Desperation Read online

  "Dad? Is it all right?"

  "Yes. Fine." He didn't know if it was or not, didn't really know what they were dealing with here, but that was what you said to your kids, wasn't it? Yes, fine, all right. He thought that if he were on a plane with David and the engines quit, he'd put his arm around the boy and tell him everything was fine all the way down.

  He opened the door, and it banged against the inside of the cruiser door.

  "Quick, come on, let's see some hustle," the cop said, looking nervously around.

  Ralph went down the steps with Kirstie sitting in the crook of his left arm. As he stepped down, she dropped her doll.

  "Melissa!" she cried. "I dropped Melissa Sweetheart, get her, Daddy!"

  "No, get in the car, get in the car!" the cop shouted. "I'll get the doll!"

  Ralph slid in, putting his hand on the top of Kirstie's head and helping her duck. David followed him, then Ellie. The back seat of the car was filled with papers, and the front seat had been warped into a bell-shape by the oversized cop's weight. The moment Ellie pulled her right leg in, the cop slammed the door shut and went racing around the back of the cruiser.

  " 'Lissa!" Kirstie cried in tones of real agony. "He forgot 'Lissa!"

  Ellie reached for the doorhandle, meaning to lean out and get Melissa Sweetheart--surely no psycho with a rifle could pick her off in the time it would take to grab up a little girl's doll--then looked back at Ralph. "Where're the handles?" she asked.

  The driver's-side door of the cruiser opened, and the cop dropped into it like a bomb. The seat crunched back against Ralph's knees and he winced, glad that Kirstie's legs were hanging down between his. Not that Kirstie was still. She wriggled and twisted on his lap, hands held out to her mother.

  "My doll, Mummy, my doll! Melissa!"

  "Officer--" Ellie began.

  "No time," the cop said. "Can't. Tak!" He U-turned across the road and headed east in a spew of dust. The rear end of the car fishtailed briefly. As it steadied again, it occurred to Ralph how fast this had happened--not ten minutes ago they'd been in their RV, headed down the road. He'd been about to ask David to play Twenty Questions, not because he really wanted to but because he had been bored.

  He sure wasn't bored now.

  "Melissa Sweeeeeeetheart!" Kirstie screamed, and then began to weep.

  "Take it easy, Pie," David said. It was his pet name for his baby sister. Like so many other things about David, neither of his parents knew what it meant or where it had come from. Ellie thought it was short for sweetie-pie, but when she had asked him one night, David had just shrugged and grinned his appealing, slanted little grin. "Nah, she's just a pie," he had said. "Just a pie, that's all."

  "But 'Lissa's in the dirty old dirt," Kirstie said, looking at her brother with swimming eyes.

  "We'll come back and get her and clean her all up," David said.

  "Promise?"

  "Uh-huh. I'll even help you wash her hair."

  "With Prell?"

  "Uh-huh." He put a quick kiss on her cheek.

  "What if the bad man comes?" Kirstie asked. "The bad man like Mr. Big Boogeyman? What if he dollnaps Melissa Sweetheart?"

  David covered his mouth with his hand to hide the ghost of a grin. "He won't." The boy glanced up into the rearview mirror, trying to make eye contact with the cop. "Will he?"

  "No," the cop said. "The man we're looking for is not a dollnapper." There was no facetiousness Ralph could detect in his voice; he sounded like Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma'am.

  He slowed briefly as they passed a sign which read DESPERATION, then accelerated as he turned right. Ralph hung on, praying that the guy knew what he was doing, that he wouldn't roll them. The car seemed to lift slightly, then settled back. They were now heading south. On the horizon, a huge bulwark of earth, its tan side cut with cracks and zigzag trenches like black scars, loomed against the sky.

  "What is he, then?" Ellie asked. "What is this guy? And how did he get hold of the stuff you use to stop speeders? The watchamacallit?"

  "Highway carpet, Mom," David said. He ran a finger up and down the metal mesh between the front and back seats, his face intent and thoughtful and troubled. Not even a ghost of a smile there now.

