, either."

  David shut his eyes and clapped his hands to his ears. He didn't want to hear any more. He refused to hear any more. Yet the man's voice came through anyway. It was relentless. He would be able to escape it no more than Jonah had been able to escape God. God was as relentless as a bloodhound on a fresh scent. And God was cruel.

  "Why are you on earth?" The voice seemed to come from inside his head now.

  "I don't hear you! I don't hear you!"

  "You were put on earth to love God--"

  "No!"

  "--and serve him."

  "No! Fuck God! Fuck his love! Fuck his service!"

  "God can't make you do anything you don't want to--"

  "Stop it! I won't listen, I won't decide! Do you hear? Do you--"

  "Shh--listen!"

  Not quite against his will, David listened.

  PART IV

  THE CHINA PIT: GOD IS CRUEL

  CHAPTER 1

  1

  Johnny was ready to suggest that they just get going--Cynthia could hold the kid's head in her lap and cushion it from any bumps--when David raised his hands and pressed the heels of his palms to his temples. He took a deeper breath. A moment later his eyes opened and looked up at them: Johnny, Steve, Cynthia, his father. The faces of the two older men were as puffed and discolored as those of journeymen fighters after a bad night in a tank town; all of them looked tired and scared, jumping like spooked horses at the slightest sound. The ragtag remains of The Collie Entragian Survival Society.

  "Hi, David," Johnny said. "Great to have you back. You're in--"

  "--Steve's truck. Parked near the movie theater. You brought it down from the Conoco station." David struggled to a sitting position, swallowed, winced. "She must've shook me like dice."

  "She did," Steve said. He was looking at David cautiously. "You remember Audrey doing that?"

  "No," David said, "but I was told."

  Johnny shot a glance at Ralph, who shrugged slightly--Don't ask me.

  "Is there any water? My throat's on fire."

  "We got out of the theater in a hurry and didn't bring anything but the guns," Cynthia said. "But there's this." She pointed to a case of Jolt Cola from which several bottles had already been taken. "Steve keeps it on hand for Mr. Marinville."

  "I'm a freak about it since I quit drinking," Johnny said. "Gotta be Jolt, God knows why. It's warm, but--"

  David took one and drank deeply, wincing as the carbonation bit into his throat but not slowing down on that account. At last, with the bottle three-quarters empty, he put his head back against the side of the truck, closed his eyes, and burped ringingly.

  Johnny grinned. "Sixty points!"

  David opened his eyes and grinned back.

  Johnny held out the bottle of aspirin he had liberated from the Owl's. "Want a couple? They're old, but they seem to work all right."

  David thought it over, then took two and washed them down with the rest of the Jolt.

  "We're getting out," Johnny said. "We'll try north first--there are some trailers in the road, but Steve says he thinks we can get around them on the trailer-park side. If we can't, we'll have to go south to the pit-mine and then take the equipment road that runs northwest from there back to Highway 50. You and I'll sit up front with--"

  "No."

  Johnny raised his eyebrows. "Pardon?"

  "We have to go up to the mine, okay, but not to leave. town." David's voice sounded hoarse, as if he'd been crying. "We have to go down inside the pit."

  Johnny glanced at Steve, who only shrugged and then looked back at the boy. "What are you talking about, David?" Steve asked. "Your mother? Because it would probably be better for her, not to mention the rest of us, if we--"

  "No, that's not why ... Dad?" The boy reached out and took his father's hand. It was an oddly adult gesture of comfort. "Mom's dead."

  Ralph bowed his head. "Well, we don't know that for sure, David, and we mustn't give up hope, but I guess it's likely."

  "I do know for sure. I'm not just guessing." David's face was haggard in the light of the crisscrossing flashlight beams. His eyes settled on Johnny last. "There's stuff we have to do. You know it, don't you? That's why you waited for me to wake up."

  "No, David. Not at all. We just didn't want to risk moving you until we were sure you were okay." Yet this felt like a lie to his heart. He found himself filling up with a vague, fluttery nervousness. It was the way he felt in the last few days before beginning a new book, when he understood that the inevitable could not be put off much longer, that he would soon be out on the wire again, clutching his balance-pole and riding his stupid little unicycle.

  But this was worse. By far. He felt an urge to bop the kid over the head with the butt of the Rossi shotgun, knock him out and shut him up before he could say anything else. Don't you fuck us up, kid, he thought. Not when we're starting to see a tiny bit of light at the end of the tunnel.

  David looked back at his father. He was still holding Ralph's hand. "She's dead but not at rest. She can't be as long as Tak inhabits her body."

  "Who's Tak, David?" Cynthia asked.

  "One of the Wintergreen Twins," Johnny said cheerfully. "The other one is Tik."

  David gave him a long, level look, and Johnny dropped his eyes. He hated himself for doing it but couldn't help it.