  "Same way he got the guns he's toting and the car he's driving," the man behind the wheel said. Now they were passing the Rattlesnake Trailer Park, now the headquarters of the Desperation Mining Corporation. Up ahead was a huddle of business buildings. A blinker-light flashed yellow under a hundred thousand miles of blue-denim sky. "He's a cop. And I'll tell you one thing, Carvers: when you've got a nutty cop on your hands, you've got a situation."

  "How do you know our name?" David asked. "You didn't ask to see my dad's driver's license, so how do you know our name?"

  "Saw it when your dad opened the door," the cop said, looking up into the rearview mirror. "Little plaque over the table. GOD BLESS OUR ROAMING HOME. THE CARVERS. Cute."

  Something about this bothered Ralph, but for now he paid no attention. His fright had grown into a sense of foreboding so strong and yet so diffuse that he felt a little as if he'd eaten something laced with poison. He thought that if he held his hand up it would be steady, but that didn't change the fact that he had become more scared, not less, since the cop had sped them away from their disabled roaming home with such spooky ease. It apparently wasn't the kind of fear that made your hands shake (it's a dry fright, he thought with a tiny and not very characteristic twinkle of humor), but it was real enough, for all that.

  "A cop," Ralph mused, thinking of a movie he'd rented from the video store down the street one Saturday night not too long ago. Maniac Cop, it had been called. The line of ad-copy above the title had read: YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT. PERMANENTLY. Funny how stupid stuff like that sometimes stuck with you. Except it didn't seem very funny right now.

  "A cop, right," their cop replied. He sounded as if he might be smiling.

  Oh, really? Ralph asked himself. And just how does a smile sound?

  He was aware that Ellie was looking at him with a kind of strained curiosity, but this didn't seem like a good time to return her glance. He didn't know what they might read in each other's eyes, and wasn't sure he wanted to find out.

  The cop had been smiling, though. He was somehow sure of it.

  Why would he be? What's funny about a maniac cop on the loose, or six flat tires,. or a family of four crammed into a hot police-car with no handles on the back doors, or my daughter's favorite doll lying face-down in the dirt eight miles back? What could possibly be funny about any of those things?

  He didn't know. But the cop had sounded as if he were smiling.

  "A state trooper, did you say?" Ralph asked as they drove beneath the blinker.

  "Look, Mummy!" Kirsten said brightly, Melissa Sweetheart at least temporarily forgotten. "Bikes! Bikes in the street, and standing on their heads! See down there? Isn't that funny?"

  "Yes, honey, I see them," Ellie said. She didn't sound as if she found the upside-down bikes in the street anywhere near as hilarious as her daughter did.

  "Trooper? No, I didn't say that." The big man behind the wheel still sounded as if he were smiling. "Not a state trooper, a town cop."

  "Really," Ralph said. "Wow. How many cops do you have in a little place like this, Officer?"

  "Well, there were two others," the cop said, the smile in his voice more obvious than ever, "but I killed them."

  He turned his head to look back through the mesh, and he wasn't smiling after all. He was grinning. His teeth were so big they looked more like tools than bones. They showed all the way to the back of his mouth. Above and below them were what seemed like acres of pink gum.

  "Now I'm the only law west of the Pecos."

  Ralph stared at him, mouth gaping. The cop grinned back, driving with his head turned, pulling up neatly in front of the Desperation Municipal Building without ever looking once at where he was going.

  "Carvers," he said, speaking solemnly thro
ugh his grin, "welcome to Desperation."

  5

  An hour later the cop ran at the woman in the jeans and the workshirt, his cowboy boots rattling on the hardwood floor, his hands outstretched, but his grin was gone and Ralph felt savage triumph leap up his throat, like something ugly on a spring. The cop was coming hard, but the woman in the jeans had managed-probably due more to luck than to any conscious decision on her part--to keep the desk between them, and that was going to make the difference. Ralph saw her pull back the hammers of the shotgun which had been lying on the desk, saw her raise it to her shoulder as her back struck the bars of the room's largest cell, saw her curl her finger around the double triggers.

  The big cop was going like hell, but it wasn't going to do him any good.