  "Tak is a god," David said. "Or a demon. Or maybe nothing at all, just a name, a nonsense syHabte--but a dangerous nothing, like a voice in the wind. It doesn't matter. What does is that my mom should be put to rest. Then she can be with my sister in ... well, in wherever there is for us after we die."

  "Son, what matters is that we have to get out of here," Johnny said. He was still managing to keep his voice gentle, but now he could hear an undercurrent of impatience and fear in it. "Once we get t
o Ely, we'll contact the State Police--hell, the FBI. There'll be a hundred cops on the ground and a dozen helicopters in the air by noon tomorrow, that I promise you. But for now--"

  "My mom's dead, but Mary's not," David said. "She's still alive. She's in the pit."

  Cynthia gasped. "How did you know she was even gone?"

  David smiled wanly. "Well, I don't see her, for one thing. The rest I know the same way I know it was Audrey who choked me. I was told."

  "By who, David?" Ralph asked.

  "I don't know," David said. "I don't even know if it matters. What matters is that he told me stuff. True stuff. I know it was."

  "Story-hour's over, pal," Johnny said. There was a raggedness in his voice. He heard it, but he couldn't help it. And was it surprising? This wasn't a panel-discussion on magical realism or concrete prose, after all. Story-hour was finished; bug-out time had arrived. He had absolutely no desire to listen to a bunch of shit from this spooky little Jesus Scout.

  The Jesus Scout slid out of his cell somehow, killed the coyote Entragian set as a guard, and saved your miserable life, Terry spoke up inside his head. Maybe you should listen to him, Johnny.

  And that, he thought, was why he had divorced Terry in the first place. In a fucking nutshell. She had been a divine lay, but she had never known when to shut up and listen to her intellectual betters.

  But the damage was done; it was now too late to derail this train of thought. He found himself thinking of what Billingsley had said about David's escape from the jail cell. Not even Houdini, hadn't that been it? Because of the head. And then there was the phone. The way he'd sent the coyotes packing. And the matter of the sardines and crackers. The thought which had gone through his own head had been something about unobtrusive miracles, hadn't it?

  He had to quit thinking that way. Because what Jesus - Scouts did was get people killed. Look at John the Baptist, or those nuns in South America, or--

  Not even Houdini.

  Because of the head.

  Johnny realized there was no point in gilding the lily, or doing little mental tap-dances, or--this was the oldest trick of all--using different voices to argue the question into incoherence. The simple fact was that he was no longer just afraid of the cop, or the other forces which might be loose in this town.

  He was also afraid of David Carver.

  "It wasn't really the cop who killed my mother and sister and Mary's husband," David said, and gave Johnny a look that reminded him eerily of Terry. That look used to drive him to the edge of insanity. You know what I'm talking about, it said. You know exactly, so don't waste my time by being deliberately obtuse. "And whoever I talked to while I was unconscious, it was really God. Only God can't come to people as himself; he'd scare them to death and never get any business done at all. He comes as other stuff. Birds, pillars of fire, burning bushes, whirlwinds ..."

  "Or people," Cynthia said. "Sure, God's a master of disguise."

  The last of Johnny's patience broke at the skinny girl's makes-sense-to-me tone. "This is totally insane!" he shouted. "We have to get gone, don't you see that? We're parked on goddam Main Street, shut up in here without a single window to look out of, he could be anywhere--up front behind the fucking wheel, for all we know! Or ... I don't know ... coyotes ... buzzards ..."

  "He's gone," David said in his quiet voice. He leaned forward and took another Jolt from the case.

  "Who?" Johnny asked. "Entragian?"

  "The can tak. It doesn't matter who it's in--Entragian or my mother or the one it started with--it's always the same. Always the can tak, the big god, the guardian. Gone. Can't you feel it?"

  "I don't feel anything."

  Don't be a gonzo, Terry said in his mind. "Don't be a gonzo," David said, looking intently up at him. The bottle of Jolt was clasped loosely in his hands.

  Johnny bent toward him. "Are you reading my mind?" he asked, almost pleasantly. "If you are, I'll thank you to get the hell out of my head, sonny."

  "What I'm doing is trying to get you to listen, " David said. "Everyone else will if you will! He doesn't need to send his can tahs or can tak against us if we're in disagreement with one another--if there's a broken window, he'll get in and tear us apart!"

  "Come on," Johnny said, "don't go all guilt-trippy. None of this is my fault."

  "I'm not saying it is. Just listen, okay?" David sounded almost pleading. "You can do that, there's time, because he's gone. The trailers he put in the road are gone, too. Don't you get it? He wants us to leave."

  "Great! Let's give him what he wants!"

  "Let's listen to what David has to say," Steve said.

  Johnny wheeled on him. "I think you must have forgotten who pays you, Steve." He loathed the sound of the words as soon as they were out of his mouth, but made no effort to take them back. The urge to get out of here, to jump behind the wheel of the Ryder truck and just roll some miles--in any direction but south--was now so strong it was nearly panic.