  Shoot him, lady, Ralph thought. Not to save us but because he killed my daughter. Blow his motherfucking head off.

  The instant before Mary pulled the triggers, the cop fell to his knees on the other side of the desk, his head dropping like the head of a man who has knelt to pray. The double roar of the shotgun was terrific in the closed holding area. Flame licked out of the barrels. Ralph heard his wife scream--in triumph, he thought. If so, it was premature. The cop's Smokey Bear hat flew off his head, but the loads went high. Shot hit the back wall of the room and thudded into the plastered stairwell outside the open door with a sound like wind-driven sleet hitting a windowpane. There was a bulletin-board to the right of the doorway, and Ralph saw round black holes spatter across the papers tacked up there. The cop's hat was.a shredded ruin held together only by a thin leather hat-band. It had been buckshot in the gun, not bird. If it had hit the cop in the midsection, it would have torn him apart. Knowing that made Ralph feel even worse.

  The big cop threw his weight against the desk and shoved it across the room toward the cell Ralph had decided was the drunk-tank-toward the cell and the woman pressed against the cell's bars. The chair was penned in the kneehole. It swivelled back and forth, casters squalling. The woman tried to get the gun down between her and the chair before the chair could hit her, but she didn't move fast enough. The chairback crashed into her hips and pelvis and stomach, driving her backward into the bars. She howled in pain and surprise.

  The big cop spread his arms like Samson preparing to pull down the temple and grasped the sides of the desk. Although his ears were still ringing from the shotgun blast, Ralph heard the seams under the arms of the maniac cop's khaki uniform shirt give way. The cop pulled the desk back. "Drop it!" he yelled. "Drop the gun, Mary!"

  The woman shoved the chair away from her, raised the shotgun, and pulled back the double hammers again. She was sobbing with pain and effort. Out of the comer of his eye, Ralph saw Ellie put her hands over her ears as the dark-haired woman curled her finger around the triggers, but this time there was only a dry click when the hammers fell. Ralph felt disappointment as bitter as gall crowd his throat. He had known just looking at it that the shotgun wasn't a pump or an auto, and still he had somehow thought it would fire, had absolutely expected it to fire, as if God himself would reload the chambers and perform a Winchester miracle.

  The cop shoved the desk forward a second time. If not for the chair, Ralph saw, she would have been safe in the kneehole. But the chair was there, and it slammed into her midsection again, doubling her forward and drawing a harsh retching noise from her.

  "Drop it Mary, drop it!" the cop yelled.

  But she wouldn't. As the cop pulled the desk back again (Why doesn't he just charge her? Ralph thought. Doesn't he know the damned gun is empty?), shells spilling off the top and rolling everywhere, she reversed it so she could grip the twin barrels. Then she leaned forward and brought the stock down over the top of the desk like a club. The cop tried to drop his right shoulder, but the burled walnut stock of the gun caught him on the collarbone just the same. He grunted. Ralph had no idea if it was a grunt of surprise, pain, or simple exasperation, but the sound drew a scream of approval from across the room, where David was still standing with his hands wrapped around the bars of the cell he was in. His face was pale and sweaty, his eyes blazing. The old man with the white hair had joined him.

  The cop pulled the desk back once more--the blow to his shoulder did not noticeably impair his ability to do this--and slammed it forward again, hitting the woman with the chair and driving her into the bars. She uttered another harsh cry.

  "Put it down!" the cop yelled. It was a funny kind of yell, and for a moment Ralph found himself hoping that the bastard was hurt after all. Then he realized the cop was laughing. "Put it down or I'll beat you to a pulp, I really will!"

  The dark-haired woman--Mary--raised the gun again, but this time with no conviction. One side of her shirt had pulled out of her jeans, and Ralph could see bright red marks on the white skin of her waist and belly. He knew that, were she to take the shirt off, he would see the chairback's silhouette tattooed all the way up to the cups of her bra.

  She held the gun in the air for a moment, the inlaid stock wavering, then threw it aside. It clattered across to the cell where David and the white-haired man were. David looked down at it.

  "Don't touch it, son," the white-haired man said. "It's empty, just leave it alone."

  The cop glanced at David and the white-haired man. Then, smiling brilliantly, he looked at the woman with her back to the drunk-tank bars. He pulled the desk away from her, went around it, and kicked at the chair. It voyaged across the hardwood on its squeaky casters and thumped to a stop against the empty cell next to Ralph and Ellie. The cop put an arm around the dark-haired woman's shoulders. He looked at her almost tenderly. She responded with the blackest glance Ralph had ever seen in his life.

  "Can you walk?" the cop asked her. "Is anything broken?"

  "What difference does it make?" She spat at him. "Kill me if you're going to, get it over with."

  "Kill you? Kill you?" He looked stunned, the expression of a man who has never killed anything bigger than a wasp in his whole life. "I'm not going to kill you, Mare!" He hugged her to him briefly, then looked around at Ralph and Ellie, David and the white-haired man. "Gosh, no!" he said. "Not when things are just getting interesting."

  CHAPTER 3

  1

  The man who had once been on the cover of People and Time and Premiere (when he married the actress with all the emeralds), and the front page of The New York Times (when he won the National Book Award for his novel Delight), and in the center-spread of Inside View (when he was arrested for beating up his third wife, the one before the actress with the emeralds), had to take a piss.

  He pulled his motorcycle over to the westbound edge of Highway 50, working methodically down through the gears with a stiff left foot, and finally rolling to a stop on the edge of the tar. Good thing there was so little traffic out here, because you couldn't park your scoot off the road in the Great Basin even if you had once fucked America's most famous actress (although she had admittedly been a little long in the tooth by then) and been spoken of in connection with the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you tried it, your bike was apt to first heel over on her kickstand and then fall flat on her roadbars. The shoulder looked hard, but that was mostly attitude--not much different from the attitudes of certain people he could name, including the one he needed a mirror to get a good look at. And try picking up a seven-hundred-pound Harley-Davidson once you'd dumped it, especially when you were fifty-six and out of shape. Just try.

  I don't think so, he thought, looking at the red-and-cream Harley Softail, a street bike at which any purist would have turned up his nose, listening to the engine tick-tock in the silence. The only other sounds were the hot wind and the minute sound of sand spacking against his leather jacket--twelve hundred dollars at Barneys in New York. A jacket meant to be photographed by a fag from Interview magazine if ever there had been one. I think we'll skip that part entirely, shall we?

  "Fine by me," he said. He took off his helmet and put it on the Harley's seat. Then he rubbed a slow hand down his fa
ce, which was as hot as the wind and at least twice as sunburned. He thought he had never felt quite so tired or so out of his element in his whole life.

  2

  The literary lion walked stiffly into the desert, his long gray hair brushing against the shoulders of his motorcycle jacket, the scrubby mesquite and paintbrush ticking against his leather chaps (also from Barneys). He looked around carefully but saw nothing coming in either direction. There was something parked off the road a mile or two farther west--a truck or maybe a motor home--but even if there were people in it, he doubted that they could watch the great man take a leak without binoculars. And if they were watching, so what? It was a trick most people knew, after all.

  He unzipped his fly--John Edward Marinville, the man Harper's had once called "the writer Norman Mailer always wanted to be," the man Shelby Foote had once called "the only living American writer of John Steinbeck's stature"--and hauled out his original fountain pen. He had to piss like a racehorse but for almost a minute nothing happened; he just stood there with his dry dick in his hand.

  Then, at last, urine arced out and turned the tough and dusty leaves of the mesquite a darker, shiny green.

  "Praise Jesus, thank you, Lord!" he bellowed in his rolling, trembling Jimmy Swaggart voice. It was a great success at cocktail parties; Tom Wolfe had once laughed so hard when he was doing the evangelist voice that Johnny thought the man was going to have a stroke. "Water in the desert, that's a big ten-four! Hello Julia!" He sometimes thought it was this version of "hallelujah," not his insatiable appetite for booze, drugs, and younger women, that had caused the famous actress to push him into the pool during a drunken press conference at the Bel-Air hotel ... and then to take her emeralds elsewhere.