  "You told me to stop calling you boss. I'm holding you to that."

  "Besides, what about Mary?" Cynthia asked. "He says she's alive!"

  Johnny turned toward her--turned on her. "You may want to pack your suitcases and travel Trans-God Airways with David, but I think I'll pass."

  "We'll listen to him," Ralph said in a low voice.

  Johnny stared at him, amazed. If he had expected help from anyone, it had been from the boy's father. He's all I got, Ralph had said in the lobby of The American West. All that's left of my family.

  Johnny looked around at the others, and was dismally astounded to see they were in agreement; only he stood apart. And Steve had the keys to the truck in his pocket. Yet it was him the boy was mostly looking at. Him. As it was him, John Edward Marinville, that people had been mostly looking at ever since he had published his first novel at the impossibly precocious age of twenty-two. He thought he had gotten used to it, and maybe he had, but this time it was different. He had an idea that none of the others--the teachers, the readers, the critics, the editors, the drinking buddies, the women--had ever wanted what this boy seemed to want, which was not just for him to listen; listening, Johnny was afraid, was only where it would start.

  The eyes were not just looking, though. The eyes were pleading.

  Forget it, kid, he thought. When people like you drive, the bus always seems to crash.

  If it wasn't for David, I think your personal bus would have crashed already, Terry said from Der Bitchen Bunker inside his head. I think you'd be dead and hung up on a hook somewhere. Listen to him, Johnny. For Christ's sake, listen!

  In a much lower voice, Johnny said: "Entragian's gone. You're sure of that."

  "Yes," David said. "The animals, too. The coyotes and wolves--hundreds of them, it must have taken, maybe thousands--moved the trailers off the road. Dumped them over the side and onto the hardpan. Now most of them have drawn away, into mi him, the watchman's circle." He drank from the bottle of Jolt. The hand holding it shook slightly. He looked at each of them in turn, but it was Johnny his eyes came back to. Always Johnny. "He wants what you want. For us to leave."

  "Then why did he bring us here in the first place?"

  "He didn't."

  "What?"

  "He thinks he did, but he didn't."

  "I don't have any idea what you're--"

  "God brought us," David said. "To stop him."

  2

  In the silence which followed this, Steve discovered he was listening for the wind outside. There was none. He thought he could hear a plane far away--sane people on their way to some sane destination, sleeping or eating or reading U.S. News & World Report--but that was all.

  It was Johnny who broke the silence, of course, and although he sounded as confident as ever, there was a look in his eyes (a slidey look) that Steve didn't like much. He thought he liked Johnny's crazed look better: the wide eyes and terrified Clyde Barrow grin he'd had on when he put the shotgun up to the cougar's ear and blew its head off. That there was a half-b
right outlaw in Johnny was something Steve knew very well--he'd seen flickers of that guy from the start of the tour, and knew it was the outlaw Bill Harris had feared when he laid down the Five Commandments that day in Jack Appleton's office--but Clyde Barrow seemed to have stepped out and left the other Marinville, the one with the satiric eyebrow and the windbag William F. Buckley rhetoric, in his place.

  "You speak as if we all had the same God, David," he said. "I don't mean to patronize you, but I hardly think that's the case."

  "But it is the case," David replied calmly. "Compared to Tak, you and a cannibal king would have the same God. You've seen the can tahs, I know you have. And you've felt what they can do."

  Johnny's mouth twitched--indicating, Steve thought, that he had taken a hit but didn't want to admit it. "Perhaps that's so," he said, "but the person who brought me here was a long way from God. He was a big blond policeman with skin problems. He planted a bag of dope in my saddlebag and then beat the shit but of me."

  "Yes. I know. The dope came from Mary's car. He put something like nails in the road to get us. It's funny, when you think about it--funny--weird, not ha-ha. He went through Desperation like a whirlwind--shot people, stabbed them, beat them, pushed them out windows, ran them down with his car--but he still couldn't just come up to us, any of us, and take out his gun and say 'You're coming with me.' He had to have a ... 1 don't know the word." He looked at Johnny.

  "Pretext," Steve's erstwhile boss said.

  "Yes, right, a pretext. It's like how, in the old horror movies, a vampire can't just come in on his own. You have to invite him in."

  "Why?" Cynthia asked.

  "Maybe because Entragian--the real Entragian--was still inside his head. Like a shadow. Or a person that's locked out of his house but can still look in the windows and pound on the doors. Now Tak's in my mother--what's left of her--and it would kill us if it could ... but it could probably still make the best Key lime pie in the world, too. If it wanted to."

  David looked down for a moment, his lips trembling, then looked back up at them.

  "Him needing a pretext to take us doesn't really matter. Many times what he does or says doesn't matter--it's nonsense, or impulse. Although there are clues. Always clues. He gives himself away, shows his real self, like someone who says what he sees in inkblots."